Badenoch is right: not all cultures are equally valid

Kemi Badenoch kicked up an almighty stink when she argued at the weekend that not all cultures are ‘equally valid’ when it comes to immigration. The Tory leadership contender was forced to clarify her comments, made in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘I actually think it extraordinary to think that’s an unusual or controversial thing to say,’ she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. The truth is, Badenoch is right – and to pretend otherwise is a mistake.

I’m a doctor and the idea that all cultures are equal, at least in the way they practice medicine, is absurd. Some years ago, the historian David Wootton wrote a slim and beautifully argued book called Bad Medicine. Wootton raged at the cultural relativism so universal in his peers. He pointed out that medical histories, in their effort to treat all cultures as equally valid, overlook whether the approaches of other places and other times actually worked. Medical practices, in other words, might well be a matter of taste, with some nations going in for doctrines of the four humours, and others insisting on randomised controlled trials. But that didn’t make them all equal, and the differences mattered.

Take the issue of infant mortality. In 1860, child death rates were higher in the richest countries in the world – at that time, the richest the world had ever known – than they now are anywhere. Modern Afghanistan offers newborns a better hope of life than the wealthiest nation on earth did a century and a half ago. That matters. The fact that we live longer, healthier lives, that seeing our children die has gone from being normal to being fantastically unfortunate, matters. When it comes to the business of medicine, cultural relativism misses out on the heart of what matters most.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

Medicine isn’t the only issue where this logic applies. Some cultural attributes are not merely different from others but better or worse. Female genital mutilation, for example, is definitely not to my taste, nor to most people’s. It arises from a wider culture of contempt for women’s lives just as improvements in child health stem from the intellectual humility and respect for method that underlie science. Shouldn’t we be allowed to say as much?

Some cultures are better than others with regards to their emancipation of women or their healthcare, their grasp of science, their freedom of opportunity or of speech, the richness of their literature, the inclusiveness of their sport, and the quality of their sauces. Not all these differences matter equally, but they all matter. In 1942, William Beveridge spoke of creating a welfare state to battle the five giants of idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want. These were the qualities of mid-century British culture he wanted to diminish, that he felt were worse – less valid – than their alternatives.

Beveridge was generalising, of course. But, as Badenoch has no doubt discovered, saying anything about a culture involves the sort of risky generalisation that always contains some error and sometimes causes harm. Not speaking of them, though, means staying silent about the richness of human variety, to the reality that some human qualities are better, more wholesome, finer or braver than others, and that these differences contribute to what we call national character.

‘Above all, I learned that the Russians, like us, were human beings,’ wrote Denis Healey in his autobiography, ‘although they were not human beings like us.’ It is difficult to say exactly how they might be different (the Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman, trying to do so, judged that ‘the mystique of the Russian soul is simply the result of a thousand years of slavery’) but a quality, or difference, does not cease to be important because it is impossible to pin down or easy to mistake.

Cultural judgements involve measuring others by our own values – but then whose values should we judge the world by, if not our own? This is not an effort we should be shy about, or try to cancel. It is better, far better, to test the mettle of our thoughts in the marketplace of ideas.

‘You say there can be no argument about matters of taste?’ asked Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘All life is an argument about matters of taste,’ he wrote. Everything is relative, but today relatively few babies die and relatively few children are orphaned. There can be no better reminders that the different qualities of culture matter very much indeed. Badenoch was right to say not all cultures are equally valid. It’s a shame her critics will never admit that.

25 years on, no one compares to the Two Fat Ladies

They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC.  Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC’s Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright aired on 28 September 1999 – I miss terribly their jaunty style of cooking, glass in hand.

I don’t think I’m alone. Spectacularly and unexpectedly successful in their lifetimes – 70 million worldwide watched their programme over its four-year run, including many in the US – the internet has allowed them to find fresh admirers since their death. One of the best things about YouTube is preserving such classic content long after it’s vanished from mainstream channels. (Though newer generations have sought to justify their fondness for these bastions of the old school by revelling in their now-fashionable #cottagecore aesthetic or even identifying them as early symbols of ‘body positivity’. They just can’t help themselves.)

The duo had the laissez-faire and bonhomie of Keith Floyd. I’m fond of Delia Smith but they understood in a way she didn’t that it doesn’t matter a jot whether you use two garlic cloves or three. As in all good cookery shows they spent as much time outside the kitchen as in it. And they seemed to actually care about the institutions they visited. When the Fat Ladies went off to cook for lawyers or lock keepers, cricketers or choirboys, they appeared invested, and in showing support for these little platoons they contributed small stitches to the fabric of national life. Revving around the British countryside on Jennifer’s Triumph Thunderbird, Clarissa wedged into the sidecar, they flirted with fishermen, bantered with farmers and squabbled amicably with each other.

There was no shortage of differences between them: Jennifer, the devout Catholic, never married or had children and had little romantic life to speak of, while Clarissa delighted in telling people she had once had sex behind the Speaker’s chair in the Commons. But they both shared a love of food and an adventurous spirit. They were also both fat, and under no illusions about it – a no-nonsense honesty that made them likeable. They had little time for any form of diet food. For Jennifer’s last meal she asked for caviar, which loyal Clarissa brought to her. Jennifer died before she could eat it, so Clarissa indulged instead.

They were unapologetically rude about vegetarians, let alone vegans. That is a dangerous thing in today’s world (just ask William Sitwell). The Fat Ladies didn’t care. They didn’t do political correctness. Jennifer had no compunction about wondering aloud: ‘Why are [vegetarians] always so cross? … It’s because they eat the wrong things. They look terrible; they’re usually of a yellow colour.’ Not to be outdone, Clarissa noted she would ‘fight to the death for their right to be vegetarian, but they won’t return the compliment. I hate fascism in any guise’.

They had been discovered by the legendary producer Pat Llewellyn (who went on to discover Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay) precisely because they were larger than life characters, in all senses. Once stopped by a policeman for parking her motorbike on a double yellow, Jennifer declared: ‘I am a spinster of Westminster and you are a mere boy, so off you go on your beat. I am going to Waitrose.’ They had, in other words, what today we like to call ‘authenticity’.

They were part of the establishment. Clarissa’s father was a surgeon to the royal household. Jennifer was even posher. And importantly, both had a hinterland beyond cooking. Clarissa was not only a barrister – at the time the youngest woman ever called to the bar – but a businesswoman, expert butcher and accredited cricket umpire. As for Jennifer, she took up employment at both The Spectator and the Oldie. At The Spectator, she not only wrote a cookery column but served slap-up lunches for the great and good coming through the office. I have been lucky enough to try the editor’s excellent homemade haggis but I imagine Fraser Nelson would have enjoyed as much as anyone Jennifer taking care of office lunch. Perhaps less appreciated might have been her tendency to interrupt then editor Peregrine Worsthorne’s debates to give her two cents: ‘Nonsense Peregrine, you are talking absolute nonsense.’ Her contemporaries remember her ruffling everyone’s hair and calling them ‘coochy coochy’. Jennifer’s Feast Days: Recipes from the Spectator is a delight worthy of being rediscovered.

The personal chemistry between the two was even more important than any alchemy at the stovetop. Since Clarissa’s death a decade ago there have been reports that they were less close than they appeared on the screen. By 1999 when Jennifer died she reportedly could not stand her co-star, bitter over an unpaid debt (Clarissa had lifelong money problems). For her part Clarissa, a former alcoholic like her father, who gave herself quinine poisoning from the vast amounts of tonic consumed with her habit of two bottles of gin a day, resented Jennifer’s late-night boozing with the crew from which she was necessarily excluded. Both were proud, often combative characters and neither gladly suffered fools. Clarissa was nicknamed Krakatoa for her volcanic temper. Jennifer knew how to hold a grudge. So the reported feuds are perhaps little surprise. But I choose not to dwell on them – their on-screen bonhomie was real enough for me.

And in truth I watch them as much for the glimpses of a past, foreign country as for their cooking or camaraderie. They did things differently there. Revisiting those episodes I feel not only a sense of joy, even tranquillity, but also an unmistakable sense of loss for the country left behind. I have felt similar watching Rick Stein’s old programmes, which show him driving around the country in search of his food heroes. But generally I can’t say I am moved in the same way by the crash-bang-wallop of most contemporary cookery shows – frenetic 30-second reels stitched together for 30 mins of programming. 25 years on, the Two Fat Ladies leaves a gaping hole – a mighty fat one, you could say.

If Spain doesn’t impress you, what will?

As a Brit who has lived in Spain for almost a decade, I must take issue with Zoe Strimpel’s recent article arguing that it’s the ‘worst country […] in western Europe’, at least as a holiday destination. My four years in Granada and almost five in Malaga have shown me that it’s the best place in western Europe to live – but not because of anything to do with ‘progressive’ politics or a Gen-Z dating trend.

The ‘buzzing terraces’ that Strimpel praises for distracting customers from horrible tapas aren’t just for tourists – they’re an integral part of the Spanish lifestyle. Life in Spain is lived outdoors, not shuttered away in heated rooms, hiding from the cold and rain. This means that people aren’t isolated in the way they tend to be in countries with harsher weather. Spanish streets and squares are noisy, friendly places, where you hardly ever see violence or drunkenness. And because the cost of living is generally low, especially in the south, you can live well without the pressure of having to pull in a huge salary.

It is often said – usually by northern Europeans, Brits, and Americans – that Spaniards are lazy. And they seem to have a point. Employees in shops, banks, and even hospitals leave their stations for breakfast around 10 a.m.; high street shops close on Saturday afternoons, Sundays, and for three hours in the middle of every weekday; banks, administrative buildings, and post offices are never open past 2 p.m., and local bus services often don’t operate at weekends. Most towns and villages are deserted between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., during which period everyone knows to respect the siesta hour.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

Such things can be frustrating, especially for expats accustomed to cities where anything is available at any time. But these customs aren’t due to laziness. They show, rather, that Spaniards don’t prioritise work above everything else. Equal importance is accorded to socialising with friends and family, especially during the week-long festivals in summer. Spaniards are experts in extracting pleasure and connection from the most humdrum aspects of daily life, which is one of the main reasons living in Spain is so enjoyable.

I do agree with Strimpel on two points, though, the first of which regards politics. Spain is, as she says, ‘nasty’ in this respect. As in many other European countries, a so-called liberal left postures as a moral guardian and defender of democracy against the march of the ‘far right’ (that is, absolutely anything right of centre). But if we’re talking about politicians who thrive on polarisation, swapping reasoned debate for pointless hostility, Spain is no worse, or at least not much worse, than anywhere else, including the UK and US.

The lamentable state of Spanish politics won’t make any difference to a holiday in Spain, though. If you’re inwardly fuming at Vox or Pedro Sanchez as you trek through the mountains of Granada’s Sierra Nevada, swim off the wild beaches of Cadiz, or wander amongst the arches of Cordoba’s Mezquita, it’s not because political nastiness has contaminated every aspect of society. It’s because you need a serious break from reading the news.

I also agree to some extent with Strimpel about Spanish food. Yes, it can be oily and carb-heavy. Bread and potatoes accompany most main courses, and vegetables, especially of the green variety, rarely appear on menus. Many dishes are deep-fried and very dry, as sauces aren’t really a Spanish speciality. To a large extent, though, food is a matter of personal taste. And in cities such as Madrid, Malaga, and San Sebastian, the culinary scene is world-class. San Sebastian, in fact, is ranked third in the world for Michelin stars per capita, behind Luxembourg and Kyoto.

Speaking of cities, Strimpel says she finds Spain’s offering ‘dire’. Even allowing for the subjectivities of taste (and the presence of foul-smelling drains outside hotel rooms), I find it hard to imagine what kind of city would appear beautiful and romantic to someone who’s unmoved by Granada, Cordoba, or Seville. What criteria of aesthetic appeal is at work here? Surely a highly specific one that would also exclude most other major European cities.

Finally, I sympathise with Strimpel’s dislike of bullfighting. But of course, if you’re opposed to it, you don’t have to go. One reason I moved to southern Spain was to be able to attend bullfights frequently – although, like everyone else who regards themselves as an aficionado, I go to witness art, not ‘bay’ for blood. Whether I am thrilled or disgusted by what occurs in the ring, though, it always makes me feel; and sometimes on those strange, intense afternoons, I love Spain more than ever.

It’s time to banish binge-watching

It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons in the opening credits with a bottle of Malbec and a Charlie Bigham’s curry to watch the new episode on Apple TV+. (Gen Z readers: at the risk of lowering the birth rate even further, this is what fun looks like in your forties after three kids.)

Being late to the party, I binge-watched the first three series of Slow Horses, the darkly hilarious – and multi-Emmy Award-nominated – spy thriller. So when the fourth series, ‘Spook Street’, premiered on 4 September and the first episode didn’t immediately roll onto the next, I was outraged. I felt cheated. I may even have kicked the ottoman footstool. Surely it’s our God-given right to gorge ourselves on six episodes in one session? What’s the point of a streaming service if not to supply us with the instant gratification that we’ve come to expect?

We’ve become so accustomed to the Netflix model of dropping an entire season in one go (Squid Game, Stranger Things) or in sizeable chunks (The Crown) to generate a buzz and excitement about the show, that weekly episodes now seem quaint, as archaic as a landline or a daily newspaper landing on the doormat. Since Netflix released its first big production, House of Cards, in one go in 2013, it has become the industry norm. (By contrast, the original BBC series had viewers gripped by the machinations of Francis Urquhart, played by Ian Richardson, over four weeks in 1990.)

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

And yet, over the past month, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his band of MI5 rejects have helped me rediscover the rhythms and pleasures of a weekly television event, a must-see, that builds suspense and tension. I’ve been freelance for a decade so have no idea if water coolers, or indeed their ‘moments’, went with Covid. My equivalent is the constant badgering of my husband (who’s read the Mick Herron books on which the series is based) with endless questions, or messaging similarly fixated girlfriends back and forth on WhatsApp. These conversations broadly fall into two camps: Diana Taverner’s (Kristin Scott Thomas) wardrobe – ‘Where do you think that coat’s from?’ ‘Dunno. Max Mara maybe? Joseph?’ – and whether Jackson Lamb, despite the dubious personal hygiene and flatulence, is actually quite hot.

Do you remember when over 20 million people tuned in to find out who shot JR in Dallas in 1980? No, me neither – but I do recall vividly the wonder and excitement with which I sat down for each of the six episodes of The Box of Delights on Children’s BBC a few years later, ending (I think) on Christmas Eve 1984. I now watch the DVD with my children during Advent, insisting on one episode at a time. They looked at me with slack-jawed horror when I first announced this. Now, it’s a part of Christmas they look forward to, savouring and digesting each episode like a foil-wrapped Lindor chocolate.

From obsessing over who killed Laura Palmer (Twin Peaks) to whether Ross and Rachel (Friends) or Carrie and Mr Big would ever get together (Sex and the City), the weekly series was a mainstay of some of my most formative years. But streaming schedulers aren’t motivated by nostalgia so much as a desire to keep people watching for a longer period of time – Game of Thrones and, to a lesser degree, Succession, kept subscribers at HBO for many years.

Binge-watchers are more likely to experience euphoric highs, but there’s the inevitable comedown after hours spent wasting away in front of the screen. After Baby Reindeer, I felt as disturbed and dirty as I did after reading Chips Channon’s unexpurgated diaries – and in need of a good scrub in the shower. Bingeing on Bridgerton felt like scoffing a surfeit of pastel-coloured, cloyingly sweet macarons – requiring the associated purge. You’re left lying on the sofa feeling morbidly sluggish and lugubrious, but in no way satiated. I’d grown weary of full releases some time ago, but Slow Horses brought it home to me. I’ve since come to cherish my Wednesday evenings, the WhatsApps and the weeks of tension. See you by the water cooler…

Michel Barnier’s government in name only

A trillion here and a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.  Of course, France now owes even more than that. To be precise, a colossal €3,228,000,000,000. Up by one trillion euros since the election in 2017 of President Emmanuel Macron, the ‘Mozart of finance’.

A ‘sword of Damocles’, admitted the new French prime minister Michel Barnier on Tuesday in his speech to the National Assembly setting out the programme of his minority government. A government in name only, it can be said, since it depends on its survival on the consent of Marine Le Pen.  

As the left opposition hissed and Le Pen beamed like one of her Bengal cats, a breed noted for its aggression, Barnier delivered his message in calm and measured tones, fooling nobody.  If anyone has any money, it’s time to start looking at the Swiss property websites.  

This year, the public deficit will exceed 6 per cent of GDP, Barnier admitted, promising to reduce it to 5 per cent in 2025 and 3 per cent in 2029.

The ‘first remedy’ is a massive reduction in spending, which will account for two-thirds of the effort expected in 2025. For this, it will be necessary to ‘renounce magic money’ and ‘make choices’. Well, that would be unprecedented in a nation accustomed to binging and never worrying about the bill.

Next, Barnier intends to improve the efficiency of public spending, by putting an end to ‘duplications, inefficiencies’, as well as fraud, abuses or unjustified pensions. President Macron promised that seven years ago, including a cut in the bloated bureaucracy.  The functionariat has subsequently grown.

Finally, the state will ask for an additional tax effort, ‘targeted, limited in time and shared’, from certain actors. Large and very large companies ‘which make significant profits’ will thus be involved, ‘without calling into question the competitiveness’ of France. The bankers in Geneva will be drooling.

Barnier seems like a decent enough chap and the French wish him well, but bromides don’t pay bills.

On law and order, Barnier said what voters wanted to hear, and what Le Pen has demanded. More prisons. Stricter immigration. Expulsions of convicted criminals. We’ve heard all this repeatedly.

Barnier acknowledged that the government is, like many modest French people, ‘walking a fine line’. He urged deputies to ‘allow the country to find the path of compromise, brotherhood and hope.’ Good luck with that. None of these qualities has ever been evident in French history.  

Watch: Tugendhat jibes at Jenrick over special forces

Uh oh. There’s trouble in Tory paradise after leadership candidate Robert Jenrick made some rather questionable remarks about the armed forces. At the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, the wannabe leader claimed that: ‘Special forces are killing rather than capturing terrorists’ because of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Tory frontrunner added that ‘those who do not understand military operations or the law of armed conflict should not be commenting on it’. Good heavens…

And, as might be expected, Jenrick’s rival Tom Tugendhat — a former army officer — has taken umbrage at his competitors comments. Speaking to the BBC, Tugendhat fumed: ‘I’ve spoken to former directors of special forces today and quite a lot of people are rather angry that this suggests they are not living up to the values and standards of the British armed forces.’ One Tory insider remarked to Mr S that: ‘Someone who wants to become leader of the Conservative party should probably be trying to keep the armed forces on side’ — while another Tugendhat backer commented: ‘Tom is seething.’ There have been rather little blue-on-blue attacks this conference season — but with a month to go until the race wraps up, there’s still plenty of time for yellow cards…

Watch the clip here: 

Dorries: Kemi should be ‘disqualified’ from leadership race

This year’s Tory conference has seen a number of old faces as well as new – and the appearance of Boris Johnson’s former culture secretary at a More in Common event this evening has caused quite the stir. Nadine Dorries told delegates that her brief speech at a venue outside of the conference centre would be her only appearance at the 2024 Tory bash, labelling herself as an ‘old bird in politics’ and adding in classic Dorries style that she initially wanted to ‘turn down’ the invite. Charming…

On the leadership candidates, Dorries was pulling no punches either – especially with one contender in particular. When pressed on who she was backing to be next Tory leader, Dorries refused to settle on any one wannabe, but added pointedly:’I just know who they shouldn’t vote for at the moment.’ On a Kemi Badenoch win, the former culture secretary noted scathingly:

We all know how the [media] feel about Kemi Badenoch, don’t we? I’d be deeply concerned. I think you need to have to be non-confrontational. I think you need to have demonstrated that you were loyal when you served in government. I think if you are someone who plotted to remove a sitting prime minister, you should automatically be disqualified.

Shots fired…

And the Boris ally wasn’t finished there, shining light on Badenoch’s rivals to hammer home her point:

We have three candidates who are standing. I’m not looking at what they’re saying now – I’m looking at how they behaved in the past. They are Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat and all three of them put the party first before their own ambition and their self-interest. They weren’t plotters, they weren’t trying to remove a prime minister that the public had elected.

Crikey. Going on, the Boris ally continued to refer only to ‘three candidates’, insisting:

All three of them are men of integrity. They understand they’re grown ups, that they understand that if you remove sitting prime ministers who were elected with a vote share bigger than that of Tony Blair…there lies madness and lies, and defeat for the party.

I think it is impossible to serve in a government and other as a minister or as a Secretary of State, whilst at the same time you are plotting to remove the Prime Minister and planning your own ambitious career. It is impossible to do your job well if you do that, and it demonstrates to me that you have neither the integrity nor the ability to lead the party in the future. And so, you know, there are three candidates. I will be ecstatically happy if any one of those candidates become the leader of the Conservative aprty in the future, because they are not confrontational. 

Although not best known for her love of unification – indeed tonight she attributed a remark to Miriam Cates, also in the crowd, that ‘one of the problems in our party is that there’s too much unity’ – this evening, Dorries made a plea to her party and, rather interestingly, Nigel Farage’s Reform. ‘We’ve got a lot of soul searching to do,’ she started, going on:

There has to be some kind of amelioration between Reform and the Conservative party. Now, I am in no way saying that Nigel Farage needs to come into the Conservative party, and I am in no way saying that we need to join together as joint… Nothing in that vein whatsoever, but we need to have a harmonious relationship with Reform because we are fighting the same enemy.

It certainly strikes a different tone from the four Tory leadership rivals – and it’s a sentiment Cates herself told those gathered that ‘I completely agree with’. Tom Tugendhat has said he doesn’t want to ‘become Reform’, Robert Jenrick has labelled the party as a ‘symptom, not a cause’, James Cleverly has branded Farage’s group as ‘Tory imitators’ and Kemi Badenoch remains in an ongoing battle with the ex-Ukip leader on social media.

And of course Mr S couldn’t quite miss the irony of Dorries’ divisive discussion at an, er, More in Common do. Some things never change…

Tugendhat: My Roger Scruton row comments were ‘twisted’

It’s the final night of Tory party conference and tempers are fraying. Three of the four leadership candidates have ended up weighing in on the 2019 sacking of the late Roger Scruton from his role as an unpaid adviser to the Department for Housing, after an interview he gave to the New Statesman (which was covered by The Spectator’s Douglas Murray at the time).

Kemi Badenoch said at a Spectator panel earlier today that ‘if you’re not prepared to fight for conservatives, to fight for your people, you have no business being involved in politics’. She explicitly mentioned the Roger Scruton case. Some might interpret that as a dig at Tugendhat, who spoke to BuzzFeed News in 2019 about the Scruton sacking, saying that ‘antisemitism sits alongside racism, anti-Islam, homophobia, and sexism as a cretinous and divisive belief that has no place in our public life and particularly not in government.

Mr S asked Tom Tugendhat what he thought of Badenoch’s comments, as the candidate was leaving a reception for LGBT+ Tories. He said:

I apologised to Roger at the time. I wrote to him and he very graciously accepted my apology. What I said was that I condemned racism. It was used and twisted to say it was a criticism of Roger. It wasn’t a criticism of Roger, but I made a mistake of allowing it to be understood that way, and that was a mistake.

Robert Jenrick, the frontrunner, has also said tonight that Scruton was ‘carelessly sacked’. The Scruton row has become a test of the candidates’ virility. But it’s only Tugendhat that it looks to be causing problems for.

Kemi Badenoch comes out fighting

It has been a busy Conservative conference for Kemi Badenoch, whose comments on Sunday about maternity pay have dominated the last few days. Each of the other candidates in the Tory leadership race is wary of saying anything that might remotely damage their chances next week. But Badenoch remains undaunted by criticism, as she showed in a trenchant performance at an ‘In Conversation’ event with The Spectator this evening in Birmingham.

Speaking to Fraser Nelson, Badenoch told the audience that:

‘Sometimes you have to walk through the fire… a lot of MPs are just afraid of not being liked, being scared of the mob. If we as Conservatives buckle every time we get criticism, we are not going to get anything done.’

It was a response which found favour with the packed-out crowd.

Badenoch’s supporters argue that she is the candidate who has done the most serious thinking about the future of the party. Her hour-long appearance was certainly staunchly ideological. She attacked those fellow Conservatives who rushed to condemn Roger Scruton in the New Statesman row; Tom Tugendhat was notably one of those who called for the late philosopher’s resignation.

‘If you’re not prepared to fight for conservatives, to fight for your people’, she said ‘you have no business being involved in politics.’ Her most strident criticism, though, was reserved for the civil service. Between ‘five to ten per cent’ of officials, she joked, ‘are very, very bad. You know, should be in prison bad’, suggesting that this minority is responsible for leaking official secrets, undermining ministers and agitating against MPs. Badenoch’s comments – which were clearly intended humorously – are already being interpreted as a call to sack 50,000 civil servants, ten per cent of the current work force.

Similarly withering criticism was directed at Conservative Campaign Headquarters. Badenoch regaled attendees with the story of how she was almost the victim of a ‘stitch up’ in Saffron Walden in 2017. The party hierarchy, she argued, has failed in its quality control of candidates:

‘As we have seen from all of the MP scandals, there are clearly some people who get to be candidates who have no business being there.’

Badenoch admitted too to being ‘extremely frustrated’ by Rishi Sunak’s election campaign:

‘This election, someone decided that national service was going to be the policy. I heard about it the same time everyone else did.’

Such remarks went down well in the room, but may hold less appeal for nervy Tory MPs, bruised by the Whitehall battles of the past five years. Badenoch’s argument is that she is not in this for herself; hence the focus on ‘renewal’ by 2030. Her supporters claim she is the only one with the mettle to make tough choices. Yet for some, the constant battles are a turn-off. One thing is for sure: she will carry on in this contest in the only way she knows how. As she said this evening: ‘I don’t have fights I can’t win. I win my fights and that’s what makes the difference.’ Next week will prove the acid test.

Will Israel fire back on Iran?

Israel has come under widespread missile attack from Iran. Some 200 ground-to-ground missiles were launched from Iran, according to Israeli media. Israelis have been ordered to stay in bomb shelters while the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intercept missiles overhead. The sound of interceptions over Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city, are constant and deafening.

So far, there don’t appear to be any casualties or direct hits. Among Iran’s targets were military bases, including airforce and intelligence facilities. It’s not known whether the attack has now finished, or if another wave of missiles is making its way to Israel. Elsewhere, a terror attack this evening in Jaffa has resulted in the death of eight Israelis. There are reports of another possible incident in Herzeliya, close to Tel Aviv, although the details are sketchy. It is not known if these various incidents are linked.

The missile attack did not come as a surprise. Reports emerged this afternoon that Iran was planning to attack Israel, putting the country on high alert. Iran has been threatening to target Israel since July, when Hamas’s leader Ismail Henya was assassinated in Tehran. The assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah last week strengthened their resolve. The United States attempted to deter Iran from attacking Israel, but its pleas fell on deaf ears. Iran chose the day that Israel started a large-scale ground operation in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah to strike.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

The Middle East is now on the verge on a wider war. Israel will need to decide carefully how it responds. Any decision to retaliate may depend on whether or not there are Israeli casualties.

When Iran launched missiles at Israel in April, the Israeli response then was limited. But this latest attack is viewed much more seriously by Israel. After all, this time the missiles were not fired through Iran’s proxies. Iran’s decision to strike directly could lead Israel to harden its strategy against Tehran. Israel might choose a tougher response this time.

So, what will Israel do next? The IDF could target Iranian nuclear facilities and other strategic assets. Such a heavy response on Iran could lead to an all-out war.

Before this attack, Israel made it clear to the Americans that it will respond with full force if targeted. Israel will not what to be seen as failing to follow through on that vow. It is determined to re-establish its deterrence against enemies that keep ignoring Israel’s red lines.

Israel is now fighting a war on several fronts; in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, the West Bank and against internal terrorism. Israel is surrounded by an Iranian ring of fire that seeks to annihilate it. Full-scale war with Iran looks like an increasingly probable, and worrying, scenario.

Iran launches a missile attack on Israel

Iranian missiles are slicing through the evening sky over Tel Aviv as Tehran responds to the killing of Hezbollah leader and terrorist mastermind Hassan Nasrallah. Some reports on Israeli television put the number of missiles at 100, while the head of emergency medical organisation Magen David Adom has told Channel 12 that the number is in the hundreds.

Videos uploaded to social media show some ballistics being intercepted. The attack has coincided with a shooting incident in nearby Jaffa, where two terrorists are reported to have murdered eight and injured a further seven. It is not clear whether the two incidents are linked.

The next few hours will give us a better picture of the true scale of this operation. As it stands, a few hundred missiles is a payload that looks impressive on TV but isn’t about to bring Israel to its knees. If this is the extent of the Iranian response to Israel’s devastation of Hezbollah, it will indicate that Tehran has decided on a mostly symbolic return of fire for now. Something to appease its hardliners and flex its military muscle, but not so much that it risks drawing Israel into a direct confrontation. However, we will have to wait to see if this wave of missiles is followed by others, which would point to a more aggressive pushback.

Even then, however, Iran will want to avoid a hot war with Israel, especially one month before a US presidential election. Tehran still hopes to revive the nuclear deal cancelled by Donald Trump and the Harris campaign would not appreciate war and national security becoming central issues ahead of election day.

There will be an additional concern that open conflict between Iran and Israel, or further escalation between the Jewish state and Tehran’s proxies, could see the return of campus unrest and large-scale anti-Israel demonstrations in major cities. If there is a backdrop Kamala Harris does not want as election day draws near, it is scenes of student radicals and other activists tearing down American flags and replacing them with Palestinian, Iranian or Lebanese ones.

The repercussions of what we are seeing over Tel Aviv this evening could stretch far from that city’s shore.

Few rulers can have rejoiced in a less appropriate sobriquet than Augustus the Strong

Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is often labelled one of the worst monarchs in European history. His reign is billed by Tim Blanning’s publishers as ‘a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance’. Yet this thorough and often hilarious study of Augustus’s life and times reveals these harsh headline words to be exaggerated. Indeed the man comes across as quite a good egg, as much sinned against as sinning. With disarming immodesty, Augustus described himself as:

A lively fellow, carefree, showing from a young age that he was blessed with a strong body, a robust constitution, an amiable, generous disposition, equipped with everything that makes up an honourable man, more devoted to physical exercise than book learning and a born soldier.

Compared with his psychotic contemporaries, the violent incel Charles XII of Sweden and the enthusiastic amateur dentist Peter the Great of Russia, I’d take Augustus’s bumbling ineptitude over alleged greatness any day.

Augustus was, by turns, a mid-ranking military incompetent, an averagely vain spendthrift and a moderate libertine. The great political project of his life – the reckless purchase of the crown of Poland – did indeed prove, in his own words, ‘a crown of thorns’. By the time of his death he left the Polish polity so damaged that it would disappear as an independent state until the 20th century. On the other hand, his public relations were effective – at least to the extent that his sobriquet, ‘the Strong’, based on a fiction of physical strength and sexual athleticism, stuck. And his insatiable desire to show off, combined with driving energy, exquisite taste and considerable resources, led to the creation of the baroque jewel of Dresden, his Saxon capital.

The nutshell version of his life was the unexpected smallpox-related inheritance of Saxony from an elder brother; rounds of Grand Touring that included trips to Versailles, Madrid, Venice and London; some inept experiments in military leadership on campaign against the Turks; the mad, impulsive bid for the vacant crown of Poland; and several bouts of beat-downs by the great bullies of the age, Peter the Great and Charles XII. ‘In this turbulent maelstrom embracing almost all of Europe, Augustus bobbed about helplessly like a plastic duck,’ writes Blanning. He was ‘often submerged, but never quite sunk’.

Of these adventures and misadventures it was Augustus’s early exposure to Louis XIV’s Versailles that left the greatest mark on history. In Blanning’s thought-provoking formulation, the glittering French court was ‘representational’, because its ‘raison d’être was the re-presentation (in the sense of “making present”) of the power, glory, wealth and legitimacy of the patron’. And it was this coupling of personal display and political power that served as the wellspring of Augustus’s makeover of Dresden as the ultimate Residenzstadt, or courtly city.

Like his father, Augustus was a pious libertine – ‘a combination which is an oxymoron, not a contradiction in terms’, the author wittily observes. His mistresses numbered not 354, as his propagandists suggested, but a mere eight (insists the killjoy Blanning). In an age which ‘did not just allow or encourage but positively privileged exhibitionism, narcissism, self-indulgence and sensualism’, Augustus was no shirk. At an ‘après manoeuvre’ party for the Order of the White Eagle, which he founded in 1705, a specially built theatre featured ‘three castrati and two female sopranos hired from Venice, Italian comedies and ballets’. There were also firework displays, hunting and ‘sumptuous banquets’. A cake was baked using a ton of flour, 305 litres of milk and 3,600 eggs. The resulting prodigy of patisserie was 18 metres long and required eight horses for its transportation. ‘As usual with Augustus, there were no half-measures.’

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

Fatefully, Augustus brought equal energy and panache to bear on the worst decision of his life – the impulsive and inexplicable bid to become King of Poland in 1696. Hereditary monarchy in that era proved a terrible way to organise human affairs. But the Polish expedient of an elective monarchy seemed to have been even worse.

The Polish electors included every hereditary noble in the country – approximately 7 per cent of the population. In the previous century, the title of King of Poland had essentially been sold off to whoever was able to bribe this aristocracy most generously. Louis XIV briefly considered offering as a candidate the recently deposed James II of England, who had been moping about, irritatingly, at Versailles. Instead, he settled on his kinsman Prince François Louis de Conti, providing a million livres to grease the necessary palms.

Undaunted, Augustus pawned not only great swathes of Saxon lands to various neighbours but also the crown jewels to his usefully well-connected court Jew (Hoffjude, a real title) Berend Lehmann. He also got the Jesuits onside by converting from Lutheranism to Catholicism. (When later admonished by his confessor for spiritual laxity, Augustus put the Jesuit’s proffered rosary on his pet dog’s neck.)

Tens of thousands of Polish nobles who gathered for the election in a field outside Krakow received IOUs from the French representatives and duly voted for Conti. Overnight, however, Lehmann toured the site with a cartload containing 40,000 gold thalers. Preferring specie to scrip, the next day’s vote turned decisively in Augustus’s favour. Though both candidates’ representatives celebrated masses, Augustus was quicker off the mark in terms of actually showing up in his new kingdom, which he had never visited before.

Poland was then the largest country in Europe (not counting Muscovy, as contemporaries did not), and its Ukrainian provinces were a vast breadbasket. But it was also the most sparsely populated, and its tax revenues were a tiny fraction of France’s. In truth, being King of Poland was among the worst monarchical jobs going. The nobles believed themselves to be descended from Noah’s most virtuous son, Japheth. The mass of the population, on the other hand, were held to be descendants of Ham, the degenerate son who saw his father’s nakedness and was cursed: ‘A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’

Biblical theories of social class were by no means the strangest feature of Polish political practice. Voting in the biannual parliament, or Sejm, had to be unanimous. A single vote could end the proceedings immediately and annul any laws or taxation hitherto approved. The fundamental governing principle after 1505 was nihil novi (nothing new). The Duchess of Orléans, better known as Liselotte of the Palatinate, observed:

Augustus would have been a thousand times happier if he had gone on enjoying a quiet and peaceful life as Elector of Saxony instead of becoming king of such a factious and volatile nation of which he will never be the absolute lord and master but will only ever be king in name.

So why did he do it? The sources can merely provide superficial answers. Blanning writes: ‘All his life, Augustus was a keen but inept risk-taker, a gambler who always called va banque! and always raised when he should have folded.’ But his decision to seek the throne of Poland was ‘a terrible mistake… one wager that brought him nothing but stress, privation, disappointment and misery’.

Polish armies had occupied Stockholm in 1598 and Moscow in 1610; in 1683 the Polish king Jan Sobieski had led the relief of the Ottoman Siege of Vienna. But by the outbreak of the Great Northern War in February 1700, armaments were in steep decline and Augustus’s troops were no match for the rising superpowers of Prussia, Russia and Sweden.

This generally splendid book does go wrong in places. Augustus never quite emerges as a three-dimensional character and remains a preening product of the court culture of his times. The narrative also goes a little deeper into 17th-century Polish economic history than the general reader might like, and the chart on the ‘Growth of Latin-rite monasteries 1600-1772/3’ is maybe point of information too far. In all, though, it is an engaging portrait of a man whose achievement in making Dresden one of the great civilised centres of the age qualifies him for a kind of greatness. And he could have been greater still ‘if the millions of thalers squandered in the fruitless pursuit of dynastic and territorial gain had been freed for investment in Saxony’, notes Blanning.

The thought leads to an interesting historical counter-factual. In the end it was the militaristic Prussia created by Frederick the Great that shaped Germany’s future in the following century and beyond. But if Augustus had avoided his foolish Polish adventure, might intellectual, baroque, humanistic Saxony have come to dominate the destiny of the German lands instead? We shall never know.

Sign up

The heart-rending story of a child’s heart transplant

Max Johnson’s life while he waited for a heart transplant had become so miserable and traumatic that he didn’t care whether he carried on or not. Indeed, the colourless, almost lifeless nine-year-old recorded a video saying he wanted to die. His parents felt as though they were on ‘death row’ as they waited for a donor. They knew, too, that the call announcing there was a heart for their son would mean that somewhere else in Britain a family was mourning. They would benefit from the sudden death of someone they were initially only told was an ‘age-appropriate donor’. Max’s mother read between the lines: her son was getting the heart of another nine-year-old.

That heart had belonged to Keira Ball, who enters Rachel Clarke’s extraordinary book full of life and with all the time in the world ahead of her – until she and her mother and siblings were involved in a car crash that left her brain dead. This book is the story not just of how Keira’s heart ended up being carefully sewn into Max’s body so that his cheeks turned pink for the first time in more than a year. It is also the story of how the Johnsons’ case helped change the law on organ donation to presumed consent, rather than relatives opting in when their loved one was dying. It is so many other stories, too: of the medical breakthroughs in mechanical ventilation, surgery and immunology that meant the transplant could happen; also the doctors involved in both Max and Keira’s treatment – from the junior medic who was first on the scene of the crash and whose own life fell apart afterwards, to the transplant nurse who still visits Max’s family today.

In fact, every moment in the book has its own history. Max being greeted by Father Christmas when in hospital allows Clarke to tell us that for many decades toys were absent from children’s wards and parents were banned from visiting:

Although such restrictions were framed as being better for children and better for parents, in truth they were also more convenient and less disruptive to the traditional working patterns of medical and nursing staff.

It was only as a result of campaigning parents in the 1960s that the wards started to open up again.

Then there is the history of how Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in South Africa in 1968, and the many failed imitations in the ensuing years before surgery and immunosuppressants advanced enough that a body wouldn’t reject another person’s heart. Barnard is a complicated figure. He had plenty of ego, but also devoted himself to the post-transplant care of each patient. Other surgeons viewed him with suspicion, criticising the way he ‘toured the world as a super-celebrity’, which led to a frenzy of attempted transplants globally, even though the surgeons performing them had ‘negligible experience of managing rejection and immunosuppression’.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

Clarke is interested by the level of detachment a surgeon must have to be able to perform these kinds of operations, to the extent that she recalls a controversial paper published by the Royal College of Surgeons of England entitled ‘A stressful job: are surgeons psychopaths?’ The authors, both surgeons, found higher than average psychopathy scores among the 172 hospital consultants they assessed.

Clarke herself has long been expert at examining the abnormal way in which doctors must relate to life and the human body. In her first book she explained how everything stops being normal as soon as you see a cadaver in medical school, and must stay abnormal so that a doctor can, for instance, stick a large needle into a patient. But she is not at all detached in this book, writing with pathos about the story of Keira.

It is not an easy read – full of the raw emotion you would expect of an account of a girl dying and the parents of a boy worrying he soon would die, too. Clarke takes us through the accident and Keira’s death in unsparing but tender detail; and she makes us sit through Max’s decline from dilated cardiomyopathy. The thoughts and feelings of the families are here. It was the 11-year-old Katelyn Ball who first raised the possibility that her sister’s organs should be donated, at a point when the adults in the room still assumed she hadn’t even taken in that Keira was going to die.

The family were all clear that their kind little girl would have wanted this, and so the consultant in paediatric intensive care, Dr Sarah Goodwin, didn’t even need to broach the subject with them. Keira’s father, Joe, who is alone because his wife is still in intensive care, decides that when his daughter returns from the surgery to remove her organs, she should be wearing a beautiful party dress. He rushes off to buy a pink sparkly taffeta princess dress from a nearby department store. Before Keira is taken into theatre, Goodwin watches him with her. ‘He talked to Keira for a long time. Then he just kissed her on the forehead and said something like: “I know you are going to go and do something incredible now.”’

Clarke is a stylist as well as a doctor, so the book is a potent combination of the arresting and the informative. It isn’t unputdown-able for the simple reason that you have to lay it down often to compose yourself. A quote on the cover describes it as ‘life-affirming’, which is a mis-sell, because it lands it in the genre of schmaltzy, sickly sweet books full of ‘hope’. That’s not what Clarke is after. She chokes you with the horror of how cruel and random life is. A saccharine account would have ended with the heart beating in Max’s chest; but Clarke has an ‘aftermath’ chapter in which she points out, probably to many readers’ surprise, that the average life expectancy of someone after heart transplant is only 14 years. She says that ‘nothing was easy’ after Max came home. Yet he had colour in his face and was able to enjoy the vividness of life because of Keira.

How ballet lessons transformed Princess Diana

There is something undeniably sweet about this book. On one level, in line with the cover’s pretty pink text, it is a simple, unpretentious story about a girl who loved to dance. But on another level, the unfolding tragedy is Shakespearian – an effect amplified by the unfussy prose of Anne Allan, a long-time professional dancer and choreographer.

Years after everyone else cashed in their Diana chips, the Scottish-born author has finally decided to tell her story. The book opens in 1981. Allan is a dancer and ballet mistress with the London City Ballet, and the performance is Swan Lake; but the drama happens offstage when she receives a call from Anne Beckwith-Smith, lady-in-waiting to Diana, Princess of Wales. Prince Charles’s stratospherically famous new bride has requested ballet lessons.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

Schedules permitting, Allan indulged the young princess’s love of dance in one-to-one sessions on a weekly basis. The lessons were secret, and their effect transformative. Diana’s ‘head continued to look at the floor. I gently noted that the head was the heaviest part of the body… I wanted her to feel the freedom that dance can give, and she did.’ The pupil ended the first lesson by giving her teacher a small posy. Many cherished handwritten notes would follow, and it was the beginning of an important relationship. The princess’s metamorphosis from Shy Di to Britain’s most glamorous asset began there, on the sprung floor of a Hammersmith dance studio in a simple leotard.

The classes spanned nearly a decade, ending only when Allan emigrated to Canada in 1989 after her marriage fell part. For eight precious years she was privy to Britain’s most famous ‘fairy story’. What is striking is the lack of control Diana had over her own life – trapped like a fly in a web, detectives bookending her lessons, her every move pinned down to tight, preordained schedules, and the presence of the palace never far away. When we first meet her, ‘blushing apologetically’, she is in love and desperately keen to please. Dancing with Diana is an uncomfortable reminder of how convenient a biddable, isolated princess was for the royal machine in those early days. Allan slowly boosts her confidence.

From the outset, there are tiny cracks. A much anticipated trip to Australia sees Diana assert herself for the first time: she will not travel without baby William. Allan watches the drama unfold on screen. Diana returns to her for more dancing and talk, admitting that the attention she got on tour seemed to ‘bother Charles’. How can she impress her elusive prince?

The first high point is Diana’s duet with Wayne Sleep at the Royal Opera House, a fitting prelude to her other great dance-off, with John Travolta. The build-up to her surprise performance at Covent Garden is riveting. Diana takes the lead: it is all her idea to celebrate the prince’s 37th birthday, including the music – Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’. She confesses that Charles prefers opera and ‘sometimes I find his friends all a bit stuffy’. Just wait until he sees his wife dance…

Her gumption, the adrenaline, the sheer joy of escaping the Royal Box and doing her own thing is palpable. ‘As she came off from the final bow, Diana said to both of us: “Beats the wedding!’’ ’ But not everyone agreed:

She made her way to Charles, and as she stood before him, I could sense she desperately wanted his approval. He said ‘Well done, darling’, and turned to talk to someone else.

Allan’s prose is careful, respectful even, but she can’t hide her loyalties.

Diana’s relationship with Allan and Sleep deepens. There is a private lunch and an official event at which Sleep is considered to have overstepped the mark. Was he talking too loudly? Hogging Diana? It is not clear: men in suits and ladies-in-waiting are discreet. They even try to stand Allan down. The princess is having none of it; by now the dance teacher has become her confidante. As much time is spent in tears on the floor over the parlous state of Diana’s marriage as it is in improving her dance moves. Allan listens and consoles, and Diana responds with notes and hugs: ‘Words are inadequate to what I feel, but you know how deeply I appreciate your advice.’

Today the King, happily married to Queen Camilla, is up against it with cancer. Most people have preferred to forgive and forget his early misdemeanours. After all, broken marriages are two a penny now. But close friendship doesn’t work like that. When Charles and Camilla visited Canada in 2014, Allan, by then artistic director at Toronto’s Confederation Centre of the Arts, found an excuse to avoid the royals’ receiving line – a gesture I feel sure Diana would have appreciated.

Life’s little graces: Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed

Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like ‘someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked’. After suffering an aortic tear, the narrator finds himself in a disorienting world of beeping machines and doctors visiting at all hours. We then track his spell as a patient in ICU.

Set in 2020 during the pandemic, the novel is necessarily restricted. The action is confined to a hospital bed, with IV lines and drips preventing its narrator from moving freely. There are few characters: a friendly doctor, and another unable to conceal her excitement at being involved in such an ‘interesting’ case; a kind, caring nurse, and her slapdash counterpart. The narrator has a partner, identified only as L, who visits him in the afternoons. Their intimacy is somewhat inhibited by the masks they wear.

This is a novel of detail, describing scans and the difficulty of performing simple bodily tasks. But it expands far beyond its notional restrictions. Hospital days act as an anchor for the narrator’s reminiscences about his past life in Bulgaria, his love of poetry and his home life with L – the ‘little graces’ of flowers, teapots and domesticity. The narrative is saturated with references to literature. A poem by George Oppen about a sparrow is remembered when the narrator looks out of his window; sonnets by Shakespeare and aubades by John Donne rattle around the inside of the PET-scan machine. When pain makes speech impossible, the words of others need to be borrowed.

We end up back outside the hospital; but much has changed. This is a quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details.

Whispers of ‘usurper’ at the Lancastrian court

When Shakespeare wrote Richard II, he billed his play as a tragedy: the downfall of a king riddled with fear, contempt and an obscure sense of majesty. Shakespeare’s portrait was a reasonably accurate one. Some historians have suggested Richard was a narcissist; others that he had borderline personality disorder.

Helen Castor offers a candid and considered view. Though the king ‘always knew he was special… his presence in the world shaped by his God-given destiny’, he simply lacked the conventional qualities of kingship. Richard’s tragedy was that he was doomed to rule under the spectre of his father and grandfather’s martial legacy – the Black Prince, hero of Crécy and the military giant Edward III.

His cousin, however, possessed all the skills that a ruler required. Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, excelled in a tournament. He was a soldier, fighting for a time on crusade in Lithuania with the Teutonic Knights, and had three sons by the time he was in his early twenties. Richard had no interest in war and his marriage to Anne of Bohemia – who was described by a contemporary as ‘a tiny portion of meat’ – provided no children to succeed him.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

Both Richard and Henry were born in 1367, three months apart, the year their fathers were at war in Spain. Princess Joan (Jeanette) gave birth to Richard in Bordeaux on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, a date Richard would exploit for all its symbolic worth. On his return from Spain, the Black Prince developed an illness that would eventually kill him. When Edward III died soon after, the ten-year-old Richard was next in line. Henceforth, kingship was a tantalising and glittering prospect; yet the reality was also mundane. Richard’s constant power-struggles with the nobility are deftly woven into Castor’s portrait.

As for Henry, the antagonist in Shakespeare’s version of events, Castor evidences a wholly different man. The dutiful son of the staggeringly wealthy John of Gaunt, he has the world at his feet, bankrolled by his father to live a life of luxury, learning and adventure. During their youth, Henry and Richard’s lives inevitably intersect – notably in 1381 when a ‘volatile compound of anger and fear fuelled a revolt that spread like wildfire’. As rebels chanted for the head of John of Gaunt, Henry was hiding for his life in the Tower of London. Richard, however, showed remarkable maturity and nous in confronting the rebels. Castor writes:

For the first time Henry was experiencing the shock of uncontrolled violence and mortal danger. For Richard, the flood of adrenaline came instead from the knowledge that, confronted with anarchy and bloodshed, he alone was untouchable.

Loyal to Richard, Henry was, like his father, bound by the traditional code of chivalry. Richard could not have been more different. John of Gaunt was forced to wear a breastplate, fearing assassination at the hands of his nephew, and Richard beat the Earl of Arundel bloody for arriving late to Queen Anne’s funeral. This king was certainly aggressive and impulsive, but Castor challenges the sources. For one chronicler, Richard’s demolition of Sheen Palace – where his wife died – was the result of petulance and grief, but for Castor, he was utilising the building materials to focus on a new project, architecture being one of his passions. In fact he focused his grief on a magnificent shared tomb where, next to Anne’s, his ‘encomium took pride of place… unwilling to wait for the judgment of posterity. He knew how he should be remembered: as faultlessly right’.

Henry watched as Richard dismantled old King Edward’s England, paying thugs to act against his people. After John of Gaunt’s death, Richard proceeded to strip Henry of his inheritance. ‘In his sorrow and his anger’, Henry had to act. In a matter of weeks, he had taken the crown: ‘The people of England had united under his command to reject a tyrant.’ But the word ‘usurper’ was now being whispered. Was Henry divinely punished? His deteriorating health suggested so. ‘The king had leprosy, they said.’ According to Castor, however, Henry had a ‘blood clot in his leg or possibly even a rectal prolapse’. The latter part of his reign was spent in physical disintegration, quelling rebellion and securing the crown until his death.

Castor’s England is a fragile realm, about to implode under the rule of a despot. Yet its liberation by a hopeful new sovereign is tainted by fears about legitimacy, dynasty and righteous succession. Castor untangles a web of fractious politics and questions the meaning of medieval sovereignty. The Eagle and the Hart is a meticulous account of the precariousness of kingship and the psychology of power. It is also a rattlingly good story, told with scholarship and humanity by one of our finest historians.

The misery of growing up in a utopian community

In Home Is Where We Start, Susanna Crossman quotes one of Nadine Gordimer’s characters on the subject of utopias:

When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on Earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

The book is a brave attempt to come to terms with the 15 years the author spent from 1978 onwards with her mother, her sister Claire and her unnamed brother in an ‘intentional community’ – as it was known by its fancifully named members. Their avowed aims were modest enough: to ‘explode’ the nuclear family, dismantle the patriarchy, save the Earth and revolutionise attitudes to class, sex, gender, money and childrearing – all in the name of those seductive but elusive ideals, freedom and equality.

The community was partitioned into Units, like ‘bees in a hive’, as a perspicacious visitor remarked, and socially divided into Adults and Kids. At the unpalatable sounding communal meals – the ingredients homegrown or bulk-bought from cash-and-carry stores – it was taboo for families to sit together. Instead of ‘Mum’, the Crossman children had to address their mother as ‘Alison’; and when the young Susanna was being overpowered by a stronger older boy, her mother was chastised for attempting to help her, since children must learn the hard way to stand up for themselves. At enculturation classes, the Kids were ‘force-fed “correct” usage, like foie-gras geese’ by the scary-sounding Barbara, because language is, of course, ‘a mechanism of male supremacy’.   

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

As countless Orwellian dystopias have taught us, it is in the nature of the pursuit of equality to morph into its opposite, and under the banner of freedom there will always lurk a menacing revisioning of conventional right and wrong. Unsurprisingly, despite the propaganda, ‘Kids’ power’ was not equal to ‘Adults’ power’, and among the adults some were definitely more equal than others. Barbara was manifestly a bully; non-compliance with the ideology was punished by social humiliation, often far more threatening for children than any physical punishment.

More disturbingly still, a faux liberal sexual emancipation, combined with the pretence that children have the resources to make genuinely free choices, led inevitably to abuse. Claire was nine when, under the care of a disgracefully irresponsible couple, she was allowed to travel to India, where she was raped and sent home alone to keep the experience firmly under wraps. A twinkly-eyed 40-year-old married member of the community invited the 13-year-old Susanna to ‘sleep’ in his Unit, where he ‘massaged’ her. When she found the courage to tell her mother that she didn’t much like the experience, Alison’s laughing response was to suggest she simply ‘tell him to stop’.

Almost as dismaying was the decision of the community that, despite Susanna having valiantly studied to pass the exam to the local grammar school, she must not set herself apart from the other Kids or abandon class warfare; so she is packed off to a much more distant, progressive comprehensive. Here, thank goodness, she begins to rebel – but hair spray, frosted lipstick and tarty clothes are much disapproved of by the hand-weaving, clog-wearing community; and sadly its long arm claws Susanna back when a school friend is forbidden to visit her    again after Susanna almost electrocutes herself forcing a plug from a socket.

‘What was the defining element which meant my family took this leap?’ she asks herself. The answer is a poignant history which does much to ameliorate any indignation felt for the later maternal derelictions. When Susanna was a baby, a freak accident led to a wall toppling on her eldest sister, Rachel, killing her. Her mother struggled on stoically, but her father seemingly couldn’t hack the catastrophe and bailed out, leaving his wife with three young children to cope with. Alison’s decision to decamp to a promise of comradeship and mutual support is something her daughter deals with generously.

Which is not to say that to understand is to forgive entirely. Discussing it all as an adult with Claire helped Susanna to process the damage they both sustained, especially the wilful disregard of the sexual molestations. By one of those ironic blows of fate that demonstrate the essential realism of Greek tragedy, this cherished sister and unique confidante died of colon cancer– so the whole experience has been bookended by traumatic loss.

I have some experience of growing up within a conformist ideology and recognise much of the ensuing psychological effect; so I know that this must have been a hard book to write. While the author discourses intelligently on the abiding failures of utopias, and interweaves her own experiences as a therapist, I think the primary purpose of the book was to explore and thus exorcise her childhood demons. In this one can only hope she has been successful.

The contagions of the modern world

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point in which he explained how little things could suddenly add up to cause huge change, in phenomena as diverse as the popularity of Hush Puppies and the reduction of crime in New York City. The book achieved its own tipping point and became a bestseller. It was followed by Outliers, which proposed among other things that in order to be really good at something you had to have practised at it for 10,000 hours. This is my first shot at reviewing a book by Gladwell, so I am several thousand hours short of practice.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

The phrase ‘tipping point’ was first coined to describe the proportion of black families it took to drive white families from a neighbourhood, so its roots are somewhat ugly. Gladwell revisits it here, and again applies it to certain phenomena – for example, a sudden suicide epidemic among students of a seemingly perfect high school in suburban America; the exploding number of bank robberies in Los Angeles; and Miami becoming a centre of cocaine dealing and money laundering. He supplies plenty of charts and graphs, which may seem intimidating at first, but he walks us through them. (He doesn’t mention the films Point Break and Scarface, but they deal with precisely these matters at around the same time he is talking about.)

Gladwell illustrates how wildly differing phenomena – for instance, the worldwide awareness of the Holocaust and the general acceptance of gay marriage – may have similar origins. In the case of those two, it’s TV: a four-part series called Holocaust aired over consecutive nights by NBC; and the delightful sitcom Will & Grace introduced a mainstream audience to the notion of a gay man who doesn’t try to kill himself by wrapping his car around a tree – to pluck an example from another earlier TV show. Gladwell does not, I am pleased to say, make glib use of either the Shoah or homophobia. You might at first be startled by the jump-cut between the two subjects, but such is his way (and I bet he really has put in his 10,000 hours of practice) that you don’t feel he’s forcing things or making inappropriate comparisons.

A problem with the book might be that non-American readers will find themselves shaking their heads at the kind of trends he describes. One – which he closes the book with – is the huge surge in deaths caused by opioids in the US – a crisis hard to grasp for anyone unfamiliar with America’s dystopian healthcare system, let alone the legal details. Another strange phenomenon is the existence of a Harvard women’s rugby team, even though interest in the sport is practically nil. Shockingly, the reason for it seems to be an attempt to keep Jews, Asians and blacks out of the university. But I presume fixing both America’s further education system and its healthcare is beyond Gladwell’s remit.

The portrait that emerges is of a deeply flawed society – or at least one that is extremely susceptible to epidemics of all kinds. Gladwell frequently uses the word ‘over-story’ to describe the kind of narrative medium in which we operate. I imagine it like the culture of a petri dish. ‘Epidemics have rules,’ he writes. ‘They have boundaries. They are subject to overstories – and we are the ones who create overstories.’ Such as: black people shouldn’t live in white neighbourhoods; gay marriage will never work and never should; and no one wants to talk about the Holocaust. Or indeed that having a women’s (or men’s, I suppose) rugby team at Harvard helps bring a vibrant ‘sense of community’ to the university.

Whether this book will actually help matters, or whether it isn’t much more than mildly nutritious chewing gum for the brain, only time will tell. But if the lessons from The Tipping Point had been learned, then Gladwell wouldn’t have felt the need to write a sequel.

Man of mystery and friend of the Cambridge spies

In April 1967 Tony Scotland, a cub reporter for Australia’s ABC television news, drove with a cameraman from Hobart to a sheep station in Fingal to interview Lord Talbot de Malahide, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had edited a book about Tasmanian flora.

This was a delicate assignment. Lord Talbot was a retired British ambassador to Laos who divided his time between his family’s Tasmanian property and one of Ireland’s grandest castles. He was fearsomely well-connected, peppery and ‘not good with people’. ABC had been trying for years to interview him, and he only grudgingly allowed in the cameras to publicise the book. Scotland, a 22-year-old English public schoolboy, wondered why he’d been given the job. His cameraman smiled knowingly.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

Undercover, an ingenious combination of memoir and biography, begins with Scotland being greeted imperiously by his host and grilled on ‘where I came from, who my people were, where I’d been to school’. He was flattered to receive so much attention from the 4th Baron Talbot de Malahide in the UK peerage, who was also the 7th Baron Talbot of Malahide in the Irish peerage, but preferred the English title with its romantic ‘de’. Milo Talbot, born in 1912, had inherited the titles in 1948 when his uncle, who kept a fine stable at Malahide Castle in County Dublin, dropped dead of a heart attack after a titanic row with his groom. His successor also had quite a temper, but his frostiness evaporated over lunch with his interviewer.

It didn’t take Scotland long to work out why. His eye fell on some books stacked together on the bottom shelf of Talbot’s library. Corydon, André Gide’s Socratic defence of ‘Greek love’, was next to The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil’s homoerotic novel set in an Austrian boarding school, and City of Night, John Rechy’s account of a male prostitute’s steamy adventures.

No one who had been close to Talbot at Winchester or Cambridge would have been too surprised. When he arrived at Trinity College in 1932 one of his first new friends was ‘an untidy but engaging Etonian with dirty fingernails’ – Guy Burgess. Scotland writes:

Whether their friendship became anything more isn’t known, but it’s most unlikely that Burgess wouldn’t have tried to coax the chilly Wykehamist into bed, for he was a serial, and uncommonly successful, seducer.

Burgess introduced Talbot to Anthony Blunt, who became a lifelong friend. Talbot had been dead for several years when the surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures was publicly unmasked as a traitor in 1979, and thus was spared the media speculation that the Hereditary Lord Admiral of Malahide and Adjacent Seas had been the Fifth Man. Scotland thinks it unlikely that this stiff-necked High Tory had any communist sympathies – but it’s difficult to prove, since Talbot worked in secret intelligence. His personal file, along with other documents relating to the Cambridge spy ring, is still conveniently exempted from the Freedom of Information Act.

Undercover’s chapters alternate between an investigation of Talbot’s mysterious career at the Foreign Office, during which he tried to clean up the spectacular mess left by his one-time mentor Burgess, and Scotland’s account of his six-year friendship with Talbot, who died, aged 60, during a cruise of the Greek islands.

Scotland, who by the early 1970s had become an elegant and unflappable presenter on BBC Radio 3, started out as one of Talbot’s ‘puppies’ – young men on whom he had a crush. This was not as sinister as it sounds. The older man was priggish and peculiar about sex, as closet queens often are, and never laid a finger on Scotland or any other puppy. He did, however, succeed in persuading Scotland to undergo a course of hormone treatment to ensure that he never drifted into promiscuity. The historian Philip Ziegler, Talbot’s assistant in the diplomatic service, went to his grave unaware that His Lordship had been hopelessly in love with him.

One of the joys of Undercover is Scotland’s depiction of the Anglo-Irish twilight. When he dined at Malahide Castle he would sit with Talbot at one end of an enormous table while the peer’s sister Rosie, ‘as reserved and rigid as her brother’, ate in silence at the other. She slept in a turret next to a copy of Debrett’s Peerage, having somehow managed to acquire the style of ‘the Honourable’ by Royal Warrant even though her father had died before inheriting the barony.

This is a lovely book. Scotland has the beady eye of James Lees-Milne without his streak of cruelty. There are so many neat sketches of minor characters that we’re spoilt for choice; but I think my favourite is of Dr Winifred Curtis, Talbot’s venerable adviser on Tasmanian botany, who, while searching for rare varieties of alpine bolster plant, would periodically fling herself to the ground ‘with a cry of “Arrgh!”, as though she’d been shot’.

Voices from Gaza, historic city in ruins

00:00 05:40

Anthony Sattin has narrated this article for you to listen to.

I have been reviewing for decades and this is by far the most difficult book I have taken on: difficult to read because it relates to what Israel has done in Gaza over the last year, and difficult to write about because the subject is so divisive. But whether you think Palestinians deserve what is happening to them or that Israel is a rogue state, please read to the end.

First there is the title. Not Catastrophe, or Genocide, or Reckoning in Gaza, but Daybreak. This is a book that carries the promise of a new day, or a dawning – a book that looks forward, but does so also by looking back over 4,000 years of history. It has come out of a collaboration between the celebrated Jerusalem bookseller Mahmoud Muna and the British author Matthew Teller, whose excellent Nine Quarters of Jerusalem (2022) was a comprehensive and revelatory account of the troubled city. Together, they have approached Gaza residents, a few foreigners with significant experience of Gaza, and some other concerned people, and asked them to talk about the place. The response is a collection of brave, resilient, heartbreaking, defiant, scared stories.

Most popular

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The leaked email that blows apart the BBC’s impartiality claims over Gaza

Madeline Grant

Does Trump prefer Starmer’s wife to him?

Laurie Wastell

The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis

We might start, as the book does, with a short piece from the 28-year-old writer Ahmed Mortaja – ‘Hello. Ahmed from Gaza here.’ On 13 October almost a year ago but less than a week into the current conflict, he worried that in the new normal, houses were bombed and women and children died before they even had a chance to scream. As for himself, he was afraid that he ‘will die and become a number’. 

There are several problems with being a number in this conflict – not least the size of the number (the UN suggests more than 40,000 dead so far, based on figures from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, and significantly more than twice that number injured) and the fact that the figure is disputed. But what-ever the body count, the point that Mortaja and the book are making is that each casualty is a human being, with a family, a story, a dream. Mainstream western media has given us intimate details of some of the Israeli victims of the Hamas attack last October, and even more of the hostages, but we have had very few personal stories of Palestinian casualties. This is in part because Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza and has killed more than 100 Palestinian and other journalists and media workers in the territory in the past year. Daybreak in Gaza is in some way a corrective to that.

Here is a range of voices. Some provide diary entries, charting the horror of the bombings and their aftermath, the daily search for bodies, as well as for fuel, food and water. There is the long view of someone like Atef Alshaer, a Gazan author and lecturer at the University of Westminster – ‘It’s something the mind is not equipped to deal with’ – and the nearer view of Izzeldin Bukhari, whose family is from Gaza, but who lives in Jerusalem, where he runs his Sacred Cuisine food courses and tours. In ‘The Ballad of Lulu and Amina’, he tells of the mad journey he made in 2008 through Israeli checkpoints with a white cat called Lulu to attend his sister Amina’s wedding.

Bukhari doesn’t write about food, but others do, as it is central to Palestinian identity, whether it is fish eaten on the Gazan shore, the oranges that were so famous in the long-ago time before the creation of the state of Israel, or Laila el-Haddad’s recipe for meat stew with chard. And food is there in the story from the late Graham Usher, one-time Palestine correspondent for the Economist, whose work Edward Said thought was ‘the best foreign on-the-spot reporting from Palestine’. Usher recorded how, in 2000, the IDF destroyed the house and guava groves of one Gaza family, along with 20 other houses and some 5,000 olive trees, displacing at least 100 Palestinians, in order to ‘defend’ a new Israeli settlement of 242 people.

I was hoping for a view of how Palestinians might view Hamas, but the group are almost entirely absent. When they are present, as in the singer Haifa Farajallah’s story, they seem threatening.

The first-hand stories of the current suffering are harrowing. Imagine, writes Mahmoud Joudeh, that you are given ten minutes’ warning and then ‘your tiny history is erased from the face of the Earth – your gifts and the photos of your siblings… the things you love, your chair, your books, the last poetry collection you read’. And talking of books and history, there is the story of Salim al Rayyes, a bookdealer in old Gaza city and the keeper of Gazan records dating back to the mid-19th century. His shop was destroyed with all its contents, along with the nearby Omari Mosque, part of Gaza’s extensive cultural heritage. The mosque was originally a 5th-century Byzantine church, adapted, rebuilt and restored by successive generations, attacked by Crusaders, Mongols, Ottomans, the British and now by Israelis.

If this extraordinary volume tells us anything, it is that Gaza and Palestine will endure, the monuments will be restored and one day Palestinians will again watch the day break in peace. The question this book cannot answer is how many more people – how much more ‘tiny history’ – will be erased before that can happen.