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SNP health secretary slammed over Oasis ticket fiasco
To Scotland, where the SNP’s newest health secretary has found himself in a rather large, Oasis-sized mess. At the weekend, Neil Gray was called out by the Sunday Mail for taking his eye off his day job and attempting to buy tickets to see the newly-reformed band during a conference event on Alzheimer’s disease. Mr S is rather unsurprised to learn Gray knows a thing or two about the Importance of Being Idle…
The initial story reported how, after Glasgow University’s Terry Quinn had finished a heartfelt speech on dementia, Scotland’s health secretary looked up from his phone to confess: ‘I’m in the queue to buy Oasis tickets on multiple devices. Hope is very important… that I get these tickets.’ Gray further admitted that he was ‘half a world away’ from securing gig access during the Alzheimer’s event. Talk about flippant, eh?
Yet rather curiously the health secretary took umbrage with the story after its publication. Gray was quick to jump on social media to fume that the front page splash was ‘total nonsense‘, insisting:
In intros to a fringe session I was chairing another panellist jokingly referred to Oasis tickets. I said, like so many, I was in the queue, but felt ‘half the world away’ from getting any. People laughed and we went into the serious business. I wasn’t trying to buy tickets in the meeting.
The newspaper hit back, with journalists claiming Gray’s very own press team had backed up the piece. And today, the story has taken another odd twist…
Now the health secretary has told LBC that he was in fact in an online queue for tickets during the panel session, admitting:
Like most people on Saturday, I think everybody was in a queue… I was in the queue and anybody that understands how being a queue for tickets works, it wasn’t something that was fast moving. So my phone was in my pocket, there was progress made in this queue dispersing.
Er, right. But Gray’s new story still doesn’t quite match what the Sunday Mail printed – and now journalist John Ferguson has taken to Twitter to blast the health secretary for attempting to ‘mislead’ the public, tweeting: ‘He says: “My phone was in my pocket.” That is not the case. His phone was in his hand and he was looking at it as he told the meeting he was in the queue for Oasis tickets.’ Good heavens. Some Might Say this is turning into quite the mess…
But this isn’t, of course, the first time an SNP health secretary has come under scrutiny over honesty concerns. Michael Matheson’s iPad scandal comes to mind…
Keir Starmer is acting like he’s still in opposition
Keir Starmer made a couple of verbal slips at Prime Minister’s Questions. Both were quite telling. The first was that he repeatedly referred to Rishi Sunak as the ‘Prime Minister’. An easy mistake to make, perhaps, when both are still getting used to the job swap they performed after the election. But the reason it was an appropriate slip was that Starmer was still largely in opposition mode, complaining about mistakes that the Conservatives had made.
The pair started by sparring on the winter fuel allowance, with Starmer making the argument that he and Rachel Reeves have made repeatedly since the Chancellor announced she was restricting this universal benefit to those on pension credit: they had no choice because they needed to ‘stabilise the economy’.
Sunak’s questions were good on this: he suggested that the (actual) Prime Minister was favouring unionised train drivers over pensioners struggling to heat their homes.
Starmer was able to quote Kemi Badenoch’s comments about pensioners in her constituency receiving the benefit when they didn’t need it. He also defended the pay deals his government has reached with train drivers and public sector workers, saying: ‘We lost an average of three million working days a year to strikes under his watch. But you cannot fix the economy.’ He told the chamber that the Tories were going to be on the opposition benches for a ‘very, very long time’ if they kept pretending that everything was fine.
The majority of his accidental ‘Prime Minister’ slips came in his exchanges with Sunak over Monday’s announcement that the UK government would be suspending around 30 out of 350 arms export licences to Israel. There, Starmer tried to argue that this was a ‘legal decision, not a policy decision’. Here was a lawyer hiding behind his lawyers – though given he appointed someone with a known activist stance on Israel as his Attorney General, it’s not clear how this wasn’t a policy decision.
Sunak had an unusually emotional question about the timing of the announcement, too – which was surely a policy decision not a legal one. He pointed out that it had been made on the same day that the hostages killed by Hamas were being buried. The Board of Deputies of British Jews had described this as sending a ‘terrible message’ Starmer insisted he stood by Israel’s right to self-defence and added: ‘We either comply with international law or we don’t, but we only have strength in our arguments because we comply with international law. I appreciate that the party opposite didn’t think that international law matters.’
His second slip came when he was answering Ed Davey’s two questions. He called the Liberal Democrat leader ‘the learned gentleman’, which is a term used in court, not the Commons. It was almost as though Starmer still thought he was a lawyer, not the Prime Minister.
Davey’s questions on the winter fuel payment were good, too. As he tends to do, he linked the topic to carers and spoke about a man caring for his wife who was going to lose the benefit because he was just over the threshold of eligibility for pension credit. Starmer insisted that this was a necessary decision to stabilise the economy.
Davey now gets two questions as the leader of the third largest party in the Commons, with the SNP relegated to just one, which was asked today by Pete Wishart. He listed the winter fuel payment, ‘austerity’ and Starmer’s claim that ‘things can only get worse’ as reasons why the Prime Minister’s poll ratings had plummeted.
The Prime Minister had a good rejoinder: he remembered when the SNP were sitting at the front of the benches for smaller parties, he said, pointing to where they were now crouched in the equivalent of the gods. So he wouldn’t take lectures from them on popularity.
Why is Javier Milei spending more on Argentina’s army?
Bitter austerity is biting in Argentina as the new president enacts the brutal cuts he promised in a bid to reign in one of the world’s worst inflation rates.
Entire government departments – including the Culture Ministry – have been canned and consumer spending has slumped across the board as Argentines find their stacks of pesos aren’t going as far as they once did. In a stark sign of the times, consumption of beef – reared by the country’s rural gauchos – slumped in the first quarter of 2024 by the biggest margin seen in 30 years.
Milei is still attempting to hold things together in Congress
However, one area of civic life hasn’t been exposed to Javier Milei’s chainsaw in quite such dramatic fashion. In fact, Milei has not only failed to cut military spending but promised that the budget for the armed forces will increase from 0.5 per cent of GDP to 2 per cent over the next decade.
Why would he do this when his motto has consistently been no hay plata (there is no money)? Argentina faces no significant or obvious military threats. It is far from the wars enveloping eastern Europe or the Middle East. Although it aspires to ownership of the Falkland Islands, it – and Milei – has shown no real desire to press its case that strongly. This is reflected in its paltry military spending: currently the lowest as a share of GDP in South America.
The most obvious practical answer is to combat so-called ‘internal threats’ (read: gangs). Although Argentina has not been plagued by violence from drug cartels to the same level as some of its continental neighbours, serious violence has ramped up in recent years in towns like Rosario which serve as vital stop-off points for the cocaine route from northern South America to Europe.
Milei’s security minister, Patricia Bullrich, has promised a strong response, perhaps following the example of El Salvador, where ‘cool dictator’ Nayib Bukele used the military to sweep up tens of thousands of young men, still held without trial. Ecuador has used some of these tactics to clamp down on growing violence and it could be that Milei has a similar idea in mind.
Another explanation is simply that Milei wants to restore the Argentine army to its previously prestigious place in society. The political hero Juan Peron, who gives his name to the Peronist movement which has been synonymous with Argentine politics for most of the past seven decades, was a general and many other leading politicians came from within the ranks of the military.
But the military also has an all-too-recent dark past. Many Argentines are old enough to remember the years of military dictatorship which only came to an end in 1983. Many too will remember friends or family members forcibly disappeared during those years. Independent human rights groups estimate the junta killed 30,000 political opponents, some thrown to their doom from aeroplanes in the dead of night. The public would likely be deeply suspicious of any attempt to use the military for policing.
Meanwhile, Milei is still attempting to hold things together in Congress. His party, a relatively new creation in political terms, boasts just a handful of representatives, leaving him exposed and politically weak. In the latest setback, lawmakers last week approved a triple-digit increase in pension payments to keep up with runaway inflation. The move puts Milei in the position of being the one to veto payments which many older Argentines say they would require to stay afloat. Police clashed with pensioners protesting in the capital this week. The increase would require spending equivalent to an eye-watering 1.2 per cent of GDP and, in a post on X, Milei said the objective of the bill was to ‘destroy the government’s economic programme’.
The row is a good indication of the scale of the challenge Milei faces to mould the country’s finances in his image – or that of the Austrian School economists which he idolises (and named his dogs after). The approach would be an about turn from most of the country’s economic history, and the all-powerful Peronist political machinery will be whirred into gear to oppose him at every turn. Ten months into his administration, the libertarian president will be hoping an upturn in living standards will kick in soon in order to give him a boost going into next year’s midterm elections.
Meanwhile, the reality on the street for ordinary people remains stark. Nearly one in five Argentines are living in extreme poverty, according to recent figures. While Milei will be hoping for an upturn in the economy to boost his hopes of political success, for most the worry is about how to put food on the table. As one of the pensioners protesting told the BBC: ‘We should have a calm life at home sipping mate [the drink], instead I have to stay here defending my income. It’s impossible to live this way.’ If you asked them about their biggest concerns today, the prestige of the military would not score highly.
Why London must get back to work
The commute is often unreliable, expensive and crowded. It is easy enough to understand why so many of London’s 5 million strong workforce are so reluctant to go back to the office. There is a catch, however. Working from home is costing the British economy a huge amount of lost output. In reality, the UK can’t afford for Londoners to carry on WFH for much longer.
According to a study just published by the Centre for Cities, London is one of the slowest major cities in the world to go back to the office full-time. Of the six cities it studied, London had the second lowest attendance rate, with full-time staff spending just 2.7 days on-site. That was similar to Sydney and Toronto, but well behind the 3.1 average in New York City, or the 3.5 days in Paris – hardly a place known for its hard work. More than a quarter of workers in London only make it into the office once or twice a week, and only 62 per cent manage three whole days, compared with 80 per cent in Paris.
This wouldn’t matter much if, as the WFH evangelists kept telling us, working from home was more productive. But it isn’t. One study from Stanford University found that workers were between 10 per cent and 20 per cent less productive when they worked from home, and those figures have been replicated elsewhere. Company after company has started demanding its people come back to the office full-time, not because they particularly enjoy running office buildings, but because they have noticed not so much gets achieved when people are not gathered in the same place.
The problem for the UK is that London is vital for the prosperity of the whole country. The capital accounts for 22 per cent of total GDP even though it only accounts for 13 per cent of the population, and GDP per capita at £63,407 is also far higher than the UK average of £36,844. It is the engine of the British economy, and it’s only genuinely world-class commercial hub. Nowhere else comes close. If we take a modest assumption that London’s output is 10 per cent lower because of its determination to carry on working from home, then that is enough to knock a couple of percentage points off the country’s potential output. It is as much as even the most dire predictions of the impact of leaving the EU. The government talks a lot about improving productivity and boosting growth. It should start by getting Londoners back into the office.
The ‘path to disaster’ that led to Grenfell
There are very few people who emerge from the Grenfell Inquiry’s final report with much credit today. Certainly very few who had a formal responsibility to ensure that those living in Grenfell Tower were safe.
The local community stepped up in the aftermath of the disaster, but even then the institutions set up to ensure victims would be cared for failed them. Institutions including local and central government failed to act on warnings which could have prevented the fire from spreading, meaning the 72 people who lost their lives could still have been with us today. It wasn’t just institutions though, of course: it was construction firms, the architects and the cladding manufacturers, many of whom, Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s damning report finds, took part in a ‘culture of dishonesty’.
The report charts a ‘path to disaster’
In short, politicians and companies either knew they were putting people at risk, or chose not to find out whether they were. The report charts a ‘path to disaster’ with multiple opportunities to prevent the fire ever spreading in the way it did, and those living in the tower from dying.
The report found that the government had repeated opportunities to address fire safety risks and by 2016 was ‘well aware of those risks but failed to act on what it knew’. The 1,700 page report also says the Department for Communities and Local Government was ‘poorly run’ and ‘displayed a complacent and at times defensive attitude to matters of fire safety’. The local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its tenant management organisation (TMO) had a ‘persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people’. The TMO’s relationship with its own residents was characterised by ‘distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger’.
By far the biggest contributor to the fire was the Reynobond 55 cladding, manufactured by Arconic, which the report found had deliberately covered up the danger of its product. Manufacturers engaged in ‘deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent data and mislead the market’. But the architects, Studio E, who were engaged by the council despite not having experience of cladding high rises, bear a ‘very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster’ because they failed to recognise that the cladding and insulation were combustible.
The report has apportioned responsibility and blame directly, while observing that everyone involved managed to find someone else to blame instead. It includes a recommendation for a single construction safety regulator who must be overseen by a single Secretary of State. The official fire safety guidance must be revised and there should be a fire safety plan produced when a building is being refurbished.
Keir Starmer has just given a statement on the inquiry’s findings and said that the government will respond in full to the recommendations within six months. The Prime Minister also needs to outline when the government will make any changes – and how: there is one more potential Grenfell failure, which is that the inquiry doesn’t lead to the change that is actually necessary. This is a common failing of public inquiries, with victims having to continually pursue institutions to effect changes – even ones they were in favour of – for years.
Macron’s search for a prime minster is a complete farce
Who will be the next prime minister of France? Almost two months after the centre lost its majority in the National Assembly, the potential candidates range from the improbable to the ludicrous.
The latest semi-crazed idea is that Emmanuel Macron should call on Ségolene Royal, the former wife of François Hollande, a socialist party machine politician hated in equal measure by both the extreme left and populist right and who generates no enthusiasm from either the moderate Republicans or the residue of the president’s centre.
Admittedly, this idea is floated by Royal herself and has been met with general derision.
Or perhaps Bernard Cazeneuve, a moderate socialist who was Hollande’s prime minister for six months. On Monday he was on the verge of being appointed, until he wasn’t.
Or Xavier Bertrand, a centrist conservative who hates Macron and who would be fiercely opposed by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which is numerically the largest party in the Assembly.
Karim Bouamrane, the socialist mayor of Saint-Ouen, has been floated, but just as quickly floated away.
Macron has even interviewed Hollande and former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Both are wildly improbable, even when you overlook the fact that Sarkozy has been convicted of illegal election spending.
There was a brief flurry of gossip about former teacher Thierry Beaudet, president of the advisory economic, social and environmental council, a technocratic leftist who has no political experience and isn’t trusted by Macron’s own group. He was a dead cert for the job for about ten minutes.
I’ve been writing here and here for weeks that the prime minister Macron wants doesn’t exist. After throwing away the credit of France and his own political credibility by dissolving the National Assembly, the president has left the nation with no government and no possibility whatsoever of anything other than a technical government to mind the store until new assembly elections can be called next year.
The commentariat here is belatedly coming to the same conclusion.
Pascal Praud, the lead political commentator of CNEWS, said today, ‘Emmanuel Macron is trying to solve an impossible equation.’ Not one of the names who have been mooted has the slightest chance of forming a durable administration, he added.
Does it really matter if France has a government or not? It does. The French are facing a severe new fiscal crisis. The deficit is projected to reach 5.6 per cent of GDP this year and 6.25 per cent next year, well beyond the permitted 3 per cent EU limit. Not that Brussels will do anything to punish Europe’s scofflaw. But the bond markets are likely to be less charitable as this farce continues.
On Saturday, France is likely to be rocked by demonstrations called by the rabid ultra-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Meanwhile the French coast guard are still fishing bodies out of the Channel after the latest failure of the police to stop the boats, even though Britain has paid them hundreds of millions to do so. The police are mutinous after another officer was killed, this time by an immigrant with ten previous convictions. Yet another church burned to the ground this week in an arson attack.
A budget to address the fiscal crisis, which would have to cut billions, has no chance whatsoever of passing a National Assembly that’s hopelessly deadlocked with no conceivable political consensus.
And both the left and right in the Assembly have pledged to reverse Macron’s pension reforms, which would probably crush the bond market. It’s a circus and Macron is the ringleader. It’s extraordinary that he’s not had the grace to admit that his presidency is an utter failure, and done the decent thing and quit.
Were he to do so, it would create an intriguing election. Marine Le Pen would be pitted against Mélenchon, as well as Édouarde Philippe, the moderate former prime minister, and numerous others. A leading French pollster tells me Le Pen is the most likely to win, plunging not just France but all of Europe into an existential crisis.
Now what? The president is constitutionally permitted to name anyone he wants. So here’s an idea, only slightly less likely than all the others. Since we’ve entered a surreal political landscape, perhaps he could consider Tom Tugendhat, who is both an experienced parliamentarian, seems to have no particular views, and is a French-British dual national married to a French diplomat. As he’s unlikely to be prime minister of the UK, he might as well accept the job.
I admit this is a mad idea, but no more so than any of the others. It is indisputable now that Macron’s intemperate narcissism has plunged Europe’s second largest economy into chaos. That Keir Starmer imagines Macron will be his new best friend in Europe is merely the latest hallucinatory element of this drama.
Watch: Starmer defers to ‘prime minister’ Sunak at PMQs
They say old habits die hard, and Sir Keir Starmer is finding that out for himself today. It’s the first PMQs back after recess and it seems as though some in the Commons are rather struggling to adjust to the change of guard. Mr S notes that the Labour leader has today referred to his opposite number Rishi Sunak multiple times as, er, ‘prime minister’. The Speaker of the House, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has also been caught making the same rather impertinent mistake. Talk about a slip of the tongue…
And it hasn’t taken long for the Tories to use the PM’s blunder to their advantage. Just minutes after Sir Keir misspoke, the Conservatives’ Twitter account took to social media to taunt him over Labour’s pensioner palaver, writing: ‘You may keep forgetting you’re the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, but the British people don’t. It’s your choice to deprive vulnerable pensioners of their winter fuel payments. It’s your choice to give striking train drivers on £60,000 a £10,000 pay rise.’ Ouch…
Watch the clip here:
The US is turning the screws on Nicolas Maduro
Actions often speak louder than words. In the case of the United States seizing Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s multi-million dollar luxury aircraft this week, that perhaps rings true. The international tip-toeing around how best to respond to Venezuela’s election result – considered fraudulent by many – and the turbulent repression that has ensued, has had global leaders scratching their heads for over a month. But the seizure of the airplane could hit Maduro where it hurts.
Strongly-worded statements condemning the lack of transparency around the election and the antiquated measure of throwing dissenters in jail have fallen on deaf ears. So the taking of the Dassault Falcon 900EX from the Dominican Republic, where it had been stationed since May, was a decisive move by the US. It’s the kind of bold signal many opposition supporters in Venezuela had been waiting for.
For a man incredibly active on social media, Maduro has chosen silence
The US alleges that the plane, a kind of Venezuelan equivalent of America’s Air Force One, was initially smuggled out of the US and was in violation of export controls and sanctions laws. The $13 million (£9.9 million) aircraft was allegedly bought through a Caribbean-based shell company in late 2022 and early 2023. It was then smuggled out of the US to sidestep sanctions placed on Venezuelan individuals and companies, as well as broad sectors of the economy, in recent years for alleged human rights abuses and corruption. Venezuela’s government has branded the confiscation ‘piracy’.
‘Let this seizure send a clear message,’ said Matthew Axelrod, from the US Commerce Department. ‘Aircraft illegally acquired from the United States for the benefit of sanctioned Venezuelan officials cannot just fly off into the sunset.’ The confiscation of Maduro’s jet wasn’t just intended to hurt him in the pocket. It marks a shift in response to the country’s socialist administration, moving from words to actions. It also signals a potential precursor for further measures intended to pile the pressure on Maduro and his friends to step aside. Rumours that the US has already drafted a list of individuals for sanctions are already circling.
Ever since the head of the South American nation was declared winner of the presidential elections for a third term in July, despite pre-election opinion polls predicting his dramatic loss, calls for him to prove his victory have been ringing loudly both from within the country and outside it. The country has plunged into economic chaos in the 11 years that Maduro has been in power, and increased its use of authoritarian measures. Almost eight million people, a quarter of the population, have left the country. Critics of sectoral sanctions say they have exacerbated Venezuela’s humanitarian and economic crisis.
While confirmation of a Maduro win is still absent, the opposition quickly presented evidence in the form of voting tally receipts. These appeared to show its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, had won by a landslide with 67 per cent of the vote, compared to Maduro’s 30 per cent. The softly-spoken retired diplomat took on the role of opposition candidate after Maria Corina Machado was banned from running. This week, a judge issued an arrest warrant for Gonzalez, accusing him of a multitude of crimes, including conspiracy and falsifying documents in relation to the election.
US president Joe Biden’s administration had until now responded cautiously to Venezuela’s predicament and refrained from impulsively slapping on more sanctions, like the ones introduced by the Trump and Bush administrations before it. It had, in fact, temporarily relaxed some sanctions on the oil and gas sector ahead of this year’s vote, but reinstated most of them due to a lack of free and fair conditions for the election. Many analysts have decried the inefficacy of sanctions.
Much of the US and rest of the international community’s hesitancy over responding to Maduro more strongly is borne out of past setbacks. The rejection of the 2018 election result and recognising Juan Guaido in 2019 as the interim president of Venezuela by the US and other countries yielded little progress. He was eventually removed from leadership after failing to make significant gains against the Maduro government.
A number of other countries, especially South American ones such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, have been more outspoken in their condemnation of the government’s recent fraud and repression. ‘There are 30 million Venezuelans screaming. Is anyone going to help them, or are they condemned to live in hell?’ said Washington Abdalá, Uruguay’s representative at the Organisation of American States. Around two and a half thousand people are thought to have been detained since 29 July. During protests, 24 people were killed.
Hope had been pinned on a trio of Latin American presidents from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. These left-leaning governments, with closer ties to Maduro, were seen as potential mediators in the move towards a negotiated transition with the opposition. However, they too have made no headway.
For a government that defines itself as pro-wealth redistribution and anti-foreign interference, the plane saga is politically embarrassing for Venezuela. Caracas has remained relatively tight-lipped, apart from a Foreign Ministry statement: ‘Once again, the authorities of the United States of America are engaged in a criminal practice that cannot be described as anything other than piracy.’ It continued that it has the right to ‘take any legal action to repair this damage to the nation’.
For a man incredibly active on social media, Maduro, for his part, has chosen silence, perhaps not wanting to draw attention to the purchase of his luxury plane, while many of his public sector employees earn just $3.50 (£2.70) a month. While actions often speak louder than words, silence does too.
Why did the Grenfell Inquiry take so long to tell us what we know already?
Predictably enough, and not unreasonably, the 1700-page final report into the Grenfell disaster apportions the bulk of the blame with the companies who manufactured and sold the flammable cladding and insulation.
The report doesn’t spare the London Fire Brigade
What has emerged from this inquiry is astonishing: you hardly need a degree in engineering to work out that it is not a good idea to wrap a tower block in combustible material. That manufacturers seem to have ‘deliberately concealed’ the risk that their products posed is something which is almost inevitably going to be picked over further in the courts. Why it has taken seven years to produce this report – thereby holding up possible criminal cases – is itself a scandal. As ever with our drawn-out public inquiries many of the guilty parties will no longer be around to face the music, at least not in the roles they held.
The report doesn’t spare, either, the London Fire Brigade, which is accused of a ‘chronic lack of leadership’. In spite of the heroism of individual firefighters, the organisation itself was found to have lacked the imagination to see that such a fire could occur – not that it should have been put in the position of having to fight a fire which should have been totally avoidable. The advice given to residents to stay in their flats must be one of the most lethal instructions to be handed out by a public authority in modern times. Many more people would likely have survived had they been instructed to leave.
But the report into the 2017 fire in which 72 people died does lack some overall context. Tower blocks were built in the 1960s and 70s on the principle that there must be no combustible material outside the flats – either in public areas or on the outside of the building. In some blocks, residents have even been asked to remove doormats. It is only by making fire impossible in public areas that tower blocks with single staircases could be made reasonably safe. But come the programme of retrofitting old buildings to modern insulation standards all that seemingly went out of the window. Reducing emissions became the over-riding focus. Something similar is happening with old houses, where solid wall insulation is being pushed at homeowners with little regard to damp issues. The insulation and cladding industry is, of course, the great beneficiary of all this retrofitting.
It is possible to insulate buildings without increasing fire risk, but when it comes to tower blocks it is perhaps best if these buildings are allowed to reach the end of their lives – not long off – without being clad with anything. One remarkable thing about Grenfell was the sheer cost of the refurbishment, which worked out at over £70,000 per flat. Tempting though it may be to think there are economies of scale in housing people in large block of flats rather than in low-rise houses, this does not seem to be the case. Trying to revive these wretched buildings is just throwing good money after bad.
There are some issues which this inquiry has not addressed. Thousands of blameless homeowners have been forced to pay to fix defective work by the developers of their properties; they have also been forced to cough up for ‘waking watches’ in blocks of flats deemed to be too unsafe to have everyone asleep at night. They have been unable to sell their properties while these issues have been resolved.
The Grenfell tragedy has also been ruthlessly exploited by rapacious freeholders out to maximise the financial return from their leaseholders. One of the legacies of Grenfell ought to be the end of the leasehold system, with all buildings converted to commonhold (i.e. the owners of the individual flats jointly own the building as a whole). This is a system which works perfectly well in virtually every other country in the world. The Tories flirted with, but ultimately were too pathetic to carry it out, compromised as they are by vested interests. The new government could curry favour with millions of flat-owners by completing the job.
There’s no shame in being ‘weird’
Are Conservative politicians ‘weird’? A series of focus groups carried out by More in Common suggests that voters – particularly in seats won by the Lib Dems – find elected Tories increasingly strange. It’s hard to disagree, but this isn’t the party’s only problem.
Who cares if a politician is weird?
As the Tories battle it out to elect their new leader, the reality is that hardly anybody out there recognises any of the candidates. The one that rings the most bells is Priti Patel. This is because, as anybody who has ever worked in marketing will tell you, she possesses an alliterative name. Tom Tugendhat also scores here, but loses because his surname is unfamiliar to most people outside Westminster and also impossible to spell. By such tiny things are careers made or destroyed.
But are Tugendhat and Patel – and indeed Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly – really weird? The accusation seems to have originated, like most of the things that bedevil us in Britain today, from America, coming hot on the heels of the Democrat campaign attempting to portray Donald Trump and JD Vance as ‘weird’. This is a bold tactic coming from an institution putting Kamala Harris up as their presidential candidate. It’s also odd, considering the ‘whole self’ movement, and obsession with ‘neurodiversity’, that is common among progressive types who are likely to support Democrats. Surely nobody is more ‘neurodiverse’ than Donald Trump. If Democrats welcome difference, why not embrace the Orange One? But no: it seems only their kind of weirdness is OK.
Perhaps then what Democrats over there – and Lib Dems over here – mean when they say a politician is ‘weird’ is something different. They are saying less about politicians and more about themselves: these ‘weird’ Tories, they want us to know, aren’t like us folk from a more elevated social milieu. Things have reached the prettiest of passes if the Lib Dems are seen as a yardstick of normality.
And here lies the real issue: all politicians are weird. There are only a tiny number of normal folk among their number, such as Alan Johnson or Liz Kendall and (maybe) Sajid Javid. Other politicians are weird in so many different ways, from the flamboyantly odd – Michael Fabricant, Michael Portillo, Ann Widdecombe – to the blank and robotic, such as Theresa May, Keir Starmer or Liz Truss.
The very strangeness of the job itself can even make apparently ordinary people look peculiar. Yvette Cooper wouldn’t make any impression on you at all if she wasn’t a politician. But send her out talking tough and looking increasingly fraught and she becomes strangely scary. This is because it’s frightening to see someone with such little judgment in a position of such power.
Why would anybody normal want the job of a politician? You have to zealously monitor yourself and everything you say and do, you get paid a paltry amount for the amount of work and responsibility, plus the public hate you, but you are at their mercy. You don’t, except for a very few ministers, even have much power.
A strange job will, of course, attract strange people. It’s a bit like accusing actors, comedians or pop stars of being weird. ‘Ooh, that Elton John, have you noticed, bit of a funny feller.’ ‘I didn’t want to say anything, but I think that Bowie chap might be wearing make-up.’
Frankly then, who cares if a politician is weird? Weird but competent would be fine, thanks. We wouldn’t mind how eccentric they are, so long as they did the job. I would welcome a prime minister who painted the right side of his body bright blue, insisted on playing the trumpet at press conferences, and whose hinterland was making life-size models of Concorde out of old Sprite cans, if he actually did the job effectively.
But many politicians don’t seem to realise this – and perhaps worrying about being seen as weird is knocking some of our leading lights off course. Kemi Badenoch’s launch speech saw her forsaking her Unique Selling Point: her usual wonderfully wry and quite stern appeal. Has she had coaching? She appeared all smiles posing in that TED Talk stance that is supposed to seem relaxed, but makes a person look as if they’re just starting to walk again after an accident.
Kemi should beware: such rebranding never works. Look at Gordon Brown, who attempted to change the way voters saw him when he was prime minister. Trying to change your presentation in such an unnatural way just makes you look weirder, and worse, as if you’re trying too hard. A smile on a face where it doesn’t belong gives a person goosebumps; it’s as disconcertingly wrongly located as a fish in a lavatory or a garden centre at the South Pole.
Weirdness – in all its forms – is neither good nor bad. It doesn’t matter very much, for example, that Ed Miliband is palpably odd. It matters that the energy secretary is hopelessly incompetent, ideologically barmy, and committed to an insane energy policy. I suspect his oddness will matter even less when the lights start going out. We’ll be begging for anyone to rescue us, no matter how weird that person might be.
SNP government finally accepts Cass review findings
Well, well, well. After all of the SNP’s sniping at Dr Hilary Cass’s review into UK gender clinics, it transpires that the Scottish government has – finally – accepted the findings of a gender clinic report in full. The revelation comes months after Cass found ‘remarkably weak evidence’ to support gender treatments for children and concluded that the ‘toxicity’ of the gender debate meant professionals were ‘afraid’ to openly discuss their views. Oh dear…
After much ado, the SNP government has now said it will implement a gender treatment review’s recommendations, with public health minister Jenni Minto confirming that a second report – entitled ‘The Cass Review: Implications for Scotland’ – has been accepted. It means that young people in Scotland looking for gender services will have to be referred to specialists by doctors rather than being able to self-refer. The development also means that children looking for gender treatment will be looked after by paediatricians as opposed to receiving care in an ‘adult sexual health setting’. It took long enough…
It’s quite the turnaround given the number of Nats who seemed, um, more than a little opposed to the original Cass review in the first place. Scottish government ministers were first accused by senior clinicians of dragging their feet in responding to Dr Hilary’s report. It emerged that two of Scotland’s largest health boards had even urged the chief medical officer – who dithered under pressure from trans activists – to adopt the review’s recommendations. Then Hapless Humza Yousaf was criticised for hesitating over the issue of Glasgow’s tartan Tavistock, before the Sandyford gender clinic eventually announced it would pause the prescription of puberty blockers to new patients under 18. When eco-zealot Patrick Harvie – formerly a junior minister when the Greens were in coalition with the SNP – snubbed Cass’s report for not being a ‘valid scientific document’, a government spokesperson refused to condemn him. And, to add insult to injury, the Scottish government was slammed for ‘sneaking out’ its much-delayed response to the gender report the day after the general election. Crikey. It’s not like the Nats to do things by halves, eh?
Netanyahu faces an unenviable dilemma on Gaza
The murder of six Israeli hostages by Hamas in Gaza earlier this week led to an outpouring of grief and fury in Israel. For a considerable and vocal section of the public, the anger was directed – in a way perhaps surprising to outsiders – not against the Islamist group responsible for the murders, but against the Israeli government.
Large and stormy demonstrations took place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, organised a (partially observed) one-day general strike. The demonstrators’ demand was a simple one: a deal to release the 97 remaining hostages now. At least 33, by the way, and possibly more of the Israelis remaining in Gaza, are believed by the authorities to now be dead.
An increased risk to the hostages is implicit in the desire to destroy the Hamas power in Gaza
The demonstrators’ demand, and the government’s refusal to accede to it, reflect the core dynamic of the war in Gaza, which has been apparent from its outset. The current focus is on the future of the Philadelphi Corridor, a nine-mile wide strip at Gaza’s southern border. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists on a continued Israeli presence on this territory. The demonstrators and those who lead them dismiss the cardinal importance of holding this area.
But the dispute over Philadelphi conceals a larger issue. Israeli accession on this point will open the way to the conclusion of a deal to end the war. According to the terms of the deal currently on the table, Israel will carry out a complete withdrawal of its forces from Gaza, including from the Netzarim and Philadelphi corridors, and from the buffer zone which it has been constructing along the border since the entry of Israeli ground forces into the strip in late October 2023. In return for this, and for the additional release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners – including individuals convicted of the murder of many civilians – Israel will secure the release of the remaining hostages over the three phases of the agreement.
This proposal, frankly and unmistakably, grants Hamas victory in the war that it began with the massacres of 7 October last year. It can’t really be spun any other way. The organisation, having initiated the war, will have come through it intact as the de facto governing authority in Gaza. In addition, it will have secured the release of a generation of Palestinian fighters, both from its own ranks and from the ranks of other Palestinian movements. The price in blood will have been high. But the achievement will be clear.
Hamas and the Islamist regional alliance which stands behind it will present any such conclusion to hostilities as a triumphant vindication of its core thesis regarding Israel. According to this view, Israeli society is fragile and vulnerable to pressure. The correct approach is therefore to seek to bypass Israel’s formidable conventional defences in order to strike directly at the civilian population. Through pressure exerted in this way, Israel can be forced into ongoing, incremental retreats, leading to its erosion and eventual strategic defeat and demise.
Netanyahu, it appears, is aware of this dynamic and doesn’t want to accede to it. The desire of those around the Israeli leader appears to be to continue operations in Gaza for another year or so, eroding and eventually destroying Hamas’s remaining authority in the strip. The intended outcome of the war will be that the Islamist de facto governing authority in the strip ceases to exist. The big picture of the war will then be that Hamas launched a war on 7 October 2023 and, as a result, was removed from the map. Following the achievement of this goal, attention would then turn to building and equipping a military force capable of taking on and destroying the Hezbollah-controlled entity in Lebanon, which is the second, much stronger example of de facto Iran-supported Islamist governance in the Levant.
Those protesting in favour of the ceasefire deal in Israel dismiss such arguments. Their stance is that Netanyahu is, in fact, motivated only by thoughts of his own political survival. Regarding the issue of the war’s outcome, they tend to assert that the willingness to pay a huge price to bring back hostages reflects a high level of social solidarity in Israel, and as such is a strength, rather than a weakness.
Behind these (I think) not very convincing arguments there is something more visceral: namely, a horror at the suffering being endured by the Israeli innocents taken on 7 October, and a desperate desire for this to end, regardless of the short- or long-term cost. This, of course, is precisely the emotion which the taking and subsequent murder of hostages was supposed to elicit.
It has to be acknowledged that an increased risk to the hostages is implicit in the desire to destroy Hamas’s power in Gaza. The six people murdered this week were killed, it appears, because Israeli forces were close to their place of confinement. Qaid Farhan al-Qadi, the Arab Israeli rescued after being found in the tunnels a week earlier, appears to have been held in similar circumstances, abandoned in a booby-trapped room after his captors fled. As Hamas’s infrastructure of control erodes, so its ability to securely hold captives becomes similarly complicated and lessened. The organisation, as its spokesman Abu Obaida confirmed this week, has elected to respond to this emerging reality with a decision to execute captives rather than see them rescued.
From the very start, it has been obvious that the goal of ending Hamas rule in Gaza, and the objective of freeing the Israeli hostages were contradictory. The hostages were taken precisely and specifically to frustrate Hamas’s destruction. At the current point in the war, this reality can no longer be blurred.
Regarding the option of accepting the ceasefire deal as is, it is worth remembering that the road to 7 October was paved by an identical deal, though on a smaller scale. Recollection of that deal and its results are the strongest argument against repeating it on a larger scale. Netanyahu and his supporters don’t and can’t assert that argument, though, because the deal took place on Netanyahu’s watch and at his instigation.
The deal in question was the release of 1,027 convicted Palestinian terrorists in return for one kidnapped IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011. This took place against the background of an impassioned and emotional public campaign, reminiscent of the current demonstrations. In it, Yahya Sinwar, mastermind and instigator of 7 October and commander of Hamas in the current war, was released.
One should be cautious of prediction in our region. But I have no doubt that the intention, at least, of the Hamas leadership is that just as 7 October followed the Shalit deal, so the successful conclusion of the hostage deal currently on offer will be followed within a few years by a united Arab Muslim military uprising west of the Jordan River, under Islamist leadership, with the intention of bringing about Israel’s demise. These are the current stakes.
Keir Starmer’s honeymoon is unquestionably over
Keir Starmer is back at the despatch box for Prime Minister’s Questions today and his honeymoon period is unquestionably over. He will face hostile questions on the winter fuel payment, on arms export licences to Israel, and on whether Labour plans to raise taxes in the autumn budget. And he will want to talk about the Grenfell Inquiry, which is publishing its report shortly. That report will be uncomfortable reading mainly for Conservatives, but the recommendations will be Labour’s to implement – or not –and the pressure will be on the Prime Minister to accept them in full.
Starmer has made public injustices and the system not working for ordinary people one of his major themes, and he will want to expand on that today. But one of his more political themes is the ‘mess’ left by the Conservatives and how all the difficult decisions this government has to take are the fault of the Tories. At yesterday’s Treasury questions, Rachel Reeves was grilled by MPs for a good 20 minutes on the winter fuel payment, and spent most of the session enforcing the ‘mess’ narrative. For once, Jeremy Hunt didn’t go on the counter-attack, and instead chose to talk about cronyism allegations. Those claims about donors and other key figures getting plum jobs and access to Downing Street will likely form part of the Conservative attack at PMQs today.
What was striking was that while Labour MPs contributed to the winter fuel payment discussion, it was largely to try to reinforce the Chancellor’s arguments. There was clearly an organised operation with backbenchers in the governing party backing Reeves. Only Rachael Maskell, who has been very outspoken on the payment, was openly critical. It will be interesting to see whether the same happens today when Starmer is on his feet.
Stop trying to make ‘weird’ happen
Where American left-liberal rhetoric leads, British left-liberal rhetoric invariably follows. Hate speech, reparations, decolonisation, white fragility; there is no intellectual fad so inane that it will not be enthusiastically mimicked, with childlike credulity, by journalists, academics, civil servants and broadcasters, regardless of whether it even makes sense in a British context. The impression you get is of status-conscious provincials seizing, herd-like, on the latest fashions and conventional wisdom from the imperial centre.
The accusation of weirdness is a striking example of the decline of political rhetoric
So it is that barely a month after the Democrats and their allies in the US media adopted ‘weird’ as their attack line on Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, some on this side of the pond are trying their best to make it a term of derision in British politics. The Guardian reports research by the think tank More in Common which allegedly shows that some voters are beginning to regard the Tories as ‘weird’.
This is unsurprising. More in Common is a classic blob outfit. Their money appears to come almost entirely from grant-making organisations totally captured by progressive activists. Their key purpose seems to be what some commentators call ‘consensus laundering’, i.e. giving the appearance of popular civil society support for policies which are in fact the pet projects of dogmatic elites, and command minimal popular enthusiasm.
The accusation of weirdness is a striking example of the decline of political rhetoric. We have, sadly, left behind the old expectation that politics should consist of robust rhetoric and agonistic debates, conducted without lasting personal animus, in favour of what you might describe as a Mean Girls culture.
In the new dispensation, passive-aggressive digs and snarky attacks are the order of the day, backhanded attacks on reputation rather than straightforward exchanges of ideas. ‘Weird’ is a fundamentally juvenile and thoughtless insult, redolent of the cruel ostracism faced at school by children who look or speak or behave differently to the crowd.
It also has no real content, because even if we take it more seriously than we should, as an honest attempt at description, it simply means something like ‘incongruent with the norms of a particular group or institution’. So from the perspective of the Biden-Harris White House, which hosts parties for men who pose topless with fake breasts, and which briefly employed a ‘kink activist’ who was later charged with stealing women’s clothes at airports, then J.D. Vance – a married conservative and observant Catholic with three children – probably does seem very weird. For Mr Vance himself, I would imagine that things look a little different.
Similarly, in the UK, promoting the idea that Tories are ‘weird’, presumably because they are well-spoken or well-dressed or well-educated, feels like nothing more than pandering to anti-intellectualism or reverse snobbery. And frankly, the last thing we need is a race to the bottom, where any politician who wants to look the part, or discuss complicated matters, or choose his words with precision, faces the accusation of being out of touch or strange.
There’s an inescapable element of projection in the charge, too. Britain’s progressive rulers espouse all sorts of beliefs and attitudes which would seem entirely bizarre not only to previous generations, but to most people in the world today. That a man can become a woman is the most obvious of these, but there are others: net zero fanaticism, disdain for the history and traditions of their own country, ferocious adherence to the diversity cult. None of these things are really ‘normal’ or popular, but they are the unquestioned axioms of the ruling class so their sheer strangeness is under-discussed.
Of course, organisations using dubious data to paint the Tories as oddballs might have another purpose, namely to narrow the Overton window, to limit the range of policies that can be openly discussed. There is a growing sense on the right of politics that a new radicalism is needed – on energy, on borders, on free speech, on national identity, on crime, on parliamentary sovereignty.
Hence the attempt to force the idea that it is ‘weird’ to want to abandon net zero, or to reform the Human Rights Act or the Equality Act, or to abolish the various committees that have assumed enormous quasi-judicial power over MPs without any of the due process protections that true courts offer defendants. The Tories must not let themselves be bamboozled into accepting this account. The ‘centre ground’ is a chimaera, an illusion. Attempting to occupy it is like trying to catch fog in a net.
There is no point at all in simply trying to avoid the appearance of weirdness by embracing the pre-emptive defensive crouch. The trick is to render the claim nonsensical and trivial with a laser focus on fixing the country’s problems.
The great French painter who had no time for France
In 1855, Paul Gauguin’s widowed mother Aline returned to her husband’s family in Orleans after seven years in Peru. She brought back her daughter Marie, eight-year-old son Paul and her collection of pre-Columbian artefacts. They had no commercial value but those strange objects, sprouting the heads of birds and animals, had a power that the westernised world had lost touch with. They sank deep into the imagination of her wild, headstrong boy, who often described himself as ‘a savage from Peru’.
After the sensory overload of South America, France and school were grey, cold and miserable. With education over, Gauguin insisted on going to sea and served in the navy in the Franco-Prussian war. He yearned for adventure, but his mother’s wealthy protector, Gustave Arosa, found him a job as a futures broker.
Van Gogh talked all the time and dragged Gauguin along for all-night blinders of sex and booze
Gauguin loathed industrialisation and always favoured handmade over mass-produced; but he proved very good at making money. He married in 1873 and took up painting and sculpture with passionate absorption, spending more and more time in his studio. While his Danish wife Mette looked after their growing family, he made friends with the Impressionists, invited them home to dinner (Mette enjoyed entertaining) and bought several of their paintings.
Then came the stock market crash of 1882, and years of misery followed. Gauguin couldn’t find a job or sell his paintings, and Mette took the children to live with her family in Copenhagen. With nothing to lose, he set out for the most remote and primitive part of France: Brittany. In Pont-Aven, to which he returned several times, he worked like a madman. Loading his paintings with colour and imagery, he fused the magical and the familiar, attempting to ‘show an inward and an outward state simultaneously’. In 1877 he started making ceramics. I confess that hitherto I have ignored these dark and faintly menacing objects, but Sue Prideaux describes them so vividly in Wild Thing that I shall look closer at the
images of strange beings that had been brewing inside him… globular, asymmetrical imaginings awkwardly anthropomorphised, interrupted by faces, limbs and orifices.
Over the next ten years Gauguin struggled on, his moments of hope regularly dashed, his money worries constant; but he was making a name for himself among the modernists. Vincent van Gogh idolised him, and begged him to come to Arles, where he would be master of an artists’ colony – the Studio in the South. Van Gogh bought 12 rush-bottomed chairs for Gauguin’s (non-existent) ‘disciples’ and painted three canvases – the ‘Sunflowers’ – to adorn his guest’s tiny room.
Gauguin’s stay in Arles, from October to December 1888, must have been a nightmare. Although the two men were painting during the day (Prideaux is good on how they inspired and challenged each other), van Gogh was obviously very disturbed. He talked all the time and dragged Gauguin along for all-night blinders of sex and booze in the village. The final straw came when van Gogh suddenly threw a glass of absinthe at his friend. Gauguin ducked and left the bar – only to find van Gogh coming after him with a cut-throat razor. Gauguin did not go home until the following morning, to be met by the chief of police – who immediately accused him of murder. Only when they went upstairs, following a trail of blood, did they find van Gogh fast asleep, having hacked off his ear. Much of Prideaux’s riveting chapter about this is based on Gauguin’s 200-page memoir Avant et Après. The manuscript was lost soon after the painter’s death, and only came to light three years ago.
Among those who thought about where art would go after Impressionism, Gauguin was recognised as the leader of the Synthesist-Symbolists. He maintained that art should be free of labels; but the more he worked, the more he wanted to touch the authentic, uncorrupted source that all art seemed to spring from. It had shrivelled in the hothouse commercialism of Europe. Might it be more evident in a world still untouched by western ‘civilisation’? In 1891 he raised enough money to buy paints, 100 metres of canvas and a passage to Tahiti.
The island had been a French colony for only 11 years, but ‘civilisation’ was already rampant. The capital, Papeete, was no longer a cluster of wood and bamboo dwellings, but rows of jerry-built brick shacks with a church at either end. The missionaries had destroyed most local traditions and insisted that Polynesian women dress in shapeless Mother Hubbard smocks. Gauguin moved away from Papeete and his compatriots as soon as he could and settled in a hut in a village by the sea. He had read that fishing was easy and fruit fell off the trees, but neither was true. He was often ill and always malnourished.
It was not until he found his wife, Tehamana, that Gauguin was able to realise his vision of Tahiti – a timeless landscape, peopled with men and women, saints and demons, animals and birds, in a dazzling synthesis of pre-Columbian, Christian and Polynesian imagery. He adored Tehamana, whose calm serenity he cherished as dearly as her beauty. But was he exploiting a teenage girl? In this century, Gauguin is regularly described as a child-molesting colonialist by those more eager to display their righteousness than understand the times in which he lived.
In 1894, Gauguin was savagely beaten up in Concarneau, where arty types were not welcome
This is dangerous ground, but the arguments Prideaux makes to defend Gauguin are backed by fact. Tehamana was about 13 when they started living together. To us this sounds horribly young for sexual initiation, but it was normal in her culture, as well as being the legal age of consent in France at the time. Her family also decreed that if she was not happy with her husband, she could come home in eight days. Of her own will, she stayed. Tehamana took another husband when Gauguin left for France for three years. When she heard he was back, she came and spent a few days with him, for old times’ sake.
When Gauguin returned to France with his paintings of Tahiti in 1892, his fame in Europe was spreading – thanks to a successful exhibition in Copenhagen of paintings by himself and van Gogh, who had died two years earlier. He revisited Pont-Aven in the spring of 1894 and was working well when disaster struck. He was savagely beaten up in the village of Concarneau, where long-haired arty types were not welcome. Gauguin was left with a leg and ankle fractured by kicks from men in wooden clogs, the shinbone sticking out through the skin. The bone was badly set, and the wounds to the shin were very slow to heal. He was on morphine for months and walked with a stick from then on.
He went back to Polynesia in 1895, never to return to France. He spent his final years in constant pain from his leg on the island of Hiva Oa, where he carved and painted and wrote indignant letters to French administrators about the injustices heaped on his neighbours. Some were forced to work for the local gendarme, and after a particularly destructive flood, men were expected to mend government roads before rebuilding their own houses. Yet Gauguin’s strenuous efforts to make their lives more bearable are often eclipsed by accusations that he came to Polynesia with syphilis and spread it all over the islands. However, analysis of four of his teeth in 2018 reveal that they were free of cadmium, mercury and arsenic – the most common treatments for syphilis at the time.
This evidence, plus the re-emergence of Avant et Après, which provides new insights into his relationships, fears and beliefs, as well as his childhood in Peru and the weeks with van Gogh, would have added considerable interest to any new biography. This one also benefits from Prideaux’s deep knowledge of 19th-century art and thought, gathered in writing her biographies of Edvard Munch, August Strindberg and Friedrich Nietzsche. The result, packed with beautifully reproduced illustrations, is a brilliantly readable and compassionate study of Gauguin – not just as a painter, sculptor, carver and potter, but as a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach.
A lively showcase for a great central European orchestra at the Proms
As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European guest orchestras. First up was the Czech Philharmonic playing Suk’s Asrael Symphony under Jakub Hrusa before moving on to Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass the following night. These grand, glittering monuments of Czech music were garnished with a couple of relative rarities – Dvorak’s Piano Concerto, played by Mao Fujita, and the Military Sinfonietta, composed in 1937 by (the then 22-year-old) Vitezslava Kapralova, who died at the age of 25.
It’s unmistakably the work of a young composer. Xylophone? Bring it on
Kapralova’s composition is a captivating thing, starting out with fanfares and strutting march rhythms before proceeding to, well, pretty much anything you can imagine. It’s unmistakably the work of a young composer; there’s that gleeful, kid-in-a-toyshop energy, with ideas and colours flying in all directions. Xylophone? Bring it on. What if the violins played the main theme on harmonics? Only one way to find out! It’s the composer’s superabundant imagination, rather than any more formal process, that makes the Military Sinfonietta so compelling – and in the light of her unfulfilled promise, so poignant.
It certainly made a lively showcase for the sound of this great central European orchestra. It’s easy to fall back on national clichés when talking about an orchestra’s character: almost involuntarily, I found my head filling with notions of woodsmoke and afternoon sunlight as those mellow yet penetrating woodwinds carolled through veils of muted strings, with a solo violin glinting high above. Such lovely individual elements; sounds to roll over the palate, offsetting the sulphurous tang of the orchestra’s German-style rotary-valve trumpets (they switched to something a bit brighter for the Janacek).
But as conductors go, Hrusa is more of an intellectual than a hedonist, and I’d hoped to listen in depth to the group’s overall sound. That plan was thwarted by a ticket allocation (critics don’t always get the best seats) that placed me almost behind the orchestra, only an aisle away from the horn section and (in the Janacek) the flame-torch intensity of the women’s voices. There was no chance of hearing the big picture, though even from there it was impossible not to feel the hellfire fervour with which the tenor David Butt Philip hurled Janacek’s jagged shafts of Old Church Slavonic across the arena.
Or, for that matter, not to admire Fujita’s heroic efforts to get the Dvorak airborne. It’s possible to adore Dvorak – to feel (hands up) that you’d gladly swap all of Brahms and Schumann’s symphonies for a single movement of Dvorak’s Sixth – and still concede that his Piano Concerto doesn’t really work. The solo writing is inhibited; chained to the middle register and hobbled by melodies that feel more like preliminary doodles than finished, fertile themes. Poor Fujita: it can rarely have been played with such loving care. But there were no calls for encores.
Three nights later, Vikingur Olafsson, Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic played Schumann’s Piano Concerto, and demonstrated what was lacking. Perhaps it’s easier for a pianist-composer such as Schumann to fit an orchestral frame around a solo piano than it is for a basically orchestral imagination (like Dvorak’s) to find something meaningful for a piano to do, but Olafsson certainly didn’t go out of his way to sell the Schumann. There were none of the expected seduction techniques – no melting softness, no sudden bravura flashes. Along with Petrenko and the orchestra – whose little drum-and-trumpet tuckets had a baroque springiness – he approached it like Bach, with the poetry (such as there was) emerging from brisk, probing counterpoint.
Here it really was possible to hear the sonic personality of the orchestra, and under Petrenko that famous Berlin solidity and depth (built on a bedrock of basses and timpani) has become even more focussed, even more centred and – on an expressive level – even more inward. Petrenko is famously inscrutable off the podium and for much of this concert it felt like we were eavesdropping on a two-way conversation between conductor and orchestra: as if the audience was not even present in the room.
How would that introversion affect Smetana’s famously outgoing Ma vlast (the second half of the Berlin Prom)? You almost never hear this work performed without the involvement of Czech artists; but it turns out that Wagner-accented Smetana has something rather striking to say. To hear the opening ‘Vysehrad’ chorale shaped as part of a dark, lyrical texture rather than carved out and plonked before us as a nationalist artefact opened up all sorts of emotional possibilities – not least, an undertow of tragedy.
Petrenko’s seriousness was infectious; in particular there was none of the silly, performative inter-movement clapping that has become such a fad at the Proms. Neither of these superb concerts were televised, though on the night of the Berlin Philharmonic performance, BBC2 did broadcast July’s Disco Prom. So that’s all right then.
Dazzling: Stoppard’s The Real Thing, at the Old Vic, reviewed
The Real Thing at the Old Vic is a puzzling beast. And well worth seeing. Director Max Webster sets the action in a vast sitting room painted electric blue with a white sofa in the centre. A lovely use of empty space. But the preview trailer on the theatre’s website shows the actors seated in a scruffy bomb site where they discuss similarities between Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play and the lyrics of Taylor Swift. Perhaps the Old Vic hopes to attract a younger audience, but this show will appeal most to Stoppard’s lifelong fans.
The play marks a major shift in his development. The exuberant and frothy cleverness of his earlier work has acquired emotional weight and a tougher outer shell. There’s a lot of jealousy and anger smouldering beneath the surface. The opening scene is a marvel of delayed comedy. A husband greets his wife after her return from a business trip to Switzerland. He knows that she’s lying, but she doesn’t know that he knows. The audience realises that something is up because the husband’s insistent and increasingly bellicose questions don’t match the banal circumstances of the reunion. And the encounter concludes on a bombshell line: ‘You forgot your passport.’
The scene is an elaborate in-joke that reworks the famous ‘Torcello’ encounter from Betrayal by Harold Pinter, which premièred in 1978. Stoppard offered this hat-tip to Pinter as a way of assuring playgoers that he shared their outlook and their theatrical tastes. Younger audiences may not grasp any of that. And they may not enjoy seeing their contemporaries mocked by Henry, the lead character, who writes scripts for a living and specialises in aphorisms. ‘What free love is free of is love,’ he says.
Henry’s angry teenage daughter asks him about the various manifestations of romantic love and he praises ‘exclusive’ relationships. His daughter denounces these as ‘colonisation’. A thoroughly contemporary view. Henry responds wearily to her banal thought processes: ‘It’s like Michelangelo working in polystyrene.’ Not a bad summary of modern debates on social media.
The cast are all right but not top-notch. The best is Bel Powley whose nomadic sexual journey forms the spine of the story. Oliver Johnstone is a brilliant Stoppardian actor but his character fades too early from the script. This dazzlingly funny play is not revived as frequently as it deserves to be. Don’t expect perfection. Don’t expect the audience to be fully absorbed. Don’t worry if the actors can’t pronounce every word correctly. Henry offers this description of a political drama written by a talentless Marxist hothead. ‘It’s half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny.’ You may be the only one who enjoys the joke. Never mind. At least you were there.
Bitter Lemons is a pair of monologues performed side by side. Two women, AJ and Angelina, tell their stories in parallel at adjoining microphones. They have several things in common. Their mothers were doting, loving angels and their fathers were cheats. Both are unmarried and desperate to succeed in male-dominated professions.
The story gets started when each discovers that she’s pregnant and decides to have an abortion. ‘It’s a bit of white fluff,’ says AJ, who wants to become a professional footballer. Angelina works as a financial analyst and the pregnancy severely affects her performance at work. She’s already struggling because the City’s ‘diversity’ culture makes her paranoid – and when she sees her image on the company website, she wonders if she was hired to fill a quota.
Her worst problem is a boorish colleague, Gary, who treats her like a servant. He asks nosy questions about her ancestry and says, ‘you don’t look mixed-race to me’. Each morning he sends her out to fetch his coffee and she meekly obeys. And he has a habit of interrupting her in meetings and snapping his fingers at her. These details sound odd. Why doesn’t she record Gary’s conduct in secret and sue the firm for millions?
The script goes into a lot of harrowing detail about the development of embryos in the womb and it dramatises the moment the abortion drugs kick in during a football match AJ is playing in. She refuses to reveal her condition to her colleagues in case the coach, a man, drops her from the team.
AJ is certainly in a tricky spot but her woes are self-inflicted. She became pregnant after a one-night stand with a barman who declined to wear a condom and she accepted his refusal. Neither AJ or Angelina considers sparing their child’s life and raising it normally. The moral of the show is clear. Slaying a baby is wiser than caring for it, especially if the abortion enables a woman to purse her true ambition – emulating men. What a perverse homily.
Delightful: Phoenix, at All Points East, reviewed
A few years ago, my nephew informed me that he and his friend were planning to come up to London for the weekend for the Wireless Festival. Did they need somewhere to stay? He looked at me like I was a mad old man. No, of course not. They were going to camp. In Finsbury Park. Because when you go to festivals, you camp. Thankfully, he didn’t turn up on the Victoria Line with his tent and then wonder why no one else was similarly equipped.
Phoenix have the air of being as much a lifestyle choice as a pop group
Inner-city festivals such as Wireless and All Points East are almost always a series of single-day events. APE is a ruthlessly programmed festival. Rather than try to be all things to all people, each day is targeted at some section of the festival-going population. This year, there were two days for people who wanted to dance (headlined by Kaytranada and Loyle Carner) on the first weekend, then over the bank holiday weekend, one for teenage girls and young women (Mitski), one for maturing hipsters (LCD Soundsystem) and one almost exclusively for people who listen to BBC Radio 6 Music (Death Cab For Cutie and the Postal Service).
I went for sections of the latter two. What interested me about the hipster day was Jai Paul, who was headlining the second stage. You may very well not have heard of Paul, for in a career lasting more than a decade he has released four singles, recorded one album – which was leaked and then not officially released for several years – and only played live a handful of times. Nevertheless, there is a chunk of the music press that regards him as something of a demigod, a veritable prince of the north-west London suburbs. His crowd, it must be said, was modest, and not notably enthused. It reminded me of going to see another R&B singer, Kelela – also the subject of huge press buzz – in a tiny club that was barely a quarter full. Sometimes the public just aren’t that enthusiastic about the pop stars that excitable writers want to foist on the world. Usually they’re right. I think they’re right about Jai Paul, who was dreary.
The next night, a hipster group of a previous generation filled the same slot. Phoenix, unlike Jai Paul, aren’t shy: they were among France’s chosen musical representatives at the Olympic closing ceremony last month. Also unlike Jai Paul, they attracted a big crowd who wanted to dance (possibly because the headliners weren’t exactly a party). More to the point, they were delightful. Singer Thomas Mars still looks like he’s stepped off a yacht at St Tropez, and the band are like the children of Roxy Music: it’s not that they sound like Ferry et al, more that they have the air of being as much a lifestyle choice as a pop group. And pop is what they are – a giddy confection of synthpop, soft rock and new wave that’s as toothsome as candy floss.
They’re also blessed with a handful of surprisingly great songs that rocked a little harder live than on record, with guitars louder and drummer Thomas Hedlund absolutely powering the whole set (he’s the secret star here; they’d be a lesser group without him). ‘Lisztomania’ was a wonderful hybrid of the Strokes, Chic and Supertramp; ‘1901’ had the sharp, crispness of synthpop but the bursting, organic joy of rock.
It was helped, too, by the brilliantly simple staging. With LED frames surrounding the screens on stage, the performance area might suddenly become pink or create a whole new world.
It was proof, too, that while hipster causes célèbres can often disappoint, there are those who are in it for the long haul. I’m not sure that something so apparently arch was designed to last – it seemed as lightweight as gossamer when Phoenix emerged – but I’m glad it did.
Why has Leonora Carrington still not had a big exhibition?
‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City workspace in 1946. ‘The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store. The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.’
Carrington blended Egpytian, Mayan, Mesopotamian and Celtic legends learned at her nanny’s knee
Over six decades in the creative chaos of this house on Calle Chihuahua, Carrington would paint some of her best-known works and write her quirky serio-comic novella The Hearing Trumpet, which is narrated by a 92-year-old woman. If you want to understand Carrington’s art, read her stories: to get the full picture you need to hear that posh authorial voice, as insouciantly piquant as a hat pin – a tone instantly recognisable in the filmed interview with the nonagenarian artist that closes Newlands House Gallery’s current exhibition.
Most of the work in this show, curated by the artist’s cousin and biographer Joanna Moorhead, is late; there are some early drawings, including a delightful watercolour of a dragon and a princess painted in her teens, but many of the images are lithographic reproductions of earlier paintings made before the artist’s death in 2011. There are also tapestries (see below) woven to her designs in the 1950s, when she moved a family of Serape weavers into the house, and bronzes of figures featured in earlier paintings, cast with the help of assistants when she could no longer paint. Her paintings will be represented in a show at Firstsite, Colchester, next month; this exhibition provides an illustrated introduction to a fascinating life story, compellingly told by Moorhead.
The story follows the escape of the 20-year-old convent-educated, twice expelled aspiring artist from the ‘cattle market’ of the London season in 1937 into the arms of the twice married Max Ernst, her subsequent welcome in surrealist circles in Paris and her wartime retreat with Ernst to a farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche bought with money sent by her mother after her father disowned her. Photographs of the couple by Lee Miller show a carefree Carrington and a besotted Ernst, who clearly couldn’t believe his luck at landing this free-spirited English beauty half his age. She had come out, but not how her parents intended.
The rural idyll didn’t last. Following Ernst’s double internment, first by the French then the Gestapo, Carrington had a breakdown and fled to Spain, where she was subjected to shock treatments in a Santander asylum. She resisted the appeals of her Irish nanny, sent in a warship to bring her home, and escaped to Madrid, where she ran into a Paris acquaintance, the Mexican poet Renato Leduc, and married him on the promise of getting to Mexico. After hanging out in New York with the surrealists in exile – including Ernst and his new lover and future wife Peggy Guggenheim – the couple moved on to Mexico City where, amicably divorced from Leduc, Carrington married the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz and had two sons. For someone who was just getting noticed in New York, leaving for Mexico was not an obvious career move – but none of Carrington’s life choices were obvious. ‘Mummy told me I have such a bad temper that I’ll be an old witch before I am 20,’ she wrote at the end of the war in her autobiographical short story The Stone Door; in Mexico the escaped English debutante embraced that identity. Trios of wise old crones appear in ‘The Three Magdalenes’ (1988) and ‘Play Shadow’ (1977), while ‘Crow Soup’ (1997) could illustrate a recipe from the Weird Sisters’ cookbook.
A mythopoeic magpie, Carrington blended Egyptian, Mayan, Mesopotamian and Celtic legends learned at her nanny’s knee into a witches’ brew of an alternative universe dominated by women, animals and hybrids of the two. Apart from the appearance of her two young sons in ‘And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur’ (based on a 1953 painting), men don’t get a look-in. Her unselfconscious surrealism feels closer to Bosch, whose paintings she saw in Madrid, than to her male contemporaries: it comes completely naturally. In an image like ‘Nine, Nine, Nine’ (based on a 1948 painting), you sense her delight in the products of her own imagination: the topiary angel, the woman with the Struwwelpeter fright wig and the pet fox, the flight of reanimated pterodactyl fossils. Her hieratic sculptures of human-animal hybrids like ‘The Daughter of the Minotaur’ (2010) manage to be sinister and seductive at the same time, and you could believe her late series of bronze masks were capable of endowing the wearer with Jim Carrey-esque powers.
Commercial success, as so often with women artists, came late. She lived to see one of her paintings sold for more than $1 million; earlier this year ‘Les Distractions de Dagobert’ (1945) broke auction records for a female British artist when it sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5 million. A biopic is said to be in the planning stages. What we need now is a big exhibition.
The timeless beauty of Shropshire’s canals
Shropshire is a strange county, little known by those beyond its border, and perhaps that’s part of its appeal. It not only has no coastline, but no city officially either. Phone cover is shaky and transport links sparse (at some times in the day, only one bus every two hours will leave my market town, and they cease abruptly around 6 p.m.).
But what it does have are medieval towns, lush green landscapes, and enormous numbers of farm animals – cows, sheep, and horses (for someone coming, as I do, from relatively arable East Anglia, this has a certain H.E. Bates charm to it). The town I’ve moved to, built on a canal, has a livestock auction house on the outskirts, the lowing of cows-for-sale emanating through the carpark outside. If the smell of ordure doesn’t deter the customers, there’s a café attached, selling cooked breakfasts and, appropriately enough, roast beef.
There are plenty of stately homes and castles to visit, but most of them are the kinds of places ten-year-olds, like my daughter who is growing up in Italy, will trudge round with a long face and flagging interest. On her most recent trip to Britain, I wanted to show her a real adventure.
For four days, there were ducks, swans, birdsong, hovering dragonflies, and the eternal, soft whump-whump of the engine
A few months ago, I wrote in The Spectator of wanting to go on a canal trip, and it was the perfect time to make it happen. I took a day’s training first in Audlem with a redoubtable woman named Linda – indispensable for beginners, whatever anyone tells you – and got a crash course in narrowboating essentials (and a baked potato, cooked in the cabin, into the bargain). Linda, an escapee from London who’s lived half her life on the canals, taught me on her 60-foot craft how to start up the engine, steer, brake by reversing, do a three-point turn, tie up the boat, and use a lock.
On a late July Monday, I drove with my cousin and our two young daughters to Whitchurch Marina to claim our rental boat – the 40-foot, green and red ‘Sooty Swift’ – and by late afternoon were chugging peacefully through open fields in the vague direction of Wales. For four days, there were ducks, swans, birdsong, hovering dragonflies, and the eternal, soft whump-whump of the engine, running at about 4 mph. The kids sat on the prow or lay on their beds inside, my cousin made cups of tea and sausage baps, and I steered the boat. This was initially hair-raising, then, as you got used to the tiller and began to feel over time as though you and the craft were one, oddly exhilarating. You slowed down for moored boats, leant on the horn when going round bends, threaded the craft through narrow (numbered) stone bridges, and began to love the slow precision of passing oncoming boats on a tight canal without knocking into them. For one of life’s slowcoaches such as myself, it was the perfect sport.
We moored wherever we wished to – by a village where fresh eggs were sold outside farms (£1, for half a dozen, in a trust box) or once by a vast wooded lake. Occasionally, we’d stop at marinas and meet those who lived there, people in the second half of their lives who had decided to throw it all up for life on a boat – ‘I’m happy as hell,’ one man told us – often with dogs in tow. One marina, Ellesmere, had an approach through a tunnel, so that our children could sit out on deck in the dark and touch the clammy ceiling as we switched on the headlights and nosed our way through. The canals, untouched by time, are another world, so that when you return to this one – even to the sleepiest of towns – and see cars driving quickly and people moving purposefully about their business, it brings you up with a jolt.
The fact our canal was the ‘Llangollen’ and not the Shropshire Union (the ‘Shroppie’) gives some sense of how intertwined Shropshire is with Wales. I had wonderful trips to Wales in childhood – pony-trekking, mountain railways, and male voice choirs – and wanted my daughter to have some of the same. A few weeks after the canal trip, we stayed the night in Llangollen – a touristy place in Denbighshire, with a dramatic weir gushing, roaring, and foaming around great jagged stones. The next day, we set out for Snowdonia, catching a trio of well-connected buses through stone villages and green valleys – tender, voluptuous, and timeless – complete with the odd waterfall roaring down the mountainside. Eventually, the bus left us at Pen y Pass, a base for climbing Snowdon, already at an elevation of over 1,000 ft, where we ate lemon drizzle cake in a hotel café and went outside for the view.
Standing on that mountain pass, witnessing my daughter’s wonder at the emerald peaks and valleys, I realised I was in a better, more life-loving mood (just the oxygen, perhaps?) than I could remember. My daughter, a habitual townie, made me promise to bring her back the next year – camping if need be – and resolved, later in life, to spend summers there with her children. As a long-term Walesophile, with vivid childhood memories of my own, I felt the pleasure of passing something on.
My daughter’s now returned to Italy, with pizza and gelato on hand and the Mediterranean Sea as her backdrop. Many Brits would envy her and never want to leave. But I’m pretty sure the canals of Shropshire and those green mountain peaks in Snowdonia will call her, insistently, back again.