-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
The Tory leadership contest is wide open
Conservative MPs who hoped for a relaxing summer break have had a nasty shock: their phones have been ringing on repeat. With just 121 MPs in their corner, the Tory leadership candidates are fiercely competing for each one’s backing. ‘They call on bank holidays when I’m with my partner,’ complains one old-timer. ‘I’m trying to relax by the pool – then I get James Cleverly on the line,’ adds another.
The decision to opt for a long contest lasting until November was meant to give candidates a break. Kemi Badenoch took one, but was attacked for missing a hustings in the north – she reacted with trademark fury and defended her right to switch off. It’s unclear if any of the six have come back refreshed. They are about to enter what one old hand calls ‘the most critical week, in terms of momentum’. There will be two knock-out rounds, then they have a month to sell themselves to MPs. The race will then be reduced to just two contenders before party members pick their winner.
‘I’m trying to relax by the pool – then I get James Cleverly on the phone,’ says one Tory
MPs haven’t been rushing to take sides, some seeing the race as a lack-of-talent contest from a party paying the price for chewing up and spitting out too many leaders. ‘It’s been a fantastic summer being inspired by the battle of Olympians,’ jokes one. ‘It’s just a shame this doesn’t apply to the leadership contest.’ Others have been impressed by Robert Jenrick. ‘Rob has the slickest campaign and has been making the most of the summer,’ says an MP backing another candidate. ‘He’s not wasting time.’
Yet the contest is seen as wide open. ‘Anyone could win – other than Mel [Stride],’ argues a shadow cabinet member. ‘With every one of those five, they want to be leader and you can chart a path.’ When candidates are eliminated, horse-trading will follow – but it’s hard to see who ends up backing whom, adding to the contest’s unpredictability.
While Stride has a loyal base, his candidature is generally not being taken that seriously yet by the bulk of the party. ‘The perception is that Mel is positioning to be shadow chancellor,’ says a former cabinet minister. So his real opposition would be the others tipped for this role: Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, and other colleagues with Treasury team experience – Laura Trott, Andrew Griffith and Jesse Norman. However, Stride supporters say he is in it to win it – pointing to the David Cameron example as proof that a long leadership contest can allow for surprising results.
Jenrick and Badenoch, the two favourites, are expected to make the final four. Tom Tugendhat, who ran against Rishi Sunak, is expected to profit from the centrist wing of the party. Several MPs believe only one of Cleverly, the former foreign secretary, and Priti Patel, or ‘the Pritster’ as she was called by Boris Johnson, who regards her as a rare loyalist, is likely to make the final four. Those around Sunak (who is still party leader) believe Patel behaved well during the tumult but Cleverly is winning over MPs with his own unity pitch.
Whoever makes the final four, a rough choice is forming in relation to the various candidates. Is a firebrand needed to shake up the status quo? Or should the party follow Labour’s example and go for a reliable, inoffensive option – and wait for Keir Starmer to trip up? Jenrick and Badenoch are seen to be the two higher-energy options, able to steal some of Nigel Farage’s thunder. ‘But at some point we should think about Lib Dem voters,’ says a One Nation Tory. This makes the case for a more mellow leadership.
All this comes down, in part, to deciding why the Tories lost – and reflecting on how bad the defeat was. But even copying the Labour playbook seems complicated. Starmer entered No. 10 on the back of Tory misfortune, but the Conservatives now have to battle with Reform to win over disillusioned Labour voters, while Reform threatens to poach more Tory seats in the future. Initial polling suggests Reform is already picking up support Starmer has lost. Team Farage regard Badenoch as their biggest competition, but doubt she’ll get past the MPs.
Among MPs, a question is being asked: which candidate could take the fight to Starmer and Farage – and score points against both? It’s a test that tends to benefit Badenoch, the candidate who most regularly comes out on top in polls of party members. She will officially launch her campaign next week with the slogan ‘truth – responsibility – country’. In contrast to some of the other campaigns, she isn’t planning to announce intricate policy but instead start with founding principles.
After Sunak was elected leader, Badenoch became the bookmakers’ favourite to succeed him. But she has a fight on her hands to win over enough MPs to make the final two. ‘If you think Kemi is the answer, you still will after the summer holiday, but if you think she is aloof and blunt then her team hasn’t done much to change that yet,’ a former minister says. Even her supporters fear that rival camps will try to rig the race so members – who are likely to choose her – never get the chance.
In 2019, Johnson demonstrated that the frontrunner can go on to win the leadership contest. He did so by learning from the mistakes that saw him drop out unexpectedly in the prior contest, when Michael Gove abandoned him and MPs decided their suspicions about him being a lone rider were correct. To reach the membership stage, the candidates will need to show that they can perform well with the public – and bring colleagues along with them.
In this race, something else is missing: the involvement of Gavin Williamson, the Tory Machiavelli whose whipping skills got both Theresa May and Johnson over the line. He – along with other seasoned campaigners – is thought to be sitting the contest out, with visible results. ‘There isn’t a serious parliamentary operation behind any of them,’ says one MP. ‘If there was, at least one of them would have 20 public supporters by now. It should be achievable.’
This speaks to perhaps the biggest point: the feeling that this race isn’t to be taken too seriously because MPs think the winner won’t last more than a couple of years and that the defeat in July was of such a scale that this is a two-, perhaps three-leader problem. The party has two months to find its next leader. But the hunt for its next Prime Minister may be a far lengthier task.
Listen to more from Katy Balls on Coffee House Shots, The Spectator’s daily politics podcast:
The unstoppable rise of stage amplification
Recent acquisition of some insanely expensive hearing aids aimed at helping me out in cacophonous restaurants has set me thinking about the extent that modern life allows us to filter our intake of noise. This is big business. As sirens wail and Marvel blockbusters and rock concerts crash through legal decibel levels, controlling sound levels has become an increasingly sophisticated operation, abetted by everything from silicone pastilles and the volume-control knob to the wireless earbud.
The National Theatre has virtually given up on ‘natural’ sound
Concert halls and opera houses remain havens of what one might call ‘natural’ acoustics, places where the alchemy of balancing convex and concave surfaces with reflective and absorbent materials creates an environment in which reverberating warmth can coexist with clarity and a whisper can carry as far as a shout. London is blessed with the Wigmore Hall and Royal Opera House in this respect (the Royal Albert, Royal Festival and Barbican halls are generally deemed unhelpful by performers, if not audiences). Although it remains a point of dignity that in such venues classical musicians aren’t electronically amplified – they refuse to, as it were, cheat with a bionic boost – it’s a principle for which Joe Public will never give them credit. But just put a Wagnerian soprano such as Lise Davidsen singing, undoctored, alongside a belter such as Adele, and Joe would be stunned by the comparative puniness of the latter’s vocal production.
In theatres, it’s a different story: the magnificent roar of a Donald Wolfit or Alan Howard, organically generated and projected, is a thing of the past. Look for the tell-tale credit ‘sound designer’ halfway down the billing: it can be evidence that the actors will be communicating through an invisible cellophane layer that gives an entirely manufactured sheen to the words they are uttering, allowing them to go sotto voce and pass Marlon Brando mumbling off as emotional authenticity. In many cases it is, frankly, a bit of a cheat, and it’s bad for audiences too, making them more reliant on the aural equivalent of wrinkle-free Photoshop fakery.
For musicals the practice can of course be justified, because even the hardiest show singers need to use their vocal cords sparingly over eight shows a week (opera singers only do three at most). Mary Martin may have starred in an unmiked South Pacific at Drury Lane in 1951 without taking a single performance off in a year, but that’s inconceivable now. (Smaller pit bands, tougher vocal training and audiences with lower expectations offer a partial explanation for such resilience.)
Quite how or when amplified sound made its advance is a mystery. We do know, however, that My Fair Lady at Drury Lane in 1958 used a row of floor (or ‘float’) microphones: these created pools of amplified sound which, according to Julie Andrews’s memoir, had an unfortunate tendency to pick up all manner of stray noise, not least Rex Harrison’s persistent flatulence. In 1961, when the ballerina Svetlana Beriosova was required to recite some poetry in the course of dancing Frederick Ashton’s Persephone at Covent Garden, a primitive body mic exploded and set fire to her costume. Five years later Barbra Streisand hit London in Funny Girl. Worried that her surprisingly small voice wouldn’t carry, she wore a mic in her cleavage – nobody else in the cast was permitted any amplification. By the 1970s rock musicals such as Hair and Evita were making more liberal use of hand-held mics, and reproducing the hi-fi quality of your stereo system became the goal.
Today, total miking is the norm for musicals. Each performer will be individually wired up to a tiny headset tactfully concealed, usually in the hairline, linked by cable to a transmitter taped to the back or thigh and mixed via a console at the rear of the auditorium to strategically placed speakers. It’s a delicate business. You can’t mic selectively: mic one, and you have to mic all, in order to avoid a two-tier effect. It’s crucial to keep the kit away from sweat – ‘the great enemy’ according to Terry Jardine, chairman of industry-leader Autograph Sound – because it muffles the higher frequencies. Something called ‘feedback colouration’ – the microphone in effect echoing itself – is another bugbear. And everything is made more complicated by the actor’s every movement changing the direction of the sound.
Jardine insists that it’s not a simple matter of providing the audience with a massive hearing aid. ‘We’re not so much turning up the volume as creating an atmosphere,’ he says, pointing to the landscape of spooky sonic effects that accompanied the success of fantasy shows such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Directors such as Jamie Lloyd, Katie Mitchell, Robert Icke and Simon McBurney have all embraced the potential of this technology wholeheartedly, even if none have gone quite as far as Max Webster, whose Donmar Warehouse production of Macbeth requires audiences to wear binaural headphones through which every ghostly creak is radioed with hyperreal three-dimensional intensity. Even a one-man version of a Chekhov play can be coated in electrically powered artifice: for Andrew Scott’s Vanya, sound designer Dan Balfour sewed two mics into the collar on Scott’s shirt, and planted further invisible mics like Soviet bugs all over the set: ‘one for the kettle, one for the sink, one for the gun, one for the door, one for the metronome, two for the piano, three for the curtain rail’, and so on, making everything with which Scott interacted ‘pop’ vibrantly, on a level with his amplified speaking voice.
All this suggests an unstoppable trend. The National Theatre has virtually given up on ‘natural’ sound. It has always had acoustic problems with the Olivier auditorium, where concrete walls deaden audibility at its upper level. Various structural alterations and interventions have been attempted, none of them successful, and about 20 years ago, the management succumbed to head mics – or ‘sound reinforcement’, as they euphemistically put it. This is now ubiquitous throughout productions in the Lyttelton and Dorfman auditoriums as well. The last bastions standing out against electronic voice wizardry are the Royal Shakespeare Company (‘except in rare cases’) and Shakespeare’s Globe. The Almeida – capacity: 300 – is using it for The Years, with a cast of five. How much does this matter? The ability to throw your voice to the back of the gallery used to be a point of professional honour. Asked for advice on successful acting, the clarion Robert Stephens replied briskly ‘Speak up!’, and the likes of Judi Dench and Michael Gambon would regard the crutch of a head mic with disdain. But the young are growing as lazy about the art of projecting as drama schools are being casual about teaching it.
It’s right that the Olivier Awards now recognise the considerable achievements of sound designers, but something of the viscerally direct communication at the heart of the theatrical experience is being sacrificed to their ingenuity. Our ears are losing touch with the real thing.
Glamour or guilt? The perils of marketing the British country house
The most angst-ridden sub-category of the very rich – admittedly a lucky bunch to start with – must surely contain those who have inherited a British country house, along with the exhortation to keep it up. Imagine the anxiety of knowing that one is custodian of a large, crumbling pile of distinguished architecture, stuffed with meaningful antiquities and perpetually besieged by damp, dry rot and taxes. For those of us who are already reliably paralysed by small-scale admin, it would be enough to drive you to drink or worse. In contrast, the landed gentry who survive best in this modern terrain must be energetic, ruthless and ingenious; in all probability possessing similar characteristics to those which propelled their ancestors to social prominence in the first place.
This is the territory of Radio 4’s The Grand House – Boom or Blight?, narrated by the director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, who says that ‘the purpose of a visit to a country house is under debate like never before’. Well, it is in some quarters: I imagine that a sizeable section of the visiting public is still perfectly happy with an extended gawp at a magnificent house and gardens and a slice of lemon drizzle cake in the café. But the wider ‘cultural conversation’ is certainly increasingly conscious of the often unsavoury sources of wealth which contributed to a fair proportion of such homes, in particular slavery and colonial plunder.
What has helped to preserve Britain’s great houses in the past, however, is the argument that they are irreplaceable repositories of history, architecture, art and craftsmanship. It was another V&A director, Sir Roy Strong, who in 1974 sprang to the defence of country houses after a long period of unchecked destruction. His landmark exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House, simultaneously celebrated what many have called ‘England’s greatest contribution to the visual arts’ and lamented their ongoing ruination, a loss of more than 1,600 properties between 1875 and 1975. In his diaries, Strong wrote that he often saw tears streaming down visitors’ faces ‘as they battled to come to terms with all that had gone’.
In the period of more mindful preservation which followed, many homes were acquired by the National Trust, while others are still owned by descendants of the original owners, who have turned them into businesses to offset the enormous running costs. Several of the latter describe here their schemes for attracting visitors to their estates: Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire hosts weddings and etiquette classes while Houghton Hall in Norfolk shows contemporary art. But other venues, such as those run by the National Trust or English Heritage, are increasingly inviting visitors to brood on the racial exploitation behind, say, the sugar plantations which funded some historic piles or the grim mahogany trade behind an imposing staircase. Important history, but – for tourists drawn in by a fantasy of Bridgerton or Downton Abbey – it’s going to prove a delicate dance between guilt and glamour.
How does it feel to grow up with a father who is addicted to lying? That’s the personal history explored in #1 Dad, in which the stand-up comedian Gary Vider examines his childhood with his father Manny, a compulsive con-man who ran the gamut from pranking to criminality with disturbing glee.
One of Manny’s biggest stunts – which ran for four years – was to get young Gary to pose as a child reporter for Sports Illustrated for Kids magazine, with Manny himself playing the accompanying photographer. Having obtained press passes under the more lax accreditation systems of the 1990s, Manny used them to gain entry to stellar sports games and locker rooms, where little Gary, notepad in hand, would conduct fake interviews with some of the biggest sports stars of the day: he even quizzed Nancy Kerrigan as they skated round an ice rink together. The articles were never published, of course, yet nobody ever asked why.
The pinnacle of the scam involved Michael Jordan, the legendary US basketball player, in a comeback game at Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately, for the first time ever, a genuine adult reporter and photographer from Sports Illustrated for Kids turned up as well. It didn’t phase Manny, who had always buttered up the security guards, and he and Gary were ushered into Jordan’s locker room long before the real journalists. The interview was not particularly profound. Gary asked Jordan his favourite food, and the star replied: ‘Steak.’
Gary was estranged from Manny at 15, and the podcast entails him going looking for his father 24 years later. I always feel a little uneasy when podcasts broadcast conversations that should really be private – such as Gary’s discussions with his wife and therapist over the wisdom of this course – but with an evident ear to their dramatic effect. But this is fascinating listening, not least because Manny emerges as a terrible but compelling character, flouting all known rules of fatherhood. His stinginess in handing over lunch money, for example, meant that young Gary resorted to making photocopies of dollar bills to give to the lunch lady. When Manny witnessed this he reconsidered his parental responsibilities – and devoted his energies to helping Gary produce better forgeries.
The Stockhausen work that is worth braving
Grade: A-
One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve never conducted his music, but I once trod in some.’ It’s almost certainly apocryphal, but the implied verdict is widely shared. Stockhausen played up to the caricature of the self-obsessed ‘squeaky gate’ composer, though his capacity to create painful noises went way beyond squeaks: only he could have written a string quartet in which each player is recorded in a separate helicopter.
So I’m sticking my neck out when I suggest that some of Stockhausen’s works are masterpieces that can be enjoyed even – or especially – if you steer clear of the thicket of mathematics, physics and astrology that surrounds them. One of these is Mantra, in which two pianists fortified by percussion perform virtuoso tricks while microphones and speakers pick up and play back their notes with subtle grades of distortion. I’ll spare you the sine-wave theory; suffice to say that Stockhausen’s manipulation of his ‘mantra’ produces tumbling bagatelles, pianistic twiddles that turn into ear-worms and a nerve-shredding electrical storm.
This new recording, featuring the piano duo of Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, is the one to have: the special effects colour the piano tones rather than overloading them, as they do in other performances. (I checked so you don’t have to.) The composer here displays the mixture of daring and whimsy that landed him on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written in 1970, at the height of his trendiness, but it hasn’t dated. If you feel brave enough to sample Stockhausen, tread in this.
Aggressively jaded: Edinburgh’s Marriage of Figaro reviewed
‘Boo!’ came a voice from the stalls. ‘Boo. Outrage!’ It was hard not to feel a pang of admiration. British opera audiences don’t tend to boo; we’re either too polite or too unengaged. But there we were in Act Three of Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of The Marriage of Figaro – just after the scene where Susanna, the Count and the Countess enjoy a three-in-a-bed romp while singing the trio ‘Soave sia il vento’ – and at least one person felt passionate enough to raise his voice.
It was hard not to feel a pang of admiration. British opera audiences don’t tend to boo
Obviously, there’s no such trio in The Marriage of Figaro. It had been prised from Cosi fan tutte and shoehorned into the antics chez Almaviva: one of several dream sequences inserted by Serebrennikov in pursuit of his hard-hitting thesis – articulated through a neon-lit slogan at the back of the set – that ‘Capitalism Kills Love’. Bold stuff; so shocking that the Edinburgh audience (and it’s never been hard to distinguish between Edinburgh opera-goers and the Baader-Meinhof Group) had mostly been applauding with the utmost courtesy. Even – no, especially – when Cherubino (Georgy Kudrenko) pulled off his Y-fronts and leaped, butt-naked, out of the window.
In fairness, Berlin’s Komische Oper is currently one of the most interesting European opera companies. No one can have expected a vanilla Figaro from this source, and the cast was clearly at ease with Serebrennikov’s interventionist approach: a spirited, edgy Susanna (Penny Sofroniadou), a handsome-sounding Figaro (Peter Kellner) and a Countess (Verity Wingate) who sang with sustained sweetness and poignancy. The orchestra was buoyant under James Gaffigan, who did not deserve the second bout of (more widespread) booing that he received at the curtain call. Possibly they mistook him for the director.
And in the first half, at least, this was a fairly conventional updated Figaro. The Almavivas were well-heeled collectors of pop art and the two-storey set was slick, if distracting (this director does his own designs). Even Serebrennikov’s riskier interventions opened up rather than closed down the drama’s possibilities. A wordless Cherubino, communicating in sign language with a newly invented sister Cherubina (Patricia Nolz), who interprets his words through song? It sort of worked – at least until they started snogging. That was a bit much.
No, it was after the interval that Serebrennikov started to muck things up. There were dream sequences, an imagined massacre by the disgruntled servants (the compassionate left doesn’t half enjoy fantasising about mass murder) and a gradual pile-up of garbage and contemporary artworks on stage. A mute henchman (another of Serebrennikov’s additions) gradually turned into a dog.
Even then, it might have flown if Serebrennikov hadn’t started rewriting the score. Barbarina got the chop, and her Act Four aria was reallocated to the Countess. Then at the climactic moment of forgiveness – the point where Figaro ascends into the stars – Serebrennikov halted to insert a chunk of Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet while the Count (Hubert Zapior) writhed about on a dirty mattress. The Countess snubbed the Count and all possibility of redemption drained away. Hey, that’s reality! Suck it up, bourgeois scum. This aggressively jaded approach to opera is not uncommon in Europe; in as far as there’s a place for it in the UK, that place is probably the Edinburgh Festival.
Hey, that’s reality! Suck it up, bourgeois scum. This aggressively jaded approach is not uncommon
Any political subtext in Scottish Opera’s Oedipus Rex, meanwhile, was presumably unintentional. A small nation sees its leaders exposed as corrupt? No contemporary parallels there, even if one theme of this year’s festival (according to the festival director Nicola Benedetti) is ‘the necessity for unity’. ‘Better Together’, you might even say. In any case, the orchestra of Scottish Opera plus a big, enthusiastic community chorus took possession of the glass-roofed Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland, squeezing around the elk skeleton, the Buddha statue and the old lighthouse lantern. The chorus mingled with the audience as the drama unfolded. In director Roxana Haines’s conception, the Speaker (Wendy Seager) was a museum cleaner and the cast were museum exhibits: ancient artefacts that came to life in an amusing riff on Stravinsky’s decision to cast the piece in an archaic language (Latin). Here too, the solo singers were heroic – Shengzhi Ren was a searing Oedipus and Kitty Whately a sombre, monumental Jocasta. Stuart Stratford conducted with the aid of at least three sub-conductors and it sounded raw and primal, although the acoustics and sightlines in the huge space were patchy at best. Frustratingly for a promenade performance, you couldn’t really promenade.
Still, it was a bracing, uplifting experience, elevated above all by the energetic singing and ritual gestures of the community singers, whose obvious enjoyment was hard to resist. It’s a curious sort of weekend when Mozart’s most life-affirming comedy leaves you sour and depressed while Stravinsky’s eye-gouging, mother-shagging horror-show has you punching the air with enthusiasm. But that’s why you go to Edinburgh.
Must-watch TV: Apple TV+’s Pachinko reviewed
Pachinko is like an extended version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I used to have to get out of shoebox at midnight, lick road clean, eat a couple of bits of coal gravel’) relocated to mostly 20th-century Japan and Korea. There’s so much misery it makes Angela’s Ashes look like Pollyanna. And there’s so little by way of laughter or a redemptive pay off you might be tempted to end it all like one of the numerous doomed characters do – off camera, fortunately – in the almost relentlessly catastrophe-laden season one.
Pachinko comes pretty close, I’d say, to being must-watch television
Now we’re back for season two and with the second world war (from the Japanese/Korean perspective) and the Korean war yet to be covered, I’m sure this one ain’t going to be a barrel of fun either. But don’t let anything I’ve just said put you off. Pachinko comes pretty close, I’d say, to being must-watch television: for the acting, for the unfamiliar setting, for the sweeping melodrama of the masochistically compulsive plot and, most instructively, for the handy history lesson.
The Koreans, it turns out, had it worse under the Japanese occupation (from 1910 to 1945) than even the Irish did under the British. They could barely earn a living (except in jobs that were near-slave labour), they were spied on and arrested if they expressed the slightest anti-imperial sentiment; they were even forbidden from eating their deliciously nutty-tasting staple white rice. Two million of them were forced to abandon their homeland to seek a miserable, squalid living as second-class – indeed stateless – citizens in Japan, where they were spat at and looked down on for eating kimchi, which the locals considered unpalatably stinky.
All they had to keep them going was their burning resentment, their pride in being Korean, and their stolid endurance. This is one of the recurring themes in this sweeping family saga – like a Korean take on the kind of potboilers Irwin Shaw wrote about America in the 1950s: no matter how hard you try to rise above the mire, there will always be a Japanese (or Yankee) boot ready to put you back into your place.
This chippiness, though understandable, can get a bit dispiriting for the viewer. In vain do you wait for an uplifting narrative arc where one of the protagonists does the right and decent thing and, against the odds, triumphs over adversity. Nope – light spoiler alert – whether you’re a brilliant opera singer, a blameless Christian pastor, a capable Wall Street financier, a toothsome, feisty peasant girl, or a maths whiz, your dreams will always turn to dust.
What carries you through are the performances, most notably from the two women who play our heroine, Kim Sunja (luminously beautiful Minha Kim in her young adult years, Youn Yuh-jung when she’s a wise, indomitable grandma who has seen everything that life can throw at her). In fact the characters are all so well-imagined – Jin Ha as city slicker Solomon Baek; Lee Min-ho as Koh Hansu, a broodingly handsome, almost cartoonish baddie with a streak of endearing vulnerability; Steve Sang-Hyun Noh as Baek Isak the pastor – that even when the plotting gets a little bit strained or convoluted, you can’t stop watching. It’s mesmerising.
I’ve not read the bestselling novel of the same name on which it is based, by Min Jin Lee, but I suspect one could get quite irritated by the contrivances. She has, for obvious reasons, sought to shoehorn her family into every major event of the historical period covered. Sometimes, this works well. The Great Kanto earthquake – which struck Yokohama in 1923, killing 100,000 people, and the senseless aftermath in which perhaps 10,000 Koreans were hunted down and murdered by vengeful Japanese – makes for a particularly powerful episode. But the cramming in of a random character with Aids, just because it’s set in the 1980s, feels strained and implausible. What’s the betting that this new season finds some tortured excuse for a scene set in 1945 in which someone from the family decides to make a spur-of-the-moment day-trip to Hiroshima?
A lot of the suspense and twists and turns in the plot depend on narrative trickery involving extensive deployment of flashbacks and strategically withheld information. Though the constant toing and froing between periods and locations can be a bit jerky and unsettling (the viewer is taken from 1920s rural Busan to Tokyo at the height of the economic boom in the 1980s, then back again, etc.), it’s rather enjoyable once you accept you’re on a rollercoaster.
Pachinko is named after an arcade game to which Koreans are addicted. There’s lots of this local colour (not to mention some superbly realised scenic depictions of Japan and Korea, past and present), which is another thing that makes it so watchable. I particularly like the Doljabi ceremony in which, on its first birthday, a Korean baby is presented with a table of items including books, ink, brushes, money, rice, thread, a bow or sword, and things of that ilk. The item they choose represents the area in which they will have most luck in the future.
The importance of copying
The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists: before art history became an academic discipline, artists were the leading authorities on art.
Founded more as a teaching resource than a visitor attraction, until the mid-1940s the gallery was reserved for artists two days a week, when other visitors had to pay for entry. This stopped them getting in the way of artists copying from the masters, an essential part of an art education in the days before cheap colour reproduction.
There’s something of the altarpiece in this image of an artist’s progenitors flanking a touchstone for his art
It’s rare to see artists copying in the galleries now that they are so jam-packed with tourists. As long ago as 1980, David Hockney wrote to the then director Michael Levey asking permission to copy a Van Gogh in the basement, as to be ‘stood in the N.G. every morning would be hard for me – people would natter to me’. Copying, he argued, was ‘a marvellous way to learn, it was good enough for Degas, Van Gogh and almost everybody else before 1920’.
The request was part of a correspondence about his 1981 Artist’s Eye exhibition, the fifth in a series designed to take the institution back to its roots by inviting living artists to hang a selection of their own works alongside favourite paintings from the collection. Hockney’s selection was decided in advance. Four years earlier he had painted a portrait of his friend Henry Geldzahler, curator of contemporary art at the Met, studying reproductions of four of the artist’s favourite National Gallery paintings taped to a screen in his studio. Titled ‘Looking at Pictures on a Screen’ (1977), the work testified to Hockney’s belief in the power of great painting of all periods to continue to ‘give off a lot of its magic’ even in reproduction. He suggested hanging the original four paintings – Vermeer’s ‘A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal’ (c.1670-2), Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Baptism of Christ’ (c.1437-45), Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ (1889) and Degas’s ‘After the Bath’ (1890-5) – alongside this picture, and Levey jumped at the idea. Being Hockney, he didn’t stop at that. A generation before social media, he introduced an interactive element by including the original screen and chair belonging to his former partner Peter Schlesinger – specially shipped from New York – so that visitors could stand in Geldzahler’s place. Now that painting – without the screen and chair – is back at the National Gallery, reunited with Piero’s ‘Baptism’ in a special display. Hockney has ‘never fallen out of love with Piero’ since he was given a little three and sixpenny book on the artist as a student, before encountering his paintings in the flesh on his first trip to the capital aged 18. He loves the quattrocento artist’s ‘clarity of light’ and his way of positioning figures in structured spaces so that ‘you could measure where all the figures are’. Piero, who shared Hockney’s fascination with geometry and optics, wrote the earliest manual on perspective in painting, De Prospectiva Pingendi, in the 1470s. Apart from the title, it was in the vernacular: originally headed for a career in the family leather business, the young Piero never learned Latin. Like Hockney’s, his way of writing about art was accessible and jargon-free.
‘Looking at Pictures on a Screen’ emulates the spatial structure and clarity of a Piero painting. The pointilliste treatment of the pink screen makes its oil colours shimmer like tempera, while the green of the wall behind is picked up in the lighted tip of Geldzahler’s bow tie and reflected in the nacreous sheen of his white linen suit, echoing the greenish shadows in Christ’s flesh tones – ‘The Baptism’ was painted on a green ground. The complementary red and green intertwine in the little chair, its trellis-patterned upholstery artfully reflected in the polished wooden floor.
On loan from an American private collection, ‘Looking at Pictures’ is a luminous piece of painting. It hangs to the left of ‘The Baptism’, with ‘My Parents’ (1977), painted the same year, on the other side (see below). In two earlier failed attempts at painting his parents Hockney had included his self-portrait in the mirror between them, but here the mirror catches reflections of Piero’s ‘Baptism’ and a swag of Fra Angelico curtain he had used to frame the earlier double portrait. Hockney’s mother Laura kept a reproduction of ‘The Baptism’ he had given her on her bedroom wall because she liked its religious subject, and there’s something of the altarpiece in this image of an artist’s progenitors flanking a historical touchstone for his art. A Chardin catalogue and an English edition of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past on the shelf below underline the continuity of past and present. ‘If paintings speak to you, it’s happening now,’ says Hockney in the catalogue. ‘So they are contemporary. They are living. The artist might have died but the pictures are still alive.’ The lesson of this little exhibition is that great art speaks to each new generation in the present tense.
The Terminator is still the best
The Terminator is James Cameron’s first film, made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is celebrating its 40th anniversary – there’s a 4K restoration out in cinemas – and I’ve never seen it. I’m not wholly ignorant of 1980s action films, it may surprise you to hear. I’ve seen Diehard. I know a single fella in a vest can see off an entire army. But Terminator passed me by and now I’m glad to have rectified that. It’s engrossing, suspenseful, has a personality all of its own and absolutely stands the test of time. That last scene with the crawling, whirring, clanking arm? Best scene ever.
Cameron, who would go on to make Aliens, Titanic and Avatar, was reportedly living out of his car when he sold the script to producer Gale Anne Hurd for $1. He made the sale on the condition that whoever financed it hired him to direct, as unproven as he was. (That said I now realise he had Piranha II: The Spawning under his belt.) She eventually raised $6 million and, as the film went on to make $78 million at the box office, I’m guessing it’s the best dollar she ever spent.
The plot, in a nutshell, is this: a killer cyborg, our Terminator (Schwarzenegger), is sent back in time from a future run by machines ‘that got smart’ and have turned Earth into a devastated nuclear landscape. (Always a devastated nuclear landscape, never lavender fields.) But there is still a pocket of human resistance and his job is to assassinate a young waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton with a Suzi Quatro hairdo), because the machines know that her unborn son will one day lead the fight against them. (What they don’t consider is the fact that if she is eliminated there’d be no need to eliminate her – look up the Hitler murder paradox – but the film takes the prudent course of simply ignoring all that.)
It opens with great flair. It’s night-time in LA and the scene is a deserted school yard. Electricity crackles, a cat yowls, windows rattle and suddenly a naked man materialises. He is a remarkable physical specimen. Each of his pecs is bigger than my head. This is our Arnie. He has maybe only ten lines, but somehow owns the entire film. He is mostly required to brutally slam into anything that gets in his way. But he carries himself with a central stillness and has a look in his eyes that is depthless. It’s the kind of charisma that would later be less apparent in, say, Jingle All The Way. Elsewhere, another naked man lands. This is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who is also from the future but is a human soldier who has been dispatched to protect Sarah. How this time portal works and who gets to use it remains a mystery, as does Arnie’s acquisition of munitions, jackboots and an entire wardrobe of studded leather gear. But let’s not be pedantic.
Sarah is, of course, initially oblivious, and part of the fun is following her to the grim realisation that something horrible is on her trail. Eventually, she goes on the run with Kyle while Schwarzenegger relentlessly pursues them, despite losing an eye and having his forearm incinerated down to his metallic skeleton. It’s a standard monster movie when it comes down to it, but brilliantly done.
There are, perhaps, too many car chases and shoot-outs and aside from Schwarzenegger, the acting can be ropey – but it’s still the brisk, raw, adrenaline-fuelled story-telling you don’t often get any more. Unlike most narratives today it tells it straight and isn’t weighed down by flashbacks (so lazy). It has old school special effects, true, but it also has old-school firepower. The final scene is one of cinema’s finest and they should have left it there. The umpteen sequels are pointless, I’m led to believe. Never mind. I may try RoboCop next.
In praise of one of cinema’s greatest trolls
The most important thing to know about the filmmaker and writer Marguerite Duras is that she was a total drunk. ‘I became an alcoholic as soon as I started to drink,’ she wrote, proudly. ‘And left everyone else behind.’
It’s not something any of the academics who’d been drafted in to introduce each film in the ICA’s exhaustive Duras season thought to mention, even in passing. Instead they spent their time trying to convince us that her films were political: they were about Palestine, feminism, decolonisation. They aren’t. They’re about being bladdered. They’re about the fact that Duras would wake up by vomiting her first two glasses of booze, before embarking on as many as eight litres of Bordeaux a day.
To ruin we all go: cinema and actors, ears, eyes and brain. In the process, a cinema unlike any other forms
Everything about these extraordinarily punishing, borderline sociopathic, but no doubt often astonishing movies begins to make sense once you’re aware of this fact: the non sequiturs, obstinacy, repetition, obliqueness, gloom. The torpor! The films are like an encyclopedia of ways to be lifeless. Characters lounge, loaf, loll, slump. When they can be bothered to stand up, they drag themselves about as if made of lead. The total calories expended by an entire cast of a Duras film could easily be recouped by a small croissant. Of course, no one eats.
In fact, the list of things no one does in the dozen Duras films I saw is impressive. No one drives; no one runs; no one kisses; no one has sex; no one drinks (ha!); no one laughs; barely anyone smiles. There are no jokes (though there is a scene in Nathalie Granger in which Gérard Depardieu attempts to sell a washing machine to two completely uninterested, near-mute witchy types, that is extremely funny), no violence, no deaths. In Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976) – one of her most extraordinary – there are no people until the final few minutes. From halfway into L’Homme Atlantique (1981), there are no images.
That’s another thing these films are about: negative form – how to fashion something out of nothing. How to make cinema out of residue. (Far less sexy than politics; much harder to talk about.) Duras’s artistic allies, remember, are not her contemporaries in the French new wave but the prehistoric cave painters and their ‘mains negatives’ stencils, to whom she dedicated a short film.
So what exactly does happen? People talk: mostly in voiceover. They discuss films unmade, fracturing relationships, diplomats gone to seed. A strict independence is maintained between music, script, and visuals, which allows for wild experiments. In Son nom, for example, she explores what might occur if the whole audio of one film, India Song (1975), were grafted onto an entirely new set of visuals to form a sequel. The confusion pushes you to madness, exhaustion, a state of manic bliss. In other words you feel badgered. Eight-litres-of-Bordeaux badgered.
No one could argue the films are enjoyable – just as spending time with someone who’s steaming is not exactly enjoyable. They are, in fact, often deeply boring. But they are a very specific, alluring kind of boring. They’re not boring like Straub-Huillet films are boring. They’re not dry, inept, stingy. They’re boring simply because nothing happens; because the stories are vague; because the camera drifts incredibly slowly over some of the most soporific, if exquisite, images in all cinema, while the same musical riff (a Diabelli variation, Andean pipe music, a tango) repeats and repeats and repeats.
At dusk, a handsome articulated blue lorry, hugging the very top of the screen, cruises past blackly muddy fields in northern France (Le Camion, 1977). We fix on cracks and mansion-house decrepitude in Son nom. We gaze out at the sea from within darkened rooms in Agatha (1981). We watch the blazing sand flats of Normandy in Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977). Underpinning every shot is this touchingly sincere belief – a belief that only ever occurs to the drunk – of the vital importance of staring at things. Of listening to the same piece again and again and again. Of wallowing and getting lost. Of being resolutely unproductive. Of living in the unmade.
Yet stuff is made: there is something monumental, sculptural about the way Duras carves time. It’s like huge chunks of marble are being presented to us, or a series of Barnett Newmans: big blocks of world-building pierced by alien flashes.
So what do we have here? One of the great avant-garde trolls of postwar cinema, no doubt. But also a sensualist whose style sprung from her embrace of being completely plastered for most of her adult life. Not that she didn’t know what she was doing; that she was drunk on the job. But rather that her cinema consciously absorbed the formal patterns and visions that are unique to being paralytic. ‘Let cinema go to its ruin,’ she wrote. And to ruin we all go: cinema and actors, ears, eyes and brain. In the process, a cinema unlike any other forms.
Drunkenness also explains why the planet we inhabit in her films is one where the hours of 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. do not exist. We’re on BST – Blotto Standard Time. Daytime is for nursing hangovers. A unique palette results: the deep blues of dusk, pale greys of predawn, golds of sunrise and sunset. Mysterious, ravishing, punch-drunk colours.
What else does it tell us, this singular amputation of daylight hours? Could this be where the politics of this communist filmmaker becomes most evident? After all, the other curious thing no one ever does in Duras’s films is, well, work.
The Ava Gardner of the ketamine age: Lana Del Rey, at Leeds Festival, reviewed
As the American superstar starts singing another slow, sad, rather beautiful song, my mind begins to drift. I’m thinking that our appreciation of music is so much about the who, the when and perhaps most crucially the where; the significance of place is an under-examined element in our relationship with what we’re hearing at any given moment. I’m also thinking that a massive over-reliance on concert revenue to sustain artists’ livelihoods means that nowadays bigger is almost always seen as better – even when ‘bigger’ comes at the obvious detriment of the music. And I’m thinking that an act’s popularity – and indeed their excellence – isn’t necessarily proportionate to their ability to successfully perform at the top end of the bill at a major music festival.
These thoughts float around while watching Lana Del Rey sing in a field near Leeds. Del Rey, the alter ego of American singer-songwriter Elizabeth Grant, is one of the most interesting pop stars of the past decade or so. She channels the weird, cinematic America of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a world of Hells Angels, sugar daddies, cult leaders, whacked-out ennui, endless romantic tragedy and good girls gone rogue. She is the Ava Gardner of the ketamine age. A dozen David Lynch films in sound. Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ made even sadder and stretched out for ever.
In her songs, a tranquillised Mansonic dread creeps over the Californian landscape like horror-movie smog. Most of the action takes place in the witching hours; when the sun is out, everything simply seems worse. It’s all done with knowing humour, drenched in degraded Hollywood glamour. Del Rey’s Glastonbury slot last year was cut short after she arrived on stage late because, she said, she was having her hair done, which seems a very Gardner thing to do (and say).
She is also a little late at Leeds, meaning her advertised 75-minute set is over in an hour. Though Del Rey is headlining on Sunday night she is not the closing act, presumably because her hazy Valium anthems are deemed just a little too downbeat to conclude this post-GCSE results, mid-teen bacchanal.
It seems an odd booking: a bit like asking the Wurzels to perform a closing medley at Henley Regatta. A typical Del Rey song tootles along a good 25mph below the cruising speed of the average festival banger, with a wide dynamic range and lots of quiet moments. On a chilly, grey evening, with a gusty wind kicking the sound around, the nuances of her music are bullied by the elements. Her voice, too, is initially underpowered, though it picks up for the sumptuous melancholy of ‘Summertime Sadness’ and the churning bad vibes boogie of ‘West Coast’. A countrified ‘Ride’ ripples with pedal steel, its mood heightened by grainy Super 8 video footage.
Framed within the fairytale-themed set, and leaning into gothic nightmare, Del Rey is a study in dramatic understatement. You might argue her stage presence is lacklustre, particularly compared to British soul/R&B singer Raye, who appears directly before her and provides a hit of loud, sassy energy. In contrast, save for a closing fireworks display, Del Rey deploys few of the glad-handing tropes this slot traditionally demands. There is no attempt to come to us. We are silently commanded to go to her. The Del Rey fans in the crowd – and there are many thousands singing every line back at her – are happy to comply, but she loses the interest of a good number of the less devoted fairly quickly.
Yet there is a stillness, a blankness, about her persona that is fascinating, even at scale. She speaks only a few words, smiles sadly, waves some little girl ta-tas, and generally seems as inscrutable and slightly alien as she does in her songs. For ‘Bartender’ she sits at a dressing table and stares wanly into a mirror. For ‘Pretty When You Cry’ she writhes around on the stage floor, oddly unsensual. For ‘Hope is a Dangerous Thing…’ she appears as a hologram, which seems a perfect metaphor: she is both here and not here.
Following a glorious ‘Video Games’, the rapped coda of ‘A&W’ is the only point where proceedings could be said to become anything close to lively. Though it’s far from a bad show, the key elements of time and place never connect. If Del Rey wants to better serve the compelling world in which her songs exist, she might consider making the difficult decision – one made previously by the likes of Tom Waits and Kate Bush – of only playing spaces where her music can shine darkly rather than be bullied, buffeted and blown away.
Artistically embarrassing but a hit: Shifters, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed
Shifters has transferred to the West End from the Bush Theatre. It opens at a granny’s funeral attended by the grief-stricken Dre, aged 32. Dre was raised by his ‘Nana’ as he calls her – rhyming it with ‘spanner’ – and he weeps when he realises that his mother has failed to show up. A beautiful young woman arrives unexpectedly. This is Dre’s teenage sweetheart and they exchange gossip over a glass of whisky while rummaging through Nana’s belongings.
The press night crowd adored these flawless yuppies. An artistic embarrassment but a sure-fire hit
The lovebirds met at school where they studied philosophy and outshone all their rivals in the class. After a short relationship they drifted apart during their twenties and now, in their early thirties, they’re ready to settle down. Will they get married? Well, let’s think. The girl’s name is Destiny so it seems possible. Both characters break the fourth wall and share confidences with the audience about their remarkable lives.
At the age of 15, Destiny was appalled by boys who treated her as ‘a grown woman’ and she withdrew into her shell and began to paint. Success arrived overnight and she became an artist of global renown whose masterpieces were exhibited in Prague, Venice and New York. Just like that. She didn’t even go to art college, apparently. Dre’s ascent was nearly as swift. After leaving school he took low-paid jobs in kitchens while working towards a diploma in business studies. He then opened a brand new fusion restaurant and the enterprise succeeded instantly. Not a single blip along the way, it seems.
Neither of them collected any debt, either. Nor were they troubled by school bullies, racist police, drug dealers, mental-health disorders or any of the woes that afflict so many characters in modern plays. Lucky them. But dramatically they’re hard to engage with because they lack internal struggles and face no serious impediments to their marriage.
Dre is a paragon of virtue. He’s tall, handsome, well-spoken and stylishly dressed in casual streetwear, like a model. Emotionally, he seems to have matured early. He works hard, he’s devoted to his family and he’s a loyal, sensitive, amusing and generous companion. But he has one vice: he’s reluctant to express his love for Destiny with sufficient lyricism and intensity and whenever she notices this fault she pulls him up on it sharply and he responds by telling her how adorable she is.
Destiny also harbours a terrible secret. She’s a perfectionist. But don’t worry: the good news is that she’s getting help for this awful problem from her therapist. These squeaky-clean lovers seem like characters from a Barbara Cartland novel. And instead of engaging in normal conversation they exchange saccharine truisms. ‘Maybe the world has to end before life begins,’ says one of them. ‘You deserve love. Big, epic love,’ says the other. The press-night crowd adored these flawless yuppies and whooped with delight as the romance developed. By the end, there were cries of ‘oooh’ and ‘ahh’ every time the lovers held hands or stroked the other’s cheek. An artistic embarrassment but a sure-fire hit.
The 39 Steps is back. John Buchan’s novel from 1915 was filmed by Hitchcock in 1935 and this show, adapted by actor, playwright and comedian Patrick Barlow, parodies the classic movie.
The story feels like an early version of a James Bond yarn and it opens with an overdressed womaniser, Richard Hannay, lounging around in his London club wondering how to amuse himself. Adventure arrives in the shape of a German seductress who claims that foreign spies are trying to kill her. They spend the night together in Hannay’s bachelor-pad where the seductress is knifed to death by an unknown intruder. Hannay is forced to escape while disguised as a milkman.
This sets him off on a wild caper across the Scottish moors, where he meets a friendly landowner who promptly betrays him. Hannay is then rescued by a helpful crofter who also betrays him. The cycle continues. Each new saviour turns out to be a crook in disguise who passes Hannay on to the next set of baddies.
The predictability of the narrative is offset by clever lighting effects and silly costume-changes that mock the creaky gothic atmosphere of Hitchcock’s original. Some of the props are badly made on purpose and when they fall to pieces, the actors roll their eyes and shrug cynically. But why satirise an elderly movie that retells a thriller written 109 years ago? Weak targets make for weak parody.
The production first opened in 2005 and its visual tricks have since been copied elsewhere, most notably by The Play That Goes Wrong. Sadly this show feels like an imitation of its imitators. It will delight anyone who likes the idea of a West End play but doesn’t want to squander too much mental energy. In other words, it’s a two-hour sleeping draft. Nothing wrong with that.
Labour’s age of miracles
I am not yet eligible for the winter fuel allowance. Nor am I especially in favour of it, regarding it as one of those times when the government bribes the public with the public’s own money and expects gratitude for doing so. Like anyone who pays taxes, I rather resent a government of any stripe using my earnings to make themselves look good. I’d go so far as to say it irks me.
Still, I have watched Labour’s abolition of the scheme with something like awe. I know pensioners who appreciate the couple of hundred quid that the government lobs their way each winter. But last month the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, simply scrapped the universal winter fuel payment. Some ten million pensioners will no longer be receiving the cash.
What would have happened if a Conservative chancellor had scrapped the winter fuel allowance?
Yet it isn’t the decision itself which interests me so much as the response – or non-response – to it. Sure, there has been an online petition (and if Reeves cannot stand her ground against this then she might as well give up now). Otherwise there has been almost nothing.
All of which is intriguing, because I keep wondering what would have happened if a Conservative chancellor had made this decision. If the saving had been made by George Osborne, Sajid Javid or Rishi Sunak, I can say with considerable certainty that there would have been outrage. Much of the media would have claimed this was fresh evidence that the Conservative party’s policy platform included freezing the elderly to death. One of those crock left-wing campaign groups would have conjured up a figure of how many pensioners were likely to die this winter because of the cut, and the BBC would have run the story every night. A group of left-wing street movements would have organised protests – filled with the obligatory Socialist Workers party banners – alleging a cull of the population by the Tories. And so on. Yet the response seems to be that a policy that would have been genocidal in the hands of the Tories is mere economic sense in the hands of Labour.
I have mentioned before that I sometimes wonder if only a Labour government will be able to tackle the problem of illegal immigration because they are allowed to do things which no Conservative government is. As if on cue, last week the Home Office announced that it is planning a ‘large surge’ of return flights out of the UK for failed asylum seekers and others who have been found to have no right to be here. The levels that Yvette Cooper and co are currently aiming for would only return the UK to the still woeful performance of the Theresa May government in 2018. But it is a start.
Once again there has been a remarkably quiet response to this. The various ‘institutes’ and ‘observatories’ that claim to take an impartial interest in these matters have either nodded sagely or clapped quietly. For their part, Labour MPs seem to accept that Cooper is trying to mend a broken system and good luck to her. She has not yet been denounced as a white supremacist, a member of the KKK or ‘literally Hitler’. I would not expect the usual raft of ‘human rights’ groups to prevent the deportation flights from ever taking off or for Bad Samaritan members of the public to ‘save’ these poor migrants from said flights.
Yet I don’t need to imagine – because I can recall – what happened when people in a government which was nominally conservative said they would perform a similar task.
Had Priti Patel or Suella Braverman announced this policy, certain publications would have depicted her as a demented bull and their comment sections would have been wall-to-wall denunciations. Crank publications and radio hosts would have announced that Britain had officially gone full fascist. There would be protests in the streets (again with Socialist Workers party banners) and these would have attracted large numbers of people, from students who genuinely believed the Conservatives were ushering in a Fourth Reich to elderly political agitators who just love to make trouble.
I wonder what the next miracle will be? My money is on the NHS. Any political party that is in charge of the nation’s finances knows that the NHS is an unreformed money-pit. And while they have to lie about it a lot, and coax it and stroke it and flatter it, they also know that they cannot endlessly feed it. For want of other solutions, they tend to realise that some type of greater integration of private sector provisions into the NHS would enormously advantage patients.
The Conservatives have been extraordinarily loath to enable NHS reform because they know which political cudgel will be smacked against their heads the minute they do anything. The public may find it impossible to get a GP and almost impossible to book an appointment. But we are still fed the ‘envy of the world’ myth. For decades the Labour party has claimed that the Conservatives want to destroy or privatise the NHS (two things that are synonymous in their vocabulary). Again the campaigning left in the media and on the streets are ignited by this issue. Labour MPs and others enjoy nothing more than pretending that a Conservative government wishes to destroy the NHS. They will make this claim even while Matt Hancock (for instance) turns on a vast spigot of cash for the NHS and goes around wearing an ‘I heart the NHS’ badge.
I suspect that the Health Secretary Wes Streeting will be the next cabinet minister to benefit from this miraculous Labour immunity. When he inevitably announces some scheme for NHS patients to have access to private hospitals and practices to shorten waiting lists, just remember that he will not be planning to privatise the NHS. He will be saving it.
Lucky Rachel. Lucky Yvette. Lucky Wes.
What ‘rot’ is Keir Starmer talking about?
With the elections over, it might be time to reflect on what Sir Keir Starmer means by ‘rot’ in the ‘foundations of this country’. What foundations are those? Political?
In the democracy (‘citizen-power’) invented by the Greeks, men over the age of 18 meeting in assembly took all decisions that our politicians take today and, aged over 30, all decisions in the courts. It lasted for 180 years (508-322 bc), but did not survive, being characterised as ‘the rule of the poor, looting the rich’. The Romans invented republicanism (‘the people’s property’). The Senate, drawn from the elites, both made the laws and occupied the various official positions – legal, financial, military etc. – of government. But it was citizen assemblies that passed the laws and elected the officers of state. On the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, monarchies became the order of the day, but few that survive have real power.
As for ‘democracy’, the word does not appear in the American constitution. Rousseau liked the idea of politically active citizens but thought that only gods could make democracy work. Still, men like George Grote and John Stuart Mill (19th C) made the case for citizen liberty and participation, and versions of a quasi-democratic republican system have become the standard model for most western governments.
Many other social and religious influences have shaped our modern democracy, but one could argue that the following features – in principle at least – emerged from classical origins: all citizens possess liberty; have the right to rule themselves; or to transfer that rule, with checks and balances, to those they elect in their place; and that the duty of politicians is to serve, not their own interests, but those of the people who have elected them.
So in this context, what is the ‘rot deep in the heart of Britain’, which it is ‘[Labour’s] project’ to fix? ‘Rot’ implies corruption. So who are the corrupt and will they be punished? What and where are these ‘rotten foundations’? And what precisely is this ‘project’? Taxing the way to moral purity?
What will become of George Orwell’s archives?
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the four winds in the wake of a corporate sell-off has stirred predictable fury among Orwell buffs. As in all the best literary rows, the contending roles seemed to be clearly defined from the outset. There were the heroes (Orwell and his many acolytes); there was a principal villain – the publisher Hachette, which had decided to unload its archive, only to find that no single bidder could meet the asking price; there was the agent of their devilry (more about him in a moment); and even some subsidiary baddies, in the shape of a clutch of rare book dealers who are now hard at work flogging off the individual lots.
A single handwritten, unpublished Orwell letter will probably set its purchaser back £10,000
All this, by the way, takes place in an exceptionally high-end marketplace. A single handwritten, previously unpublished Orwell letter, of which a few are still thought to exist here and there, will probably set its purchaser back £10,000. As for the Hachette treasure trove ornamenting the dealers’ catalogues, the firm of Peter Harrington is offering the papers relating to Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), for a cool £75,000. The file on his third, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), is marked at £50,000. The rival establishment of Jonkers is advertising a collection of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) papers for a more modest £35,000. The file on Animal Farm (1945) has already gone for £100,000. That amounts to more than £250,000 for the contents of a not very large crate.
How has this happened? Here a little context is in order. Each of the four titles mentioned above was first published by the fine old firm of Victor Gollancz Ltd. By the time of its founder’s death in 1967, Gollancz was somewhat less of a fine old firm: come the late 1980s, by then in a more or less moribund state, it had to be sold off to Houghton Mifflin. A decade later, after another round of industry reconfiguration and corporate pass-the-parcel, it became the property of the Orion Publishing Group, subsequently bought by Hachette. In 2018 Hachette decided to close the warehouse in which the material was stored and instructed Rick Gekoski, possibly the wiliest rare book dealer on the planet, to dispose of the contents. Failing to reach the £1 million valuation put on the archive as a whole, Gekoski was reduced to selling it piecemeal.
As it happens, I am familiar with the Gollancz Orwell files (there are many other celebrated authors involved, by the way, from Kingsley Amis to Ivy Compton-Burnett, and it would be nice to know what has happened to their leavings). Back in the early 2000s, working on Orwell: The Life (2003), I more than once managed to arrange for the Orwell papers to be sent up from the warehouse to Orion’s premises in St Martin’s Lane so that I could take a look at them. Everyone was very helpful, although it had to be said that the security arrangements inclined to laxity. On one occasion, the box containing – among other choice items – Orwell’s bitter laments to Victor Gollancz about the editing of Keep the Aspidistra Flying simply disappeared, and it would have been perfectly possible for a less scrupulous operator than myself to walk off with anything that he fancied.
Twenty years later, in the middle of a corking spat about publishing ethics and the desirability of keeping literary archives intact so that scholars and biographers can work on them untrammelled by their owners’ caprice, I discovered that, curiously, my own attitude to the Hachette debacle was far less clear-cut than it would have been when I first had access to Gollancz’s bounty.
On the one hand, the best place for the material now being offered for sale by Messrs Harrington, Jonkers et al, is certainly the Orwell Archive at University College, London rather than – its most likely destination – the private vault of some American collector. On the other, publishers’ archives are marketable assets. Whoever did due diligence on the Gollancz warehouse when the firm was first put up for sale in 1989 would doubtless have realised that its contents were probably worth more than all the firm’s existing contracts put together. In these circumstances, it is difficult to blame Hachette for wanting to make some easy money, and even more difficult to blame them for the archive’s subsequent dismemberment. And in some ways, at any rate from the biographer’s point of view, corporate inflexibility is less irksome to deal with than the other hulking storm cloud that tends to hang over the affairs of any recently deceased author: the family they have left behind.
There is nothing that can be done about them, their word goes, they can be hell to accommodate, and all you can do is conciliate their whims. Hermione Lee, the biographer of Virginia Woolf, used to tell a horrifying story of her sit-downs with Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow and the keeper of his flame. When calling at Mrs Eliot’s flat, Lee was never allowed to enter the sanctum in which the great man’s letters were kept, but Valerie would occasionally favour her with a fragment or two snipped out of one with a pair of scissors.
The only solution is for writers to make arrangements for their papers’ dispersal after they die
The most arduous biographical chase I ever embarked on – this was for Orwell: The New Life (2023) – involved the papers of a man named Dennis Collings, whose wife, Eleanor, Orwell had wanted to marry before she became Mrs Collings in the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold in 1934. I spent long years cultivating Dennis’s daughter, custodian of the papers, but never managed to get past the door of the room in which they were housed on the grounds that the builders were ‘in’. Then, when Susannah Collings died, the Bonhams employee called in to make a preliminary survey of the contents, and deciding to investigate the woodshed, found a discarded handbag containing a buff envelope on which Eleanor, who died in 1962, had written the words ‘Burn after my death’. Inside were 19 of Orwell’s love letters.
The cat-and-mouse game that followed this discovery lasted an entire decade. To begin with, the letters were put on sale at Bonhams and then mysteriously withdrawn. The Collings family declined to answer emails. No rare book dealer, even Mr Gekoski with his ever-quivering antennae, had any idea what had happened to them. Finally, in 2018, a Norfolk art dealer – in fact, the same man who had found the letters in the first place – got in touch to say that the Collingses were prepared to sell. The whole cache was bought at vast expense by Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, who later presented it gratis to the Orwell Archive.
Naturally, philanthropists of this kind are extremely rare. It can confidently be predicted that, once sold, the Orwell papers now advertised in the dealers’ catalogues will never be seen again – a tragedy for Orwell scholarship as, although the Orwell letters they contain have all been printed up, some of the supporting correspondence between agents and publishers offers tantalising hints about Orwell’s whereabouts, opinions and plans in the mid-1930s. The only solution to these impasses is for writers to take a more active role in what happens to their papers and make arrangements for their dispersal after they die. You may not be able to retrieve ancient billet-doux of the kind that were found in the Collingses’ woodshed, but you can at least find out what your publisher has in the files and leave detailed instructions to your heirs.
Only the other day I had a look in the ancient box file where all the correspondence of the pre-internet era reposes. And there they all were – the furious letter from Martin Amis accusing me of traducing his father’s memory, the map of the British Isles with Alan Sillitoe’s wireless-operator annotations, the august postcards from A.S. Byatt. No idea what will happen to them, but they certainly won’t be left in an envelope marked ‘Burn after my death’ for posterity to dither over and ignore.
Save our steam engines!
Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not in celebration, but in mourning. It was a tiny mechanical wake for Mamod, the Birmingham firm which has made model steam engines since 1936, and which has announced that it is ceasing production. It’s estimated that more than 2.5 million engines have been sold by the company over the years.
As commerce and government push our behaviours down digital channels, older hobbies don’t register
When a beloved brand perishes, there’s rarely a single reason. Like many small manufacturing companies, Mamod had endured a difficult few years. The previous owners cut corners, and somehow managed to lose the rights to one of their classic designs, the SL1 railway locomotive. A new owner stepped in last year, hoping to turn the company around – only to be met with legislation criminalising unlicensed ownership of the solid fuel tablets that drive Mamod’s products. For decades these hexamine tablets were freely available. Now, apparently, they’re a terror risk – and the resulting financial hole, coupled to rocketing rents, seems to have derailed the company for good.
Small business has cash-flow crisis and shuts factory. So, what’s new? Actually, part of the problem here is careless legislation accidentally criminalising a harmless and long-established pastime – and in the process, wrecking the last commercial manufacturer of steam engines (very small ones, for sure, but the principle is the same) in the city of Matthew Boulton and James Watt.
It’s not just the steamers that have felt the clunking fist of blanket regulation. The 30,000 members of the British Model Flying Association (BMFA) have been building and flying their model aircraft legally and safely since 1922: longer than British Airways has been airborne, and almost as long as the Royal Air Force. They have a long-standing and mutually constructive relationship with the Civil Aviation Authority: in many ways, the gold standard of how these things should be handled.
But even here, red tape has been thrown around with thoughtless abandon. Since 2019, new regulations meant for drones have affected the entire sport of model flying, imposing an annual licensing scheme for larger model aircraft. It’s pointless to plead that the kind of people who indulge in dangerous or illegal flying are hardly likely to apply for registration. Instead, responsible hobbyists have been lumbered with a new expense and the anxiety that comes with it. ‘It is seen by many to be nothing more than a tax with no relevant purpose or benefit,’ says Chris Bradbury, the BMFA’s drone support officer. ‘It does leave a bitter taste.’
True, the costs involved are not large (though high by European standards). There are exceptions and workarounds. But it’s yet another unnecessary, joy-sapping worry. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, and even small obstacles can have a ripple effect, turning relaxation into stress, and sometimes – as with Mamod – pushing small businesses over the edge. Mamod’s current owner, Adrian Lockrey, asked the relevant authorities why the statutory consultation on fuel tablets didn’t include steam manufacturers. He was met with incomprehension, and then disregard. ‘They approached a model boat club, who said it wouldn’t affect them,’ he told me when the crisis began to bite. ‘And that was the model industry consulted.’
There are many tales of the unintended consequences of over-zealous regulation, not all from the UK. European rules on bottle caps put a supply-chain squeeze on the manufacturers of Hetman musical instrument valve oil (horn players around the world swear by it). Owners of full-size steam engines, meanwhile, are facing a coal-supply crisis. Net-zero politics forced the closure last year of the last mine in the UK that supplied the high-energy, clean-burning coal that historic engines require. Green alternatives are in development, but are still some way off. Meanwhile operators are having to source steam coal from as far afield as Australia and South America – at far greater environmental cost. Amateur blacksmiths are already obliged to purchase costly imported coke – and are fearful that even this might soon go the way of household coal, which was banned outright last year.
Little of this is deliberate. Legislators don’t generally set out to ruin anyone’s fun – it’s more that they don’t even consider it. But it doesn’t feel entirely coincidental, either. In a computerised world, pursuits such as modelling, crafting and heritage restoration are gloriously offline. They’re all about physical craft; old but characterful technologies, and the ancient pleasure of making something with your hands and operating it with skill. The benefits of switching off and steaming up can be huge (I write from experience). But as mass media, commerce and government all work to push our tastes and behaviours down predictable (and manageable) digital channels, older hobbies don’t register, and don’t fit.
So they are forgotten by government and increasingly – or so it seems – they get trampled. On the day that Mamod called it quits, I lit up my boyhood model traction engine and sent it clattering and wheezing around the garden. My wife didn’t expect it; she laughed out loud in surprise and delight.
That’s a common reaction. In the words of the late Teddy Boston, vicar and steam enthusiast: ‘The steam engine is the nearest thing to a living being made by man.’ Now I can’t speak for the model aviators and amateur blacksmiths but that simple, playful human pleasure is surely common to all old-school hobbies.
It’s reason enough to expect our lawmakers to take care of these quirky liberties; these gentle pursuits of the small battalions. When every model Hurricane is grounded, and the final Mamod steamroller sits cold upon a shelf, we really will have lost the last of England.
The unappetising truth about tasting menus
The tasting menu has fallen from fashion, and this is good. They are a curio – a window to the chef’s soul – and they have always incited more pity in me than awe. They draw the chef’s subconscious on the plate, and it isn’t always palatable; or, rather, it is too complex for joy.
In their own words, they are unhappy. In The Devil in the Kitchen, Marco Pierre White writes that he was haunted by the loss of his mother, and his kitchen was an attempt to recover her. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘I was trying to kill myself but sacrificing your health for your career was all the rage.’
Bernard Loiseau (three Michelin stars) killed himself in 2003. Anthony Bourdain killed himself in 2018. François Vatel, hero to chefs, stabbed himself in 1671, as he was preparing a banquet for Louis XIV, because the fish was late. White writes: ‘Why aren’t I happy?’ He gave his Michelin stars back in 1999: he got better.
Bourdain became a chef to spite his mother because she once went to a famous restaurant and left him in the car. ‘Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay,’ he wrote. ‘Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness.’ They are, ‘in some fundamental way dysfunctional’. Of course, food is capable of tenderness: it is capable of anything. I’m just not sure how much of that the chef extends to himself.
Or the diner, when they are force-fed a tasting menu. They became popular because people are credulous, chefs are controlling, and, with the exception of Ollie Dabbous’s at Hide – a rare, beautiful meal – I have never liked one.
I ate Massimo Bottura’s memories of a Normandy childhood – lamb, kelp, cider – at Osteria Francescana in Modena. There was something neurotic about this preservation of a memory and when, between stabs at Bottura’s parents, a tiny, perfect lasagna arrived, I moaned. I wanted a normal-sized lasagna, not a taunt. It was better than the tasting menu at the equally famous Per Se in New York City, from Thomas Keller. I felt like I was being tortured, though I did order the vegetarian menu. I thought – why am I eating your rage, Thomas Keller? I have my own: no room for yours. Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park, also in New York City, was better. I didn’t feel hated, but I can’t forgive what he did to Turnip: Variations in its Own Broth. I stirred it and thought: Daniel Humm, who couldn’t you save?
Food can do anything: it is love given and, sometimes, love denied. For me, the meal I loved best was red snapper, pulled from the Caribbean Sea, and cooked in a shack half rebuilt after a hurricane, but I was in love. The tasting menu is something more controlling, narcissistic and fraught (though somehow pastry chefs remain immune. They are perfect). For the definitive portrait of a neurotic chef – Thomas Keller has a cameo – watch The Bear for Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a man ever in danger of making a tasting menu, or, as likely, ‘yelling at himself’ in a walk-in fridge.
What China wants from Russia
On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 appears to be going from strength to strength. Last week, Chinese Premier Li Qiang spent four days in Moscow and signed off on what Putin described as ‘large-scale joint plans and projects’ that would ‘continue for many years’. Russia’s trade with China has more than doubled to $240 billion since the invasion, buoying the Kremlin’s coffers with oil money and substituting goods sanctioned by the West. Moscow and Beijing have also stepped up joint military exercises. Last month, Chinese and Russian long-range bombers were spotted patrolling together near Alaska just days after joint live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea, the first such exercises since 2016.
Is China – with Russia, Iran and North Korea in tow – forging the same kind of axis that threatened world peace in the 1940s? Could Putin and Xi Jinping be ‘wondering if it is their historical mission to usher in a new age of what they may think of as necessary violence’, as the American historian and diplomat Philip Zelikow has recently warned? The reality of the new Sino-Russian pact may be less threatening – and more complex – than it appears.
An avalanche of Chinese goods has taken over Russian markets abandoned by western retailers
First and foremost, Beijing’s economic ties with Russia remain small beer compared with the $1.5 trillion of annual trade China does with the US and Europe. China may be Russia’s largest economic partner, but Russia is only China’s 13th. Beijing has also been careful to avoid becoming entangled in western economic sanctions on Moscow, with a slew of Chinese companies quitting Russia after the invasion. Among them was Sinopec, one of the biggest investors in the Russian energy sector, which froze negotiations on a planned $500 million investment in a petrochemical factory in Russia. Two leading Chinese banks – ICBC and Bank of China – pulled out, along with UnionPay, a Chinese payment system that was considered a lifeline for many Russians following the exit of Visa and Mastercard in March 2022.
Crucially, the Chinese government has also suspended plans for Power of Siberia 2 (POS-2), a 1,700-mile-long natural gas pipeline that was to link gas fields in western Siberia to northern China. That mega-project could have made up for the catastrophic loss of European gas markets in the wake of the September 2022 destruction of the €20 billion Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines – yet there is no mention of POS-2 in China’s long-term economic plans for the rest of the decade. Even when the project was first mooted a decade ago, the Chinese refused to fund POS-2. Neither did they contribute a penny to the smaller and partially completed Power of Siberia 1, which links gas wells in eastern Siberia to the Chinese grid, and was financed entirely by Russia’s Gazprom. Perhaps taking a lesson from the Kremlin’s use of gas cut-offs as a political tool against Europe in 2014 and again in 2022, Beijing prefers instead to rely on domestic supplies of coal for 56 per cent of its energy.
China has also green-lit the construction of 21 new nuclear power plants over the past two years alone, and has added more renewable capacity than the rest of the world combined. China, just like India and Turkey, is happy to import Russian oil – which currently trades at a discount thanks to a price cap of $60 a barrel imposed by the EU and US. But when it comes to committing itself to relying on Russian gas supplied through fixed pipelines, Beijing’s answer has been a strong no.
Since the start of the war, an avalanche of Chinese goods has taken over Russian markets abandoned by western retailers, accounting for 70 per cent of smartphones and 49 per cent of new cars sold last year. But alongside consumer durables are many high-tech components that Russia needs to keep its war effort going, Nato has alleged. In a stinging statement at the alliance’s 75th anniversary meeting in Washington last month, the bloc’s leaders accused China of being a ‘decisive enabler’ of Russia’s war against Ukraine and said its ‘large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base’ are ‘enabling Moscow to wage its war’. Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg urged Beijing to ‘cease all material and political support to Russia’s war effort’.
That accusation drew a sharp rebuke from the Chinese, who blasted the Nato statement as ‘filled with Cold War mentality and belligerent rhetoric’, and denounced it as ‘provocative with obvious lies and smears’. Beijing insists that it’s neutral in the Ukraine conflict and wishes only to ‘promote peace talks and seek political settlement’ on the basis of the United Nations Charter. Just weeks before a ‘peace summit’ organised by Ukraine and its western allies in Switzerland in June, China published its own six-point peace plan jointly with Brazil.
On the face of it, that kind of talk appears to support Kyiv’s position much more than Putin’s. But at the same time, the Beijing peace plan also condemned ‘expanding military blocs’ – a clear dig at Nato’s expansion and involvement in the war. China – which stayed away from Volodymyr Zelensky’s summit in June – instead suggested a separate international peace conference that would have representation from both Kyiv and Moscow. The Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba discussed the idea with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi during a three-day visit to Beijing last month. Xi had previously spoken at length by phone to Ukraine’s President, talks which Zelensky described as ‘long and meaningful’. Zelensky has now backed, in principle, some kind of talks with Russia in November – an example of China’s potential as a middleman in the endgame of the war.
‘[Beijing] has no interest whatsoever in the Ukraine conflict, beyond preventing nuclear use’
Clearly, China’s ‘no limits’ partnership with Russia does, in fact, have very distinct limits – and is being conducted very firmly on Beijing’s terms. President Xi ‘does not want to be seen to be abandoning Putin and does not want him to fail’, argues Sir Lawrence Freedman of King’s College London. ‘But it is a choice. He is not under any obligation. While he may give Putin considerable latitude, there are limits on the partnership, for example when it comes to threats to use nuclear weapons, and he has made it clear that Russia is not an ally. Most importantly, he never pretends that this is a coming together of equals. China is by far the senior partner.’
China has refused to provide Moscow with military assistance (at least publicly), forcing Putin’s military to scour the world buying up old Soviet-model shells and artillery from as far afield as North Korea and Syria. It has also refused officially to recognise Crimea as Russian territory and has abstained from, rather than voted against, UN resolutions condemning Putin’s invasion.
So what does China really want from its relationship with Russia? First and foremost, Beijing wishes to prevent the normalisation of the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield – a development which would radically change the military calculus of a possible Chinese annexation of Taiwan.
Second, Beijing wishes to stop Nato’s strategic turn to focus on the Asia-Pacific region – a recalibration led by Washington and backed by both Republicans and Democrats. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed that America – not China – ‘wins the competition for the 21st century’, and that ‘we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership’. She also spoke of an ‘enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny’. At the same time, former president Donald Trump has often spoken of Europe’s need to look after its own security and for the US to focus on China.
Beijing’s fundamental national interest is to keep the US – and Nato – out of Asia, and to avoid a hot conflict with Washington. Ultimately, the chief value of Russia – as well as China’s other rogue associates, such as Iran and North Korea – is as bit-part actors in that vitally important strategic game. ‘Fundamentally [Beijing] has no interest whatsoever in the outcome of the Ukraine conflict, beyond preventing nuclear use and avoiding the collapse of the [Putin] regime,’ says one senior western official who has been in close contact with Chinese leaders during the war.
One optimistic scenario is that Beijing could help Europe solve its Russia problem by brokering a peace settlement in Ukraine and reining in Putin, while Europe could in turn help Beijing by restraining American bellicosity towards China. At the other end of the spectrum, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that a post-Putin Russia could one day find itself having more in common with Europe than with its great Eurasian rival.
Historically, Russia and China have been natural enemies rather than allies. Putin launched his war on Ukraine on the basis of a historic narrative of imperial conquest and ancient rights. But by that same logic, China has an excellent case for reclaiming swaths of Manchuria sliced off by Russia
during the Qing dynasty. Indeed, though Ukraine’s current incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is commonly described as the first foreign invasion since 1941, it’s actually the Chinese who last took a chunk of territory from Moscow, when they occupied Zhen-bao (or Damansky) Island on the Ussuri river in March 1969. A Soviet T-62 tank that was captured during that 1969 border war is now on display at the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution – a place of pilgrimage for every senior Chinese officer and a reminder that just a generation ago Moscow and Beijing were at war.
China’s friendship with the Kremlin is purely pragmatic, limited and highly transactional. Putin’s war has, for the first time in centuries, effectively cut off the western-facing head of the Russian double-headed eagle, forcing it to look exclusively eastwards for economic and diplomatic succour. That weakness suits Beijing well, providing not just cheap energy but also the pick of Russian technology and human resources (Huawei, for instance, has reportedly recruited hundreds of top Russian engineers since the start of the war). A weaker Russia means a stronger China – which, for the moment, suits Xi’s ambitions to challenge America for global supremacy just fine.
Do I have too many friends?
Can one have too many friends? I asked myself this question as we prepared yet another dinner party for ten people, at which I ate and drank far too much as usual. Forget bikini body – it’s kaftan time in Saint Tropez at the moment for me. We’ve been at our villa in the South of France for nearly three months this summer and during that time we have hosted 34 guests, who stayed anywhere between three days and two weeks. We’ve hosted two daughters, one son, in-laws and cousins, several dozen friends and one baby granddaughter, and they have kept Percy and me on our social toes. But we really truly enjoy it, as most of the time the majority of our guests know how to behave in other people’s homes.
However, some most definitely do not. Throughout the three decades of tenure in my quiet and beautiful Provençal villa, there have been a few standout bad-mannered oafs who will never be invited back. One memorable ex-friend arrived from New York with a duffel bag. Emptying it on to the kitchen floor, out spilled a grubby selection of shorts, socks and shirts. ‘See that they get washed and ironed,’ he demanded of my minimal staff, then poured himself a large serving of red wine into a glass and proceeded to head down to the pool. ‘Uh, sorry, but we only use plastic glasses down by the pool,’ I called after him. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t spill it,’ he called back insouciantly over his shoulder. Half an hour later, I discovered him lying in the pool on a lilo, nursing the wine and chatting away to a nubile young guest, regaling her with exaggerated tales of New York life. ‘If that red wine spills, or heaven forfend the glass breaks, we’ll have to empty the pool to clean it,’ I admonished. ‘Oh, you’re such a nag,’ he replied, whereupon he tried to get off the lilo and spilled the entire contents into the pool.
Then there was the guest who was called away from the pool to take a phone call, in the days before mobile phones. He proceeded to tramp through the house soaking wet, and took a half-hour phone call while he dripped all over my pristine office. This same ex-friend also consumed a considerable amount of the grape during his time, but when one of my friends suggested they visit the local winery to replenish my dwindling stock, he snorted: ‘It’s OK. She’s still got two or three bottles left.’ A more recent guest requested freshly laundered towels in her bathroom every day. ‘What am I, the Ritz?’ I quipped.
My French is rusty, to say the least, thanks in part to a very strict French teacher at Francis Holland who absolutely insisted on teaching how to grammatically conjugate and recite our verbs before we even attempted conversational French. Thus, I am adept at je suis, vous êtes etc etc, but hopeless at carrying on a cheery chat with the gardener. I was informed that someone had left a package for me at the local pharmacy. When I struggled to explain this to the owner in my fractured Français, she shook her head, looked puzzled and said: ‘Je ne comprend pas.’ I tried again to explain: ‘Je m’appelle Joan Collins. Y a-t-il un… erm, package… pour moi?’ ‘Que?’ she asked, doing a fair imitation of Manuel from Fawlty Towers. ‘Joan Collins! Je suis. Vous avez une… livraison… pour moi?’ I whispered urgently as a line formed behind me. I looked helplessly back at my three non-French-speaking pals, as several people in the queue smirked. ‘Je ne comprend pas,’ the chemist said firmly – and just as I was about to beat a hasty retreat, a charming Frenchman bellowed ‘Elle est Joan Collins!’ and proceeded to explain to the sorcerer’s apprentice what I was asking for. ‘Ah! No. Il n’y a rien ici,’ she said, briskly saying that no package had been waiting for me. Crestfallen, I strolled out trying to look cool, while the Gallic gang smiled knowingly and my pals giggled.
I’ve read so many books while we’ve been here, and it seems that the older they are, the more interesting I find them. Modern novels lack pace, characterisation and description – all of which I use liberally in my novels and articles. ‘It’s not modern,’ says my agent. ‘We need more angst and fewer adjectives.’ ‘Well, you won’t get that from me,’ I replied. ‘There’s enough angst in the world without me adding to it.’ So now I’ve turned to Dickens and Steinbeck to enthrall me. At least the angst has a purpose. I may even give Jeffrey Archer a whirl when I finish Cannery Row.
The death of free speech in Britain
In Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front government. Nine years after its publication, submission seems more imminent on this side of the English Channel.
My American friends are surprised to learn there’s no equivalent to the First Amendment in Britain. They have forgotten a free press was one of the things their ancestors rebelled to establish in the US. Free speech is a much more recent thing in the UK. If it was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s.
If free speech in the UK was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s
After the recent riots, people were given prison sentences for posting words and images on social media. In some cases, the illegal incitement to violence was obvious. Julie Sweeney, 53, got a 15-month sentence for a Facebook comment: ‘Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ Lee Dunn, 51, on the other hand, got eight weeks for sharing three images of Asian-looking men with captions such as ‘Coming to a town near you’.
As these sentences were delivered, the government announced its intention to axe the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the act, which requires universities and students’ unions to protect free speech and academic freedom, would place too much of a burden on universities and expose them to costly legal action. But there’s been speculation the real motive for ditching it is to avoid antagonising China, a country noted for the number of students it sends to the UK, not for its commitment to free speech.
When I came to the West in 1992, free speech seemed a settled issue. From defamation to fraud, perjury to libel, insult to incitement, the legal limits were largely decided. Some European countries kept blasphemy laws, but these were dead letters. We understood why Mein Kampf was banned in Germany but not in the US. Each country had taken a different historical journey towards the liberal end of history.
Beginning in the 1960s, the UK moved away from a paternalistic regime of censorship and censoriousness. The British were proud of their new-found free speech, including their tolerance for lèse-majesté and blasphemy. Think of the impotence of the BBC’s ban on the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ or the success of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
But a triple whammy towards the end of the 20th century upended this: the arrival of fundamentalist Islam in the West, the rise of far-left critical theories of social justice and the advent of the internet as the public square.
The clash between fundamentalist Islam and modern British values became clear in 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. At the time, Margaret Thatcher provided Rushdie with taxpayer-funded protection. The message was clear: Britain wouldn’t submit to foreign actors who threatened murder in pursuit of censorship. It wasn’t enough. The threat to Rushdie continued, very nearly claiming his life two years ago.
Those who expressed concern about the cultural differences with fundamentalist Islam were condemned as xenophobic. Even the police feared confronting Muslim men who ran grooming gangs for fear of being viewed as racist.
The second trend was the rise of far-left ideas within the Labour party. Though Jeremy Corbyn was too obvious a leftist for British voters, Keir Starmer successfully presented himself as a harmless alternative to an inept Tory government.
Now his government seems intent on enshrining a definition of Islamophobia in law, using the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims’ definition of Islamophobia as ‘a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. In opposition, Labour consistently supported adopting it. Health Secretary Wes Streeting was the APPG’s chairman. Starmer reportedly intends to introduce the definition in a non-legally binding fashion, similar to Theresa May’s anti-Semitism definition in 2016. But I agree with those, such as Bob Blackman, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, who warn this is a move towards a blasphemy law. Blackman should know. He was accused in parliament of Islamophobia for sharing a post critical of sex gangs in the UK.
The third force at work is the internet, which gave Islamists and the radical left the chance to reach impressionable youths. It particularly suited them in 2020 when the most popular platforms made clear they would adopt critical race theory and other elements of woke ideology, under the guise of ‘content moderation’.
Of course, some internet regulation is necessary to prevent it becoming a bazaar for child pornography, drugs and weapons. But conservatives underestimated how regulation could morph into a regime of surveillance and censorship. The Online Safety Act was passed by the Tory government in October last year. As Fraser Nelson argued, it could serve as a ‘censor’s charter’ because of its inclusion of the phrase ‘legal but harmful’ to characterise certain content.
Now the left wants more. London mayor Sadiq Khan said after the riots that amendments are needed. He described the act as no longer ‘fit for purpose’. Peter Kyle, the Science and Technology Secretary, added that the government is committed to ‘building on the Online Safety Act’ – whatever that means.
The losers in all this are not the hapless fools languishing in jail because of their crude online posts. The losers are the millions of people who believe the government exists to protect us from foreign enemies and criminals, not to prohibit ideas, words or images that might offend. The winners? That unholy alliance of Islamists and leftists who want to use the state to impose their dogmas on everyone else.
Watch more from Ayaan Hirsi Ali on SpectatorTV:
Starmer’s specs appeal
No doubt Lord Alli should not have been given a 10 Downing Street pass, but that is true of most who work there. BB (Before Blair), roughly 100 people were in the building. Today, it is 300. The quality of government has deteriorated as the numbers have swelled. At least Lord Alli has been genuinely useful. It is officially declared that he gave Sir Keir Starmer ‘multiple pairs of glasses’ worth £2,485. It was an inspired move. Until about April this year, Sir Keir did not wear spectacles on public occasions. Observers concentrated on his startled and unhappy-looking eyes because they were the only striking thing in his oddly inexpressive face. Once Lord Alli had found him the right frames (slightly reminiscent of old ‘National Health specs’, but with a reassuringly expensive finish), Sir Keir looked avuncular, wiser, more prime ministerial. An election landslide was in the bag.
Labour priggishness inevitably invites accusations of sleaze to mark its first hundred days. The charges are rather weak, so far. However, the fact that Jess Sargeant, who oversaw the unit for constitutional change at Labour Together, is now deputy director of the government’s Propriety and Constitution Group shows how tangled the ‘ethical’ web has become. Labour Together are the stormtroopers of Starmerite moderation, fanatically loyal to Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s Dominic Cummings. They are ill placed to inhabit the rarefied world of propriety, as defined in the civil service rulebook. Ms Sargeant is not neutral, and presumably not supposed to be. Therefore her appointment infringes propriety, as does Sue Gray, who made a similar error in reverse, moving from running government propriety and ethics to running Sir Keir. Starmerites are the political equivalent of Albigensians. They see themselves as ‘parfaits’, free of sin. Voters may soon disagree.
The very first item in the Democratic party’s 2024 ‘platform’ – roughly what we call a manifesto – published in time for its national convention in Chicago last week, was a ‘land acknowledgment’: ‘We gather together to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial. We honour the communities native to this continent, and recognise that our country was built on Indigenous homelands…’ The acknowledgement then becomes Chicago-specific: ‘We also recognise and honour the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations,’ plus ‘the many other tribes who consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten.’ Land acknowledgment ‘statements’ now feature in American public events. I have read a guide to doing them. You must find out ‘the indigenous people to whom the land belongs’ (no suggestion that it might belong to its current legal owners) and ‘Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonisers.’ I wonder if this will catch on here. Should I, in my Sussex old rectory, arrange a ceremony to acknowledge the Church of England, which owned it until a century ago, and the Catholic church from which it (probably) misappropriated it? And the Normans who conquered everything near us in 1066, and the Saxons, whose name shows they were not indigenous? And the Romans, the Regni (Celts) and the Atrebates (Belgic)? Can’t think of any indigenous ones. Happy to acknowledge the lot: it is interesting to know who preceded one, but it would be a lifetime’s fruitless labour to attribute blame, as American land acknowledgments do. Imagine trying to start such a ceremony in Gaza or Jerusalem. Such a mentality causes unappeasable unhappiness.
A historic church in Derbyshire must stay unheated all winter because the diocese insists it install net-zero heating, and it can’t. The problem is widespread. The Diocese of Chichester, in which we live, bans new oil boilers in church from next year. It estimates its total cost of net-zero compliance as £69 million, of which £55 million will ‘require the diocese to seek funding sources’, a phrase that we translate as ‘parishioners’. It admits difficulties for listed buildings – ground-source heat pumps, for example, are simply impossible for our churchyard and water level – but cites Berwick church, which got heat pumps for the, to us, unimaginably large sum of £100,000. The guidance adds that ‘Churches that are being closed would come out of scope and their emissions deleted from the year’s emissions number’. The environmental logic is that the only good church is a dead one.
Years ago, I predicted in print that attacks on hunting, racing etc would develop into a wider attack on riding horses at all. It has come to pass, mainstream enough to be the cover piece (a well-researched one, I admit) in last Saturday’s Telegraph magazine. There is something about the zeitgeist which makes it hard for people to understand the idea of a working domestic animal. Wild animals and pets have roles which are understood, but the existence of a creature that does something for us – winning a race, jumping a fence, carrying a burden, is frowned on. Behind this disapproval lies an idea of the creature’s ‘natural’ state spoiled by human beings. This ignores breeding. Even if you put on one side the obvious fact that if horses were forbidden to serve humanity there would be hardly any left, it makes little sense to speak of, say, a thoroughbred, recovering its ‘real’ nature. If you let that happen it would, in effect, become extinct. We seem to be extending to animals the notion of the noble savage which has done so much harm to the way we look at human civilisation.