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.

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.

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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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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.

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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?

Can the Tories avoid the fate of Canada’s Conservatives?

00:00 06:52

Wayne Hunt has narrated this article for you to listen to.

As the Conservatives edge closer to disaster in the general election, the hunt is on for a historical comparison. Tony Blair’s dispatching of John Major in 1997 was mild compared with what polls say could be in store. Those wondering how bad it could get should look to Canada in 1993, when a Conservative-majority government showed the world just how far it is possible to fall. The similarities are clear.

Brian Mulroney, the prime minister, had seemed to usher in a new conservative era when he was elected in 1984 with an unlikely coalition of voters. He had managed to cross Canada’s equivalent of a Red Wall by winning support in his native Quebec (French Canada had traditionally been the turf of the Liberals). But not enough was done to keep the voters on board. A recession led to cost-of-living pressure which was compounded by constitutional mayhem when Mulroney, sensing the inevitable, resigned in 1993.

Kim Campbell took charge and hoped to turn things around. She called an election close to the end of the party’s five-year parliamentary term. But a new centre-right party had emerged, calling itself Reform. It was populist, bold, brash, socially conservative and influenced by the Christian right. It took aim at a myopic political class and its message to voters was that it was time to vote down a tired consensus that did not move, either physically or imaginatively, out of the nation’s capital. When the election was called, Reform was at about 12 per cent in the polls. Almost identical, in fact, to Richard Tice’s Reform party in Britain today.

Canada’s establishment is sometimes called the ‘Laurentian elite’ (after the Laurentian mountains in Quebec), and they tended to be oblivious to those outside their bourgeois Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal bubble. The Liberal party of Canada had been the natural political home of these comfortably off bien-pensants for ever. The cycle was only broken when the Conservatives (John Diefenbaker in 1957; Mulroney in 1984) managed to harness discontent in the hinterland.

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But in 1993 the Liberal party was led by Jean Chrétien, a millionaire lawyer who somehow contrived to play the class card and portray himself as the li’l guy from a small town in Quebec. He promised financial stability, fiscal restraint and all the rest. It worked. He was swept to power, the separatist Bloc Quebecois became the official opposition – and votes for the brand-new Reform party were concentrated so that they ended up with 52 seats in the House of Commons.

As for Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservatives, the polls – which had looked extremely bad for them throughout the campaign – had been too kind. They ended up with 16 per cent of the vote, so thinly spread that they went from 169 seats to just two. To this day, it is the worst defeat suffered by any governing party in an advanced democracy. It could, and perhaps should, have been an ‘extinction-level event’. But instead the Conservatives regrouped and were back in power within 13 years. How?

Stephen Harper, who led the Conservative comeback and became prime minister in 2006, was one of the founders of the Reform party. He was elected in that 1993 election, and tried to build on it – but failed to break Reform out of its western Canadian base. He left politics for a spell but returned in 2002 to become leader of a reformed Reform party, now renamed ‘Canadian Alliance’. This was then merged with what remained of the old Conservatives to become, yes, the Conservative party of Canada. Had Reform swallowed the Conservatives, or vice versa? Either way, the right was reunited.

The lesson is that a party thoroughly condemned by the electorate (as Labour was in 2019 and the Tories may well be this year) needs to show that it has changed. Harper managed this by being competent and refusing to be drawn into the culture wars being conducted in the mainstream Canadian media. He was no populist and avoided talk of immigration. He knew that if he did, the Conservatives could not win enough seats.

That was a different era, when the demographics of an ageing society with low productivity levels relative to the United States meant that Canada needed to bring in more working-age newcomers. Many immigrant families instinctively voted for the party that had allowed them to come to the country, which meant the Liberals. To change this dynamic, Harper kept immigration levels high. He also avoided big-ticket constitutional issues and did what he could to keep spending down, including on the military, despite Canada being a Nato member.

Harper was defeated by Justin Trudeau in 2015. Now voters are turning on Trudeau: his approval ratings are almost as bad as Rishi Sunak’s. The Canadian PM has two more years to go, but his demise looks pretty much as certain as that of the Tories, because Canada’s Conservatives seem to have reinvented themselves yet again, under Pierre Poilievre, another bilingual party leader.

For years, Trudeau’s tactic was to portray his opponents as extremists. But he overreached during Covid, when truck drivers who were protesting vaccine mandates were accused of ‘ideologically motivated extremism’ and had their bank accounts frozen. Poilievre defended them and learnt from it. He knows how to come across as a defender of common sense and puts up homemade videos on subjects such as housing and cost of living. A Conservative-dominated media ecosystem has started to form.

Trudeau’s answer has been to try to portray Poilievre as Canada’s Trump. But this has failed to take hold because the Conservatives keep tight party discipline and a laser-like focus on real-world economic issues. It is too late for the Tories in Britain to draw lessons from Poilievre for this election. But when the time comes to rebuild the party, Canada can be an instructive example.

Assassination attempts, executions and volleyball: a history of Horse Guards

00:00 03:04

Mark Mason has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Will they never learn? The signs are very clear: ‘Beware! Horses may kick or bite.’ Yet last week a woman became the latest tourist to get a shock at Horse Guards, when the animal she was fussing suddenly turned its head and bit her arm. She was unhurt, but you can see why the animals occasionally lose their rag. They’re there to protect the monarch, after all. Sending a gentle message once in a while can’t do any harm.

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This small patch on Whitehall is where the King’s Life Guard do their thing because it’s still classed as the official entrance to Buckingham Palace. The building also used to house the office of the commander-in-chief of the British Army. Prince Frederick (the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’) and Wellington both worked there; the latter’s coffin rested in the room the night before his funeral. These days the ground floor is home to the excellent Household Cavalry Museum, where you’ll find the wooden leg used by the Earl of Uxbridge after his real one was hit by a cannon ball at Waterloo. ‘By God sir, I’ve lost my leg!’ he cried. ‘By God sir, so you have!’ replied Wellington.

Look closely at the clock on top of the building and you’ll see the stone underneath the two (marked as ‘ten’ – the face spells out minutes rather than hours) has a black dot on it. This is said to commemorate the time of Charles I’s execution on 30 January 1649, outside the Banqueting Hall over the road. The dot isn’t a regular shape, which might imply an accidental blemish – but the authorities certainly haven’t done anything to clean it up, so they obviously like the story as much as anyone.

The parade ground gets its annual day in the spotlight as the venue for Trooping the Colour, which originated with different regiments being shown their flags (‘colours’) on the battlefield, so they could stay together during the fighting. The ceremony used to take place on the monarch’s actual birthday, but Edward VII’s was 9 November and he didn’t fancy the weather, so he created an ‘official’ birthday in the summer. In 1981 Marcus Sarjeant fired blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II. The previous week he’d stolen a copy of The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth’s novel about a plot to shoot Charles de Gaulle) from one of his fellow college students. This just happened to be Shaun Williamson, who later went on to play Barry in EastEnders.

A decade later, Horse Guards was the scene of another assassination attempt, when three mortars sailed across the parade ground towards 10 Downing Street. The IRA were more professional than Sarjeant, but they were unlucky. A mark had been left on Horse Guards Avenue, near the junction with Whitehall, telling the driver of the van from which the mortars were fired exactly where to park. But snowfall had covered it up, so the driver had to guess. The mortars fell short. John Major survived.

During the 2012 Olympic Games, Horse Guards Parade was the venue for one of the most eagerly anticipated events. There was some speculation that the foreign secretary might take a look, but sadly it wasn’t to be. ‘For those asking,’ tweeted William Hague, ‘I can’t see the beach volleyball from my office.’ He did, however, confirm that he’d tried.

The not-so-French roots of chicken cordon bleu

We all have our quirks when it comes to cooking. I have clear mental blocks over what is and is not a complicated supper, many of which do not follow any kind of logic. I wouldn’t think twice about setting a sauce or ragu going early in the day, blipping gently, returning to it every so often for a stir and a taste, knowing that it will take hours and not inconsiderable attention before it is ready. I don’t mind at all making dough which will need proving and shaping as the afternoon wanes. I even find the act of slicing or chopping various different components meditative.

But there are processes that set off klaxons in my head: warning, warning, avoid. I don’t mind parboiling potatoes and roasting them, but boiling and mashing them goes against everything I believe in for a quick weeknight supper. Onion gravy, no problem; ‘proper’ gravy is a no-go. I’m a law unto myself. Equally, breadcrumbing (and the associated frying) is something I find myself avoiding: it feels faffy, messy and time-consuming. In reality, it is none of these things. Until recently, though, it has put me off making the gorgeous chicken cordon bleu.

Like its more famous cousin, the chicken Kiev, chicken cordon bleu enjoyed its heyday at 1970s dinner parties. Unlike the Kiev, it didn’t enjoy the same revival as comfort or convenience food. Perhaps it’s because the gentle ooze of cheese is not as show-stopping as the spurt of garlic butter. But that is to its advantage: there is nothing sadder than cutting into a chicken Kiev and finding it hollow; the more robust cheese and ham filling poses much less of a risk.

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Despite its name, chicken cordon bleu isn’t French and neither does it have anything to do with the famous cookery school or, really, the blue ribbon after which both it and the cookery school are named. The ‘cordon bleu’ was originally a literal blue ribbon worn by the knights of L’Ordre du Saint-Esprit, which was set up by Henri III in 1578. At some point the term came to refer to both food and chefs of a particularly high standard and became a byword for quality.

Chicken cordon bleu was first referenced by name in the New York Times in an advert for United Airlines in 1967, suggesting it as an example of what luxuries their service offered. Nevertheless, strikingly similar recipes existed before, often using veal in place of chicken, and the modern version bears strong resemblance to older dishes like schnitzel and roulade, which must have acted as an inspiration or jumping-off point.

To make it, the chicken is butterflied and flattened out between clingfilm, using the gentle glancing thwack of a rolling pin. Swiss cheese and deli sliced ham are laid inside the thinned chicken breasts, before the whole thing is rolled up and panéed. The outside is shallow-fried, before being transferred to the oven to cook through. The result is neat little parcels of golden-brown crunchy breadcrumbs encasing chicken and melted cheese and ham.

Panéeing, or breadcrumbing, whereby you coat meat first in flour, then egg and finally breadcrumbs, is a non-negotiable part of chicken cordon bleu; it is what gives it its beautiful appearance and texture. If you set yourself up properly, it is both speedy and mess-free. You need three bowls for each of the coatings for dunking, and a tray for the finished chicken. The golden rule is to use one hand for the wet coatings, and one for the dry, and you won’t end up panéeing yourself. Chicken cordon bleu is, in fact, an ideal supper: the thinning of the chicken can be done in advance, the frying is the work of moments and then it’s all into the oven for the final stint, while you wrestle bathtime or put the bins out or just have a glass of wine.

Some serve chicken cordon bleu with a cheese sauce but I don’t think it needs it. I do think it needs a good pile of chips to accompany it, though, and a generous green salad, with a dressing as mustard-laden as you can bear to cut through that rich filling.

Makes 2
Takes 20 minutes, plus chilling
Cooks 25 minutes

• 2 chicken breasts
• 2 large slices Swiss cheese
• 2 slices cooked ham, thinly sliced
• 50g plain flour
• 2 eggs
• 75g Panko breadcrumbs
• 200ml vegetable oil

1. Butterfly the chicken breasts by cutting through them horizontally, stopping just short of cutting all the way, then open the breast up like a book. Place each breast between two sheets of clingfilm and gently bash with a rolling pin – use glancing blows rather than pummelling up and down hard – to thin the meat, without tearing it.
2. Place each flattened chicken breast on a new sheet of clingfilm, smooth side down, and then lay a slice of ham across the breast, followed by a slice of cheese. Roll tightly into a neat parcel, tucking in the ends of the chicken and using the clingfilm to help you. You can then roll them again in another sheet of clingfilm if you would like to, tightly winding the ends, to tauten the chicken. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes and up to a day.
3. Preheat the oven to 220°C/200°C fan. Heat the oil to 180°C in a large, high-sided frying pan, with the oil coming no more than halfway up the sides.
4. Set up three dishes: one with the flour, one with beaten egg and one with the breadcrumbs. Season the flour with fine salt and ground black pepper. Unwrap the chicken parcels from the clingfilm and dunk them in each of the coatings in turn, first flour, then egg and finally breadcrumbs.
5. Fry the chicken in the hot oil for 1-2 minutes on each side, then transfer to a baking tray. Bake for 25 minutes, by which time the chicken should be thoroughly cooked through, and the cheese melted and gooey. Serve straight away.

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Sharjah Masters

The top Emirati grandmaster Salem Saleh is an imaginative, dynamic player whose games are a treat to watch. But his win at the recent Sharjah Masters against Vladimir Fedoseev (formerly Russian, but now representing Slovenia) was surely the artistic highlight of his career. The combination which ends the game is dazzling, but both players deserve credit for energetic play in the earlier part of the middlegame.

Vladimir Fedoseev-Salem Saleh
Sharjah Masters, May 2024

1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 h4 A modern extravagance, mainly used by players who wish to avoid the combative Grünfeld defence which would arise after 3.Nc3 d5. If Black stubbornly insists on a Grünfeld-style approach with 3… Bg7 4.Nc3 d5, then 5.h5 poses serious problems. d6 4 Nc3 Nbd7 5 Qc2 c5 6 d5 a6 7 e4 b5 A standard pawn sacrifice borrowed from the Benko Gambit. For the sacrificed pawn, Black gets open lines on the queenside, and weakens White’s central grip. 8 cxb5 Bg7 9 bxa6 O-O 10 h5 An ambitious counter sacrifice, opening the h-file for an attack. Nxh5 11 g4 Nhf6 12 g5 Nh5 13 Be2 Bxa6 14 Bxh5 gxh5 15 f4 e6 A well-timed break. When the centre opens up, White’s king will be in danger too, but castling queenside will invite different problems. 16 Nge2 16 Qh2 is too primitive. After 16…Re8 17 Qxh5 Nf8 the attack reaches a dead-end. Qe8 17 dxe6 fxe6 18 Ng3 Ne5 I suspect this brilliant sacrifice was made primarily on intuitive grounds, since it animates the Bg7 and Rf8. A slower plan with 18…c4 and Nd7-c5-d3 was possible, but then the Ba6 loses some potency. In sharp positions, vigour takes priority over bean-counting. 19 fxe5 Bxe5 20 Qg2 20 Nxh5 meets with a beautiful refutation: 20…Qxh5! 21 Rxh5 Rf1+ 22 Kd2 Bf4 mate. Rb8 21 Nxh5 Qg6 22 Be3 d5 A clever idea, since 23 exd5 Bxc3+ 24 bxc3 Rb1+ wins quickly. 23 Bxc5 is viable, but then 23…Bxc3+ 24 bxc3 Rb2! attempts to deflect the queen from e4, and after 25 Qg4 Re2+ 26 Qxe2 Bxe2 27 Kxe2 Qxe4+ Black can count on at least a draw. 23 O-O-O d4 24 Rdg1 24 Qh3! was stronger, setting up the idea of Nf6+. After 24…dxc3 25 b3 Be2 26 Nf6+ Bxf6 27 gxf6 Bg4 the position remains wildly unclear. dxc3 The apparent drawback of 24…dxe3 is that White can immediately respond with 25 Nf6+, but after 25…Rxf6 26 gxf6 Qxg2 27 Rxg2+ Kf7 28 Rxh7+ Kf6 Black’s active bishops offer excellent compensation. 25 b3 Bd3 26 Qh3 (see diagram) Now was the time to jump in with 26 Nf6+!, since after Bxf6 27 gxf6 Qxg2 28 Rxg2+ Kf7 29 e5 White has the better chances. I suspect Fedoseev felt he could push for a knockout, but underestimated the ferocious counterattack which follows. Rxb3!! 27 axb3 Ra8 28 Kd1 Fedoseev must have overlooked the combination which follows, or he would surely have tried 28 Nf6+! After 28…Bxf6 29 Qxe6+ Kh8 30 Rxh7+ secures at least a draw, while after 29…Qf7 30 gxf6+ Kh8 31 Qc8+! is a stunning defensive resource, to distract the Ra8 from the mate threat on a1. However, after 31…Rxc8 32 Rg7 Qxg7 33 fxg7+ Kg8! 34 Rd1 Bxe4 35 Bg5 Kxg7 Black should probably win in the end. Qxh5+ An exquisite finish. The knight was guarding the f4 square. 29 Qxh5 Ra1+ 30 Bc1 Rxc1+ White resigns since 31 Kxc1 Bf4+ 32 Kd1 c2+ 33 Ke1 c1=Q+ 34 Kf2 Qe3+ 35 Kg2 Qg3 is mate.

No. 803

Black to play. Elisabeth Paehtz-Michael Adams, Salamanca Masters, May 2024. With his next move, Adams induced immediate resignation. What did he play? Email answers to chess@-spectator.co.uk by Monday 3 June. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1…Ne3! and White resigned, in view of 2 fxe3 Qxg2 mate or 2 f3 Rxg2+ 3 Kh1 Qxf3 wins.

Last week’s winner Peter Bray, Cardiff

Competition: Vote for us

In Competition 3351 you were asked to send in an election manifesto in verse (lucky timing). The entries threw up plenty of bold ideas for strategists to pick over, though a degree of cynicism was in evidence – the general mood captured by Basil Ransome–Davies’s ‘Opportunist party’: ‘If you favour easy answers,/ Vote for us, the British chancers’. I’m sorry not to have had room for Alan Millard’s Cross Your Fingers party, Bill Greenwell’s Horny-Handed Sons of Toil, Adrian Fry’s Bigots of Britain, Frank Upton’s moon-is-green-cheese promises, Sylvia Fairley’s manic-festo, and more. A special mention for Chris O’Carroll’s last-ditch Tory plea: ‘Vote with us for a Parliament that’s hung.’ Those first past the post win £25.

What does modern Britain need? Our manifesto states
That we don’t have the foggiest, because our candidates
Are picked to be uncertain, and to dither at a choice –
Which is why the Don’t Know party’s the authentic national voice
We don’t know what we’re doing, and we don’t know where we’re going,
And Ipsos Mori tells us our support is huge and growing.
We’re not sure what our policies are, but we can promise this,
We’ll build a happier Britain, if ignorance is bliss.
All other politicians may pretend they know what’s what,
But we alone will honestly admit that we do not.
Instead we shrug our shoulders, and take little interest,
And hope we’ll muddle through by sort of hoping for the best.
And so we speak for Britain. You may be asking, though,
Whyever should you vote for us? We truly do not know.

George Simmers

Our pledge is to reclaim the throne of France;
Along with it, the pens of all your aunts!
All those vineyards – just imagine it –
Like Henry Five, Plantagenet,
Once more, unto the beach we’ll all advance!

One nation ours, from Nice to John O’Groats –
The plan is guaranteed to stop the boats.
The French will hardly rue it;
It’s the only way to do it,
For want of any safe and legal routes.

No Frenchman’s really going to miss Calais;
Be fair, it’s not exactly Saint-Tropez.
Some have travelled a long way
To arrive in the UK
Et voilà, ils sont déjà arrivés!

David Silverman

Voters, lift your glasses clinking,
bend your elbows, lend an ear,
join the party that loves drinking;
Sort It Out Over a Beer.
Cure what ‘ales’ you: debt, inflation,
bring the bar to Number 10,
booze up at the polling station,
make this country drunk again!
Be like Churchill, sloshed and proud
on the hustings, scotch in hand,
your voice matters, say it loud,
pick your liquor, choose your brand,
we’ll debate between our bitters,
we will cheer for People Power,
campaign with the heavy hitters,
vote for us at happy hour.

Janine Beacham

The Guild of Formal Poetry requests
all true-blue patriotic Brits to vote
for us. The free verse movement that infests
our Isle must at the ballot box be smote.

Our land is home to Wordsworth and the Bard,
so everyone should speak in metric feet;
and formal English language has been marred
by slang, a vicious trend we will unseat.

Those citizens who can’t converse in rhyme,
and those who chop up prose and call it verse
will be incarcerated for a time,
and afterwards comes unemployment’s curse.

Let’s talk of Grecian Urns and Light Brigades,
of mortal coils and daggers. Every bloke
and lass – elect tradition lest it fades,
expunged by all too liberal-thinking folk.

Paul A. Freeman

I’ve invented a marvellous party!
The rest have been doing it wrong.
We’ll declare honestly
That each new policy
Will be made up as we go along.
There is always a problem with leaders,
And when we should show them the door
So we’ll take it in turns so that every MP
Does the job for no longer than two days or three,
Since they wouldn’t enjoy any more.
It’s really a marvellous party!
The Commons was once such a bore,
But we all know debates are just playing with words,
So in our cut and thrust, we’ll be using real swords,
Then we’ll leave government to the House of Lords,
So no one needs to vote any more.

Brian Murdoch (with apologies to Noël Coward)

We’re movers, shakers, power-takers,
Set to rule the land.
We know exactly what you want:
Check out our groovy plans!

The details, though, we won’t reveal,
Until we’re voted for,
’Cause simple stuff, like how things work,
Like, man, is such a bore!

The task for now is just to smash
The other parties’ views,
Then disinter the good bits,
Deciding which to use.

Vote Middle Ground, vote nicey-nice,
And see just what’s in store:
A nest of mediocrity,
The type you’ve loved before!

Nicholas Lee

No. 3354: Outta palo alto

You’re invited to send in the musings of a tech billionaire (150 words/16 lines maximum, and no billionaire should be able to sue). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 12 June.

2656: A la carte

Unclued lights, including one of two words (all in Chambers) display nine items of a kind in the grid, appropriately positioned in relation to each other. All nine must be highlighted.

Across

 1    Bear dire deed to resolve neurosis (7)

 7    Indian city cleric lacking force (7)

13    Running into water ebbing for ages (5)

14    Flaw of terrible mishearing (7)

15    Expert to restrain lawyer’s friend (8)

16    Record one bovid with adult parasites? (6)

17    Unwise or silly, eating seconds (6)

18    Coal dust around German city (4)

23    Old instrument’s din heard (7)

24    New line in French church showing mercy (8)

25    Some feeding us tomato relish (5)

28    A fun time, consuming right jellies (5)

29    She tries to reform crooks (8)

31    Worries, cutting son’s hair (7)

35    Family members in US city (8)

37    Poetry volume’s neglected language (4)

41    Maria and I’ve developed health issue (8)

42    Botanist’s tip about hostelry (7)

43    Analyse heart of tipsy chap (5)

44    Opens funny note, officially in residence (2,5)

45    Like Napoleon in exile in Leeds, oddly (7)

Down

2    French loaf topping? (5)

3    Swindle one used in chess (4)

5    Fissure runs through vessel, nearly empty (6)

6    Noblemen she confused with a stoic (9)

9    Echoes seller: swears without hesitation (11)

10    American diamonds for cloak (5)

11    To sailors, perhaps they create solitude (9)

13    Sue picked up a ring (6)

17    Spreads out crisps eaten messily (11)

19    From literature, terse passages (7)

22    Rage working drill mechanism (4,5)

23    Study again on fire, overturned by bomb (2-7)

27    Soak atop the Parisian tower (7)

30    Holy writings in paper on OT book (6)

32    Bad painter wanting a pigment (6)

33    Emperor in PM’s home? No, moving south (5)

34    Uncover dodgy haunt (5)

39    A setter’s on line – radical! (4)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on  17 June. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2656, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.

2653: Order! Order! – solution

The twelve symmetrically placed unclued entries NATURAL, MAIL, MONASTIC, STANDING, PECK, LOGICAL, BATTING, APPLE-PIE, OPEN, EVICTION, BANKERS and SIDE can precede the word ORDER, and the title alluded to an ‘A to Z’. Thus unclued entries had to be entered in alphabetical order.

First prize Seonaid Chapman, Brampton, Cumberland

Runners-up Peter Lawrence, Durham; Julie Sanders, Bishop’s Waltham, Southampton

Vote Rod!

It suddenly occurred to me that I need to stop dressing like a radical lesbian bag lady if I am going to ingratiate myself with the voters in the constituency in which I am, perhaps unwisely, standing for the SDP. ‘Always look better than them’ is the injunction made by Steve Martin in the underrated film Leap of Faith: he plays a charlatan evangelistic preacher, which is not a million miles away from standing for parliament, although probably rather more fun.

It’s a tall order – at least five people in my Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland are lithe and under the age of 50. I suppose I had better stop comparing myself to a radical lesbian bag lady as well, just to forestall any offence. But then there is literally no simile or metaphor to describe my appearance which would not offend somebody somewhere. I resemble a sack of dead cats? Nope. ‘I am not very well turned out’ is about all one is left with.

That is the problem with politics – it dredges the colour and fun from our lives and imposes in its place lies and insincerities and cant and a deadened language – just read the party manifestos when they come out. That was cant by the way – heaven forefend, etc. So, no jokes, no allusions, no adjectives which might be misconstrued by an idiot, nothing but corporate bollocks. My next bunch of days will be consumed by the absurd bureaucratic rigmarole of filling in official forms to prove that I exist and getting the necessary signatures that allow me to stand, and queuing at the local council office for validation, unless I can get my agent, Kev, to do it for me. That, by the way, is the full extent of my team – me’n’Kev. I bet Westminster is quaking in its collective kitten heels.

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If it is not quaking, then it is perhaps marching with quiet determination towards the booby-hatch, certainly on the Conservative side of the divide. I’m sure the notion of reinstating national service will commend itself to three or four hundred Reform supporters who were in favour of the Enclosures Act and supported the Corn Laws. But what was it supposed to signal to the rest of the population, bunged into the mix after CCO seemingly spent a night on the piss?

It’s not so much that I disagree with the idea – it’s more the case that in its sudden arrival from nowhere at all it had about it all the rigour and conviction of a Labour frontbencher insisting that they were not going to raise taxes. Rishi Sunak had already enraged his party by calling the election when nobody was ready for it; now he left them rolling about with laughter. What’s next, capital punishment? He had made the decision of 4 July, I have been told, because he considered that his party was ‘ungovernable’, which I suspect is close to the truth, although it shows scant confidence in his own abilities that he would consider it more ungovernable the longer he remained in office.

But there may be a certain political sense in what he has done and, unlike those Tory MPs streaming for the exit with their lifejackets in their paws, I do not consider that this election is unsalvageable from a Conservative point of view. I am not suggesting that they might actually win – that would be going too far. But logically you might assume that as far as the opinion polls are concerned, Labour’s lead can only decrease – and the question then becomes how far it might decrease.

The first thing the early election did was scupper Reform. Richard Tice’s party had big ambitions for this election – rightly so, considering their impressive polling. More defections, plus the undoubted bonus of having Nigel Farage wading back in to stand again – if that had been allowed to happen, the Reform vote might have mortally wounded the Conservatives. But now they do not have an adequate time to prepare, they are not awash with money, the Farage business isn’t going to happen and already their vote is slipping a little in the polls.

It was ever the case that Reform would not poll anywhere nearly as high in an actual election as their figures suggest – at Rochdale, for example, they polled just over 6 per cent. But an early election suggests that even 6 per cent may be a fairly large overestimate. Without the hoop-de-doodle planned by the party and the swell of publicity, you might expect an awful lot of Reform votes to return to the Tories. How many is the question that may determine whether we do indeed see a Labour landslide or instead the possibility of a hung parliament.

Next, Labour’s approach to the election has been vacuous and disingenuous and this has been registering with the voters. On Question Time last week, Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, was flayed alive by a Labour voter in the audience who berated her for failing to answer any question she had been asked. Her interlocutor was quite right and drew a warm round of applause from the audience. If the Labour strategy of saying absolutely nothing – in order not to frighten, offend or be held hostage to any promise – remains in place for the duration of this contest then the party will not commend itself to the voters.

Labour has other serious problems too, which I’ve detailed before. It is at grave risk of losing seats in constituencies where the proportion of Muslim voters is above 30 per cent – there are about 20 of these. Labour has votes to lose to the non-Muslim left, as well – especially to the Greens among the younger voters. In short, the polls look likely to narrow, and the more they do so, the greater an impetus builds for the government. It’s not quite over yet.

Now Labour blocks Lloyd Russell-Moyle from standing

It is a bad time to be a member of the Socialist Campaign Group. Hours after Mr S revealed that Labour activists in Poplar are urging the party to intervene against Apsana Begum, tonight Lloyd Russell-Moyle has confirmed that he will be blocked from standing again in Brighton Kemptown. The left-winger, a former frontbencher under Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, told activists tonight that ‘yesterday, out of the blue, I received an administrative suspension letter.’

According to Russell-Moyle, an unknown person has made ‘what I believe to be a vexatious and politically motivated complaint about my behaviour eight years ago. This is a false allegation that I dispute totally.’ He claims that this was ‘designed to disrupt this election’ and that because there ‘isn’t enough time to defend myself as these processes within the party take too long’ the party has now ‘told me that I will not be eligible to be a candidate at the next election.’ 

With a ‘gutted’ Russell-Moyle bowing out, who will deliver a rant on election night now? The news means of course that the Labour leadership can begin imposing a candidate on Brighton Kemptown where the party currently has a majority of more than 8,000. A Labour spokesman said: ‘The Labour party takes all complaints extremely seriously and they are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures, and any appropriate disciplinary action is taken.’

Who’s next on the list eh? Watch out John McDonnell…

UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long. An hour after news of Russell-Moyle’s enforced retirement broke, the Times is now reporting that Labour will suspend Faiza Shaheen as its candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green. Joseph Starmer strikes again!

Why are French politicians obsessed with world war two?

War talk is all the rage in France. The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are often cited, but the war that has come to increasingly obsess the political class in recent weeks is the one that began in 1939. Almost every day brings another reference to a period that barely anyone in the Republic experienced first-hand.

The latest example was a radio interview on Tuesday morning between Marion Maréchal, Vice President of Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party, and a journalist from France Inter, a radio station that describes itself as ‘progressive’. ‘What difference is there,’ the journalist asked Maréchal, ‘between the defence of the family that you propose and that proposed by Marshal Pétain?’ Maréchal did not appreciate the comparison to Pétain, the figurehead of the Vichy regime during the four years of Nazi occupation, calling it a ‘stupid, crazy and outrageous question’.

The question was asked of Maréchal because a few days earlier she had criticised the Cannes film festival for awarding its best female actor accolade to the ensemble cast of a film that includes the transgender actress. ‘So it’s a man who is receiving the prize for… female interpretation,’ tweeted Maréchal. ‘Progress for the left is the erasure of women and mothers.’ Six LGBTQ+ associations have since filed legal complaints accusing her of a ‘transphobic insult’.

Pétain viewed the family in 1940 as integral to the spiritual revival of France, what he called his ‘National Revolution’. Maréchal, like Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, is a defender of the traditional family unit, and is opposed to those elements within radical progressivism that seeks to dehumanise and diminish women. The question put to Maréchal was facile, another attempt to smear the French right by linking them to Pétain and Vichy.

Twelve months ago, the then Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, described Marine Le Pen’s National Rally as the ‘heir to Pétain’, to the irritation of her boss, Emmanuel Macron. The President admonished Borne, telling her that ‘you won’t be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far right believe that they are fascists.’

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That message doesn’t appear to have filtered down to Valérie Hayer, the lead candidate for Macron’s party in the European elections. ‘Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen lead a party founded by Pierre Bousquet, a corporal in the Waffen SS,’ she tweeted this week. Bousquet was one of the founders of the National Front in 1972, and not the only founder member to have fought for the Nazis. So did Léon Gaultier. On the other hand, several of the National Front pioneers fought for the Resistance, among them Rolande Birgy, honoured by Israel for helping save Jews during the war.

Hayer’s tweet was a reaction to a social media post from Le Pen. ‘National Resistance Day’ is on 27 May in France, a date to remember the brave men and women who actively opposed the Nazi occupation, and Le Pen had hailed their ‘commitment and sacrifice’. Le Pen’s declaration also incurred the contempt of the left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI). ‘Your party was founded by collaborators and Waffen SS,’ Antoine Léaument, one LFI member, tweeted. ‘You are the political descendants of the people the Resistance fought.’ Not to be left out, the Communist party’s lead candidate in the European elections, Léon Deffontaines, also accused the National Rally of being the successor to Pétain.

In the years immediately after the war, French communists aggressively pitched themselves as the principal force that had resisted the Nazis, overlooking their initial collaboration with the occupier in 1940. The Resistance, like the Vichy regime, attracted men and women of all ideologies. I know because I have interviewed numerous veterans. I met men who had been members of the Socialist party in 1944 and still were 60 years later; similarly, I was acquainted with three Resistants who had fought alongside the SAS in the Morvan in the summer of 1944, and decades later felt no shame in telling me they voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen because only he ‘stood up for France’.

These old men still loathed François Mitterrand, who was their MP in the late 1940s before eventually becoming the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic in 1981. Mitterrand served the Vichy government before switching sides and joining the Resistance, but in the eyes of the men I interviewed, he was a Vichyiste first and a Resistant second. The Vichy regime was like the Resistance in that it pulled in people of all ideologies. While many were right-wing, Vichy’s anti-Semitic prime minister, Pierre Laval, was a Socialist before the war, as was the notorious chief of police, René Bousquet, responsible for organising the deportation of French Jews to the Nazi death camps.

Mitterrand and Bousquet became close after the war, and it was an embarrassment to the former when his friend was indicted in 1991 on charges of crimes against humanity. The man who was instrumental in bringing Bousquet to court was Serge Klarsfeld, the founder of ‘The Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France’. Late last year, Klarsfeld gave an interview in which he expressed his satisfaction that Marine Le Pen’s party had shed the anti-Semitism espoused by her father. He also spoke of his bitter regret that this bigotry was embedded within elements of the French left, although he added that there was a ‘tradition’ of left-wing anti-Semitism in France. On the same day that Maréchal was accused of pining for the days of Pétain, a far-left MP from LFI was suspended from the National Assembly after waving a Palestinian flag during a debate. Later, another member of LFI, Dabid Guiraud – accused of anti-Semitism earlier this year – manhandled a Jewish MP, Meyer Habib, with a cry of ‘this man is a pig’.

Habib, a centre-right MP, has said he intends to file an official complaint because ‘calling Jews pigs is the oldest anti-Semitic insult in the world’. The strategy of the left and their progressive allies to link the right to the dark days of the occupation is not working. Bardella, the National Rally’s lead candidate in the European elections, yesterday recorded his biggest approval rating yet among voters – 34 per cent, which is 18 per cent more than his closest rival, Hayer.

What preoccupies the majority of the French, though, is not the complex past but the alarming present. A cost-of-living crisis, spiralling crime and crippling debts. A new wave of anti-Semitism sweeping the country, one inspired not by Petain but by a the war in Gaza.