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Should the UK copy Europe on standardised chargers?
You probably know the frustration: you are sitting there trying to stuff a charging cable into your phone before realising that no, it’s the wrong one: it is left over from your last phone, or belongs to some other device. Just how many kinds of near-identical cables and sockets is it possible to produce?
It was this frustration, together with the wastage which arises when old chargers are thrown away purely because they won’t fit a charging port, which led the EU to announce in 2022 that phone companies will have to use a common charging cable: the USB type C port. Apple protested that iPhones would no longer be allowed to use their own unique charging sockets, but relented. The changes are due to come in from 28 December this year.
As it is, Britain is in the best of two worlds
In its crusade to standardise chargers, though, the EU has set post-Brexit Britain one of its first big challenges over product standards. Do we oblige phone manufacturers to copy EU regulations in Britain or do we take advantage of our new-found freedom and allow them to adopt whatever kind of chargers they want?
At the risk of sounding too reasonable, there are arguments both ways. Yes, it is irritating that there are so many different kinds of charging cable. It means, for example, that you often can’t borrow a friend’s charger when you have forgotten to pack your own. When it comes to electric cars the preponderance of different cables – and apps required to use chargers – is a huge impediment to their take-up. Had manufacturers adopted standardised chargers, so that any car could drive up to any charger and plug in their vehicle, using any credit or debit card, I suspect the resistance to electric cars would be a lot weaker.
But there are serious problems, too, when a government, or supra-national organisation like the EU, tries to demand standardised products: it chokes innovation. Imagine if, ten years ago, the EU had demanded one type of electric car charging cable. We might never have had ultra-rapid chargers. Worse, imagine if in the early 1990s the EU had decided that henceforth there should only be one standardised form of storing computer data: the floppy disk. How would that go down now?
The previous government declined to join the EU’s standardisation drive and said it wouldn’t force phone manufacturers to adopt a single design of charger. But the current Labour regime is reported to be thinking otherwise.
But why? As it is, Britain is in the best of two worlds. No phone manufacturer is going to design a uniquely British charging cable purely for the sake of it. Why would they want to? Most phones sold in the UK are going to adopt the EU standard whether or not they are obliged to because it makes business sense. Even if you wanted to distinguish your product from a rival’s by employing a different standard, you are unlikely to want to manufacture two versions yourself, each to be sold on opposite sides of the Channel.
On the other hand, refusing to adopt the EU standard on electrical and electronic goods means that if there is a very good reason to experiment with a new, improved design. Britain could become the test bed. We can become an island of innovation, where future equivalents of DVDs, flash drives and so on can be developed before they are allowed to be sold in a floppy disk EU.
Thank God for the EU phone cable directive. It will mean less fiddling around for most of us as our phones adopt one standard. But the government has no need to follow the EU with legislation when standardisation will happen anyway. If our new government has wisdom it will leave things as they are.
Working people will pay for Reeves’s NI hike
Who would pay for Rachel Reeves’s increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions? Well yes, in the first instance it is the companies that would have to hand over the cash, but the real burden would be much more widely shared.
To see why, start with the simple question: what does a company do if it finds its labour costs have suddenly gone up? It can do nothing, in which case its profits fall (or even less agreeably, its losses rise) and it pays a bit less in corporation tax. It can trim its workforce to hold costs down, which will cut the government’s take from income tax, and – of course – from National Insurance. It can increase its prices, in which case customers pay. It can cut or postpone investment, accepting some damage to future growth. It can hold down wages, in which case it is the workers who pay.
Governments have to raise money, and they should do so in a way that does the least damage to the economy
The balance between these different consequences varies enormously from company to company and sector to sector, and it is extraordinarily hard to predict the overall outcome. As you might imagine, there is a sizable industry of economists trying to work out how people react to tax changes, and there is a sub-section devoted to NI. For example, there was a paper by the OBR last February that looked at what happens when the government cuts NI. It examined the ‘income effects’, ‘substitution effects’, ‘participation elasticities’, ‘progression elasticities’, together with ‘separate elasticities for income and substitution effects’. The outcome was that the cuts led to an increase in hours worked equivalent to another 94,000 people in jobs… in 2028/29.
It is easy (and unfair) to mock. So much depends on the mood of the hour – what John Maynard Keynes back in 1936 dubbed ‘animal spirits’, the way emotions drive business and investment decisions. In a time of overall high inflation, a company is more likely to try to pass on higher costs by jacking up prices. If a business is already worried about falling demand, a rise in NI might push it to trim staff numbers now rather than take the risk of having to cut more savagely later.
Right now, the jobs market seems to be softening. The latest ONS stats just out are weaker than expected, and there is the prospect of the government’s reforms to workers’ rights coming into law soon, which may encourage companies to try to trim their workforce as soon as possible. It is quite possible then – though we just don’t know – that most of the impact of higher NI will indeed be on employment, rather than any of the other variables. If that is right, it will be the people who lose their jobs, or fail to find work, that will pay much of the bill. On the other hand, a softening job market may enable companies to hold down pay increases anyway, and the rise in NIs will give them another lever to do so.
The bottom line is this: governments have to raise money, and they should do so in a way that does the least damage to the economy. But pretending that ordinary working people won’t have to pay for an increase in employers’ NI contributions is wrong. Working people, or formerly working people, will stump up.
My life as a historian of the Great War
As the author of eight non-fiction books, I am most often asked why did I chose to write a particular title. The answer is that my books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question – almost irrespective of whether the topic would interest anyone else. Fortunately, most have.
I started early, writing my first title, The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front, when I was in my twenties. This, my most personal book, was a homage to my late father, Frank Jones, a very elderly dad who had been in his sixties when I was born. As such, he was a veteran of the first world war, but, like me, a myopic spectacle-wearer, he spent the conflict behind the lines in the châteaux where generals like Douglas Haig planned their bloody offensives. Dad’s task was to take down their battle orders in shorthand and then type them out. The nearest he came to danger was when a shell exploded on high, killing a pheasant which fell at his feet. He took it into the Mess for lunch.
My books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question
By a hideous irony, his younger brother Ernest, who had perfect eyesight, enlisted in the Rifle Brigade in 1914 aged 18 and was killed the following year near Ypres – possibly as the result of an order typed by his brother. My father brought me up on stories of the war and took me to visit the old battlefields and Uncle Ernest’s grave. I became obsessed with the subject, but only when I read other books on the subject did the obsession crystallise into the idea of writing my own.
The first book I read on the Great War was Verdun: The Price of Glory by the late Alistair Horne, for my money the most moving and brilliant of all the myriad books written about the war. Verdun is an ancient citadel in north-east France that was the scene of the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. A French friend inherited an old family house there, which I used as a base to explore the haunted glades of the battlefield. (After the war, despairing of ever returning the poisoned ground to the plough, the French planted a huge forest to cover it and the nine villages obliterated by the battle.)
The second book that inspired me to write was A Walk Along the Wall by the journalist Hunter Davies, a travelogue about his tramp from one end to the other of Hadrian’s Wall. Why not, I thought, apply this idea to the whole western front, and walk the 400-mile active section of the old trench lines, from the Belgian coast to St Mihiel in Lorraine, combining my travels, my family story, a potted history of the war, and my interviews with some 30 surviving veterans in a single book. Obtaining Mr Davies’s permission to nick and adapt his idea, I began my work.
My first problem as a complete unknown in the literary world was to find a publisher, but this was solved more easily than I had feared. At a book launch party, I met Norman Longmate, a social historian, who recommended Robert Hale, a small publisher with offices on Clerkenwell Green. After a single letter outlining my plan, I was summoned there for an interview and left clutching a contract for the book.
My second book sprang directly from the first: one of the veterans I had interviewed was the famous German writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger, the much-wounded and decorated author of the classic great war memoir Storm of Steel. I found him so interesting that my interview stretched to a three-week stay in his village, during which the 90-year-old sage mentored my first (and only) LSD trip: Jünger was a friend of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had first synthesised the drug, and had been writing about it since the 1930s – long before Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary followed him down the psychedelic trail. Incidentally, both Jünger and Hofmann lived to be over 100, so not all drug fiends die young.
Earlier in his varied career, Jünger had been the bard of the Freikorps, the mercenary force of ex-soldiers and young right-wing students who had crushed communist uprisings in Germany immediately after the Great War, and been so brutally effective that they had even tried to overthrow the young Weimar Republic with a military putsch. There was only a single history of the Freikorps in English at that time, and so I put myself forward to fill the gap, making Jünger the dedicatee of my book. This time my publisher was the venerable John Murray, a gentlemanly house who brought out my book Hitler’s Heralds in 1987, coincidentally in the same week that Rudolf Hess, like Jünger a Freikorps veteran, hanged himself in Spandau jail.
Lucky happenstance played a part in my third book, when for the first time I dipped my toe into the tricky waters of biography. At school, I had played a role in a production of a play by Patrick Hamilton, the alcoholic playwright and novelist now celebrated as the coiner of the concept ‘gaslighting’ from the title of his eponymous stage thriller.
I moved to Brighton in the late 1980s and discovered that Hamilton’s only surviving relative, his sister-in-law Aileen, was a near neighbour. Despite the fact that she detested him, Aileen was the guardian of Patrick’s papers and literary manuscripts, and delighted me by pulling out a huge suitcase stuffed with these relics from beneath her bed, giving me the freedom to use them as I wished. Within a week I had obtained a contract to write Hamilton’s biography.
I then found that I had a rival in the field. The publisher Faber had written Aileen a slightly snotty letter announcing that they had anointed the writer Sean French to pen a biography, and demanding her cooperation with the project. Aileen had taken umbrage at their presumption and not even bothered to reply, and, thanks to her, I had Patrick’s literary legacy and a decisive head start over my competitor. Nevertheless, once I had completed my book, I invited Sean to visit and consult my papers. I got the drop, and my biography Through a Glass Darkly duly appeared first.
By a hideous irony, his younger brother Ernest, who had perfect eyesight, was killed near Ypres – possibly as the result of an order typed by his brother
Sean had the last laugh though: together with his wife Nicci Gerrard, he formed the best-selling crime writing duo ‘Nicci French’ and a whole shelf full of books now testifies to their success. Aileen bequeathed me Patrick’s papers in her will, but having already used them, I sold them via Sotheby’s, and today they rest in that graveyard of British literary legacies, the University of Texas at Austin.
Another projected biography brought me more grief than poor Patrick had ever done. Richard Cohen, a distinguished books editor, decided to set up as a publisher with his own imprint and commissioned me to write the life of the artist Lucian Freud as one of his first titles. I was living in Austria at the time and was desperate to return home, so I accepted the brief without knowing too much about Freud or his private life. It turned out that Freud strongly objected to anyone prying, which was fair enough. I had not appreciated the lengths he would go to to stop the biography appearing, despite being warned by a former friend of the painter that he was a nasty piece of work with close contacts in London’s criminal underworld.
Anonymous phone calls warning me off soon escalated to actual threats, and I became paranoid enough to leave my home and sleep out in the office of a small literary magazine in Hove. Richard Cohen decided that publicity was my best protection, and arranged for the story of my disappearance, together with a gnomic comment from Freud, to appear in the Observer and the Independent on Sunday. The date was 31 August 1997, and although both papers had put the story on their front pages, it was immediately swallowed up and forgotten by what happened in Paris on that day: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Deciding that no book was worth the trouble that Freud’s life had brought me, I proposed to Richard that I should abandon the project, and instead write the biography of the safely long-dead poet Rupert Brooke, a figure from the Great War era who had long fascinated me. Brooke’s official biographer, Christopher Hassall, had been discreet to the point of deception about the poet’s busy hidden life, and as Brooke had died without heirs, I assumed I would be safe from any Freudian persecution. I was wrong.
A beak at Eton College had acquired the unpublished letters that Brooke had written to Bryn Olivier, one of several women he had wooed simultaneously. The beak lent me copies of the letters without imposing any restrictions on their use, but strangely objected when I published them in the Hove literary magazine as a taster for my biography. A legal letter from his solicitor demanded £25,000 from me, which I declined to pay, and used the letters in my biography regardless. Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth duly appeared and was serialised in the Sunday Times without more ado, and when the beak died soon afterwards, I saw it as a kind of divine retribution.
And so, somehow, the books kept coming: a history of the Tower of London; a brief biography of Britain’s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, written with the cooperation of Mosley’s eldest son Nicholas; an account of the attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944, written with the help of Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, eldest son of the heroic would-be assassin; a history of the Edwardian era on the eve of the first world war; the story of a Berlin brothel used by the Nazis to spy on the clients. I am not sure what such varied interests say about their author, but it has been a very exhilarating ride.
Tesla is in trouble if Kamala Harris wins
In the third century BC the city of Rhodes, in celebration of the defeat of Demetrius I of Macedonia, built the Colossus, a 30-metre-high statue of the sun god Helios. It became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Now there is a new Colossus to wonder at, not a statue but a supercomputer, reputed to be the most powerful in the world. So which American tech company built it? Apple, IBM, Google, OpenAI? Actually, none of the above. The new Colossus has been built by a US auto company… Tesla. How come?
In the space of 14 years, Tesla has risen from being the manufacturer of an electric sports car based on the Lotus Elise and powered by mobile phone batteries to an EV behemoth which, despite competition from China’s BYD (Build Your Dreams), is the world’s largest producer of EVs. Tesla has achieved this with only two mainstream models – the Model 3 sedan and the Model Y, a mid-size SUV. (It should be noted that these figures do not include hybrids. Nor should they. As one analyst wittily pointed out, in technology terms it would be like a company sticking a petrol engine on the back of a horse in the early 20th century, when the world transitioned from horses to internal combustion engines.)
Sales of Tesla’s Model Y (a four-year-old car) are poised to now overtake Ford’s F-150, which has been America’s top vehicle every year since 1977. Last year, Tesla’s SUV was the world’s best-selling vehicle, even though it is relatively expensive compared to the previous title holder, Toyota’s subcompact Corolla.
If this year has been a year of consolidation in terms of Tesla’s EV sales, next year is likely to see a second wave of exponential growth. The now-dated Model Y is likely to be replaced. As with the Model 3, which was replaced at the end of last year, the improvements in build quality, technology and battery life are likely to be spectacular.
In addition, next year Tesla is slated to build a cheaper ‘Model 2’ using elements of a revolutionary manufacturing system called the ‘unboxed’ method, which is expected to cut production costs by 30 per cent. Meanwhile, Tesla’s futuristic Cybertruck, an electric pickup, is already being produced at a run rate of 50,000 vehicles per year. That compares with GM’s electric pickup, the Hummer, which only sold 13,001 units since its introduction in 2021.
Lastly, Tesla will start production of a £230,000 ‘Semi’ (lorry in British parlance) in a new gigafactory in Nevada in 2025. It plans to have a production capacity of 50,000 units per annum; in an industry where most semis are quasi hand-built, this would be the most automated plant in the world. The new plant is next to Tesla’s Gigafactory I, which will overtake the Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, as the world’s biggest manufacturing facility when its current build-out is completed.
Despite these production plans, which will likely increase Tesla’s capacity from 1.8 million units to 3 million units per annum over the next two years, its CEO and founder, Elon Musk, places little value on its automobile business. As he recently told investors, ‘I recommend anyone who doesn’t believe that Tesla would solve vehicle autonomy… should sell their Tesla stock.’ He is right. At a £575 billion market capitalisation, Tesla is massively overvalued as a car company or even as a utility-scale battery power manufacturer, in which it is also a world leader.
However, Tesla would appear to be close to reaching the Holy Grail of autonomous self-driving. Musk’s confidence is such that, last week, he appeared on stage at Warner Brothers’ vast Burbank, LA studio complex to launch the Robotaxi, Tesla’s dedicated autonomous vehicle which is designed with no steering wheel or pedals.
This is where Tesla’s Colossus comes in; its computing power is such that it can massively increase the company’s neural network training capacity. Colossus comprises a water-cooled array of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs (£23,000 each). A projected expansion next year will add a further 50,000 H100s, plus 50,000 H200s. The total cost will be in the region of £3.8 billion, which shows the extent to which Musk has gone ‘all-in’ on real-world artificial intelligence.
The result is that Tesla’s ‘Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD)’ system is rapidly improving to the point where it will be considerably safer than human drivers. On current trends, it will soon be ten times safer. In the past fortnight alone, Tesla has added ‘Smart Summon’ to its FSD. For example, Teslas can drop off their owners at a supermarket and then park themselves. After buying groceries, the Tesla owners can then ‘summon’ their car using a phone app.
Tesla’s Robotaxi launch has been compared to the legendary introduction of the Apple iPhone by Steve Jobs in June 2007. But whereas Jobs’s iPhone presentation was brilliantly slick, Musk’s ‘We Robot’ presentation was chaotic. Self-admittedly aspergic, Musk is an erratic performer. His jerky bodily movements, his stuttering speech, and his frequent hyena laugh sometimes make him appear like a malfunctioning robot… unlike the platoons of humanoid robots who interacted with the invited audience at Warner Brothers.
The fact is that Tesla’s humanoid robots are being trained in the same way as its Robotaxis. Within two years, Tesla has propelled itself to the lead of the race to produce humanoid robots. Next year, Tesla aims to have up to 2,000 humanoid robots operating in its factories. Last Friday, Tesla’s robots played a more entertaining role. At Warner Brothers’ Westworld (after the dystopian film Westworld, starring Yul Brynner), Tesla’s cowboy-hatted robots poured drinks and gave out snacks. They even played ‘rock-paper-scissors’ with guests while they waited for their ride in the 20 Robotaxi prototypes.
Given that Musk has gone all-in on his support for Trump, his Robotaxis may not be too welcome in Democrat states
While the value of a business that dominates the Robotaxi market has been estimated at £3.8 trillion or more, the value of the humanoid robot business, which Musk aims to sell for £23,000 per unit from 2026, is expected to be much more; ‘the biggest product ever’, as he has described it.
So, what are the pitfalls for Tesla in this ‘brave new world’? Firstly, there are rivals such as Google-owned Waymo in America and Baidu in China. Over the past two years, they have built up significant automated ride-hailing businesses in cities such as Wuhan and San Francisco. However, Waymo and Baidu rely on expensive geofenced systems supported by radar; on the road, their cars appear to be carrying a traffic cone atop a surfboard above their vehicles. It is estimated that they cost up to £115,000 each compared to a Tesla Robotaxi, which, relying only on inexpensive cameras and neural network training, will cost just £23,000. A fearful Uber has now formed a defensive alliance with Waymo to combat Tesla’s Robotaxi. Perhaps the best indication that Tesla may crush Uber is that its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, sold £53 million of Uber stock in June.
Secondly, there is the problem of public acceptance for automated taxis; in San Francisco, Waymo’s cars have suffered Luddite attacks, and in Wuhan, there has been a public outcry over risks to jobs. Thirdly, there is the problem of regulation. Musk plans to roll out autonomous driving in California and Texas next year. But given that Musk has gone all-in on his support for Trump, his Robotaxis may not be too welcome in Democrat states.
Neither will Musk be popular at the federal level. Democrat-leaning federal institutions such as the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) have already blocked Musk’s SpaceX company from launching its revolutionary Starship and from deploying its broadband Starlink business, which has doubled its subscribers from 2 to 4 million since 2022.
There has been little love lost between Musk and President Joe Biden, who gormlessly excluded Tesla from his White House EV summit in 2021. But whereas Musk, like most California techies, voted for Biden in 2020, he has now gone all in for Trump, appearing at his rallies and donating hundreds of millions of dollars in support. If Kamala Harris wins, Musk, who has described Harris as a ‘puppet’, is aware of the consequences; as Musk only half-jokingly said to Tucker Carlson, ‘If he [Trump] loses, I’m fucked.’
Alex Ferguson was brilliant, but did he deserve £2m a year?
Manchester United have axed Sir Alex Ferguson’s contract as an ‘ambassador’ for the club, and it is not clear whether the most shocking part of this news is that he has been put out to grass by new owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe or that he was getting £2.16 million a year to shake hands with executive box customers (the ones Roy Keane famously called ‘the prawn sandwich brigade’).
Sir Alex is a club legend, of course. He will be 83 at the end of this year, and is said to not be in the best health these days. He also lost his wife, Cathy, a year ago. He’s also had to suffer watching a substandard United team for the past 11 years, unable to come anywhere close to the kind of team he moulded during his reign – a reign that made him the most successful manager ever in this country.
There may be an argument that you’d have to pay someone to watch Manchester United under David Moyes or Erik ten Hag, but £2 million a year?
The amount of money being spent by clubs at the top of the football pyramid is famously obscene, yet Ferguson’s role shows there are still increasingly inventive ways for clubs to splash out in a week what it takes most of their supporters a lifetime to earn.
Even Ferguson’s £2 million a year would be small change to some of the staff. United’s highest-paid player, Casemiro, earns as much in six weeks as Fergie was getting in a year. Even Mason Mount is on £200,000 a week and hardly gets in the starting XI.
Plenty of teams are charitable enough to give former long-serving players and managers a largely cosmetic and simple role within the club after retirement, which usually involves donning a shirt and club tie and doing a bit of meet-and-greet in the hospitality suites during home games or maybe the odd stadium tour. Some go further – during Covid, former Spurs captain Gary Mabbutt personally rang 3,000 vulnerable and elderly fans to check on their health and others to wish them happy birthday.
But that’s an exception, and many of those who were around before Sky made every average Premier League player a millionaire before their 30th birthday are grateful for the extra income and the chance to still feel involved in football.
None of which applies to Sir Alex Ferguson. He is not like any normal manager. For starters, he remained at United’s helm for 27 years at a time when most managers struggle to last 27 months. He did not win his first trophy for four years but under previous administrations was given the chance to grow a team into challengers – something unlikely to happen these days.
His record is well documented but worth repeating. He won 13 Premier League titles between 1993 and 2013 and didn’t need a dodgy Middle Eastern sugar daddy to do so. His United side, featuring several homegrown superstars, also won five FA Cups and four League Cups. If that was not enough to set him apart from his rivals, it is in Europe that he saw his greatest triumphs – namely two Champions League victories as well as a Cup Winners’ Cup one.
He was irascible and dictatorial. He would get rid of players, no matter how good, if they angered him. He had to handle the egos of Beckham and Cantona and did so successfully.
Is all this worth handing him a small fortune 11 years after he packed it all in? Probably not. Would any United fan begrudge him for it? Also, probably not.
But as an example of how clubs spend their money, it is yet another reason why it hurts so much for fans who have already seen rising ticket prices, teams travelling 100 miles by private jet to get to a game, replica shirts for £100 even though they will be out of date in a year, or ending concessions for pensioners. And all this without the blow being cushioned by the kind of success Ferguson brought to the club.
Private schools brought this tax hike on themselves
It’s the season to do the rounds of senior schools and my 10-year-old son and I have been jostling through the crowds to glimpse science labs and drama workshops for the past month. Open days for the top state schools have been heaving. At a state boarding school rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted (boarding fees aren’t subject to VAT), the head apologised for lengthy queues to register, get coffee, join a tour. Another 200 people had turned up in addition to the 600 booked in. Among them, I spotted several families whose children are currently at local prep schools.
Labour starts charging VAT on school fees from January. But an estimated 10,000 children have already been taken out of independent schools, mine among them. Data collected by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) found a drop in pupil numbers by 1.7 per cent between September 2023 and the beginning of this term. The starkest drop was at the Year 7 transfer point, with a 4.6 per cent fall in the number of children starting at private secondary schools.
When we were shown around the prep that my sons attended briefly, the head boasted that ‘We’re an all-Steinway school’
This ‘is just the tip of the iceberg’, warns Julie Robinson, chief executive at the Independent Schools Council (ISC), as most parents will do ‘anything they can to get to the next transfer point’ before pulling their child out of the system.
The hardest-hit are not the big public schools that Labour’s ‘rhetoric is pointed at’, she stresses, those with foundations and endowments, but small schools with under 300 pupils. These are parents – often with borderline special needs children – who pay fees termly out of their dual-taxed income, not family money. ‘It’s not about social cachet or status, but what’s right for my child,’ she adds.
At least one such school, St Joseph’s Prep in Stoke-on-Trent (fees £3,415 a term, about half that of the average private school), is to close at the end of the year because parents cannot find the additional 20 per cent. The ISC estimates it will cost the Department for Education an extra £92.8 million this school year to educate these additional children coming into state schools. Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson’s latest statement – ‘our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery’ – seems to confirm that the policy has political gain, and not children’s needs, at its heart. ‘It is nothing to do with tax or education’, says Ralph Lucas, editor-in-chief of The Good Schools Guide and a hereditary Tory peer who often speaks on education in the House of Lords, ‘and starting in January is sheer cruelty’.
But Lord Lucas – who has warned of what he calls ‘boiling the frog’ of fee inflation – says the sector (specifically the top end) has brought this on themselves. ‘When I was young, your average doctor or country solicitor could afford an independent school,’ he says, ‘so could a journalist or an MP. So they’ve lost their constituency – how many MPs, even in the Conservative party, are out there defending private schools? Very few. Because they’ve become unaffordable.’
Why? Because ‘parents like the frills’, says Lucas, and the top 100 or so schools with fees over £40,000 a year have thrown themselves into an arms race for the best facilities. When we were shown around the prep that my sons attended briefly, the head boasted that ‘We’re an all-Steinway school’ and I winced. Astroturf pitches, en suite bathrooms in boarding houses, all-weather riding arenas… you don’t need particularly left-leaning sensibilities to find this sort of privilege – and the associated fees – distasteful, verging on obscene.
To make matters worse, Labour’s VAT changes allow schools to claim back the tax they spent on capital project over the last 10 years. The more a school spent on swimming pools and Steinways, the larger the windfall they’ll be able to claim in January. Once again, the small private schools suffer.
From January, Eton will pass the full 20 per cent onto parents, putting fees up to around £63,000 a year. New joiners to the sixth form at Cheltenham Ladies’ College will pay £61,740. When you consider that a newly-qualified consultant in the NHS earns £74,000, this starts to look like a form of crass conspicuous consumption – up there with Saddam Hussein’s gold bathroom.
Top public schools are likely to remain oversubscribed and weather the VAT storm, but elsewhere in the sector, the policy is already having a ‘profound effect’, says Danny Boswell, bursar of Downside (boarding fees currently £43,470; VAT in full to be passed on to parents in January; definitely ‘do not have embossed stationery’). In September, pupil numbers dipped under the 300 mark. ‘We’ve seen a 20 per cent drop in numbers over the last two years,’ Boswell discloses, ‘ever since it became apparent Labour was going to win and do this’.
With private schools haemorrhaging pupils, might parents expect a reduction in fees? With the sector also set to lose its 80 per cent charitable business relief rates from April 2025, don’t hold your breath. While a few schools (Giggleswick) have said they’ll absorb VAT, most are having to pass at least a proportion on; fees across the 23 Girls Day School Trust schools will increase by 12 per cent.
At Downside, all Boswell can offer is ‘hopefully’ avoiding an annual fee increase next September. ‘We are making significant sacrifices,’ he says; avoiding redundancies but not replacing staff who leave and cutting down on ‘the really transformational bursaries of 100, 110 per cent we offer to the poorest children’. Going after more international students isn’t ‘a magic bullet’, he points out – as their fees are about to go up by a fifth, too (though I see from the school’s Instagram account that the head has just been on a trip to Lagos to court new pupils).
With private schools haemorrhaging pupils, might parents expect a reduction in fees?
Lord Lucas says fees have got to come down and private schools can do this by increasing class sizes. Surely this would remove their USP? ‘Schools have sold themselves on small class sizes being better for your child,’ he says. ‘It isn’t true — and schools know that it isn’t true.’
But as Lucas, an Old Etonian, points out, if you’ve got a good state school as an option, ‘why wouldn’t you?’ (His children started at private schools in London, switching to state when they moved out and ‘thrived’.) I’ve been hugely impressed by the largely non-selective secondary schools we’ve looked round: impressed by the numbers off to Oxbridge and medical school, impressed by the GCSE grades, the team sports, orchestras, music tours. Things have improved dramatically since I endured what Alastair Campbell would have called a ‘bog-standard comp’ in the 1990s.
There is a sector of society that is scared of state schools – in the way that some people are scared of the North of England. Now, accepting that their parents’ generation was the last to afford school fees, they are going to the other side – and are pleasantly surprised by what they find. ‘It takes a lot to break the mould, having been privately educated,’ says one mother, whose daughter moved at 11 from a prep school to Midhurst Rother College in West Sussex, part of the United Learning group. ‘I have been blown away: we are experiencing more work, stricter rules, plenty of sport… and I can now afford the geography field trip to Iceland and every other extra I’d have had to say “no” to at private school.’ Let’s hope, then, that Bridget Phillipson has done her sums – and all that non-existent embossed stationery can be converted into the 6,500 more teachers Labour has promised – and quickly.
I think we’re turning Japanese
Japanese culture is rapidly colonising the West, from our theatres to our cinemas, to our streaming services and our bookshops, to the food we eat and the clothes we wear, even the footballers we cheer on. This year alone I must have written half a dozen articles on different areas where Japanese culture is making its mark worldwide (and especially in the UK). Some are quite surprising, such as novels. By one estimate, a quarter of the two million translated novels sold in the UK last year were Japanese. It has become almost de rigueur to be seen reading the latest volume by Banana Yoshimoto, Sayaka Murata, et al.
Though we all long ago surrendered to sushi, the next target for Japan’s imperial ambitions could be British hospitality
Netflix is turning Japanese in a big way, increasing its anime catalogue to 891 shows in 2023, with the share of viewers in the UK growing from 3 per cent to 9 per cent. The streaming platform has the live-action version of One Piece – probably the most famous manga series in Japan – as well as one of the country’s best-loved sitcoms, the gentle gay rom-com (with cooking) What Did You Eat Yesterday? Then, of course, there is Shogun on Disney+, which swept the board at the Creative Arts Emmys.
As for theatre, Studio Ghibli is in the process of transferring its weird and wonderful anime creations to the stage. Spirited Away was a huge success at the Coliseum, as was My Neighbour Totoro at the RSC (it’s coming back next year). Expect more from the Ghibli back catalogue to reach the West End and hopefully the rest of the UK too.
Also due in the next few weeks is the latest from Japan’s most famous dramatist Hideki Noda, known for his ambitious juxtapositions of history, classical literature, song, dance, and comedy. Love in Action, starring boy band heartthrob Jun Matsumoto, in which Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov collides with the bombing of Nagasaki, will play at Sadler’s Wells at the end of this month. I saw it in Tokyo. My advice? Go.
Japanese-themed exhibitions or events? Londoners, at least, can take their pick. You could head down to the Dulwich Picture Gallery for Japanese printmaking, or to the Victoria Miro gallery for Yayoi Kusama (she of the polka-dot pumpkins). Or if you want something more bizarre, Japan House on Kensington High Street has Japanese plastic food replicas on display from all 47 prefectures. Unfortunately, you’ve just missed Myths to Manga at the V&A and the all-encompassing Hyper Japan at Olympia, but both will no doubt be back.
And though we all long ago surrendered to sushi, the next target for Japan’s imperial ambitions could be British hospitality. London now has its first fully Japanese-themed luxury hotel, The Prince Akatoki, which offers the mystical art of oriental hospitality omotenashi to weary, enlightenment-seeking travellers. The Prince is the first of what parent company Seibu Group hopes will be many more omotenashi hotels across the globe.
Corporations like Seibu have the full backing of their government in their quest to spread Japanese culture across the globe. Like many successful ‘Japanese’ initiatives, the policy was nicked from somewhere else – in this case, us. After the perceived success of Cool Britannia, the Japanese government started to promote Cool Japan. Arguably, they were helped in this by the sclerotic domestic economy and the burden of a dwindling and ageing population, spurring businesses to seek new ways to market Japan to curious outsiders.
But why are outsiders so curious? What is the eternal appeal of Japan? At the high-culture end, as well as the deserved reputation for quality, there is a certain snob appeal – a pleasing notion that one is partaking of a sophisticated and mysterious activity not for the common herd. This conceit extends from novels and plays to food (onigiri is all the rage in Europe now, while in Japan it’s a pretty bland convenience store staple).
At the pop end of things, Japanese stuff is shiny and quirky and cool and allows those who wish to retreat to a fantasy land to do so without feeling too embarrassed. It also, refreshingly, comes without heavy-handed progressive (‘Don’t be racist!’) messages attached. It’s fun. And the Japanese don’t care about ‘cultural appropriation’, so you can wear that kimono or cosplay Doraemon to your geeky heart’s content.
And the marketing is so subtle. As I once heard the legendary menswear proprietor Mark Cho explain, there is no one better in the world at presenting themselves and their wares than the Japanese. Creators are often enticingly, mysteriously anonymous, the packaging is exquisite, and when you do get into something Japanese, you often have the satisfying feeling that you discovered it yourself. In reality you were gently, seductively led by the nose.
One final mutual benefit: Japan’s cultural export boom allows those who fancy themselves Japanophiles (and don’t we all?) to experience, or believe they have experienced, Japan and all its wonders without the hassle of actually going there. The Japanese know this, and, given the headaches mass tourism is causing around the world, are very happy about it.
Thomas Tuchel would be a divisive choice for England manager
Thomas Tuchel, the former Chelsea and Bayern Munich manager, has emerged as the favourite to succeed Gareth Southgate as England manager. The Times reports that he could be unveiled later this week. It is believed that negotiations could proceed quickly, bringing to an end the FA’s search for a successor to Southgate, who quit after England’s defeat to Spain in the Euro 2024 final in July.
Tuchel is attractive, in part simply because he is available. He has been out of work since leaving Bayern Munich at the end of last season. Appointing him would mean no lengthy or expensive negotiations to prise him away from a club contract. Exact terms have yet to be agreed, but Tuchel is reportedly keen to take the job. He would become the third foreign coach to manage the England team, following in the footsteps of Sven-Göran Eriksson and Fabio Capello. Neither could be described as successes in the role.
It would also appear to be curtains for Lee Carsley, England’s under-21 head coach, who had been put in charge for six Nations League games until next month. He presided over Sunday’s 3-1 victory over Finland but also oversaw the shambolic defeat to Greece last week. Carsley hasn’t exactly helped his cause by a series of bizarre utterances in which he seemed to rule himself out of the running.
Tuchel has qualities that recommend him to the FA. His command of English is excellent (unlike Capello), and has also worked in the Premier League and is familiar with many of the players. He coached England’s captain, Harry Kane, at Bayern last season.
So he ticks plenty of boxes, but so does Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager, whose contract expires at the end of this season. The FA were reportedly keen on Guardiola, but few seriously believed that he would want the England job. The official remit is for ‘a world-class coach who has won trophies’ to manage England. Tuchel certainly qualifies on that score. But his time at every club is also remembered for bust-ups with everyone from players to higher-ups. Tuchel’s time at PSG included a falling-out with the club’s sporting director, Leonardo. He was eventually sacked in 2021. He was then hired by Chelsea to replace the struggling Frank Lampard, leading the club to Champions League glory. But he lasted just 20 months at Stamford Bridge before an inevitable falling-out with the new owners. And therein lies the problem.
Some see Eddie Howe of Newcastle as a better long-term option
Tuchel is nothing if not combative. It has been reported that he once made a player crawl on all fours as a punishment. He has a habit of picking rows with senior players and rival coaches (who can forget the infamous occasion on which he squared up to Antonio Conte, refusing to let go of his hand on the touchline?). How will England players, used to Southgate’s cuddly arm-around-the-shoulder approach, cope?
Plenty of England fans will also be unhappy with Tuchel as the national manager. Some see Eddie Howe of Newcastle as a better long-term option. There are still some who think the job should go to an English coach, first and foremost. One thing is for certain: Tuchel’s reign will not be free of controversy. He might just be the most divisive manager the FA suits could have chosen.
The journalist’s journalist: the irrepressible Claud Cockburn
No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career.
By late 1931, his eyewitness reporting at the start of the Great Depression convinced him that Marx was right
Indeed, it is the journalist son’s signal achievement to have surmounted left-wing cliché and written a fascinating and subtle portrait of a paradoxical career. Claud was a mostly loyal child of the British Empire, who renounced establishment status and comfort (as a distinguished foreign correspondent for the Times) for the freedom (as a committed communist on the margins of British journalism) to pursue and describe the most important story of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler’s mostly unchecked rise to power in Germany and the fascist movement that set fire to the entire world. That Cockburn’s mimeographed news-letter, The Week, in the 1930s became a must-read in the appeasement-corrupted elite that he left behind might well have merited official honours in post-war England; but he had to settle for having been right before almost anyone else.
Conventional distinction didn’t seem to interest Claud, who, Patrick writes, was ‘above all… a serious revolutionary who wanted to change the world’. More convincing is that Claud was a profoundly sceptical enquirer, whose diplomat father, Henry, imbued him with a sense of right and wrong that made it impossible for Claud to go with the flow. ‘China Harry’ survived the Boxer rebellion and had ‘no doubts about the British Empire being a force for good’, according to Patrick. But in Henry’s next diplomatic posting, his protests against Japan’s violent subjugation of occupied Korea ran foul of British policy and eventually forced him to return to England. Claud took note, Patrick tells us:
The episode reveals that Henry, who was by far the greatest influence on Claud growing up, was the kind of independent-minded High Tory with an overriding objection to injustice whom his son always liked.
Another influence was Graham Greene’s father Charles, the liberal, politically pessimistic, chess-playing headmaster of Berkhamsted school, who regularly summoned Claud for matches and taught him a view of history that pointed ‘inexorably toward disaster’. Claud caught up with contemporary history soon enough, in post-1918 Eastern and Central Europe, where resentment and revanchism were rampant. When his father was sent to Budapest by the Foreign Office, Claud developed an interest in politics and a sympathy for the ‘victims’ of the victorious Allies, including Germany. But his compassion for the losers soon waned.
After Oxford, in 1927, he went to work as an assistant to the Times correspondent in Berlin, where he demonstrated a knack for the news business. A teacher’s report at Berkhamsted had already identified his studies in Latin and Greek as ‘quick and appreciative’, while warning that he ‘must not be led away from thoroughness by the facility with which he can turn out work’ – effectively, praise with faint damnation. In other words, Claud was a quick study and a fast writer, essential tools for a good journalist, so it’s not surprising that before long the Times’s Norman Ebbutt gave him serious assignments that resulted in scoops.
By 1929, Claud was a rising star at a prestigious newspaper, covering the stock market crash as its New York correspondent and earning the notice of Geoffrey Dawson, the Times’s legendary editor. But while in Berlin, Claud had already fallen into bed, romantically and politically, with the Schwarzwald circle, an eclectic group of anti-Nazi intellectuals, and his earlier communist flirtations (indulged in in England with his friend Graham Greene) began to flower.
By late 1931, his eyewitness reporting at the start of the Great Depression convinced him that Karl Marx was right. Despite Dawson’s entreaties to stay with the paper, Claud had made up his mind that the only story worth his time was the Nazi movement, and he wanted to be where the action was, in a position to do something about it. He wrote to Dawson:
There comes… a point where not to act, or try to act more or less on one’s political convictions, becomes damaging to oneself in some way, and unfair also to one’s employer.
Nazi Germany was too dangerous, so Claud returned to London to found his ‘one-man band in which all instruments could be played by Claud’. Launched on 29 March 1933, The Week immediately began scooping the competition because there were so few outlets for anti-Nazi Germans, foreign office dissidents and foreign reporters based in the UK to get any news out about Hitler’s repression of political opponents and Jews. As a clearing-house for accurate information about Germany, The Week became essential reading for politicians, civil servants and journalists alike. It also attracted the interest of MI5, whose detailed memos about Claud provide a kind of parallel biography that Patrick astutely employs to flesh out what until now has primarily been Claud’s own version of his life, as told in his bestselling autobiography published in the 1950s.
With a circulation of never more than 5,000, The Week by itself would make a book; but two revelatory stories stand out. In 1934, Claud scooped the world ten days before the Night of the Long Knives by reporting that Hitler was on the verge of establishing a military dictatorship. In 1937, he ‘described for the first time’ the Astor family’s network of friends and associates that he later dubbed the ‘Cliveden set’, named for the Astors’ country estate, a moniker that became a worldwide synonym for the appeasement of Hitler. Given John Jacob Astor’s ownership of the Times and Dawson’s membership of Cliveden’s collection of high-society fools, this must have been the sweetest of victories for Claud.
In a sense he was overtaken by his own prescience, and he should have quit while he was ahead – in 1940, when Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. Never a doctrinaire communist, his sense of humour, numerous romantic entanglements and ideological rebelliousness interfered with party discipline. But he was nonetheless blinded by the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact in August 1939. ‘Churchill’s national coalition,’ writes Patrick, ‘was very like the anti-fascist Popular Front government Claud had advocated.’ Claud was ‘insufficiently aware… that almost everything that he had campaigned for since fleeing Berlin in 1933 was, by the summer of 1941, official British government policy’.
Sadly, to Claud’s and the Churchill government’s discredit, The Week was shut down for toeing the Soviet line of non-confrontation with Germany as late as January 1941. It only resumed publication in September 1942, well after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union had brought Stalin into the war. The British communists were similarly ungrateful toward their subversive comrade (after all, he had risked his life covering the Spanish Civil War for the Daily Worker.) Once the ban was lifted, the CP leadership hoped ‘to keep [The Week] closed’ because ‘it was too independent, though widely assumed to be under their control’. As the anti-communist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote:
No God failed [Claud] because communism never assumed a God-like shape in his eyes. He supported it as a cause wholeheartedly and with characteristic verve; and when it ceased to appeal to him as a cause, he ceased to support it.
The court favourite who became the most hated man in England
Lisa Hilton has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive… to astonish posterity’. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful. His mother Mary, a practical and ambitious woman, knew what his looks could do for the family, and she aimed high. The mark was King James I, a monarch who openly loved men. The king had lavished his then favourite, Robert Carr, with titles, wealth and great offices, but the finest pair of legs in Europe extinguished his star. James was to remain utterly enthralled by Villiers for the rest of his life, so ensorcelled that it was believed the author of Daemonologie had himself been bewitched.
The period between 1603 and 1625 hovers on the brink of modernity, its mores both recognisable and elusive; if the Jacobean age were to be personified in a masque, the bizarrely beautiful art form it created, it would dance as Janus, the god of duality and transition, looking simultaneously forward and back. As ‘a man who lived a woman’s life’, Buckingham (as he became) is its alien familiar, the unique creature of a unique time.
Clever, coarse, suspicious and passionate, James I had endured an emotionally starved and frequently terrifying childhood, shadowed by the fate of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. The precise nature of his physical relationship with Buckingham remains uncertain. More relevant, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett observes, was the king’s need to make a whole family of his favourite. ‘God bless you, my sweet child and wife,’ runs an early letter, ‘that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.’ Buckingham was nicknamed ‘Steenie’ by the king, after St Stephen, who was said to have had ‘the face of an angel’. In return, he happily described himself as James’s ‘dog’.
The contest between parliament and royal prerogative, which would ultimately end in civil war, had its roots in James’s reign; but Buckingham benefitted from a monarchy which was still almost absolute. Knighted in 1615, he was a marquess by 1618, aged 25, and Lord High Admiral a year later. In 1623, James made him a duke, the first time the title had been granted outside the royal family since the beheading of the Duke of Norfolk in 1572.
The Puritan writer Lucy Hutchinson sniffed that Buckingham had risen to ‘a pitch of glory… upon no merit but that of his prostitution’. Yet, unlike a royal mistress, he was able to translate his position into one of genuine political influence, maintaining his domination into the next generation after James’s death in 1626 with Charles I. The son may have loved Steenie almost as much as his father had, but Buckingham’s career as the most powerful man in England, after two kings, can best be described as mixed.
An avid collector and genuine connoisseur of art, he was instrumental to the cultural flowering of the Caroline court (though Hughes-Hallett points out that James’s neglected Danish Queen, Anne, who was mocked for spending so much time among her pictures, was the true founder of the Royal Collection). Aided by his dealer, Balthazar Gerbier, Buckingham amassed works by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raphael, Giorgione and Correggio, and employed Orazio Gentileschi as an interior decorator. A lost work by Rubens, ‘The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham’, designed as the centrepiece of his London palace York House, can be seen in a sketch in the National Gallery, vast, magnificent and, inevitably, ‘splendidly hubristic’.
As a diplomat and military leader, however, Buckingham was swiftly exposed as an amateur. His ‘incognito’ gallop to Madrid with Charles in pursuit of the Infanta Maria as a bride was a flamboyant fiasco, described by the Venetian ambassador as ‘an abyss of marvels, a monster among decisions’. A second wedding mission produced a wife for the prince, the future Queen Henrietta Maria, but failed to secure the French alliance that was the object of the match. While James’s diplomatic policies were directed at maintaining peace to preserve lives and money, Charles and Buckingham squandered both. A conscientious but incompetent commander, Buckingham became a positive liability in action. When he arrived at La Rochelle to ‘liberate’ the Huguenot city from Catholic oppression, the mayor met him at the gates and begged him to go away. Nor did he seem so splendid to the 5,000 (out of 8,000) men who lost their lives at the disastrous siege of the Île de Ré.
If Buckingham’s ascent was due to the magic of the divine right, his fall may be attributed in part to a far more modern phenomenon: the press. The early 17th century witnessed a vast rise in publications for an increasingly literate and news-hungry public, which focused its discontents on the favourite. Rumours of sorcery, and even the murder of James I with a poisoned posset, gathered such force that parliament moved twice to impeach Buckingham on 13 charges, which included corruption, conspiring with the Pope and attempting to convert Charles to Catholicism. Buckingham implored Charles to allow him to answer the accusations, but the young king impetuously dissolved parliament to protect him. In 1628, Buckingham was stabbed to death by a disgruntled army officer, John Felton. Hailed as a hero before he was hanged, Felton had deprived the nation of the one man to whom Charles I listened.
Francis Bacon had warned Buckingham that royal favourites might be ‘offered as a sacrifice to appease the multitude’. Scapegoat is a largely sympathetic portrait of a man trailed as sexual bait before the throne. Hughes-Hallett proved her exceptional scholarship with The Pike, her 2013 biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, but this balanced, brilliant book is even more ambitious. Pacing is dramatic: punchy, factual round-ups move along in tense, shifting montage, interspersed with disquisitions such as ‘Advice on Bargaining’ or dealing with ghosts. The author revels in the oddities and excitement of Jacobean language – the newsmart of St Paul’s cathedral is ‘the ears’ brothel’; Buckingham on trial is the ‘causer of causes’. Like its subject, this biography is a prodigy, an almost bewilderingly skilful portrait of James I’s reign in all its glittering strangeness.
A scorched Earth: Juice, by Tim Winton, reviewed
Late last year in Australia’s The Monthly, Tim Winton wrote an essay on the urgent need for writers to look the climate crisis in the eye. Quoting Amitav Ghosh’s observation about the ‘patterns of evasion’ that continue to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, he argued that writers must overcome the habits of mind that treat the natural world as an inert externality. Instead, they must find ways to recognise that we are part of nature, and our fate is inseparable from the world around us. ‘We have difficult work to do,’ he declared. ‘And we’re late to the bushfire.’
Of course, Winton is not someone who could ever be accused of treating the natural world as mere window-dressing. For more than 40 years, his fiction has been engaged in an ongoing conversation with the Australian landscape and the legacies of beauty and trauma encoded within it. Nonetheless, it’s difficult not to read his latest novel, Juice, as an attempt to rise to his own challenge. Set several generations from now in a world transformed by rising temperatures, and incorporating explicitly science fictional elements such as synthetic humans and energy weapons, it takes aim at the economic systems and industries that are driving the climate crisis. It also explores ideas of connection and the possibility of hope in dark times.
The unnamed narrator is raised in a homestead on North West Cape/Palydi Manu, halfway up Western Australia’s coast – ‘not a place for the faint-hearted’. The summers are so hot that the only way to survive them is to retreat underground: in winter, staying too long outside can also be deadly.
Trained by his mother, the narrator learns to be self-sufficient and independent. But in his late teens he is recruited by a secretive organisation known only as the Service. Like a terrorist group, its operations are compartmentalised, so exactly who funds it is never clear, but its mission is. For while our world – the place the narrator and his contemporaries refer to as ‘the Dirty World’ – is long gone, the descendants of the billionaires and corporate executives whose profiteering cooked the planet have survived, hidden away in bunkers and on seasteads. It is these ‘scions and factors and collaborators’ that the Service is dedicated to hunting down and exterminating.
At first there is a whiff of QAnon about the Service and its secret crusade against the corrupt. But as the narrator is drawn deeper into its operations, he realises that he is simply a pawn in a much longer game. Winton powerfully captures the cumulative damage of combat and betrayal, writing movingly about the way it isolates the protagonist. This is especially true in the novel’s latter stages, when it becomes clear not just that the Service is losing, but that the planet’s climate is continuing to heat up.
Despite its raw grief and pain, Juice is not a nihilistic book. Instead, it insists on the necessity of hope even in the face of insurmountable odds, and on the notion that our survival depends on our capacity to care for one another. It also goes further, especially in the extraordinary final pages, which offer a vision of what it might be to reject the desire for dominance and surrender to the world as it is. Or, as one of the characters remarks midway: ‘The first form of revelation is the natural world. Wild, living nature, coherent, intact, independent and unknowable in its abundance and fecundity.’
The rollercoaster ride of the world’s most reckless investor
For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid ‘salaryman’ business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth of online shopping. The bullish mood didn’t last, and Masa slunk away from the limelight – but only for a while. A techno-optimist, the now 67-year-old has repeatedly reinvented himself, urging doubters to see beyond the immediate: ‘You’re limiting your field of vision to 30 years… Start bold and think 300 years ahead.’
Masa’s greatest coup was with Alibaba, turning $20 million into more than $100 billion
According to Lionel Barber, who for 15 years edited the Financial Times, Masa is ‘probably the most powerful mogul of the 21st century who is not a household name’. At once a master of consumer psychology and a ‘trickster’ with a fondness for short cuts, Masa has proved a central character in an age of ‘hyper-globalisation’ that has seen money and ideas flow freely across the world. This detailed biography documents a career punctuated with attention-grabbing successes and abrupt reversals.
Barber has a journalist’s eye for his subject’s telling idiosyncrasies – a haste to board planes that means he sometimes embarks without socks or shoes, and a penchant for painting landscapes in the manner of Van Gogh. Of particular interest is Masa’s main home, a Batman-style lair in Tokyo. The decor highlights his fascination with Napoleon, but there are also numerous dog baskets for his salon of teacup poodles. Meanwhile, his office features a serene Japanese garden; guests who sit on an elevated platform are afforded a view that’s ‘not exactly trompe l’oeil’, yet alters their sense of space, exemplifying Masa’s bent for conjuring unusual perspectives.
These rarefied scenes are far removed from Masa’s gritty childhood. Growing up on the volcanic island of Kyushu, in a makeshift house not much better than a cowshed, he felt like an outsider, especially when mocked by other children over his Korean heritage. His father ran a pig farm, and Masa would forever be haunted by memories of the stench. The family later made a small fortune operating slot machines and by his teens Masa could aspire to become a teacher. But that plan was derailed by reading about Den Fujita, a business strategist lauded for introducing Japan to the McDonald’s hamburger. When Masa engineered a meeting with Fujita, the older man impressed two ambitions on him: to get to grips with computing and to learn English.
Masa did both, finding his way to the University of Berkeley, where he imbibed the ‘frontier spirit of Californian capitalism’. When he hit it off with a professor who had developed a tiny voice synthesiser, he saw the chance to create a commercially attractive product – a handheld device for translating between languages. He became so preoccupied with it that he was late for his own wedding, twice. The episode reveals his defining traits: single-mindedness, a gift for juggling numbers, the knack of forming useful relationships (as he later did with Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs), an instinct for being the middle man between innovators and the market, and a cavalier attitude to formalities.
As Masa branched out – into telecoms, semiconductors, real estate and robotics – a pattern established itself: ‘A blizzard of ideas followed by intense enthusiasm and focus, leading to overreach, failure and repentance.’ Another recurring theme was self-promotion, at times veering towards what Barber calls ‘tin-eared bravura’. Advisers have often struggled to tell whether Masa is being serious or fanciful. His greatest coup, taking an early stake in the online marketplace Alibaba, turned $20 million into, at peak, more than $100 billion. Among his gravest blunders was losing $16 billion as he backed the office-sharing venture WeWork, whose flamboyant CEO, Adam Neumann, he goaded for being ‘not crazy enough’. One investor complains that this was ‘like feeding a monkey alcohol’. A smaller but revealing misstep, which Barber doesn’t mention, was pumping money into a dog-walking app, Wag. When it sought $75 million, SoftBank bewilderingly advanced four times that amount.
Barber has interviewed Masa at length and spoken to more than 150 of his associates. The result is a sure-footed account, efficient rather than ruminative, which applauds his courage and ‘capacity to effect change’ while characterising him as ‘good at making promises, even better at spending other people’s money’. His latest incarnation is as a futurist. Insisting that his past punts were ‘just a warm-up’ and that he can make unprecedented sums by pouring investment into artificial intelligence, he thinks of himself as ‘an architect to build the future of mankind’.
What kind of future might that be? Discouragingly, Masa compares himself to Genghis Khan. Little more cheering is Barber’s suggestion that he resembles both Mr Spock, Star Trek’s emotionless master of the ‘mind meld’, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.
The magic of carefully crafted words
Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations. Something glints in the light, catches his eye. ‘It is thin, translucent, honey-black and sharp; sharper than a surgeon’s steel.’ He knows just what it is. A flint, a tool, a precision instrument. ‘I am the first to know in the eight to ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.’ Alan Garner knows time; time knows Alan Garner.
Powsels and Thrums is a collection of essays – and poems and a little bit of remarkable fiction – published in Garner’s 90th year. Since his first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, appeared in 1960, he has held a unique place in British contemporary literature, being both a popular children’s author of what is often described as fantasy and a writer whose work inspires an esoteric devotion for its distinctive scholarship and original thought. A couple of years ago he found himself on the Man Booker shortlist for his slim, stunning novel Treacle Walker, which is, on its surface, a book about a sickly boy’s encounter with the past, with myth and magic, but is, too, an encapsulation of so much of what has preoccupied Garner from the start.
There is more evidence of these preoccupations in Powsels and Thrums, a sequence of work collected from various sources across the years which offers a remarkable window into Garner’s mind and heart. I use the word window advisedly, for Garner’s prose is as clear as glass, perfectly conveying the precision of his thought. Precision runs in the family. The book is dedicated to his grandfather, Joseph Garner, who was ‘a triple smith – white, black and lock’:
Grandad remembered having used fifteen tons of iron to make thirty-three thousand six hundred shoes for eight thousand four hundred horses during the first world war.
But Joseph’s own ancestors were handloom weavers. ‘Powsels and thrums’ were the remnants of work they kept to make clothes of their own. They are offcuts, but ‘the product of the same loom’. Garner was the first in his family to have no skill with his hands; and so, too, the first in his family to have a tertiary education. His schooling (Manchester Grammar School, Oxford) plucked him out of his native milieu but also gave him the tools to comprehend it. He has spent a lifetime ‘working with a pen’ – a phrase which any author might use, but in Garner’s case underlines his role as craftsman, one in a long family line.
You don’t have to know his work well to become immersed in this little book, but it will surely make you return to his novels. ‘The Carr’ is a moving, vivid demonstration of what it truly means to know a place, as Garner describes a lifetime’s relationship with an alder coppice not far from his home. ‘The Valley of the Demon’ is an uncanny account of the work that led to his haunting 2003 novel Thursbitch and is one of several pieces that demonstrate a philosophy which proves, over and over again, that ‘myth is as near as words, through poetry and metaphor, can get to the wholeness of perfect truth’.
‘If the other feller can do it, let him,’ Joseph told his grandson. All his life Alan has carved his own path. Some of the delights in this volume take the reader back to his youth, to discovering the joy of book-learning at MGS – his greatest teachers are named and given their due – to the loping runs he took along the roads of Cheshire with a young scientist who would first be brutalised and then honoured by the state. He tells us he could never write a short story, and then provides one which raises the hairs on the back of your neck: ‘Feel Free’ from 1966. He reproduces it here, he says, not for our literary delight but because it ‘exemplifies a period of cultural change when working-class children were shown to have aesthetic sensibilities’.
To read these words is to sense a rebuke. There’s being given the skills to understand the past, and then there’s heading back to darker days, and that we must never do.
Whipping up a masterpiece: painters and their materials
If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks at them and wants to eat them ‘as if they were ice cream or something’, in Damien Hirst’s phrase, then Martin Gayford’s latest book will be a banquet. In part, this is thanks to the illustrations – luscious close-ups of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes like buttercream icing, and a double-page spread of a golden Rothko large enough to tumble into. But mainly it’s due to his intention to understand the medium of painting from the inside out: from the artists’ viewpoint rather than the art historian’s. He is well placed to do this, having interviewed almost every well-known artist (many of them for this magazine) during his past 30 years as a critic. From these conversations, as well as his studies of earlier artists, he gives us this deeply absorbing and original account, far removed from most conventional art history.
The image of the Romantic artist who puts himself through torment for his art is everywhere evoked
He begins briskly, dismissing the usual schools, movements and so on: ‘Rather than constantly evolving towards some further state, painting in all its crucial aspects has remained exactly the same as it ever was.’ An artist today who has chosen the medium of paint is in many ways faced with the same dilemmas as any painter stretching back through the millennia: what surface to choose? What tool – brush or palette knife, squeegee, bucket or automatic paint-squirter? What paint, and how to mix it to the right consistency? One irresistible detail among many is the information that Rembrandt, who had dozens of recipes for mixing paint, developed a method of emulsifying egg, oil and pigment into soft globules that held their shape: that is, 100 years before the Duc de Richelieu’s chef, Rembrandt invented mayonnaise, and used it to paint with.
Once the materials have been selected, there is the slippery concept of control (the more an artist may seem to have, the more they may have to surrender), and the physicality of painting becomes a recurring theme. ‘Our body is crucial,’ says Lee Ufan. ‘Our body does not belong to us. It creates a relationship with the world.’ Creating a painting is a dance (Jadé Fadojutimi), a duel (Auerbach), a tennis match (Ufan again, who compares artists to athletes – ‘as an athlete trains, artists train themselves as well’). A lifelong partnership is maintained between the artist’s body and the medium, obsessively practised and honed in the studio.
Gayford visits many of these studios and describes his interviews in them – usually long, convivial conversations with booze and cigarettes and not much in the way of food, in rooms that vary from those coated with a geological record of paint splatters built up into topography, to pristine, industrial-monastic cells. Cosy they are not. Indeed, the image of the Romantic artist who puts himself through torment for his art is everywhere evoked here – often because of the physical demands each artist’s particular vision demands of them. The ground colour of one of Patrick Heron’s huge canvases took him 14 continuous hours to paint: ‘I couldn’t stop or have lunch or anything because when I came back it would have become minimally drier and wouldn’t merge.’ The consensus is, in Euan Uglow’s words: ‘No one can be perfectionist enough… What’s the point of being slack about painting if it’s the most interesting thing you do in your life?’
A passion for painting inevitably means a fascination with all art, and most of these artists mention the profound inspiration they have gained from others. ‘This phenomenon is usually called artistic “influence”, but is better described as a revelation of what a painting could be,’ writes Gayford. A sense emerges of a community of painters through time, communicating with each other despite what seem superficially to be vastly different results. De Kooning, for example, says: ‘My idols are Rembrandt and Soutine.’ Titian’s brushwork inspires Jackson Pollock. Ideas about composition, colour and representations of the human body spark responses decades or centuries later: El Greco’s resurrected saints speak to Picasso’s prostitutes in a brothel window, which in turn affect Claudette Johnson’s powerful ‘Black Women’.
Looking through this lens, Gayford seems entirely justified in dismissing the threat of other media. Painting has been declared dead with great regularity since the appearance of daguerreotypes, then photography, film and now AI. Yet in each case, paint has again risen up, apparently indispensable, with its extraordinary capacity to communicate paradoxes and universalities beyond words. From the first drawings in ochre crayons on cave walls to Oscar Murillo on his London industrial estate, paint seems to sustain and support human expression in some atavistic way. Murillo himself puts it beautifully: ‘I want to talk about the medium as an infinite well of water. You can continuously draw out of it, and it always gives. It keeps you hydrated.’
Mounting suspicion: The Fate of Mary Rose, by Caroline Blackwood, reviewed
‘She was dead even before I became aware of her existence.’ The menacing opening line of this gripping novel is not about the title’s Mary Rose but about another six-year-old girl, Margaret Sutton, who has been abducted, raped and murdered in the Kent woods.
The story is told from the perspective of Mary Rose’s father, Rowan Anderson, who spends most of his time in London, writing a biography of the scientist Hertha Ayrton and feuding with his possessive girlfriend, Gloria. He periodically visits his daughter and his wife, Cressida, in their country cottage. Cressida busies herself with domestic chores in the cramped space, compulsively ironing sheets, painstakingly preparing elaborate meals (which Rowan flushes down the lavatory), and ‘stuffing Mary Rose with iron and vitamins, with cod liver oil, wheat germ and yeast and various other nutritional supplements’ to counter the child’s sickliness.
Rowan dislikes Cressida’s beloved Kent cottage, but praises it out of ‘polite hypocrisy’, while despising the way they have ‘learned to skate so gracefully on the ice of [their] own politeness’. He copes by escaping to the village pub to drink vast quantities of whisky. Troublingly, it transpires that he was so drunk on the night that Margaret was abducted that he has no memory of his actions.
First published in 1981, this is one of three novels by the late Caroline Blackwood that Virago are reprinting. A wealthy Anglo-Irish socialite, Blackwood was perhaps better known as the wife and muse of the painter Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz and the poet Robert Lowell. She began writing in her thirties, and this horrible, wonderful tale is testament to the fact that she had as much creative talent as her men.
It is disconcerting to read a story narrated by the possible perpetrator of such a crime, and it becomes increasingly disquieting to witness Cressida’s growing obsession with it. She keeps vigil over Mary Rose, installs bars on the windows and embroils the child in her fixation, taking her out of school, bolting her in their bedroom and describing the tragedy to her in graphic detail. She releases Mary Rose for Margaret’s funeral and Rowan watches the two of them go: ‘The big black figure being followed like a duck by a pathetically small black duckling.’ The wry humour adds another layer of discomfort. What hope is there for the little girl, caught between a neglectful, dissolute father – who might be a rapist murderer – and a crazed, controlling mother?
The Fate of Mary Rose leaves one unsure whether to be more frightened by the threat of paternal physical brutality or maternal psychological violence; whether a child should trust an absent father or a domineering mother. With both the woods and the cottage transformed into places of darkness and menace, Blackwood’s world is chilling indeed.
And still the colonial memoirs keep coming…
Since the 1990s there has been a spate of post-colonial memoirs written by white Africans. The best was Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a poetic, guilt-stricken Afrikaner confessional published on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Two others of note were by Rhodesian/Zimbabwean writers: Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Both were beautifully written, funny and full of original insights. Peter Godwin, another Rhodesian/Zimbabwean, is the most prolific of all, and Exit Wounds is now his third memoir. These writers, all beneficiaries of an excellent British-supervised education system, can really tell a tale.
Godwin has a significant hinterland as a respected foreign correspondent and documentary film-maker. He has written many books, some very good (When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about his parents’ slow decline in Mugabe’s crumbling Zimbabwe – a theme repeated here); some average (The Fear, the Mugabe book one of his fellow Zimbabwean writers said read as though he’d phoned it in); and one execrable (The Three of Us, written with his then wife Joanna Coles, a solipsistic two-Brits-arrive-in-New-York romp, littered with cultural clichés and self-absorption).I would argue that his most important book is his first, Rhodesians Never Die (1995), written with Ian Hancock: a vivid narrative that covers the Rhodesian bush war and the last days of colonial rule.
I approached Exit Wounds with some trepidation. An early reviewer had drawn attention to some clunky similes, and we do indeed have: ‘The knowledge that my mother couldn’t be bothered to say goodbye… unfurls in my brain like a malignant flag’; and ‘She emerges from her cellphone, a rabbit startled out of a lettuce patch’. There are lame jokes – ‘She was now an expert on cout-ure while I was an expert on tort-ure’ – and excruciating sixth-form-poetry-prize alliterative attempts: ‘Parading a posse of potential purchasers’, and ‘Torn by tumults of temper’.
But there is far more good writing than bad in this smart, observant, touching story of a colonial family in various stages of progress and decline, set against the disappointments of their homeland. The unpromising prospect of yet another white African burdening a broadly uninterested 21st-century western audience with his sad experiences is overturned by Godwin’s enthusiasm, vivid memory and erudition.
So here we are in Life with the Godwins. The author’s elderly mother Helen and respected journalist sister Georgina are living in the UK, and he and his soon-to-be ex-wife Joanna, a driven superwoman, are in America. They all come and go and bicker. Joanna wears Prada and climbs the publishing greasy pole; Peter brings up their two sons. The couple play tennis in the Hamptons one afternoon, after which Joanna tells Peter she wants a divorce. Then he ruminates at length, poetically, philosophically, about these swirling engagements as he witnesses both his marriage and his mother disappear.
I found the passages centred around the dying Helen deeply affecting, containing not only the best writing but also the most heartfelt emotions. I identified strongly with this. The mother and son’s exchanges could well have been between me and my mother, who was also a clever, articulate woman translocated from post-second world war Britain to the colonies before finally returning to Britain to die. In her final months, Helen suddenly starts speaking in the cut-glass accent of our late Queen. (My mother became convinced that our unspecified but apparently deeply shameful family secrets were being revealed nightly on the ITV news. ‘They’ve been at it again,’ she would tell me whenever I visited her in the hospice.) Godwin’s recreation of his mother’s final days and the impact it had on the siblings felt touchingly familiar.
I was less taken by his recollections of life on New York’s Upper West Side – his jogging route along Riverside Park and his role of stay-at-home writer and raiser of the children as his powerhouse wife spins through glamorous Manhattan like the Hearst Corporation’s equivalent of Anna Wintour.
This third memoir may mark an appropriate moment for us to move on from the old colony’s white confessionals and turn our attention instead to the new generation of exceptional black Zimbabwean writers who are producing novels of brilliance. They, too, are beneficiaries of an outstanding British education system – possibly the best in Africa, and virtually the only legacy Mugabe failed to trash. NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and many of their peers dance through the English language with the grace of a Nureyev or a Fonteyn. Now is their moment. Time to move on.
The demonising of homosexuals in postwar Britain
Not every human culture leaves clear and legible accounts of itself. Here we have a comparatively recent way of life which we know thousands of men led. It was proscribed, and those who lived within it had good reasons to conceal their participation and nature, usually taking care not to leave any records. Invisible and, even at this short distance, impossible completely to understand, the culture of male homosexuals in London was only partially legalised in 1967. Before that has to be interpreted through material which is intrinsically unsatisfactory.
A comparison might be drawn to the textual means historians have of understanding another proscribed culture, the early Christians in Rome. What we have are comments by outside observers, such as Tacitus or Celsus, who obviously didn’t understand, and whose views were driven by hostility. There were times when members of the secretive circle were too strident to be ignored and had to be punished. We have records of martyrs, and the investigations and persecutions of Nero and Domitian. Did these reveal typical members of the cult? It seems unlikely. And we have quantities of writing about the culture from years later which might divulge anything or nothing.
Peter Parker has assembled a fascinating amount of written material about the existence of homosexual men from 1945 until 1967, when Harold Wilson’s government, under the guidance of Roy Jenkins, legalised homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of 21. The publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957, recommending legalisation, is a key moment at the centre of the narrative. Parker has austerely but usefully ruled out any material printed after 1967 on the grounds that hindsight affects accuracy. He excludes even Quentin Crisp’s autobiography The Naked Civil Servant, published in 1968.
The use of pretty policemen to entrap homosexuals was always denied, but seems indisputable
What we have are fascinatingly partial accounts, some of which are valuable because they are often hilariously wide of the mark. What many politicians, journalists, psychologists and psychiatrists believed about homosexuals now seems so ludicrous as to be worth including for entertainment value alone. Investigative journalism produced some implausible scenarios. A News of the World reporter took a trip to Wimbledon Common one night in 1963. (‘Owls hooted and small animals rustled in the undergrowth.’) Unable to resist the temptation to gild the lily, he assured readers that ‘occasionally mass orgies involving 20 or more develop, during which weird chanting takes place’.
Speculation runs riot. A member of parliament says that ‘the ability and the willingness to enter into homosexual acts is a means of promotion’ at work. A psychiatrist postulates to a journalist that a cure might be found in ‘the delicately balanced endocrine glands’, and that despite recent developments, research is ‘still in the groping stage of trial and error’. There is much priceless naivety at work here. I strongly recommend a 1950 profile in People of three of Britain’s ‘most eligible bachelors’, Terence Rattigan, Ivor Novello and Norman Hartnell, and their burning problem – ‘three famous men who can’t find the right girl’.
The Sunday Mirror, however, had no uncertainty about ‘How to Spot a Possible Homo’: ‘They wear hairy sports jackets… they play golf… the over-clean man… the man in the bar WHO DRINKS ALONE.’ The Sunday Pictorial in 1961 uncovered a chief cause of homosexuality. Men ‘become homosexuals eventually because they are afraid to make contact with women. They may try once or twice and be given the brush-off’. The reporter had, however, a cure for it:
After just a few sessions of LSD the actor told me: ‘It is amazing. I have reached the stage now where I can get some excitement from thinking about women.’
Decades of extra-clinical trials have shown that this result is not repeated on a large scale.
Amusing as all this is, it rests on an obvious delusion. Most commentators on the dangers of homosexuality focused on the prevalence of dishonesty and susceptibility to blackmail, particularly after the Vassall case; and on the widespread addiction to secrecy and fondness for underground clubs of dubious legality. They seemed, too, to be unable to tell the difference between prostitutes of either sex and men who merely happened to be homosexuals. It didn’t apparently occur to most people that the root cause of secrecy might be the fact that you could get sent to prison otherwise. The habit of concealment persisted for years after 1967, and opportunities remained for blackmail in those areas where homosexuality remained proscribed – the military (until 2000) and the diplomatic service (until 1991).
Parker includes a good many rather gruelling accounts of prosecutions for sexual activity, mostly in public. These caught a number of celebrated figures including Sir John Gielgud and Wilfrid Brambell (the actor behind Old Steptoe). A large part of the success of police prosecutions was due to their willingness to entrap. The use of pretty policemen was always denied, but seems indisputable. PC Butcher told the Wolfenden Committee:
I had one one day, and I said to the chap at work with me that if he will follow me to such lengths he will follow me to the police station, and he did. I gave him a smile…
Whether the public much cared, despite the irritation of finding a lavatory being used for sexual purposes, is not clear. Gielgud was greeted at his first performance after his arrest with a standing ovation. Clearly, the forces bearing down on the homosexual threat had over-egged their horror. In 1967, two details about the killer of a teenager seemed about equally reprehensible. ‘Two grim facts emerged. He is a homosexual. He is an expert in cutting up bodies.’ The Lord Chamberlain fought a long and lonely battle against licensing plays about homosexuality. Of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, one commentator wrote: ‘There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indication that the dead man was a homosexual.’
Parker has done an excellent job of unearthing passages from novels, plays and film scripts from the period. The splendid Rodney Ackland Soho drama Absolute Hell and the campaigning movie Victim are now familiar,but others ought to be better known, such as a favourite novel of mine, 10 Pollitt Place by C.H.B. Kitchin. A wonderful range of extracts from outrageous pulp fiction makes this substantial anthology unmissable.
Then as he saw me crying like this his arms were round me, and I cried and sobbed and he said: ‘Never call me missy again, Don.’
This sort of thing must be read with a sceptical eye. The discreet relationships between professional men sharing a house that occasionally appear – an anonymous doctor and banker, or Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten – are not good material for fiction of this sort. Nevertheless, the trash is excellent, and perhaps tells us something about what its readers wanted, rather than what they were.
More reliable are the occasional courageous diary-keepers – Keith Vaughan, the pornographer John S. Barrington and Joe Orton – who at least describe their lives, atypical though they might have been. But most telling of all are the uninhibited recollections of guardsmen, and the screamingly funny small ads in selected publications:
Pleasant young man required weekly in young designer’s flat. Must be willing to do anything from floor scrubbing to bed-making. Friendly atmosphere.
Parker says that he was refused permission to quote from some well-known material of the period. There are various telling extracts from fiction by observant heterosexual writers, including a splendid account of a ‘queer wedding’ from Frank Norman’s Stand On Me, surely a classic in need of revival. There is, however, no Keith from Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings; nor the predatory Frankie feeding on the cultured Patrick in Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness; nor the very sad failed seduction scene in Kingsley Amis’s The Anti-Death League. If these estates and others turned Parker down, it was an unfortunate missed opportunity.
Most moving are the stories of unnecessarily destroyed lives – the suicide of a man who, accustomed to the fear of authority, had kept his lover away from medical help and watched him die of appendicitis. Careers were ruined. Major Fitzroy Fyers, who had been equerry to the Duke of Connaught and was described as ‘one of the bravest men ever known’, resigned his post as serjeant-at-arms after smiling at a police constable at South Kensington underground. E.M. Forster, at 85, saw the whole thing clearly: ‘How annoyed I am with society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousnesses that might have been avoided.’ After 1967, the situation was irreversible. But the issue didn’t end there; and a third volume – perhaps pursuing the negotiations between militancy, injustice and mild boredom to the 1980s – might be equally rewarding.
Of course it is so recent that memory and experience can enter in surprising ways. Mine came with a two-part Daily Mirror investigation entitled ‘Will My Son Be a Homosexual?’ by Quentin Crewe. ‘Every one of them will be unhappy… Theirs is an existence which one would not wish on one’s worst enemy,’ he wrote. Screamingly funny, of course, but one which has an interesting personal application. The piece appeared in April 1965. I don’t suppose my parents were readers of the Daily Mirror but, as it happens, I was six weeks old at the time. Also, as it happens, it didn’t work out so badly. This is an anthology with an immense amount to tell us about its period, scrupulously sieved, and just as much about our lives now.
Listen to Philip Hensher on The Edition podcast:
Watch: Farage blasts Labour over Elon Musk snub
Sir Keir Starmer’s investment summit may have concluded, but the row over its invite list certainly has not. Now Nigel Farage has taken to Twitter to lambast the Labour lot for not inviting US tech billionaire Elon Musk to its big business bash. In a video post on the platform, the Reform leader questioned: ‘Why was the world’s richest man Elon Musk not invited to Labour’s UK investment summit?’ Going on, the Clacton MP raged:
A huge investment summit going on Labour government and businesses all over the world. But they’re all big corporates. They don’t really invite entrepreneurs and the one person they have’t invited is the world’s most amazing guy Elon Musk. Whether it’s buying this platform [Twitter], whether it’s the incredible space missions that he’s going on, whether it’s his cars, whatever it is. If there is anybody who is the world’s greatest entrepeneur, who should have been invited to this summit, it’s Elon Musk. But Labour don’t like him. You know why? Because he believe in free speech. Can’t have that now, can we?
Crikey. Farage’s tirade comes after government minister’s refused to give much away about why Musk had not made the guest list. The Beeb claimed that the snub is down to ‘his social media posts’ during the recent bout of rioting that spread across the UK, yet on Sunday, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds refused to remark on the matter on Sky News, insisting: ‘I’m not going to comment on particular invitations for particular personnel.’ A day later, Science Secretary Peter Kyle added: ‘Elon Musk has never come to any of the past investment summits that have been held under the previous government. He doesn’t tend to do these sort of events.’ How curious.
Watch the clip here:
Why was the world’s richest man @elonmusk not invited to Labour’s UK investment summit? pic.twitter.com/yJvW4RerJn
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) October 15, 2024
Britain doesn’t know how to remember the Holocaust
On 27 January next year, the world will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. ‘The commemoration will be the last of its kind’, says Michael Bornstein who, having hidden for six months in his mother’s bunk, aged only four, was among the youngest survivors.
What lies ahead regarding Holocaust memory – and anti-Semitism – when Michael Bornstein is no longer with us? Lily Ebert’s death last week week feels like an important moment: the most famous Holocaust survivor, at least to the TikTok generation, is also now gone. So far, Britain has met this historical moment in bizarre ways. The D-Day anniversary that Rishi Sunak left a few months ago was the last time such an event would occur with living veterans present.
A few weeks ago, Sir Keir Starmer set out his muddled vision for Holocaust memorialisation in a speech at the Holocaust Educational Trust. It was not mere politics for him, but something deeper. His Holocaust education as a schoolboy was significant in his formation: he recalled how, when a Holocaust survivor came to visit his school, his boisterous classmates ‘fell silent, totally silent and still’. He declared with utter certainty that improvements to Holocaust education would help to combat anti-Semitism – that a renewed emphasis on Holocaust education could provide the antidote to ‘hatred marching on our streets, the pulse of fear beating in this community’.
Such claims are naïve in the extreme. The Prime Minister insisted that the Holocaust will remain on the curriculum ‘come what may’, and committed to closing the loopholes that currently allow some schools to get away with not teaching it. But, as he conceded, the Holocaust is already on the curriculum: and this has done nothing to arrest ‘record levels of anti-Semitism’. Indeed, it is easy to imagine it having the exact opposite effect, breeding a certain resentment towards Jews for appearing to get a special, enshrined status in the curriculum. All this is further inflamed, of course, by the ongoing war in the Middle East, where parallels with the Holocaust are never too far away. The most popular reply to Sir Keir’s tweet about his speech, with 16,000 likes, reads ‘“We will make sure the Holocaust is never again repeated” – Man Supporting Another Holocaust’.
In his speech, Sir Keir wholeheartedly endorsed the ‘Testimony360’ programme, which uses VR technology to allow students not only to hear Holocaust survivors but ‘interact’ with them too. He hopes this will ensure that ‘the message of Britain’s Holocaust survivors will echo eternally across the generations’. VR may have a part to play in the future of education, and it is good that survivor testimony is still being collated before it is lost forever. But they may be trying to execute an impossible task. Time does pass, and historical events do become more remote and less relevant to us with its passage. Even the Holocaust, the most egregious crime in history, is no exception: it is not beyond the natural passage of time or the fading of memory.
Sir Keir capped off his speech with a puzzling line: ‘For the first time, studying the Holocaust… will become a critical, vital part of every single student’s identity’. It probably isn’t the place of the national curriculum to dictate to pupils their ‘identities’; nor is it clear to me what this would look like in practice. Such a sentiment springs from a worldview that ‘education’ is a panacea; it is a worldview that insists that the cure for all social ills is ‘training courses’ and ‘workshops’.
It is a worldview that insists that the cure for all social ills is ‘training courses’ and ‘workshops’
The physical manifestation of this sentiment will be the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, right next to parliament. Part of Sir Keir’s speech was devoted to a defence of this controversial project: the Centre will be built ‘boldly, proudly, unapologetically; not as a Jewish community initiative, but as a national initiative’. One of its most dogged supporters is Robert Jenrick, for whom, incidentally, Dov Forman, Lily Ebert’s great-grandson and TikTok co-star, is a senior researcher. The Centre is borne of the same deep anxiety as Sir Keir’s speech ‘Testimony360’: ‘every day that passes’, say its proponents Ed Balls and Eric, Lord Pickles, ‘means fewer Holocaust survivors will be around’. That it will be so close to parliament is no accident. Just as Sir Keir hopes that the Holocaust will be a ‘vital part of every student’s identity’, Balls and Lord Pickles hope that the Centre, in its location, ‘will remind all of us, and future citizens, that the Holocaust is central to our own history and society’. It is as though, anxious about the passage of time, these figures are going into overdrive to assert the importance of the Holocaust to modern Britain. Rather than being an event in which Britain was largely offstage, now it is presented as a foundational moment in our own national story.
I spent much of the summer in Rome. Every morning, I walked along a street that was once home to a large Jewish community. I stepped over at least a dozen Stolpersteine, small plaques bearing the names of Holocaust victims outside the homes they were torn away from. Sometimes I skipped over them in a hurry, late for my lesson; other times I stopped for a while, muttering their names in tantric concentration, trying to commit them to memory. These stones, I think, will be the most poignant and enduring Holocaust memorials. That they are unobtrusive is part of the point.
Can Reeves get away with a national insurance hike?
The Budget is not due for a fortnight, yet with every day that passes its contents seem to become clearer. This morning Keir Starmer gave an interview to the BBC where he twice refused to rule out a rise in employer’s national insurance contributions in the Budget. Instead, he repeatedly stressed that Labour’s manifesto promise was specifically that it would not raise taxes on working people. Asked for clarity on whether employers could face a national insurance hike later this month, Starmer would only say that his government would ‘keep promises we made in the manifesto’ and not ‘raise tax on working people’. He also warned that the budget would be ‘tough’.
The comments come after Rachel Reeves on Monday gave the clearest hint to date that businesses could face an increase in national insurance. The Chancellor argued that Labour’s election pledge not to increase NI only applied to employees. The Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds made a similar comment on Sunday when he told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips that Labour’s promise not to increase the tax ‘was specifically in the manifesto, a reference to employees’.
The risk is Labour fall into the same territory that Philip Hammond found himself in 2017
It comes as the Tories have gone on the attack – arguing any rise in NI whether to the employee or the employer constitutes a manifesto breach. As the shadow chancellor Jeremy Hunt put it on Monday: ‘It’s obvious to most people that raising national insurance would breach Labour’s manifesto pledge to… not raise national insurance!’ Labour figures respond that the Tories urged them to rule out raising employer NI during the election campaign, so the Conservatives did not think the manifesto pledge did.
This story is striking for two reasons. First, why are ministers getting drawn into a game of what may or may not be in the Budget? While there may be a case for pitch-rolling a change to fiscal rules on borrowing for infrastructure spending (to prepare the markets), the standard response to questions about the Budget would traditionally be ‘no comment’. Secondly, even if something is technically true, it can fail a basic smell test. OBR analysis from 2021 found that raising employer national insurance does hit workers. The IFS’s Paul Johnson has already come out to say it would amount to a ‘straightforward breach’: ‘I went back and read the manifesto and it says very clearly “we will not raise rates of national insurance”. It doesn’t specify employee national insurance.’
The risk is Labour fall into the same territory that Philip Hammond found himself in 2017. The then-chancellor proposed a national insurance increase for the self-employed. At the time, ministers initially argued that it was in keeping with the election manifesto pledge not to put up national insurance, income tax or VAT. However, the government later U-turned after conceding that even if that could be argued on a technicality, it was still a breach in spirit. The question is whether Reeves can avoid that fate.
Hear Katy and Michael Gove discuss on Coffee House Shots: