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What a super-majority means for Labour
When the last Tory government fell, the famous question after election night was: ‘Were you up for Portillo?’ Were you awake in the small hours when the man many expected to be the next leader lost his seat?
This year, there’s no shortage of big beasts likely to be turfed out by the electorate. Jeremy Hunt, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Grant Shapps are just some of those tipped to lose their seats. Many touted as potential leaders – Penny Mordaunt, Miriam Cates and James Cleverly – are also endangered. If current polls are to be believed, the Tories could be reduced to a rump of about 100 MPs and Keir Starmer will be sitting with one of the largest majorities in parliamentary history.
Tories fear that the BBC and other broadcasters will treat them as a fringe party
The word ‘landslide’ doesn’t quite capture the scale of it. Tony Blair had a majority of 179 MPs in 1997, the biggest since 1931. According to a recent Survation MRP poll, Starmer is on course for a 286-seat majority, which would mean his MPs occupy about three quarters of the Commons. The 100-odd Tories and 60-odd Liberal Democrats and SNP MPs will be there to ask questions, but they’re unlikely to present much of a serious threat to Starmer. The more important opposition would be likely to come from his own ranks. Starmer would be managing one of the biggest cohorts of backbenchers any prime minister has had to deal with: about 300 in all.
Tory MPs are beginning to believe that this horror show is possible. Comparisons are being made with the 1993 Canadian general election, in which the Conservatives lost 154 of their 156 MPs. Tories fear that the BBC and other broadcasters will treat them as a fringe party.
In this scenario the Labour party would in effect be both the government and the opposition. The nature of not just government but politics would be changed. All the important tensions in policymaking – from economics to net zero to Israel/Palestine – would be between Labour factions. Ideas seen to be daring now – pushing through planning reform or even state regulation of the press – could be law in a heartbeat and a large flock of younger MPs would be more open to modernisation.
The Westminster ecosystem would also change, with thinktanks – from UCL’s Policy Lab to the Resolution Foundation to Morgan McSweeney’s old outfit Labour Together to the Tony Blair Institute (or what will be left of it after the expected mass transfer of staff to the Labour ranks) – competing for influence. Blair has already established himself in a stately home near Chequers.
Right now the Tories exert a gravitational pull on Starmer. A YouGov poll shows that about half of those who voted Tory in 2019 will not do so this time – and Starmer is keen to win those voters over. He has even saluted Margaret Thatcher’s boldness. Rachel Reeves emphasises fiscal discipline and talks as if (while not quite promising) she won’t splurge or raise personal taxes.
Once in power, this dynamic will change. An emboldened Labour party will face a rare moment of genuine power and potentially a majority bigger than that of Thatcher, Blair or even Attlee. It’s not hard to imagine Labour backbenchers urging a cautious Starmer to seize the moment and push for radical reform while he still can. ‘You are only going to get one chance to make bold, structural changes. Look at Blair’s second term,’ says one party figure, pointing to how 9/11 then changed everything.
Starmer’s people are not keen to talk about the implications of a mega-landslide. They fear that looking complacent might be off-putting to voters. ‘Not one vote has been cast’ says a senior figure. This week marked the anniversary of the 1992 Sheffield Rally, where Neil Kinnock’s triumphalism was seen to have dismayed voters and turned Labour’s lead into an unexpected defeat. Starmer’s team say that the polls will narrow, and point out that they need to win 120 seats from the Tories to have a majority of just one.
‘You would start off with hedonistic euphoria. Then people would move to start indulging themselves’
A super-majority would also bring problems of its own. As a former whip puts it: ‘You would start off with hedonistic euphoria. Things would calm down and then people would move to start indulging themselves. That’s when you would have problems.’
When Starmer first became Labour leader, his aides spent much time thinking about the ‘Squad’ in Washington – the four Democrat congresswomen, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who became an internal opposition as they tried to push their party to the left. It’s one of the reasons why selecting ‘Starmtroopers’ who could be relied on to be team players has been crucial. But many of them are new to politics, not just Westminster. There has been an effort to recruit candidates from a range of professions – from ex-military to vaccine scientists – rather than from just within the party. About half of Labour MPs will have no experience of parliament – no postwar party would have experienced a change like it.
Mindful of the experience of the Red Wall Tories after 2019 – many of whom were astonished to be elected – Labour is trying to train candidates in what is effectively a Westminster finishing school. The aim is to build the parliamentary party equivalent of a ‘Ferrari’.The training ranges from how parliament works to campaigning, public speaking and even posture. There’s also a sense that they need to get the balance right between constituency and parliament. New Labour grandees say that one of their mistakes in 1997 was to be too heavy-handed about the dangers of Westminster, which meant the new MPs spent too much time in their constituencies.
Some of the training sessions are in person, with actual away days, even overnight sessions. The most regular sessions though are online, almost weekly, and held with Starmer’s top team, including Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, now Starmer’s right-hand men. They go through campaign messaging and set monthly campaign targets for candidates to meet.
Shadow ministers also sometimes make an appearance. Last month, deputy-PM-in-waiting Angela Rayner appeared on the call to give a rallying cry about how candidates need to stay focused and fight on after Rishi Sunak had ‘bottled it’ on a May election. ‘They are often pep talks,’ says one attendee.
A test of loyalty came when Starmer ditched his key election pledge to spend £28 billion a year on Green issues. Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband gave candidates a joint briefing call on the U-turn. One might have expected complaints but rather than anger at being marched up and down a Green hill, the session was dominated by candidates thanking them both – and asking if there would be a briefing paper of lines to take, so that they stayed on-message.
But though the party is well-behaved, there’s a question over how long that will last once it is in power. ‘We all want to win. But once the shadow cabinet are in departments with teams, there will be some muscle-flexing I’m sure,’ says a Labour aide.
Blair used his mega-majority in the first term to focus on constitutional change – devolution, the new Supreme Court and quangos – to reshape the political landscape in a way more favourable to Labour. Starmer can quickly do some things – votes for 16-year-olds and EU citizens – to reform the landscape even more to his advantage.
At one stage, the Tories worried that he’d team up with the Liberal Democrats to change the voting system, but they have no fear of that now. The old Westminster system, designed to turn close elections into big majorities, could be about to give Starmer more power than any leader in Europe.
Listen to Katy Balls discuss a Labour super-majority on The Edition podcast:
The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter
This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first, in 2022, surveyed the work of Vivian Maier, who at her death left behind a vast quantity of prints and negatives: evidence of a hidden life unsuspected even by those in whose household she lived and worked for four decades. There are continuities between Maier and the subject of the current show, Saul Leiter. They were contemporaries, loners who lived into their eighties (Leiter died four years after Maier, in 2013), prolific but uninterested in recognition, their reputations largely posthumous.
Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh, like Andy Warhol and, like Warhol, he got out. His father was an austere Talmudic scholar, and Leiter dutifully studied to become a rabbi. When he gave up theology school in 1946 and moved to New York to pursue painting, he was promptly disinherited. Introduced to photography as an outpost of avant-garde concerns by the youngest of the abstract expressionists, Richard Pousette-Dart, Leiter began to try his hand in black and white, then in colour, at a time when the latter was regarded as the province of advertising, or vacation snapshots, or the news from nowhere found in National Geographic magazine.
Leiter’s photographs are messages in bottles, a counterfactual history running in parallel
Street photography was a response to the growth of American cities during the 1930s and the Depression, which encouraged a new documentary candour – and was well served by the small and silent 35mm Leica, available from 1924. But the street came into its own as a subject after 1945, when photographers embraced graininess, blur and the Manichaean dramas of monochrome. With no formal training, and no agenda, Leiter began to explore what lay to hand: his circle of friends, his immediate surroundings. After he found an artist’s studio apartment on East 10th Street in 1952, he stayed put for the next 60 years – alone, more or less: a downtown local, documenting a few blocks of the East Village. This included the view from the Third Avenue El (an elevated railway line which was closed in 1955), whose 14th Street station was a balcony of sorts looking on to the doings below, and an opportunity for pin-sharp images of pedestrians, captured through cracks in the floorboards.
Leiter’s style was oblique from the outset: interrupted views, windows and mirrors, glimpses and reflections, confusions of outside and inside, individuals seen through mist and steam, rain and snow – so many veils. His reliance on available light meant wide apertures and a reduced depth of field, as did the slow emulsions of early colour film: a constant dialogue between what is in and out of focus. The constraints encouraged a wise passivity rather than any attempt to control outcomes. Leiter was uninterested in cropping his prints or nudging the development process. The street was itself an improvisation, the sidewalk a ballet of cross-purposes. Above all, he explored the gap between what is seen and what is known: ‘A person’s back tells me more than the front.’ Isolated by his camera, his subjects tend to look preoccupied. He often used a telephoto lens, which sees only what it wants to see, compounding his tendency to abstract from a scene in the interests of a general aesthetic statement.
New York photographers were typically outsiders. Maier was a servant of sorts. Helen Levitt, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was an intensely private figure who lived alone. Garry Winogrand described his occupation as ‘survivor’, and Leiter often repeated his belief that ‘being ignored is a great privilege’. The photographer had become as marginal as his subjects, but also at home in their midst. Leiter’s imperfect snaps of the human subject – spectral, always in the wrong place – were also a form of self-portraiture. It is a far cry from the droit du seigneur which Henri Cartier-Bresson had exercised over his ‘decisive moments’, as though breaking in an unruly horse. No matter how off-centre or off-balance, order and proportion reign inside the tiny frame of Cartier-Bresson’s Leica. The picture tells a story, and its narrator is omniscient. Levitt and Leiter both saw the 1947 Cartier-Bresson exhibition at MoMA and admired it, but drew new conclusions for their own work.
Leiter is now described as a neglected figure, a belated pioneer. But he removed himself, after early encouragement – not least when he sidestepped Edward Steichen’s invitation to take part in the most famous photographic exhibition ever mounted, The Family of Man at MoMA in 1955. Having escaped his own family, the idea of joining a ‘family of man’ seemed a dubious alternative, not least as its claim to universality glossed over uncomfortable facts of oppression and subservience. In any case, photographers were keen to distance themselves from social concerns of the kind that had co-opted photography during the 1930s. No longer a sociological tool, the camera was creating its own facts.
Leiter polished his few square inches of metropolitan ivory. He refused to travel – whether into suburbia or out into the great wilderness, those two sides of the quintessential American coin. Whereas Lee Friedlander or William Eggleston revealed America as a place seen from a car, Leiter’s serial refusals must complicate any notion of him as a lost leader. ‘Ahead of his time,’ we say, but the idea of a hidden pioneer is a contradiction. Leiter’s photographs are messages in bottles, a counterfactual history running in parallel. How, one wonders, can his ‘experimental’ colour photography be epoch-making, as is routinely claimed, if it was invisible to the epoch in which it was being made? The 1976 exhibition of Eggleston’s work at MoMA is rightly seen as the visible moment when colour was accepted into polite avant-garde company. His garish large-format investigations of banality in the American South were a paradigm shift. He took pictures of things no one would photograph. Colour as a new kind of knowledge had arrived, and the idea took hold that some stories could not be told in black and white.
Leiter belongs in both camps. On one of his few forays out of Manhattan, in the 1960s, he went to Paris, and the MK Gallery includes a view, in contre-jour, of traffic stalled along the quais, shot from inside a darkened restaurant, glass door ajar, canopy half-visible overhead. A dull afternoon light pours down between the Haussmann buildings riding at anchor in the distance, before bouncing off the curved bonnet of a Citroën DS in the foreground. Like so many of Leiter’s images, it speaks of time spent against the flow, and seems to have composed itself. Wherever he looks, Leiter’s monochrome eye finds the same scene (barely a scene) waiting for him, a city silent and half empty, the mirror of his own absence. His black-and-white prints often recall Eugène Atget, and like Atget he was drawn to window displays, shadows, mannequins, reflections – and deserted streets. This is his individual vision. In a sense it says nothing, with care, and is intensely involving.
By contrast, the colour work is talkative. The familiar New York tropes are ever-present: traffic lights, yellow taxi cabs, signage of all kinds, the weather as a prop, the striving human subject. And the borrowings from abstract art: a touch of free-floating colour here or there (a red umbrella, a dab of neon), large areas of empty foreground blocking the view. The analogue reds and greens look bleached, because Leiter liked to experiment with expired film stock. In ‘Footprints’ (c. 1950, see below), shot from directly above, a woman negotiates a snow-covered sidewalk, beneath a bright umbrella, pursued by the prints made by all the previous feet. In ‘Mondrian Worker’ (1954), a workman assembling or disassembling a shed appears to be imitating the blocks of colour and black dividing lines of a Mondrian. In ‘Taxi’ (1957) a masculine hand, bronzed, cufflinked, urbane, holds a strap – all that can be seen in the rear seat of a passing taxi. Pure Mad Men.
Street photographers tend to complicate any neat account. They are prolific, they act on impulse, and they leave a chaos of unacted intentions. Maier left behind more than 100,000 negatives (most of them discovered only in 2007). After Winogrand’s death in 1984 a third of a million undeveloped pictures were found in his studio. Leiter left a modest 15,000 black-and-white prints, 40,000 colour slides, and an equal number of black-and-white negatives. Janet Malcolm suggested that photography needs to be protected against itself, by a process of constant winnowing.
But this makes little sense for a figure like Winogrand, for whom the activity was its own end. He had no interest in the museum wall as a destination, or in the material aura of his work (‘anyone who can print can print my pictures’). The passage from archive to oeuvre, cherished by curators, is an uneasy one. Quite simply: why these photographs and not those? Photography traded loss of authority for a new kind of power, located in the image’s refusal to explain itself. Rather than answer the question ‘Why me?’, an Eggleston photograph asks the viewer: ‘Why you?’
Leiter is a curious case. He too saw his work as having no exhibition value, but he also harboured aesthetic ambitions, left over from his beginnings as an aspiring painter. His photography is weakened by its painterliness and the pursuit of abstract motifs within the textures of the everyday. To use an old-fashioned word, it is arty.
The MK exhibition makes no attempt to be chronological, wisely, since there is no career as such and no clear development. It gives prominence to the work in black and white, otherwise sidelined by the myth of Leiter as a colour pioneer. The clue is scale – the colour prints are invariably larger, or too large, with more space than they need. At his best, Leiter is a black-and-white miniaturist. Reproductions in books do not convey this aspect. But Leiter’s tiny fugitive images of Manhattan have a reticent and negligent grace, and their epigrammatic clarity is well served by the MK installation: nicely underlit, unfussy, five rooms in enfilade, the pictures at eye level, where they can talk without raising their voices.
Impressionism is 150 years old – this is the anniversary show to see
The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition amounted to less than three years. Over the course of that period, the city had witnessed the collapse of the Second Empire, suffered a siege at the hands of the Prussian army and seen vicious house-to-house fighting between the troops of the Versailles government and the
scrappy citizen-army of Paris proper. All Parisians would recall the rivers of blood running down the city’s ritziest shopping streets, zoo animals being butchered for restaurant fodder, and the mass slaughter of rebel prisoners across the public squares of the city’s eastern faubourgs.
Given that almost all the big hitters are present and correct, it is a guaranteed blockbuster
All this played out over a period roughly equivalent to that which separates the present moment from the final lifting of lockdown restrictions. I’ve never seen an impressionist show that explicitly acknowledges this background, nor – call me an innocent – had I ever really joined the closely affiliated dots between the slaughter of 1870-71 and what might be the most important modern art exhibition of them all.
Yet the first thing we see in this show, which commemorates the landmark 1874 impressionist exhibition, is a horrendous depiction of the slaughter, created by a man who refused to participate in the show. The work is Édouard Manet’s lithograph ‘Guerre Civile’ (1871), in which the corpses of combatants litter the ground around a half-demolished barricade, artillery smoke still wafting over their military-issue greatcoats. This, for Parisians rich and poor, had quite recently been daily reality.
In the unlikely event you are unfamiliar with impressionist lore then quick, here’s a recap: in 1874, the key figures of the movement that would become known as impressionism opened a private show in opposition to the state-sponsored Salon, itself a kind of a super-charged Royal Academy summer exhibition. It took place in the former studio of the photographer Nadar, and it drew crowds – journalists among them. One, the critic Jean Prouvaire, penned a withering review in which he reproached the participants’ tendency to record ‘the “impression” of things, rather than their true reality’.
The premise of the Musée d’Orsay’s commemoration of that event is simple: in brief, its curators have done their darnedest to re-unite as many of the 200-plus works exhibited there as they could get their hands on; I suspect it contains more than half. These are accompanied by associated pieces, a smattering of canvases from its follow-ups and – this really is a neat trick – three galleries’ worth of paintings that were shown at the official 1874 Salon. Given that all the big hitters, with the exception of Manet – who opted to try his luck with the Salon proper, as he’d sold a truckload of his works there the year before – were present and correct, it is, and really should be, a guaranteed blockbuster.
It’s immediately obvious that this is modern art because it reeks of weird sex. Degas depicts plump ballerinas in spooky grisaille; Renoir captures a courtesan and her client, gazing skyward through opera glasses. Cézanne reimagines Manet’s ‘Olympia’ (1863) with the scrappiest of brushstrokes, so that the composition’s central figure appears to be lying resplendent on a badly drawn cream puff.
Cézanne also retreats from the frame of the source image: the focus is actually the (bearded, male) client, who appears to be going into cardiac arrest at the spectacle, clutching the side of his chaise-longue as the servant girl whips the sheet clean off our heroine’s body. Honestly, you start to wonder how this insistently deviant style ever earned such persistently lower-middlebrow associations.
Turn the corner, however, and you find yourself confronted with a massive gallery of pictures from the official exhibition, which opened just a few weeks later.
For once, trust the French state to give the last word on the matter
I can’t be the first observer to remark on the prog-rock/punk parallels. Plunging back into the maximalist silliness of Lawrence Alma-Tadema or the lumpen Delacroix pastiches of the justly forgotten Alfred Dehodencq makes even the politest of the so-called ‘impressionist’ works look rough and ready. Indeed, from here on in, even the Alfred Sisleys looks faintly radical.
Most of the artists who appeared in the original impressionist show have long since been forgotten. And a few surprises aside – I liked Zacharie Astruc’s bizarre, queasy, watercolours of wan figures lounging in opulent bourgeois interiors – their obscurity is well-merited. In fact it must be said, much here is deathly dull (Pissarro’s landscapes being a particularly boring case in point). But was it intentional? Monet and Degas were quite possibly the original Mean Girls: surrounding themselves with mediocrities so that their own star shone brighter.
This is conjecture, though. What isn’t is that 2024 marks 150 years of impressionism, and will see no end of commemorations, in a mad variety of global venues. For once, trust the French state to give the last word on the matter: they have the will, the collections, and indeed the imperative to make something of their most likely disastrous Olympic incumbency. If you’re going to see one show on the theme, make it this one.
Never admit that your band is prog – it’s the kiss of death
Sensible prog-rock bands try to ensure no one ever realises they play prog. What happens when you are deemed a prog band is that you are condemned to the margins – little radio airtime, few TV appearances, barely any coverage in the mainstream press – because it has been decided you exist solely for the delectation of a tribe that baffles the rest of the world. Once non-proggers have decided you are prog, that’s it. There is no way back for you. Just collect your Campaign for Real Ale membership card, go home and practise your drum solos.
Once non-proggers have decided you are prog, that’s it. There is no way back for you
Hence Radiohead – absolutely, indubitably a prog band, right down to the tricksy time signatures – don’t bang on about Tales From Topographic Oceans. Hence Muse – also absolutely, indubitably a prog band, right down to the concept albums – present themselves to the world as a power trio. And watching Air’s stunning son et lumière performance of their debut album Moon Safari – with long instrumental interludes, and Jean-Benoît Dunckel facing the audience, playing different synths either side of him with each hand, giving it the full Rick Wakeman – it was absolutely apparent that they too are a prog band, given a fair wind.
Moon Safari, which came out in 1998, was one of those records that seemed to exist in a world of its own. There were hints of lounge music and easy listening, bits of krautrock and electronica, all wrapped up in a package that was playful and welcoming, rather than just being an introduction to Dunckel and Nicolas Godin’s exquisite taste. Live, what came through most strongly was the absolute 1972-Pink-Floydishness of it all – the long, lazy melodies, the sense of stillness and care over the whole sound. The album’s closing track, ‘Le voyage de Pénélope’, was extended from its three minutes on the record into something vast and ever-evolving (and drummer Louis Delorme really was playing those Nick Mason fills that sound like an audio representation of a ship rocking on a moderate sea).
There were just the three musicians onstage – no guest vocalists, no additional guitars or horns – so it wasn’t an exact replica of the album so much as a representation of it – and all the better for it. There were new peaks, and the reworking of ‘All I Need’ without Beth Hirsch gave it a fresh spikiness. Once they’d finished with the main album, a greatest hits set continued and extended the mood; ‘Don’t Be Light’ was ecstatic and thrilling, a motorik rush to the end.
But we need to talk about the show, because the show was astounding. The trio played inside a low, white rectangular box situated on the Coliseum’s stage, open at the front and lined with LED bulbs that sometimes just lit them starkly, sometimes made the walls appear like mirrors, or showed rushing planets or retrofuturist graphics (there was no lighting directed at the stage; it all came from within the box), their little performance area wholly surrounded by darkness. From the front row of the Coliseum – and none of the reviewers in the front row could quite believe their good luck; it’s not usually like this – it was overwhelming, like looking through the windscreen of a car travelling at high speed. I’d be curious to know whether those in the gods found it quite as extraordinary as we did, or whether it was like watching something on a mobile phone from great distance.
There was more 1972 on view in Kentish Town, as Liam Gallagher and John Squire headlined a packed Forum (they’ve been doing a series of small gigs before Gallagher returns to his usual mega-shows later in the year) to play the album they have made together in full. The 1972 exposed here was that of Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie, real men playing real rock, the direction in which Squire had been steering the Stone Roses before they fell apart. ‘I’m a Wheel’ was introduced by Gallagher asking: ‘Anyone here like the blues?’ Squire then led the band into a weary, plodding example of the kind of thing no one ever needs to hear. The sprightlier they were, the better. ‘Raise Your Hands’ and ‘Just Another Rainbow’ (with its bassline borrowed from the Beatles’ ‘Rain’) were fun. Squire is a fantastic guitarist. And an encore of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ was better than the Stones have been playing it in recent years. But through it all, I wondered about the cult of Liam Gallagher, as 1,500 people chanted his name between songs.
He’s not much of a writer (all the tracks on their record were written by Squire); his voice is a piercing snarl, without nuance; he’s never been what you might call an involved performer (he stands still to sing, his hands behind his back). Yet he remains an idol to so many. Given that his public persona is a walking, talking, punching ego, it’s worth considering the lack of ego required to accept so many limitations; to accept that all you really have to offer is not talent or musicality but simply your presence. The art of Liam Gallagher, after all, comes not from the songs he sings but from being Liam Gallagher. From offering real rock for real men.
Choreographers! Enough with the reworkings of Carmen and Frankenstein!
Carmen and Frankenstein are without a doubt two of the most over-worked tropes in our culture, the myths of the evasively seductive gypsy and the human monster machine being lazily recycled and plundered and vulgarised in various forms to the point at which their authentic primal power has been altogether deflated. So it was with a heavy sigh that I anticipated their two latest danced iterations. No surprises were likely, and none were delivered.
It’s not bad, it’s just not good enough – yet another retread of familiar material
The list of choreographers – Roland Petit, Alberto Alonso, John Cranko, Mats Ek, Antonio Gades, Matthew Bourne, Carlos Acosta – who have had a go at Bizet’s poor old traduced score, either in its original orchestration or in Rodion Shchedrin’s bastardised suite, could be continued ad infinitum. Petit and Bourne at least tried to create scenarios that didn’t simply mimick the opera’s narrative or the Hispanic setting; others have stuck much closer to it and have therefore been dragged into cliché. To this latter number must be added the Swede Johan Inger, whose version was premiered in Spain in 2015 and has travelled widely since. Now it’s been taken into English National Ballet’s repertory.
The programme note claims that the performance is ‘unlike any other’ – a reading that returns to Bizet’s source in Prosper Mérimée’s novella, focuses on domestic violence and tells the tale through José’s ‘tortured psyche’.
But apart from the excision of the additional character of Micaela and the addition of a spectral androgynous child – presumably representing the young José, who loses his innocence and runs into trouble with a bunch of creepy-crawly figures of fate shrouded in black – the opera’s outline is closely followed without incorporating or implying any of Mérimée’s emotional or structural nuances.
The choreography, heavily indebted to the sportive and angular idiom of Inger’s compatriot Mats Ek, reminded me at times of a step-aerobics class: wilfully unpretty, but vigorously functional, with lots of deep pliés and running on the spot.
To the indignities inflicted on Bizet by Shchedrin is heaped an electronic mash-up by one Marc Alvarez. Not nice. But if it isn’t half as original as it thinks it is, the show is certainly quite tight, slick and glossy. Its strongest element is the spare and elegant set design by Estudio Dedos: eight panels, illuminated from within, glide across the stage to form walls and rooms that enclose and separate, hide and reveal. And a well-rehearsed company dances with terrific panache. Two juniors have been promoted to leading roles: Minju Kang has plenty of glamour as Carmen, even if Inger doesn’t allow her to suggest the dangerous contrarian outsider, obsessed with her duende. Her José is Rentaro Nakaaki, a beautiful limber mover – I’d like to see him in something more substantial.
Some advice for English National Ballet’s director Aaron S. Watkin: perhaps try looking a bit further and mining the riches of the back catalogue. Why not revive Massine’s La Boutique fantasque from 1919, or a Ballets Russes classic? How about Jack Carter’s The Witch Boy or Roland Petit’s L’Arlésienne?
There is one compelling reason to sit through Mark Bruce’s hour-long take on Frankenstein, and that is the mesmerising Jonathan Goddard. Slithering into half-life as he attempts to understand what and who he is, pathetically sensitive to his alienation from ordinary humanity yet unable to control his impulses, he embodies all the poignancy of the Monster’s condition without exaggeration or sentimentality.
The rest of the company give able performances, but they pale beside his cadaverous intensity, and everything else about the show seems superficial – the gratuitous appearances of a brooding winged sphinx, some spooky sound effects, choreography with bland balletic overtones.
It’s not bad, it’s just not quite good enough – yet another retread of familiar material. Dance needs to find other stories to tell.
Exhilarating: MJ the Musical reviewed
If you’ve heard good reports about MJ the Musical, believe them all and multiply everything by a hundred. As a music-and-dance spectacular, the show is as exhilarating as any Jackson produced while he was alive. The sets, the costumes, the choreography and the live band deliver an amazing collective punch.
When he removes his black trilby he looks like Rishi Sunak at a karaoke bar
The script, by Lynn Nottage, takes us into Jackson’s twisted personal history. He was one of ten children raised in a four-room shack in Gary, Indiana, by weirdo parents. His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness who refused to celebrate birthdays or Christmas. His father, Joseph, didn’t share his wife’s Christian beliefs and he poured all his energy, and all his wages from the local steel-mill, into his talented sons. He was a failed bluesman whose band, the Falcons, never got a break so he transferred his ambitions to the Jackson Five. He was a violent disciplinarian and he feared that his sons might end up as bums – or worse – if he didn’t give them a strong work ethic. He bullied Michael about his looks and called him ‘pizza face’ and ‘big nose’ in front of his brothers. These taunts led eventually to Michael’s destructive obsession with plastic surgery.
When the boss of Motown saw the Jackson Five he recognised Michael’s talent immediately. ‘That kid is lit from within,’ was his famous verdict, although in this show he says, ‘that kid is out of this world’. The band’s success coincided with the arrival of colour television in America and the production celebrates the lurid psychedelic colours of that era. The boys perform in matching purple jumpsuits with flouncy orange shirts flaring from their chests like bursts of sunlight. The costumes from the 1990s look tame and drab by comparison.
MJ is played by the astonishing Myles Frost, who matches the vocal firepower of his subject and brings the same intense and ferocious energy to the dance floor. His only defect is his Napoleonic stature and when he removes his black trilby he looks like Rishi Sunak at a karaoke bar.
Frost also shows us Jackson’s eccentric behaviour off-stage. He speaks in a whispery, itty-bitty voice but he’s very demanding and he forces his team to push themselves ever harder to realise his vision. Money means nothing to him and he’s happy to re-mortgage Neverland to raise funds for the extravagant stage effects he wants for his shows. Even during ordinary conversations, he dances non-stop because he has too much spare energy to burn.
In part he’s driven by his desire to outdo his rivals in the world of pop. He orders his artistic director to try out a new idea because ‘it came to me in a dream from God and if we ignore it, God will offer it to Prince’. In the history of art it’s rare for a creator to have both the freedom and the money to deliver everything that his imagination demands. Jackson was in that unusual position and this production shows us his creativity in action.
Fans of gossip will be disappointed that the show overlooks the child abuse allegations and Jackson’s difficult marriages to Lisa Marie Presley and to Debbie Rowe. But a dramatisation of his entire life would last longer than the complete works of Shakespeare. This is a fantastic starting point.
A dramatisation of Jackson’s full life would last longer than the complete works of Shakespeare
There are two views of Dostoevsky. One is that he’s a purveyor of profound political insights and the other is that he’s a garrulous, overrated sentimentaliser. His admirers will have countless reasons to applaud Laurence Boswell’s gripping dramatisation of his short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, which has been updated to modern Hackney. The narrator is a rootless depressive living in a boarding house crowded with noisy refugees. The walls are so thin that he can hear the junkies next door snoring. He owns nothing but a suitcase, a few books and a revolver, which he uses to mime his impending suicide. One night he dreams of an island paradise whose inhabitants are so happy that the concepts of ‘God’ or ‘the afterlife’ mean nothing to them.
Open-air copulation is normal in this steamy tropical realm, and the vices of romantic jealousy or sexual frustration are unknown. Young couples pair off and stay together for life, apparently. But the idyll is broken by the arrival of sexual shame along with deceit and violence. And the story develops like the fall of Adam and Eve. The narrator advises us that love can cure our wicked natures – but only if lust is isolated and destroyed completely. That’s quite a tricky operation to pull off.
Before the narrator can explain how to deliver the panacea, his story comes to an end. This quietly spectacular son et lumière show will be loved by fans of Dostoevsky. But its brilliance may not be enough to turn the sceptics into devotees.
Dramatic, urgent and intriguing: BBC1’s This Town reviewed
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight was last seen on British television giving us his frankly deranged adaptation of Great Expectations. Happily, he’s now returned to form with a show that, while not a retread exactly, is definitely Peaky-adjacent.
In This Town we’re back in a Birmingham – this time in the 1980s – that’s rundown, riven, violent and soul-stifling, yet that Knight presents with unmistakable love. Nor, once again, is there any escaping the overwhelming power of the family as a blessing and a curse. There’s also the same combination of apparent social realism with something much stranger and more mythical – and not just round the edges, but deep within the programme’s soul.
This Town is so full of incident that, after two episodes, summing it up is already impossible
This is most obvious in the dialogue, which is often heightened to a degree that means nobody would speak it in real life, but which perfectly suits – and helps to create – the show’s overall feel. But it also applies to the characters, who, in a more conventional drama, might seem merely implausible. In this one, they manage to pull off the neat trick of being both far-fetched and somehow archetypal.
Leading the way is the teenage Dante (Levi Brown), who wants to be the new Leonard Cohen, but who in his dreaminess, lack of side and fondness for unrequited love bears an unexpected resemblance to that other Midlands teenager, Adrian Mole. Dante was first seen composing poetry in his head as he wandered unwittingly into the Birmingham riots of 1981 where he was beaten by a racist policeman. Running away, he bumped into the more worldly Jeannie (Eve Austin), who failed to interest him in a joint, listened to his unprompted tales of heartbreak and asked: ‘How’s your gorgeous rock-hard brother?’
And with that we cut to Greg (Jordan Bolger), the brother in question: a soldier in an even more riot-torn Belfast. Faced with the rioters, Greg’s main tactics were to notice the beauty of the birdsong and to bellow out the advice that Catholics and Protestants should ‘sing together’. (In the event, they elected to shoot at him instead.)
Completing the trio of male misfits is Bardon (Ben Rose) in Coventry, whose father Eamonn wants him to forget his more artistic dreams and embrace his responsibilities to the family firm – which, unfortunately, is the IRA. Seeing what was going on, Bardon’s nan Marie (Geraldine James) went to confession and begged the local priest to intervene. This the priest did, but only by sending someone else from the IRA to threaten Marie so successfully that she died of a heart attack. At which point, we learned that Marie had been Dante and Greg’s grandmother too.
By this stage – surprisingly early on, given all that had happened – it was apparent that one of This Town’s many strengths would be the serving up of crunching set-pieces. Marie’s funeral allowed for several more, not least the appearance of her drunken daughter – and Eamonn’s estranged wife – Estella (Michelle Dockery). Led to the front by Dante and Bardon, Estella announced, to general consternation, that she’d like to sing a song for her old mum. Susan Boyle-like, she then turned the congregation’s excruciation to misty-eyed wonder as she knocked ‘Over the Rainbow’ out of the park.
This Town is so full of incident – and fully drawn characters, including any number of minor ones – that, after two episodes, summing it up is already impossible. (Do these people never think of the reviewers?) But if there is a through-line, it’s maybe the simultaneous importance and difficulty for the younger people of learning to go their own way and escape what’s expected of them.
Or if you prefer, of learning to sing their own song – a phrase that in This Town oscillates constantly between the metaphorical and the literal. In another terrific individual scene, Bardon drowned out his father’s rendition of a sentimental Irish ballad with a performance of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘You Can Get it if You Really Want’. It’s also quite clear where the drama is heading: the young principals will form a band, combining Dante’s poetry with the Jamaican ska they hear all around them – and that makes for the programme’s thrilling soundtrack.
Of course, it’s exactly the parts of Birmingham and Coventry we see here that gave rise to the British ska revival, which was well under way by 1981 in the real world. (It’s perhaps another sign of the show’s not-quite-realism that it hasn’t yet happened in this universe.) For now, however, our heroes still have many rivers to cross before they so much as play a note together because, like everything else in a programme that’s shaping up to be one of the highlights of the year,
the obstacles put in their way by the grown-ups are growing ever more dramatic, urgent and intriguing.
Compelling and somewhat heartbreaking: Girls State, on Apple TV+, reviewed
Here’s a fun thought experiment: instead of entrusting the future of American democracy to one of two old men, what if you put it in the hands of 500 teenage girls? Girls State, the sister documentary to Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s award-winning 2020 film Boys State, follows the events of a week-long civic engagement camp where high-schoolers create an all-female democracy from scratch.
A feminist manifesto is much easier to compose than a real solution to culturally ingrained inequality
Girls State and Boys State programmes have given argumentative American teens an education in the necessary evil of politics since the 1930s. Each state has its own variations of the camps, where high-schools nominate students in their penultimate year to apply via a highly competitive, state-wide interview process. The top applicants are invited to spend a week creating their own government: running for office, debating bills, hearing court cases. Attendance, at least at Boys State, bestows the prestige of being part of a group of (in)famous alumni: Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Chris Christie, to name a few.
The decision to follow the 2022 Missouri Girls State, which took place during the same week as Boys State, makes for fascinating viewing. While the boys are encouraged to listen to real politicians speak about public affairs, the girls gather in auditoriums to sing songs with silly hand motions. At Girls State, the adults enforce a strict buddy system and dress code, constantly reminding them they cannot go anywhere alone and must cover up their backs and shoulders inside, even in all-female spaces. The boys, naturally, are free to roam, solo and shirtless.
‘Does it get political at any point?’ asks one Girls State attendee, Emily Worthmore, who is frustrated with the ‘fluff’ of the camp – making bracelets, decorating cupcakes, trying to become best friends with everyone, moaning about the buddy system. With her heart set on becoming governor of Girls State, the camp’s highest elected office, Emily finds the other girls’ insistence that women are constantly told they can’t do things because they’re women to be a confusing concept. It is not only false but self-reinforcing, perpetuating the idea that being female implies being disadvantaged.
Emily, a preacher’s daughter and firm conservative, is an unlikely hero for the documentary’s two Californian directors whose star in Boys State was Steven Garza, the son of Mexican immigrants who door-knocked for Bernie Sanders. But Emily’s reluctance to sign on to the more strident feminism of her left-leaning peers (you can tell who’s a liberal, she says, by how loud they are) makes her discovery of her own limitations a compelling, somewhat heartbreaking watch.
Emily is in for two bitter reckonings. First, that her campaign strategy of ‘reaching across the aisle’ and running on bipartisan patriotism isn’t as appealing to young women as railing against the patriarchy. (She loses the gubernatorial race to another girl who delivers a ‘feminist manifesto’.) Second, that a feminist manifesto is much easier to compose than a real solution to the fiscal and culturally ingrained inequality she finds herself subject to.
After her loss, Emily turns her focus to an investigation into the inequalities between Girls and Boys State for the camp newspaper. She discovers that Missouri Boys State received $600,000 in funding, while Girls State received a third of that. The adults running Girls State say the camps are designed to be different and are therefore ‘incompatible for comparison’.
Things get emotional but never nasty. Mean Girls, this is not. We see the girls-only Supreme Court holding hands before hearing a case, reciting mantras of reassurance and self-forgiveness. It’s reminiscent of a quip in Barbie, where Supreme Court Barbie says, ‘I have no difficulty holding both logic and feeling at the same time and it does not diminish my powers. It expands them.’
But this is no Barbie Land. It is the Real World, with its obstacles intact. These young women will go to the polls for the very first time in November with still no hope of electing a female president. Sure, there’s a morbid but slim chance for Kamala Harris to end up in the Oval Office, but her approval rating, which is tanking even faster than Joe Biden’s, is evidence that girl power only gets you so far in American politics.
Clever, beautiful and sonically witty: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album reviewed
Grade: A+
Carter is a useful surname to have if you’re making a country album. So it is with Beyoncé: she married into the name when she got hitched to Jay-Z, but he is from New York, not Poor Valley, VA. Helps if you’re from Texas too – just to convince folks that this bit of genre-hopping is rooted in authenticity.
It isn’t – but who cares? This is a clever, beautiful and sonically witty album. Country music’s conventions draw out of Beyoncé perhaps the most sublime melodies she has written, or part-written. There are cameos from Dolly Parton, half-forgotten black sharecropper’s daughter Linda Martell, Willie Nelson and the ghost of Chuck Berry, but – the last excepted – they don’t add much to this sprawling but magnificent double album.
‘Texas Hold ’Em’ has amassed more than 250 million downloads on Spotify and may end up being her most successful single. It’s great, an R&B inflected hoedown. But there is even better stuff here – the lovely, smoky, sway of ‘Alliigator Tears’ and the fabulous pop-Motown stomp of ‘Bodyguard’. Plus there’s a lush and faithful rendition of Paul McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’ (Paul having assured everyone, in ’68, that the song was not about turdus merula, per se, but about black emancipation. OK, Paul).
Sure, I could do without hearing ‘Jolene’ again – the lyrics are the usual ‘respec’-me-I-is-a-strong-independent-woman’ stuff with which we are extremely familiar. But, for once, don’t let that put you off. This is certainly Beyoncé’s strongest album since Lemonade (2016), and it may just be her best ever.
Country music suits you, Ms Knowles. Maybe stick to it.
Watch to Rod Liddle and Fraser Nelson discuss Beyoncé’s new album on Spectator TV:
Letters: screens in schools are not a problem
Screen tests
Sir: As somebody whose teaching career coincided with the digital revolution, I must take issue with Sophie Winkleman’s well-meaning but blinkered views on screens in schools (Actress’s Notebook, 30 March). I shall ignore the several familiar yet unsubstantiated opinions presented as facts, but I cannot let ‘straight back to books, paper and pens’ go unchallenged. Adults involved in education have often, lamentably, seen it as their job to prepare children for the world they themselves grew up in, rather than the one that awaits the next generation.
The comment, ‘Well it worked for me!’ boils my blood. Any perusal of the current school curriculum would have visitors from outer space rolling their eyes in disbelief at how irrelevant to a child’s future much of it is. ‘Right, children, today we’re going to be learning how oxbow lakes form.’ Bafflingly, we don’t seem to have recognised that almost anything a child wants or needs to know is now at their fingertips. The world has moved on at lightning speed and preparation for inhabiting that world must be the priority. Once public examinations complete their transition to digital only, children in schools and the adults they will become will rarely, if ever, need paper and pens again in their lives. Sad? Perhaps. But inevitable nonetheless.
David Edwards
Norton-sub-Hamdon, Somerset
Passion project
Sir: Charles Moore would love to see a film approaching Jesus’s Passion through the eyes of a practising Jew (Notes, 30 March). He might also be interested to read M. Kamel Hussein’s City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem (1959), a very sympathetic Islamic look at the Passion. Sadly I suspect that it would be unlikely to be written today.
Timothy Kinahan
Bangor, Co. Down
Road to nowhere
Sir: I thoroughly enjoyed Rory Sutherland’s article on driverless cars (The Wiki Man, 30 March). At last a new perspective: one which shows why the whole idea is fatally flawed.
Fortunes have been spent already on the chimera of this techno dream. Politicians and businessmen seem especially gullible to the snake oil of Google et al. Like the paradoxical frog leaping to the wall, champions of driverless cars tell us they are getting ever nearer to success but they never arrive there, and never will. Safety and insurance are clearly unresolved issues, but so too are spontaneity and happenstance: the very stuff of owning a car. Like bikes, cars are an extension of oneself – while trains, buses, taxis and the imagined driverless cars are not. Bring on driverless trains and buses. Forget the cars.
Chris Rhodes
Horsham, West Sussex
The uncertainty principle
Sir: Justin Brierley’s contends (‘Living on a prayer’, 30 March) that, if the Resurrection of Jesus is not literally true, then Christianity isn’t valuable. Where does that leave the countless people whose Christianity inspires them to put the needs of others before their own, and who derive comfort and company from church attendance, but whose belief in supernatural events (such as the Resurrection) is a bit flaky? Perhaps in this uncertain world there is a great appetite for the kind of certainty – but certainty is not belief. Belief encompasses doubt, and it is doubt which gives belief depth and makes it valuable.
Anthony Thompson
Hereford
Latin lover
Sir: Harry Mount asks whether male classicists are irresistible to female fans of Latin (‘Veni, vidi, non vici’, 30 March). It is now 50 years since I started a Latin degree at London University (which I left with a barely scraped third); at the start, my philosophy, like that of Catullus, was vivamus atque amemus (‘let us live and love’); by the end, it was more a stoical nil desperandum.
Tom Stubbs
Surbiton, Surrey
Atlantic alliance
Sir: As Yascha Mounk says, in Britain the cult of the brilliant essay is prone to encourage writing which displays originality but gets things spectacularly wrong (‘Degrees of influence’, 30 March). Perhaps it is time to craft a new genre which seeks to combine the strengths of the solid American and flashy British styles at their best: the dazzlingly competent.
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln
Flair path
Sir: Yascha Mounk is right about the game UK academia plays when seeking flair. In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the principled, wayward tutor Hector says: ‘I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone. If I had gone to Oxford, I’d probably never have worked out the difference.’
Struan Macdonald
Hayes, Kent
Up the Downs
Sir: I read with fascination the review of Alexandra Harris’s book, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape (30 March). Such was the variety of characters mentioned that I could understand the absence of my favourite author, Hilaire Belloc. The depth of his work is founded on his love for these very square miles of Sussex, and he relates a journey across the county in his marvellously bizarre 1911 novel The Four Men. I managed to arrange a walking trip with some friends, suggesting we follow part of the book’s exact route. There is indeed a magic about those few square miles which I do not fully comprehend.
Timothy Smith
Heaton Moor, Lancs
Write to us letters@spectator.co.uk
The ‘luxury beliefs’ that harm vulnerable children
Now that everyone insists that the oppressed must be lifted up – or platformed, if you’re that way inclined: why does no one in the West give a second thought to the most obviously powerless group: kids in care – children who’ve been abandoned by or taken from their parents? An astonishing amount of kids brought up in care end up in jail or homeless or preyed on by gangs. Why no Facebook filter for them? Why no flag-in-bio solidarity?
Opposite me now in a café in Cambridge is a man who might have answers. Rob Henderson grew up in institutions and foster homes in California – ‘I think it was like 16 different houses in total.’ He escaped the usual fate of kids in care via the air force and university and now, at 33, he has written a book, Troubled, about his life and his thoughts. Troubled does not reflect very well on human nature.
‘Somehow expressing concern for disadvantaged kids became coded as conservative or right-wing’
Henderson says: ‘I think somehow expressing concern for disadvantaged kids became coded as conservative or right-wing. There’s this meme of “Oh won’t someone think of the children” and it became a kind of punchline and it became associated with finger-wagging church ladies. The last thing an educated member of the cultural elite wants to be is thought of as the sort of narrow-minded church lady. It’s just so much more fashionable to talk about climate.’
Henderson is dapper, contained, clear-thinking. He’s half-Korean and, he’s recently discovered, half-Mexican. To look at him, you’d never guess the utter chaos of his early life. Henderson’s mother came from a stable, middle-class family in South Korea, but from the moment she arrived in California she dived straight into sex and addiction. Two baby sons were taken from her before he was born, and when he was three years old he was taken too.
Here’s his earliest memory from his book: ‘It’s completely dark. I am gripping my mother’s lap. Burying my face so deeply into her stomach I can’t breathe. I come up for air and see two police officers looming over us. I know they want to take my mom away, but I’m scared and don’t want to let her go… The memory picks up, like a dream, in a long white hallway with my mother. I’m sitting on a bench next to her drinking chocolate milk. My three-year-old legs dangle above the floor. I sneeze and spill my chocolate milk. I look to my mom for help, but she can’t move her arms. She’s wearing handcuffs.’
One of the recurring themes in Henderson’s memoir is the emotional pain inflicted on children as they make and are forced to break attachments. It can last a lifetime. ‘In the foster homes, I lived in nine different kinds of homes by the time I was eight,’ he says. Of the many betrayals in his young life almost the most sickening is that he was also abandoned aged nine by a foster father he loved. Gary Henderson wasn’t an addict or a drifter but when his wife left him, he broke contact with their small foster son just to punish her. That’s what I mean about human nature.
At certain points in his teenage life Henderson looked almost certain to follow the usual trajectory for institutionalised kids worldwide: addiction, prison. But he escaped his own fate by joining the air force, then Yale via a ‘warrior-scholar project’. It was at Yale that he witnessed up close the episode that first alerted many of us here to the madness that was incubating in universities across the western world.
It was just before Halloween in 2015. Erika Christakis, a teacher at Yale, wrote an email suggesting to students that perhaps they were robust enough to decide between themselves which Halloween costumes were culturally insensitive. What ensued was a full-on howling meltdown followed by a witch-hunt. Students declared themselves traumatised. There were death threats. Erika left Yale. I remember a YouTube video which showed her husband, Nicholas Christakis, surrounded by a mob of screaming, weeping, ululating students. As he tried to reason with them, they were quite clearly itching for a lynching.
Henderson’s Yale classmates were some of the richest and most privileged young people on the planet, yet according to them, they’d suffered far more than he ever had. It was explained to him that he was ‘too privileged to understand the pain these professors had caused’.
It’s to Henderson’s great credit that instead of despising his peers, the hysterical, self-absorbed children of the elite, he studied them. ‘I really wanted to understand what these students thought,’ he says. And it was at Yale that he devised the theory he’s become known for – the concept of luxury beliefs.
Luxury beliefs are ideas or causes a genuinely privileged person espouses, safe in the knowledge that they’re insulated from their effects. For instance, when the middle-class left in this country bewail the evils of stop and search, that’s a luxury belief: they’re never going to have a child stabbed with a zombie knife. When my good friends talk down capitalism, while living off its proceeds, that’s a luxury belief. When privately educated children cheer on the idea of communism, you’ve got to hope that’s a luxury belief.
The indescribably awful Scottish hate crime law that came into force on Monday is the horrific consequence of a snowballing set of luxury beliefs, and as ever it won’t be the progressive political class who reap the consequences. It’ll be the poor. Luxury belief pairs naturally with the phrase first coined here in The Spectator by James Bartholomew: virtue-signalling, because the point is not to fix a problem but demonstrate progressive cred.
America is awash with luxury beliefs: defund the police, legalise drugs, decriminalise shop-lifting etc. But for Henderson the most pernicious is the idea that the old two-parent family is outdated, and that children are equally likely to thrive in all types of care.
‘By the 1970s divorce and all this free love had spiked across the socio-economic ladder, but then if you look at the 1980s, for the upper class it had reverted, whereas for the lower classes and the working class, they just never recovered,’ he says. ‘Families continued to deteriorate over time. Today if you visit poor working-class areas in the US and in the UK, to see a child raised by two parents is an anomaly. It’s this massive class divergence.’
Henderson pauses, then adds: ‘I know a lot of people right now are focusing on social media and smartphones and devices to explain why kids are unhappy, but I wonder if… I mean we’re now two to three generations into unmarried parenting and divorce being relatively normalised, if that might not have an effect, especially for less educated, lower-income people… Now you’re seeing Zoomers in their twenties who were raised by a single parent who was raised by a single parent. They have no model at all of what a stable family looks like and they’re passing on a lot of that feeling of instability.’
There’s selfishness at play too though, isn’t there? I say. People can’t tolerate any more the idea that they might have to be a little unfulfilled at times in a marriage, and yet stay for the sake of the children. There’s this idea that you have a duty to your own happiness.
‘I have had two conversations recently with two different guys,’ says Henderson, ‘and they both told me a similar story. One worked in finance, the other was a tech executive and both had been married for a few years. Each had a couple of small kids and they were becoming a bit bored and unhappy and wondered if maybe it was time to move on. There was no abuse or mistreatment but it was just less exciting and stimulating than they’d hoped and they were considering breaking up the marriage, leaving their wife, leaving their kids.’ (Over here, we call that ‘doing a Hancock’ I tell him.) ‘Both guys got in touch with me because they had read something that I had written on my Substack and they both told me, “I realised that I was being selfish and I decided to reconnect to the marriage, to my wife, to the kids.”’
Henderson’s point here is that it is possible to change the culture – people can be persuaded to act like that church lady, to think of the children. ‘There’s so much focus on economics and finance as a driver of behaviour,’ says Henderson. ‘I just think it’s a real mistake. We forget the role of culture and ideas.’
But how can we possibly change the culture? How, in a post-Christian world, can we, for instance, bring back shame for fathers who abandon their families?
‘Educated people are perfectly willing to use shame for certain behaviours,’ says Henderson. ‘So they are willing to stigmatise misogyny and homophobia and racism, and cigarette smoking.’
What are you thinking? Warnings on condom packets? ‘This extra-marital affair could seriously affect your kids?’ Maybe a photo of a poor, neglected child? Henderson doesn’t laugh. He looks as if this might be just the sort of jolt society needs.
‘I think the reason is, people are naturally drawn to exhibitions and demonstrations of strength, so when they see people marching and chanting at movements to change climate policy, for instance, they are drawn to that united force,’ he says. So it’s precisely because they have no power and no visibility that middle-class luxury believers don’t fancy championing kids? ‘I’m not confident about this, but I think people are almost repelled by the weakness of children. Kids can’t vote, they don’t unite and rally and agitate in favour of their own interests. They can’t say “Hey, pay attention, we are being harmed.”’ Thank God then that Rob Henderson, at least, is doing it for them.
Watch Rob Henderson discuss luxury beliefs on The View From 22:
How many people sleep rough?
Ballot points
Michael Gove hinted that the general election could be on 14 or 21 November. Have we had a November election before?
– General elections were held on 15 November 1922, when the Conservatives won a 74 seat majority and on 14 November 1935 when the National Government won a majority of 242.
– There have been no general elections in November since then.
– Prior to the first world war, general elections were not held on one specific day but were spread over several weeks. General elections spanned November in 1806 (Whig victory), 1812 (Tory), 1868 (Liberal) and 1885 (Conservative).
Raw facts
How many times was sewage discharged into rivers and the sea in 2023?
– The Environment Agency monitored 14,318 storm overflows – places where sewers are emptied directly into rivers or the sea, bypassing sewage works.
– The average number of spills per overflow was 33, making for a total of more than 472,000 sewage discharges last year.
– 60% of sewage overflows spilled more. than ten times; 14% did not spill at all.
Source: Environment Agency
Rough figures
The government wants to grant police new powers to move on rough sleepers causing a nuisance, but Conservative rebels want to decriminalise rough sleeping by abolishing the Vagrancy Act. How many people sleep rough? In a government census one autumn night in 2022, 3,069 people were counted sleeping rough in England. That included:
London 858
South-east 575
South-west 413
West Midlands 250
Yorkshire and Humberside 170
North-east 61
Source: Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
Country numbers
How much farmland in England is owned by the individual or business farming it? Of nine million hectares of English farmland:
– 6.2m hectares are owned
– 6.2m hectares are rented on long-term tenancies
– 504,000 hectares are rented seasonally
Looking at individual holdings:
– 54% own their land outright
– 14% are wholly rented
– 19% are majority owned
– 13% are majority rented
Source: Defra
Why I’ll never own a pair of jeans
Will Moore has narrated this article for you to listen to.
North Korea has a problem with Alan Titchmarsh’s crotch. Last week a 2010 episode of Garden Secrets was aired on state television, but the network blurred Titchmarsh from the waist down. The offence was his gardening trousers – a pair of jeans. For the Workers’ Party of Korea, jeans represent an ‘invasion of capitalistic lifestyles’. They must be resisted.
In a sense, Kim Jong-un is right that jeans are a sign of American dominance. In 1986 the philosopher Régis Debray declared there was ‘more power in blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll than the entire Red Army’. Communist states agreed. Western-produced jeans were banned in the Soviet Union and Maoist China. The smuggling of bootleg jeans became so widespread that Soviet authorities gave it its own name – ‘jeans crime’. A single pair could be sold for as much as a month’s average salary. In the mid-1970s there were attempts in East Germany to manufacture state-approved alternatives to American jeans, but without much success. As one disgruntled reader wrote to Pravda: ‘When you can make jeans better than Levi’s, that will be the time to start talking about national pride.’
Yet when it comes to the idolisation of jeans, nothing can top country music. The association of jeans with blue-collar work and cowboy individualism is irresistible to many country stars, as spoofed by the comedian Bo Burnham in ‘Country Song (Pandering)’: ‘A cold night/ A cold beer/ A cold jeans.’ The strongest example of sincere jeans worship comes from Zac Brown in his 2003 song ‘Chicken Fried’. He cites ‘a pair of jeans that fit just right’ as one of the things that American troops fight and die to protect.
Giorgio Armani said that jeans represent democracy in fashion because anyone can wear them, but is that true? Jeans have been part of the uniform for every western youth culture movement of modern times (skinheads and hippies; rappers and punks; goths and hipsters), but there’s an unsettling feeling when you see someone in their off-duty jeans, like bumping into your teacher at
the weekend.
In 2018, ‘researchers’ from CollectPlus made the unverifiable claim that 53 was the maximum age someone could get away with jeans. The truth is that while age, attractiveness and politics may all be factors, who can and can’t wear them is an instinctual judgment. Ronald Regan could wear jeans; Richard Nixon couldn’t.
Confession: I don’t own a pair of jeans. I once told this to a Montanan cowboy. He looked at me as if I’d told him I don’t own a toothbrush. Unlike Kim, my dislike isn’t ideological, it’s visceral. Jeans may be timeless, but their different iterations are not. I blame my prejudice on the style that was popular when I was teenager in the early 2000s. Then, the fashion for boys’ jeans was big, baggy and deliberately ripped, worn so they hung around the thighs. I was inoculated against them forever, like a bad oyster.
Still, while I don’t own a pair, and I’ll keep to corduroys and chinos, I’m grateful jeans exist, because they led to some nifty innovations. For instance, jeans were the first trouser to feature an ‘Amazing Hookless Fastener’ – or, as it was later renamed, a zip.
Tricky but delicious: how to make the perfect pretzels
My husband is obsessed with pretzels. The joy that a slightly warm, soft baked pretzel brings him is disproportionate. And, unlike in Germany and the States, where soft pretzels are ubiquitous, they are hard to come by here. So, for a while I have been trying to perfect the pretzel. It has not been smooth sailing.
Throwing your pretzels into a cauldron of water feels somewhere between heresy and madness
Pretzels are tricky: as well as being made from bread dough, and therefore yeasted, they are boiled before baking, have a very distinctive flavour, and their shaping requires a certain knack. Getting them right was a labour of love. But now I’ve cracked it, which means you should be able to avoid my pitfalls. I bake a lot, but the pride I felt when I removed my latest batch from the oven – mahogany gloss on the outside, pale and chewy within – was unparalleled.
The origins of pretzels are not certain – possibly they came to us from Christian monks, and they certainly became associated with both Lent and Easter – but they have been part of German baking traditions for centuries. Pennsylvanian Dutch immigrants introduced them to the US in the late 18th century and they spread across the country.
The most classic pretzel is made from a simple, yeasted bread dough, shaped into a knot, and flavoured simply with coarse salt on the top. The magic is in the contrast between the almost tangy roasty-toastiness of the dark brown crust, and the pale soft interior; a pretzel should be chewy inside and out. This is traditionally achieved by bathing it in lye after shaping and before baking.
Lye is sodium hydroxide, and a strong alkali, which alters the pH of the outside of the pretzel. But it is also corrosive and dangerous to breathe in. I am not going to ask you to source lye. The last time I used it was to clean an oven when moving out of a rented flat, and I gave myself burns all up my arms. Admittedly I was 22 and an idiot, but once chemically burned, twice shy.
The usual alternative to lye is bicarbonate of soda (often called baking soda in the US). This is a much weaker alkali that will have a similar if lesser effect once dissolved in water. It is possible to bake bicarbonate of soda to increase the alkaline level, but by doing so, you’re taking it closer to lye and its associated risks. Instead I favour normal bicarb, and a longer plunge of the dough into the bicarb solution.
Here comes the science bit. First the boiling gelatinises the starch; this fixes the pretzel’s shape, stops it from expanding very much in the oven and prevents the crust from becoming crunchy. Secondly, it deactivates (most of) the yeast, which results in a dense, chewy crumb. Finally, the bicarb (or lye) in the boiling water alkalises the outside which – as well as creating that beautiful hickory colour – gives the distinctive pretzel taste.
If you’ve never done it before, throwing your pretzels into a cauldron of water can feel somewhere between heresy and madness. It can also feel like you are going to undo all your good work. That beautiful dough! All your careful twisting! Fear not. Dipping the pretzels as soon as they’re shaped – rather than employing a second prove – retains their shape during the dunk.
And the knot-shaping itself is much easier than you might think. The key is to roll out each piece of dough to the correct length (about 70cm), and then leave each of them to relax just while you roll out the rest. This (short!) time will mean that when you come to shape them they won’t spring back. To shape: bring the ends of the dough together as if making a circle shape then, where the ends would meet, twist them twice and then flip the twisted ends over on to the base of the circle to create the iconic pretzel shape.
We eat these with classic American accompaniments: blue-cheese or French-onion dip, canary-yellow, American-style mustard, and a bowl of pickles. And, of course, a bottle of cold beer.
Makes 8
Takes 20 minutes, plus 2 hours proving time
Cooks 20 minutes
- 630g strong white bread flour
- 7g instant yeast
- 10g fine salt
- 20g butter, melted
- 1 tbsp malt syrup, or honey
- 350ml water, slightly warm
- 2 litres water
- 100g baking powder
- Flakey salt, to top
- Place the flour, yeast, salt, butter, malt syrup or honey and water in a large bowl or base of a stand mixer. Bring together into a dough and knead until the dough is elastic and starts to come away from the sides of the bowl. Cover and leave to prove for two hours.
- Turn the proved dough out on to a floured surface, and divide into eight equal portions. Roll each into a sausage shape. One by one, begin lengthening each sausage into a rope, letting the dough rest if it is pinging back, or struggling to stretch. Ultimately you want each rope to be about 70cm long.
- Take one dough rope and curve it round as if to make a circle; where the dough meets, cross the two ends over twice, and then flip the twisted ends downwards to sit on top of the curve, making the classic pretzel shape. Transfer the shaped pretzel to a lined baking tray. Repeat with all pieces of dough.
- Preheat the oven to 200°C. Bring two litres of water to the boil in a large pan, then add the baking powder. Lower each pretzel into the solution for 90 seconds, then transfer to a lined baking tray, and sprinkle generously with flakey salt.
- Bake for 20 minutes, then move to a cooling rack.
Labour’s Gaza problem
The district of Pendle in Lancashire has a long history of dissenters, nonconformists, witches and murderers. Perhaps because it is so sodden and bleak and northern: life is nothing but an impoverished struggle against everything, accompanied by the occasional maniacal cry of the curlew and the demented smoke-alarm call of the lapwing. The Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 are famous and many locals have campaigned to have the seven women and two men who were hanged posthumously pardoned. I don’t know if they were witches, but they certainly sounded hugely irritating – especially Alice Nutter, who lived up to her name.
The more Starmer sticks to a nuanced line, the more his opponents within the party will begin to bark
It is sometimes argued that we shouldn’t hang people simply because they are irritating, but with each year that passes I find myself more and more at odds with that point of view. Anyway, the area boomed for a while when the looms were spinning away but is now broke and just a little bit squalid. Pendle has the highest rate of any local authority for child poverty in the country – 43 per cent. The principal town, Nelson – dowdy, windswept, boarded-up – makes Hartlepool resemble Monaco. The soaked, flat-topped, lowish Pennines envelop the area, providing a suitably isolated place for the locals to indulge in their strange hobbies of witchcraft and murder. Asians from India and Pakistan arrived in Pendle postwar to work in the mills, and Nelson is 52 per cent Muslim. For Pendle, the figure is 27 per cent.
Last week the psephologist Sir John Curtice predicted that Labour was 99 per cent certain to win the next general election. I don’t doubt that Labour is more likely to win, but I think that Sir John should spend a night or two in Nelson to see some of the problems which Labour is busy storing
up for itself.
Sir Keir has just lost 20 councillors in Pendle and hence joint control of the borough council itself. This huge tranche objected, as one, to being told by the leadership to shut the hell up about Israel and Palestine and have decamped to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats (who have always had a strong presence of heavily bearded dissenters in the mill valleys of Lancashire and West Yorkshire). Of the 20 councillors who have left the Labour party, it seems that almost all were Muslim. The local parliamentary constituency – formerly just Pendle but set to become Pendle and Clitheroe for the next election – is a bit of a bellwether: a Conservative marginal in 2017, a solid Red Wall Tory win in 2019.
The Labour candidate last time around was a chap called Azhar Ali, whose name might be familiar to you. He was the official Labour candidate at the recent Rochdale by-election, until a selection of his anti-Semitic comments came to light and he was suspended and disowned by the party. Many of Ali’s Labour council colleagues still campaigned for him, mind.
This time Labour has selected a former copper called Jonathan Hinder to fight the seat. I do not think he is going to win. Mr Hinder needs the Muslim voters of Pendle to outweigh the Tory votes in Clitheroe, but he’s not going to get them, is he? Pendle’s Labour party is at war with the national Labour party and the Muslim voters know whose side they are on. It is true that all the parties in this rather benighted satrapy play to the gallery. A couple of years ago it was proposed that the Palestinian flag should fly from the council offices. Every single councillor voted in favour of the motion, including all of the Tories. The point, though, is that the Muslim vote still went almost entirely to Labour and it will not do so this time around.
I apologise for spending so much time discussing what might seem to be an isolated area of concern for Labour. But it is not an isolated area of concern – and has been something I’ve been banging on about for a good eight months or so. It may well be that the vast majority of the British voting public does not give much of a monkey’s about what is going on in Gaza, but that does not mean that, away from the Pennine witches and nutters, all is well.
First, the outright defiance of Starmer by the Pendle 20 undermines one of the leader’s strongest suits: the notion that he has a party united under his control and of agreeably moderate opinions. Second, what happened in Pendle will happen again, with varying degrees of harm to Labour, in a whole bunch of other seats across the country – largely where there is a large proportion of Muslim voters, but not exclusively so. (Don’t forget there are still a considerable number of Hamas groupies in the Labour party with names like ‘Jeremy’.)
To give you an idea of the extent of the problem, Pendle and Clitheroe ranks 34th in the list of constituencies with the highest number of Muslim voters. Every time this issue raises its head – and it will do so in constituencies from east London, via Birmingham and Leicester, deep into the northwest of England – more and more will be convinced that the Labour party nationally has deserted Gaza and thus deserted them. It would not surprise me terribly much if George Galloway – elected with some ease in Rochdale – were assigning winnable seats to Muslim candidates at this very moment, perhaps anticipating a couple of MPs to keep him company.
There is very little Starmer can do about it – and the more he sticks, with some principle, to a nuanced line on Gaza, the more his opponents within the party will begin to bark and the less attractive Labour will appear to the voters.
Joe Biden is running out of time in the Middle East
Jerusalem
The idea of a Saudi-Israel rapprochement would have been unthinkable not so long ago, and yet, shortly before the 7 October attacks, it was on the cards. The Emirates and Bahrain had recognised Israel’s sovereignty. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was positioning Saudi Arabia to do the same. Now Joe Biden – who on Tuesday said he was ‘outraged’ at a convoy strike that killed seven people – is desperately trying to see if he can get things moving again.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, is in Saudi Arabia this week meeting with MBS in a last-ditch attempt to save Biden’s grand design for Middle East peace. He’s unlikely to succeed, but the manner of the failure could determine how the next stages of the war between Israel and Iran and its regional proxies play out.
The President wants to show his own restive Democratic party that he’s trying to end the war
The contours of the Biden administration’s plans are well-known. Israel agrees a timetable for a ceasefire in Gaza and allows a ‘revitalised’ Palestinian Authority to assume control of the devastated strip. Israel also commits to serious negotiations about a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. The Saudi kingdom ‘normalises’ its unofficial relationship with Israel, and signs a strategic co-operation agreement with the US, giving it unprecedented access to American arms and even a civilian nuclear programme.
For Biden this would be the crowning foreign-policy achievement not just of his presidency, but of his long public career: ending the war in Gaza, solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and creating an American-friendly security partnership in the Middle East, led by its two main allies, Israel and the Saudis, to counter Iran. But there are too many obstacles to realising his vision.
Israel’s objective of destroying Hamas’s military capabilities in Gaza is still far from realised six months on. Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out a role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza once Hamas has been vanquished and it’s by no means clear that the Authority can be ‘revitalised’ under the sclerotic rule of its 88-year-old President Mahmoud Abbas. A new government was formed this week in Ramallah with a new Prime Minister, Mohammed Mustafa. But the 69-year-old American-educated economist is hardly a fresh face who will challenge the other time-servers. He served as Abbas’s economy minister and chairman of the Palestine Investment Fund: he’s business as usual.
And while the Saudis are interested in a strategic alliance with the US, and, along with the Emiratis, may be prepared to foot the bill for rebuilding Gaza’s ruins – assessed by the World Bank as costing at least $18 billion – it remains to be seen how determined they are to take on Iran whose leaders will do all they can to disrupt the American plan.
On Monday, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing seven officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, including General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the expeditionary Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon. Zahedi was also the senior representative to Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, which has been waging a low-intensity war with Israel since the Hamas attack.
The strike was a reminder that Israel is fighting at least two wars simultaneously. While the Gaza war is aimed at ending Hamas’s rule there, Israeli objectives to the north are still undefined. Hezbollah is a much larger force that effectively controls Lebanon. Israel’s military is more powerful, but an all-out war with Hezbollah would lead to major damage to Israeli cities from thousands of Iranian-supplied missiles. Hezbollah stands to lose its dominance in such a war too. Which is why Israel has taken a calculated risk in targeting the group’s Iranian patrons on Syrian soil, driving home the message that Israel is determined to limit Hezbollah’s influence on its borders.
Israel’s security and political establishments are split over the Biden plan. Netanyahu has made no secret of his desire to deliver an agreement with the richest, most influential Arab nation, but at present refuses to pay the price the Saudis demand – a role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and negotiations towards a two-state solution. This is not only because of his personal resistance to any concessions, but also because his far-right coalition partners would bring down his government if he agreed.
The pragmatic wing of the emergency coalition, namely ministers Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, who joined the war cabinet when the conflict began, are more open to the idea, though they haven’t said so in public – yet. They are backed by many security chiefs as well. ‘Israel has a chance to emerge from this war with a new regional framework in which the major Arab regimes join it against Iran,’ says one general. ‘But it won’t happen if the politicians miss the opportunity.’
Biden is pushing through despite knowing the chances, for now, are slim. He wants to show his own restive Democratic party, which is increasingly critical of his support for Israel, that he’s trying to end the war. If MBS gives the green light, the US President may publicly present the plan, leaving Netanyahu to either reject it or, though it seems unlikely, accept it as a last resort to save his own tarnished legacy at the price of his coalition. But above all, Biden is giving it another try because he believes in his plan, just as he believes he will beat Donald Trump in November and secure a second term.
By then, Israel will have been at war for more than a year and many expect Netanyahu will not be able to prevent an early election, which he will almost certainly lose. The next Israeli PM may be more amenable. The only thing Biden knows for sure is that this time next year, MBS, who doesn’t have to submit himself to the indignity of elections, will still be in charge of Saudi Arabia. So he’s trying to lock him in while he can.
Can Starmer control 450 unruly MPs?
It doesn’t matter how loyal a candidate is. Once elected, all MPs (to a greater or lesser extent) conclude they have won their seat because of their unique qualities and personal vision. When they look in the mirror, many will see a future prime minister. Almost every backbench MP believes they are one reshuffle away from ministerial office.
Managing 450 MPs is a tall order for any party leader. As prime minister, Keir Starmer would have his work cut out managing the payroll vote of 150-160, especially as only around a third of the new parliamentary Labour party will have been in office before. A big Starmer win would inevitably pave the way for new Labour tribes, each with their own instincts, demands and ambitions. Blairites vs Brownites will feel like a thing of the past as new factions form around place, age and identity.
A big Starmer win would inevitably pave the way for new Labour tribes
Historically, Labour’s heartlands dominated its backbenches – blocs from Scotland, Wales, and Yorkshire got together, traded votes and secured positions. Recent polls paint a different picture: Labour’s heartland is predicted to be in the north-west with more than 70 seats – perhaps a tribute to the mayoralties of Steve Rotheram in Liverpool and Andy Burnham in Manchester.
Then there’s that other mayoralty, London, which may end up not far behind with perhaps more than 60 Labour seats. In the south-east more widely, the party is tipped to gain 30 seats – much of the demographic change driven by London house prices pushing Labour voters into commuter towns. Add to this the candidates outside the capital who earned their spurs politically as councillors in London boroughs (and will therefore bring with them a more metropolitan version of progressive politics) and you have a sizeable bloc.
All in all, nearly half of Labour MPs may end up coming from London, the south-east and the north-west. These three groups could find themselves clashing on where investment should go, as well as on the frequent anti-London rhetoric of Burnham and his allies.
Geography will be just one potential flashpoint. The debate on trans rights, the speed of Labour’s move to back a ceasefire in Gaza and even the row about whether to reinstate Diane Abbott have all been thorny issues which have split Labour. And not along traditional left-right lines either: often it’s been along age lines. This will be a very young party (another consequence of the deep defeat in 2019), which will drive the backbench political demands in many ways. Renters’ rights will matter more than the triple lock. Taxation on wealth will be demanded – particularly on domestic property – rather than on work. Issues of equality will be common currency, not something derided as ‘woke’.
Nor has the hard left gone away. There are still 35 members of the Socialist Campaign Group. The selection process means there’s only a handful of new candidates from this bloc, such as Faiza Shaheen, a Corbynista likely to unseat Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford. But the existing ones are changing their tactics too: advocating a red-green politics that has broader support than older hard-left positions and dominating modern communication channels, as Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome from the 2019 intake do on TikTok.
Starmer may not be interested in radical change – but he may struggle to drain the energy and idealism of a Labour parliamentary party that will be keen to seize what could be an unrepeatable political opportunity.
The Besiktas nightclub fire was tragically inevitable
At least 29 workers died and two were seriously injured yesterday in a fire at an Istanbul nightclub. The Masquerade club is in the basement of a 16-storey building in the Turkish city’s Besiktas district, known for its nightlife, and was being renovated. Nine people have been arrested in connection with the blaze.
The fire has shone a spotlight on the dangers to construction workers in Turkey. Last year, almost 2,000 died in workplace accidents. Trade unions and opposition parties have long accused the government of failing to enforce safety regulations in order to maintain economic growth and attract foreign companies.
A construction boom has been taking place in Turkey following last year’s huge earthquake in which tens of thousands of people died, many from buildings collapsing. In the rush to rebuild, there has been a spike in workplace deaths, and authorities continue to turn a blind eye to safety rules.
Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, promised to investigate the incident, but said that the club had not sought permission to carry out renovations. The initial investigation showed that some of the suspects for causing the fire have previous criminal records related to intentional injury, sexual harassment, drug possession, and illegal possession of firearms. According to emergency services, the fire was caused by an explosion of a gas cylinder used for welding. Most of the workers died of smoke poisoning.
‘The club was shut for the month of Ramadan’, said Orhan Tuncay, who works at a small restaurant next door. ‘They do this every year out of respect and use the time to do renovations. First we saw the smoke coming out. Apparently, one of the two exits was locked and the other was blocked by the fire trapping the workers inside. The smoke from the paints and other materials was poisonous, we even saw some of the firefighters almost fainting.’
A construction trade union boss said the workers who died were under pressure to finish work by the end of Ramadan next week. Ozgur Karabulut, head of the DEV Yapi-Is union, said: ‘Under such pressure and chaotic conditions accidents are inevitable.’
This devastating fire is the last thing that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs, after he lost the Istanbul municipal elections on Monday. Erdogan was blamed last year for presiding over a culture of lax building standards which led to so many deaths in the earthquake. Some contractors even set up their own building standards companies, to mark their own homework.
Erdogan said in the days after the earthquake that all Turks ‘have lessons to learn from the disaster we have lived through’. This latest fire suggests that this has not yet happened.
Poll predicts Labour could become Scotland’s largest party
As Scotland’s embattled First Minister continues to face backlash over his Hate Crime Act, his party has been hit with yet more bad news. New polling from YouGov suggests that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party will become the largest party in Scotland, taking 28 seats and pushing the SNP into second place. The Nats are predicted to lose almost 25 of their Westminster seats, retaining just 19, the next time the electorate head to the ballot box.
The MRP poll suggests that Labour will sweep up across Scotland’s central belt – widely regarded within the Scottish party as being ‘the first red wall to fall’ – and is even predicted to take some Glasgow constituencies. Na h-Eileanan an Iar is also predicted to elect its Labour candidate, former Daily Record journalist Torcuil Crichton, following the expulsion of the constituency’s current MP Angus MacNeil from the SNP last year.
But it’s not just the Nats that will find the new survey hard to stomach. Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross told The Spectator in October that he thought his party ‘could have a really good general election’. Well, he might have to think again. Instead of making gains, the poll predicts that the Conservatives will lose two of their seven seats north of the border. Scotland has previously been thought to be the one part of the UK in which the Tories could make gains at the next election, but this new poll suggests Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will face a worse defeat than John Major in 1997. More than that, 11 cabinet ministers are at risk of losing their seats, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan among them.
The long and short of it? While the Tories fear electoral wipeout, the SNP’s fortunes aren’t looking particularly promising either. The First Minister told his party conference in October that independence preparations would begin again if they won a ‘majority’ – 29 – of Scotland’s Westminster seats. If the Nats only hold on to 19 after the country goes to the polls, not only will they have lost over half of their Westminster MPs, they’ll have lost anything resembling an independence mandate too.
The truth about Israel’s ‘friendly fire’
David Cameron has got some front. The Foreign Secretary is haranguing Israel over its tragic unintentional killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, and yet he oversaw a war in which such ‘friendly fire’ horrors were commonplace. In fact, more than seven people were slain in accidental bombings under Cameron’s watch.
Terrible accidents happen in war
It was the Libya intervention of 2011. In that Nato-led excursion, in which Cameron, then prime minister, was an enthusiastic partner, numerous Libyans died as a result of misaimed bombs. Things got so bad that the West’s allies took to painting the roofs of their vehicles bright pink in an effort to avoid Nato’s missiles.
In one awful incident, 13 people were slaughtered by our ‘friendly fire’. Their number included not only anti-Gaddafi rebels but also ambulance workers. It was in the wake of this calamity that the rebels got out the pink paint. ‘How to avoid friendly fire? Libya rebels try pink’, said a headline at NBC News.
Yet now Cameron is on his high horse over Israel’s bombing of trucks carrying volunteers from the World Central Kitchen. He is demanding a ‘full, transparent explanation of what happened’. Fine. Three of the dead were British nationals, so it makes perfect sense Britain wants answers. But you would think a former PM who was involved in wars in which other accidents happened would understand that ‘friendly fire’, sadly, is all but inevitable in bloody conflict.
This is not to downplay the horror of what happened in Gaza on Monday. That civilians were killed while trying to help people, while trying to deliver food, is horrendous. It is fitting that the Israeli president Isaac Herzog has apologised for the bombings, and that the Israeli government has promised to get to the bottom of what happened.
And yet there is something off, even something nauseating, in all the Western finger-wagging. It isn’t only Cameron. US president Joe Biden has also weighed in, saying he is ‘outraged’ by the killing of the aid workers. You can’t help but wonder whether he directed similar outrage at his own nation’s military when 37 Afghanis at a wedding party, mostly women and children, were killed by mistake in a US airstrike.
‘Stop killing Afghan civilians’, the then president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, said to the newly elected US president, Barack Obama. And who was Obama’s vice-president? Biden, of course. You would think a man whose own military has killed huge numbers of people in error would understand that these things happen, even if every decent person would rather they didn’t.
Vast numbers of civilians have been killed by accident by the US in recent years. At another wedding party in 2004, this time in Iraq, 11 women and 14 children were killed by American fire. Was there a ‘full, transparent explanation’ for that calamity?
Terrible accidents happen in war. That’s because war is hell. If you hate the war in Gaza, as you should, then you should aim your ire at Hamas, the virulently anti-Semitic terror group that started this war with its pogrom against the people of southern Israel on 7 October. The seven decent souls of World Central Kitchen would be alive today had Hamas not taken the decision to visit its racist barbarism on the Jewish State.
For once war starts, error becomes unavoidable. There are few wars in history – none, perhaps – in which innocents have not perished in the violent maelstrom. What is striking about Israel’s mistake is that it is not being treated as ‘friendly fire’ at all. Instead it is held up as proof of Israel’s evil, evidence of its malevolence.
What is striking about Israel’s mistake is that it is not being treated as ‘friendly fire’ at all
Across social media, the cry goes up: Israel did this on purpose. It seems Israel is the only state not allowed to make mistakes. Where us decent Westerners kill friends in error, Israel does it intentionally, with malice at its heart. The double standards are staggering. It is hypocritical and ridiculous for the citizens of nations that have accidentally killed far more people than Israel to now lecture Israel about its wayward bombs.
It smacks of bigotry, too. We make mistakes, they commit crimes. We err, they murder. We should be forgiven, they should not. There’s an ironically neocolonialist bent to this fury with Israel, for it bigs up the West, despite its history of war crimes, as a suitable judge and jury of that uppity little state over there.
Indeed, it strikes me that something larger is at work here. It seems that some in the West are seeking to launder their reputations through attacking Israel. From Cameron to Biden, powerful men who have been involved in wars far more horrific and far less justified than Israel’s war on Hamas, are now pontificating against the Jewish State.
The historically illiterate left is lapping up the lectures Cameron, Biden and others are making to Israel. This isn’t ‘anti-imperialism’ – it’s the attempted rehabilitation of Western prestige on the back of bashing Israel. Shame on everyone involved.