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How flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become
The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions. A good place to start is to ask what drawings are for, and that is what Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum has done with its current show of sketches by Flemish masters – staged in collaboration with Antwerp’s Museum Plantin-Moretus – dividing them into studies, designs and stand-alone finished works.
Van Dyck’s teenage studies are a measure of how flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become
If you’ve ever had the chance to visit it, you’ll know what a special place the Plantin-Moretus is. Still occupying the original premises in which it was founded as a printworks in the 16th century, it sits on a hoard of drawings by the great names of Flemish art dating back to a time when Antwerp was at the centre of a booming trade in prints, metalwork, stained glass and tapestry, all of which began with drawings on paper. The design section features drawings of breath-taking intricacy – the world of interiors can never have witnessed towel racks more spectacular than those designed by Paul Vredeman de Vries – but for lovers of drawing rather than design, the studies and stand-alone works are this show’s most exciting attraction.
The teenage prodigy Anthony van Dyck’s astonishing ink and wash study for his first public commission, ‘The Carrying of the Cross’ (c.1617-18) – even allowing for his use of the Tipp-Ex of the day to make corrections – is a measure of how flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become. In life classes today, where they’re still taught, students learn how the human body moves under its clothes; in Van Dyck’s day they worked out how it moves under its skin. Forget those cute little wooden jointed artists’ mannequins; to delineate the calf muscles in this drawing, the young Van Dyck will have used a statuette of a flayed human corpse – unless, that is, Rubens let his star assistant borrow his anatomy book of drawings of skinless bodies.
Rubens was a different order of prodigy. In his drawing after Hans Holbein’s woodcut of ‘The Abbot and Death’, he turns the dance of death into a jive; he was 13 at the time, but he never grew out of improving on other artists’ work, retouching master drawings in his collection to fatten up their women to his taste. His creative energy infused everything he touched, even stone: a Pygmalion with a brush, he put a twinkle in the eye of his ink study of a Roman statue of ‘Mars Ultor’. In his scrambled action drawing of ‘Hercules Strangling the Nemean Lion’, Hercules has five legs and the lion has balls.
Rubens gets the lion’s share of studies here, plus a dazzling portrait drawing of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel (c.1629-30, see above). Pieter Bruegel I is represented by a riotous ‘Temptation of Saint Anthony’ (c.1556) full of Boschian monsters and a marvellously atmospheric ‘Landscape with a Village and Cattle’ (c.1554); his son Jan Brueghel I goes one better with a limpid ‘Hilly Landscape (c.1615-18) in two-tone blue and sepia watercolour as minimalist as a Turner ‘colour beginning’, but with intimations of distant detail of which Turner, never a draughtsman, would not have been capable. Equally exquisite is the personalised still life dedicated by Joris Hoefnagel to his friend the cartographer Ortelius in 1593, illustrated with butterflies, a dragonfly, a caterpillar, drawing implements and Athena’s owl perched on a globe – though this is strictly a painting rather than a drawing, unlike the contemporary nature study of an earthworm’s locomotion by an anonymous hand.
Landscape is the field of drawing in which artists are freest to enjoy themselves. Jan Siberechts’s curvaceous pen and wash ‘Study of an Old Gnarled Oak’ (c.1661-72) is a world away from his regimented views of English country houses, and Rubens’s slant on a ‘Woodland Scene’ (c.1635-40) near his Het Steen estate feels like a personal record of a much-loved place with little concern for composition, every tree put in because it was there.
The design section features drawings of breathtaking intricacy – including spectacular towel racks
But my vote for landscape artist of the exhibition goes to Anon for ‘Mountainous Landscape with a Bridge’, dashed off at speed in chalk on tinted paper. It reminds me of the work of Roelandt Savery, now mainly remembered for having immortalised the last remaining dodo in the aviary of Rudolf II while serving the Holy Roman Emperor’s court in Prague. But Rudolf also sent his Flanders-born artist to the Tyrol to get a lowlander’s perspective on the mountains, prompting a thrilling series of proto-romantic drawings for prints of which this, with its tilted cross and rickety bridge, looks very like one. A rackety character, Savery had a soft spot for rickety bridges.
Whoever drew this dynamic sketch and didn’t bother signing it left visible proof that – to adapt John Lennon’s observation on life – the most vivid drawings sometimes happen when an artist is busy making other plans.
Should beautiful actors be allowed to play those with plain faces?
Sometimes I Think About Dying is one of those titles you want to shout back at – what? Only sometimes? It is co-produced by, and stars, Daisy Ridley from the Star Wars franchise who, in going from a blockbuster to an interesting independent film, is taking the opposite of the usual career trajectory. Perhaps you can only fight the Dark Lords of the Sith for so long? But it has paid off, as this is an understated little gem.
It is directed by Rachel Lambert and written by Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead and Kevin Armento. It’s hard to say what it is exactly. A dour, deadpan romantic comedy probably gets nearest. Ridley stars as the thirtysomething Fran. Fran works in a small office in a small coastal town in Oregon and she is drab. Drab hair, drab clothes, often brown, which is always a bad sign, I don’t know why. (I like brown, personally.) It made me think. Now that we are super-sensitive about which actors play which roles – and that black-face and gay-face and Jew-face and so on are verboten – what about plain-face? When beautiful women pretend they are not. Are non-beautiful actors ever asked to play beautiful parts just to make it fair? The thought just occurred to me, that’s all. (But while we’re on the subject…Charlize Theron should probably be awarded a lifetime achievement in plain-face. See: Monster, Tully.)
Back to Fran, who lives a solitary life, avoids eye contact, rarely says a word, thinks agonisingly hard about what to write in someone’s retirement card before she comes up with: ‘Happy retirement. Fran.’ She keeps to her little office cubicle – she does something involving spreadsheets – as her co-workers chat and life happens around her. Then a new employee arrives: Robert (Dave Merheje). Their boss – a David Brent character – gathers them round the table and asks them to introduce themselves and their favourite foods: ‘I am Gary. Spaghetti.’
Robert seems determined to connect with Fran even though she introduced herself with: ‘Fran. Cottage cheese.’ He asks her to the movies. To her surprise, she accepts. Robert is a film fan. He loves the one they’ve just seen. ‘Did you?’ he asks her. ‘No,’ she says. They continue to have short, awkward exchanges. ‘I like your sweater,’ he will tell her. ‘I like your pants,’ she will reply. ‘I just ironed them,’ he will reveal. Will she unfurl? Will she ever stop thinking about dying?
This is the thing with Fran. She, yes, sometimes thinks about dying. She has daydreams, and intrusive thoughts, imagining herself dead in various situations. She may imagine herself dead in a pastoral forest; or it’s after a Viking funeral and she sees her lifeless body arranged like a tableau, as do we. I got the feeling that it wasn’t because she wished to be dead but because she doesn’t yet know how to live.
The film does a lot with little. No character has a substantial back story. Is Fran’s place chintzy and old-fashioned because it once belonged to her parents? We never know and don’t ever feel we need to. The naturalistic writing and directing means everyone arrives fully formed and believable.
Ridley is excellent: subtle, restrained, compelling and always true to Fran, who does change, but not in a way that seems like a betrayal of who we met at the outset. Crucially, she allows you to feel for a character who, in other hands, might have appeared plain cold or closed down. As a new Star Wars film is currently in the works, Ridley is back to that. It seems a pity – but hey-ho. I guess those Dark Lords aren’t going to destroy themselves.
Baffling and vile: ETO’s Manon Lescaut reviewed
In 1937, John Barbirolli took six pieces by Henry Purcell and arranged them for an orchestra of strings, horns and woodwinds. Nothing unusual about that: arranging baroque music for modern symphony orchestras was what famous conductors used to do. Beecham and Hamilton Harty re-upholstered Handel. Mahler did something similar with Bach, then directed the result from a grand piano, and wouldn’t you give anything to have heard him? All good clean fun in those innocent days before the advent of historically informed performance.
‘Can you tell me what was happening?’ asked a woman on the way out
It’s unusual to hear these things revived now, and curiouser still when the person doing the reviving is Thomas Adès, currently artist in residence with the Hallé. But here he was, sweeping into Barbirolli’s steroid-pumped Purcell with a 50-piece string section and encouraging the four horns to knock it for six. There wasn’t an inch of flab, either: 21st-century string players know how to vary their vibrato, and the sheer heft and muscularity felt transgressive enough. A solo cor anglais phrased Dido’s Lament with smokey sadness, and that lush body of strings responded as if it was Tchaikovsky. Purcell, eh? Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
Adès never conducts anything he doesn’t choose, and if his aim was to flatter his Mancunian hosts with a quick rummage through the Hallé’s archive, there were surely any number of less mischievous options. You shouldn’t necessarily take Adès as a bellwether of general taste, but those who remember when he was routinely described as the next Britten might be pleasantly surprised with the way that, in his middle years, he seems to be bedding in as the new Walton. The Ischia-period Walton, that is: the lover of warmth and abundance, sufficiently comfortable in his own skin not to care what other people think.
So Adès went for Elgar (Sospiri – five minutes of concentrated sorrow as tearstained as anything in Mahler), a world première by Oliver Leith (Cartoon Sun – a study in maxi-minimalist dynamic contrasts for a huge, bell-decked orchestra) and his own Tevot, which seems to have grown grander and more extravagant since its première in 2007. It surged forward like a man-o’-war under full sail; guns run out, musicians practically spilling off the platform and the percussionists rushing to their stations as if they were about to repel boarders. Best of all, if you suspect that Sir Michael Tippett’s entire generation got him disastrously wrong and that we’re only now moving into his longed-for Age of Aquarius, was a performance of Tippett’s Triple Concerto: a work so utterly unconcerned with concert hall economics that this was its first UK performance since 2012. There it sprawled, a huge
exotic blossom at the centre of the programme, breathing its perfume over the music that surrounded it and drawing great sprays of tingling colour from Adès and the orchestra.
That’s not nothing. Just 13 years before Adès’s birth, a BBC orchestra broke down live on air while attempting to play a Tippett symphony. The Hallé gave us glistening precision, and no praise is high enough for the three soloists – Anthony Marwood (violin), Lawrence Power (viola) and Paul Watkins (cello), who sang together gorgeously, making light of their blindingly difficult individual parts. The Tippett revival is one of the great good news stories (god knows we need them) of British music in the past decade. His opera New Year has just been recorded in Glasgow, but shrewd critics will be keeping their powder dry for the Birmingham Opera Company’s full production – the first in 33 years – in July.
I’ve been trying to think of something to say about the English Touring Opera’s production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut that wouldn’t be unfair to the orchestra and conductor (Gerry Cornelius), who played with energy and warmth, and the cast, who wore the vilest costumes imaginable. They all deserved better than Jude Christian’s production. Jenny Stafford, as Manon, sang tirelessly and expressively in a blue pudding-bowl wig, and Gareth Dafydd Morris, as Des Grieux, was every bit the heart-throb tenor. He was also the only major character who dressed or acted as if he were a believable human being.
It all plays out in a curtained dream-space delineated by office watercoolers and kitschy gold sculptures of French bulldogs. At one point a doppelgänger of Manon appears at a lectern with an overhead projector, and with a new English libretto by Christian (the original writers don’t even get a name check) that delivers such zingers as ‘possibility has driven us to madness’, there’s a definite air of the sociology seminar about it. Manon delivers an angry deconstruction of patriarchal narratives around female agency while dying of thirst. Meanwhile Puccini powers on regardless, like the misogynist swine he is. ‘Can you tell me what was happening?’ asked the woman behind me, on the way out.
Entirely pointless and extremely pleasant: House Flipper 2 reviewed
Grade: B+
Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them offer satisfactions of a different sort: the gentlest of difficulty curves and the calming pleasure, instead, of a mildly absorbing repetitive task which whiles away the idle hour in the way you might pass it flicking through a set of worry beads or making a cat’s cradle with a ball of string.
The unexpected sleeper hit House Flipper (2018) was one such. It was boring, but in a good way. Its sleeker, prettier sequel has had the wisdom not to depart far from the formula. The premise is that you travel around a breezy seaside town sprucing up properties for profit. You start small. You’ve returned to your hometown of Pinnacove and are living in your parents’ spare room. An old friend rings you up to offer you a cash-in-hand job cleaning up a property that has been ravaged by raccoons.
You’ll spend anything up to an hour patiently righting tipped-over plant pots, straightening the telly, filling bin bags with rubbish, and scrubbing raccoon paw-prints off the sofa. Your future, you hope, holds great feats of interior design, and the redesigning and ‘flipping’ of stunning coastal mansions for vast profits. For now, you’re more Mrs Mop than Anouska Hempel. It’s so easy that you don’t even have to search, annoyingly, for that last paw-print. A scanner shows you what to click next.
It’s entirely pointless, and extremely pleasant. Highly suitable for those with blood pressure issues, insomnia or OCD – and millennials who’d like to be able to at least fantasise about buying and selling property for profit.
Why Mummy smokes
It’s 7.02 p.m. and I’m standing outside my house by the bins smoking a fag. Upstairs, I can hear that my six-year-old is awake but I’m choosing to ignore her. How repellent, I hear you murmur. And it is repellent, in many ways. I am a smoker and a mother, hardly the Madonna and child. How can these two realities ever be reconciled? They jam against each other all day long, uncomfortably.
Smoking is bloody great. If you’re a smoker that is. Otherwise it’s just disgusting
It’s OK, I tell myself, every single day. I never smoke in front of them. Instead, I smoke when they’re in bed, when the day is done, and the bedroom doors are firmly shut. Often, I smoke during the day too. This is harder to conceal but I’ve got quite good at it: an episode of Alvin here, a nap there; I take my chances stealthily, silently. My hands are red raw from washing them obsessively, my pockets are jammed with mints.
God knows what the neighbours must think. Do they see smoke curling up from behind the bins and shake their heads? Do I even care what they think? Mostly not. I would, however, care deeply if my daughter came downstairs and busted me smoking because how could I ever explain such overtly self-destructive behaviour to her? Each drag is underwritten by shame. And relief. Don’t forget the relief: smoking is bloody great. If you’re a smoker that is. Otherwise, it’s just disgusting.
I want to understand when exactly I became a bin-dwelling anachronism. I want to understand when smoking turned from something totally acceptable into something so reviled, something so shameful that, as a fellow smoking mother says, ‘puts you one up from a pederast, or, as a woman, perhaps Myra Hindley’. Obviously, there was the smoking ban in July 2007 that outlawed smoking in enclosed public spaces. But that didn’t really stop us true smokers; we soon adapted to the sub-zero temperatures outside. If, however, Rishi Sunak’s proposal to make it illegal for anyone turning 15 or younger this year to ever buy tobacco products succeeds, then it’s official: smoking is truly a mad outpost of the past like caning children or binding their feet. Boris says the proposals are ‘nuts’ but the tide is turning.
When I became a mother, smoking became harder to justify. It became tantamount to child abuse because my crazy relationship to risk took in more people, innocent children to boot. I try not to look at the facts, but they are these: children exposed to second-hand smoke are more susceptible to respiratory infections, ear infections and asthma attacks.
Amazingly, to me at least, I managed not to smoke through both pregnancies. This had little to do with the intense bombardment of NHS messaging on the risks of smoking and pregnancy – still a major concern as 9.1 per cent of pregnant women smoke – but rather some hormonal trap door had swung open in my head, and I found the smell quite nauseating. It is the only time in nearly 20 years of smoking when I have seen the issue from the other side of the tracks.
Of course, it didn’t last. Call it postnatal depression, call it being totally demented by the sound of a baby crying in an empty basement flat after less than three hours of sleep, but I soon took it up again. I felt bad, but not bad enough to stop. Smoking helped me to grieve my former life by kidding myself that it wasn’t over. Unlike other drugs, it also didn’t affect my ability to change a nappy, administer a bottle of formula or drive. If anything, smoking makes me do those things faster. One friend, a mother of five with a full-time job and no domestic help, describes her fag break as a ‘necessary cessation of manual labour’.
Clearly, there is some link between smoking and the unforgiving landscape of modern motherhood. Hit by astronomical childcare costs, a lack of community and the asymmetric burdens of parenting that mean women pick up the slack, is it any wonder that they need the odd fag to cope? In a study published in the medical journal Addiction in 2015, it emerged that 31 per cent of mothers who had stopped during pregnancy had resumed smoking in the first year of their child’s life. Nine years on, what would a study of smoking and motherhood tell us now? Would it reveal a shift in maternal attitudes towards not just the health of their children but their own health? Judging by the number of mothers I know who smoke in secret and/or vape when they can, I’m not sure.
There is a photograph of my mother holding me when I was probably two years old. She looks at the camera and smiles, cigarette in one hand, child in the other. A totally normal tableau. For me, at least. My parents smoked freely around me when I was an infant and later a child; in the car, in the house, near the pram. There’s nothing wrong with me! Or is there? A study carried out by Columbia University in 2015 found that ‘daughters were almost four times more likely to be nicotine-dependent when their mother was’. Poor mummy, another stick to beat her with, although I’m pretty sure that her mother smoked too.
Will my daughters smoke because of me? Possibly, although it seems that the chances of them ever being able to get hold of a packet of fags are now pretty slim. Looks like I’ll be behind the bins on my own, then.
Why does the West protect Israel but not Ukraine?
Svitlana Morenets has narrated this article for you to listen to.
When Israel and its allies shot down hundreds of Iranian drones and missiles, they demonstrated what an effective air defence looks like. The slow-moving Shahed-136 suicide drones were not hard for the Israeli, Jordanian, British, American and (probably) Saudi air forces to find and eliminate. Even Iran’s cruise missiles were thwarted. It was an overwhelming victory for Israel and a humiliation for Iran. In Ukraine, all this was watched with desperation and even anger.
While Israel boasts robust air defence systems and, with its allies, can deploy hundreds of combat aircraft to repel Iran’s attack, Ukraine must ration its defence munitions. Kyiv is forced to choose which cities to protect. Ukraine’s interception rate – which was above 75 per cent in 2022 – is now down to 46 per cent. Russians have adapted their routine so that after their missiles hit, they fire a second round (a ‘double-tap’) to kill the emergency services.
Zelensky has tried to dispel the idea that the US has a choice between supporting Israel or Ukraine
Could Ukraine’s allies not give it the same protection they give Israel? Such protection could have prevented 600 people from being crushed in the rubble of the Drama Theatre in Mariupol. The Russian ballistic missiles loaded with banned cluster munitions that hit the train station in Kramatorsk, killing 61, could have been intercepted. The Kremlin’s missiles might not have destroyed the shopping mall in Vinnytsia, killing 28. The list of tragedies goes on. Last week, Russian missiles destroyed the Trypilska thermal power plant, which provided electricity to the Kyiv region. Ukraine shot down the first seven of Russia’s 11 missiles, then ran out of rockets. More defences are desperately needed.
Last month, Russia attacked Ukraine with more than 400 missiles, 600 Iranian-made drones and 3,000 guided aerial bombs. When the anticipated summer offensive begins, these tallies will probably double. Ukrainian soldiers now have barely enough weapons to hold the front line. The lack of air defences means they are now exposed to Russian aircraft, which for the first time in this war have started dropping thousands of bombs. Since the beginning of the year, Russian forces have seized more than 140 square miles.
This week, David Cameron made the case for not helping to defend Ukraine’s airspace. The fear is that a western pilot could down a Russian plane: ‘The difficulty… is if you want to avoid an escalation in terms of a wider European war, I think the one thing you do need to avoid is Nato troops directly engaging Russian troops.’
But Russia’s pilots rarely enter Ukraine-controlled airspace: its drones and missiles do. And no one in Kyiv is asking the RAF to fly over Belarus and shoot down rockets, as they did to such effect last weekend over Iraq and Jordan. The request is for equipment, not men. In particular, Ukraine has asked for Patriot air defence systems, 25 of which, Volodymyr Zelensky said last week, would allow Ukraine to fully defend its airspace. Now, in the face of western hesitancy, Kyiv is begging for just six.
A few dozen F-16s, promised last year, are finally due to arrive this summer. President Zelensky has said they will be used to shoot down Russian drones and cruise missiles. But there are not enough defence systems to protect Ukraine’s airfields, so this squadron of jets may not last long. Russia, meanwhile, has 30 times more aircraft than Ukraine and unlimited drone supplies from Iran.
For months, Ukraine has been waiting for the next US aid package to be approved by Congress. Its members stand firm in support of Israel but are isolationist when it comes to Ukraine. J.D. Vance, an Ohio senator, says that support for Ukraine risks weakening Israel by diverting the weapons needed for its defence: ‘Israel is much more important to the United States than Ukraine.’ The fact that Ukraine has a defence treaty with the US and the UK (promising it protection in return for surrendering its nuclear weapons in 1994) is ignored.
Zelensky has tried to dispel the idea that the US has a choice between supporting Israel or supporting Ukraine. ‘Shaheds in the skies above Ukraine sound identical to those over the Middle East,’ he said. ‘The impact of ballistic missiles, if they are not intercepted, is the same everywhere. Terror must be defeated completely and everywhere, not more in some places and less in others.’
He is choosing his words carefully: any hint of exasperation or ingratitude could be fatal. He cannot afford to alienate opinion in the US House of Representatives. Many congressmen seem to be thinking what J.D. Vance is saying: that Ukraine is not worth the fight. That is another way of saying that Europe isn’t worth the fight. Donald Trump, the favourite to win November’s election, has said that he would cede part of Ukraine’s territory to Russia to achieve ‘peace’. He has even claimed he would encourage Moscow to invade Nato members which did not meet their defence spending targets.
Ukraine must defend itself, yet it is expected to fight Russia alone and not to be too successful. Its advances must be just sufficient enough to show that the cause is worth supporting. Ukraine is encouraged not to target Russian oil refineries, as this might cause oil prices to spike before the US presidential election, even though this would be the most effective way of inflicting damage on Russia. The western allies’ lack of resolve, as well as their indifference, makes Ukrainians fear that their sacrifice will be in vain. The petty politics signal to Putin that he can terrorise the country however he wants.
The truth, of course, is that without western support, Ukraine will lose the war. To witness Israel being given so much backup was painful. The West scrambled to help Israel because they wanted to deter an aggressor and prevent a wider war in the region. Surely the same logic applies to Ukraine and Europe?
Clean up the MoD graffiti!
Mary Wakefield has narrated this article for you to listen to.
When I first saw the Ministry of Defence building splattered in blood-red paint, I assumed that it had only just happened. There were no police or protestors about but the damage was so extensive and so shocking, I felt sure it was recent. No decent government would put up with that for long. I was east-bound in a car at the time and as we drove past I craned out of the window for a last look. The Whitehall clean-up crew would arrive soon, I assumed, and I gawped because I wouldn’t see it again.
I cannot for the life of me understand why it’s all right to leave the MoD looking like an abattoir
But I did. The next day, there it still was, and the day after that, and the one following. I’ve been back every day since just to check. Whoever monitors the MoD CCTV will be alert after repeat appearances of a dishevelled woman in a black anorak standing staring at the building looking haunted and confused.
I am confused. We’re now right at the culmination of Operation Steadfast Defender, an exercise specifically designed to show the world that Nato forces are not to be trifled with. We’ve been told repeatedly about the vital importance of showing our enemies how proud and well organised we are. I cannot for the life of me understand why it’s all right to leave the MoD Main Building looking like an abattoir; as if some giant bleeding carcass had been slapped repeatedly against its side.
The incident itself happened on 10 April and it was embarrassingly easy for the protestors. The video that’s doing the rounds shows four or five wan eco-toffs (Youth Demand) vaulting the railing in front of the building and then using fire extinguishers filled with house paint to spray the walls. They vault in unison (great for TikTok!) and no one scarpers when the police appear because to get arrested is half the point – also great for social media. There’s a banner: ‘Youth demand an end to genocide.’ And chanting: ‘We’re people united, we’ll never be defeated. Oil is murder.’
It doesn’t seem to matter what you chant these days. Max Jeffery, bravely embedded with Youth Demand on the next page, tells me that the group is short of cash. I don’t see why next time they shouldn’t tack a few little paid ads on to the chants, in the manner of a YouTube video: ‘Silence is Violence. Wear AirPods.’ Could be lucrative.
Youth Demand are a model of coherence in comparison with the statement given by our ferret-faced Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, directly after the protest: ‘The Armed Forces can’t and won’t be intimidated. Those inside Defence HQ stand up to dictators and terrorists every day – patriots, many of whom put their lives at risk to protect us all.’ What’s he on about? Did he see the protestors? I feel like Grant’s mum. No more highfalutin patriotic nonsense from you, Grant, till you clean up your room. Look at the state of it! Covered in red paint.
At a recent MoD press briefing, a colleague kindly enquired for me as to why the MoD graffiti had not yet been removed. He was told: ‘The MoD Main Building is Grade-I listed and specialist equipment is required to avoid damage. The work is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.’
‘Coming weeks’ is brilliantly vague. My bet’s on late autumn. I watch as the coach-loads of European tourists tip out on to the Embankment and blink in surprise at the state of the MoD. Sometimes they take photos of the Fleet Air Arm memorial against its Insta-friendly backdrop of blood. Others have figured out that if you crouch down, you can get a shot of the bronze soldiers commemorating the Battle of Britain running towards the mess.
Come summer the Chinese wedding parties will appear again and pose along the Embankment with their professional photographer crews. The British State in shameful disarray makes a charming backdrop for any bride and group affiliated with the CCP. On my last stand-and-stare expedition I noticed that the immense windows of the raised ground floor were also slathered with red paint. When the morning sun shines in from the east, those civil servants in the desirable river-facing desks must be bathed in a crimson glow.
On Tuesday lunchtime an old punk with spikes of silver hair came to stand beside me. ‘Makes the building look sad, doesn’t it?’ he said. Then: ‘I expect they’re going to make the kids who did it clean it off.’ I’m not sure there’s much chance of that. The MoD spends tens of millions a year on lawyers. The thought of sending a teenager up a ladder with solvents would give them palpitations. I asked a pair of passing policemen why no one had yet cleaned the building. ‘These things take their time, don’t they? It’s all about the stone. It’s a very delicate sort of stone. Can’t be rushed.’
But that’s the opposite of the truth. Now that I’m a graffiti-removal expert I can tell you that the more delicate the stone, the more important it is to act quickly. A very capable-sounding company cleaned up just the same sort of paint from just the same sort of porous Portland stone at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin a few weeks ago. The longer you leave it, they said, the more the paint penetrates and the more likely the mark is to be permanent.
Maybe, on my lunchtime visit today, I’ll explain this to patrolling policemen. They’d like that. Or perhaps I’ll turn up next week, with any Spectator readers who would like to join me, and begin slowly wiping off some of the more reachable stains. My bet is we’d be arrested with far greater speed and urgency than Youth Demand ever were.
Sack Andrew Bailey? Let’s look at the case against him
The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, is a loyal and well-intentioned public servant in a role that, by its nature, attracts constant blame and hindsight judgment. Liz Truss is a spectacularly failed 44-day prime minister with a book to sell.
So when Truss says Bailey should have been sacked for his part in her downfall –when the Bank intervened to prevent a pension fund crisis after her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s radical mini-Budget of September 2022 – and that he should be sacked anyway for being part of a Keynesian economic Establishment, with the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility, that has delivered nothing but stagnation, my instinct is to stand up for Bailey.
But just for a moment, just as an intellectual exercise, let’s take the publicity-seeking Truss seriously and examine the case for the prosecution. Long before the mini-Budget fiasco, I described Bailey as a highly competent middle manager whose ‘misfortune’ was to have been promoted to the governorship. Other observers, reviewing his record as head of the Financial Conduct Authority between 2016 and 2020, disputed ‘highly competent’. Since then, nothing about the Bank’s market signalling and management of interest rates to combat the 11 per cent inflation spike it plainly failed to predict has boosted confidence in the Governor or his institution, even if the rate-hike medicine has eventually worked.
Central bankers are most effective when markets imbue them with mystical authority, as they did in recent times with Alan Greenspan at the US Federal Reserve and, for a while, Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank. The uncharismatic Bailey has never come close. And now we discover – in a report by another ex Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke – that the forecasting model on which Bailey’s Bank has based its decision-making is a Heath Robinson contraption of outdated IT and manual data inputs, too slow to spot the economic shifts on which rate-setters needed to act in good time.
If Bailey played a part in toppling Truss, it was for the good of the nation; everyone outside her Westminster clique knew she was a disaster. But the charge sheet against the Governor in all other respects is a long one.
Bailey was appointed for an eight-year tenure, to 2028. Rishi Sunak claims to have confidence in him and surely won’t be seen to take a lead from Liz Truss on this or anything else. Any minor political gain from canning the Governor ahead of the general election might rebound in gilt-market turmoil. And the all-but-certain next chancellor, Labour’s Rachel Reeves, is an ex Bank of England staffer for whom Bailey will be a comfortable colleague.
So the idea of sacking Bailey is, in reality, nothing but a headline for Truss and a popular theme for right-wing dinner parties. But decent chap that he is, knowing that his beloved Bank has seriously lost esteem under his leadership and can afford no more mishaps, this diminished Governor would be well advised to keep a signed resignation letter in his inside pocket.
War, weather and wages
What form might the Bank’s next mishap take? An upward blip in US inflation in March has changed expectations for interest rate cuts on both sides of the Atlantic, even though UK inflation came down another notch to 3.2 per cent. When 2024 began, most pundits expected a series of quarter-point steps down from the current UK base rate of 5.25 per cent; now Rishi Sunak will be lucky if there’s more than one before election day. And despite Andrew Bailey’s weak signal that rate cuts are ‘in play’ at monthly Monetary Policy Committee meetings, we may see none at all this year if war, weather and wage pressures conspire.
Let’s begin with this month’s 9.8 per cent rise in the national living wage, following annualised growth in ‘regular earnings’ of 6 per cent in the quarter to February. As for war, the barrel price of Brent crude oil has recently moved from $75 to $90 in response to the rising Iranian threat, and actual missile attack, against Israel. And a ban on international trading in Russian metals aimed at impeding Kremlin military spending against Ukraine has sent aluminium and nickel prices jumping.
As for the weather, you may not know your robusta from your arabica but you need to know that unseasonal heat in Vietnam and heavy rain in Brazil have driven price spikes for both major coffee crops, while wholesale cocoa is also rising and bad European hop harvests are about to punish your pint of lager. On the domestic front, following a year of record claims for storm damage, expect home insurance renewals to soar this year the way car insurance premiums shot up last year. In short, inflation may be creeping back – and let’s hope it has already set lights flashing on the Bank of England’s ramshackle forecasting machine.
Call me Governor
In scarlet robe and jewelled medallion, I was installed last week in a governorship that’s a lot less problematic than Andrew Bailey’s. I speak of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, for whose leading role I hope I qualify first on the strength of misspent youth as an investment banker in Asia, secondly for my ample capacity for banqueting, and proudly for my role in The Spectator’s annual Economic Innovator Awards, which open for entries shortly.
The encouragement of entrepreneurship – by the Company and the Awards alike –is one of the best things my lucky ‘boomer’ generation can do for the allegedly less advantaged millennials behind us. As Merchant Adventurers, we pray to ‘find another and better world’ from which we’ll bring treasure to ‘enrich man’s life on Earth’ – a balance of social purpose and profit motive, plus philanthropy, which is how good capitalism works. The young entrepreneurs who are our Awards finalists invariably express similar aspirations. Perhaps I can wear my governor’s regalia for our gala Awards dinner in November.
Kippers could save your life
I miss kippers. My wife won’t let me eat them at home, and they have become a rarity in restaurants. I stayed in a luxury hotel last month, and the manager was telling me that if I wanted anything – valet parking, room service, breakfast after 10.30 a.m. – I had only to ask. When I enquired if kippers were on the menu, he went as white as unsmoked cod and mumbled that the head of housekeeping had forbidden them because of the luxury soft furnishings.
But I have medical science on my side: a report in the British Medical Journal last week said that fish such as herring could save lives, and the planet. Nearly three-quarters of forage fish – those half-way up the food chain, between plankton and larger fish, like tuna or cod – that are caught are not eaten, but made into fish meal for farmed fish like salmon. Cutting out the middle-fish and eating forage fish themselves would be more efficient, sustainable and – because they contain omega-3 fatty acids – could save 750,000 lives if they replaced red meat in our diet. Also – and it’s a shame the scientists didn’t make more of this – herring tastes better than farmed salmon, the most boring fish on the market.
One of the problems is that these fish do not last: those who bought fresh herring from cadgers before refrigerators found that it was inedible as often as not, which is why ‘cadger’ now means ‘someone who gets something for nothing’ rather than its original meaning of ‘a hawker of fish’. The only way to keep herring edible, if not palatable, was by heavily salting the fish and smoking it for nearly two months. The herring took on a red colour and a smell so overpowering that foxhounds could be put off the scent – hence the term ‘red herring’.
The kipper was an invention of the railway age. When inland cities could be reached in hours, herring only needed to be lightly salted and smoked. The more romantic story is that in 1843 John Woodger in Northumberland split and gutted a herring ready
for breakfast and left it overnight near a smoking stove; the result was so delicious that he had to share it. His smokehouse – conveniently enough, he had one handily situated for both the fishing village of Seahouses in Northumberland and the North-Eastern Railway – is still in operation.
Now, as then, the herring are ‘cold smoked’ – placed at a distance from a slow-burning fire, fuelled by sawdust and woodchips. Oak is best, but some smokers cut it with other wood; as long as there is some oak among the deadwood it can be described as ‘oak-smoked’. This seems less of a cheat than the first world war trick of painting kippers with a dye made from coal tar to cut the time spent in the smokehouse.
This wartime expediency was the beginning of the end of the kipper. From its place on every Victorian and Edwardian breakfast table, it became the food of the poor – George Orwell writes in The Road to Wigan Pier about a supper of kippers and strong tea – and the Ministry of Agriculture was worried about what to do with all the herring. Civil servants wanted to distribute it free to schoolchildren – this is what they’d done with the oversupply of milk until Mrs Thatcher snatched it away – but the minister refused, saying: ‘You cannot feed necessitous children on raw salt herring. I can imagine nothing which would upset a child more.’
The Herring Industry Board lasted until 1981, when Mrs Thatcher got rid of it too. I hope the BMJ’s scientists have more success.
How Linzer torte stood the test of time
Linzer torte has quite the claim to fame: some assert that it’s the oldest cake in the world; others that it’s the oldest to be named after a place. It feels churlish to split hairs, but those two assertions are quite different, aren’t they? In any event, it’s certainly very old. For a long time it was thought it dated back to 1696, when it was mentioned in a recipe held in the Vienna City Library. But 20 years ago, an earlier reference was found by Waltraud Faißner, a Linzer torte historian, dating it to 1653 in the snappily titled Book of All Kinds of Home-Made Things, Such as Sweet Dishes, Spices, Cakes and also Every Kind of Fruit and Other Good and Useful Things etc.
This is a pudding that looks as if you’ve put in huge amounts of effort and skill, when the opposite is true
A Linzer torte is composed of two layers of pastry encasing a jam filling, but what makes it distinctive is the Linzer dough. This is a very short, crumbly, butter-heavy dough, with a large proportion of nuts – most traditionally hazelnuts, although walnuts and almonds often feature – lemon zest and a little spice. It is biscuity and nubbly, with the intensely earthy, buttery, bittersweet flavour of the nuts sitting happily against the gentle spice and lemon. And biscuity is the right word: while ‘torte’ means cake, the texture and experience of eating a Linzer torte is far more cookie than cake. It’s no surprise that it enjoys a second life in both Austria and America as an individual holiday treat.
The filling is not set in stone. Some Linzer tortes use raspberry jam or, in countries where it is more widely available, redcurrant jam. Cranberry is common, as is apricot. I have seen suggestions of Nutella, mincemeat and marmalade, but these do feel a little like heresy to me. I like a combination of redcurrant jelly (easier to find here than the jam), and whole cranberry sauce; the sharp tang of the two work well against the pastry, and the cranberries bring welcome texture.
This is a very beautiful torte: the top is always latticed, using the same dough as the base, with the jewel-red of the jam gleaming through the diamonds of the crossed pastry. But for all that beauty, it’s deceptively easy to make: the dough is best brought together in a food processor, so it’s much simpler than the kind of pastry you have to rub or cream.
Using toasted or roasted hazelnuts brings an extra dimension of flavour. Often shop-bought hazelnuts will already have been roasted and skinned, but if you’re doing it yourself, make sure they’ve completely cooled before grinding them, or they’ll give out too much oil and turn into nut butter.
Once made, the pastry is sticky, even after chilling, and feels like it may be a complete nightmare to work with. In fact, the first time I ever handled it, I tried to be too clever, and it was a complete nightmare. I attempted to roll the whole thing between two sheets of greaseproof paper – usually a nifty trick for getting a neatly rolled dough that neither tears nor sticks. The opposite happened, and it was like trying to roll out Polyfilla. Happily, the dough responds far better to a lightly floured surface – and if the pastry does tear, the butter content will ensure it stitches back together as it bakes, and the nut content makes it unlikely that you’ll overwork the pastry if you need to have a second go at rolling.
The pastry’s composition also means there’s no need to blind bake. You merely line a tart tin with a layer of the pastry, fill almost to the edge with your jam, and lay strips of the dough on top. Unless you fancy making your own jam, the filling needs almost no preparation and no cooking. And the lattice topping is a bit of a cheat: it’s actually just a criss-cross. Easy!
There’s nothing I like more than a pudding that looks as if you’ve put in huge amounts of effort and skill, when the opposite is true. Linzer torte delivers effortless grown-up elegance while having more in common with a simple jam tart than other, far more involved Austrian tortes. Perhaps that’s why it has stood the test of time as the oldest cake in the world. Or the oldest cake named after a place. Who’s really counting?
Takes 20 minutes, plus chilling time
Bakes 30 mins
Serves 8
For the pastry
- 175g plain flour
- 80g icing sugar
- 175g roasted, skinned hazelnuts
- 1 lemon, zested
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
- ½ tsp ground cinnamon
- ¼ tsp fine salt
- 175g butter
- 1 large egg
- 1 large egg yolk
For the filling
- 350g redcurrant, cranberry or raspberry jam
- 1 lemon, juiced
- Pulse the hazelnuts into a fine rubble in a food processor, and set to one side; go slowly so that you don’t grind the nuts too finely, which will cause them to give up their oil. Now pulse the flour, butter, icing sugar, lemon zest, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt together. Add the ground hazelnuts, egg and egg yolk, and pulse briefly until a cohesive dough forms. Turn the dough out, wrap in cling film, and refrigerate for an hour.
- Preheat the oven to 180°C. Take three-quarters of the dough and roll it out into a 10in round. Transfer onto the base of a 9in tart tin, pressing it into the sides, and leaving a little overhang at the top.
- Stir the lemon juice into the jam, and spoon this on to the pastry base.
- Roll out the rest of the pastry, and cut thin, ¼in strips. Use these to create a lattice on top of the filling by laying half of the strips out in one direction, and then crossing them with the rest of the strips, to form a diamond pattern exposing the jam, then fold the overhang of pastry on to the tart, to enclose the edges of the lattice.
- Bake for 30 minutes until the pastry is golden brown. Allow to cool before demoulding from the tart tin.
My letter from Chris Packham
I do not know Chris Packham, the BBC nature broadcaster, personally, but he wrote me a letter last month, enclosing a book called Manifesto, The Battle for Green Britain by Dale Vince which, he tells me, ‘has something very important to say at this most important time’. In his letter, Chris says that ‘irrespective of any party politics’, ‘The coming election will be the most important of our lifetimes’ because we are ‘halfway through the last decade’ left to avoid ‘the worst of climate breakdown’. So ‘we must help young voters navigate the new voting rules’. Politics has ‘become the final frontier for a real greener Britain’. What Chris does not mention is that party politics is very important in this most important book. Dale Vince (‘a mate of mine’, Chris explains) has been a multimillionaire donor to the Labour party for more than ten years and was also, until he buckled under the criticism, a big donor to Just Stop Oil. As Dale himself puts it, ‘I pivoted from Just Stop Oil to Just Stop the Tories in late summer 2023,’ a pivot not unrelated to the coming election. Labour, he says, ‘will be the greenest [government] we have ever had and potentially the world has ever seen’. If it gets in, we shall have online voting and proportional representation which, he implies, will get rid of the Tories for ever. At present, Chris Packham is also pursuing his own court case against the Tory government, seeking judicial review of its changed timetable for phasing out petrol and diesel cars. To see the oddity of this, imagine, say, Mishal Husain being allowed by the BBC to help take the government to the International Court of Justice for selling arms to Israel. By promoting his mate Dale’s book, Chris is specifically working against the Conservative party and in favour of Labour. As its title implies, the purpose of Manifesto is a Labour victory asap. Packham’s fame rests almost entirely on presenting nature programmes for the BBC. And yet, because he is technically freelance, he is being excused the full rigour (ha, ha) of its impartiality rules. I would like Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, to explain to us all over again how its impartiality works.
‘The Iranians probably did not intend to cause serious damage or casualties,’ writes William Hague in the Times, almost as if it was really quite nice of them to hurl more than 330 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles into Israel last weekend. But if I had been an Israeli citizen enduring Tehran’s efforts in the night sky, I would not have believed I was watching a son et lumière. And if Lord Hague had been a British cabinet minister and Iran (or anyone else) had put on a similar show over London, would he have advised the British people, as he currently advises the Israelis, that ‘The smartest move now is to signal de-escalation of the immediate confrontation’?
A couple of weeks ago in this space, I murmured against the London Library bombarding its members with emails pushing contentious events upon us. My point was that this uniquely great lending library is a place for the study of books, not the striking of attitudes. Since then, the library has further woked up and doubled-dumbed down. It is inviting us to a ‘member-exclusive’ for Pride month and ‘an evening dedicated to the great literary taboo of Shakespeare’s real identity’. The most irritating thing about the latter is the word ‘taboo’. Sad to say, there is no taboo against Shakespeare identity speculation. The world is awash with batty theories about Bacon, Oxford, Shakespeare being a woman etc. Even as I write this, I know, with a sinking heart, that I shall be inundated with some of them. Yes, there is reputable scholarly inquiry about the collaborative authorship of several of Shakespeare’s minor plays by other hands, such as George Peele’s and Fletcher’s, but there is no sane theory that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare. Why is a serious library staining its reputation in this way? It is the literary equivalent of Elvis being still alive or Jews having bombed the World Trade Center.
Last week, the baby son of friends was baptised in Hastings. The parents, who are predominantly Polish, used the ‘extraordinary form of the Roman rite’, which is chiefly in Latin. It begins with a ceremony of which I had heard but had never before seen. Most of it takes place outside the church door, the purpose being, with the help of the godparents, to expel the Devil before entering. The celebrant breathes three times on the face of the child, then exorcises a plate of salt (‘creature salt’) so that it becomes a sacrament for ‘the putting to flight of the enemy’. He applies a tiny pinch of it to the infant’s tongue. Then he exorcises the child, saying that Christ commands Satan (‘maledicte, damnate’) rather as, walking on the sea, He stretched out His hand to ‘sinking Peter’ (‘Petro margenti’) to ‘give honour to the true and living God’. Then we entered the church and baby Antoni became a Christian. I could see why such a ceremony is frowned on today. It is too visceral, arguably primitive. But therein lies its dramatic power. It is saying that baptism is not only a lovely moment but the vanquishing of the fallen world. From the windows of the East Hastings Angling Club, where we celebrated, we could look out upon the sea more thoughtfully.
The government’s gradual elimination of smoking by date of birth sets an interesting precedent. How about setting a ‘best before’ date for lots of our freedoms this way, thus consoling the old while protecting the young from being triggered by the threat of liberty? As a journalist born in the 1950s, I, for instance, could be allowed to eke out my twilight years attacking, say, mass immigration or gender-neutral lavatories, but those starting out in media would be banned from taking such incorrect positions. Come to think of it, that is pretty much what is happening already.
The Lebanese always return home
Beirut
You might have thought that the threat of the Gaza war spiralling into an all-out regional conflagration, along with breathless travel advice from western governments urging their nationals to leave the country, would have deterred Lebanon’s expats from flying home to celebrate Eid al-Fitr this year. Not one bit. Flights, hotels and restaurants were fully booked despite Iran’s drone strike.
The Lebanese know that even if there is fighting (and in South Lebanon, there is on an almost daily basis), if it isn’t on your doorstep, there’s no reason to stop the party.
The Lebanese know that even if there is fighting, if it isn’t on your doorstep, there’s no reason to stop the party
In any case, the Lebanese always think they have the inside track. ‘We knew it wouldn’t come to much,’ a friend assured me after Beirut airport reopened at 7 a.m. on Sunday. ‘There was a deal. No one wanted an escalation. It was less dangerous than a night out in London.’
This cheery indifference to danger and an almost fanatical obsession with finding any excuse to come home is typically Lebanese and, ironically, a by-product of a long history of emigration, one that has existed since the first millennium bc when King Hiram of Tyre despatched his people across the sea to establish trading colonies. Since then, poverty, persecution, war – in some cases all three – have been contributing factors. We Lebanese go abroad; we work, we make money, we come back and show everyone how well we’ve done by building a McMansion.
Take my Lebanese grandfather. Sometime in the late 19th century he killed a man who insulted his mother. His father put him on a boat to Brazil where he opened a trading company, became a freemason, married a Swede and, when the heat had died down, returned to his village, a relatively prosperous man with a foreign wife.
It’s true that more people are leaving and the country is experiencing one of its periodic episodes of existential anxiety. The 2019 collapse of the banking sector and the subsequent hyperinflation mean there are no genuine job opportunities for a workforce stuffed to the gills with graduates.
The UAE has long since taken over from Brazil as the destination of choice, but Montreal, Melbourne, London and Paris also have thriving Lebanese communities. In West and Central Africa, they run the show, trading everything from ball bearings to blood diamonds. But wherever they live, the new priority is to wire money home to parents whose life savings and pensions were wiped out in the crash.
But ultimately, despite what the politicians and the religious leaders fear about losing their constituents and a shifting sectarian balance, the majority of the diaspora will always return. Yes there are more people of Lebanese descent outside the country than in it, but gone are the days when people left and never came back. My grandfather and his brother returned from Brazil but another stayed. That’s a 66 per cent success rate at a time when journeys were major undertakings. My daughter, who runs an art gallery in Mayfair and can basically travel anywhere she wants, flew into Beirut for New Year’s Eve, when return tickets from London were changing hands for well over £1,000. Her school friends, who live and work in Bahrain and Los Angeles, were in town and she ‘needed’ to go.
In the last week of Lent, I met a group of wine-making Maronite monks at the St Moussa monastery in the Upper Matn district of Mount Lebanon who have made it their mission to thwart any exodus by convincing those in rural communities to stay and get involved in Lebanon’s burgeoning wine industry. ‘We have a close relationship with the vine,’ said Father Youhanna, the head winemaker, who had just returned from studying the industry in Australia. ‘We want people to stay on their land.’ By ‘on’ I felt he really meant ‘in’.
That afternoon, I attended a church service for a cousin who had died in Canada after living there for more than 30 years. He had wanted his ashes brought back to his village where the urn was duly placed in the same vault as his grandfather and Swedish grandmother, as well as his aunts and uncles, including my father, who died in Africa.
As I was leaving, I bumped into the priest and, possibly a bit too cheerfully, asked him if he’d ever held a service for an urn of ashes. ‘More and more,’ he replied. ‘They all want to come home. Sometimes they come by DHL.’ We both laughed and then stood in silence. He pointed to the ground and tapped his foot for emphasis. ‘Hawn akhretna.’ Here is our end.
A smoking ban is pointless and illiberal
Why is Britain poised to ban cigarette smoking, when the habit is already dying out anyway? Smoking is seen by the young as disgusting and outdated. A generation ago, 50 per cent of school pupils said they had smoked at some point. By the time David Cameron came to power, this was down to 25 per cent. It has since halved again, to 12 per cent – of whom just 1 per cent smoke regularly. Vaping among the young presents its own challenges, but smoking cigarettes (at £15 a packet) is in terminal decline. So naturally the state has decided to intervene.
Smoking is dying out among the young because they are choosing not to smoke, not because it is banned
Politicians of all parties united this week to usher in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which will create two categories of consumers. Those born before 2009 will be able to purchase whatever they please in shops. Those born later will be supervised consumers: banned from buying not just cigarettes but any tobacco products, including cigars and shisha. How will this be enforced? The task will obviously fall to shopkeepers, who will one day be breaking the law if they sell Silk Cut to a 35-year-old, thinking they looked 36. It’s patent nonsense, which is why the New Zealanders (whose idea it was originally and whom Rishi Sunak copied) abandoned it.
The most worrying aspect of this is that creating two tiers of consumers is a breach of the basic doctrine of equality before the law. Once this principle is created, what will follow? It won’t be long before the health lobby tries to extend the banned list of products to sugary food, perhaps introducing an age limit for buying Terry’s Chocolate Oranges and Frosties. The bill, as framed, will also ban vape flavours that ministers think are too tempting – rather reminiscent of the pandemic years, when they spent precious time debating whether a Scotch egg counted as a substantial meal.
It is reasonable that Sunak might want to secure himself some kind of legacy and that he’s understandably excited at finally finding a policy that has public support (something the Tories have struggled with for quite a while). But he has divided cabinet colleagues whom he needs to keep united. Some of his MPs said they came into politics to defend the principles of equality, individual choice and liberty. Kemi Badenoch, his Trade Secretary and most likely successor, was one who opposed him on the grounds of the burden on small businesses and the equality before the law principle.
There cannot be any adult left in Britain who is not aware that smoking causes several forms of cancer as well as damaging the heart and circulatory system. Its demise is an unalloyed benefit for public health. Yet the mission-creep had already started. We have seen the banning of snus (tobacco pouches held between the lips and gums), yet snus has helped Sweden, where it is legal, to lead the world in cutting cigarette use.
The most fundamental objection to the ban is that it shifts government health policy from its role of giving simple and honest and unbiased information to that of seeking to change our habits by force. Yes, hard drugs are banned of course (though, oddly, some of those most in favour of the smoking ban want to decriminalise marijuana), but there is a big difference between psychoactive drugs, which can turn people violent or alter their behaviour in some harmful way, and shisha, cigars and cigarettes.
In Tuesday’s debate, the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting was not inclined to engage in the slippery slope argument, insisting instead that the argument against a smoking ban was akin to the argument against ever banning anything. Yet the SNP has a list of ‘junk foods’ (even including porridge) whose promotion it wants to restrict on the grounds that they are deemed to pose a health risk. Once public health policy goes down this route, there is no obvious end.
This will, of course, be great news for those who sell things under the counter. Taxes on cigarettes are already so high that one in every ten smoked comes from the black market, usually smuggled in duty-free. So how effective does Sunak think his new age restraints will be? Every few years, the NHS tests the system by asking children from the age of 11 upwards if they encounter difficulty buying cigarettes. Its studies show that most do not: this in a country where the age limit for smoking is supposed to be 18. Smoking is dying out among the young because they are choosing not to smoke, not because they are banned from doing so.
The idea that the state should police our habits was reinforced during the Covid-19 pandemic, when we were subjected to endless fussy restrictions. But early on in the pandemic, the chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser were much more impressive when they addressed us directly, giving us the facts as they were then known, and appealing to our own sense of responsibility and judgment to behave in ways that would slow the spread. It worked, too.
In a democracy, this is a good general principle for public health. The best and most effective method is to provide accurate information and then leave people to make their own decisions. Sunak was one of the members of the government who were most sceptical of lockdown measures and coercion. The Prime Minister should remember his brave and reasoned stance then, and leave cigarette smoking to die its own death.
Are Stonewall and Mermaids charitable?
Iwas once asked by a colleague to sponsor him on an undertaking designed, he said, to raise money for a very good charitable cause. I can’t remember what the cause was – cancer, maybe, or mental kids – but I do remember the nature of the undertaking. He intended to walk a number of miles down the Great Rift Valley in Kenya.
Why not, I suggested, just donate the enormous amount of money such a trek would cost direct to the charity? It would easily outweigh the amount raised, not least because miserable bastards like me would probably decide it was not a charitable act at all but first-world grandstanding with a smug hubris masquerading as kindness.
Being designated ‘charities’ gave these organisations an imprimatur they most certainly did not deserve
A few years later someone asked me to sponsor them on a walk across Greenland – another example of a jackass desperately wanting to feel good about enjoying the holiday of a lifetime. I hope a polar bear got him. Mind you, I half thought about jumping on the bandwagon, by getting people to sponsor me for completing a gruelling weekend in Amsterdam’s famous ‘De Wallen’, as I ploughed through Lieke, Elsa, Beatrix, Esmee etc, while whacked out of my head on Ketama Gold. ‘All the money raised will go to the little handicapped kiddies, probably,’ I would assure friends and colleagues. ‘I’m aiming for 36 whores in 72 hours.’ Never did it, though, and I fear it is too late now.
None of that stuff is charitable, of course, in the proper sense of the term. However, it now occurs to me that it is substantially less odious than the industrialised charities which comprise our ‘third sector’ and which – in the majority of cases – are not remotely charitable at all, but vehicles for self-righteous idiots to breast-beat, advance their own imbecilic agendas and experience the warm glow of feeling superior to everybody else. For a long while I donated hard-earned money to some of these organisations, believing that despite all the arguments about the money they spent on themselves and their headquarters and so on, they must surely be making the world a better place.
Nope – they were, in the main, making the world a substantially worse place. The ones which raised money to alleviate poverty in Africa, for example, spent the majority of their income imposing vacuous ideologies upon their benighted captives and engendering in them the belief that the perfidious West was to blame for every misfortune that has befallen the Dark Continent, establishing an institutionalised sense of victimhood which works tirelessly to prevent prosperity.
Then there is Amnesty International, to which I used to bung £30 a month, believing, erroneously, that they would be dedicated to protecting universal human rights rather than just the human rights of scabrous third-world lefties. I was reminded of this organisation last month when I read its tearful pleas for Israel to release the murderous Palestinian terrorist Walid Daqqah from prison, seeing as he was seriously ill. Daqqah was the leader of a group of savages who abducted, tortured and murdered an Israeli soldier. Mercifully, Daqqah is now dead, so Amnesty can get back to its more usual job of demanding a ceasefire (from the Israelis, not Hamas).
But even Amnesty is a cut or two above the sorts of domestic charities whose names have been in our newspapers ever since the Cass report was made public – by which I mean Stonewall, principally, but also Mermaids. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘charity’ as the following: ‘an organisation whose purpose is to give money, food, or help to those who need it, or to carry out activities such as medical research that will help people in need, and not to make a profit’.
By my reading of that definition, neither Stonewall nor Mermaids are charities. They are advocacy groups which disseminate their odious agendas to any organisation stupid enough to pay for them – and that, surely, is the crucial point. They flog horrible ideas and the taxpayer (it is usually the taxpayer) forks out for the benefit. I would have fewer qualms about both organisations if they simply fessed up that they were acting in the manner of major-league consultants, much like, say, McKinsey or PwC. Because the appendage of the term ‘charity’ to these institutions suggests, to the highly suggestible denizens of our bloated and myopic public sector, that what they are telling you must be ‘good’ and ‘right’, rather than hugely damaging to children and indeed the nation as a whole. We will be paying – in cash as well as human terms – for their monomaniacal insistence upon the rights of children to define their own ‘gender’ and for their enthusiasm for purveying dangerous drugs to vulnerable kids. There will be endless court cases, especially if the Mayo Clinic’s research is correct that there could possibly be a link between puberty blockers and cancer. (It may be that for self-preservation they are trying, rather desperately, to distance themselves from their previously gung-ho devotion to the cause of compulsory transitioning.)
But here is my point: I believe Stonewall and Mermaids had every right to append their colours to the ideological mast of transitioning, even if that mast lay wrecked upon the rocks. None of us are right all the time. But being designated ‘charities’ gave these organisations an imprimatur they most certainly did not deserve. They were not helping people out; they were pursuing a political agenda. That may be laudable, but it is not charitable. Charity must be politically neutral.
Of course, most of our charities spend the majority of their time advocating rather than handing out dosh. I vaguely remember, back in the late 1980s, some right-of-centre thinktank added up the costs to the public purse of all the demands made by charities on the BBC Today programme within a single week and discovered that if they were adopted, we’d have been bankrupt by Christmas. But these were charities making the demands… so they must be right, huh?
The Democrats have a Joe Biden problem
The Democrats dare to hope that this week will be a study in contrasts. On their side stands President Joe Biden, the veteran statesman, using all his diplomatic experience to stop a third world war breaking out in the Middle East. On the other, in the dock in Manhattan, sits Donald Trump, facing 34 criminal counts in a case relating to porn stars, adultery and hush money.
As Biden urges Israel to ‘think carefully’ as it considers how to respond to Iran’s attack last weekend, Trump is, as ever, ranting away about himself. This speaks to Biden’s 2024 re-election pitch: it’s democracy (him) vs chaos (you know who).
Trump can point to a string of successes that stemmed from his more assertive ‘madman’ approach
The problem is that the public does not appear to be swallowing the message. Whenever Trump’s ‘legal woes’ make headlines, his popularity seems to go up. That’s because many voters find the Democratic penchant for attacking their political opponent through the justice system to be far more odious than anything Trump has or hasn’t done. And they find the presence of Biden in the White House to be anything but reassuring.
Most Americans do not like Trump. But poll after poll suggests that they regard the Biden administration as the bigger disaster.
On Saturday, three days before Trump’s Manhattan trial began, a New York Times-Siena survey showed that 42 per cent of respondents ‘generally remember the years that Donald Trump was president’ as ‘mostly good’. Just 25 per cent said the same of Biden’s time in office.
Democratic politicians find it baffling that the common folk cannot see their obvious moral and professional superiority. On the economy, Biden keeps hailing the latest record job numbers as proof that ‘America’s economy is the strongest in the world’. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen talks about the United States being the ‘key driver’ of global growth. Yet still a significant majority of Americans appear to trust Trump more than Biden on the economy, even if the gap has narrowed in recent weeks.
The difficult truth for the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign is that most US citizens think that doddery Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris are simply not up to their jobs. A recent JL Partners poll found that only four in ten Americans are confident that 81-year-old Biden can remember the names of his key staff.
Such doubts make voters even less likely to trust Biden on the issues they care about most. For instance, 20 per cent of voters say that immigration is their number one concern, and 65 per cent disapprove of the current administration’s handling of the border.
In a normal US election, voters might be less interested in foreign relations. This year, however, with war in Europe and the Middle East, ‘national security’ is a growing source of anxiety. On this front, too, a majority of Americans appear to agree with former British prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss that the world was safer under Trump.
President Biden seems convinced – to the point of delusion – that international relations is his strong suit. His memoirs are stuffed with vainglorious anecdotes about him talking tough to Vladimir Putin in the 2000s and persuading Bill Clinton to bomb the Serbs in the 1990s. In recent weeks, he’s been busy reassuring nervous allies that he and Benjamin Netanyahu are due ‘a come to Jesus moment’. But just 31 per cent of Americans approve of Biden’s foreign-policy record, and only three in ten say they are confident that he is capable of fully digesting national security briefings.
Biden’s biggest decision abroad – the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan – turned into a major national humiliation. The Potemkin government that the US had spent trillions propping up in Kabul collapsed. Today, Afghanistan is run by the Taliban, under the patronage of Beijing and Moscow.
Teddy Roosevelt advised statesmen to ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. The Biden administration seems to take the opposite approach. In June 2021, Biden warned of ‘consequences’ that ‘would be devastating for Russia’ if the opposition figure Alexei Navalny died in custody. In February this year, Navalny’s life ended in mysterious circumstances and not much happened, other than the White House announcing another round of sanctions. Rogue actors tend to feel emboldened when threats aren’t followed through on.
The US electorate is hardly crying out for America to be the world’s policeman. On the contrary, Trump appealed to many voters in 2016 precisely because he stood against the hawkishness of the George W. Bush era.
Having served as president, however, Trump is now able to point towards a string of foreign policy successes that stemmed from his more assertive ‘madman’ approach. Russia did not start a war while he was in the White House, for instance. Trump also tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and its Gulf neighbours – a series of agreements that helped further isolate Tehran and which the Biden administration considers the best hope for peace in the Middle East.
Under the less assertive Biden, Washington’s words often seem peculiarly disconnected from its actions. In recent weeks, the President has expressed grave concerns about Israel’s ‘over the top’ bombardment of Gaza, even as he waves through massive military aid packages to help Israel complete the destruction.
Last week, Biden, who prides himself on his empathy, had a one-word message for an Iranian regime that was preparing its revenge attack on Israel: ‘Don’t.’ Then, last weekend Iran did, and by Sunday Biden had switched to urging Israel to ‘show restraint’. He urged Netanyahu to ‘take the win’, since Iran’s missiles were almost all shot down. By Monday, however, the Israeli war cabinet had promised to launch retaliatory ‘action co-ordinated with the United States’ and Biden’s wise-man routine appeared to be causing yet more of a muddle.
Trump, by contrast, says bluntly that Israel is ‘losing the PR war’ and needs to ‘get it over with’. He prefers to grandstand about his epic legal battle against the ‘deep state’. Which leaves Americans wondering: who is the real chaos candidate?
A teacher like Michael Tanner would never survive in today’s university climate
I came up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a rain-sodden October evening in 1976. I’d flown from spring sunshine in South Africa to this misery – the weather having turned abysmal after the best summer of the century, just as one would expect. I didn’t know what a Cambridge porter was meant to do as I plonked down my bags at the lodge, anticipating assistance. The porter, a stocky, tough military type, hardly gave me a glance, saying ‘Pick ’em up and follow me’. This, I was soon to find out, was the legendary Jaggard, the porter with the most fearsome reputation in the university, upon whom Tom Sharpe’s Skullion in Porterhouse Blue was based. As I heaved my bags across the dark and dismal New Court, up two flights of cold stone stairs, I resolved to leave as soon as I could get a flight home.
But then everything changed. I was told by the senior tutor the next morning to present myself to Dr Tanner in his rooms, P1 in the Old Court. ‘But not too early,’ he said. ‘Dr Tanner is not a morning person’.
I climbed the stairs and knocked on the stout oak door in the oldest court in Cambridge. There was a heady aroma on the landing and the pounding of loud classical music inside. I knocked again but nobody came to the door. So I pushed it open and was confronted by a chaotic room strewn with books to waist height, the air heavy with perfumed smoke, Aramis aftershave, and fresh coffee. One could just make out a grand piano and a desk piled with books and photographs. There was a wall of shelving with hundreds and hundreds of LPs, and further heaps of records scattered over the surviving floor space. Large reel-to-reel tapes turned slowly, recording the music. Balanced on top of the debris, precariously, were large mounted close-up portrait photographs of nobody I recognised. I was to learn that they were Wagner, D.H. Lawrence, Mahler, Maria Callas and Wilhelm Furtwängler. The only hero who was missing was Nietzsche.
It took a moment to make out a figure tucked close to the windows with a telephone to his ear. He looked up with a frown of irritation and then a sudden radiant smile as he waved me in with one hand, rotating the other in a gesture of boredom at the conversation he was having, arching and flickering his eyebrows in a way that would become characteristic. Michael spoke with facial gestures – particularly with his eyebrows – just as the Italians speak with their hands.
I saw he had chiselled lines on his face, dishevelled red hair (‘not red – autumn brown’), and was wearing a leather jacket, open-necked shirt, and tight pigskin trousers. He puffed at a scented cigarette between shouting above the music into the phone. It was not at all the image I had expected of a Cambridge don, but I had the immediate sensation that I knew who he was: Butley, the charismatically dissolute lecturer in Simon Gray’s play (I had recently seen, and loved, the film version with Alan Bates).
‘Yes,’ Michael said at some later point with a dismissive wave of his hand, ‘so I’ve been told. I did lodge with Gray, but as for the resemblance – never been so insulted.’
And so a close relationship began – one that aspired to Wagner’s attitude towards music.
Michael believed in university education in the way that Wagner – his hero above all the other heroes whose photographs adorned his room – believed in music: as the total work of art. It was all or nothing, and Michael, I think it fair to say, saw his role in almost messianic terms. The relationship between pupil (his word) – at least those he singled out – and teacher was all-consuming, and committed to moral and aesthetic seriousness.
He was a moral philosopher, doubling as a fellow in English, but his interests were in aesthetics, then hardly known in Cambridge. His particular passion was for music, and composers were ranked in a strict hierarchy. It had taken him some considerable time, he would say, to be able to take even Mozart seriously, never mind the more frivolous bel canto composers which he had also come to love, so far were they below the rigorous standard set by Wagner, the master. His ability to make room for the lesser composers was largely on account of Maria Callas whose voice was for him the sublime expression of the sensual rapture he craved.
Michael believed, and believed passionately, in the power of art to measure, illuminate and transform life. He was proud to point out that his doctoral thesis – of which he gave me his original copy – opened with the words ‘I believe’. He was an educational proselytizer, and a most charismatic one, in a sense that I don’t think exists any more in universities, and it was perhaps only in the open and permissive period of the Seventies in which it could flourish.
Michael expressed his views trenchantly. There was a world according to Michael or there was nothing. He was an iconoclast and revelled in mocking and undermining most authority and convention, particularly that of the university. He would regale his acolytes – that is what we were – with outrageous and scurrilous anecdotes about colleagues and prominent university figures. His mode was irony, which ranged from the mischievous to the sardonic. We could never quite face, or take seriously, members of the college after Michael’s excoriating hatchet jobs.
He identified closely with F.R. Leavis and his ‘open-shirted’ morality – the only university figure he genuinely admired – in regarding education as a strenuous moral mission, akin to warfare, which was concerned with ‘life’ (in Leavis’s sense). Michael was an avowed atheist but his educational manifesto was propelled by a religiose-like fervour. He, like Leavis, saw himself as a prophet without honour: ‘Cambridge in spite of Cambridge’, as Leavis put it. And he saw himself as the bearer of the Leavis torch. He told me that Leavis had said to him (and here Michael adopted the penetratingly lugubrious tone of Leavis, which was close to his own voice anyway): ‘Tanner, you’re the one’, accompanied by a riveting stare. Whether that was true or not, it confirmed the image, and the mission, Michael set for himself.
His relations with ‘pupils’ was didactic and sometimes overwhelming. He believed the essential qualities of life were vitality and emotional generosity, both of which infused his style of teaching. He believed in an all-consuming inclusiveness in which his teaching was merely a part, albeit the driving force, of a total relationship. Pupils were drawn into his Weltanschauung (a word he often used) and became acolytes. It was a dizzying experience because once drawn in and flattered with the intense attention bestowed by Michael it was hard to be without it. He was adept at discarding those he became bored with or who in some way offended (or deviated from) his strict principles. It was thus that a kind of Russian roulette was played, with a pupil being a favourite one moment and banished to the wilderness the next. It was game which is no longer able to be played but it was inspirational to be a part of it. One was the music while the music lasted.
In recalling those years, I think about how very different university was in the Seventies, and especially so Cambridge in that milieu, and how profoundly the relationship between lecturer and student has changed. In these dismal times, fraught with fragilities, it would be impossible for somebody like Michael to survive, and impossible for a student to experience such extraordinary inspiration. The upshot is a considerable impoverishment on both sides.
Time is ticking to save Vladimir Kara-Murza
A year ago today, the Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for 25 years – the longest sentence handed down to a political prisoner in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. For the last year, Kara-Murza has been held in a prison in Siberia, often in solitary confinement, with only occasional visits from his lawyer, a couple of books and hostile prison guards watching over him.
Kara-Murza was arrested in April 2022 and held for over a year in pre-trial detention after being accused of treason and spreading ‘fake information’ about the Russian army. The most alarming aspect of the charges levelled against him was that they related to speeches he gave abroad, including one to the Arizona House of Representatives the previous month when he condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a ‘war of aggression’.
Putin is a bully. He only recognises, and responds to, force and actions
He had been on the Kremlin’s radar for years thanks to his work in the US helping to implement the Magnitsky Act in 2012, which allowed for sanctions against individuals involved in corruption and human rights violations. The legislation has since been copied by countries around the world, including the UK. In an indication of just how Kafka-esque today’s Russia has become, the judge who sentenced Kara-Murza last year, Sergei Podoprigorov, was himself sanctioned in 2020 thanks to the Act.
The death of Alexei Navalny in February means that Kara-Murza now has the macabre honour of being Putin’s most high-profile political prisoner. What also sets Kara-Murza apart from other dissidents imprisoned in Russia is that he is a British citizen, having moved to London at the age of 11 in the early 90s.
At first glance, it might seem unlikely that Kara-Murza will serve the entirety of his sentence. Given that Putin is already 71, he will almost certainly not be president of Russia in 24 years’ time. But Kara-Murza’s family fear he may not live to see the end of Putin’s regime.
He suffers from a degenerative nerve condition called polyneuropathy. The condition is the result of two Kremlin-sanctioned poisoning attempts in Moscow in 2015 and 2017. Since 2022, his health has deteriorated sharply – even more so since Christmas, when I first spoke to his wife Evgenia about his imprisonment. According to Evgenia, he has now lost 30 kg since his arrest, and no longer has any sensation in either of his legs and one of his arms.
The prison authorities in Russia have, unsurprisingly, prevented him from receiving medical treatment. And there is, of course, every possibility that the Kremlin could make another attempt on his life while they have him under lock and key.
For Kara-Murza’s family, colleagues and supporters, then, time is of the essence. They are calling on the British government to create a dedicated hostage affairs envoy who could advocate for British nationals held abroad. Speaking in London on 11 April to mark two years since his arrest, Evgenia called on the British government to ‘stand with those Russians who are the faces of a democratic Russia that we all want to see, to stand with them and to fight for their survival not because they are UK citizens, but honestly because this is the right thing to do.’
Speaking at the same event, chair of the foreign affairs select committee Alicia Kearns announced the formation of a new all-party parliamentary group on hostage taking and arbitrary detention, due to launch in the coming weeks. Its focus, she said, would be to ‘[try] to make sure that everyone is left in no doubt that hostage taking is an act of terror’. How effective this APPG will be in aiding Kara-Murza remains to be seen.
The dialogue around releasing Kara-Murza has, according to those around him, improved since David Cameron became Foreign Secretary in November. Evgenia, and Kara-Murza’s mother Elena Gordon, met with Cameron at the start of March. But there is little to suggest the UK has a coherent plan for this tricky diplomatic situation. In February, just days after Navalny’s death, the Foreign Office said the government ‘could not and would not countenance a policy of a prisoners swap’. This shot down any hopes that Kara-Murza could be returned through a prisoner exchange, as Germany was reportedly considering in the case of Navalny before his untimely death.
Chris Allan, a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, also spoke at the event last week. He insisted the government would do its utmost to keep Kara-Murza’s case in the spotlight. He promised it would continue raising Kara-Murza’s imprisonment with the authorities in Moscow, as well as on the international stage through platforms such as the UN.
But this sort of lobbying will only carry Kara-Murza’s cause so far, and crucially will have little sway over the Kremlin. Without firmer action (tightening sanctions against Russia, boosting aid to Ukraine, firmer rhetoric towards Moscow and the threat of more meaningful diplomatic punishment for holding British citizens in illegal detention) to demonstrate that the British government can back up tough talk with tough action, Putin will never meaningfully engage with our politicians.
The simple reason for this is that Putin is a bully. He only recognises, and responds to, force and actions. Words, to him, are meaningless. Until the British government recognises this and steps up its game, Kara-Murza will remain in Siberia.
The National Portrait Gallery’s bizarre obsession with slavery
The movement to radicalise the art and museum world was always going to come back and bite its own children. It has happened more quickly than we thought, as demonstrated by the seriously red faces at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) last week.
Among the paintings on display at the NPG was one by French society artist James Tissot of Edward Fox-White, a well-known British 19th century art dealer who opened his first gallery in Glasgow in 1854. Last year, Donald Gajadhar, a descendant of Fox-White’s and manager of the art appraisal business founded by him, noticed a statement in the gallery’s notes next to the picture of his great-great-grandfather. This stated baldly that Fox-White’s father-in-law Moses Gomes Silva, a Jamaica planter, had set him up in business from the something under £400 compensation that he had received following the abolition of slavery.
The gallery’s response was a combination of self-justification and PR-speak
Gajadhar raised the issue with the NPG, asking what evidence it had of this origin of the Fox-White fortune. After some vacillation, the NPG admitted that there was actually none, and agreed to remove the statement in due course.
All well? Not entirely: this episode is still disquieting. For one thing, it raises issues about how far the post-BLM obsession with slavery connections is being taken. There are actually serious questions about whether it is necessarily relevant to one’s understanding of a person that they happened to have made money from a (then entirely lawful) slave-holding concern rather than, say, a commodity dealing company – but let that pass. The problem here is that the connection is much more tenuous. There was no suggestion that Fox-White himself had any interest in slavery: the only hard fact was that he happened to marry a girl whose father had owned slaves and on abolition in 1836 had, in common with many others, received compensation.
Here we are getting close to an almost religious idea that slavery is a kind of miasma which willy-nilly affects anyone at all with any connection, however remote, to a person or business connected with it. Of course people, including museum staff, have every right to hold such a view. But whether such a connection can be said to be relevant to the understanding of a remotely-affected person or of professional relevance to an art cataloguer is, to say the least, open to severe doubt.
Secondly, this episode says a good deal about the quality of the cataloguing work at the NPG. What happened here, it appears, is that whoever was tasked with preparing the notes about Fox-White found out that his first wife had been the daughter of a Jamaican slave-owner who had received compensation. The researcher then simply assumed from this that that compensation money must have gone to set up the son-in-law in business.
This is not the kind of work we can expect from a prestigious institution. By all means state, if you must, that the father-in-law’s compensation might possibly have gone to Fox-White even though there is no evidence that it actually did and that it might perfectly well, for all we know, have been spent on something completely different. That is what the evidence actually shows. What is unacceptable is spicing up such inconsequential facts by making arresting suggestions that Fox-White’s business was actually built on the proceeds of slavery. That is bad history and bad cataloguing.
Unfortunately, this is not how the NPG sees things. Having been caught out making entirely unwarranted statements about a major figure in the art world by a relative who knew more about the subject than it did, the director might have been expected to make a fulsome apology and promise to take steps to stop this happening again. But this is not what happened. Instead the gallery’s response was a combination of self-justification and PR-speak. ‘Having listened to Gajadhar’s concerns,’ it said, it accepted that there had been ‘insufficient direct evidence to show that compensation money received by his father-in-law benefitted White’s financial situation and business’. It had, it said, ‘thanked him for his feedback and would be very happy to continue to discuss the matter with Gajadhar, if there are further areas of concern.’
This is close to not being an apology at all. What it seems to imply is that everyone knows that Fox-White probably started his business with blood-money, but that his descendants were technically right to say there was no proof and needed to be humoured. It is not surprising that Gajadhar has asked for a full public retraction, and so far has heard nothing from the NPG.
By its failure to come clean on this matter, the NPG has also shot itself in the foot in another way. The Fox-White portrait, like a good number in the NPG, is not actually the gallery’s: it had been made available to it on loan. It is very much in the gallery’s interest to encourage such loans.
Now just think for a moment. Suppose you are asked for the loan of a picture of a relative. Are you more or less likely to agree if you know that the result may be that your relative’s personal reputation may be trashed on the basis of mere speculation by a curator with an ideological point to make? My guess is that the result is likely to be a good many fewer pictures available for the public to view in St Martin’s Place.
Rishi gets witty at PMQs
Keir Starmer came to Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) with a spring in his step. He announced that he owned ‘a rare unsigned copy’ of Liz Truss’s memoirs. ‘The only unsigned copy,’ he added with a chortle. Then he asked Rishi Sunak to justify the calamities of Truss’s premiership.
‘He should spend less time reading that book,’ said Rishi, ‘and a bit more time reading the deputy leader’s tax advice.’ That scuppered Sir Keir’s day in parliament. To wriggle out of trouble he played the class war card, and he accused Rishi, ‘a billionaire prime minister’, of ‘smearing a working-class woman.’
Rishi deserves great credit as a witty, fleet-footed Commons performer.
A Labour backbencher tried another Truss-related ambush and asked the PM to name Liz’s greatest achievement. Rishi was ready. He praised her work as foreign secretary signing a series of trade agreements that turned the UK into the world’s fourth largest exporter. No one saw that coming. Rishi deserves great credit as a witty, fleet-footed Commons performer. But if he forfeits his majority at the next election he’ll go down as one of parliament’s greatest losers.
The house seems to be full of tree-hugging, pacifist backbenchers who call constantly for a ceasefire in the Middle East. These hippy MPs must have been thrilled at the weekend to see that Iran’s murderous attack on Israel had been repelled with virtually no casualties. What a victory for the anti-war movement. And yet none of them praised Israel and its allies, including Britain, for neutralising the swarm of air-borne weapons fired at civilian areas by Iran. How strange.
The cause of peace has died on the lips of the pacifists. Only George Galloway brought up Israel/Palestine and he asked Rishi about his recent phone call with Benyamin Netanyahu. Galloway’s question, which was simply an advert for his brand, accused Israel of killing and maiming ‘100,000 Palestinians’ since last October. He didn’t mention the hostages or Hamas’s attempt to re-start the Holocaust. From Rishi all he got was an earnest, flavourless reply.
The atmosphere that greeted Galloway’s question was conspicuously surly. A hostile silence simmered all around him. He just can’t seem to make friends in the Commons. But each time he gets thrown out, Boomerang George comes flying back again.
Many backbenchers attacked their local councils and urged voters to replace them at the 2nd May elections. Rishi spoke up for the mayors of the West Midlands (Andy Street) and Tees Valley (Ben Houchen) and lambasted Birmingham council for hiking council tax by 21 per cent. He mentioned this outrage three times but his message for London, where Sadiq Khan faces re-election, was more subdued. ‘Kick him out and vote for Susan Hall’ he advised. At least he remembered her name.
The Tory campaign to elect Hall is about as robust as the Church of England’s support for Christianity. Effectively, her cause is non-existent. Whisperers will tell you that the Tories want Sadiq Khan kept in office because his control-freak leadership embarrasses Sir Keir. Very unlikely. The Tories don’t have that level of strategic acuity.
Stephen Flynn’s loss of form continued. The SNP leader has a problem at PMQs. He needs to attack Labour, his main rivals in Scotland, while putting a question to the Tory leader. He tied himself in knots today by asking Rishi if he agreed with Gordon Brown’s warning that the Union is threatened.
‘Scotland is far stronger inside the UK,’ said Rishi with a shrug. Flynn moved on to Labour’s doubts about IndyRef Two. This has nothing to do with Tory policy and he had to parcel up his question in irony and paradox. ‘Does he welcome the fulsome, whole-hearted and warm support of the Labour party in denying the people of Scotland a say over their own future?’
Rishi tittered. He pointed Flynn towards the result of IndyRef One in 2014. Flynn’s brand of irony doesn’t work in the Commons. He should use brute force instead.
Sunak has no excuse to not proscribe the IRGC
Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him decently and the inner fair-minded fellow would come out. ‘Actually’, Renwick would point out, ‘they’re a bunch of thugs.’
Given Rishi Sunak’s own schooling, the Wykehamist fallacy came to mind when the prime minister’s spokesman made clear that the government would not be banning Iran’s terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Surely if the Iranians could just be persuaded to pull on some pads and play a round of cricket, we could sort this frightful mess out?
According to the PM, Britain will not blacklist the IRGC for fear that the regime would retaliate by breaking off diplomatic relations. Without diplomatic channels, Sunak’s spokesman said, we would be deprived of ‘one of our most effective channels for avoiding escalation.’ I get that. But you might be forgiven for thinking: so what? This is a regime bent on war, murder and the subjugation of the West. Surely it’s no time for more fruitless jaw-jaw?
Personally, I tend to think that our cringing desire to ‘avoid escalation’ lies at the heart of the problem, as it has bled so easily into appeasement. Iran is a far smaller military power than the West. Its defence budget amounts to under $10 billion, compared to the United States’ $850 billion, our nearly $60 billion and Israel’s $23 billion. The Ayatollahs know this very well. But they also know that we prefer to invite them for talks, talks and more talks. And when the missiles fly, we play defence.
Lord Cameron has echoed the Prime Minister’s message, adding another point: if we banned the IRGC, the Iranians would shut down our embassy in Tehran. This, he said, enabled Britain to ‘deliver a direct message to the Iranians’. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that in the world of international diplomacy, communicating with the Iranian regime is a lot more complicated than sending them an email. It still doesn’t weigh against the imperative to keep our people safe.
Mandarins have also argued that our embassy in Iran is useful for the purposes of espionage, not just for our own purposes but also for the Americans and Israelis. I remain sceptical. Given the spectacular Mossad operations of recent years, from the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the ‘father of the bomb’, to a string of mysterious explosions at nuclear plants around the country, I’m not sure how crucial a flag-flying British embassy is to Israeli black ops.
To be fair to the Foreign Office – for that is the organ of state that is set most firmly against the ban, while many wiser heads at the Home Office support it – there are other more substantial reasons. One senior diplomat recently summarised them to me in a message. Blacklisting the IRGC, he said, ‘would increase the threat to the UK; harm other work by the UK, Europe, the US and its allies to counter the threat to Iran; and not give the government no meaningful new powers to counter the IRGC (which is already sanctioned in the UK).’
The first of these claims – that the threat to Britain would be increased – can be filed under cowardice, pending any meaningful detail.
The second point, that banning the group would place Britain out-of-step with our European partners, warrants consideration. In the dovecote that is the European community, our influence on Iran policy has traditionally been relatively hawkish, particularly in the nuclear negotiations that failed so spectacularly last year. But this argument is predicated on a worldview that places better diplomacy above the demands of national security on our own soil. What’s the point of greater influence in Brussels if dissident Iranian journalists are being stabbed in west London?
The Foreign Office frets that proscribing the IRGC would be an unprecedented move because it is a state entity. What worms would emerge from that newly opened can, it asks? Would there be a bad-faith campaign to proscribe the Israel Defence Forces? Surely it would turn the rules of diplomacy upside down? Once again: file this under hand-wringing cowardice. The Americans blacklisted the IRGC in 2019 and that didn’t bring the sky down. On the contrary, it meant that dissident Iranian journalists whose lives were at risk in Britain have been able to flee to a place of safety. The United States, which made the move that we are resisting, gave them refuge. That tells you something.
Mandarins also argue that in bilateral talks with the Israelis, including during the Prime Minister’s visit to the country in October, banning the IRGC was not on the list of requests made by Jerusalem. This argument feels a little rum to me. Perhaps the Israelis were a little more focused on Gaza? Banning the group was a demand made by the Americans after October 7, which we ignored. And Benjamin Netanyahu himself publicly called for the measure in a recent interview with an Iranian dissident channel based in Britain.
Which brings me to the most significant Foreign Office claim: that a ban would ‘not give the government no meaningful new powers to counter the IRGC (which is already sanctioned in the UK)’. This, I’m afraid, is just wrong. Ultimately, it amounts to a belief that to counter the Iranian threat on our shores, we simply need to keep doing what we have been doing, but more so. More sanctions. Tougher enforcement of existing laws. That kind of thing. Very well. But let us consider how well the current policy is working, and how a ban would help.
The scale of the Iranian threat on British soil is serious. I have been told by security sources that Iran is often at the very top of their list of concerns. That is why figures like former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove have been calling for the IRGC to be blacklisted.
In 2022, the director general of MI5 revealed that the IRGC had attempted ten assassinations in Britain that year. In his annual speech on the threats facing Britain, Ken McCallum said Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ was actively planning terrorist attacks on British soil, labelling it as ‘the state actor which most frequently crosses into terrorism’. Tehran was a ‘sophisticated adversary’, he added. Last year, Matt Jukes, the head of counter-terrorism policing at the Met, disclosed that 15 Iranian plots to either kidnap or kill people in the UK had been foiled.
The stabbing of journalist Pouria Zeraati this month, believed to be at the hands of the IRGC, was a case in point (it goes without saying that he has called for the group to be banned). But this is far from the first time Iranian agents have threatened violence, or indeed carried it out.
Last year, Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, confirmed that Iranian agents were mapping prominent Jews in Britain for possible targeting in the event of a war with Israel. In 1992, dissident television presenter Fereydoun Farrokhzad was knifed to death in Bonn. In 2021, an Iranian diplomat was convicted of plotting to bomb an opposition rally in Paris. And in 2019, an Iranian ex-pat in Glasgow told the Times that he had been threatened by regime goons with a handgun.
These attacks are just the sharp tip of a spear that is being allowed to hide in plain sight. Because the IRGC is not proscribed, organisations can have open links with it and not fall foul of the criminal justice system. One group with alleged links to the IRGC is the Islamic Centre of England (ICE). Based in a former cinema in London’s Maida Vale, just a short walk from several synagogues, it has been described by Alicia Kearns, chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, as the IRGC’s ‘London office’. It was given an official warning by the charity commission – for it is a charity – after it held a vigil to honour the memory of Iranian terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani . This would be illegal were the IRGC proscribed. (An ICE spokesman has previously said the centre is a ‘purely religious and cultural organisation, which provides various services to the local communities… It is an independent charity regulated by British law, which is totally funded by the local beneficiaries. The majority of the trustees, donors, and attendees are British citizens. Indeed, this charity is nothing to do with politics, while we strongly believe that the politically motivated lobbies are trying to drag the charity into their political disputes.)
This is not the only such centre in Britain that may be closed down in the event of proscription. In another revelation by the Jewish Chronicle, we exposed the Islamic Student Association of Britain, based in a former Methodist church in Hammersmith now known as ‘Kanoon Towhid’, round the corner from the Godolphin and Latymer girls’ school. According to our report, since 2020, the organisation has hosted online talks with multiple senior IRGC commanders, several of whom are sanctioned by Britain for human rights abuses.
One such speaker, Saeed Ghasmi, we reported, whose job is to hunt down enemies of the regime, told the students that had Soleimani not been killed, ‘we could have taken over one after another the European countries you are studying in.’ The JC reported that Ghasmi insisted that the Holocaust was a hoax. ‘The real Holocaust,’ he insisted, ‘happened in my country in the first world war, 1917-19, when the UK occupied Iran.’ (The former chair of the association said ‘Islamic Students Associations have never had any direct or indirect affiliation to the IRGC or any army, government or security group anywhere in the world and neither have I… Islamic Students Associations have never held any physical gathering/deminar/conference in Kanoon Towhid or anywhere else with any of the falsely accused individuals.’)
The conclusion is clear. The fanatics of Tehran are not good chaps at heart that just need to be placated. They are not like you and me, and certainly nothing like Winchester-educated Mr Sunak, or Eton’s Lord Cameron. They are gripped by a deeply malevolent ideology that lusts after an apocalyptic war. They have a threefold strategy to achieve this: overseas militia, ballistic missiles and nukes. They are serious. To think that British sanctions will contain the threat is like trying to stop a rampaging knifeman with a fine.
When it comes to foreign policy, the Wykehamist fallacy has much to answer for.