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Dear Mary: how do I stop our cousins’ dog peeing on the curtains?
Q. I have a friend whom I see quite often who keeps asking me if I will ‘get her invited’ for a weekend to the beautiful and luxurious country house of another friend. The country-house host is a long-standing friend and she barely knows the friend who wants to be invited. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting they invite her but am under constant pressure to do so. I am very fond of this first friend but am really embarrassed that she cannot see how pushy she is being and I don’t know how to get her to stop going on about this. What should I do?
– F.G., Bath
A. Next time the pushy friend chivvies you, put the ball into her own court. Say: ‘I am sure she would love to have you. You just need to gee her up a bit and let her get to know you. Why don’t you ask her to lunch or the opera or something? Then she’s sure to remember to ask you.’
Q. To be blunt, our elder daughter’s godfather is as rich as Croesus. (He and my husband were at university together.) Our friend is always coming to stay and saying: ‘Sorry I’m an absolutely hopeless godfather. I haven’t brought anything,’ and the temptation is to reply: ‘Yes you are hopeless, you have literally never given her a present.’ Mary, can you think of anything subtle that could be said or done? He is unmarried, so has no wife to nag him. By the way, we like him very much.
– Name and address withheld
A. Next time he mentions that he is a hopeless godfather, reply that your husband would be too if he had to remember Christmas and birthdays. Add: ‘Instead he has taken the practical step of instructing his lawyers to accommodate his godchildren in his will. So he never needs to worry.’ This may prompt your Croesus-rich friend to do the same.
Q. Next month some older and slightly eccentric cousins, whom we love, will be making their annual three-day trip down south to stay with us for Ascot because we live only 12 miles from the racecourse. Our problem, which we are hoping you can help us with, is that they bring their male lurcher, which without fail cocks its leg on our hall curtains every time he comes in or out of the house. For some reason they deny it point-blank.
– H.S., Maidenhead
A. Be doubly pleasant to your guests, but prepare for their visit by dropping each of the hall curtains into a black plastic refuse sack, bulldog-clipped to half way up the curtain. In this way they can still be opened and shut but are out of range of the ‘jet stream’. If the cousins query the bags’ presence, smile and change the subject.
The best bottle to come from the Gigondas
One needs wine more than ever, yet when imbibing, it can be hard to concentrate. So much is going on. We were at table and the news came through about Slovakia. Was this an obscure incident, regrettable but below the level of geopolitics? Or would it become a second Sarajevo? Fortunately, that seems unlikely. In Mitteleuropa, there are always ancestral voices prophesying war and there is usually plenty of dry timber. But it does not seem that this assassination attempt will be the spark.
The Barruols have a reputation for delightful eccentricity but they are committed to their bottles
When we had come to that conclusion, there was an obvious next step. Gavrilo Princip nearly missed his chance to murder the Archduke. If he had failed to do so, would there still have been a war? We decided that the answer was yes. The central powers were squaring up and the public mood resembled that of a war horse pawing the ground and waiting for the sound of trumpets. Winston Churchill did warn that the wars of peoples would be more terrible than the wars of kings but even he did not realise what everyone was letting themselves in for. The bands struck up, the flags flew, the joyous troops set off – to chew barbed wire in Flanders, during the second fall of man.
One hundred and ten years later, the damnosa hereditas of 1914 is still with us. The fall of empires always leads to carnage. In 1914, the precarious state of Europe led to war and chaos. The precariousness persists and shows no sign of being resolved.
So pass the wine. We were drinking various bottles of Gigondas from the house of Barruol. Louis is the current maître but the family have been there for 500 years. They call their wines Saint Cosme, as in Cosmas and Damian. The Barruols have a reputation for delightful eccentricity yet they are committed to their bottles. Their range stretches from Côte du Rhone upwards to Château Saint Cosme and Côte Rôtie. They are all good value and I do not believe that a better wine comes out of Gigondas. Berry Bros are their agents in London, which is not surprising. They have been in the business for almost as long as Saint Cosme and they know excellence when they taste it.
Apropos excellence, sadness does not only arise from politics and statecraft. Admittedly, Tony O’Reilly, who has just died, had not been well – and he was 88. But he was a broth of a boy and earned a magnificent send-off, as befits one of the most remarkable men to emerge from modern Ireland. He burst into fame as a rugger player for both Ireland and the British Lions. Still in his teens as an international, he was a Prince Rupert of a winger who could bring crowds roaring to their feet. Whenever he had the ball, there was the possibility of a try.
He then became an equally dashing businessman which led him to philanthropy and the ownership of newspapers. Above all, he played a crucial role in modernising Ireland. In the decades after the travails and bloodshed before Eire broke away, Éamon de Valera led the infant nation into a sterile and backward theocracy. Matters would have been very different if Michael Collins had not been assassinated; the wrong fellow was shot.
From the 1950s, everything started to change and Tony was part of that process. A proud Irishman, he was equally at ease in London and New York. By 1960, it appeared as if a new Ireland was coming into being, with him as one of its leaders and as befits a member of an Irish side which included Prods and Papists, Tony did not have a sectarian atom in his anatomy.
I saw a bit of him when he owned the Independent. I do not remember what we drank, but no one went thirsty. He loved talking politics, culture, rugby and the human condition. Larger than life, he was a life–enhancer. We will cherish his memory.
The myth of the global majority
‘You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame,’ sang my husband with execrable delivery. ‘No,’ I said, ‘You can’t sing things like that now. In any case, I was talking of Bame, not Mame.’
The hit musical from 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, has only the most tangential relevance to the latest lurch in approved terminology for what we were encouraged to call Black and Minority Ethnic people until that term was expelled from polite conversation. Now the trendy label is global majority. ‘The term Global Majority was coined as a result of my work in London on leadership preparation within the school sector between 2003 and 2011,’ says someone called Rosemary Campbell-Stephens. In a biographical note in her paper ‘Global Majority; Decolonising the Language and Reframing the Conversation about Race’, she says ‘her great love is speaking, whether as a keynote, in podcasts or dialogue about equity or decolonisation’.
The Oxford English Dictionary, however, cites examples of global majority from 1971 onwards, though it notes that in early use it was not a ‘fixed collocation’.
I find the concept of a majority undefined by any common feature rather hard to grapple with. If you started with the Ainu, an ethnic group indigenous to Japan, then everyone else is the global majority, including poor white folk. Quite a lot of people are Africans, but the global majority aren’t. The same goes for people of Chinese heritage.
There used to be a way of referring to the dead as the majority. ‘This Mirabeau’s work then is done,’ wrote Thomas Carlyle. ‘He has gone over to the majority.’ Sometimes they were called the silent majority, a phrase more often used of those who, unlike the vocal minority, find their great love in something other than speaking. I remember being told that more people are alive today than had ever lived before, but that is not true. If there are eight billion or so people alive today, more than 12 times as many have died.
Portrait of the Week: Infected blood apologies, falling inflation and XL bully attacks
Home
Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said: ‘I want to make a wholehearted and unequivocal apology’ for a ‘decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life’, as described in the report by Sir Brian Langstaff from the Infected Blood Inquiry, which found that successive governments and the NHS had let patients catch HIV and hepatitis. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, apologised too. So far more than 3,000 have died, of the 30,000 infected with HIV or hepatitis C from blood products or transfusions between 1970 and the early 1990s. Interim compensation of £210,000 will be paid to some within 90 days. BT postponed until January 2027 a deadline for forcing customers to switch from copper-based landlines to internet-based services.
Wylfa on Anglesey was earmarked for a new nuclear power station. The High Court ruled as unlawful legislation amended by statutory instrument that had attempted to increase police powers against demonstrators by lowering the threshold for what counted as ‘serious disruption’. After people fell ill with diarrhoea caused by Cryptosporidium parasites, 16,000 households in Brixham, Devon, were told by South West Water to boil drinking water. Water companies in England and Wales want bills to increase by between 24 per cent and 91 per cent in the next five years, according to the Consumer Council for Water. Manchester City became the Premier League champions for the fourth time running, pipping Arsenal to the title. A woman in Hornchurch, Essex, died after being attacked by her two registered XL bully dogs.
Annual inflation fell to 2.3 per cent in April from 3.2 per cent in March. Labour issued a card with six pledges: economic stability, the establishment of Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean energy company, cutting NHS waiting lists, stopping the gangs arranging small boat crossings, providing more neighbourhood police officers and recruiting 6,500 teachers. In the week ending 20 May, 324 migrants arrived in England in small boats. The online used-car site Cazoo went into administration. Sir Anthony O’Reilly, the rugby international, creator of Kerrygold butter, newspaper owner and bankrupt, died aged 88. Frank Ifield, who topped the charts in 1962 with ‘I Remember You’, died aged 86.
Abroad
Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, sought arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, Ismail Haniyeh,the political leader of Hamas, Mohammed Deif, the group’s military chief, and the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, over alleged war crimes in the Gaza conflict. President Joe Biden of the United States said: ‘The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.’ He said there was ‘no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas’. Ireland, Norway and Spain said they would recognise a Palestinian state from May. Ebrahim Raisi, the President of Iran, died in a helicopter crash, along with Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Foreign Minister, in a mountainous region near the border of Azerbaijan, where they had been meeting President Ilham Aliyev.
Russia used hundreds of glide bombs against Ukrainian settlements. Thousands were displaced by a Russian advance near Kharkiv. Ukraine said that a missile attack had destroyed a Russian minesweeper, the Kovrovets, in occupied Crimea. President Vladimir Putin of Russia visited Beijing for talks with Xi Jinping, the ruler of China. Robert Fico, the Slovak Prime Minister elected last year after opposing military support for Ukraine, was reported to be no longer in danger of losing his life four days after being shot four times by a man who was arrested.
Australia and New Zealand sent planes to New Caledonia to evacuate citizens caught by unrest over elections; President Emmanuel Macron of France flew in to sort things out. A court in Greece abandoned the trial of nine Egyptian men accused of causing a migrant shipwreck in the Mediterranean in which 600 were feared drowned, because the judges ruled they did not have jurisdiction, since the vessel sank in international waters. The ship that smashed into a bridge in Baltimore on 26 March was towed to a marine terminal; the crew of 21 remained aboard. Spain withdrew its ambassador to Buenos Aires after President Javier Milei of Argentina visited Madrid and said of the Spanish Prime Minister: ‘When you have a corrupt wife, let’s say, it gets dirty.’ Naples was hit by 160 earthquakes in one night. A British man aged 73 died on a Singapore Airlines flight from London, diverted to Bangkok, which was hit by turbulence. CSH
A summer election is suicide for the Tories
As soon as Rishi Sunak told the House of Commons that ‘there is going to be a general election in the second half of this year’, nervous Tory MPs spotted a problem: that could mean 4 July, which the Prime Minister has now announced will be the election date.
Calling an early election is an admission of defeat – and that, on everything from public finances to public services, the worst is yet to come
With every opinion poll pointing to a Labour landslide, it’s unclear what Sunak is trying to gain – unless he has given up hope of victory altogether. Calling an early election is an admission of defeat and signals that, on everything from public finances to public services, the worst is yet to come.
Of course, holding the line until November would have been tricky. The Tory party is in demonstrable disarray. Every week there have been rumours either of a new defection to Labour or a freshly brewed scandal. Some Tory MPs can’t even wait a few months for this political torture to end, and are already taking new jobs. Displays of sleaze and selfishness serve to throw more mud on the Conservatives’ reputation. Sunak’s approval rating, meanwhile, is lower than that of almost any prime minister since records began.
Many Conservative MPs think that the choice of the next election is between a defeat that is survivable (that is to say, the party keeps about 200 MPs out of the current 344) and one that could be an extinction-level event (keeping just close to 50 MPs). Gallows humour is the main force sustaining the Tory tea rooms, with more seasoned campaigners quoting Tennyson (‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred’) and would-be Tory opposition leaders openly canvassing support.
When Sunak became Prime Minister, he had hoped that the Tories would, by now, have narrowed the opinion poll gap to about ten percentage points – at which stage the race would be (as he put it) ‘contestable’. He had hoped that his presence in No. 10 would lower UK borrowing costs: this was not to be. He had hoped NHS waiting lists would be falling quickly by now: this has not happened either. He had hoped Labour would self-immolate, but Keir Starmer has proved to be resilient.
So why, then, should he have waited for a November election? Because there are, even now, credible grounds for believing that things will seem better by then. Net migration is due to start falling quickly when the tighter visa regime kicks in – with the number of visas for study and skills down 25 per cent year-on-year. But this will only become clear when the figures are collated in the autumn. The obvious story at the moment is of a party that ‘took back control’ of the borders via Brexit – only to promptly lose control of them again.
The NHS waiting list – 7.5 million at the last count – is expected to fall below six million by the end of this year and to a ten-year low by the end of next year. But again, this success – the result of extra NHS capacity – will only be apparent in the autumn as the effect of the junior doctors’ strikes will take time to unwind. A summer election means that the official line on the NHS appears to be one of unmitigated failure.
Then we have the cost of living. With inflation fast heading back to the 2 per cent target, the average salary is rising more quickly than the CPI index. This means that the long contraction in living standards is finally over – and the prediction is that they will steadily rise over the next four years at least. But none of this is, to put it mildly, evident at present. It wouldn’t have been much more so in a November general election, but at least there would have been some positive data to point towards.
How much do people trust the Conservative party now, after the mayhem of the last few years and with the largest tax burden in living memory?
The Prime Minister may yet succeed in deporting failed asylum seekers to Rwanda – stranger things have happened – but that won’t come to fruition for several weeks. To call an election now means Sunak looks like he’s failed to deliver on his promise to ‘stop the boats’: there have been more arrivals so far this year than in any other. Even if he does manage to outwit the campaigners and send a flight to Rwanda, any effect on refugee numbers will take months to be noticeable. The Labour party will have no shortage of sticks with which to beat him.
There could be a deeper problem for Sunak: the country has stopped listening to the Tories. This happened to John Major, who engineered a strong and long-lasting economic revival, only to find that it was, as he put it, a ‘voteless recovery’. Perhaps the biggest question when the general election comes will be: how much do people trust the Conservatives after the mayhem of the last few years – and with the largest tax burden in living memory?
Sunak has positioned himself as a results-based Prime Minister: more perspiration than inspiration, perhaps, but someone who can nonetheless be relied on to get things done. As he put it when he released his five pledges: ‘We’re either delivering for you or we’re not.’ To call a summer election before he has anything to substantiate any claim of having ‘delivered’ on his promises is an admission of defeat.
Inside Labour’s fight with the unions
By the end of the year, Britain may be one of the few countries in the democratic world where the right is losing. In America, Donald Trump is the favourite to win. Ahead of next month’s European Parliament elections, momentum is with Germany’s AfD, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Austria’s Freedom party. Migration is the most pertinent issue pushing Europe rightwards, but many voters are also turning to insurgent right-wing parties as a rebellion against the cost of net-zero policies.
Labour sees an electoral benefit in sticking to its green energy plans to stop voters defecting to the Greens
In the UK, the future of green scepticism looks somewhat different. Should Starmer win a majority, the fiercest critics of his green ambitions won’t come from the opposition, but from his own side: the unions.
Unite, the trade union that gives more money to Labour than anyone or anything else, launched a campaign this week complete with banners, billboards and newspaper wraparounds. Its goal isn’t to preserve a Labour pledge, but to get one to be scrapped: Ed Miliband’s plan to block new oil and gas licences in the North Sea.
Gary Smith, the head of the GMB trade union, has ridiculed the shadow energy secretary’s agenda, saying that the only ‘green jobs’ for British workers involve either lobbying in London or counting the dead birds under wind turbines. Now Unite has a similar message. The campaign slogan is ‘No ban without a plan’. Any restriction on oil and gas exploration would badly affect industrial jobs – disproportionately in the north-east. In what way is Labour’s plan anything other than a green version of the Thatcher-era closure of the coal mines and steelworks? It’s a question the party has to answer.
‘Labour needs to pull back from this irresponsible policy,’ says Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary. ‘There is clearly no viable plan for the replacement of North Sea jobs or energy security.’
A study this week from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen gave credence to Unite’s concerns. It warned that the UK is running out of options for a ‘just transition’ for oil and gas workers to equally good jobs in renewables. ‘Bottom line: the percentage of workers who will get a decent job is less than half a per cent,’ says one trade unionist.
So the unions are fighting for their members, even if that means fighting Labour. Unite’s six-week campaign is focused on Scotland and six constituencies believed to be so closely contested that Labour’s green agenda could cost the party those seats at a general election. Scottish Labour, fearing a voter backlash, has long been uncomfortable with Miliband’s green crusade. Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader in Holyrood, has said ‘oil and gas will play a major part of the energy sector for decades to come’.
At the GMB, Smith calls Miliband’s oil policy ‘bad for investment, jobs and national security’. As one Labour union insider puts it: ‘Smith is straightforward “drill-baby-drill”. Unite’s position is there has to be net zero – but not if Scottish workers are sacrificed on the altar.’
What Smith and Graham have in common is that they are a new breed of union leader. When Len McCluskey ran Unite, he was an ideological Corbynista who wanted control over Labour’s party mechanisms – and even influence over the selection of Labour candidates. ‘Sharon is the political opposite of McCluskey,’ says a union figure. ‘She’s led a turn away from parliamentary gazing to the shop floor.’
Within the shadow cabinet, there is a confidence that Unite – which really wants investment – will come around and see that some of its demands have already been met. A Labour source emphasised that Unite isn’t really asking to change the licences policy, but for greater support: ‘It is campaigning for things we’ve agreed to.’
In the meantime, Unite has played its favourite trick of withdrawing funding: some £6 million is said to have been diverted from Starmer’s war chest. However, since Labour now takes much more from private donors, this is not quite the slam dunk that it would have been a few years ago. ‘Relations between Keir and Sharon are frosty,’ says a party figure. ‘But he also needs her less.’
The debate over oil and gas is just one of the green policy challenges that a Labour government will face in its first term. Starmer has already axed his plan to spend £28 billion a year on green investment, which had hitherto been his signature economic policy. While there was little in the way of a Labour rebellion when the U-turn was announced, some MPs wonder privately whether Miliband will be able to deliver his pledge of clean power by 2030. Even his biggest supporters won’t deny that the target is incredibly ambitious. In shadow cabinet, parallels are being drawn with the vaccine task force set up during the pandemic. It is seen as an example of what can be done when government and industry have clear priorities: they can deliver extraordinary results.
Some party figures are most concerned about the role planning reform will have to play in making the green agenda work. They worry about the community kickback to the number of pylons and amount of above-ground infrastructure that will be needed. The plan is to encourage community consent by giving households near to new infrastructure money off their energy bills.
Despite these concerns, Labour sees an electoral benefit in sticking to its green energy plans, because the policies will stop voters from defecting to the Green party. Labour strategists have long believed that sending out Miliband with his ukulele to sing about the pros of wind turbines is a good way to keep the coalition on side.
But as the financial pain caused by net zero becomes more obvious, the fight between Labour’s green idealists and the protectionist unions will only get worse. A green plan that leads to mass unemployment among industrial workers is one that the party’s oldest paymasters will not be able to get behind.
The deluge: Rishi Sunak’s election gamble
‘Only a Conservative government, led by me, will not put our hard-earned economic stability at risk,’ said Rishi Sunak as he announced a general election on the steps of Downing Street in the pouring rain. Upon these words, the Labour anthem ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ boomed out from the street. The din made the rest of his speech nearly inaudible. His suit jacket went from wet to soaking. ‘It’s bizarre,’ said one former minister. ‘How are we supposed to trust No. 10’s judgment when no one in the group even knows what an umbrella is?’
Sunak’s gamble is that while he can’t get a hearing in government, he might get one in a short election campaign
A few hours earlier, almost no one in the cabinet had any inkling that the Prime Minister was about to lead them into battle. They had dismissed the rumours of a summer election as wild speculation.
‘To go now would be a death wish,’ said one cabinet minister yesterday morning. ‘I quite like my job and don’t want to end it.’ Yes, the cabinet meeting had been moved from Tuesday to Wednesday, but Sunak had been travelling so his schedule was off kilter. The election speculation was chalked up as crossed wires. The last prime minister to spring an election on the cabinet with no prior discussion was Theresa May. That did not end well. Would Sunak really tempt fate like this?
But for weeks the Prime Minister has held the view that an election campaign should be launched as soon as enough decent economic news comes through. First, it turned out the UK economy grew faster than expected at the start of the year. Next, inflation fell. Those pieces of news were enough, he thought, to make his pitch: that he has a plan – and Labour doesn’t.
There were dissenting voices around the cabinet table. Esther McVey, who Sunak calls his ‘minister for common sense’, said voters may not feel enough economic improvement at this stage to swing the vote, but they might if an election was held in November. Several others in the cabinet agreed, although none said so at the time. ‘Going now doesn’t make sense,’ one said before yesterday’s meeting. ‘We will have more to point to on the economy and migration by the autumn.’ Chris Heaton-Harris – the Northern Ireland Secretary – also voiced concerns. But he’s standing down at the election and said he’d support the Prime Minister’s decision.
Sunak came to the view that there is little evidence so far to suggest that waiting for better economic weather would lead to greater Tory support. After ten months of real-terms wage increases, for example, the polls have barely moved. As John Major found in 1997, economic recoveries don’t always translate into political ones.
The hope in CCHQ and Downing Street is that calling an election now will focus minds and mean the Tories are at least heard. ‘A lot of voters are currently not listening,’ says a minister. The thinking is that, with an election, voters – especially those who are usually politically minded – will sit up and pay attention. ‘Now is the time for the country to look at the actual choice they have,’ says a senior government figure. Sunak’s gamble is that while he can’t get a hearing in government, he might get one in a short election campaign.
The Tories will fight the election on the economy and the idea that Sunak brought stability to the country. The second part of the campaign will be to position him as a leader willing to hold unpopular positions when he believes they are right (such as on Covid lockdowns, welfare reform and the need to moderate net zero). At yesterday’s cabinet meeting, Sunak’s close ally and protégé Claire Coutinho opted not to complain about the election and instead praised her boss as a man unafraid to stand up for what he believes in. Starmer will be attacked as a weathervane, who holds whatever position suits him that day.
Victory may look unlikely but, as the last ten years of elections have often showed, polls can be wrong and experts can be confounded. That said, few in Sunak’s party believe his timing is anything other than an attempt to lose less badly. Isaac Levido, the Tory election strategist, has previously been of the view that waiting until autumn is the best option. Others, such as the deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden and James Forsyth, formerly of this parish, are said to have seen the merits of going sooner. However, the final decision was ultimately Sunak’s. His circle has been divided: on current polls, most Tory MPs will not be returning to their jobs. Those with the safest seats have been the ones most likely to say that holding an election when the party is 20 points behind in the polls is worth the risk.
For some Tory MPs, the election call was so inexplicable they refused to believe it at first. An hour before Sunak’s announcement, when a July poll was being reported as fact, some were walking around parliament insisting it could not be the case. The optics of the campaign launch was not terribly auspicious. The protestors were on song and the rain had been falling long before the lectern was positioned in front of No. 10. ‘It’s all too much of a metaphor,’ said one MP.
And what about the tax cuts Jeremy Hunt was promising? He had spoken of another ‘fiscal event’ before the election, but it was never clear how his giveaways would be paid for. Then there are potentially unpleasant surprises: increases in the NHS waiting list when the number is supposed to be falling, for example. More embarrassing immigration figures. Or perhaps the prospect of summer riots in prisons or coming HGV licence changes that could mean lorries crossing into Europe are held up in endless queues.
No prime minister has ever called an election from 20 points behind and won. One cabinet member said just before the election was called that a good result would be retaining 200 MPs (implying a landslide Labour majority) and a bad result would be keeping just 50-odd. ‘Our best message in this campaign is saying that we’re going to lose, but Labour doesn’t deserve a crushing majority,’ said another cabinet member. ‘But we can’t say so. We have to pretend that we stand a chance of winning.’
CCHQ has a few lines of varying plausibility to raise morale among MPs. One is to point to the national polling share in the recent local elections, which was closer to a ten-point Labour lead than the 20 points suggested in general election polling. But many Tory MPs believe those results were dire and hardly constitute a launch pad from which to take the decision to the country. ‘I don’t know what they are thinking,’ says a concerned MP, ‘other than maybe they want it all done now.’ Nadine Dorries, the Boris Johnson loyalist who quit in protest at Sunak’s refusal to ennoble her, claimed that Sunak wants to go early because the Californian school term starts in August.
On the right of the party, some MPs are pleased because they believe the failure of the supposedly ‘wet’ Sunak would pave the way for someone more radical in opposition. But it’s not clear who that candidate would be. Kemi Badenoch remains the bookmakers’ favourite and the shadow Tory leadership election will be a subplot throughout the upcoming campaign.
All of this is seen by Labour as richly comic. Shadow ministers were truly taken by surprise at Sunak’s decision and the party’s strategists had been reluctantly coming round to the likelihood of an autumn election. But Starmer had his election speech ready and rehearsed. Morgan McSweeney, his main lieutenant, has long believed that an election before the autumn was probable. Labour’s manifesto is nearly complete, and many policy announcements are ready to go. The final document should be thin and simple: Starmer wants to get away with saying as little as he can, to present as small a target as possible.
Might the Tories have some ammunition by 4 July? There are still some who claim a Rwanda flight mid-campaign is possible, ideally with enough time to also demonstrate a deterrent effect. However, this seems unlikely. Instead, part of the reasoning behind going earlier than planned was concern that lawyers would bring system legal challenges that could tie it all up.
Sunak is taking the classic underdog approach to debates: to say ‘yes’ to everything and try to portray Starmer as a shyster on the run should (as the Tories expect) he try to limit his appearances to just two or three debates.
‘How are we supposed to trust No. 10’s judgment when no one in the group even knows what an umbrella is?’
The Tories want to have a special broadcast focus on GB News. In the words of one campaign figure: ‘It is the most important election channel.’ The reason for this is its viewership among the coalition of Tory voters that Johnson assembled in 2019. BoJo himself will be asked to join the campaign trail to woo these voters back. David Cameron, whose return to government seems destined to be short-lived, will be deployed in the Lib Dem-facing seats.
In Scotland, the SNP is facing a massacre as John Swinney, its caretaker leader, is plunged into battle after just a few weeks as First Minister. Labour is hoping to take about 20 seats from the SNP and the Tories about five, but the result should mean that Swinney stands aside after the campaign and Kate Forbes, his deputy, picks up the pieces.
Perhaps the biggest single Tory hope is that Reform may implode or, at least, never get the chance to develop into a genuinely national political party. As an opinion poll option, Reform is the preference of about 12 per cent of the public. But it has few candidates, no national apparatus, no get-out-and-vote operation. If it fails to present itself as an electoral force, then at least some of its voters will be up for grabs. Just as the contraction of Nigel Farage’s Ukip vote in 2015 took Cameron over the line for a majority, the Tories would be the beneficiaries should Richard Tice’s party seem more irrelevant in a general election than in the locals.
This is, perhaps, the Tories’ best chance for a miracle. ‘When you look at the polls, Reform and the Tories are backed by about half of the country,’ says one of the more optimistic cabinet members. ‘We think the same things as the country think, and Labour doesn’t really think anything. The argument should not be too hard to win.’ The worry, though, is that Farage springs a political comeback in the coming days.
Anyone who does think the Tories will win should, of course, go to the bookmakers, who are offering odds of 25-to-one on a Tory majority. It’s hard to think of a Conservative government that has faced more daunting odds. ‘We could win: stranger things have happened,’ says one former leadership contender. ‘It’s just that I can’t think of any.’ Yet for all their doubts over Sunak’s strategy, Tory MPs have little option but to back him and hope for the best.
Get more election analysis on Spectator TV:
The unstoppable rise of country music
When a major artist releases a new album, the first thing to follow is the onslaught of think pieces. And when Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter earlier this year, the tone of these think pieces – especially on this side of the Atlantic – was one of slightly baffled congratulation. Here, at last, was a pioneer who might drag this hidebound genre – of sequins and satin, of lachrymose, middle-aged songs about drink and divorce – into the modern age.
‘Modern country is like punk for the Hannah Montana generation’
The only problem is that Beyoncé was not leading; she was following. Beyoncé pivoted to country not to make it cool, but because it’s become cool – and more of a commercial powerhouse than it has been for years. In the US, just 23 country songs have topped both the country chart and the Billboard Hot 100, and three of them came in the week of 5 August last year.
You might argue that what goes around comes around – the Grammy-winning country singer Lainey Wilson might well proclaim in song that ‘Country’s Cool Again’, but 43 years ago Barbara Mandrell was claiming ‘I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool’ – but there is something different this time around. Because country today (at least the version that is shooting up the charts) is young people’s music. And it’s not just for Americans – this summer, Morgan Wallen becomes the first pure country star to headline a non-country festival in the UK, when he tops the bill at BST Hyde Park on, fittingly, 4 July. (One of the other days is headlined by Shania Twain, who has returned to a more country sound in the past few years.)
But not everyone is delighted. For 30 years Tom Bridgewater has run the British country label Loose Music. Among his discoveries is Sturgill Simpson, who went on to sign to a major label and fill American arenas. When asked why he thinks country music is on the upsurge, he’s scathing. ‘Because it doesn’t sound like country anymore. Modern country is like punk for the Hannah Montana generation.’
Whether country sounds like country is the great faultline through the modern genre. In America, traditionalists bemoan the state of country radio stations across the US using identical playlists that promote music that sounds less like country than pop, rock or hip-hop with a bit of pedal steel and fiddle dropped on top. The style known as ‘Bro Country’ (in which men sing about trucks and beer over a modern rock backing) has attracted particular disdain, but has produced some of the genre’s biggest current stars, among them Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean.
What used to be called country – serious-minded songs played on more traditional instruments – is now known as Americana, largely for marketing reasons. And even in the UK, mainstream country and Americana attract very different audiences. Bridgewater mentions going to see the singer Tyler Childers, who has quietly ascended to playing Hammersmith Apollo on his last visit to London. ‘It was noticeable that the crowd was the “bridge-and-tunnel” element,’ he says. ‘It’s the UK redneck crowd.’ Certainly, as I wrote in these pages at the time, when the breakout star Oliver Anthony played in London earlier this year, it was not at all the typical London gig crowd – Shepherd’s Bush Empire was full of people singing ‘Joe Biden’s a paedo’.
The non-metropolitan element matters. ‘There’s a rural, working-class value to it,’ says Ross Jones, editor of online country magazine Holler. ‘These artists come from small towns and they’re working on ranches and fishing – and I’m from Devon and I feel like I get that. People like songs about working hard.’
‘People never felt they could listen to country in an office – because they were too embarrassed
It’s true that the UK now has an infrastructure for country. In 2013, the annual Country To Country festival began in London, with outposts in Glasgow and Belfast. There are country radio stations, including one run by the commercial giant Absolute. There is a country airplay chart, though it’s run by the Nashville-based country label Big Machine (which launched Taylor Swift upon the world) rather than being produced by the Official Chart Company (which has its own country albums chart).
The airplay chart launched earlier this spring, and it was an explicit response to country’s rising tide over here. ‘There has been an increase in country’s UK popularity over the last eight years,’ says Alexandra Hannaby of Big Machine. ‘Taylor Swift is a big part of that – her pop fans have gone back to her country albums. And there was a massive jump when Covid hit. One theory is that country fans were late adopters to streaming, and only started doing it during Covid, so we saw a massive uptick. And we saw people who were already on streaming platforms started playing country more – as if they never felt they could in an office, because there was an element of embarrassment about listening to country.’
What’s interesting here is how this fits into a wider and rarely mentioned fact about the modern music industry: that the major labels no longer have the power to create interest in music through promotion because few people now care about the old levers of promotion – press, radio and TV. Music, thanks to social media, is global in a way it wasn’t even 15 years ago. When one talks to label executives, a common theme one hears is that popularity on social media – which those executives cannot control – is now the surest way to guarantee a hit. Songs go viral on TikTok, people share their tastes on Twitter, they post clips from shows on Instagram.
Still, though, to put Wallen, who has only played one UK show so far – admittedly, headlining to a 20,000-strong crowd at the O2 – top of the bill in front of 65,000 people seems a bit of a risk. But this is not so, insists Jim King, who oversees festivals for the promoter AEG that puts on BST Hyde Park.
‘All promoters face an element of risk with any artist booking but securing the hottest act in this genre was certainly low down in the gambling stakes,’ he says. And what will follow? ‘There’ll be many more stadium tours in this genre that the UK will get to see.’
There’s no doubt that selling out Hyde Park will be a watershed moment. But how deep will the love go? Will the crossover stars lead new fans into the bywaters of American music? Bridgewater laughs at the notion. ‘There’s no way a Morgan Wallen fan is going to know who the Handsome Family are.’
Suppress your groans: this women-only show is fascinating
In a Victorian art dealer’s shop a woman waits with her young son while the supercilious owner examines her work; behind her two top-hatted gents interrupt their inspection of a drawing of a dancer in a tutu to give her the once-over. The woman’s shabby umbrella, propped against the counter, awaits reopening in the rain outside. She knows what the dealer will say, and so do we.
Every picture tells a story, and Emily Mary Osborn’s ‘Nameless and Friendless’ (1857) summarises the plot of Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, Now You See Us. Unlike her picture’s protagonist, Osborn was herself a successful artist in a field dominated by men – not the fate of many of the artists in the Tate’s new survey of four centuries of British art by women.
Suppress your groans; this isn’t a gender-balance tick-box exercise
Suppress your groans at the prospect of another women-only show: the curators of this encyclopaedic exhibition haven’t flung together any old female artists in a gender-balance tick-box exercise. Instead they have sought out every female artist known to have practised and exhibited in Britain between 1520 and 1920 and compiled a fascinating blow-by-blow account of their struggles to achieve parity with men.
The exceptions – Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman and Laura Knight – only prove the rule. To succeed, women had to play men at their own game, dispelling the perception that they could only copy – that they were good at painting flowers and portraits but couldn’t work from imagination. Kauffman challenged that myth in her allegory of a female artist practising ‘Invention’ (1778-80) – commissioned for the Council Chamber of the Royal Academy from whose deliberations, as a female member, she was excluded – but copycat works by less talented successors such as Mary Beale, whose portraits borrowed compositions from Lely and Van Dyck, tend to confirm it.
If the point is to prove that women are creative equals of men, then a smaller show focused on fewer, more original women could have landed more punches. As it is, there are too many artists here who paint like clones of more famous men. It didn’t help their cause. Ethel Sands’s reward for the flatteringly Sickertian style of her ‘Tea with Sickert’ (c.1911-12) was exclusion from the all-male Camden Town Group. The show’s stand-out works avoid stylistic tics: Lucy Kemp-Welch’s dramatic ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’ (1897), acquired for the Tate when she was just 28; Louise Jopling’s confident self-portrait, ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1875), newly added to the Tate’s collection; Ethel Wright’s ‘The Music Room: Portrait of Una Dugdale’ (1912), an image as decisive as its feminist subject. Like Knight, who in 1936 became the first female artist after Kauffman to be elected a full Academician, these women didn’t faff about with masculine fashion. They had the independence to keep things simple, as did the show’s poster girl, Gwen John.
There’s another thing, non-gender-related, about the best female painters in this show: from the 18th-century Scottish portraitist Catherine Read, who studied in Paris, to the 19th-century Austrian-born Marianne Stokes, who spent time in the artists’ colony at Pont-Aven, most of them trained abroad. Stokes’s dreamlike ‘The Passing Train’ (1890), with its cloud of steam about to envelop a red-caped mystery woman in a field at sundown, is a magical invention. But imagination isn’t everything; copying has its place. The discovery of the show, for me, was the 18th-century amateur Mary Delany and the botanical collages she began making in her seventies – around the same age as Matisse began his cut-outs. Her ‘Crinum Asiaticum’ (1772-82) is as exquisite as a Karl Blossfeldt photograph and as botanically accurate: Joseph Banks swore by her reproductions. Now in the British Museum, Delany’s ‘paper mosaicks’ would have been banned from Royal Academy exhibitions as ‘baubles’, along with needlework and shell-work. (She did those, too.)
Too many artists here paint like clones of more famous men – the best avoid this
If professional status means working for money, amateur status gives an artist total freedom. An amateur woman needn’t paint like a man: she can be a complete original. Beryl Cook was a boarding house landlady when she was given the one-woman show at Plymouth Art Centre in 1975 that made her a national treasure overnight. She can hardly be described as invisible, but Cook’s jovial art, long dismissed by art world snobs as ‘popular’, is currently accruing critical bona fides in a joint exhibition at Studio Voltaire with homoerotic icon Tom of Finland. There is no doubting this woman’s powers of invention: her vision was entirely her own.
In the background of ‘Nameless and Friendless’ a clerk is making entries in a ledger, reminding us that art dealing is not just about aesthetics, it’s about what sells. Even now collectors rarely pay top dollar for art by women; Britain’s first official female war artist Anna Airy put her finger on it when she observed that galleries and buyers felt ‘safer with a man’. But if art by men still commands higher prices, art exhibitions attract more female visitors – and that’s shifting the dial.
The jaw-dropping story of the British Museum thefts
It’s August 2023 when news breaks that artefacts have gone missing, presumed stolen, from the British Museum. I’m about an hour into investigating the story for a feature when a suspect is named in the press. I know him. He’s the curator I was seated next to at a British Museum dinner nine months earlier.
Listening this week to three preview episodes of Thief at the British Museum, an electrifying nine-part series on Radio 4, I kick myself for the second time for spending most of that evening talking to the professor on my left. What can I remember of the man on my right? He was quiet. Ruddy-faced. Nothing else remarkable springs to mind.
What can I remember of the man? He was quiet. Ruddy-faced. Nothing else remarkable
The British Museum has launched legal proceedings against curator Peter Higgs, who was dismissed from his curatorial post pending the investigation. The path that led them to his name, as described in the new series, is one of the most extraordinary you are likely to hear, but not because it is convoluted – quite the contrary.
We follow that trail through the accounts of Danish gem specialist and dealer Ittai Gradel. He is, quotes presenter Katie Razzall, ‘the museum world’s answer to Sherlock Holmes’. This Danish Holmes is a gem-obsessed ‘outsider’ with a photographic memory. He left academia because he couldn’t bear sitting at the same desk and seeing the same colleagues ‘every bloody day’. One former colleague describes him as ‘quite a character’. His resemblance to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes is hammed up across the episodes to an irritating degree.
Gradel happened upon the trail unwittingly. In 2010, one of his friends, a fellow antiquities dealer, came by a new supplier who purported to be an elderly man named Paul Higgins. Gradel purchased many items from his collection happily enough until some background research revealed there was no man matching his profile in public records. Before a meeting could take place, an email arrived to say that Higgins had died.
Fast-forward a year, and Gradel is delighted to find a new seller on eBay. He goes by the name of Sultan1966 and offers gems worth £5,000 for as little as £15. Gradel is in cameo Eden until, one day some years later, one comes up for sale that he has seen before. How could an object catalogued as belonging to the British Museum possibly be listed here?
The gem isn’t the only thing that’s familiar. Gradel suddenly realises that packaging from another gem he’d ordered from Sultan1966 carried the same name as the earlier supplier who had reportedly died. More bewilderingly still, Gradel’s Paypal receipts reveal a marginally different name: Peter Higgs. Could he be synonymous with the British Museum curator who was born in 1966 and goes by Sultan1966 on Twitter?
Since Higgs has not been charged with anything to date – and his family has protested his innocence – it will be interesting to see how far the BBC probes his life and possible motivations in the remaining six episodes. It certainly sounds as if the Museum will come under scrutiny. Gradel says as much when he describes the strangeness of uncovering a crime to which its staff are oblivious from the comfort of his study in Denmark.
Against all efforts to present him as a weirdo engaged in esoteric research – references to his ‘specialist knowledge about history’ and ‘dusty books about the ancient world’ will grate on anyone with an ounce of intelligence – Gradel emerges from this otherwise gripping series as a normal guy determined to do the right thing. He’s neither Sherlock Holmes nor Miss Marple. His story is that of a rare somebody who keeps his eyes wide open.
Poet Ian McMillan is another advocate of keeping one’s eyes open. While Roman gems tantalise Gradel, park benches, buses and rubber bands are more McMillan’s bag. The Beauty of Everyday Things, which the Yorkshireman presents on Sunday, takes the form of a one-off, half-hour monologue in which he describes what he sees while strolling through his day.
Before dawn he notices tinsel overflowing from a bin, a smell of smoke and a stray rubber band which – this reflects his optimism – reminds him of the moon. Debussy’s Clair de Lune begins to play. ‘Light,’ reflects our poet, ‘is starting to wash the sky’s face.’ Later, he spots fungus that reminds him of his uncle’s ears, and a hanging basket with nothing in it.
You need to be in the right mood for this kind of thing. I am all for the sentiment – get off your phone, look at the world, be alive – but the process of spelling it out can sound strange. That’s not to say there aren’t some beautiful images and turns of phrase. McMillan, like his idol Georges Perec, is an interesting wordsmith, and I recommend sticking with it. But I came away feeling that this exercise is best conducted inside one’s own head.
The new Mad Max film is a betrayal of everything that made Fury Road so good
Action films are boring. This isn’t really an opinion, it’s just demonstrably true. Try it for yourself: put on any high-octane, orange-and-teal action movie from the last 15 years and see how long it takes before you start automatically fiddling around with your phone. I can usually make it about five minutes. This is weird. I can deal with all the incredibly sedate cinematic vegetables just fine, but as soon as there are gunfights or chases involved I get distracted. I think I know why.
The real betrayal of this Mad Max sequel is that it’s full of talking
Action directors know that they’re competing with the sensory equivalent of a crackpipe in every pocket, so they do whatever they can to make their films as attention-grabbing as possible. Everything comes out slick, shiny, computerised; a lot of the time, each individual shot only lasts for a few seconds, in case you get tired of looking at one thing for too long. They’re desperate not to bore us. But the overall effect is of loud, manic, basically unconnected digital images swimming in front of your eyes – which happens to be the exact same effect you get from scrolling mindlessly on your phone. So you may as well just look at your phone.
In a way, CGI has ruined the dumb action film. When anything is possible, nothing is ever really impressive. When an essentially fictional camera can swoop through a simulated environment at will, the image loses any relation to the actual process of looking and it’s hard to maintain any visual interest. You can throw in as many explosions as you like; it still feels like watching a screensaver.
But it wasn’t always like this. You can go back and watch the magnificently dumb original Matrix from 1999: there’s some computer-generated stuff happening around the edges, but most of what you’re seeing onscreen is a human body being dangled on wires by a Hong Kong choreographer, and it looks visceral and real. In the 2003 sequels, that’s been replaced with CGI, and it looks like those animations they play at the bowling alley.
Anyway, one of the great recent exceptions to this rule was 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which was a lot of things, but not boring. The entire film essentially consists of one extremely long car chase through a post-apocalyptic Australia up until the end. As soon as you sit down, you’re battered in the face by one audacious practical effect after another. Real buggies covered in rusty metal spikes, real big rigs decorated with human skulls, real explosions in a desert somewhere. Even if the skulls are plaster, the effect is genuine. By the end, I felt myself bludgeoned into a kind of meaty pulp, about the same consistency as gravy left in the fridge overnight.
The film’s other great virtue was its refusal to explain what it was doing. The title character barely spoke five words in the entire two-hour runtime. The plot revolved around a general called Furiosa trying to steal away the harem of a bloated warlord called Immortan Joe and take them to somewhere called the Green Place, but even that was mostly told through firefights instead of dialogue. Meanwhile there were weird stilt-walkers in the dead marshes, legions of cancerous, white-painted warriors kept alive by constant blood transfusions from their prisoners, and an obscure religious cult based on the principles of eternal rebirth and sniffing paint. None of this was ever explained, which didn’t matter at all. They were great images. Great images work by themselves.
In fact, as part of the writing process for Fury Road, director George Miller produced pages and pages of backstory for every character. I’m sure this is part of what made the film work: it might have been proudly dumb, but it wasn’t stupid; there was an internal reason for everything that happened. But we, as viewers, do not need to see that backstory. It’s much more fun to just be thrown into the chaos of this world. Unfortunately, Miller seems not to agree.
Since he had the backstory, why not adapt it? Which is why we have Mad Max: Furiosa. When the trailer was released, it sparked an immediate backlash: this prequel seemed to be stepping away from practical effects and leaning more heavily on CGI. Which it does, to its detriment – but the real betrayal is that this thing is full of talking. Long dialogues in which the characters explain themselves and their motivations to each other. Near the end, an enormous, climactic war between two rival chieftains is skipped over in a five-second montage so that two characters can have a conversation about the futility of revenge.
It’s all fine. Anya Taylor-Joy is fine as the vengeful heroine. Chris Hemsworth is fine as the lightly maudlin villain. The set-piece battles we get are fine. We see some of the mysterious locations mentioned in Fury Road, and those are fine, too. There are a lot of people who will be really into this sort of thing: there’s a whole cottage industry of YouTube explainers, delving into the backstories and lore of every big entertainment franchise, neurotically disassembling everything into its moving parts. They like things to be explicable. But I felt a strange urge to look at my phone instead.
BBC1’s new Rebus is the kind of TV detective they just don’t make any more
Imagine a new series of Morse in which the real-ale-quaffing, jag-driving opera buff is turned into a speed-snorting mod on a pimped up Lambretta. Or – this one I’d actually like to see – jeune Poirot, featuring a clean-shaven habitué of fin-de-siècle Brussels absinthe dives. This may give you an inkling as to how upset one or two Rebus fans are about the Edinburgh detective’s latest TV incarnation.
Confusingly titled Rebus – as opposed to, say, Punk Rebus or Wee Rebussie – the series depicts a protagonist quite a bit younger than his former TV incarnations, grumpy, dishevelled Ken Stott and a mite-too-smooth John Hannah. Still only at the detective-sergeant stage of his career, he is a lot more aggressive – like maybe Begbie from Trainspotting would be in the unlikely event he ever joined the police – with a hair-trigger temper and a drinking problem.
This isn’t so much a faithful adaptation as a controlled demolition
This isn’t so much a faithful adaptation of Ian Rankin’s crime novels as a controlled demolition. I say ‘controlled’ because Rankin himself gave screenwriter Gregory Burke, author of the hit play Black Watch (based on interviews with Iraq war veterans), carte blanche to reimagine Rebus as he wished. And apparently he’s very happy with the result.
I don’t blame him, for this Rebus is the kind of TV detective they just don’t make any more. He’s a bloke. He likes pubs. He’s guiltily sleeping with the wife of his best mate (and mentor and former colleague, who was crippled in a run-in with a gangland boss). And even though he isn’t obviously buff and could look almost cherubic if he bothered to shave, it turns out that he is properly handy with his fists.
Richard Rankin (no relation of Ian’s) is so perfectly believable in the role that you never tire of watching him and keep rooting for him even when he’s being a complete and utter idiot.
Quite how such a piece of unreconstructed machismo made it on to the BBC, I can only speculate. I’m guessing that because Burke is working-class Scottish and obviously fluent in local dialects this was thought sufficiently ‘diverse’ as not to require the jemmying in of various ethnic, trans and disabled characters. Even though it’s set more or less in the present, this gives it a period-drama throwback feel: the dialogue, the players and the look owe more to the era of, say, The Sweeney – or even Get Carter – than they do to your typical contemporary series about plucky, empowered women being simply amazing.
Even the plot clichés bring a nostalgic tear to the eyes: there’s the pretty ex-wife Rhona (Amy Manson) with her new, nice but dull, much richer bloke Lockie (Nick Rhys); the young daughter (it’s never a son, you’ll notice; always a girl) caught between the two parents and their very different lifestyles; there’s the ex-squaddie with the tin box in the lock-up containing his beret, his medals and (well I never!) his old service handgun; and – but of course – there’s the very reluctantly accepted new colleague, a fast-tracked graduate fresh off the detective training course. And just take a guess at what she read at university? Sociology, that’s what.
But the clichés – as cosily reassuring in their way as an episode of Midsomer Murders – don’t matter one bit, for it’s all in the handling and the telling. The half-poignant, half-disturbing scene where Rebus boasts to his therapist about his ‘breakthrough’ (he no longer instantly wants to kill his wife’s new man as soon as he sees him); the sudden outbreak of very realistic ultraviolence in the hospital; the brutal retribution meted out by a sadistic gangster to his minions on a rough housing estate: sure, we’ve seen this sort of thing many times before, but rarely with such watchable conviction.
It’s well scripted, too. Mostly it’s dour, laconic and sardonic. But just occasionally Burke will throw in a gem, such as in the scene where Rebus’s partner DC Siobhan Clarke (Lucie Shorthouse) is wheezing her way up one of Edinburgh’s innumerable hills. Rebus rebukes her: ‘You’re in the city of John Knox. Life’s supposed to be difficult.’ And I couldn’t resist the cruel, class-war sneering with which Burke imbues a line he gives to Lockie, when he’s consulting Rhona as to whether she’d mind if he set up a trust fund for her daughter: ‘I know a million pounds isn’t much these days but it’s a start…’
Bristol’s new concert hall is extremely fine
Bristol has a new concert hall, and it’s rather good. The transformation of the old Colston Hall into the Bristol Beacon has been reported as if it was simply a matter of upgrading and renaming. There were probably sound reasons for doing so, but in fact (and despite protests from the Twentieth Century Society) the postwar auditorium has been demolished outright and replaced with a wholly new orchestral hall designed on the best current principles: shoebox-shaped, with much use of wood and textured brick.
Butterworth sears his melodies on to the eardrums. Isn’t it weird we still think of the Edwardians as inhibited?
Acoustically, it’s extremely fine – not a glamorous sound, but a remarkably transparent one. And while it seats 1,800 people (the individual seats are comfy and capacious), the scale remains human. Even with a capacity audience it feels lively rather than crowded: as if you’re part of something shared. That much was evident from a sold-out concert with the Hallé orchestra and Mark Elder, who are currently making a sort of national victory lap ahead of Elder’s farewell concerts with the orchestra later this summer.
But with a solo appearance from Stephen Hough to sweeten the deal, this was more than just a handy pretext to appraise the new hall. It was that too, and in a work as densely scored as Brahms’s First Piano Concerto it was noticeable how translucent the orchestra sounded, with the lower-middle of the texture benefitting particularly. Bassoons and horns stood out from the turmoil, plaintive and tender by turns, while both Hough and Elder resisted any temptation to play for obvious effects. Their reading was passionate without being melodramatic – serious, articulate music-making with a monumental sense of proportion and purpose.
Only in Hough’s tiny Schumann encore did we get to hear just how delicately it’s possible to play in this new space; and better still, to feel the miraculous sensation of oneness that comes when 1,800 people are sitting in absolute silence and simply listening. After the interval, Elder conducted Butterworth’s rhapsody A Shropshire Lad, beginning so quietly that you felt rather than heard the basses. He didn’t hold back at the opposite extreme, either: the huge, brass-torn crags that rear out of Butterworth’s rolling landscape, searing his melodies on to the eardrums. Isn’t it weird how we still think of the Edwardians as inhibited? Elder finished with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and this time he dialled back the drama. A wise move: this most perfect (and most perfectly English) of orchestral character studies is a domestic epic made up of small delights and fleeting emotions, and while Elder knew exactly where he was going he’d clearly decided that there’s nothing to be gained by overcooking Elgar. It’s only right that the audience should laugh out loud (as it did here) at the door-slamming conclusion to the fourth variation, ‘W.M.B.’, or sigh in appreciation as ‘Dorabella’ gives one last giggle and is gone. There were a lot of smiles visible as the audience streamed out to mingle with the crowds for Hamilton, playing just around the corner.
Scottish Opera’s third and final full-scale production for the year was Verdi’s La traviata. Let that sink in for a moment: a national opera company with an entire season containing just three fully staged shows. Well, that’s where you end up when state funders are ideologically hostile to an entire art form. All current evidence suggests that the withered, subservient state of this excellent company (with its formidable touring programme) is very much what the arts councils south of the border have in mind for English and Welsh national operas, too.
None of that is Scottish Opera’s fault, and this Traviata – a revival of David McVicar’s gorgeous 2008 production, where the action plays out between black velvet drapes atop a gigantic representation of Violetta’s gravestone – is a class act. Ji-Min Park is the Alfredo you hope for but too rarely see: an impulsive, gauche young man whose frantic immersion in his impossible love story is desperately relatable. It’d be wrong to describe his partnership with Violetta (Hye-Youn Lee) as fire and ice. Lee is far too touching for that. But her singing never wavers in its eloquence and poise, whether she’s floating a phrase on silence, or making an ensemble light up. Both artists deserved (and received) a tempestuous ovation.
And yet this was unquestionably an ensemble achievement, with everything welling up from Stuart Stratford’s visceral conducting. No febrile Victorian death-wish here; the whole company was vigorously alive, and determined to stay that way. The big chorus scenes, in particular – lovingly observed and framed by McVicar, and brilliantly re-animated by the revival director Leo Castaldi – generated an energy that overflowed the stage and made it feel like we were all guests at Violetta’s soirée. Again: you could feel the buzz on the way out, which is no small achievement in the Glasgow drizzle.
The weird, hypnotic world of Willie Nelson
Many years ago, I wrote a book about Willie Nelson. At its conclusion, I reached for an elegiac, valedictory tone. In 2006, when The Outlaw was published, Nelson was already 73, and it seemed plausible to suggest that one of the great American lives might be winding down. I pictured Nelson rolling off the road and into the sunset, his work on Earth more or less complete.
Nelson embodies both sides of an increasingly divided nation; hippie and redneck, patriot and agitator
Well, scratch that ending. Having recently turned 91, Nelson is still going strong. The touring has slowed down a tad – we haven’t seen him in Britain for years, partly due to the effects of long-distance travel on an ageing body, but also because feeding his prodigious weed intake becomes a trickier proposition overseas – but the albums are still coming.
The latest is The Border, his tenth in the past seven years. As he sings on ‘How Much Does it Cost’, ‘I’m a songwriter, and always will be’. He’s more than that, though. Nelson is a living link to a vanished America. Hailing from hardscrabble rural Texas, he was born into the Great Depression. A near contemporary of Hank Williams, he is the same age as the FBI. He started writing songs when Truman was President. His timeless standard, ‘Crazy’, was a hit for Patsy Cline in 1961. Elvis Presley covered ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ in 1970. He runs through American music like a river.
He also embodies both sides of an increasingly divided nation. Nelson is both hippie and redneck, patriot and agitator. He wrestled with the Nashville establishment before swapping hard liquor for marijuana and relocating to Austin, Texas, at which point he became the spaced-out poster boy for the outlaw country movement.
The cartoonish veneer – bandana, pigtails, weed, weed, weed – conceals a darker, more complex reality. Up close, I found Nelson weird and hypnotic. His eyes were black, his epigrams gnomic: ‘We’re all thinking basically the same thing. We’re all basically the same person. A lot of things are happening at quantum speeds.’ A sense of slightly crazed stillness radiated around him. During one occasion we spent together, in a hotel room in London, one of his friends literally bounced off the wall before falling into a deep stupor, lying comatose at our feet as we talked. Nelson seemed entirely unfazed. ‘We lost him. He went out the door.’ He brings all this to his music. Whether written by him or not, the material on The Border smartly plugs into Nelson’s mythos. ‘Many a Long & Lonesome Highway’, one of two songs written by fellow Texan Rodney Crowell, paints him in romantic colours as a windblown troubadour. ‘Hank’s Guitar’ is about the lasting power of Hank Williams’s music, but cannot help but evoke the legacy of Nelson via his own trusty, totemic and truly dilapidated instrument, Trigger. His guitar playing still sparkles, lithe lines flowing through
several songs.
In his prime, Nelson was vocally as facile and adept a conversationalist as Sinatra; a master at making the listener believe they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder with him on a pair of barstools as he delivers alternately wry and woebegone tales. Naturally, some weathering has taken place. There is grit in the pearl these days, but Nelson retains a zen-like ability to communicate the essence of a song; a truth. Of the four tracks co-written with producer Buddy Cannon, ‘Once Upon a Yesterday’ is the pick, a soft, sentimental ballad with all the weight of his nine decades pressing upon it.
At this stage, perhaps the most we can reasonably hope from The Border is that the songs spark connections with those from Nelson’s prime. The Tex-Mex roll of the title track, also written by Crowell, evokes the spare, dusty majesty of 1998’s Teatro, on which he worked with Daniel Lanois. ‘I Wrote This Song For You’ echoes ‘Sad Songs & Waltzes’ as it deconstructs the songwriters’ craft, while slyly acknowledging that the one thing a wayward musician can always do when in a tight corner, spouse-wise, is knock out a heartfelt love song.
Above all, the record’s sombre, stately mood recalls his mid-1990s classic, Spirit – although Nelson can still swing when the fancy takes him. The honky-tonk hoot of ‘Made in Texas’ distils a lifetime’s listening to Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb into three perky minutes, while also doubling as a pithy summation of home-state pride.
As for valediction: ‘Nobody Knows Me Like You’ – filled with ‘memories I can’t outrun’ – transmits a palpable sense of an ending, yet the closing ‘How Much Does it Cost’ makes clear that Nelson will be doing this until he drops. ‘Maybe I’ll write another hit song,’ he croons, ‘And we can all sing along.’ Why stop now? And why stop here? Hell, he’s old enough to run for president.
Headed for the canon: Withnail and I, at the Birmingham Rep, reviewed
After nearly 40 years, Withnail has arrived on stage. Sean Foley directs Bruce Robinson’s adaptation, which starts with a live rock-band thumping out a few 1960s hits. The musicians take cameo roles as maids and coppers. The show needs a larger cast especially for the tea-room scene – ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity’ – which calls for a big crowd of crumbling old crocks. Never mind. The production would have thrilled diehard fans. As for newcomers, they would probably have been better to start with the film.
This production of Withnail would have thrilled diehard fans – newcomers less so
Robert Sheehan delivers a glitzy, karaoke version of Withnail which is all surface and very little inner torment. And that fits well with Adonis Siddique’s melancholy, pent-up Marwood who binds together the emotional twine on which the piece hangs. The balance between them is richer than in the film, where Paul McGann’s Marwood seems like an empty outline. Malcolm Sinclair lacks the menacing bulk of Richard Griffiths’s Uncle Monty and omits to wear make-up during the seduction scene. Rather than a queasy mound of flesh, he imagines Monty as an athletic, dandyish sorcerer. Kenneth Williams might have played it this way.
Alice Power’s ingenious multi-layered set moves effortlessly from the hovel in Camden to Uncle Monty’s townhouse via the Irish pub full of homophobic thugs. She plonks in a red phone box and adds a vintage sky-blue Jag – with one lamp blown out – that trundles on and off stage. These fixtures are easy to recreate, but some of the modifications don’t come off.
Withnail delivers his false urine sample beside the motorway rather than in a police station. It’s cumbersome and not hilarious. The country walks have been curtailed or relocated indoors. The scene with the charging bull becomes a duel between the principals who re-enact the Hamlet/Laertes sword fight with false sabres. This is a new scene and it looks terrific. It’s funny as well. (If anyone wants more of Withnail, they should read Robinson’s screenplay whose stage directions are as good as the dialogue.)
The strangest moment is the closing soliloquy spoken to the wolves at London Zoo, which seems weightless and underpowered. But the journey has only just started with this version, which may become part of the permanent repertoire along with Abigail’s Party and Educating Rita. The only drawback is the absence of decent roles for women. An all-female production can’t be far off.
Michael McManus’s affable new satire, Party Games!, resembles a lookalike contest. The year is 2026 and a general election has just wiped out both the Tories and the Labour party. Into the vacuum rushes a new centre-right grouping led by a bumptious, gaffe-prone clown, John Waggner, who likes to quote Latin and has a knack for populist rhetoric. Who could that be?
His glamorous young wife, Anne, strides around Downing Street showing off her designer gear while disclaiming any similarity to ‘Carrie Antoinette’. The new PM’s deputy is a combative northerner who likes to swing her fists. A female John Prescott, maybe. Among the PM’s advisers is a scruffy maverick from Northumberland, Seth Dickens, who wants to privatise the NHS, scrap the House of Lords and liberate all schools from state control. He uses a robot that collects private data about civil servants which is supposed to be a secret, even though it sits on a desk for all to see. Dickens, played by Ryan Early, dances on the spot during political discussions like a DJ at a rave which suggests that he doesn’t have enough to do on stage. He’s not the only actor trying to amplify his role with bits of business.
The story becomes a little unwieldly as the UK lurches from crisis to crisis. Power cuts interrupt the electricity supply while a volcanic ash-cloud threatens to ground all flights. Meanwhile, SNP plotters are making a grab for power as widespread rioting breaks out following a car-crash involving King Charles’s limousine, which has run into a pedestrian. A plan to reform the constitutional position of the monarchy coincides with a move to realign Britain with the single market, and so on and so forth.
The chief whip, wearing a Michael Fabricant wig, wanders around the place carrying a poisonous tarantula that’s likely to bite someone. Eventually it does. As the victim falls, the plot takes off. The show’s most attractive feature is its focus on wordplay. The PM believes that ‘nuclear’ is pronounced ‘unclear’ and that ‘log-sticks’ means the same as ‘logistics’. He suffers from the delusion that ‘FTSE’ refers to a form of toe-to-toe flirtation beneath the dinner-table.
There are many other enjoyable details squirrelled away. Waggner once served as an arts minister but when he told the tabloids he liked opera he became a hate figure. It’s clear that the writer has more interest in the psychological nuances of his subjects than he can display in this farcical show. A play with more broth and less froth might work better.
The unbeatable glory of a doner kebab
Ionce shared a bed with a doner kebab. I’d hungrily joined a 3 a.m. queue for much needed post-pub sustenance, only to pass out as soon as I sat down on my bed to eat it. It was a vinegary and leathery bedfellow to wake up to, but I’ve felt ever since that spending a full night with a doner qualifies me as an expert.
I can tell you that any major city’s kebab purveyors can be ranked by the number of pints you need to have drunk before you feel like tucking in. Think of this number like the zones on the London Tube map. At the smart end there’s the zone one kebab: restaurant-grade and easily enjoyed as part of a full sit-down meal. At the other end there’s zone six: a last resort on the way home from a six-pint (or more) pub session.
Each kebab house, whatever its zone, is run by a patriarch who is referred to as ‘bossman’ (‘Cheers bossman, go easy on the garlic’). They oversee everything in their kebab kingdom, from the daily preparation of the carcass-sized kebab stacks – made by marinating lamb or beef and then layering it on to a vertical rotisserie machine – to flirting with the friendlier customers and acting as a bouncer to the nocturnal and usually inebriated clientele who provide most of bossman’s business.
An important part of the doner-buying experience is the decor. One place I used to frequent in kebab zone six had a display of lemons that seemed fresh the first time I visited but thereafter never changed. When I moved house and came to say goodbye to the bossman, I took a close look at the lemons and saw that they were encapsulated in a thick layer of mould. My new – zone three say – local has a display of seafood. Seeing the same beady black-pearl-eyed king prawn I saw the Saturday before gives me pause each week. I order anyway. They’re just that good: savoury, salty, spicy, fatty sliced lamb, salad and sauce (mixed is a must) wrapped in a fluffy comfort-blanket flatbread. It’s the greatest of all-time post-pub snacks.
Kebabs have been a staple of Ottoman cooking for centuries, but it was 1970s Berlin that birthed the doner. When post-war West Germany experienced its Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), a huge industrial ramping up needed thousands of migrant workers to take the jobs that couldn’t be filled on account of the Wall cutting off the labour supply from the east. Turkey provided the answer and over 12 years 650,000 Gastarbeiter (guest workers) and their families settled in Germany, bringing the Ottoman vertical rotisserie cooking style with them.
Doner is a hot topic in Germany, where 1.3 billion are consumed every year. This month the youth wing of the German Left party proposed an economic intervention of which their Soviet political antecedent would surely be proud. Doner kebab prices would be capped with £4 billion of annual state funding, ensuring everyone could get their hands on the perfect snack for under a fiver. Last year a voter confronted Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the cost of living, saying: ‘Speak with Vladimir Putin… I’m paying €8 for a doner.’
European Seniors
England teams brought home an Aladdin’s cave of medals from the European Senior Team Championship, which concluded in Slovenia last week. Their victory in the over-65 section was particularly convincing. The team of John Nunn (reigning world senior champion 65+), Tony Kosten, Peter Large, Chris Baker and Nigel Povah lost just two games out of 36, and picked up four individual board medals, including gold for Chris Baker. Peter Large demolished a Finnish grandmaster in the following game.
Peter Large-Heikki Westerinen
European Sr Team Championship, 65+, 2024
(see left diagram)
1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 3 Nc3 dxe4 4 Nxe4 Bd7 5 Nf3 Bc6 6 Bd3 Nd7 7 O-O Ngf6 8 Neg5 Bxf3 9 Qxf3 c6 10 Re1 Be7 11 Qh3 Nf8 12 c3 Nd5 13 Qh5 Bxg5 14 Bxg5 Qd7 15 Rad1 Nf6 16 Qh4 Qe7 (see left diagram) Westerinen has conceded both bishops and oceans of time but castling queenside would improve the outlook. So the following central break is timely. 17 d5 cxd5 18 Bb5+ N8d7 19 c4 White’s pieces are ideally situated for this forcible opening of central files. a6 20 Bxd7+ Kxd7 21 cxd5 e5 22 Qh3+ Kd8 23 d6 Qe6 24 Qc3 24…Rc8 25 Qa5+ Kd7 26 Rxe5 wins easily, so Black resigns
The margin of victory was narrower in the 50+ section, with England 1, Hungary and Italy all tied on match points at the top of the table. The awkward happenstance of England 1 being paired against England 2 in the final round may have raised eyebrows among their competitors, but in truth England 1 already held a comfortable lead in the tiebreak, and their win in that match was just as expected on paper.
England’s first team of John Emms, Glenn Flear, Keith Arkell, Nigel Davies and Stuart Conquest also won four individual medals, with golds for Conquest and Arkell. Arkell showed his famed endgame skill on several occasions, but the game below shows a crisp mating attack.
England also fielded the only women’s team in the 50+, so the team of Sheila Jackson, Natasha Regan, Petra Fink-Nunn, Helen Frostick and Susan Chadwick brought home the women’s gold medal as well. In the 65+ event that honour went to Germany.
Keith Arkell-Tim Jaksland
European Sr Team Championship, 50+, 2024
(see right diagram)
40 Nf6! Rg6 40…Rh8 was the lesser evil, but after 41 Nh7+ Black should give up rook for knight anyway, since 41…Ke8 42 Qa8+ Rd8 43 Nf6+ wins, or 41…Kg7 42 Nxg5 43 Nxf7! Kxf7 44 Qf3+ wins. 41 Qa8+ Kg7 42 Nh5+ Kh7 43 Qf3 A unexpected double attack. Re1 44 Qxf7+ Kh6 45 Qf8+ A lovely finish. Now 45…Kh7 46 Nf6+ wins easily, so Black allows the mate instead. Kxh5 46 g4+ Kh4 47 Qf3 Black resigns
No. 802
Black to play. Rocco-Ghasi, 4NCL, May 2024. White’s last move Rd1-a1 was a mistake, and with his next move Ghasi provoked instant resignation. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 27 May. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1…Qf2+!! 2 Rxf2 Rb1+ 3 Rf1 Bd4+ 4 Kh1 Rxf1#
Last week’s winner Richard Booth, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
Spectator Competition: Beg to differ
In Comp. 3350 you were invited to write a refutation of a well-known line from literature. Ian Jack once imagined quibbling with Jane Austen over ‘a truth universally acknowledged…’: ‘“Universally”, Miss Austen, even among pederasts with good fortunes, or among the heathen races?’ Poetry dominated, which is reflected in the winning entries (£25 to each). Pats on backs to Tracy Davidson, D.A. Prince, Nicholas Lee, Sylvia Fairley and others.
The unexamined life is most worth living:
I implore you, feel the gusto in the Now.
There’s so much to do, and Time is unforgiving,
You’ll never figure why we’re here, or how.
Leave experiences quite unmediated,
Surf that sense-data as if it were a wave;
There’s a world outside yourself you’ve underrated:
Don’t let introspection lull you to the grave.
It’s thumb-suckers’ comfort only, self-absorption,
Scrap those navel-gazing theories you revolve.
Face the world instead; it’s out of all proportion,
Like an ocean into which all selves dissolve.
Let examiners continue their dissections,
As they tear themselves apart, just turn away
For the Now is beckoning from all directions:
Come unblinking and unthinking out to play.Adrian Fry
Essentially a tragic age?
No, comic, I would say:
John Thomas rising from the page
While making new-mown hay –Lady Jane, and dialect,
While joining in a jiggle –
And Clifford, who does not suspect –
My goodness, what a giggle!Refuse to take it tragically?
Well, I for one do mourn
That Lawrence, almost magically,
Reduces all to corn –Life’s an existential jest:
Does that sound rather callous?
It saddens me though, when undressed,
To dwell upon the Phallus.Bill Greenwell
‘My dear Mr Bennet, have you heard Saltburn is to be let at last?’ Mr Bennet replied that he had not.
‘But it is, and a young man of not thirty years, with a good fortune, is to take it. He has visited with his friend Mr Quick, lately down from Oxford. We must surely attend one of their parties.’
‘Perhaps the young men will prefer to be alone.’
‘Mr Bennet, how can you vex me so? You know full well that our daughters are eligible and pretty. You have no respect for gaiety.’
‘You mistake me my dear. I have every respect for gaiety. Sir James has indeed invited me to assist at one of his, ahem, parties.’
‘You, Mr Bennet?’
‘Indeed so. It is not often acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a good fortune, may be simply in search of some fun.’Chris Ramsey
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty: that is not
The total sum of all you need to know.
That which the coughing Hampstead bard forgot
I’m pleased to itemise for you below:
You need to know the way to separate
A bottle of prosecco from its cork;
To call an Uber, take a selfie, eat
A lobster thermidor sans knife and fork;
How long to leave kefir grains in the fridge
And what to do when they begin to curdle;
You need to know your Lotus from your Bridge
And what’s the best of start words for your Wordle:
Adieu! Adieu. So fade my sad refrains.
I leave this aide memoire for you to keep.
Fled is this music – one last thing remains:
You need to know whether you wake or sleep.David Silverman
We happy families, they say,
Are all alike; unhappy ones,
Unhappy each in their own way.
But while my neighbours and their sons
And daughters while away the hours
In simple, soft, suburban bliss,
And tend to gardens full of flowers –
I feel that I would be remiss
Were I to never mention how
My uncle built a Panzer tank
And drove it right past city hall
And used it, then, to rob a bank.
He’s now in jail. Yet even so,
He’s having fun. To that extent,
Although he has twelve years to go,
My family is quite content.Steven James Peterson
The worst of times: a child who dies
Beneath a cruel carriage wheel.
A sister used, despite her cries,
By aristos who do not feel.The best of times: the marquis killed.
And the people have arisen.
But still revenge within us cries
With a doctor’s curse in prison.Neither the best of times nor worst,
Watching the next Evrémonde heir
To a title forever cursed
Mouthing a final silent prayer.Neither the worst of times nor best,
By the scaffold daily sitting,
Knowing that though I’m still oppressed,
I’ve improved my skill at knitting.David Blakey
‘A garden is a lovesome thing.’ You what?
It’s not. The idea is absurd.
Mine’s like a parking lot,
Crapped on by every single bird.
And really, is ‘lovesome’ even a word?
But ‘grotty’ is, and mine’s a load of grot.
Maybe I am too easily deterred,
But I can’t grow grass. (I’ve never tried pot!)
Roses? No chance. What flourishes are weeds,
Greenfly, blight, slugs and dandelion seeds.
Ignore TV or all the books one reads,
A fourth-floor flat is what one really needs.
I’m up to here with bloody gardening.
A garden’s nothing like a lovesome thing.Brian Murdoch
No. 3353: Running on full
You are invited to submit a poem about the dine-and-dash phenomenon (16 lines max). Please email entries to competition@-spectator.co.uk by midday on 5 June.
2655: Primacy
The unclued lights (one of two words) are of a recent kind.
Across
10 Late bishop, terribly welcoming (10)
13 Farah off with English – that’s dull (8)
16 Confiscate trawler catching small fish (5)
17 Nick caught with grass in school (7)
18 Could be Turkish transport (7)
20 Poirot found by small transport plane (8)
25 John’s game (3)
26 Attachment to Hutton’s Test award (4,3)
28 Cavalrymen capture amateur looters (7)
29 He’s in jail again (3)
31 Ashes score shows adjustment on TV screen (4,4)
34 Main variation of Tchaikovsky work in Wales (7)
36 Monster’s toll on artist (7)
40 Overdue train is damaged completely (8)
41 Maybe Basra residents misread quins’ regular letters (6)
42 Instrument getting one rat running (10)
44 Little lad beside strong sovereign (8)
Down
1 Member of an African ethnic group with a new suit (6)
2 Bound along, a shade like a rabbit (3-5)
3 Form a pure, biting, cold insight (6)
4 Didn’t lie – had been a candidate (5)
6 Ancient coin found in carrier on lake (4)
8 Composer who arranged odd pieces (4)
9 One faithfully following British tennis player around church (8)
11 Petty decisions from Soviet recording (3,4)
14 Refusals, as hooter is heard (4)
16 Partitioned off – causing worry (11)
21 Shed with 25A’s, we’re told (4)
22 We hear Lucille Ball has five measures (4)
23 Worker’s rant for safety feature (4,4)
24 Elimination of synthpop duo (7)
25 Blackcocks gather here for money (4)
27 All at once, gentle soul inside performed vocals (4-4)
30 Covers of Annunciation – author not known (4)
31 Mac’s to take notice of Spanish wine plug (4)
32 Nightmares give poor gran this belief (6)
35 Region outside northern stadium (5)
37 Sound of disapproval meets uniform skirt (4)
38 Publication, one for long-distance travellers (4)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 10 June. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2655, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.