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Wallace turns his guns on the Foreign Office
Uh oh. This time, it seems, mandarins at the Foreign Office have finally gone too far. In a scathing piece penned for the Telegraph, former defence secretary Ben Wallace has opened fire on civil servants after the Foreign Office drew up a statement on the death of Iran’s president. Ministers have refused to use wording supplied to them to call the demise of a man dubbed the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ a ‘tragedy’. And Wallace has more to say on it all too…
Taking to the paper today, Wallace questioned: ‘In what world was it the correct thing to do to stand in silence for the Iranian president?’ Turning to longer-standing problems with the institution, including failings in Sudan, Kabul and Ukraine, the ex-defence secretary fumed that it would be ‘hard to pick out a low point’ from his former dealings with the Foreign Office ‘because there were so many’. His blistering attack went on:
The Foreign Office seems to be governed by two principles. The first is ‘not to upset anyone’, even if it comes at the cost of Britain’s national interest. The second is that it has an overwhelming ‘duty of care’, not to UK citizens but its own workforce. No sacrifice, no putting Britain first, no risk, and definitely no recognition that in today’s world you need to be good at ‘playing chess’ with your opponents. Instead, we have a Foreign Office that hides behind protocol and pomposity.
The blame for this lies not with our ambassadors but with a HQ in King Charles Street that has removed authority from them. The Foreign Office’s leaders, past and present, like Lord Macdonald, have reduced our ambassador network to being postboxes for centrally crafted policy nonsense. Foreign Office HQ doesn’t practice mission command or devolution, and ignores the knowledge of our people on the front line.
Ouch. And he wasn’t done there, continuing:
Time and time again, the phrase ‘duty of care’ was bounced around meetings by the Foreign Office permanent secretary. It was the ‘duty of care’ mantra that saw us evacuate the Kyiv embassy to Poland when we didn’t need to. It was the ‘duty of care’ that saw King Charles Street demand that diplomats and military personnel left Sudan, even when we had a benign foothold in Port Sudan. But if the duty of care mantra didn’t get you, the overwhelming desire by Foreign Office mandarins to not upset anyone saw us time and again fail to take sides.
Talk about a dressing down. Will Foreign Office pen pushers take note? Maybe when their ears have stopped burning…
The ICC arrest warrant request for Netanyahu is repulsive
On Monday, Karim Khan KC, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that he had applied for warrants for the arrest of three leaders of Hamas as well as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
If Khan thought that applying for arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders would show how fair he is, he was gravely mistaken
If Khan thought that applying for arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders would show how fair he is, he was gravely mistaken. The equivalence drawn between the terrorist masterminds of genocidal atrocities and a democratic government doing its best to prevent their threatened repetition, was truly repulsive.
President Biden said ‘The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.’
And 106 of the 120 members of the Israeli parliament signed a statement declaring: ‘The scandalous comparison by The Hague prosecutor between Israel’s leaders and the heads of terror organisations is an unerasable historic crime and a clear expression of anti-Semitism. We reject this with revulsion.’
But the Prosecutor’s public statement was not just insulting; its inaccuracy was embarrassing.
He claimed: ‘The siege [of Gaza] also included cutting off cross-border water pipelines from Israel to Gaza – Gazans’ principal source of clean water – for a prolonged period beginning 9 October 2023.’
The entirety of this statement is untrue. Prior to Hamas’s devastating attack on 7 October 2023, Israel was supplying less than 10 per cent of the clean water used in the Gaza Strip. In the course of the Hamas attack, two of the three pipelines were damaged, according to the IDF. Israel resumed the supply of clean water through the undamaged pipeline within six days of stopping it and through another pipeline when it was mended shortly afterwards.
Khan also accused Israel of ‘cutting off and hindering electricity supplies from at least 8 October 2023 until today’.
Nine out of the ten power lines from Israel to Gaza were damaged in the Hamas attack on 7 October. Electricity is used by Hamas to light and ventilate its terror tunnels and to launch its rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. Much of the electricity in Gaza is produced by individual generators and Israel has allowed in enough fuel to generate electricity for essential services, despite the risk that this fuel is taken by Hamas.
The Prosecutor referred to ‘the imposition of a total siege over Gaza that involved completely closing the three border crossing points, Rafah, Kerem Shalom and Erez, from 8 October 2023 for extended periods’.
Did he forget that the Rafah crossing, which he visited at the end of October 2023, is between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, not Israel – and that it was reopened for humanitarian supplies on 21 October? Did he not realise that the Kerem Shalom crossing was damaged in the Hamas onslaught on 7 October, but was reopened following repairs on 17 December? And is he not aware that the Erez crossing is not equipped for cargo transfers?
These egregious inaccuracies raise further questions as to the approach of the ‘Panel of Experts in International Law’ who agreed with the Prosecutor. Did they examine only what they were given by the Prosecutor or did they check thisinformation by carrying out their own research? False information about Israel is so pervasive that no one should take what they are told for granted without carrying out independent checks.
It appears from the Prosecutor’s statement that he relied on statements by UN organisations. He should not have done. Personnel of these UN organisations are often severely prejudiced against Israel and at least one of these organisations hasbeen heavily infiltrated by Hamas.
The advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004 on Israel’s security barrier in the West Bank provides an illuminating example. The ICJ relied on a statement by the UN that the occupancy of beds at the UN hospital in Qalqilya had fallen by 40 per cent in the course of concluding that the barrier had severely restricted access to Qalqilya. But as the Israeli Supreme Court observed in the subsequent Alfei Menashe case, two new hospitals had opened in Qalqilya, and this was likely to have affected demand for the UN hospital.
There is a regrettable tendency to suppose that where there are any perceived problems, the Zionists are to blame. In the present conflict, Israel has enabled considerably more than enough food to enter the Gaza Strip to feed its entire population. However, there have been some difficulties in its distribution inside the Gaza Strip, because Hamas and other armed gangs have been stealing it before it can be delivered to those Palestinians who most need it. Who should be blamed for that? It seems that Karim Khan KC blames the Zionist leaders.
China will struggle to resist Biden’s trade war
Attending a business summit in Shanghai earlier this year, I was struck by how downbeat the mood was. China’s stagnant economy, in particular the slow-motion meltdown of the property market, had clipped investor confidence across a number of industries. One Italian businessman told me the event had many fewer international attendees than previous years. But the apprehensive mood was cut through by the bolshiness of one senior executive from a leading Chinese electric car company: ‘America, Europe, Japan and South Korea are our high-potential markets’, the exec beamed as he set out a plan for what seemed like world domination.
His optimism was not misplaced. In post-pandemic China, electric cars have come out on top as a national success story. The market leader, BYD, sold more cars globally in the last three months of 2023 than Tesla. Chinese brands are expected to take a quarter of European new EV sales this year. The Chinese are so chuffed with the success of their electric cars that they are dubbed one of the ‘new three’ (xinsanyang): EVs, solar panels and batteries. Past the age of mass production of clothes and toys, these are China’s champions in the 2020s.
The Chinese government under Xi Jinping is not one for taking provocations lying down
This competitiveness is exactly what sows fear amongst American and European rivals. Last week, Joe Biden announced a raft of new tariffs on Chinese goods, the most eye-catching being an 100 per cent tariff on Chinese electric cars, four times the current rate. In Brussels, the European Commission has begun a number of anti-dumping probes into Chinese EVs, solar panels and medical equipment. Ursula von der Leyen has so far resisted American entreaties to present a united front on tariffs, but has pledged to penalise Chinese companies if these investigations prove their low prices damage the EU economy. A new trade war has begun.
The Chinese government under Xi Jinping is not one for taking provocations lying down. To punish France for taking a leading role in the Commission’s investigation into Chinese EVs, and for favouring French carmakers with subsidies not available to the foreign, China began an investigation into brandy imports (99 per cent of which comes from France). On Sunday, China also launched an anti-dumping investigation into imports of a thermoplastic widely used by the US, EU, Japan and Taiwan in its car industries.
But ultimately, Beijing is limited in how much damage it can inflict. Its fundamental problem is that it exports much more to the US and EU than vice versa. What’s more, with its economy already in the doldrums, any revenge will hurt it too. China could go after German and American automakers, for example, who make up three fifths of its car imports, but that would hurt Chinese consumers, as well as the Chinese joint ventures that the foreign automakers partner with. Or it could target American grains and oilseeds, which account for two thirds of US exports to China by value and are protected by a powerful lobby in Washington, but that would also only hike prices for consumers and businesses at home. Protectionism hurts both sides, and in this case, as in Trump’s trade war, the West can afford to go lower.
It has also been suggested that China could target key electoral states in the US, hitting Biden where it matters in this crucial election year. A Swedish trade NGO has calculated that more than a quarter of Biden’s 2020 winning margin could be put at risk in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin if China blocked exports from those states and hurt local jobs. But would a Trump victory really be better for China, considering the former president is the original mastermind of a trade war against Beijing?
Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly suggested that if China took a harder line on Russia, Europe’s relationship with Beijing would be better. But even if Russia surrenders tomorrow thanks to Chinese help, the scale of the economic and security challenges emanating from China have become too large for Washington and Brussels to ignore. In reality, this trade war has many more years to run.
Judges are empowering Just Stop Oil
It has been argued that the preparedness of the courts to declare governmental action unlawful is vital to the rule of law. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Yesterday’s High Court decision which annulled new police powers to control protests shows that there might be two sides to this, especially when you find yourself on the school run behind a deliberately dawdling crocodile of JSO protesters or in front of a a bunch of XR zealots lying in the road.
The rule of law is all very well, but progressives cannot be allowed to have it all their own way
The background to the episode is boringly legalistic. (Please accept apologies in advance.) The Public Order Act of 1986 allows the police compulsorily to divert a procession or gathering, or exclude it from any public place, to avoid serious disruption to the life of the community. By 2022 it emerged that it was unclear whether JSO or XR gatherings caused ‘serious disruption’, and that police were therefore playing safe when it came to using the 1986 powers against them. A 2022 change to the 1986 legislation therefore introduced a Henry VIII clause allowing the Home Secretary to issue regulations which would amend the law by making clear what did count as serious disruption. Chris Philp, minister of state at the Home Office, did just that. His regulations stated that serious disruption included, among other things, ‘the prevention of, or a hindrance that is more than minor to, the carrying out of day-to-day activities (including in particular the making of a journey)’ –making it clear that small-scale road-blocking could be curtailed.
It was these regulations that the High Court yesterday overturned. In its lawyer-like way it decided, in effect, that the Home Secretary could not define as ‘serious disruption’ anything that the court did not think was in fact serious. And, in addition, that having discussed the matter with the police, he could not regulate without also consulting supporters of would-be protesters.
Very good, some might say: it’s a simple case where the government got its law wrong, and the courts have rightly called it out. The progressive establishment is saying just that. But there is more to the issue.
The point to note is, as even an educated non-lawyer can see, there was nothing inevitable about all this. Administrative law is in fact remarkably flexible. The court could perfectly plausibly have decided (for example) that on a proper interpretation of the Henry VIII clause in the legislation, the Home Secretary’s view of what should count as serious should prevail over a literal reading of the word, and that talking to the police who had to enforce the law did not carry with it an obligation to consult those who might later try to break it. In other words, what we have here goes beyond a simple case of judicial oversight. If it is not judicial activism, it inclines very much that way. And while the former is something most will support, the latter is decidedly controversial. The rule of law is all very well, but progressives cannot be allowed to have it all their own way.
Indeed, in this case there are good reasons why the radicals should not have it their way. An important feature of the rule of law, especially when it comes to police powers to control the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable disruption, is predictability. Protesters and police need to know where they stand, as for that matter does the often-forgotten class, the general public going about their business. If anything, this should be a strong steer to the courts against invalidating regulations that were, after all, meant to clarify what protesters were and were not allowed to do.
Furthermore, it is not as if there was a lack of democratic scrutiny. The regulations were approved by the House of Commons, and in the end by the Lords – unweillingly in the latter case, but that does not alter the situation.
As it is, we now have the worst of all worlds. There is now no certainty about what the law on the right to protest is. The Public Order Act on the government legislation website says one thing. But according to a High Court judgment the provisions inserted into it by the Home Office are to be ignored, and we have to read the Act as it appeared before the changes. But the judgment is itself under appeal; if the Court of Appeal thinks differently in a few months’ time the new provisions are valid after all. The poor constable faced with all this deserves your sympathy. But he also deserves your understanding when, faced with a stand-off between angry motorists and protesters determined to make life as difficult as possible for them, he declines to intervene.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that the Home Secretary has produced regulations of exactly the kind envisaged when the public order legislation was amended, and despite those regulations having been approved by both the Commons and the Lords, apparently nothing changes. For the next few months at least, until either the government runs a successful appeal or manages to get primary legislation past an increasingly obstructive House of Lords, the disruptive cults of JSO and XR seem destined to have a field day. It is a fair bet that you will have to allow a good deal extra for that school run.
Will Ireland’s police question the ex-IRA boss who says he killed Mountbatten?
Do you remember when, last December, the Irish government took the United Kingdom to court over proposals for dealing with the legacy of the Troubles? They, and many domestic critics in the UK, said that plans to establish a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission – in which individuals could receive an amnesty in exchange for honest testimony – amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for people who may have committed terrible crimes.
‘Yes, I blew him up,’ Michael Hayes said
Well, nothing quite puts that story in perspective like this week’s report that Michael Hayes, a former IRA commander now living in the Republic of Ireland, has openly boasted about being the mastermind who planned the 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten.
‘Yes, I blew him up. (Tom) McMahon put it on his boat…I planned everything, I am commander in chief,’ Hayes told the Mail on Sunday. ‘I blew up Earl Mountbatten in Sligo but I had a justification…He came to my country and murdered my people and I fought back. I hit them back.’
Perhaps Hayes will be swiftly arrested and prosecuted; there certainly appears to be no formal barriers to the police in Dublin at least investigating Hayes’s remarks. But it would be quite a turn-up for the books; to date, the burden of investigation into alleged historic crimes in Northern Ireland has all too often fallen disproportionately on the security forces.
The most obvious example of this was the so-called comfort letters scandal, which came to light when one such communication collapsed the trial of John Downey, the IRA member accused of carrying out the Hyde Park bombing in 1982.
Under the Belfast Agreement, prisoners serving sentences for Troubles-related terror offences were released. However, this did not apply to those who had evaded capture or not yet been charged. A formal amnesty for these suspects was opposed not only by Unionists but also Sinn Féin – because it would have included British troops.
Instead, the Blair government covertly sent the ‘on-the-runs’ – a group which by definition only included suspected terrorists, not security forces personnel – letters saying they were no longer wanted by the authorities.
Sinn Féin got exactly what it wanted: a de facto amnesty for republican suspects, but no protection for its enemies; in 2016, the Belfast Telegraph reported that ‘police have since revealed that OTRs who received letters were linked to hundreds of murders.’ Those victims will never receive justice.
Since then, this problem has persisted. Ben Lowry, a Northern Irish journalist, has written extensively about the disproportionate attention seemingly paid to allegations against military and police personnel. In 2017, it was reported that such cases made up 30 per cent of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI’s) legacy caseload. On first glance, that might seem broadly fair, if one divides the participants of the Troubles into Republicans, Loyalists, and the security forces. But that simplistic analysis misses a couple of critical facts.
First, the Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary between them account for only around ten per cent of all killings associated with the Troubles, not a third. Second, those organisations were state actors with the legitimate right to use lethal force in the execution of their duties.
That doesn’t mean they have sovereign immunity, nor that military and police personnel did not perpetrate unlawful killings. But it does make a simple comparison of even the true bodycount misleading. Many of the deaths attributed to the security forces will have been lawful and proper; every death attributed to republican or loyalist terrorists was a crime.
Sinn Féin does not accept this, of course. For all its posturing about being an army, the IRA seems deeply averse to the idea of lawful death in combat; republicans have tried to insist that the military be investigated even for such clear-cut engagements as the 1987 Loughall ambush, in which an eight-man IRA squad was ambushed and destroyed by the SAS whilst attacking an RUC barracks.
Meanwhile, London has been remarkably lax about letting Dublin strike bold poses on the question of historic justice without posing hard questions about the Irish government’s own record, especially its chronic refusal to extradite IRA suspects to face trial. In 2019, Unionists were justly outraged when Patrick Ryan appeared on a BBC programme to boast about his work sourcing cash and munitions for the IRA; Dublin had refused to extradite him in 1988.
Hayes’ confession is a chance to start putting things right. He has admitted to orchestrating the assassination of a senior member of the royal family, and a former member of the British government. If the Irish government is so concerned about seeing justice done for historic offences, it should arrest him and hand him over.
If not, its latest posture will be exposed as communitarian special pleading, dressed up in the borrowed feathers of concern for due process.
Visa figures fall again – but is it enough?
It’s a big day for stats in British politics. Following the news that inflation has dropped to 2.3 per cent, the Home Office has this morning published its latest figures for visa applications. They reveal a 25 per cent fall across all visa routes in the first four months of 2024, following the package of changes that the Home Secretary announced in December 2023. The most significant drop was in student dependant numbers, which fell by 79 per cent.
This big fall is one of the reasons why Home Secretary James Cleverly is reluctant to clamp down even further on the graduate visa route. Last week’s report by the Migration Advisory Committee disappointed some Tory MPs, who have significant concerns about the number of visas being handed out. Now that the Rwanda Bill has passed into law, some Tories think that the ‘die is cast’ on illegal migration. There has been great pressure to focus on bringing down legal migration numbers, where the Home Secretary has more levers to pull.
The cabinet, however, is split on further changes. Both Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, and Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary, have warned Cleverly of the dangers of clamping down on graduate visas. Cleverly and his team are wary of taking what one calls ‘a sledgehammer’ to the graduate route, as universities and the economy start to feel the hit of these changes.
It is no surprise then that some Tories want to see further visa changes
The fact that the existing changes have seen such a big fall in student dependants will therefore be held up as vindication by Home Office ministers that their existing changes are working. Cleverly will likely urge MPs to ‘stick to the plan’, just as how Jeremy Hunt is saying similar on the economy. After the record post-pandemic years, these figures allow Sunak’s government to claim it is finally getting net migration back until control.
The Office for National Statistics figures out tomorrow though are expected to tell another story. These cover the period up until December 2023 and will therefore not take account of the changes that the Home Office made to visa routes in December. It is no surprise then that some Tories want to see further visa changes announced either in the coming months or as part of a manifesto package at the next election.
Listen: BBC’s Emma Barnett in bust up with Jeremy Hunt
Another day, another drama. This time it involves the BBC’s Today programme, where interviewer Emma Barnett was quizzing Jeremy Hunt on the UK’s economic prospects. The conversation didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned for the Chancellor…
Barnett started on how today’s inflation figures have decreased to 2.3 per cent this morning — the lowest level in three years — which Hunt first hailed as ‘good news’, before admitting it may take a little longer until voters feel better off. His interviewer then went on to broach the subject of Liz Truss, lecturing Hunt on how ‘some of the shocks’ of the former PM’s premiership are ‘still being felt’ by the population. The Chancellor admitted that ‘mistakes were made’ — before Barnett interjected that ‘more than mistakes’ are to blame for the current cost-of-living crisis. In turn, Hunt asked his interviewer if he might be able to, er, actually answer her question. And by the time Barnett had moved onto the subject of rents, things had gotten even more awkward…
EB: I’m getting messages here. Nick has said: ‘My rent went up £200 a month due to my landlord’s mortgage going up.’ You know how these things work, Mr Hunt, as a landlord, as an MP, as a chancellor. Do you feel wealthier?
JH: It’s lovely talking to you, Emma, but it’s almost like you’re not actually listening to the answers I give.
EB: I am listening incredibly carefully.
JH: Well, then let me say this. I said to you that we’ve created more jobs than anywhere else in Europe, that we’ve had more foreign investment. I notice you’ve got very good researchers on the Today programme. You haven’t challenged me on any of those facts and the reason I don’t think you’ve challenged me is because you know they’re true.
EB: And I’m listening. I’m listening.
JH: Great! Well that’s a good start.
EB: Thank you so much.
JH: Thank you very much indeed. Well we’re going to have a great— we’re going to get on just fine, aren’t we?
EB: We are — but I asked you a question, if you don’t mind listening to my question.
JH: I did listen to your question.
Oo er. Next time, keep the petty squabbles off the airwaves…
Listen to the clip here:
Inflation falls close to target, but could interest rate cuts be delayed?
The UK inflation rate has slowed to 2.3 per cent on the year to April, down from 3.2 per cent in March. This marks the lowest headline inflation rate in almost three years, before the unwinding of lockdowns and release of pent-up demand sent prices spiralling. The Spectator‘s Data Hub outlines the inflation saga below:
April’s slowdown is largely thanks to Ofgem’s reduction to the energy price cap, as higher energy costs fell out of the data. The lower cap saw bills reduce by around 12 per cent: a reduction of £238 from the average household’s yearly bill. According to the Office for National Statistics, the ‘prices of electricity, gas and other fuels fell by 27.1 per cent in the year to April 2024, the largest fall on record, with figures available back to 1989.’
The Chancellor’s decision not to raise tobacco duty in his March Budget also contributed to a slowdown in price rises, as did the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks: prices rose by 2.9 per cent on the year to April, easing for the 13th consecutive month as price hikes slowed from their peak of 19.2 per cent in March last year. But it wasn’t just energy, food and tobacco costs that slowed: core inflation, which excludes these more volatile costs, fell too – from 4.2 per cent on the year to March to 3.9 per cent in April.
The near-return to the Bank of England’s target of 2 per cent is close enough that ministers are declaring victory. Rishi Sunak has declared inflation ‘back to normal’ and, similar to his comments that the economy has ‘turned a corner’, the Prime Minister insisted this morning that ‘brighter days are ahead.’ Meanwhile Chancellor Jeremy Hunt took a slightly more reserved tone, noting on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that prices are still ‘a lot higher than they were a year ago’ – a nod to the fact that a slowdown in the inflation rate means prices keep rising, but at a much more manageable pace.
The trouble is, while this morning’s inflation update is a positive development, the Bank of England may not see it that way. Although inflation slowed significantly, the fall was still smaller than expected, with both the BoE’s expectation and market consensus sitting at 2.1 per cent. Given Threadneedle’s Street’s more hawkish attitude these days – especially regarding returning inflation to target in the medium term (the Bank expects the rate to rise back to where it sits now by the end of the year) – today’s news may not be as encouraging to the Monetary Policy Committee as it is to politicians.
That doesn’t mean a summer interest rate cut is off the cards: indeed, on Monday the Bank’s deputy governor all-but-confirmed speculation that a rate cut is on the way. But there are three chances for the Bank to start its rate-cutting process over the summer: June, August, or even September, at a push. Today’s news further throws up in the air whether the MPC will opt for a cut at its next meeting, or wait until later in the summer to start the process.
Still, ministers are lucky that today’s inflation update – which has the spotlight – overlaps with this month’s public finances update, which is by no means a feel-good story. In short, the government can’t stop spending. Public sector borrowing stood at £20.5 billion last month: £1.5 billion more than in April last year and £1.2 billion than had been estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility in the March Budget. As a result, the ONS has increased its forecast for borrowing for the 2023-24 financial year by £0.8 billion.
Debt servicing payments continue to weigh down the Treasury, as costs hit £8.6 billion in April, ‘the highest monthly payable for ten months’. Again this was higher than expected by the OBR, and raises further questions about any scope the Chancellor might have for another tax cut ahead of the election, when the cash Hunt has to spend must be funnelled into paying for what’s already been borrowed and spent.
These spending updates help to highlight the catastrophic consequences of the inflation crisis – which today seems, finally, to be under control. But while the crisis may be ending, the damage it created has not all been repaired.
Sainsbury’s self-checkouts are just the start
Sainsbury’s has long had a special place in my heart. The weekly shop at the Orange Store offered excitement to a child and a comforting familiarity that my adult self has found hard to shake off. But roll on the decades and I’m standing, dismayed, in my local Sainsbury’s.
The boss of Sainsbury’s has claimed that many customers like the company’s self-checkouts
The supermarket in my London suburb was a friendly place and the air over the checkouts rang with chatter between customers and the long-standing staff. But on this day a curious silence reigned. Half the checkouts had gone and had been replaced by a ‘self-checkout’ zone. Disconnected from their usual posts, the staff wore rattled expressions. They’d been told they would still have jobs, one said, helping customers ‘on the floor’.
After that, I went to Sainsbury’s less and less. When I did so, I avoided the self-checkouts: instead, I chose to stand resolutely in line in the hope of being served by a person. One evening, I rounded an aisle with my shopping basket full to find the two remaining checkouts closed, a red band drawn across the exit. The harried-looking woman running between the self-checkouts confirmed that no one was available to serve me. Putting down my basket and proclaiming my intention to shop there no more, I was conscious of how loud my voice sounded. Nobody seemed to speak in the new Sainsbury’s: all the other customers were staring silently at the screens in front of them, inputting data.
Amid a backlash against the growing automation of our supermarkets, the boss of Sainsbury’s claimed last month that many customers like the company’s increasing use of self-checkouts. Simon Roberts said: ‘If you visit one of our supermarkets, what you’ll see is definitely more self checkouts than a number of years ago, because actually a lot of customers like the speedy checkout.’
Automation has happened fast: returning to Britain after two years’ exile (my response to lockdown was to leave the country), the replacement of people by machines was the first thing I noticed. Buying a drink in a Sainsbury’s Local was like going through airport security, weaving through lanes towards banks of machines under the gaze of uniformed men. In suburban supermarkets, cameras appeared over the self-checkouts in Tesco, Lidl and the Coop, filming customers close-up. Surveillance in the Coop! What was the country coming to?
I decided to ditch supermarkets, a domestic mission that has taken me to butchers and greengrocers, health stores and Poundland and into a new world of ‘international’ shops stocking produce from Turkey, Poland and Iran. Never has my shopping been so promiscuous or my cooking so from-scratch.
But the habits of a lifetime die hard and I confess that on occasion I would sneak into a Sainsbury’s for a bottle of ginger wine or block of Emmental. Until, that is, I came to a horrible realisation: Sainsbury’s decision to reduce the number of manual checkouts was just the beginning of the supermarket’s dystopian transformation.
Let me explain. The automation of our supermarkets is part of a wider trend in which what we eat and how we get our food is undergoing a profound transformation. If it succeeds, our food supply will depend, like never before, on technology and corporations. Supermarkets very much want to be a part of this.
Sainsbury’s has published a report which describes the path towards a future of tech food through a series of imaginary case studies. In 2025, eco-health student Julia is cooking a celebratory meal for her family out of seaweed and vegetables, the latter grown at Sainsbury’s in-store hydroponic shelves. She knows her dad would prefer a steak but is educating him into a diet beyond meat and fish as part of her mission to promote ecological public health. Julia is good at this: by 2050 she has her own business producing ‘environmentally friendly proteins’ where meat is grown in a vat and ‘assembled’ via 3D technology. Customers, who include her local councillor, come to the plant and watch their dinner being printed out.
In 2169, Julia’s granddaughter is woken by a vibration in her wrist. The implant ‘notifies her nutrition drip to prepare her breakfast shot, dispatched the previous night by Sainsbury’s’. After her automated feed, Jill settles down to watch the news on the inside of her eyeball and marvels at the ‘feats of humankind’.
Where can a grocery business have got ideas fit for Brave New World? The answer, in part, lies in the Netherlands. Modern humanity’s intoxication with the possibilities of technology is in the zeitgeist: these days the Guardian, the paper I used to read for recipes and tips on gardening, runs pieces about ‘lab-grown sausages’ sizzling in a pan of foaming margarine’ at the Dutch startup Meatable.
New forms of technology-based food are also being promoted heavily by a set of powerful commercial and ideological interests. Food Valley NL in the Netherlands is a network of food tech startups, accelerators, R&D labs and multinationals dedicated to accelerating the ‘journey’ to a new food system by 2050. This is a ‘transition’ which they argue is urgently needed to save the planet. One of its leading initiatives is the ‘protein transition’. And yes, this includes eating more insects.
So when I read Sainsbury’s gushing over that fact that it was ‘the first UK supermarket to introduce snack-packs of insects through the brand, Eat Grub’ in their report, I felt a mix of emotions that extend beyond the disgust food tech evangelicals say we must ‘get over’ at the sight of a plate of bugs.
Sainsbury’s holds happy memories for me: the crisp aisle was a highlight on my weekly shop with my mother. But if this supermarket wants to be at the forefront of driving technological change and making the experience of shopping feel even less personal, then count me out. Goodbye, Mr Sainsbury. It’s been a hell of a ride, from excitement and familiarity to dismay and disillusion, but I won’t be coming with you on your journey to the future.
Zelensky’s time as president is up, but he’s right to stay put
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky’s five-year term is up, but he’s staying put. Unsurprisingly, some of Zelensky’s critics – and the Kremlin – have questioned his legitimacy. But Zelensky, who marked five years in office on 20 May, is right not to step down. The idea that, as a result, there has been some unprecedented outrage against democracy simply doesn’t stand up.
It is impossible to conduct a free, fair and representative presidential election
The practical problem in holding an election is obvious. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 gave it control of 16,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. The full-scale military invasion in February 2022 saw Russian forces seize another 46,000 square miles, leaving about a quarter of Ukraine under occupation. Ukraine’s counterattacks in the summer and autumn of 2022 liberated nearly 30,000 square miles of territory. Nevertheless, an assessment this week by the Council for Foreign Relations estimates that 18 per cent of Ukraine is currently occupied by Russian military forces.
It is obviously impossible to conduct a free, fair and representative presidential election when a fifth of the country is controlled by the enemy. As late as last autumn, Zelensky was considering whether there could somehow be a poll, making provision for votes to be cast abroad and for those in the armed forces to exercise their franchise, but the practical obstacles were too great. Even if elections were held in the four-fifths of the country not occupied, polling stations would be prime targets for Russian military strikes, and meaningful campaigning would be almost impossible.
In legal terms, the point is moot. President Zelensky declared a state of martial law on 24 February 2022, in response to the Russian invasion, according to the Constitution of Ukraine. One of the strictures of martial law is that elections cannot be held. Equally, Article 108 of the constitution makes it clear that the incumbent president remains in office until a successor is sworn in.
This is not a matter of autocratic disdain by the head of state: in November last year, all parties represented in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, agreed a memorandum agreeing that elections should be postponed until martial law comes to an end. It states that ‘future free and fair national elections (parliamentary, presidential) shall be held after the end of the war and the end of martial law with a period of time sufficient to prepare for elections (at least six months after the end of martial law)’.
This accommodation of brutal military reality should not surprise us. The Parliament Act 1911 set the length of a parliament at five years, but a general election was postponed during the First World War, initially by the Parliament and Registration Act 1916 and then by other pieces of legislation. A poll was finally held in December 1918, only weeks after the armistice but eight years since the preceding general election.
Britain reached the same sensible conclusion during the Second World War. The 1935 Parliament should have been dissolved in 1940, but the Prolongation of Parliament Act 1940 extended its life by a year. Similar acts were passed in the next four years of the conflict, and a general election was eventually held in July 1945, when the parliament was almost a decade old.
American critics argue that presidential elections have never been interrupted, and Franklin Roosevelt was subject to re-election in 1944 when the United States was still at war with Germany and Japan. But the comparison is fatuous: America was never occupied during the Second World War, nor was there any serious suggestion that it might be invaded. So the electoral infrastructure was intact and unthreatened.
If a country is invaded and partially occupied by an aggressor, it changes the situation on the ground. That is practical politics – more fundamentally, it is an acceptance of reality. Zelensky used his constitutional to declare martial law, and he has carried the Verkhovna Rada with him. The legislature has agreed that elections should be held only when the war is over and robust voting arrangements can be put into place: a decision democracies, including our own, have regarded as inevitable in the past.
Unless you can provide a workable alternative, showing how a free and fair presidential poll can be conducted with Russia occupying a fifth of Ukraine, you are simply ceding the initiative to a genuine dictator, Vladimir Putin.
Did the SNP miss the boat on saving commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde?
Scotland’s SNP government would like nothing better than to be seen to have saved commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde. It likes the idea so much it has spent almost half a billion pounds of taxpayer money on the effort while trying to produce two new ferries for Scotland’s island communities. How ironic would it be if an opportunity emerged to finally create a commercially viable yard in Glasgow only for nationalist politics to get in the way of it coming to fruition? Yet that may well be what has happened in recent months.
If anyone is going to save commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde, it probably won’t be the SNP
The fatal moment appears to have been November of last year, when the SNP administration effectively kiboshed a plan from managers at Ferguson Marine, the nationalised shipyard at the centre of the ferries scandal, to make the yard long-term sustainable via a combination of new boat production and regular contract work for the UK military.
The yard’s then boss, the recently sacked David Tydeman, had asked for £25 million of investment in a new steel plating production line and other upgrades to raise productivity. The Scottish Government’s Economy Secretary, Neil Gray, rejected the request, insisting the yard should ‘refine’ its business plan before agreeing extra funding. Tydeman, who took the helm at Ferguson in February 2022, was subsequently relieved of his duties in late March.
His sacking came as something of a surprise. After previous costly failures, Tydeman had finally managed to get to grips with the production and design issues that had held up the building of the Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa, the two overdue, overbudget boats the yard had been struggling to build. At the time of his departure, the Glen Sannox was in the water conducting sea trials, while the Glen Rosa is in the final stages of completion.
Tydeman had also, for the first time, produced a serious plan for making the yard commercially sustainable. With the £25 million of new investment, he argued the yard would be in a strong position to build several new small vessels the Scottish government will soon commission as well as fulfil regular contract work on new ships for Britain’s navy.
UK defence contractor BAE has a shipbuilding yard in Govan. Insiders report that the yard is so busy its management is eager to utilise capacity elsewhere, so long as quality and productivity standards can be met. Tydeman appears to have recognised this opportunity early on. Not long after taking on the management of Ferguson he started sending a team of welders and platers to Govan on a day-rate basis. This then led to a formal pilot project for the state-owned business to produce three units for the Govan yard’s Type 26 frigate programme.
This went well, and there was every reason to believe ongoing military contract work alongside more precarious civilian full vessel construction could form the basis of steady future revenues. A formal five-year business plan was created, in line with recommendations from independent consultants brought in to produce a report (currently secret) on turning the yard into a commercially competitive operation.
The £25 million investment seemed a relatively small amount to create a business that would no longer be a drain on government finances and could finally be seen as a national asset.
There is an obvious incentive for nationalists to allow the yard to fail to become reliant on British defence procurement
However, timing was critical. For Ferguson to secure more contracts with BAE, and possibly also with Babcock’s defence shipping yard in Rosyth, and for the business to be in a position whereby it could competitively build smaller ferries, a new plating line had to quickly be ordered – some of the equipment has two-year lead times. One person close to the management team at the time says that when Neil Gray refused to give the go-ahead for purchase orders to be placed, BAE’s enthusiasm for Ferguson dissipated.
In a statement at Holyrood at the time, Gray said state aid rules prevented him giving a commitment on the new funding. He told MSPs the government’s ‘independent due diligence’ on the request had concluded it would not meet a ‘key legal requirement’. However, state aid rules only potentially apply to any contract for the small ferries the Scottish Government plans to order. Upgraded facilities are needed regardless – at least if the goal really is to create a commercially sustainable yard.
But was that Gray’s goal? Politically it might be easier to keep the business afloat but uncompetitive to get beyond the next Holyrood election. There is also the possibility that nationalist ideology has gotten in the way of pragmatic commercial considerations. Had Tydeman’s plan come to fruition it would have tied the sustainability of Scottish commercial shipbuilding directly to Scotland remaining within the UK. There is an obvious political incentive for a Scottish nationalist administration to conveniently find a way for the yard to fail to become reliant on British defence procurement. What an irony it would be if what was meant to be a totem of the independence cause emerged under nationalist control as a symbol of being ‘better together’.
As with so many aspects of the SNP’s ferries fiasco, the ministerial decision-making from November might never fully and honestly be explained. What is clear is that there was an opportunity last year for the yard to have a shot at becoming a sustainable business. That opportunity seems to have been forfeited.
That said, Scotland now has a new first minister who is smarter than the last one and seemingly eager to tone down the nationalism. Will John Swinney’s government be pragmatic enough to invest to boost yard productivity and get the military contract work back online? I wouldn’t bet on it. A repeat of past mistakes seems more likely.
If anyone is going to save commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde, it probably won’t be an SNP government.
Guns, drugs and beatings – I loved boarding school
My son and various well-meaning friends have been advising me to abandon writing history books and cash in on the trend for boarding school misery memoirs. On the face of it, as someone who was sent away aged seven and remained in these institutions until I was 18, I am well qualified to add my contribution to what has now become a recognised sub-genre of English literature. My problem, though, is that I quite enjoyed my time at boarding schools and I cannot claim – as so many do – that it adversely affected my life; rather the reverse.
In his extended essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell recorded his awful schooldays at St Cyprians, a snobbish boys preparatory school in Eastbourne. There he suffered the fetid smells of urine, dried crud on porridge bowls, pathetic canings by the headmaster and the sadistic antics of his wife Flip. Though some contemporaries claimed Orwell exaggerated his account, the damage was done. Prep schools were forever pictured as hellholes.
I was beaten there too of course, but justly so, for attempting to steal rifles and a Bren machine gun
In 2021, Louis de Berniers wrote about abuse at his boarding school, Grensham House. In the same year, Old Radleian Richard Beard argued in his book Sad Little Men that boarding schools damage their pupils while preparing them for power, thus create old boys like Boris Johnson who damage us all. This year, Charles Spencer’s memoir, A Very Private School, detailed his experience of prep school cruelty. It topped the charts. The Times and Telegraph have published similar accounts by Simon Mills and A.C. Grayling. Even the Speccie has joined the chorus: my friend Robin Ashenden has recently given an account of his own boarding school terrors in these very pages.
So I feel almost perverse in stating that in my case boarding school gave me some of the happiest days of my life – in spite of receiving more than my fair share of beatings, for I was an incorrigible rebel against all forms of authority and discipline. I hope I don’t sound too callous about the pain of others when I say that I got over such things with relative ease, though after my first beating I threw myself on the floor whimpering and writhing in agony.
That punishment was inflicted by an old monster called F.W. ‘Sammy’ Sanders (long dead) who typified the traditional picture of a prep school master: reeking of stale tobacco and BO, with leather elbow patches and hair sprouting from ears and nostrils. You get the picture. Sammy had himself been a pupil at the school and after graduating from Oxford he couldn’t wait to get back and teach at it. He hated me with passion – no doubt with good cause – and the feeling was mutual.
Founded by a Liberal MP called J. Howard Whitehouse, Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight was dedicated to the ideals of Whitehouse’s hero, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Strangely, however, Whitehouse was also a fervent admirer of Benito Mussolini and the boy Sammy Sanders had led a party of pupils to pay homage to the Duce in Rome before the war.
Not all punishments were as physical as the beatings: I once had to stand in front of the school for half an hour with my tongue protruding – a penalty for having a ‘sharp tongue’ which the headmaster claimed I used to ‘cheek the staff.’ I also bucked the system by leading a mass Great Escape-style breakout: more for the fun of it than as a flight from tyranny. Five of us got away, only to be detained trying to board a ferry for the mainland. All things considered, it was hardly a surprise when my parents were told that they should find a new school for me when I reached puberty.
The next school – like the establishment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – was in rural North Wales and provided the erotic and theatrical thrills which make my later schooldays so rich in my memory. By the end I preferred being at school with my mates than being at home with my parents. I was beaten there too of course, but justly so, for attempting to steal rifles and a Bren machine gun from the armoury of the school’s cadet corps while planned mutiny while under the influence of Lindsay Anderson’s famous film If…
Even more influential were the dances we were allowed to hold, attended by convent schoolgirls from Wrexham and young ladies from a nearby posh girls’ boarding school called Moreton Hall. We were awash with adolescent testosterone and I don’t think I have ever had a more exciting experience than dancing with a Nigerian princess: a real one.
Almost as enthralling were our experiments with drugs. An American friend used to smuggle pockets full of weed through Heathrow from Miami and when we had smoked our way through his supply, we filched ether from the chemistry lab for clandestine sniffing sessions. I only stopped doing that after a chequer board pattern on the floor of the room where I took my first sniff mysteriously reappeared on the grass of the playing field where I took the second sniff days later and I wondered what the stuff was doing to my mind.
An aspiring actor, I was chosen to play Richard Rich, the villain who betrays Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons. The performance was enlivened when the headmaster who was producing the play had a midnight flit with another master’s wife on the eve of production and was never seen again. An enterprising teacher called Alec Wilding White took over the play and managed to get us a week’s gig at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre where we trod the boards before bemused Scousers in between live performances by Roger McGough.
Another time I was caught red handed by the head boy while breaking into the school’s clothing store with a couple of confreres. Our punishment for this offence did at least show a touch of imagination. The headmaster ordered us to draw a tent from the school’s scout troop; bread, beans and cornflakes from the kitchen and, totally unsupervised, told to disappear into the wild Welsh countryside and make ourselves scarce for three glorious days.
Hoping to enhance our basic diet with a chicken, I drew the short straw and was selected to break into the hen house of the farm where we were camping and grab the necessary bird. Catching a chicken that doesn’t want to be caught was more difficult than I expected and the resulting din made me fear getting my arse peppered with the farmer’s buckshot.
At last I got my bird in hand but then came the problem of despatching it. I had never wrung a neck before and so – I am still ashamed to recall – I ended by drowning it in the nearby Llangollen Canal. It must have ingested too much water, for halfway through the lengthy plucking process we smelt the distinct odour of decomposition, so the chicken ended up buried in the field outside our tent instead of in our stomachs. These days the headmaster who decreed our temporary banishment would be prosecuted for criminal neglect, but I can only look back in wonder and gratitude on my wild schooldays.
The hell of interior design
I spent seven hours yesterday cutting up cardboard boxes into little square pieces with a Stanley knife and stuffing them into rubbish sacks. I’ve just moved house and my home is piled high with bulging black bags and looks like Leicester Square during the Winter of Discontent. Given that I don’t currently have the necessary bin from the council, I could end up living with them forever.
These are just some of the stresses of moving into a newly bought flat. Everyone knows the legal process of buying a place is an ordeal – the multitude of documents you can’t find and questions you can’t answer, the survey that over-stresses all the problems, apparent 11th hour impediments to closing the deal that, as in a Hollywood film, finally evaporate as completion day approaches.
The room now has a clinical look, soulless and arctic. You feel less happy inside it
But just as strenuous is the period after you’ve moved in – a world of endless decisions and choices, each one of which may be wrong and will cost money to repair. I’ve already bought a dud tablecloth and pair of curtains, both of which will have to be returned (I’m tempted to just give them to Oxfam and avoid the red tape). But both of these pale beside the long-awaited armchair, which was so quietly disillusioning it seemed to teach me something about life itself.
I’d wanted this armchair – from a certain well known Swedish manufacturer of furniture products – for such a long time. It had a pleasing 1950s solidity, a kind of four-square quality, that made me think of the early Bond films. But when it arrived, it turned out to be – the first disappointment – self-assembly, and no armchair in God’s earth should be that. Armchairs ought to look as solid as Mount Rushmore, as though they’ll outlast you and your grandchildren, and there should be something arcane, known only to experts, about their composition. I already felt I knew too much about this one’s secrets and that daylight had been cast upon magic. But it was when I’d constructed the thing – a collection of shapes, all covered in a horrible papery material which I then had to tug the fabric onto – that reality started to dawn. The armchair was nothing like I’d imagined.
It was just so much bigger than one could have expected it to be. I know we have an obesity problem in this country and that these people, if overlooked, tend to get whiny and litigious. But this chair seemed to bite great chunks out of my living space, and had a seat so needlessly outsized it was possible to sit on it and feel lonely. I’d obviously made a mistake too ordering it in grey. There was now a white elephant in the room. Perhaps visitors would be kind enough to skirt over it and pretend it wasn’t there.
Actually, they won’t need to. The company has a generous returns policy and, disassembled once more (thank God I didn’t cut the labels off), the beast goes back today. I’d also pondered sending back the Shaker-style daybed it took me nine hours and every inner resource of patience and coolheaded thinking to put together, and which turned out to have a hairline crack in one of its feet. But I just couldn’t face taking it apart and looking at so much particle board again (a substance I now nurse a settled loathing for), so the daybed stays. Some mistakes have to be lived with.
There is also bathroom-gate to deal with. I just knew the magnolia my bathroom had come in was all wrong and that it should be white – a virginal, pristine white, the white of freedom and space and light and clean new beginnings. Having masked up the entire room (it has black ceiling beams) and taped polythene to the floor, I duly splashed five litres of ‘Brilliant White’ matt emulsion over it. At the end, having listened to the entire audiobook of David Nicholls One Day (a singularly misnamed book – doing the bathroom took three) I grabbed a moment to stand back and survey the effect. The room now has a clinical look, soulless and arctic. You feel less happy inside it.
So it’s back to the drawing board/Homebase with that one too. My sister tells me these mishaps on the way to having a pleasantly decorated home are quite normal, and that, in furniture terms, you have to bark your shins a few times and factor in the odd cock-up to get the look and atmosphere you’re after. I’ve heard wise people say you should live in a flat for a few months and just let it speak to you before you make any decisions about doing it up. But who has the time? A kind of madness has overtaken me. I just want to get the job done.
So what colour should I paint the bathroom in? Going back to magnolia will be a climbdown, and I’m sure there’s something bold and off-the-wall – some cool cascade of aquafresh blue, an invigorating mint green – that would work miracles in there. Perhaps there’s some secret bathroom colour I don’t know about, which will take me to a peak of bath time serenity, a shade so tranquil and sedative it will stop me worrying, worrying about things like what colour to paint the bathroom in. I can’t balls it up again, so now have a fistful of tester pots from Dulux, with names like ‘Willow Tree’, ‘Marine Splash’ and ‘Nordic Sky’ (none of them, on first splatter, quite living up to the lyricism of these titles).
Among them is a low-risk number called ‘Fine Cream’, and this is probably what I’ll plump for – what I have already, just in a warmer version. I am, I realise, probably an off-white kind of person. It seems preferable, on balance, to sit in a neutral bathroom fantasising about all the bright, bold paints you could have done it in than actually to choose and commit to one of those colours, which may let you down or start to grate at a future moment in a way that off-white never does. Anyone who wants to see this as a metaphor for wider things in life is welcome to. But I probably shan’t be inviting them round when the place is finished.
Real Southerners never liked Elvis
Cowboy boots are ubiquitous in Nashville – although not hats. ‘That’s Texas,’ one woman told us earnestly. Locals say, ‘y’all,’ ‘yes, ma’am,’ and make eye contact when they speak to you. Despite the lack of cowboy hats, this is still the South. Welcome to Music City, the capital of country and the gleaming buckle of the Bible Belt. Nashville is home to over 700 churches and numerous evangelical choirs. The Union Gospel Tabernacle, built in the 1890s by a Tennessee businessman, was once the largest church in the city. Now its simply the Ryman Auditorium. After the first world war, the owners found they made more cash booking secular performers.
The audience hated it, Elvis bombed and vowed never to return
For over 30 years, the Ryman was home to the Grand Ole Opry, a radio show broadcast live across America every evening. The Opry had been kicked out of its previous venue thanks to its rowdy crowds; the producers were said to be particularly drawn to the Ryman’s wooden pews because of how hardy they were.
A slot performing on the show became a rite of passage for country music stars and a pilgrimage for old-timers. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris and Patsy Cline are among those who have played there over the years. The most famous become lifetime members and are allocated a postal locker for fan mail (Dolly Parton’s is no.163; according to the Opry staff she reads every letter she gets). But there’s still one big flop that everyone talks about: Elvis. The king of rock n’ roll made his debut at the Opry in October 1954 with a gyrating rendition of his soon-to-be hit ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. The audience hated it, Elvis bombed and vowed never to return. Even now, 70 years on, the city has an uneasy relationship with Tennessee’s greatest son.
In the 1970s, the Opry moved on – this time to a purpose-built auditorium on the edge of town. But still, fans flow into its quaint auditorium to perch on replica Ryman pews (this time cushioned) to hear musicians rattle through a few of their best tunes. Each act is introduced by the host, dressed in a sharp grey suit. He stood behind a lectern, reading off the bands’ biographies before they came on. In the breaks he also read aloud a list of adverts: one for shoes, another for a state-wide chain of diners. One band I saw there were making their debut. They barely looked old enough to drink and were dressed in cowboy hats – Texans, perhaps? – and sang in pacy harmony. Their mothers whooped from the row behind me.
To hear some rougher material, you’ve got to head for the honky tonks. Narrow and crowded, with dim lighting and sticky floors, these bars are where country musicians go to test out their latest songs or just entertain the crowds with classic covers. Most of them are open from midmorning until the early hours.
At that time of night, normal people find themselves tiring of bluegrass and go in search of food. Nudging my way up the street through the crowds of tourists and hen parties, I arrived at Prince’s Hot Chicken in a brightly-lit modern food court nearby. Legend has it the first Prince’s Hot Chicken restaurant was started by a womaniser whose lover had tried to take her revenge by spiking his favourite hot chicken with extra chilli and spices. He loved it – and, like a true-born American, turned it into a money-spinner.
Nine dollars will get you four enormous tenders served on thick white bread with a few pickle slices laid on top. Simple, sure, but far from plain. The sharpness of the pickles cuts through the richness of the greasy chicken – helpful for packing in the last few mouthfuls. Only the bravest, though, would dare go above ‘medium’ on the heat scale (it goes all the way up to ‘XXX hot’). I slipped off home, away from the noise of Broadway and back to the Bobby hotel. Low-lit with thick red carpets, my room felt like a hideaway in which to finally succumb, gratefully, to jetlag.
Prince Harry loses bid to name Murdoch in phone-hacking trial
As much as Prince Harry claims to hate the media, he never manages to stay out of the spotlight for long. Now it transpires that the renegade royal has been reprimanded by a High Court judge for trying to bag ‘trophy targets’ — and has been told that he cannot take phone-hacking allegations against Rupert Murdoch to trial.
The pampered Prince’s team claimed at a court hearing in March that Murdoch, owner of News Group Newspapers (NGN), was aware of unlawful activity taking place at his media outlets as far back as 2004. The allegations made against Murdoch suggest the media mogul ‘turned a blind eye’ to reports while he oversaw a ‘culture of impunity’. Lawyers for the monarch of Montecito approached the High Court for permission to update their case against the Sun publishers — but today Mr Justice Fancourt ruled that the additional claims added ‘nothing material’ to the case. In a further blow for Harry, the judge also ruled that the ex-royal would be unable to introduce new claims of phone hacking.
And Fancourt didn’t stop there either. He told the Prince’s team that:
I also consider that there is a desire on the part of those running the litigation on the claimants’ side to shoot at ‘trophy’ targets, whether those are political issues or high-profile individuals… This cannot become an end in itself: it only matters to the court so far as it is material and proportionate to the resolution of the individual causes of action.
NGN denies the allegations raised by Harry’s lawyers, saying today that the court decision has ‘thoroughly vindicated’ the organisation’s position. Meanwhile, the Prince was informed by Fancourt that he could, ‘in principle’, change some of the details of his case to name ‘certain further journalists and private investigators’ before the trial is determined next January — but received a slap on the wrist for not complying with a July order that prevented him from bringing claims against the Sun and News of the World. Oo er.
The High Court judge went on to add that the Prince’s lawyers ‘cannot resist adding more and more detail to the claim, as more and more missing pieces of the jigsaw are found’ — but, he reminded the royal rebel, ‘the trial is not an inquiry’. That’s them told…
What’s really behind the Tories’ present woes?
The problem is, we really need a Tory party. Whether we have one at the moment is another question. Political debate requires a significant and trustworthy proponent of personal freedom, of the limits of government, of personal responsibility, of strict limitations of government expenditure, of independent enterprise which may succeed through a lack of intrusive state control or may fail without hope of public rescue. Not everyone will share those values. But I think everyone should accept that it’s proved catastrophic that those values have apparently disappeared from public policy.
History rhymes, but does not repeat itself. The lessons of previous periods when major economic policies of an interventionist sort were agreed with no serious dissent ought to have been learnt. In particular, the disasters of the Heath government, which went as far as reintroducing Wilson’s National Board for Prices and Incomes, should be considered.
There has been a collapse of any kind of trust in the Tories, because they seem, and indeed are, utter hypocrites
At the moment we have a situation where it seems to be almost universally accepted that millions of people perfectly capable of work should be supported in full or in part. The abandonment of social principles that trusted personal responsibility at the outset of the Covid pandemic still seems to me quite remarkable. I wrote a novel about it which began: ‘The State gave an order. We obeyed the order. Everyone obeyed the order. And the world changed.’ I still find it quite incredible that the state at the time was under the control of the Tories, who were supposed to value personal independence.
The severe lockdown had a number of consequences. The economic burden will be felt for decades. We are just finding out what lockdown turned that generation of children, school and university students into – in many cases, unsocialised, obsessed with victimhood and tiny slights, full of undirected rage. Worst of all, with lockdown came an end to the social mobility that education used to offer children who had little parental support. It probably made no difference in the end to the course of the virus – and I say that as someone who was extremely ill with it, unprotected, as it turned out, by the severity of lockdown.
Now, people may have chosen to support all those consequences. They may have been right to have done so. But there was nobody in the supposed party of freedom, as far as anyone could see, holding their nerve. The consequence is the collapse of any kind of trust in the Conservative party, because they seem, and indeed are, utter hypocrites. What was wrong with those Downing Street jamborees was not that they took place, spreading the virus among young, healthy people who were taking their chances, as they ought to have been free to do. The disgrace was that those people were demanding enforced restrictions that they evidently didn’t believe in, imposing policy from outside the mainstream of Conservative thought with results catastrophic for the nation, and even more for the Tory party itself. Some choice of ideas should have been presented to the nation – in quite cartoonishly broad form, it was, in 2017, between Boris Johnson’s mayor-in-Jaws shtick and Jeremy Corbyn’s antediluvian interventionism. What the nation got, when a predictable but unforeseen event struck, was the opposite of what it thought it had asked for.
It is fair to point out that Geoffrey Wheatcroft doesn’t agree with this point at all. He strongly criticises Johnson’s government, not for its abandonment of its presumed principles, but for not acting in a still more authoritarian way and closing down society earlier, and more strictly. Lockdown, however, is only part of the analysis. As long ago as 2005, Wheatcroft wrote an excellent and very amusing book, The Strange Death of Tory England, about the woes of the Conservatives, running up to Tony Blair’s third triumph. Now he returns to the scene of the crime. It might be thought that his obituary was premature, followed as it was by the revival of the party under David Cameron, a 2010 coalition government and from 2015 a series of Tory governments. But those governments have not had much to show in the way of successes, despite some very talented and able ministers, and increasingly have lurched from one disaster to another.
It now appears widely accepted that millions of people perfectly capable of work should be supported in full
The two root causes of the present lamentable state are what Wheatcroft identifies. First, the disastrous revision of the leadership election procedure to hand the final choice to a small and unrepresentative party membership. As was said long ago, if the members had had the choice, Edward Heath would still have been in place in 1992, having lost his sixth successive general election. There is a strong case for saying that the people who make the best choice are those who know the candidates best, the parliamentary party. Knowing that the membership will have the final say not only robs that decision of finality, but makes them second-guess what their members think, with repeatedly disastrous effect. Will they have the nerve to go for Kemi Badenoch, clearly the modern-day equivalent of their 1975 gamble on Margaret Thatcher? We will find out.
The second cause was Cameron’s ill-advised turn to the referendum as a device to govern. Wheatcroft reminds us of Clement Attlee’s brisk dismissal of a suggestion by Winston Churchill, that he could ‘never consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum, which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism’. (Hitler held four.) Cameron managed to get rid of the question of proportional representation with his first referendum, in 2011. The second, on Scottish independence, poisoned debate and pushed a grossly incompetent and posturing nationalist party into power without adequate controls. And the third was on Brexit, with consequences we are still finding out about.
As it turned out, the conduct of the European Union in the Brexit negotiations was such as to defeat any moderately competent and natural collegiate leader, such as Theresa May. Once she had gone, the only choice appeared to be to go for what might be termed the madman option. In the 1980s, the Cold War debate shifted decisively because the Soviet Union believed for the first time in decades that they had an American president who might genuinely want to fire nuclear weapons at them. In the same way, the Europeans didn’t believe for a second that May would ever commit to Brexit without a deal, but just could not be sure that the same applied to Johnson. He might be capable of anything. That, in the end, was quite a good thing for delivering a conclusion to Brexit. But was it a good motive for choosing a prime minister? The processes imposed on us during Covid answered that question decisively.
This is an amusing, though somewhat rancorous book, and unlike its predecessor gives a slight impression of heckling from the sidelines. Some people come off without their merits recognised – Michael Gove did a magnificent job at Education, for instance. A few good anecdotes are repeated by Wheatcroft from before, and, though there is a fine and very convincing parallel drawn between Johnson’s career and Disraeli’s, there may be a little too much remote history in a fairly short polemic. Wheatcroft is a splendid and convincing phrasemaker – a United States of Europe would be ‘an answer without a question’ – and enjoyably feline in his malice. Some people will think his observation on the last days of Queen Elizabeth a bit much – that ‘having to see the two of them [Johnson and Truss] in turn might be enough to polish off any frail 96-year old, and two days later the Queen died’. The rage, however, at the national low point reached by the brief and embarrassing Truss premiership can only be justified.
The Conservative defeat in the coming general election is all but certain. During the Labour party’s Corbyn period, the shadow front bench looked comically unprepared (Richard Burgon, Diane Abbott). Now, as in Blair’s shadow cabinet before 1997, a lot of the figures look at least as competent as their opposite numbers – a very bad sign for a government.
There may be some positive indications. The Tories seem to have abandoned their bizarre flirtation with ill-founded bien-pensant social ideas, for instance. If a longish stretch in opposition enables the party to find a new leader, just as it did in 1975, committed to core principles of freedom, limited expenditure and a shrinking, not an expanding, state, then we might at some point feel that we are presented with a proper choice. Better still, with a sense that we are being trusted to listen like grown-ups to ideas. That hasn’t been the case for some time.
How Margaret Thatcher could have saved London’s skyline
Looking around London on the eve of the millennium, it would have been difficult to think that the UK government had an adviser on architectural design. The 1990s had been a dismal decade. Yet such a body existed in the quaintly named Royal Fine Art Commission, refounded in 1924.
The original Commission had been created as a way of giving Prince Albert, recently married to Queen Victoria, something to do – contriving the decorative scheme for the new Palace of Westminster. Fresco, the chosen medium, was not ideal in that damp position beside the Thames since the plaster took three years to dry; and the Duke of Wellington did not help the project by declaring he could not remember having met Blücher on the field of Waterloo, as depicted by Daniel Maclise. When the Prince Consort died, the RFAC as then constituted did not survive him for long.
The name never suited its 20th-century successor. The politicians, civil servants and architects who called it into being were inspired less by Prince Albert than by the United States. Sir Lionel Earle, one of the prime movers, knew America well and admired the United States Commission of Fine Arts, convened to advise the federal government on proposals for Washington. When its chairman was asked if he found the ‘Fine Arts’ element of the name an embarrassment, given the Commission’s focus on architecture, he replied: ‘We would if we ever paid the least attention to it. But we do not.’ Back home, the idea that public taste should be directed by an official body appointed by the state appealed so much to Britain’s first Labour government that it established the RFAC as one of its first actions – although, this being Britain, it had to be Royal.
Who should be on it? In The Battle for Better Design, Robert Bargery reveals that ‘official papers record a series of unsavoury judgments, as unsuspecting artist and architects had their professional and (more often) personal defects examined’. William Lethaby’s vacillation ‘was little short of maddening’. Albert Richardson was cranky (‘we do not want another cockney or another professor’). William Rothenstein had a German name. Given his pre-eminence, Edwin Lutyens was inevitable, as well as being ‘fantastic and frivolous’ – much more fun than Herbert Baker.
Pandora’s Box opened, and out flew Nine Elms Lane and other horrors
to plague humankind
Lutyens remained on the RFAC until his death in 1944, urging that ‘the height of all buildings’ should be reduced ‘to the width of the streets on which they stand and in no case higher than 80 feet, with these heights again ruled by the aesthetic needs of historic buildings’. Alas, his words merely illustrate the impotence of the RFAC. While perhaps managing to lop a storey or two off some offenders and getting others re-sited, they could not prevent the skyline of London from being despoiled, although what seemed outrages at the time were nothing to what would come. Tinkering could not prevent the proposed National Gallery extension in the early 1980s from becoming a ‘monstrous carbuncle’, as the then Prince of Wales famously called it.
The RFAC was at its best when obsessing about the small, if important things of life: street lamps, red telephone boxes, postage stamps, whether to put the equestrian statue of Earl Haig in the middle of Whitehall, near the Cenotaph, or in the Mall, where it wouldn’t obstruct traffic. Margaret Thatcher made the RFAC a plaything for her unlikely friend, the foppish Lord St John of Fawsley. How could she have ignored the obvious candidate? Prince Charles would have fitted the Prince Consort’s shoes to perfection.
After 1997, New Labour made a bonfire of British traditions and the RFAC joined the other institutions going up in smoke. It was replaced by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), under a property developer who had to resign after a conflict of interest. CABE was in turn scrapped by the Tories. While these shenanigans were going on, successive mayors of London opened Pandora’s Box and out flew Nine Elm’s Lane and other horrors to plague humankind. Any Briton who visits Paris can only regard London as a national shame.
The Battle for Better Design has been reissued (without mention of the fact) to celebrate the centenary of the RFAC’s second foundation. Bargery is the executive director of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust. Cleverly established by Lord St John, the Trust strives to improve public taste – a hopeless yet noble task. It isn’t the absence of a government commission that explains the sorry state of architecture but the lack of visually informed clients.
Was the flapper style of the 1920s so liberating?
I had held Beauty’s sceptre, and had seen men slaves beneath it. I knew the isolation, the penalty of this greatness. Yet I owned it was an empire for which it might be well worth paying.
—Olivia Shakespear, Beauty’s Hour (1896)
All the Rage is a perfect title for a book about terrible beauty. The phrase means what’s fashionable at a particular time; but rage is a violent, sudden anger, stemming from the same Latin word that gives us rabies – mad, passionate, dangerous. Beauty, and its attainment, preservation and curse, are all things Virginia Nicholson chronicles and analyses in this compelling history spanning a century and focusing on its western, female manifestation.
Nicholson, named after her great-aunt Virginia Woolf, is the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell – to my mind, two of the most beautiful and stylish women of the past century. In her introduction, she reminisces about playing at dressing up in the 1950s at Charleston in clothes from the Victorian and Bloomsbury era. This would have made anyone a dedicated follower of fashion, as well as a devotee of the beautiful.
Nicholson is a specialist in women’s history and culture, the author of, among other books, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s, and How Was It For You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s. She casts her net wider this time, from mid-Victorian days to the start of the ‘contemporary’ – from corsets and infinite buttons to pedal pushers and pop tops.
Amid massive and unprecedented advances for women ‘into the economic, educational, sexual and political strongholds reserved for men’, a woman’s body progressed too – from the mid-19th century when ‘women’s anatomical realities were refashioned from the exterior, via sharp steel and galling whalebone’ to around 1960, when women were ‘able to appear in public places wearing a bare minimum of clothing. It was a convincing transformation from captivity to liberation – or was it?’ The vexed question of liberation is Nicholson’s chief theme:
This book is an attempt to understand and to reconcile the history of the liberation of the female body in light of an incongruity: that, at the very time that women’s economic, educational, sexual and political chains were being unlocked, the shackles of perceived ‘femininity’ were tightening their grip.
Each section of All the Rage is prefaced with the portrait of a woman well known in her day as a ‘professional beauty’ or an avatar for how to look: Alexandra of Denmark, Lillie Langtry, Diana Manners, Freda Dudley Ward, Prunella Stack, Betty Grable and Brigitte Bardot – ‘white, western celebrity influencers, movie stars and icons’ from a period when ‘beauty, privilege and whiteness’ were all predominant in fashion. But women of colour were also beginning to be influential, and Nicholson stresses the input and inspiration of such trendsetters as Josephine Baker, Mamie Garvin Fields and Madam C.J. Walker.
La Crème Ramey, supposed to eliminate fat and wrinkles, had as its active ingredients thorium and radium
The book is packed with stories within stories. Beginning with a photograph of ‘the Jersey Lily’ stretched out on a recamier, figure shaped into a perfect hourglass by her constricting clothing, Nicholson gives us Langtry’s biography as she analyses the studio image. What could working-class women and girls do to emulate Langtry in striving for beauty? How did the rational dress movement push against those corsets and long, heavy dresses with hundreds of buttons?
Belle-Époque women were also interested in exercise and dieting – or ‘banting’ as it was called, after the obese funeral director William Banting, who ‘lost 46lb by giving up sugar, carbohydrates and dairy products’. His Letter on Corpulence (1863), one of the first dieting guides, was a bestseller, and remains in print. It was deemed unfeminine to straddle a bicycle, but women swiftly embraced that means of getting around, and gave up their skirts to ride it, too. Call yourself a cyclist and be damned for your ‘loud-hued leggings’; call yourself a pédaleuse, and acceptance could be easier. Details like this made me smile, and also sigh in sympathy: just use a French word to make something more attractive and ‘feminine’ to a resistant English audience.
Nicholson creates a fascinating kaleidoscope of information that all feels connected, as if the reader were a woman in that time, trying to figure out how to process the possibilities. At the beginning of the period discussed, there seemed a certain strange liberation in strictures:
Self-starvation was rare, and had no medical name. Body hair was left in situ; pedicures were irrelevant, and respectable women didn’t use make-up. It was impossible to make unfavourable body comparisons on the beach when your swimwear – including black stockings – hid everything in sight.
Metal hoopskirts and crinolines worked not just as fashion but a comfort and deterrent: the widespread skirts literally kept men at arm’s length and gave legs room to relax. ‘They could also be artfully arranged to conceal pregnancy.’
With the advent of the ‘new woman’ and a new century, some changes were for the better, others questionable. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 had been a tremendous boon. Until then, a woman’s property, unless cleverly entailed, belonged to her husband, as did their children. For a woman to escape a bad marriage with her children was almost impossible. In 1860, there were 103 divorces in England and Wales. By 1928, there were 4,018. Emancipation, of a sort.
Then there were the changes made possible by rampant modernism and its technological and scientific advances: La Crème Ramey, which was supposed to eliminate fat and wrinkles, had as its active ingredients thorium and radium. Horribly unsafe cosmetic treatments included injecting paraffin into the face (which damaged the spectacular looks of Gladys Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough). A relief to many women was the shearing of hair into a jawline-skimming, or even earlobe-level, bob. Victorian tresses took hours to arrange properly, and literally weighed women down as they walked. When Virginia Woolf had just completed the first draft of Orlando early in 1927, she and her friend, the poet and playwright Beatrice ‘Bobo’ Mayor, drank too much Spanish wine and Mayor cut off Virginia’s long hair. ‘It’s as short as a partridge’s rump,’ Virginia reported delightedly to Vita Sackville-West – surely the sweetest description ever of a ruffled Jazz Age bob.
Radclyffe Hall; Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone With the Wind; Phyllis Anna Chadwick, the diathermic knife; eugenics; Bardot in her bikini; Pamela Harriman in Dior – they’re all here, from the well-known to the near-forgotten or in many cases newly brought to light and analysed. Nicholson’s research, and her talent for shaping her vast material into a compelling, thoughtful tale, are most impressive. She stops before the explosion of the 1960s. The decades since, however, have not answered the question with which Nicholson leaves us: ‘Will we ever declare a truce on the beauty front line, that danger zone which for so long has kept women from parity and peace of mind?’ Indeed, modern times only seem to vex the question further, and All the Rage gives you some very good ideas as to why this is.
A walled garden in Suffolk yields up its secrets
In the hot summer of 2020, during the Covid pandemic, Olivia Laing and her husband Ian moved from Cambridge to a beautiful Georgian house in a Suffolk village and began work on restoring the neglected, extensive walled garden behind it. She was vaguely aware that the garden had been owned and loved by the well-known garden designer and plantsman Mark Rumary, who had died in 2010. He had been the landscape director for the East Anglian nursery of Notcutts, and I remember him as a genial man overseeing extensive, award-winning tree and shrub exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show in the 1980s.
I once owned a copy of the Notcutts Book of Plants, written by him, which was an indispensable reference book for garden designers before the advent of the internet. Many of the plants that Laing discovered, as she painstakingly cleared the rampant perennial weeds, such as hardy hibiscus, corkscrew hazel, Akebia quinata, Yucca filamentosa, Lavalle’s hawthorn, Rosa ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’, were well described in the Notcutts book. The Garden Against Time is, at least partly, the story of how she discovered Rumary through his garden.
It is also part Covid reminiscence, part political polemic, part family memoir, part potting-shed diary, all skilfully interleaved. Lockdowns and the process of renovating the garden, give her leisure and the desire to interrogate the nature of gardens and, in particular, the meanings of Eden and Paradise. There are interesting, if sometimes overlong, essays on, inter alia, John Milton, John Clare, Derek Jarman, the Diggers, William Morris, Eliot Hodgkin and Andrew Marvell. Many follow well-trodden paths, but Laing has done useful archival research into the slave-owning Middletons who built Shrubland Hall, and her account of Iris Origo’s war in Italy, uplifting and sad in equal measure, may be unfamiliar to British readers.
Laing’s prose exhibits that hypersensitivity to atmosphere and beauty that we all felt (though could not have so well expressed) when our lives became well-nigh intolerably circumscribed – observing every open flower, every bird flying across the garden. There are a scatter of accomplished linocuts by John Craig, although I could have done with a plan of the garden, as well as the position of house and outbuildings. It’s asking a lot of readers that they understand the layout of a complex garden, made up of ‘rooms’, entirely by the written word.
The glimpses of personal memoir are intriguing: a rackety childhood, followed by youthful environmental activism, work as a herbalist, and a more tranquil middle age as a writer, married to a retired Cambridge don. But then the pandemic was a time when we all looked to our histories. That said, Laing’s careful descriptions of hard graft in the garden over two years are accompanied, and sometimes overlaid, by her evident angst that we are hurtling to hell in a handcart.
Only late in the day does Laing seem to appreciate the deep privilege of owning a garden
There were times when reading the oh-so-earnest political sentiments that I felt as though I were being beaten over the head by a sheaf of contemporary left-liberal preoccupations: Trump, tick; climate catastrophe, tick; historic homophobia, tick; ecological degradation, tick; transatlantic slavery, tick; exploitative colonialism, tick; the horrors of Brexit, tick; the threat of fascism, tick; the evils of capitalism, tick; persistent power inequalities, tick. (One of the few current catchwords missing is ‘rewilding’, perhaps because Laing would have had to admit that she was doing the exact reverse.) Without the salt of humour, or even much light and shade, to add savour and variety to the fine writing, it felt like a pummelling. The irony is that Laing is not a lone, righteously furious voice, for her views line up neatly with those of many of the most powerful and influential people and institutions in the land.
As for historical figures, poor Capability Brown, who created much of lasting beauty from which we can all still gain spiritual refreshment, comes in for some stern anachronistic judgment. All in all, I found the combination of finger-wagging at the past, which can’t answer back, and pessimism about the present, had a progressively lowering effect on my spirits – not surprisingly, since, in John Buchan’s words, ‘pessimism is the only ism that kills the soul’. It certainly withered mine, for I couldn’t help thinking how fortunate Laing was. Only late in the day does she seem to appreciate the deep privilege of owning a garden, and the deeper consolation that comes from caring for it. Almost at the end, she describes opening her garden to visitors, to raise money for the National Gardens Scheme, which gave her ‘probably the best day of my life’. A common paradise found, at last? Let’s hope so.
Abba’s genius was never to write a happy love song
Memories. Good days. Bad days. In 1992, U2 mounted their Zoo TV tour. U2 being U2, the gigs were over-earnest affairs, their showbiz razzmatazz never emulsifying with their agitprop posturing. But disbelief was colloidally suspended the night the show hit Stockholm – and U2 were joined on stage by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulväeus for a cover of ‘Dancing Queen’. In truth, that evening’s take on one of Abba’s meisterwerke was a lumpen affair. Bono had to drop his voice an octave for what ought to be the song’s soaring refrain. And while Björn looked happy enough strumming a few chords on an acoustic guitar, Benny, at a keyboard the size of a slipper, was patently flummoxed at how little of the song’s harmonic majesty could be retained when a beat combo is laying waste to your melodic line. Bono is a hard man to agree with even when he is right, but when he bowed to Benny and Björn and told them ‘we are not worthy’, he was spot on.
The clothes, it turned out, were ridiculous by design – the better to be tax deductible
Then again, says Giles Smith, in 1992 Abba themselves weren’t all that worthy. Ten years on from their break-up, their stock was low. Polygram, which had recently acquired their back catalogue, hadn’t a clue what to do with it. A little market research revealed that while people wouldn’t mind hearing Abba’s hits again, they wouldn’t want photos of the group on the album’s sleeve.
Glance through the picture section of Smith’s My My! Abba Through the Ages and you’ll be reminded why. Though what you might call the A side of Abba were as pulchritudinous as pop ever got, the group was still a mess: Benny’s beard; Björn’s barnet – not to mention his bell-bottom dungarees; and what Smith artfully calls the ‘peek-a-boo onesie’ once sported by Agnetha (blonde, soprano). Those clothes, it turns out, were ridiculous by design – the better to be tax deductible. But as Björn acknowledged: ‘We looked like nuts.’ Add in the fact that they sounded like fish (Abba was also the name of a Swedish fish cannery; the company did not object, provided the band did nothing to bring creamed crab and curried herring into disrepute), and you have to wonder how they lasted 50 minutes, let alone 50 years.
But here we are, half a century on from their triumph at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton, and Abba still prevail. Indeed, Smith suggests, with the stage musical Mamma Mia! packing them in in the West End these past 25 years, and Abba Voyage (a show starring digital avatars of the four), they are more present in our lives now than they were in their 1970s heyday.
This isn’t just because Benny and Björn wrote some of the catchiest tunes ever. It’s because, Smith argues, Abba were adults in the playroom of pop. Though the foursome were of an age with most of the other popsters of the 1970s – Bowie, Bolan, Elton, etc – they always seemed older. Björn and Agnetha married in 1971, and had their first child in February 1973 – a year and more before anyone outside Sweden had ever heard of Abba. And while Benny and Anni-Frid (brunette, mezzo) didn’t have children together, they did have two apiece from earlier marriages. Hence, Smith argues, the potency of Abba’s bust-up songs. They’re not just about teens going their separate ways. They ‘involve property, furniture and children’. A couple of years after its release, the Bay City Rollers’ ‘Bye Bye Baby’ can’t but have seemed callow to even its most devoted fan. Songs like ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ and ‘The Name of the Game’ have only accreted meaning as they – we – have aged.
Which goes to the heart of Abba’s genius. They never wrote a happy love song. Their bounciest melodies are ballasted with melancholy. Even ‘Money, Money, Money’, a tango about the joys of wealth, is in A minor. Smith is never not sharp, but he is at his most acute when he describes Agnetha (who as a child wanted to be a shrink; who never understood, let alone enjoyed, the adulation of her fans; whose mother committed suicide) ‘narrowing the gap between singing and crying until there’s only a breath between them’.
But then there is little that escapes Smith’s ears. His eyes are a little less reliable. Certainly he seems unaware that what he calls the repeated motif in Abba videos of ‘close-ups of the band as couples, one in profile, the other face-on, the focus shifting between them’ is an hommage to Ingmar Bergman’s homage to catatonia, Persona. Otherwise, he has the band bang-a-boomerang to rights. Who but he has spotted that whereas Frida dances to the rhythm of a tune, Agnetha moves to its melody? That ‘S.O.S.’s perpetually startling repetition of a musical phrase first over a minor chord then over a major chord (play it yourself and ‘you stare at your fingers in disbelief that the melody hasn’t moved’) is a steal from Richard Rodgers’s ‘My Favourite Things’? That Benny (whose solo album Piano transforms ‘Thank You for the Music’ into a Chopin ballade, and ‘The Day Before You Came’ into a mash-up of Beethoven’s ‘Pathetique, and ‘Appassionata’ sonatas) can’t read a note of music? Praise be that Smith can. And that he can write English that’s a joy to read. At last, a book that’s worthy of Abba.