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Labour’s plans to rewrite the National Curriculum
Michael Gove’s decision to stand down in this election was a reminder that the one really bright spot in the past 14 years was the education reforms he steered through between 2010 and 2014. These policies were vindicated in the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which showed England climbing the OECD’s international league table and outperforming Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In maths, England rose from 17th place in 2018 to 11th in 2022, whereas Scotland, significantly above England in 2010, fell below the OECD average.
I was involved in the most successful of these reforms, the free schools programme. Many of these schools are now topping the performance tables: the Michaela Community School got the best Progress 8 score in England last year (this measures how much progress pupils make between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to children with the same prior attainment) and the King’s Maths School got the best A-level results in the country. Of the four free schools I co-founded, the three primaries are all ranked ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted and the secondary’s GCSE results last year placed it in the top 2 per cent of English comprehensives.
Labour is going to rewrite the national curriculum, reverting to the failed skills-based approach
It is disappointing, therefore, that the Labour party wants to dismantle many of these reforms. Take the curriculum. One of my reasons for helping to set up those schools is that the national curriculum Labour devised in 1999 was so poor, with its emphasis on skills over knowledge. Broadly speaking, this is the curriculum still being taught in Wales, which is so far below England that, according to PISA, the average pupil there performs at the same level as the most disadvantaged pupil in England.
Free schools, like academies, are exempt from having to teach the national curriculum, meaning we were able to ditch subjects like civics and make doing a GCSE in a foreign language compulsory. In the primaries, we adapted the knowledge-rich curriculum developed by the American educationalist E.D. Hirsch and now share those resources with hundreds of partner schools across the country. The success of our growing Multi-Academy Trust, which boasts nine schools, shortly to be ten, is in large part due to the rigorous, knowledge-based curriculum we teach at those schools.
Unfortunately, Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, has said Labour is going to force free schools and academies to teach the national curriculum. That wouldn’t be so bad if it meant teaching the one introduced by Michael Gove in 2014, a vast improvement on its predecessor and pretty close to what we already teach. But she’s also announced that Labour is going to rewrite it, reverting to the failed skills-based approach that has turned Welsh education into a basket case. In addition to making schools teach ‘creativity’ and ‘problem solving’ – neither of which can be taught as stand-alone skills, according to the eminent cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham – Phillipson wants to add ‘speaking skills’, which she says ‘should be taken as seriously as reading and writing’.
This odd addition has been made at the behest of Peter Hyman, a senior adviser to Keir Starmer, who founded a free school in 2012 that placed ‘oracy’, a fancy term for ‘public speaking’, at the heart of its curriculum. But the school he set up has not been a success. Its Progress 8 score is negative, meaning the progress pupils make between 11 and 16 is below average, and its most recent Ofsted report said it ‘requires improvement’. The percentage of students who got a grade 5 or above in their English and maths GCSEs last year at the school was 45 per cent, compared with 93 per cent at Michaela, which also favours the knowledge-based approach. Yet the Labour party has decided that Hyman’s ‘oracy’ curriculum is the one that all state schools in England must follow.
This education policy has received far less attention than Labour’s plan to impose VAT on school fees, but it will affect 20 times as many children. It’s also something parents no longer able to afford school fees should be concerned about, since their children will be taught ‘speaking skills’ rather than, say, a foreign language. In addition, expect the curriculum in England’s state schools to be ‘decolonised’, i.e., colonised by the radical progressive left. Perhaps that’s why Labour is so untroubled by the prospect of 25 per cent of private-school pupils defecting to the state sector: all the more children to indoctrinate. Starmer’s proposal to lower the voting age to 16 begins to make more and more sense.
The Battle for Britain | 1 June 2024
The perils of going to Manchester United
Plodding up Wembley Way to the FA Cup Final at the weekend surrounded by a phalanx of well-refreshed Manchester United fans was not a savoury experience, but the game was something else. What was clear was how good United were, full of bite and high-throttle energy, ready to go for broke against the best team in the world, and playing in a way that hasn’t been seen all season. So Manchester City couldn’t pull off their ‘double-double’ – the League title and the Cup in two successive years. For the first time, United played for their manager, Erik ten Hag, and Pep Guardiola couldn’t do anything about it. On this occasion, the Dutchman showed superior tactical nous to outwit him.
You couldn’t blame Thomas Frank for coveting the United job but you do hope it doesn’t end in tears
Whether it’s enough to save his job is another matter. Jim Ratcliffe has been noticeably mute when offered the chance to support Ten Hag, so the decision to remove him has probably been made. Ratcliffe could get this very wrong, as Ineos’s sporting record, from cycling to sailing, is far from perfect. Who do the top branch want? And what sort of football do they want the team to play? Who will have to tackle the knotty dilemma of whether to accept a job offer at Old Trafford? Will it be Kieran McKenna (Ipswich), Thomas Frank (Brentford) or even England’s Gareth Southgate? There’s a big risk of ending up falling from a very great height, very quickly, possibly bringing your career to a brutal full stop.
McKenna has reportedly signed a contract keeping him at Ipswich, though I wouldn’t bank on his newly promoted club much enjoying life in the Premier League next season. You couldn’t blame Frank (who has the rare ability, as a middle-aged man, to pull off the V-neck sweater with nothing underneath look) for coveting the United job, of course. But you do hope it doesn’t end in tears.
Meanwhile, English rugby fans should be praying that manager Steve Borthwick finds it in himself to challenge the ruling about selecting players based overseas. The monumental flanker Jack Willis was jaw-droppingly fearsome in Toulouse’s epic victory over Leinster in the Champions Cup final in Dublin. It was one of the greatest games of rugby I have seen. Not a try was scored until extra time but the game could not have been more tense. And Willis, who joined the French aristocrats of the sport when Wasps collapsed, put in an extraordinary performance in defence. He was nearly as brilliant as Antoine Dupont, who was man of the match and is the best player in the world. What a loss that Willis won’t be able to tour with England to New Zealand this summer. Who wouldn’t want to see him take on the All Blacks?
Blink and you may have missed it, but British middle-distance running gets ever more dazzling. Scotland’s Josh Kerr took nearly a second off Steve Cram’s 39-year-old mile record in Oregon last weekend, beating his arch-rival Jakob Ingebrigtsen. Outside the Olympics, athletics is treated like some distasteful affliction, but these are exceptional times for the sport, every bit as inspiring as the golden age of Coe, Ovett and Cram himself. We have an eye-watering galaxy of talent to make the Olympic middle distance races quite unmissable, with Kerr poised to become a star of the Paris Games.
And if you’re searching for more excellence, look no further than Nelly Korda, a pre-eminent golfer about to tee off on the most important few days of her life at the Women’s US Open in Philadelphia. She is brilliant, beautiful, charming and has the best swing in the game (male players included). She has won six of her last seven tournaments and unless you are the partner or parent of one of her rivals, you can’t fail to be a fan.
Dear Mary: how do I stop my book club banging on about their grandchildren?
Q. At the Ludlow Piano Festival, during a Tyler Hay concert, my husband and I spotted a fascinating-looking couple who were fellow members of the audience. We longed to know who they were and are kicking ourselves that we never found out the identity of this charismatic pair. During the interval we could have approached them but didn’t want to seem pushy or pervy by just introducing ourselves. What could we have said?
– S.S., Abergavenny
A. ‘Sorry to bother you but do you happen to be a friend of Derek Duck? Oh… he gave us a jumper to return to someone he said would be at this concert but we stupidly can’t remember the name of whoever it is. We’ve asked all the other likely men here. By the way, I’m Sylvia Smug and this is my husband Cedric – and you are?’
Q. I am part of a ladies’ book club with many good friends. Recently, however, almost the entire duration is spent sharing photos of grandchildren along with discussions on their progress. I am yet to become a grandmother and now rather dread these evenings. I feign interest, yet it is flagging. How can I steer the conversation back to book matters without offence? – T.J., London SW6
A. Arrive first. As the others drift in, announce that you are longing to get off your chest an encounter you’ve just had with a plumber, but you’re aware you are meant to be talking about the book and so you have brought an oven timer so you don’t go on for more than three minutes. Finish your anecdote as the bell rings. When they start to talk about the grandchildren, say pleasantly: ‘Shall I set the timer again so we don’t get distracted?’
Q. Our eldest daughter, five, is due to start at a London day school in September. The only fly in the ointment is that contact details of the other parents have already been circulated and one mother has set up a WhatsApp group for mums. I really don’t want to join and be part of the competitiveness, nor the trivial details that will be shared, but my husband has cautioned me about appearing standoffish. How can I keep my distance?
– Name and address withheld
A. Most schools have an official PTA class rep who sends a weekly email with all the important info. A WhatsApp group for mums should be optional, but it is sometimes helpful for asking questions at short notice. Why not join, so you can use the group in an emergency, but mute the chat? Be extra friendly at the school gate and if anyone asks if you have read on the WhatsApp group about the latest rivalry issues, look blank and say you are hopeless with technology.
‘Grand and isolated’: The Wolseley City, reviewed
I am fretting about this restaurant column’s election coverage and then I alight on something superficially grand and lovely, which has been hollowed out and is now useless and barely able to function: a shell. It is the Wolseley 2 – the Wolseley City – and this is perfect.
I name it the election restaurant, and Tories should eat here while they still have their shirts
Few restaurants are important, though I treasure Martha Gellhorn’s description of an operating theatre for the wounded of the Spanish Civil War which was once a restaurant in a grand hotel. But was it any good? Tales of society folk eating are self-serving: real history happens nowhere near them, says the Marxist in me – and PR is, well, PR. But the Wolseley, which opened in a former car showroom by the Ritz in 2003, expressed London’s confidence, though in retrospect this confidence was mostly based on stolen Russian money, paid for with our pride. That Lamborghini? It’s a power station in the Urals, miniaturised, spray-painted orange and driving down the Cromwell Road to nowhere special.
Even so, it was fine: a grand café that sold bacon sandwiches and coffee cake to Lucian Freud and people who knew themselves to be normal, and that was its secret. For all its frontage it knew there is no life without variety, and because the staff were joyful the restaurant was too, and there’s a lesson here. I ate here very late, in a sympathetic rainstorm, the night Elizabeth II died, and it felt magical, even if – or perhaps because – it is named for an Edwardian motor company that hasn’t built a car for 49 years. Magic cannot be replicated by whim or greed. It doesn’t work like that.
The Wolseley changed ownership in 2020, and now belongs to Minor Hotels, a name whose irony I don’t have space to do justice to, because they are in the expansion business like McDonald’s. They opened this second branch near the monument to disaster in Pudding Lane, in another tall Edwardian building with a bronze ticking clock and Portland stone: Ozymandias speaks to Ozymandias near All Bar One.
The ceilings are lower than in the original Wolseley and the decoration is weirder: more gilded and self-conscious. This building was a bank, and then a department store, and at some point someone decided to decorate it in homage to ancient Egypt, but Art Deco, and the effect is to summon the fictional mid-century House of Fraser Hercule Poirot would visit for socks. That is, it’s fantastical and lonely, and as such, I name it the general election restaurant, and Tories should eat here while they still have their shirts.
It’s quiet on a weekend early evening, and perhaps this is the problem. The Wolseley needs all kind of people, and the City lacks that. The few full tables seem to be tourists who are marooned by fate. The menu is, as ever, a piece of everything. I have a delicate chicken soup but, as I have said before, you cannot buy good chicken soup because good chicken soup cannot be bought. My companion has the chicken schnitzel which, again, is fine: no better or worse than at the real – I mean other – Wolseley, which teaches me that this was never about food, but a hope that money cannot summon by itself. A grand salon without people is just the set of The Shining, and though I am not consumed with terror, that’s the closest description I can give.
Are you ready for the ‘Genny Lex’?
‘It sounds like Polari to me,’ said my husband, who can remember Julian and Sandy (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) on Round the Horne, 1965 to 1968. They used Polari, an assorted camp slang popular in the years when homosexual acts were still illegal.
It was the phrase Genny Lex that my husband had heard, popping up as a jocular name for the general election. This annoys people. On that old-fashioned social medium, X, someone with the handle bewilderedyorks posted: ‘*Opens Twitter* *Reads post about “the genny lex”* *Burns iPhone*.’
‘Right, if you’re gonna call it the gennylex, I’m calling the protagonists Richie Soons and The Starmeister General,’ wrote GlennyRodge, who has a reputation on X for humour.
Genny Lex, with its air of a personal name, has been floating about since 2022. On 20 October, Liz Truss resigned. Someone on Twitter mounted an opinion poll: ‘Genny lex?’ The answers were: Yes, 92.3 per cent; No, 7.7 per cent. There were 39 respondents.
But they were discussing an election, not its name. An attempt earlier that year had been to call the Platinum Jubilee the Platty Jubes. An even less successful attempt was to call the Queen’s funeral the statey funes. From the same stable came cozzie livs for cost of living.
Historically that stable must have been shared by Muriel Belcher, who ran the Colony Room Club. Her monstrous successor, Ian Board, would refer to the police as Lily Law, and even went so far as to give a name to his early morning hangover vomiting reflex as a Vera Vomit.
This was echoed in camp redoubts such as St Stephen’s House (Staggers) in Oxford, in the early 1970s, during A.N. Wilson’s time there, when it was ‘a Firbankian madhouse’. Inmates were known as Tawdry Audrey or Plum Tart.
A different thread (evident in bank holibobs) connects with that singular genius ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin (1911-2002), who described the trombone as ‘simbrant brass whose tones are an aggregale for the pitchy of sliding this barrel huffalo-dowder at intervold’. We now have upon us Glasto, Wimbo and the Parrie Limps, by when the Genny Lex will be done with.
Portrait of the Week: Sunak’s downpour, national service and the ‘triple lock plus’
Home
Parliament was dissolved, leaving no MPs until the general election on 4 July. With hours to go, Diane Abbott had the Labour whip restored to her, and Lucy Allan MP was suspended from the Conservative party for endorsing the Reform UK candidate for Telford. Among bills that were lost was one prohibiting the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 31 December 2008. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, had provided an abiding memory by announcing the election standing in heavy rain in Downing Street and making a speech as though it weren’t raining. The Conservatives suddenly said that everyone should do a form of national service at the age of 18. The Tories proposed adding to the triple lock for state pensions a promise that they would never incur income tax.
Sir Keir Starmer made a speech telling the world that his sisters and his uncle lived for many many years in Worthing but he was raised in Oxted, where it was easy to get pocket money ‘clearing stones for the local farmers’. He proposed ‘a Britain once more in the service of working people. Country first, party second’. He repeatedly used the word ‘change’. Labour confirmed its policy of immediately imposing VAT and business rates on private schools after the election. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said: ‘We certainly won’t be increasing income tax or national insurance if we win.’ In a letter to the Times, 121 business people, including Jimmy Wales and Tom Kerridge, endorsed Labour. Greater Manchester Police said it would take no further action over allegations concerning the sale of a council house by Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader. Labour promised that in five years’ time most NHS patients would have to wait less than 18 weeks to be treated.
In two days 515 migrants arrived in England in small boats; the total number for 2024 rose to more than 10,000, a greater rate of arrivals than ever before. Paula Vennells, the chief executive of the Post Office 2012-19, appeared for three days before the public Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, repeatedly weeping and reaching for a box of Kleenex as though it were Robinsons Barley Water at Wimbledon. She often admitted a lapse of memory, ignorance or a lack of understanding. Ofcom investigated Royal Mail’s record of delivering only 74.5 per cent first-class post within one working day. International Distribution Services, Royal Mail’s parent company, agreed to a £3.6 billion offer from the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. A Double Gloucester cheese was pursued wildly down steep, grassy Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire.
Abroad
The International Court of Justice, an organ of the UN, ordered that Israel must ‘immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah and any other action that could bring about ‘the physical destruction’ of the Palestinians. Hamas launched from Rafah perhaps eight rockets at the Tel Aviv area. Israel launched an air strike on the Tal al-Sultan area north-west of central Rafah, targeting two named Hamas leaders; but civilian fatalities were put at about 45, which Israel called a ‘tragic mishap’. Israeli tanks advanced into Rafah. The bodies of three more Israeli hostages were recovered from Jabalia, a week after the recovery of another three in Gaza; Israel says about 120 are still being held.
Russia killed at least 12 people when it attacked a DIY store called Epicentr K at Kharkiv with glide bombs. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visited Spain and Belgium. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of Nato, said that western powers should consider lifting restrictions on Ukraine striking inside Russia using the weaponry they supply. A Ukrainian drone hit a Russian radar station capable of tracking nuclear missiles at Orsk on the border with Kazakhstan. Russia is to build a small nuclear power station in Uzbekistan. A German military officer was jailed for three-and-a-half years for spying for Russia.
China held military drills in the skies and seas around Taiwan. More than 2,000 people were feared buried by a landslide in Papua New Guinea. A hospital in Delhi, where seven babies died in a fire, was operating without a valid licence, police said, and also lacked fire extinguishers. A fire in a gaming arcade in Rajkot city, Gujarat, killed 27 people. The Pope apologised for saying in a meeting with Italian bishops that homosexual men should not be students at seminaries because c’è già troppa frociaggine – ‘there’s enough poofery already’. CSH
Could Michael Gove support Labour?
Now that Sir Keir Starmer has reaffirmed he is a socialist, interviewers are asking other leading Labour figures if they are too. The shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, explains he is a Christian socialist, which makes me want to go back to Sir Keir, an unbeliever, and ask him how he thinks his atheist socialism differs from Marxism. Socialism is in essence an economic doctrine about the common ownership of (to use the famous Clause 4 wording) ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange’. How does Sir Keir believe that common ownership should be achieved? He may not want to say. It would be equally reasonable – and equally awkward politically – to ask Rishi Sunak whether he is a capitalist. I should like to know, because their answers might clarify the current confusion in which Tories hint at approval of socialist principles and Labour of capitalist ones, without quite saying what they mean.
I join the tributes to Michael Gove as he leaves parliament. He has been the longest-serving British cabinet minister since Lord Hailsham left in 1987, and one of the subtlest, most innovative and (in private) funniest. I must admit, though, to a sense of frustration. Michael is opaque, and likes to be. He is also, I suspect, ‘on a journey’. He might not go so far as to join the Labour party, but I would not be at all surprised if he were soon tasked by a Labour government with some interesting role designed to weaken Tory morale yet further – chairing the BBC, perhaps?
As we took our places at Frank Field’s funeral in Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, on Wednesday last week, rumour of an election announcement began to circulate. Frank would have enjoyed that. I found myself sitting next to Wes Streeting, with Ben Bradshaw and Dame Margaret Hodge nearby, and said I was pleased to see Labour represented since Frank’s relationship with his former party had ended in acrimony. He grinned and explained: ‘We’re here by invitation.’ Uniquely – in my experience – this was a funeral to which the congregation had been bidden by the deceased, Frank having left a list. So there was particular interest in who was not present e.g. Sir Tony Blair, and Jeremy Corbyn whom, in a moment of madness, Frank had nominated for the Labour leadership contest of 2015. Those present included Mr Speaker Hoyle, Archbishop George Carey, the Marquess of Salisbury, and the man who runs the Laughing Halibut, Frank’s favoured fish-and-chip shop in Strutton Ground. It was a touching Anglo-Catholic occasion, Frank being catholic in the ecclesiastical and vernacular senses.
The next day, I took the train to Chippenham for the memorial service of Captain Ian Farquhar, Master of the Beaufort Hunt for 34 years, relinquishing the horn after 26 of them. The church at Badminton, a rural version of St Martin-in-the-Fields, was brimful with 300 people (largely invisible in the box pews). Outside were 700 more, listening to loudspeakers. The Queen was there, sharing a pew with her former husband, Andrew Parker Bowles. Staring at the back of my head was Henry, 1st Duke of Beaufort, as rendered by Grinling Gibbons, and I faced a row of men who, I quickly worked out by their stiff gait and respectful but slightly uneasy way of wearing dark suits, were retired hunt servants. Two of Ian’s granddaughters recited ‘Running on’ by W.H. Ogilvie and one of his daughters sang ‘Danny Boy’. Ann Mallalieu read the passage from Revelation about ‘the first heaven and the first earth’, and it occurred to me that the phrase ‘the first earth’ would contain a different meaning for a man like Ian who worked with hounds. It would be hard to think of an occasion so full of people to whom modern electoral politics offers almost nothing and yet who are essential England.
The European Union Entry-Exit System (EES) for non-EU citizens is insisting, from October, that those wishing to get the Eurostar from St Pancras must first be fingerprinted and upload a photograph there before boarding the train. This will be a great bore: there will be queues for the 49 booths erected for the purpose. Each victim will have to pay €7. Even the French who, in principle, are not upset by causing the British inconvenience, are worrying about the potential delays. I have a partial solution (not uninfluenced by the fact that we live in East Sussex). Because of its losses during Covid, Eurostar suspended the international elements of two stations – Ebbsfleet and Ashford – which had until then been part of the promised regeneration of Kent. It half-promised they would return in 2025. Now is surely the moment to make good on this, putting up booths at those two stations which will process you much faster than the London terminal and offering once more, from Ashford, the quickest possible train journey to France. I wonder, by the way, if the EES problem influenced Rishi Sunak’s decision to call the election earlier than expected. New pictures of hours-long waits shortly before an autumn polling day would have been the least helpful way of reminding voters about Brexit.
P.S. Wise after the event, I add three points about Mr Sunak’s soaking outside Downing Street. 1) It might have looked a bit pompous if an official had held an umbrella over the Prime Minister as he spoke, but mightn’t it have been rather touching if his wife had done so? 2) If Mr Sunak was insisting on braving the elements unprotected, he would have done much better not to wear a lightweight suit which let the water sink straight in. The stout worsteds that prime ministers such as Churchill or Harold Macmillan wore, come rain or shine, were quite heavy enough to repel water for ten minutes. 3) Why do prime ministers now feel they must announce elections outside Downing Street and gild the news with a speech from a lectern? This is an unnecessary 21st-century innovation, asking for trouble.
What Labour lacks
Has Keir Starmer promised anything so far, during this general election, that will make anyone’s life significantly better? The clearest pledge is to impose VAT on independent schools and it’s hard to see how this benefits anyone. Many of the smaller schools will have to close and others will be forced to cut bursaries. The money raised is intended by Labour to increase the number of state-school teachers, but it will do this by just 1 per cent – and, even then, this non-ambition is to be staggered over a five-year period. When it comes to firm commitments this is about all Labour has to offer.
Starmer should be using his opinion poll lead to claim a democratic mandate for difficult reforms
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, is doing his best to sound as if he has a reforming agenda. He has declared that within five years no one will be waiting more than 18 weeks for an operation. But isn’t this just a way of preparing us to accept a failing NHS for another five years? Streeting has no coherent policy for NHS improvement. Any plan will take at least a year to devise and another two years to implement.
The 18-week NHS pledge was anyway first made by John Reid when he was Tony Blair’s health secretary as part of the 2004 NHS improvement plan.
What Streeting’s pledge really shows is the staggering decline of ambition in the Labour party. It stands to inherit an NHS that costs £170 billion a year, twice as much as it did under Reid, so why would it need until 2029 to achieve what Labour once promised by 2008?
A sense of inevitability seems to have settled over the election campaign. Conservative proposals are seen as the insincere and desperate attempts of a doomed government and Labour ideas are increasingly accepted as the ‘change’ we need. In fact, Labour offers nothing new. When Streeting says he will use private-sector capacity to cut waiting lists, he is simply talking about what has been done for a quarter of a century.
From the moment she enters No. 11 Downing Street, Rachel Reeves will find herself besieged by demands from unions, quangos and all the many clients of the state who expect a Labour win to mean payday. Will Reeves and Starmer really keep public spending within the limits set by the present government’s economic plans? It is extremely hard to imagine an incoming Labour government with nothing to offer its political friends. The Blair government explicitly sided with the users of public services, not the providers. Starmer does not.
The policies already announced by Labour will be seriously expensive and none more so than the party’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030. This is a ludicrously unworkable idea. The plan to spend £28 billion a year on green programmes has been abandoned and so the cost will end up falling heavily on energy consumers. Of course there is no admission from Labour that this is the case.
Labour has promised us a fully costed spending programme before the campaign is out, and when it arrives investors in UK government debt will be poring over it keenly. Labour was quick to present the bond market as a font of great wisdom when it was delivering a verdict on Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget two years ago. Yet now it insists that, like Truss, it will find cash by ‘growing the economy’. Labour will have to be prepared for the possibility that markets may take issue with their plans, too.
There are only two ways to improve public services: to give them more money or to reform them. The Tories lazily took the first option on everything but schools. Labour will not be able to borrow more money, which means that it must embrace reform. So why does it seem so set on dismantling any Tory successes and assuaging its own special-interest groups? How will Reeves grow the economy? By offering stability, she says – a promise that would be more credible had she not dangled, then axed, the £28 billion-a-year economic policy.
Professor John Curtice, one of Britain’s best-known psephologists, says there is a 99 per cent chance of a Labour victory. Perhaps he is right. But for the next few weeks, the Labour party should have the decency to at least go through the motions of auditioning for the right to govern. Starmer could and should be using his massive opinion poll lead to claim a democratic mandate for the difficult reforms he must enact, but that he may struggle to get past the vested interests in his party.
The fact that Starmer is so timid at this stage in the election, and with this sort of lead, is a bad sign. The danger is that a Tory implosion will give him a huge majority that will encourage him to avoid the hard thinking that Blair was, in the end, forced to do. Those who cast their vote for Conservatives in the next election will not do so in the expectation of a Sunak victory but to try to achieve a healthier balance of power.
The TikTok stars taking on the Tories
‘Sorry to be breaking into your usual politics-free feed,’ chirrups Rishi Sunak in his first-ever TikTok video. He is awkward, understandably. TikTok is enemy territory for the Tories. What most users learn about the Conservatives is usually damning, from left and right.
‘I think the Tory party deserves to die,’ says Jess Gill, who with 1.2 million ‘likes’ has a larger TikTok following than the party she wants dead. ‘They’ve betrayed Britain. On all fronts, but particularly immigration. We have an extremist immigration policy that is ruining this country.’ She is from Bolton and commutes from Reading to King’s College London on the two days she has to go in to study. Her videos denounce those who ‘simp for’ (or ‘defer to’) the Tories.
The old adage is you win elections by seizing the centre ground. That’s not how you win TikTok
Such videos rarely last as long as a minute, but Ofcom says TikTok is now a far greater news provider than any newspaper. At the last general election, TikTok didn’t even appear in surveys about news sources. Now almost a third of young people use the platform to get news, as do 10 per cent of Britons. It’s designed to be addictive and it succeeds. For its users, TikTok has replaced television. Surveys suggest that the average young user watches its videos for about an hour a day.
The Tories and Labour have long hesitated to join but now both parties have TikTok accounts. Sunak struggles with the medium and the message. His debut 50-second video was about his plans to conscript teenagers, claiming that they could ‘choose’ the military. That isn’t true. They can apply, but it’s the military that will pick the most able 5 per cent. Most will end up doing community service – which TikTokers have been quick to point out. Over the next few weeks, the Prime Minister will have to work out how to sell his other youth policies, such as forcing teenagers to study maths until 18.
Labour’s response was a Shrek meme that accused Sunak of throwing children into the army meat-grinder. The party seems to have captured the anarchic tone of the app a little better (it has recently hired a TikTok adviser). Abroad, several popular politicians can credit the platform for their rise, from the French right-winger Jordan Bardella to Argentina’s Javier Milei. Upstart parties are making liberal use of TikTok in next week’s European parliament elections.
There’s a price to not being on it too. Olaf Scholz, the 65-year-old German Chancellor, was recently chastised by an activist in Dresden for his party having no TikTok presence. The far-right AfD’s account, meanwhile, has 420,000 followers. The TikTok generation, he was told, is becoming the AfD generation. Nigel Farage and Reform have been using the app for months: Farage has a personal following of almost 600,000.
But TikTok users listen to their peers more than politicians – and official parties
tend to struggle with this. In Australia’s recent referendum on a constitutional ‘voice’ for Aboriginals, videos from Fair Australia (an unofficial No campaign) had 20 million plays overall, compared with about a million on the two official pro-voice accounts.
Both Labour and the Tories are understood to be on the hunt for political influencers or ‘spinfluencers’. But those who are politically active on TikTok say Starmer isn’t left-wing enough and Sunak isn’t right-wing enough. The old adage is that you win elections by seizing the centre ground. That’s not how you win TikTok.
Take Harry, a 23-year-old from Leicester who runs the account @thechampagne_socialist. His videos have been liked 14 million times. He voted for Keir Starmer to be Labour leader but became disillusioned after Starmer refused to back the striking doctors and train drivers. ‘That was a real turning point,’ he says. As you might expect, he’s no fan of Sunak either. ‘Look at the demonising of the disabled, the idea that there’s a “sick-note culture”. Bro, that’s not a thing. We’re having to spend £69 billion a year on health and sickness disabilities because we’ve had austerity for 14 years and they’ve gutted living standards.’
Chris Kunzler is another left-wing influencer, whose videos have been liked 13 million times. He tends to post about the war in Gaza and thinks that Labour has disgraced itself on the issue. ‘There’s been a complete failure to offer opposition on anything,’ he says. Would he respond to an approach from Labour HQ? ‘Absolutely not. I couldn’t say yes to their current policy on Israel and a lot of other social issues such as trans rights. On that, they’re the same as the Tories; on austerity, exactly the same as the Tories.’ He says he would have been ‘much more happy to work with a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour’.
The app might cause the two leaders trouble in other ways. A spoof clip of the Prime Minister’s voice – AI-generated – declaring that he could not care less ‘about energy bills being over £3,000’ has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Only one conservative party has cracked TikTok: the New Zealand National party, which triumphed last autumn. Its videos were viewed ten times more than those of the country’s Labour party, and mostly by the young. Sean Topham, the party’s TikTok guru, now runs an agency that claims to have ‘swung more elections than Russia’. He says the lesson is simple: ‘TikTok is the main online battleground these days. Good videos can reach millions very quickly and it’s extremely effective. Politicians need to embrace the different styles, trends, aesthetics of TikTok. It’s not like Facebook at all.’
There won’t be time, in this campaign, for any Westminster party to master TikTok. Given that polls show under-25s supporting Labour over the Tories by a ratio of six to one, the TikTok generation may be lost to Sunak. But if Starmer gets into power, he may find TikTok no more welcoming to his government than it has been to the Tories. Sunak and Starmer want the influencers – but the influencers don’t really want them.
Project Dunkirk: Rishi Sunak’s real election strategy
Since Rishi Sunak called the election last week, Tory MPs have been in a state of discombobulation. ‘It’s an absolutely crazy decision,’ pronounces a minister, after seven days of chewing it over. ‘It is the dumbest thing that has ever happened.’ To most Conservatives, every aspect of the campaign has seemed eccentric, even self-defeating – from Sunak’s rain-drenched announcement speech to his visit to the Titanic Quarter in Belfast.
The policy announcements, moreover, seemed designed to further alienate young voters. The plan for mandatory national service for 18-year-olds – 95 per cent of which would consist of compulsory ‘volunteering’ at weekends – is an idea which had never been seriously discussed at any point in 14 years of Tory or coalition government. Keir Starmer likened it to a ‘teenage Dad’s Army’. ‘It was something we actually joked they might do,’ says a Labour aide.
Isaac Levido keeps morale up by handing out a cuddly toy koala to the hardest workers
Along with conscription for the young there were the proposed tax breaks for pensioners. Only at this point did a coherent but concerning pattern become apparent: this is certainly a strategy, but it is not aimed towards victory. The goal is crash-landing while retaining a core ‘base’ – now defined as the over-65s.
Viewed this way, Sunak’s recent manoeuvres make a kind of sense. Victory would have required a one-nation strategy to attract all kinds of voters – and cautious policies that the Tories would actually implement. But winning would mean taking 350 seats while current polls suggest the Tories are heading to win about 100. ‘So we can guess what has happened,’ says one former cabinet member. ‘Rishi has been told by his strategists: you can’t win this. But you can lose with 200 MPs rather than 100 by love-bombing the pensioners – even if it goes against your own politics.’
Running the day-to-day campaign is Isaac Levido, a key player in Boris Johnson’s 2019 win, who keeps morale up by handing out a cuddly toy koala to the hardest workers. But while he calls the shots on the campaign, the decision to call the election was entirely Sunak’s – and it’s emerging that decision was driven in part by the fear that the Rwanda scheme was heading for a crunch point that could end up splitting the party.
Sunak had pledged that deportations would start in July and he’d see off any legal challenge. But as the date drew nearer, a challenge from the European Convention on Human Rights looked inevitable. That would force Sunak into making the move towards exiting the ECHR.
Sunak was said to be open to that idea, but it would have prompted other senior Tories to quit. There were concerns that Alex Chalk would resign as Justice Secretary if the ECHR was overridden, as could Victoria Prentis as attorney-general. ‘They are wets,’ explains one senior minister. ‘But this could have split the party in two and we’d have had an election due to Tory collapse,’ says another former cabinet member. ‘That’s why Rishi called an election.’
Whatever the real explanation, there is a consensus among the 346 Tory MPs that they will be doing well if 200 of them return after the election. This would still mean a Labour landslide, but it would give the party a fighting chance of returning to power in five or ten years. ‘If we can fare better than we did in 1997 when we won 165 seats, we will be doing OK,’ says one minister. Privately, some are dubbing this the 200-seat strategy. A pollster refers to it as the ‘Dunkirk strategy’ – to accept defeat and seek to minimise losses. Viewed this way, survival is victory.
This explains why the Tories are the ones churning out headline-grabbing (if so far uninspired) initiatives, while Labour is saying nothing and nailing expectations to the floor. Starmer has been running a ‘Ming vase’ strategy, trying not to drop his 20-point opinion poll lead by saying or doing anything that might scare or upset voters. When Theresa May was expected to win in a landslide in 2017, she sought a mandate for change. Starmer, by contrast, is using his lead as an excuse to say nothing. ‘It would not shock me if all the stuff we have in the manifesto is what we have said before,’ says one party figure.
The Tories’ hope is that they will soon start to look energetic and radical in comparison to the risk-averse Starmer. But Tony Blair ran a similarly wide strategy, keeping it vague – and duly won three landslide majorities. At times it seems Starmer is trying to exhume the ‘Cool Britannia’ of the mid-1990s. This high-flying lawyer is now giving speeches about how he is, in fact, a country boy who had to share a football field with grazing cows. There is no attempt to pitch himself at Labour’s core vote: his campaign seems directed at Middle England.
Once, a Tory core-vote strategy would have focused on the shires or younger, aspirational voters. But age has replaced social class as the big divider in UK politics. This is partly due to demographic changes: a larger number of pensioners depend on the taxes of a relatively small number of workers. The over-fifties already constitute the majority of those who are likely to cast a vote on 4 July. So Sunak, 44, is junking some of his own politics, which tend to favour youthful entrepreneurialism, and instead playing to the generation above him.
At the 2019 election, the Tories were ahead with these voters by more than 40 points – which helps explain why Johnson won such a large majority. That lead has diminished. Richard Tice’s Reform party is winning over some of this cohort. Reform has 12 per cent of the vote nationally, but is far more popular among the over-fifties. That’s playing on Tory minds.
This week, Conservative MPs received a message on WhatsApp from one of the party’s campaign coordinators: ‘Squeezing Reform is the top priority so I encourage everyone once the delivery dash pre-expenses is finished, to pivot to canvassing in areas with a high Con/Reform audience.’
This approach is a far cry from the ‘Let Rishi be Rishi’ strategy of the last Tory party conference, when the Prime Minister said he would defend himself against a 30-year failed consensus. Now he’s gone from tech bro to pensioner whisperer. ‘He’s a young Prime Minister – not just his age but how he dresses. The hoodies, the bracelets,’ argues one former cabinet colleague. ‘He hated Boris’s plans to bribe the elderly and went all-out against them. So he’s now saying the opposite of what he thinks.’
There is little to suggest Sunak has a longstanding interest in national service – as chancellor he slashed the budget for the ‘national citizen service’ that was introduced by David Cameron by two thirds. When Johnson wanted to fund care homes, Sunak was appalled, saying that it subsidised the wealthy without in practice adding any capacity. He didn’t threaten to resign but said he would have to push up taxes to fund the idea, thinking Johnson would back down. He didn’t.
Labour looks on with some bemusement. It views the election so far as a comedy of Tory errors, with its own side subjected to minimal scrutiny. The plan is that by making no specific new pledges, it will offer as few hostages to fortune as possible. ‘It is a tough, tough message – yes, you want to shout about policy but discipline has to reign,’ says an aide who works with Labour’s campaign director Morgan McSweeney. ‘We have known from day one where we need to go to win.’ The Labour staffer’s best reward, according to the aide, is ‘a nod and well done from Pat [McFadden, Labour campaign co-ordinator] – never to be confused with a ray of sunshine’.
Starmer is presenting himself as patriotic and stable, distinguished more by what he doesn’t want to do. This is in marked contrast to the Conservatives’ lavish pledges. ‘The Tories are going hell for leather – they have promised the best part of £70 million already in the campaign,’ says a Labour aide. ‘It is the Corbyn 2019 approach. Jeremy Hunt has transformed into Jeremy Corbyn.’
The first debate has been called for next week. Reform had wanted Nigel Farage to represent them in any showdowns – but there seems little chance of that now that the former Ukip leader has said he won’t be standing and that his heart lies across the Atlantic with Donald Trump. So in the meantime the more restrained Richard Tice must seek to channel his inner Farage as much as he can. Farage takes the view – as do many in Reform – that the real election they need to focus on is the one after this. Reform is not necessarily looking for MPs but for a voter base: ideally 15 per cent of the electorate.
Then we have Ed Davey, the obscure Liberal Democrat leader whose main contribution to the campaign so far has been posing on (and falling off) a paddleboard. The party’s plan is to pitch him – in the words of one Lib Dem aide – as ‘a centrist dad’. It wants to cut through its small party disadvantage by having him out on the campaign ‘having fun’, being photographed in the sea or frolicking in fields. ‘Ed is enjoying the moment,’ says a member of his team. Of the Lib Dems’ top 80 target seats, more than 70 are held by Tories.
At a briefing for Lib Dem aides in Pimlico two days before the election was called, staff were told about their new target voter: Waitrose Woman. She lives in the Blue Wall and enjoys dog walking, Countryfile and the chef James Martin. It is the Lib Dem campaigner’s job to spend the next few weeks wooing her. If the Tories do melt down, constituencies that have only ever been blue – such as Jeremy Hunt’s South West Surrey and the seats of the departing Dominic Raab and Michael Gove – could finally fall to Lib Dems. Yet the Lib Dems fear that the ‘Surrey shufflers’ – those who have moved from the big smoke to home counties suburbia – are more likely to vote Labour.
After just a week of electioneering, the party leaders have adopted their personas and strategies, with varying degrees of plausibility. But the way the campaign is being fought suggests that this is not so much a battle about who will govern Britain. Rather, it is about the scale of the expected Labour victory.
An exclusive look at Graham Linehan’s Father Ted musical
The tree-lined streets of Rotherhithe are an odd place to unveil a West End musical. But this is a suitably odd situation. Graham Linehan – lauded comedy writer turned culture warrior – is about to unveil what he calls ‘a musical that may never be seen’.
For much of the past 30 years, the idea of turning Father Ted, cult sitcom of the 1990s, into a West End musical would have seemed a hot prospect – certainly to the legions of nerdy, largely male fans who still stream episodes decades later. Once upon a time, it looked destined for Shaftesbury Avenue, backed by one of the biggest names in theatre. Now it might be going nowhere.
The company which produced Father Ted offered Linehan £200,000 to take his name off the project
When we meet at his east London apartment, Linehan concedes that, by doing an impromptu read-through, I may end up as one of the last members of the small club of people who have ‘seen’ the show. Father Ted: The Final Episode may be almost oven-ready – songs included – but a Mexican stand-off between Linehan and his former producers means it’s stuck in purgatory.
Never one to hold his tongue, Linehan is eager to air his side of the story. Last month, he launched a social media campaign calling on his former backers to #FreeFatherTed and allow the show to be performed. But before we get to that, I have a bigger question: is it any good?
As he projects the script on to his giant television, Linehan fizzes with energy – impressive for a man just back from a speaking tour of Australia. I’ve barely sat down when he is off at the pace of a racing commentator, assigning every character in the opening scene (an assortment of feuding cardinals in the Vatican) various Dublin lilts.
Pretty soon, the gags are flowing. We’re back on Craggy Island – the fictional Atlantic outpost where Father Ted is set, where life is three parts slapstick and one part Samuel Beckett – and the priests, Ted, Dougal and Jack, are as lovably hopeless as ever. It seems obvious to say, given who wrote it, but the first realisation is just how recognisably Father Ted the whole thing is. There are, of course, callbacks galore, but Linehan is clear it was written for more than just fan service. ‘We wanted to give Ted a decent story and a good ending, given how sadly the original show ended,’ he says – referencing the death of its lead actor, Dermot Morgan, who suffered a fatal heart attack aged 45, one day after wrapping up filming.
Then there are the songs. Back in the more optimistic days of 2018, Linehan recruited his old friend and occasional collaborator Neil Hannon (face of the pop band the Divine Comedy) to write most of them. They are, in a word, excellent, reminiscent of the similarly exuberant work of Tim Minchin or Danny Elfman.
So why, then, is this musical stuck in limbo? Like many things in the culture war, it is a long and contested story. But both Linehan and his detractors would agree it largely boils down to one thing: his decision, in 2018, to take a public (and strident) position on questions around limiting access to single-sex spaces for transgender women.
Within months, Linehan’s public image had changed. No longer the affable comic who used social media to say fashionable things about the NHS, he was now – in the eyes of his detractors – a bigoted transphobe seeking to sow division. Naturally, this became a point of concern for the musical’s two major backers – West End supremo Sonia Friedman and the comedy mogul Jimmy Mulville.
In the eyes of his detractors, he was a bigoted transphobe. ‘I was told I was on the wrong side of history’
Early in 2020, Linehan recalls being summoned to Friedman’s office for a discussion about toning down his social media positions. ‘I had already been getting a lot of pressure at this point about what I was saying,’ he tells me. ‘Then she said something that really triggered me and we ended up having a full on row. She said I was on the wrong side of history – and that really irked me.’
Unable to reach a compromise, Mulville, whose company produced the original Father Ted television series, made Linehan a bold offer: £200,000 to take his name off the project.
Was Linehan ever tempted to take the deal? ‘I was thinking about it for a while and we even started working on a statement with Jimmy about me stepping back.’ Then he found out that the £200,000 would be an advance on his royalties. ‘That is when I said no way,’ he says. ‘I told them that if they’re firing me from my own show, they should be paying from their own royalties, not from mine.’
At this point, debating the rights and wrongs of Linehan’s stances feels as intractable as arguing about Israel-Palestine with Ken Loach or vegetarianism with Morrissey. When we touch on the topic, he points out – rightly – that some of his positions have been vindicated: such as opposing the use of puberty blockers for gender-questioning children. Yet his blunderbuss attacks on many of his showbusiness colleagues (including calling them ‘groomers’) continue to raise eyebrows.‘If I have ever let my emotions get the better of me, it’s because I get so confused as to why people aren’t with me on this stuff,’ he says. ‘My ability to carry on a civil discourse is really tested when I am constantly under attack.’ Still, he rejects the assessment of his former colleagues that there is wrong on both sides of this particular spat.
Should he have just taken the money and called it a truce? Telephone calls to theatre insiders throw up a pretty incredulous response. While some musicals may make millions, they say, guessing which ones will be profitable is a tough call. ‘If you are ever offered money up front, you take it,’ summarises one producer.
But there are questions, too, about why the project would have been so difficult. As Linehan points out, similar controversies around J.K. Rowling (who is also routinely branded a Terf, or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’) haven’t dented the success of the Harry Potter stage play.
Could the show have been disrupted by demonstrators? Probably not: the West End has ramped up its security after protestors from Just Stop Oil managed to halt a performance of Les Misérables last year. The activists have since been convicted of aggravated trespass, having cost the show’s producers £60,000, and are due for sentencing.
Linehan has a more cynical assessment of it all. He thinks that Hat Trick Productions, Mulville’s multi-million-pound comedy company, pulled the show due to industry politics. ‘He doesn’t want to have the Derry Girls walking out in protest,’ he says. The show was a huge hit for Hat Trick, and one of its lead actresses, Nicola Coughlan, is a big advocate for gender politics. ‘I don’t think Jimmy actually believes any of this stuff about gender,’ he says. Instead, he suggests, Hat Trick is looking after its bottom line.
Speaking over the telephone, Mulville gives his assessment of the situation. ‘If you’d have told me six years ago, this would happen then I wouldn’t have believed you,’ he says with a sigh. The decision to pull the plug wasn’t anything to do with Linehan’s views, he insists, but due to the relationship with his former partners souring. Friedman confirmed that her company was no longer looking to produce the show, but declined to offer any comment.
Might the musical eventually see the light of day? In the immediate term, there are some small practical obstacles: Hannon, the show’s songwriter, sold some of the music for Father Ted to the makers of last year’s Wonka movie. For Linehan, though, the only way forward is for his former partners to sell (or give up) their stake in the vehicle. Until then, he says, there will be no return to Craggy Island. ‘The only way it could happen is if I die. And I’m definitely going to put something in my will that this show can’t be made in that case.’
If nothing else, it all seems a little rough on Ted Crilly: the hapless priest for whom controversy was – until recently – an alien concept. Knowing that the musical was written to give Linehan’s most-loved creation a satisfying ending – thanks to a surprise twist that he insists I keep secret – is rather galling. Does he ever feel guilty for Ted?
‘Absolutely I do,’ he says. He pauses for a few beats, sounding notably softer now we’ve moved on from the culture wars. ‘This show was meant to be about showing people the real character, which is a frustrated man who gave his life over to something that he shouldn’t have done.’
In Ted’s case, he says, that was the Catholic Church. Any similarity with Linehan’s story is, as they say in the television business, purely coincidental.
Let the Lemon Twigs pour warm syrup into your ears
Grade: A
If you enjoy the sensation of having warm, jangly syrup poured directly into your ear, then this is probably the summer album for you. You might think that syrup cannot, by definition, be jangly. But imagine treacle with popping candy in it – poured into your ear in a kindly manner by a smiling young man.
This Long Island sibling duo have been honing their pastiche for eight years or so and here reference almost every power-pop band that ever existed, from the Byrds via the dB’s to Teenage Fanclub, but also taking in the winsome pop which dominated our charts before the Beatles came along (but post the advent of rock’n’roll) – as well as many less cool contributors to the genre, such as Herman’s Hermits and, gawd help us, Wings. They wave their Rickenbackers about on the superb ‘My Golden Years’ and do a passable imitation of Chris Stamey on ‘How Can I Love Her More’.
‘Peppermint Roses’ and ‘Church Bells’ are Revolver-era Beatles, while the doo-wop ‘In the Eyes of the Girl’ is their affectionate, not to say utterly sappy, take on Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys. They get away with this back catalogue plundering largely because everyone is at it these days, but more importantly because they have a knack for melody which predisposes one to forgive them.
The band they most remind me of is their fellow out-of-town New Yorkers, the Gigolo Aunts, who were also able to mix crunch with sappiness – but the Gigolo Aunts possessed a little edge. The Lemon Twigs do not know what edge is, and would not know what to do with it if they suddenly found it.
I worry Romesh Ranganathan might not have enough work
Let’s say, for the purposes of this joke, that I was recently staying in a hotel and kept hearing through the wall a voice shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ At first I assumed it was someone having sex – but I later found out that the next-door room was occupied by Romesh Ranganathan’s agent.
This year’s Comic Relief featured a W1A sketch where one of the gags was about how Ranganathan now presents everything on television. But the truth is, apart from that sketch, his only TV gigs so far this year have been presenting The Weakest Link, presenting the Baftas, co-presenting Rob & Romesh Vs…, co-writing and starring in the sitcom Avoidance as well as guest appearances on QI and Would I Lie to You?. (Then again, he has been preparing for his stand-up arena tour, which started last week.)
Most of the time, Ranganathan was only a Panana hat away from being a bog-standard travel presenter
It was therefore high time for the return of his travel-series-with-a-difference, The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan, in which he goes to countries not generally thought of as tourist paradises to see if the scepticism about them – including his own – is justified.
Or at least, that’s the pitch, because the shows themselves are a lot more artful than that, thanks to their frank embrace of cakeism. On the face of it, Ranganathan’s scepticism extends to the whole notion of celebrity travelogues. The programme, for instance, began with a knowing pastiche of their usual introductions, especially the sort of ringing questions whose answers are unlikely to surprise us: ‘Is Uganda all about Idi Amin? Is Madagascar full of animated talking lions?’ Yet, once he was in Uganda for the first episode proper, the scepticism became much more sporadic.
Granted, he was understandably amused to find that the source of the Nile is now sponsored by a beer company. He later visited what ‘has been described by people who are almost certainly wrong as the world’s most powerful waterfall’.
Most of the time, however, he was only a Panama hat away from performing the role of a bog-standard travel presenter: marvelling at the scenery, pretending that he thought he ‘was actually going to die’ while white-water rafting and being rubbish at basket-weaving. There was also the inevitable trek through a wildlife trail which (like most of them in my experience) was notable for its total lack of wildlife. Ranganathan’s guide was a Ugandan woman called Alex, who laughed gamely, if a little wearily, at his many jokes and responded gamely, if a little wearily, to his many inquiries about Idi Amin. (Another example of Ranganathan’s cakeism was that he both declared how silly it is to keep banging on about Amin and kept banging on about Amin.) Where she wouldn’t play ball was in their discussion about Uganda’s new, ferociously anti-gay legislation. ‘I think it represents what we believe as a people,’ she told Ranganathan, who was even more aghast to discover that this was probably true – that most Ugandans do seem to be proud of laws that have apparently led to, among other things, the widespread ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians.
Ranganathan didn’t note the dark irony that his (surely righteous) objections represent an old-school colonial belief in the superiority of European values. Nonetheless, he ended his trip obviously, even tearfully troubled by the contradiction between the ‘lovely’ Ugandans he’d met and their support for a ‘disgusting’ decision to ‘make it illegal for people to be who they are’. After a programme that, while perfectly enjoyable, hadn’t always made it easy to tell when Ranganathan was reacting naturally and when he was just playing the part of a travel presenter, this felt almost joltingly authentic.
All of which leaves less room in this column than it deserves for The Sympathizer, a classy new series from HBO that offers the ever-reliable pleasure of being intriguingly tangled and straightforwardly exciting at the same time.
The setting for the opening episode was Saigon in the terrifying weeks, and then days, leading up to its capture by North Vietnam in 1975. The main character, known only as the Captain, is a communist spy working for the secret police in the South. Or maybe a secret policeman in the South pretending to be a communist spy working for the North. Either way, it already looks as if it’s going to be a lot of sophisticated fun finding out which.
Less sophisticated, mind you, is Robert Downey Jr’s performance as the American éminence grise in the city. Chewing a cigar and the scenery with equal vigour, Downey gurns and mugs his way through his every appearance.
On the one hand, the sight of him in full bonkers flow has a certain brazen charm. On the other, in a show that otherwise seems to be aiming for nuance and complexity, his casting feels mystifying – or would do if the closing credits hadn’t revealed that he’s also an executive producer.
Amazingly sloppy: Romeo & Juliet, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed
Romeo & Juliet is Shakespeare with power cuts. The lighting in Jamie Lloyd’s cheerless production keeps shutting down, perhaps deliberately. The show stars Tom Holland (also known as Spider-Man) whose home in Verona resembles a sound studio that’s just been burgled. There’s nothing in it apart from a few microphones on metal stands. He and his mates, all dressed in hoodies and black jeans, deliver their lines without feeling or energy as if recording the text for an audiobook. Some of them appear to misunderstand the verse.
Shakespeare’s most thrilling romance has been turned into a sexless bore
When not muttering their lines they stare accusingly into the middle distance, like catwalk models. Then a power cut strikes. This indicates a swordfight, apparently, and it goes like this. The yelping characters are busy trading insults and daring their opponents to ‘draw’ their swords (even though no one carries a weapon). Then the theatre is plunged into darkness. A tense silence follows. Then the lights spring back on and several of the swordsmen are sporting dollops of jam across their tummies. And they’re screaming like babies. Not convincing.
An overhead screen is used to project chunks of the play that have been pre-recorded in the theatre’s scruffy backstage areas. There’s a speech on a roof, a bit of dialogue in a dingy corridor and a soliloquy up a fire-escape. The director hasn’t bothered to adjust the lighting so these scenes look like raw footage from a war zone. Very lazy. Or very thrifty, perhaps.
No money was spent on sets, props, make-up or wigs. Mercutio, played by Joshua-Alexander Williams, styles his hair in fist-sized bunches that look like Mickey Mouse ears. Michael Balogun (Friar Laurence) is completely bald, which draws attention to the radio mike plastered against his skin. In close-up video shots, a flap of Sellotape is visible dangling from his cheek. Amazingly sloppy work.
The best actor by far is Freema Agyeman who plays the Nurse as a flirtatious cougar, chatting up Romeo and giving his pecks a playful squeeze. Why doesn’t he ditch Juliet and run off with her instead? Evidently he prefers Francesca Amewudah-Rivers whose Juliet is a morose, closed-off creature with a permanent scowl on her face. Not her fault. She’s obeying direction.
To newcomers, this show will look like a cheap crime drama about a weepy thug called Romeo who conceives a bizarre passion for a surly crosspatch called Juliet. There’s no zest, excitement or romantic warmth here. The omission of furniture creates huge problems. We can’t physically see the sumptuous palace where Juliet lives so we can’t grasp what she risks by contracting a forbidden marriage. And her father’s threat to disown her carries no weight if she’s already shacked up with Romeo in his derelict warehouse. It’s an amazing feat. Shakespeare’s most thrilling romance has been turned into a sexless bore.
The main challenge with Richard III is not the king’s disability but the narrative clarity of the text. The play is a lengthy history lesson that takes in battles, marriages, trials, rebellions and executions involving three generations of inter-related dynasties. Only a historical expert can grasp every detail of the plot – and that’s when the show is performed straightforwardly.
The Globe’s female-dominated production stars Michelle Terry, who plays Richard without reference to his physical eccentricities. All the distinctions between male and female characters have been erased so the story is impossible to decipher. It feels like an am-dram show staged for the amusement of boffins at an all-female college.
It feels like an am-dram show staged for the amusement of boffins at an all-female college
The visual aesthetic is deliberately ugly. The Globe’s interior has been covered in chains, ropes and rusty iron grilles, and the rear wall is festooned with scrappy turquoise posters. The stage pillars are caged in wire frames like the piers of a concrete bridge under construction. Designers who dislike the Globe can sheath the décor in plain cloth. No need to dump builder’s clutter all over the place. The costumes are worse: half modern, half medieval. Terry first appears in a Blackadder tunic and a blond wig like Jimmy Savile. Then she dips into her fancy-dress collection. Gold trousers, black trousers, an emerald fur coat, a Calvin Klein gym outfit, three changes of ankle boots, a fake bodybuilder’s torso made of latex. After the coronation, she sports a scarlet MAGA cap. She might have spent less time on costume and more on character.
She begins the play by giggling sadistically at all the courtiers she intends to murder, and she never varies this tone of hectoring triumph. A horrible, gloating Richard. The crowd seemed to enjoy it, although there were clusters of schoolkids fidgeting and chatting throughout. Hardly surprising. To comprehend this show you’d need to spend weeks poring over the text and examining each scene in detail. The actors have done just that, and they’re the only ones qualified to appreciate the result. A theatre that pursues this solipsistic policy will die.
When Fauré played The Spectator
Gabriel Fauré composed his song cycle La bonne chanson in 1894 for piano and voice. But he added string parts later and he premièred that version in April 1898 at the London home of his friend Frank Schuster: 22 Old Queen Street, the building currently occupied by this very magazine. I’m not sure how much Fauré gets played at Spectator HQ these days; his music certainly hasn’t been a feature of recent summer parties. Perhaps Fauré himself caressed the ivories where James Delingpole and Toby Young now prop up the bar. Imagine Verlaine’s poetry drifting out into the garden to mingle with Rod Liddle’s cigarette smoke on the moonlit air. L’heure exquise, indeed.
Perhaps Fauré himself caressed the ivories where Delingpole and Young now prop up the bar
The studio theatre at the Crucible doesn’t exactly evoke the belle époque either, but on this occasion that hardly mattered. It’s a utilitarian black box, but the atmosphere it generates – with audience closely packed on all four sides of the performance space – is wonderfully immediate, especially when (as on this occasion) it’s filled to capacity. A fellow critic sitting nearby grumbled that it’s an unflattering acoustic for a singer – not much space for them to sing into and very little resonance to help the voice. It’s a valid point, but I don’t buy it. With chamber music, you need to feel the performers’ breath, and Fauré, the darling of the Paris salons, expected his songs to be heard in a drawing-room acoustic: tactile, intimate, and close enough to seduce.
The instrumentalists were Ensemble 360 – the resident ensemble of the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival – and the singer was Roderick Williams. It’s easy to talk about certain musicians as born communicators, but Williams had thought carefully about the way he presented the cycle – reading an English précis of Verlaine’s poem before each song and inviting the audience either to follow the printed translation, or sit back and let the mood and the music take them. Trusting to my GCSE French I did the latter and it was surprisingly effective, not least because Williams’s welcoming approach to concert presentation is matched by weapons-grade charisma. He simply exudes generosity, intelligence and warmth. It’s rare to witness a Williams recital in which the audience isn’t eating out of his hand.
So there was no vocal grandstanding: just clear, natural singing, intensely alert to the texture and meaning of the poetry, and glowing with the sunlight that plays such an important role in this rapturous cycle. We knew Williams could roar when he needed to: earlier, in Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, he’d practically shaken the walls in the second song ‘Aoua!’ (in which Ravel, canny as ever, futureproofs himself by setting a ferocious denunciation of French colonialism). The players of Ensemble 360 (here, a flute, a cello and a piano – the group’s kaleidoscopic versatility is one of its strengths) responded with explosive force.
In truth, though, they’d been playing out of their seats all night. The eerie, humid sounds that Ravel drew from a high cello and a low piccolo were redolent of woodsmoke and tropical musk: Tim Horton, the group’s long-serving pianist and (you sensed) its rock, was particularly fine here. But in La bonne chanson and (earlier) Fauré’s D minor Piano Quintet they surged, glittered and swelled, with a powerful sense of sap rising. After the interval, the strings were replaced by five wind players for a tangy account of Poulenc’s Sextet – bold primary colours splashing, Raoul Dufy-like, against Horton’s crisply inked outlines. Poulenc famously remarked that long romantic melodies and rippling pianos – Fauré’s stock-in-trade – made him vomit, so this was a cheeky bit of programming. But then came La bonne chanson and Old Queen Street got the last word after all.
Irish National Opera brought its new production of Vivaldi’s L’Olimpiade to the Linbury Theatre and, following their terrific staging of the same composer’s Bajazet in 2022, they were clearly aiming for gold again. Mission accomplished. The director, Daisy Evans, has a patchy record; her Magic Flute last year for Welsh National Opera was frankly awful. But this stripped back, neon-lit take on the baroque was everything that her Flute wasn’t: fun to watch, loyal to the spirit of the piece and telling the story (which is convoluted even for Metastasio) with clarity and wit. Evans even presented the closing double betrothal as a joyous event, which is a bold move these days.
Vivaldi helps, of course: his propulsive, rhythmically driven idiom offers a low-calorie alternative to Handel, and under Peter Whelan the period-instrument band kicked, glittered and pulsed. From a lively ensemble cast, Gemma Ni Bhriain (Megacle) stood out for her expressive power, and Rachel Redmond (Aminta) for her sparkle. Incidentally, the Olympic Games of the title (the action is set in ancient Greece) occur towards the end of Act One. They’re over in three minutes, which seems like an excellent idea.
Is there still life in British still life?
‘The tyrannical rule of nature morte is, at last, over,’ announced Paul Nash in the Listener in 1931. ‘Apples have had their day.’ Since Cézanne fulfilled his famous boast that he would astonish Paris with an apple, artists had been trying the same trick in London, with limited success. Astonishment, unfortunately, only works once. Nash had had it up to here with them apples: tired of post-impressionism, tired of still life.
An electric toothbrush occupied the same place in Hamilton’s heart as Mont Sainte-Victoire in Cézanne’s
Continental ghosts haunt the tabletops of Pallant House Gallery’s informative new survey of modern and contemporary British still life. First it was the Dutch, emulated in the show’s introductory room in a Mary Moser flower painting and a ‘Still Life with Joint of Beef on a Pewter Dish’ (c.1750-60), done to a turn by the Chichester-born painter George Smith. Had other Britons followed Smith’s patriotic lead in their choice of subjects we might have developed a native strain of still life less dependent on European influence; as it is, the exhibition proper begins with William Nicholson’s 1920 ‘Silver Casket and Red Leather Box’ (see below) emulating Chardin and a bunch of fauve-light fruits in compotiers by the Scottish colourists. Meanwhile, Mark Gertler’s animated ‘The Dutch Doll’ (1926) forecasts a new wind from across the Channel, bringing surrealism.
Surrealism was a gift to still-life painters, opening up the tired old nature morte repertoire to all manner of exciting new objects like the nautical odds and sods in Edward Wadsworth’s ‘Bright Intervals’ (1928). But the bright interval wouldn’t last; the vanitas returned with the second world war. Keith Vaughan’s ‘Still Life with Skull’ (1952-3) echoes Cézanne’s 1898 composition of the same title, without the apples. To see the shape of things, it helps to clear the clutter.
But already another new wind from across the Atlantic was blowing in a different kind of consumer clutter. Bruised by postwar austerity, British artists didn’t believe the promise of American pop art – Eduardo Paolozzi titled his series of pop art collages ‘Bunk!’ – but they relished cutting-edge product design. In ‘The Critic Laughs’ (1968), Richard Hamilton made an idol of his Braun electric toothbrush, crowning it with a set of teeth cast in sugar; the German company’s designs, he claimed, occupied the same place in his heart as Mont Sainte-Victoire in Cézanne’s.
Patrick Caulfield rejected the pop-art label, preferring to focus on traditional objects: the ‘Reserved Table’ (2000) in his modern restaurant interior is dominated by a giant lobster escaped from a 17th-century still life by Willem Kalf. Only the California-born Jann Haworth brings a touch of genuine Americana to the table with her soft sculpture ‘Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic’ (1962) – a memory of teenage visits to the Big Donut Drive-In in North Hollywood made from quilted and embroidered fabric while she was a student at the Slade.
The influence of the Spanish still-life tradition – too sacral for our protestant nation? – is curiously absent. Anthea Hamilton salutes Juan Sanchez Cotan with her ‘Wild Food’ (2012), printed on a kimono, but one of Eric Rimmington’s contemporary English bodegones would have gone well in the show’s ‘Stillness and Reflection’ section. Rimmington’s beautifully painted shelf-pictures are peopled with what Nash called ‘object personages’ invested with quirky personal meanings. It may sound too obvious to need saying, but for a still-life painting to mean something to the viewer its objects must have meaning for the painter. Beside Winifred Nicholson’s infectious delight in the sun-drenched flowers in her windowsill painting ‘Vermilion and Mauve’ (c.1928), her husband Ben’s ‘1928 (striped jug and flowers)’ – all formal structure and no feeling – left me cold.
It’s the discovery of the unfamiliar in the familiar which makes still life interesting
The work of another European still-lifer, Italian this time, is subverted by two contemporary artists. For his photographic print ‘Evertime 05’ (2018), Ori Gersht lined up replicas of Giorgio Morandi’s vessels before shooting them with an air rifle and a camera. Nothing still about that, or about the porcelain-white crocks in Jane Simpson’s ‘Our Distant Relatives’ (2004) which – deceptively cast from silicone rubber – are designed to quiver when you pass.
Is there still life in British still life? There’s cartoon humour in Glenn Brown’s ‘Saint Bimbo’(2024), an anthropomorphised turnip borrowed from a 17th-century painting by Bartolomeo Bimbi, and gallows humour in Mat Collishaw’s ‘Last Meal on Death Row (Louis Jones Junior)’ (2012), one of a series of photographic representations of final menus ordered by American prisoners before execution. To adapt the song lyric, contemporary still life is not a bowl of cherries, but we can live and laugh at it all.
Ernst Gombrich thought that without ‘the discovery of the familiar in the unfamiliar’ the still life tradition would lose its meaning, but it’s the discovery of the unfamiliar in the familiar that makes the genre interesting. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy describes his heroine Elizabeth-Jane, exhausted from watching by her mother’s sickbed, wondering confusedly ‘why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape’. An artist who has never asked that question is unlikely to find meaning in still life.
Arresting and memorable: Compagnie Maguy Marin’s May B reviewed
Samuel Beckett was notoriously reluctant to let people muck about with his work, so it’s somewhat surprising to learn that he licensed and approved Maguy Marin’s May B. This 90-minute ‘dance theatre’ fantasia may play on vaguely Beckettian themes but in no way is it faithful to his texts or instructions – in some respects it even subverts them. Yet it has enjoyed huge success all over Europe since its première in 1982, and finally reached Britain last week. A long wait, for something that turns out to be very odd indeed.
Ten dancers of all shapes and sizes in grotesque make-up and dressed in chalky, tatty underclothes stand immobile as light slowly grows out of the darkness to the sound of Fischer-Dieskau singing the doom-laden final song from Winterreise. A whistle blows and they begin to huddle, moving first with painful slowness accompanied by animal grunting, then with an explosion of carnival energy that turns nasty. After some half-hearted hanky-panky, everyone ritually removes their shoes. After about 40 minutes of this sort of thing, figures more specifically familiar from Beckett’s plays appear – Vladimir, Estragon and blind Pozzo from Waiting for Godot, Clov and blind Hamm from Endgame. They don’t do much beyond staring passively out at the audience, as we hear Kathleen Ferrier singing more solemn Schubert. At this point in the proceedings, the tension sags.
The last half hour grows out of a recording of Gavin Bryars’s ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’. This repetitive threnody of an old hobo provides music for a sequence in which a ragtag of refugees tentatively escape from the stage through the auditorium, leaving only a single figure, seemingly trapped mid-motion, who announces ‘C’est fini’ as the lights slowly fade. The audience was baffled, but not bored: Marin has made haunting tragicomedy out of this parade, evoking something of the melancholy clowning of Buster Keaton, a genius greatly admired by Beckett, mixed with something of the absurdism of Pina Bausch. I’m sceptical of Marin’s pretentious claim in the programme that ‘the dance’s power comes from its capacity to represent the mystery of our presence in the world’, but what she has devised is certainly arresting and memorable.
Stone Nest is the name newly given to a hideous Victorian Presbyterian chapel abutting Shaftesbury Avenue, now promisingly repurposed as an arts venue after ingloriously morphing into a louche club. To an audience seated round the circumference of its domed central chamber, Rambert presented Analogue, a 50-minute work by the Canadian choreographer Jill Johnson, formerly a dancer with William Forsythe’s defunct Ballett Frankfurt, once the troupe with the sharpest edge in Europe. Johnson’s austere style is marked by Forsythe’s influence. Fourteen dancers in neutral black trousers and white shirts reel round in kaleidoscopic circles, sometimes like zombies, sometimes in panic, sometimes in unison, sometimes fragmented. The pace quickens and slackens and the chain periodically breaks into random groupings that mirror each other, but the confrontations seem meaningless and momentary – nobody connects, relates or assumes any humane individuality.
Like Forsythe’s Eidos:Telos and McGregor’s Infra, this seems to be a meditation on urban anomie, the lonely crowd, and it has a cumulative power. Regrettably, it’s accompanied by one of those vacuous minimalist scores that seems to be de rigueur – why bother with a human composer, why not just let AI provide a roll of aural wallpaper gratis? – but Johnson’s concept is strong and Rambert’s dancers are so impeccably assured that one’s attention is held fast.
Nickelback may not be cool but they are very good at what they do
In May 2013, Rolling Stone polled its readers in an attempt to discover which band might be crowned the worst of the 1990s. The winners – or losers, depending on how you look at it – were Creed, trailed in second place by Nickelback. Eleven years on and Creed appear to have turned that status around, in America at least – Vanity Fair, Vice and Slate have noticed that they have, whisper it, become cool. And Nickelback? Well, no one’s claiming coolness for them: last year they released a documentary called Hate to Love: Nickelback, a recognition of the fact that, outside their fanbase, they are usually mentioned only as a punchline.
They can afford to laugh about it because their fanbase has turned out to be large enough to make them very successful – they’ve spent 20 years filling arenas. Creed, on the other hand, had to fall apart and disappear before they were allowed their come-back. Both bands had emerged from the musical hellscape known as ‘post-grunge’, in which bands shouted loudly about feeling unhappy. It was an attempt to resurrect a model perfected by Nirvana – with few doing it anywhere near as well. But Nickelback realised the traps of that, and quickly became a jack-of-all-trades hard-rock band, offering a little bit of everything to everyone.
At the O2 their crowd encompassed older men in leather, young women looking for a party and everyone in between. To my mild surprise, I noticed a middle-aged lesbian couple singing the ballad ‘Photograph’ to each other. And hearing the songs one after another it was very easy to appreciate the craftsmanship in them: they are constructed to hit pleasure point after pleasure point. Singer and songwriter Chad Kroeger – who, in the documentary, has the air of a man keeping a very tight leash on something explosive inside him – would have thrived in some hard-rock Brill Building, because he really can write a song in any style.
Churning modern metal? That was the opener, ‘San Quentin’. The one that sounded like it was made to be played in strip clubs? That would have been ‘Figured You Out’ (‘I like your pants around your feet/ And I like the dirt that’s on your knees’). ‘This Afternoon’ was the one that sounded a bit like it was meant for country radio with a big phones-in-the-air chorus. Black Sabbathy grooves? That was the closer ‘Burn It To the Ground’. But at the heart of it all were the ballads – even the hits ‘How You Remind Me’ and ‘Rockstar’ conceded precedence to the ballads. The ballads are why Nickelback are still huge, and Kroeger is expert at targeting nostalgia with a scientifically perfect balance of celebration and regret – not just on ‘Photograph’, but on ‘Those Days’ from the new album they were promoting.
If they were a pop group, Nickelback’s consummate professionalism and magpie approach to styles would be celebrated. But this is rock music, and the complaints about them have always been about their inauthenticity. They’re not strictly my bag, but I suspect their bank accounts are real enough.
Nevertheless, it’s still more exciting watching a group trying to form their identity rather than one that has long since realised its purpose on this planet. Cardinals, from Cork, are one such. The singer from Fontaines D.C. has called them his favourite new band. In Brixton they were a sometimes confounding racket. Their singles ‘Nineteen’ and ‘Unreal’ made them sound like Oasis. They looked about 12 years old. One fella just sat on a barstool on stage. It turned out he would later play accordion. There was an identity here. Big, pummelling rock would give way to mood pieces – on ‘Roseland’ and ‘If I Could Make You Care’ – that spun off into other directions entirely. There was the thrilling sense that it all might fall apart into chaos, not least because they were playing at a volume that felt very physical – the thump in the sternum from the kick drum, the sense that a power chord was creating a wave of air pressure.
Cardinals haven’t yet fully worked out their identity, but they have a questing sense about them. They have ideas – whether or not these seem reasonable. The band, aesthetically, musically, should not have an accordionist. But who can begrudge them such a delightfully unnecessary addition to the line-up? The chaos of the Cardinals flows from these explorations rather than from them being too mashed to stand up. Bigger rooms await. Catch them now, while it still only costs a fiver, and you can see the whites of their eyes.
Craving some alien spider insanity? Sting’s the film for you
This week, a horror film – and with it, a whole load of alien spider insanity. If you’ve been hankering after a whole load of alien spider insanity, then Sting will hit the spot. As a rule, I avoid this genre, as I still suffer from nightmares after bunking off school to see The Exorcist (aged 12), but this is playful, B-movie horror rather than horror horror. It’s 90 minutes of silly, daft fun. I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between these films in future. Maybe every 35 years rather than every 40?
I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between horror films in future. Maybe every 35 years?
It’s from writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner and it’s set in an apartment building in Brooklyn. If it’s not a cabin in the woods, it’s an apartment building. I suppose it’s because apartment buildings offer dimly lit corridors and the opportunity to terrorise multiple households and air duct systems involving those ventilation shafts that no one can crawl through but, for cinematic purposes, they can. (The top ventilation-shaft films are probably: Dr. No, Die Hard, Alien, and the first Mission: Impossible, although in this one it was actually feasible, as Tom Cruise is very small.)
The insanity begins with an alien egg crashing to earth, ending up in one of the apartment rooms, opening like a Venus fly trap, and hatching a little black spider. It’s discovered by Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a young girl who opts to keep it as a pet and names it Sting.
The movie is also a family drama. Charlotte’s dad is out of the picture, but she does have a stepfather, Ethan (Ryan Corr), who is a comic book artist as well as janitor of the building. They’ve, however, yet to bond.
Charlotte’s mother (Penelope Mitchell) and Ethan have just had a baby and she is jealous of the attention her little brother is receiving. Hence, perhaps, the need to have something that is her own. Meanwhile, her demented maternal grandmother lives on the top floor along with a nasty, Roald Dahl-esque aunt. Aunts always get bad rap on screen for some reason. As do spiders. Contained in their tiny brains is, apparently, the geometry for a million webs. Isn’t that incredible? And you know their legs are hydraulic? OK, I tried, but I’m not especially fond either. (I once stayed out of our kitchen all day because it looked like there was a big spider on the worktop that turned out to be the stalky bit of a tomato.)
Charlotte keeps Sting in a jar and feeds it live cockroaches. The more Sting is fed the more Sting grows and the more Sting grows the more food it demands. It’s like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, but with legs. The film is pacy; it doesn’t mess about. Soon, Sting is the size of a Fiat 500 with a taste for meat. First to go is grandma’s parrot, who is left looking like it ‘had sex with a blender’. What could have done that sort of damage?
The plot includes things you always knew it would: one, someone picks up the phone only to find the line is dead; two, someone calls for a cat that will never return; three, a dog barks at seemingly nothing; four, an ice storm outside means no one can go anywhere; five, everyone and everything at some point will be crawling through the ventilation shafts that no one in real life – except Tom Cruise – could crawl through.
Roache-Turner is no Hitchcock or Spielberg, but he has a sure touch when it comes to knowing what fans of these films want and expect. And as Sting seeks flesh, and scuttles and drops from ceilings and wraps victims in slimy cocoons, the film does offer a couple of decent jump-scares. (That said, fans of the genre might not find it frightening enough.)
It’s wildly derivative but as that’s its intention, you can’t feel hard done by. I won’t say how it concludes but, of course, by the end our spider is dead, dead, certainly dead. Or is it?