-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed
Ivy, the protagonist of Megan Hunter’s magnificent Days of Light, lives with her family at Cressingdon, a Sussex farmhouse, which is ‘covered with her mother’s fabrics and artworks, every room thick with the breath of her, of Angus’ (her mother Marina’s lover). At weekends, her father Gilbert, a travel writer and notorious womaniser, comes down from London to stay.
The clear parallels with Angelica Bell and Charleston extend even further. Ivy develops a tendresse for, and eventually marries, Bear, a man 25 years her senior and Angus’s former lover. Like his prototype Bunny Garnett, Bear worked on the farm to avoid conscription during the first world war. Like Bunny with Angelica, Bear is present at Ivy’s birth and immediately contemplates marrying her.
Hunter deftly skewers the tensions and contradictions within this unconventional household where sexual shibboleths are challenged yet class distinctions are rigorously policed. (Marina is horrified when Ivy considers becoming a cook.) For her part, Ivy believes herself to be devoid of talent and a constant disappointment, ‘coming from the family she did, the daughter of artists – famous ones at that’. Marina, meanwhile, is bitterly resentful of her sister Genevieve, a celebrated writer who has ‘all the time in the world. And Hector waiting on her every bloody need.’ In contrast to the childless Genevieve, Marina feels that Ivy and her brother Joseph have held her back.
This sibling relationship lifts the novel to another dimension. Days of Light opens on Easter Sunday 1938, when Ivy and Joseph go for a swim in the nearby river. Joseph drowns and Ivy witnesses a strange, otherworldly light, which ‘in some ways was love itself’. Joseph’s body is never found and the mystery, together with the loss, haunt Ivy for the rest of her life, as she marries, has two daughters, and, in an echo of her parents’ romantic entanglements, embarks on a passionate affair with her brother’s former girlfriend Frances.
Where Ivy differs from her mother’s set is in her strong religious faith. Marina proudly declares Cressingdon to be ‘the most secular house in England’, and inhabits ‘a world of objects’ (a phrase repeated several times in the book). Ivy, on the other hand, studies theology and, in the 1960s, enters a convent. The speed with which she abandons her vocation after a resurgence of romantic love is the one flaw in this beautifully written novel, that, rare in contemporary fiction, evokes a deep sense of the numinous.
What if Trump is just bonkers?
‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial politician Talleyrand. Whenever a person behaves in ways we had not anticipated, it is a Darwinian and often useful human instinct to suspect a rational motive, and seek it out.
So it’s unsurprising that in the world of commentary a whole industry has now arisen in search of an ‘explanation’ of Donald Trump’s various démarches concerning, for instance, Gaza, Greenland and Canada.
And now he’s trying to wreck world trade.
Academic economists have been hauled from their ivory towers, business journalists from their statistical charts, public opinion pollsters from their psephological scrutinies, and even child psychiatrists from their textbooks on infant development, to make sense of the US President’s decrees, speeches and obiter dicta for a bewildered world.
I have especially enjoyed the valiant efforts of fellow journalists on financial pages to find the rationale (if not the wisdom) behind a large nation slapping massive tariffs on its allies and trading partners. There have been charts, forecasts, modellings – all designed to guess or suggest what the President hopes to achieve and why, and to assess his chances of success.
A favourite answer to the apparent riddle of a man who appears able to believe (and say) six impossible things before breakfast has been that Trump must not be taken literally. Another is that ludicrous demands are part of the negotiating strategy of a ‘transactional’ dealmaker. And still the explanations, some more plausible than others, come. Keep them coming, chaps.
But what if Trump has just gone bonkers? Literally bonkers? What if no other explanation is needed? What if we behold an old man who, as he approaches 80, is simply losing his mind? What if a kind of early-onset (and not all that early) senile dementia is taking place?
After all, Joe Biden isn’t much older than Trump. But with Biden we reached the right diagnosis quickly and stopped looking for more subtle explanations because his symptoms are so very common in ageing individuals. We oldies start forgetting things, losing our thread, showing signs of confusion. For a while (you may remember) there was an attempt to explain away such surface traits as being unconnected with Biden’s deeper wisdom and acuity: as disregardable as, say, a shaky hand or faltering voice. But soon the obvious could not be brushed aside. The President was losing it, and had to be eased out.
Among senior Republicans there will already be a growing recognition that their President has lost his marbles
In Trump’s case, the power, if not the content, of speech remains strong. He still looks vigorous. He is not yet frail physically. Superficially at least, he has lost neither his grip nor his bite. But the power of reason, the ability to reflect and contemplate all sides to a question, the capacity to ask oneself at least privately whether one might be wrong, the suppleness of intellect that marks a person in full command of their mental faculties – might these all be in sharp decline?
The atrophy of what we might call the brain’s muscle is a kind of degeneration whose outward signs may not be immediately evident until what crystallises as a series of terrible decisions becomes impossible to overlook as part of a mental disorder. Whispers of ‘not right in the head’ are heard. Any family business whose patriarch is slowly going gaga but who can still walk, talk and conduct an apparently intelligent conversation will be familiar with the creeping realisation. Fits of obvious insanity become ever harder to ignore.
As so often, Shakespeare created the archetype. Trump is beginning to remind me of King Lear: fitfully reasonable, physically strong but gripped by sudden bouts of madness and a kind of lunatic stubbornness – a vicious hardening of the mental arteries. George III’s illness took him more stealthily, returning him for long periods to sanity, until senior figures felt obliged to make legislative provision for a regency.
Winston Churchill, though never mad, had slipped into a mild senescence before he ceased to be prime minister. Learned volumes have been written about ailing leaders in power and many examples are cited – but there have surely been many more whom we never suspected: old fools kept on their feet by discreet courtiers as their powers ebbed.
I remember watching General Franco’s new year message on TV in Spain in 1973. You could all but see a strong arm behind his back keeping his spine vertical as the shrunken old man, a pile of bones inside a stiff, bemedalled military uniform lisped his now-croaky way towards his concluding: ‘¡Que viva España!’
But Franco had long lost real power. Trump has not. In his first term, though his utterances were sometimes typically deranged, his actions – far more restrained – evidenced a sense of the limits of the possible. We can already be confident that among senior Republicans who still publicly support him there will be a growing private recognition that their President has lost his marbles, and with them that better part of valour.
Public silence betrays, I suspect, a realisation that the US Constitution makes it difficult, if not impossible, to remove a sitting president still in possession of his elementary faculties except through impeachment. But in politics, even constitutional politics, where there’s a will, a way can sometimes be found.
The imperative with Trump is to hobble him. If or when his policies begin to redound to the clear disadvantage of those who voted for him, if the next midterm elections show powerful evidence of national disgruntlement, if he loses the congressional control he now has, the President’s fair-weather friends will begin to peel away. Once that starts, the abandonment will become headlong: I’ve observed often enough in British politics how shamelessly fast such friends depart once the weather turns.
And it will turn. Our own Prime Minister may be unwise to seek the role of go-between with a White House incumbency that may soon be regarded as a moment of quite literal madness – and sooner than some think. I remain to be convinced that the world order has changed for ever.
Letters: The case for ‘raves in the nave’
Reality check
Sir: While I share Mr Gove’s diagnosis of lodestar-less Starmerism (‘Cruel Labour’, 5 April), I cannot share the accompanying pearl-clutching.
For decades, politicians and voters have engaged in a mutually reinforcing entitlement spiral that took it as given that the civil service and welfare bill could expand ad infinitum, that working for a living was optional, and that our geopolitical enemies didn’t really mean what they said. This fantastical worldview was predicated on an equally fantastical delusion that cheap energy, low inflation and low interest rates were locked in rather than temporary historical blips. You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
Lee Jenkins
Bolton, Lancashire
Trust issues
Sir: When I heard of the National Trust’s proposal to leave Clandon Park as a ruin I was relieved that another pastiche as at Uppark was ruled out (Arts, 5 April). Reconstruction of badly damaged buildings is, I suppose, a way to soak up the insurance payout, but it is fake. There is no getting away from it. In other situations the Prince-Bishop’s Palace in Wurzburg is similarly a beautifully realised fake. So are the remains at Knossos: I was surprised at how much of the place Minoan builders had left until I found out how much reconstruction had been done by Arthur Evans and his team.
Why can’t they just leave things as they are? And, in the case of the National Trust, look after the place better. One all-consuming fire might be accounted a misfortune; two looks like carelessness.
Nicholas Wightwick
Rossett, Wrexham
Rave reviews
Sir: I sympathise with the Revd Franklin’s stance on ‘spiritually hollow’ events being held in sacred spaces (‘Foolish naves’, 5 April). But as a former (and short-lived) chief operating officer of an English cathedral – which is another story – I am afraid that without the spiritually hollow events he despises there will eventually be no sacred spaces to cherish. Put simply, the economics of your average cathedral demand income-generating events to survive but, in my experience, they only proceed with the congregation’s permission. And what better way to introduce a whole new audience to these beautiful buildings? In my glass-clearing duties at one of our ‘raves in the nave’, I overheard countless middle-aged ravers declare their amazement at the beauty of the place and state that they would return. ‘Success!’ I cried. More footfall, and a dramatic reduction in the average age of our visitors.
Alex Siddell
Chelmsford
Gospel truth
Sir: In his manifesto for the next Archbishop of Canterbury (Diary, 5 April), Quentin Letts suggests that he or she should ‘urge most clergy to stop preaching’. He cites, as justification, a parish priest who warned his congregation they would not reach heaven unless they denounced the Balfour declaration. If that counts as preaching, I wholeheartedly agree it should stop – but let us be clear: it is not. Preaching, as the New Testament writers understand it, is the proclamation of the message of Christ – his life, death and resurrection – from the word of God. This kind of preaching has the power to change lives, fill churches and transform society. Martin Luther believed as much when he reflected on what effected his reforms to the abuses of the church in the 16th century: ‘I simply taught, preached and wrote God’s word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends… the word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.’ We need an Archbishop who will, first and foremost, teach, preach and write God’s word – and will inspire the clergy to do the same.
Richard Coombs
Rector of Cheltenham
Face value
Sir: I find it hard to imagine senior Anglican women with thick moustaches, though Giovanni Guareschi, the inspiration for Quentin Letts’s NUNC!, would surely have known of the definition of baffona, in Alfred Hoare’s Short Italian Dictionary (Cambridge, 1954): woman with not unpleasing moustache.
Rhidian Llewellyn
London SW14
Pull your punches
Sir: Roger Alton asserts that ‘boxing belongs in the Olympics’ (Sport, 29 March). At a time when Rugby Union’s authorities are making changes to the game intended to minimise head contact to avoid injuries which have devastated the brains of players such as Steve Thompson, the fact that boxing hasn’t come under closer scrutiny is surprising. That there exists a spectacle involving two powerful and highly trained people deliberately harming each other, in order to ultimately create a head injury so serious that the opponent becomes disabled through unconsciousness, is archaic and immoral. Muhammad Ali’s mind, once so sharp, was destroyed by the head impacts he sustained over his lifetime. Boxing certainly should not be in the Olympics.
Jacques Francis
Westcott, Surrey
Ringing the changes
Sir: Apropos Charles Moore’s lament for red telephone boxes (Notes, 29 March), he will be happy to know that here in Topsham, Devon, we have one which houses a small library, and another which has been taken over by our local museum. It contains a changing exhibition of items of local interest and, being beside the church, often features in wedding photographs.
Jenny Pearson
Topsham, Devon
Why it might be best if US stock markets go on falling
It gives me no pleasure to say I told you so. ‘If [Donald Trump] is prepared to cause mayhem in global trade as his first move, he’s even more dangerous than his detractors thought,’ I wrote in February. ‘British commentators of the “Why can’t we have visionary maverick musclemen like Trump?” persuasion should be careful what they wish for.’ And in November, ahead of the presidential election, I wrote that gold could have ‘more upside ahead’ while bitcoin holders would be wise to take profits – advice that looked wildly wrong in December but finally came right with gold at an all-time high and the cryptocurrency suffering its worst first quarter for a decade.
All of which (you’ll think, if you’ve taken refuge in Casablanca for the umpteenth time) ‘don’t amount to a hill of beans’ beside the $10 trillion wiped off global share values since Trump’s so-called Liberation Day. Let’s face it, all market predictions are ephemeral; new ones amid a strengthening tempest would be peculiarly pointless. But what’s perverse about the present imbroglio is that it might actually be better for US stock markets to go on falling, because the ruin of crony fortunes and voters’ pension plans may be the only thing that will persuade the President to reverse his catastrophic course.
Safe-haven gold
‘Sit tight unless you have urgent cash calls’ must be the only advice worth offering any investor today. But I’m grateful to a City reader for this nugget: on the 12 occasions since 1945 when the S&P500 US share index fell by 20 per cent from its peak, it delivered positive returns over the subsequent year in eight of those cases – and in all of them over five years, with an average return of just over 50 per cent. And my source adds that the political impetus behind this week’s market plunge makes it more susceptible to a quick rebound than a sell-off driven by pure economics.
But would you also be wise to add some safe-haven gold to your portfolio? It’s the classic store of value for those uncertain where else to park cash, with buyers currently ranging from Chinese retail punters to central banks, and it’s usually quick to bounce from wider market dips. What’s more, this column’s veteran investment guru Robin Andrews sees an opportunity to buy shares in gold and silver producing companies that have declined sharply along with other asset classes: ‘Hochschild and Fresnillo are outstanding longer-term opportunities – for the brave.’
Cold shower
This column comes from France, where President Emmanuel Macron has called for ‘collective solidarity’ in the form of a suspension of new investment by French companies in the US until the tariff standoff is ‘clarified’. His targets included CMA CGM, the shipping group, which has $20 billion worth of US expansion plans, and Schneider Electric, which is investing $700 million in energy projects over there. It may also have been aimed at Bernard Arnault, the LVMH luxury -goods tycoon, who recently declared in response to French corporate tax hikes that he felt ‘the wind of optimism’ in the US, but ‘when you come back to France, it’s a bit of a cold shower’.
Arnault’s attitude is an indication that Macron’s appeal to corporate patriotism is unlikely to land well: a Le Figaro editorial summed it up as ‘Punish yourselves to punish Trump’. Rational businesspeople every-where, accountable to shareholders, concerned for their workers, concerned for their own pensions, watch in despair as vain politicians turn their livelihoods to dust.
I must be mad
I’m here to build my own coalition of the willing around the idea of converting a redundant barn in my Dordogne village into a theatre and concert venue. A majority of those to whom I’ve shown sketches have responded: ‘What a wonderful idea, go for it!’ But the one person I know who has actually battled with French planning and licensing bureaucrats to complete a similar scheme said simply: ‘You must be mad.’
Maybe. But as world leaders (except our prudent or pusillanimous Prime Minister, that is) trade blows with Trump while he wrecks the trade in goods that has done so much for prosperity and peace, what can we citizens do but form ‘small platoons’ to promote benign co-operation on a local scale? That phrase belongs to Edmund Burke, writing, as it happens, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It originally referred to the need for aristocrats to resist revolutionary vandalism of traditional institutions, but it came to be applied to civil society in all its forms as a positive counterweight to overbearing government.
That’s not entirely why I conceived a pipe dream which another of my doubters compares to Fitzcarraldo’s opera house. But I’ve certainly found a distraction from the horrors of the greater world.
A cortege passes
Returning north via the drab railway town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, I have a couple of hours before my departure for Paris. But the station brasserie has closed down and the hotel opposite is shuttered, as are most of the shops towards the town centre. There’s only a Turkish barber, a tabac doing desultory trade in scratchcards and a funeral cortege. Dispirited by this vision of the near future, I pause to read the rest of Le Figaro’s rant about Trumpian protectionnisme suicidaire.
Then a door opens – Le Comptoir St Sernin, which serves a pleasant lunch ahead of a contemplative journey to Gare d’Austerlitz in time for a stroll at dusk along the banks of the Seine among thousands of young Parisians chattering, drinking and flirting without a care. Onwards a day later to Épernay, to join The Spectator Champagne tour at Pol Roger and Taittinger. As darkness descends, we must find comfort wherever we can.
Eco warriors are driving themselves to extinction
It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust. I remember, in the early months of 1995, sitting in our instructor’s front room as she passed around a plastic model of a female pelvis while she asked us: ‘So how do you think the baby gets out?’
Fast-forward three decades and there is a new way for middle-class would-be mothers to spend their evenings: attending sessions of a project entitled ‘Motherhood in a Climate Crisis’ put on by the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute. There is no better way to describe it than to quote the academics’ blurb. The project, they write, was designed to use ‘therapeutically informed participatory theatre techniques to collaboratively explore concerns around reproductive decision-making for women in an era of unfolding climate crisis’. There are photographs of women curled up on the floor, or standing arms outstretched as if in religious devotion.
A report of the project reveals that the sessions have led to many couples deciding not to have a child for the sake of the planet. ‘I have this deep grief and anger around not having a second child amid the climate crisis,’ declared one 37-year-old attendee, Rosanna, who added that she spent the sessions writing a letter entitled ‘To the second child I will never give birth to’. Ruby, 31, had made her mind up, saying: ‘I don’t want to bring new children into the world as it currently is. I wouldn’t feel OK making that choice.’
The sessions, which began in 2022, will not have helped Bristol’s collapsing birth rate. Ten years ago, the city was enjoying a mini baby boom. Now, it has one of the fastest-plunging fertility rates in the country. It doesn’t take too much to work out that if a population is going to sustain itself in the long term, women will have to bear an average of at least two children. In an advanced industrial society with a low rate of infant mortality, demographers tend to work on the assumption that a Total Fertility Rate (TFR, the average number of children born to a woman during her childbearing years) of around 2.1 is replacement level.
In the early 2010s, Bristol’s TFR was running at around the then national average, at 1.89. By 2023 it had plunged to 1.14. But Bristol isn’t quite the lowest. In Norwich it is 1.09, Oxford 1.07. In Camden, where the Royal Free Hospital announced the closure of its maternity unit for want of business, it is 1.0. In several districts the TFR has dropped below one – in other words the mother isn’t even replacing her place in the population, let alone her partner’s. In Brighton and Hove it is 0.98. Cambridge – where my children were born – comes bottom at 0.91.
There is one thing which links these places: they are hotbeds of green politics. True, Bristol, Brighton et al have high house prices and large numbers of professional women who may prioritise careers over family, but they are also the places where eco-zealotry reigns. People in these green ghettos are likely to be susceptible to the much-quoted figure among environmental absolutists (which can be traced to a paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change in 2009) that a woman who has a child will be responsible for a remarkably precise 9,441 tons of carbon emissions. That is 5.7 times the emissions she directly causes during her lifetime. The guilt, therefore, runs to subsequent generations.
For those in thrall to green dogma these calculations are existential. Some have argued that the figure should be amended to take account of cascading generations of carbon-emitting children and grandchildren. To this, in a lightbulb moment which will surely challenge Descartes in its significance, a PhD student at the LSE, Philippe van Basshuysen, has come up with a compromise: parents should be held accountable for their children’s carbon emissions only until the age of 18.
Whatever the risks to humanity from carbon emissions, it is certain that refusing to breed doesn’t help the human race survive. There are some on the extreme fringes of the green movement – such as the self-styled Voluntary Human Extinction Movement – who would welcome a complete collapse of births as a big gain for the planet. But they, and more moderate greens, who think couples should, say, limit themselves to a Maoist single child, are overlooking something: maybe their actions will merely reduce the reproduction rate of eco zealots. This could be nature’s revenge – Darwinism in action, in which people with loony ideas shrink their gene pool before they can do too much damage. Perhaps we should welcome collective guilt sessions for green activists, even make them compulsory. The fewer children to whom they can impart their way of thinking, the better for the rest of us?
What’s the biggest stock market crash ever?
Crash comparison
What’s the biggest stock market crash ever?
– There are different ways to measure a crash. The biggest percentage fall in the Dow Jones Index in a single day occurred on 19 October 1987 (or ‘Black Monday’) when the Dow fell by 22.6%.
– The biggest fall in percentage terms over a longer period was in the Nasdaq – covering tech shares – which fell by 80% between January 2000 and October 2002.
– The biggest fall in terms of the amount of money wiped off the US market – at least until this week – was in February/March 2020, when the S&P500 lost 34% of its value over the course of a month, including losing $3.3 trillion of value in two days.
– Perhaps the most painful crash is one where it takes a long time for the market to reach its previous peak. On this, the Wall Street crash of 1929 is unparalleled, with the market taking 25 years to recover. By contrast, the S&P500 took five years after its October 2007 peak to reach that value again. In 2020, it took nine months.
Utmost imports
Prior to Donald Trump’s announcement of tariffs, which countries had the lowest – and the highest average tariffs – on imports?
Lowest
Hong Kong, Macao 0%
US 3.4%
EU 4.9%
UK 5.1%
Montenegro 5.3%
Ukraine 5.8%
Highest
Bangladesh 155.1%
Nigeria 120.5%
Tanzania 120%
Zimbabwe 106.7%
Kuwait 98%
Kenya 93.8%
Other notable countries include China (10%) and India (50.8%).
Source: World Trade Organisation
Roundabout
The government relaxed its proposed ban on petrol hybrids. How the date for banning petrol and diesel cars has changed:
2017: Theresa May’s government announces ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2040.
Feb 2020: Boris Johnson brings date forward to 2035.
Nov 2020: Date brought forward again to 2030, with hybrids being allowed to be sold until 2035.
Sept 2023: Rishi Sunak pushes ban on pure petrol and diesel cars back to 2035.
June 2024: Labour manifesto proposes that ban be restored to 2030.
April 2025: Keir Starmer announces that hybrids are allowed to be sold until 2035.
Saviour complex: Jonathan Powell is still trying to change the world
In 2011, the Hampstead theatre put on an autobiographical play about a marriage strained by lies, betrayal and, as the exasperated wife says, the presence of ‘three of us’ in the relationship. The play was Loyalty by the journalist Sarah Helm, the third person was Tony Blair and the principal male character was a barely disguised Jonathan Powell, her husband and Blair’s chief of staff. The lies are about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and the betrayal occurs when the Powell character goes along with the war despite not ‘really’ believing in it, siding with Blair over his partner.
Two decades on, Powell is Keir Starmer’s national security adviser and may have more influence over foreign policy than anyone in government after the Prime Minister himself. He is one of the few senior officials responsible for the Iraq war who has managed a return to the corridors – and the sofas – of power. The historical record shows that he had doubts about Iraq’s WMDs, but thought Saddam Hussein had to go ‘because he was a ruthless dictator suppressing his people’. This was, as Blair named it, ‘liberal interventionism’, which called for the West to ‘get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’. Though Powell is more ‘grizzled’, as one old colleague puts it, he has the same instincts today. After Iraq, and Afghanistan, he still wants to save the world.
Powell came to Blair’s Downing Street through a series of chance encounters. He started off working at the BBC and Granada TV, but – by his own account – his parents thought journalism wasn’t a proper job and he applied to join the Foreign Office (it had a better pension). He became a political officer at the Washington embassy and chose to follow an outsider in the Democratic primaries, Bill Clinton, because they had been to the same Oxford college. When Blair visited the US in opposition, Powell was able to introduce him to Clinton. One of his contemporaries remembers: ‘Jonathan really fell in love with Tony.’ When Blair’s first choice to be his chief of staff turned him down, he asked Powell.
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles was chief of staff to the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, and spoke to Powell at No. 10 ‘almost every day’. He tells me Powell is ‘pragmatic, sensible… tough, fair minded, good with ministers – a real operator’. He also has a ‘sense of the absurd’ – no doubt a requirement for working in Whitehall – and ‘can be quite sardonic’ in private. Sir Sherard calls him ‘an inspired appointment’, especially given the current geopolitics, because he knows America. ‘Despite Iraq, he’s a very, very good man. We’re lucky to have him. He’s a national asset, and far better than having some jobsworth Foreign Office official.’
Sir Sherard wrote an introduction to Helm’s play, calling the invasion ‘morally wrong, politically mad, and almost certainly illegal’. Many officials agreed ‘deep down’ but only two ‘had the guts’ to resign. Some 179 British servicemen and women were killed, along with more than 4,000 Americans and some 200,000 Iraqi civilians, but Powell has never repudiated the war. Instead, he has spoken, lightly, of being a ‘redeeming sinner’. There has been no British equivalent of Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during Vietnam, who spent his last years publicly regretting having been ‘wrong, terribly wrong’. One former senior official who served alongside Powell told me he was now sometimes critical of Blair in private but would always be loyal in public. Powell knew that to do otherwise would mean ‘effectively saying to people that their kids died in vain’.
Powell’s great achievement at Blair’s No. 10 was bringing peace to Northern Ireland. He conducted a secret negotiation with the IRA to get them to sign what became the Good Friday Agreement. An RUC officer at the time told me that to keep the talks going, Powell even tipped off the IRA that one of their arms shipments from eastern Europe was being watched. This supposedly allowed the IRA to walk away without losing money or personnel. I’m told Powell has no recollection of anything like this and didn’t get operational intelligence as Downing Street chief of staff. Powell’s allies say there were many such ‘rumours floating around the system’. And anyway, they argue, this would have been a small price to pay for peace.
He has never repudiated the Iraq war. Instead, he has spoken, lightly, of being a ‘redeeming sinner’
Some accuse Powell of romanticising the Republican gunmen. A former intelligence officer said he’d spoken to Powell many times about his clandestine talks and thought he was ‘too impressed by the other side… There’s definitely a slight element, and I don’t want to exaggerate this, of the sexiness of dealing with killers’. Ulster’s ‘securocrats’ were horrified to get reports of Powell jumping into a taxi at Belfast airport with a notorious IRA bomber.
Powell has written that Blair authorised him to go alone to meet the Republicans on their own turf to build trust. Powell’s father, an air vice-marshal, had been shot at by the IRA; his brother, Charles – Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted adviser – had been forced to hide under the cabinet table during an IRA mortar attack. When Powell met the Sinn Fein leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, for the first time, he refused to shake their hands. He would eventually call that ‘a petty gesture I now regret’.
Powell later wrote a book called Talking to Terrorists and this is exactly what he did after leaving office along with Blair. He founded a charity, Intermediate, that worked secret back channels to try to bring an end to conflicts around the globe. In 2015, he proposed talks with Isis. This was not long after Jihadi John had severed the heads of British and American hostages on video. Powell wrote in the Atlantic that ‘once the red mist of rage’ had lifted it was important ‘to think coolly and calmly’ about a long-term strategy for ending the violence. He thought you could split the ‘more moderate’ Isis leaders from those trying to usher in the apocalypse. One source told me Powell had gone on to meet Isis, though he has never confirmed this. He did, apparently, meet Mohamed al Jolani, once al-Qaeda’s leader in Syria, now the country’s President. This is proof, Powell would say, that you should talk to anyone.
Powell’s years of negotiating are a guide to what he will do now as national security adviser. Just after last year’s general election, he said conflict resolution should be a priority for the new Labour government: ‘We can make it our sort-of USP.’ He told a conference at Chatham House that the ‘one opportunity’ provided by Brexit was to make it easier to bring armed groups to Britain for talks. Even when he was at No. 10, he said, he had never been able to get visas for the Hamas leadership, because of EU and other rules. Mediation could largely be done by NGOs or individuals, ‘government steering, not rowing’. Britain could help bring peace to the Sahel, Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar and many other places. ‘I find myself apologising for my ancestors everywhere from Myanmar to the Middle East to Nigeria. So, I think we always have a duty to do something.’
This is the new version of liberal interventionism: make the world a better place, but not at the point of a gun. The new two-word doctrine for British foreign policy is ‘progressive realism’, a term coined by the Foreign Secretary David Lammy: idealism plus realpolitik. Britain will now operate in the world as it is, not the world as we would like it to be. The Labour government will hold fast to our values, while also working in the national interest. It will be a good trick if Powell can pull it off: cakeism in foreign policy.
Powell’s first test was to finalise a deal for the Chagos Islands. The aim was to expunge Britain’s colonial guilt for having kicked the Chagos islanders out in the 1960s, sending many to live near Gatwick airport. The solution is not to give the islands back to them, but to give the territory to Mauritius, along with £9 billion. This is also the deal that will, apparently, satisfy the lawyers. The US had a veto, because of their runway and listening post at Diego Garcia. The deal, it seems, has squeaked past Donald Trump.
He said the ‘one opportunity’ provided by Brexit was to make it easier to bring armed groups to Britain for talks
Keeping President Trump happy was a major reason Powell got the Ukrainians to agree to a ceasefire – his triumph in his new role at No. 10. He did it almost alone, taking a very small team with him to Kyiv and scripting the Ukrainian reply to the US, according to one source. Britain will send peacekeepers in the unlikely event that this leads to a deal with Russia to end hostilities. It is an echo of Iraq: a British government sending troops into danger to maintain the transatlantic alliance. (In 2001, it was Powell who told the British ambassador in Washington to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’.) Tom Fletcher, a former No. 10 official now with the UN, told me that Powell was perfectly suited to the current ‘transactional’ reality in world affairs: ‘You need somebody who knows how to get deals done.’
Others are not so sure. The former intelligence officer critical of Powell’s attitude to the IRA tells a story about Field Marshal Lord Inge being invited to No. 10 to be asked about invading Iraq. Inge told the Blairites ‘You only go to war as a very last resort’, a message they did not want to hear. Inge remained silent about the meeting for many years but eventually the old soldier spoke about his dismay that – in his words – ‘they were all randy for a war’. No one at No. 10 now seems to have the same eagerness, but the former spy said Powell shared with Starmer ‘an unshakable conviction in his own moral superiority’ that was dangerous in its own way.
Powell wrote a memoir about his time in Blair’s No. 10, a guide to wielding power called The New Machiavelli. He described himself back then as more ‘Candide’ than calculating, ‘unable to stop asking gauche questions and blurting out the truth, however inconvenient’. That was always disingenuous, and no one now would accuse Powell of being naive. The question with Powell back at No. 10, and as influential as ever, is how much his idealism will be tempered by realpolitik, how much Candide will be restrained by Machiavelli.
Cicero’s case against astrology
The young in Canada are said to be taking up astrology. But why? Do they think Mark Carney is a star? The ancients saw astrology as a form of divination, which Cicero debunked in 44 bc.
The debunking is in the form of a debate with his brother Quintus, who defines divinatio as ‘the foreknowledge and foretelling of events that happen by chance’.
First, Cicero points out that no one summons up the diviner when there are experts to hand. On questions of nature men go to a scientist, on statecraft to a politician, on war to a general and so on. The diviner has no role anywhere.
Then consider the logic. If something happens ‘by chance’, it cannot, by definition, be predicted: otherwise it could not be said to have happened ‘by chance’. Could even a god predict what happens ‘by chance’? If not, how could a diviner?
Cicero then proposes a different tack: that everything is controlled by fate. In that case, divinatio is not a lot of use because it cannot, by definition, prevent fate taking its course. If something is fated, it will happen, come what may. No amount of divination would help you avoid it. And how awful it would be to know everything that will happen to you, Cicero goes on, quoting the example of the recently assassinated Julius Caesar. If, on the other hand, fate could be turned aside, then nothing is certain. In which case divinatio is pointless too, since it is supposed to deal with what is certain.
Cicero then mocks horoscopes, oracles, dreams, watching birds and other such nonsense and asserts the importance of true religion, which he associates with ‘the knowledge of nature’, contrasting it with ‘superstition, which must be torn up by the roots: for it is at your heels all the time, pursuing you at every twist and turn and means you can never be at peace’. Perhaps it is Canadian youth’s final, desperate effort to get a handle on Donald Trump’s thought processes. Any other ideas? Perhaps telling him ‘tariff’ is an Arabic word might make a difference.
In defence of benzos
Tom Lee has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In the latest series of The White Lotus – a moral fable about the narcissism and toxicity of the privileged class – Parker Posey plays Victoria Ratliff, a Southern matriarch routinely spaced out on the tranquilliser lorazepam. Her daughter Piper asks why she needs it. ‘Certain social situations make me anxious,’ she drawls. When her husband Timothy (Jason Isaacs) gets word that his crooked financial empire is about to crumble, he starts necking Victoria’s pills in secret before swiping the bottle.
My ears always prick up at the mention of lorazepam because, like Timothy Ratliff, I have taken it illicitly to manage anxiety. However, I was not stealing it from my wife, but receiving it in the post from my mother.
This year is the 70th anniversary of the accidental discovery of Librium, the first of the benzodiazepine family of tranquillisers. Librium – quickly followed by close relations Valium, lorazepam and others – revolutionised the pharmacological treatment of anxiety and, between the late 1960s and early 1980s, Valium was the most widely prescribed pill in the western world: the defining drug of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr’s so-called ‘age of anxiety’.
Benzos, and their predecessors, always had a bad image – not the countercultural glamour of weed, acid, cocaine and heroin, but the go-to drug for the desperate suburban housewife in the Stones’ ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, or the ruined starlets of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls and Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays.
Benzos’ image problem was soon accompanied by a broader panic about the medical dangers of the drugs. This went mainstream in the UK in 1984 via an item on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life: an outpouring of stories from viewers who described a host of life-wrecking symptoms they believed had been caused by the drugs or by trying to come off them. Prescribing guidelines were tightened, with warnings that treatment should be limited to short periods, and long-term users advised to come off them gradually. A class action lawsuit involving 17,000 people followed in 1988 – the then largest ever in the UK.
In 2007, with no previous experience of mental illness, I suffered a sudden descent into acute anxiety which left me unable to work, parent or even leave the house. The Prozac-type antidepressants I was given had no effect and, seeing how much I was suffering, my mother suggested I take one of her lorazepams – the only psychiatric drug she felt she had ever benefited from over a long period of mental ill-health. The effect was miraculous: more or less immediate relief from my anxiety and the chance to function again. My GP, and everything I read online, warned in drastic terms about the risks of addiction and withdrawal, but my mother continued sending me a small strip of pills once a month and I used these to stay afloat and start putting my life back together.
As The White Lotus goes on, Timothy, increasingly bombed on lorazepam, staggers zombie-like around the luxury hotel. At one point he inadvertently exposes himself to his children by allowing his dressing gown to flop open; at other times he fantasises about killing them and himself. Meanwhile, Victoria frets over her missing pills and Piper quips: ‘You don’t have enough lorazepam to get through one week at a wellness spa?’
The effect was miraculous: more or less immediate relief from my anxiety and the chance to function again
This representation of lorazepam – and benzos in general – has barely changed since the 1960s: the lifestyle drug of the moneyed class, numbing themselves to the hollowness of their affluence and risking an overdose in the process. ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ never went away.
What’s obscured by this – and by the continuing clinical and social panic around the drugs – is the profound benefit they can have for people like me who have suffered from acute anxiety. Prescribing guidelines in the US, where the patient is more like a customer to be accommodated, are far looser than in the UK, and Victoria Ratliff’s easy access to lorazepam is plausible. In the UK, it’s a different story. My GP refused to prescribe it to me and warned in apocalyptic terms about its risks. GPs vary – my mother’s is a case in point – but my own experience appears close to the norm: an extreme reluctance to prescribe even a short course, and a deep concern about its addictiveness. One GP I spoke to said he would only consider a benzodiazepines prescription at the point where a patient suffering a mental health crisis was waiting to be hospitalised.
Many academics and clinicians believe the reputation of benzodiazepines is in need of reappraisal. Clare Stanford, Professor Emerita of neuropharmacology at University College London, tells me: ‘The image of [them] as a terribly dangerous drug is completely inaccurate.’ Stanford acted as an expert in the 1980s class action suit and concluded that at the recommended dose and duration, there was no evidence the drugs would lead to addiction. She noted that the class action collapsed before reaching trial.
The authors of a 2020 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry entitled ‘Benzodiazepines: it’s time to return to the evidence’ make the same case, arguing that when appropriately prescribed for anxiety, they are ‘not widely abused drugs’; nor are they ‘gateway drugs leading to other abuse’.
Andrew Solomon, author of the landmark 2001 book The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression, goes further, maintaining that the fear of addiction has led to ‘gross underuse of the benzos’. ‘I have met people,’ he writes, ‘who were tortured with psychic anguish that could have been alleviated had their physicians been more permissive in the prescription of the benzos.’
Of course, there is room for abuse, and the street use of illegally manufactured copies is an increasing problem, but the prohibition on the careful prescribing of these drugs appears to help no one. It might not make great drama – and The White Lotus is a drama, after all, not a documentary – but this is something closer to the truth.
Leave our Lords alone
Within a few months, the constitution that has served this country so well for hundreds of years will yet again be vandalised by a Labour government drunk with power. Tony Blair did what damage he could, what with devolution, the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court. But Sir Keir Starmer wants to go further. New Labour’s ‘reform’ of the House of Lords, limiting the number of voting hereditaries to just 92, wasn’t spiteful enough, apparently. A bill is being railroaded through that will reduce that rump to zero.
The arguments against this wanton act of destruction should be familiar to most readers. For one thing, the hereds had a better attendance record than life peers in the last parliament – 49 per cent vs 47. For another, many I’ve met forego their daily allowance, so represent better value for money. And their contributions to debates are often far superior to those of commoners like me, particularly in areas where they possess real expertise, such as agriculture and conservation.
But none of these arguments cuts any mustard with the Labour benches, as I’ve witnessed in the past few months. One amendment after another is rejected with stony-faced indifference. We all know the real reason Labour is doing it. Not because the hereditary principle is ‘indefensible’, as it said in the party’s manifesto, but because only four of the remaining hereditaries take the Labour whip, with the majority being Conservative. Once they’ve been consigned to the dustbin of history, Starmer can replace the hereds with Labour apparatchiks and turn the Lords into an echo chamber of the Commons. It’s the worst kind of gerrymandering – permanently wrecking our constitution for partisan political gain.
Insofar as anyone on the Labour side has made an effort to criticise the status quo on philosophical grounds, their arguments were neatly summed up by my colleague Andrew Roberts: ‘It works in practice, but not in theory.’ Some variation of that is nearly always the reason for ‘modernising’ an institution that works well and, taken to its logical conclusion, would be an argument for throwing out the entire constitution. As one Conservative peer pointed out during the debate over the Hereditary Peerages Bill, if you’re opposed to inherited privilege on principle, why stop at the hereditaries? Shouldn’t you scrap the monarchy as well?
One philosophical argument I’m tempted to make in the chamber is that life peers have also inherited their status, so they too should go. After all, they’re a pretty bright lot and IQ is about 50 per cent heritable. Yes, they’re also grafters, mostly, but as the American philosopher John Rawls pointed out, the capacity for hard work is passed down from parents to children via DNA. That’s especially obvious if you look around the chamber, where there are at least 11 ‘nepo peers’ – life peers whose parents were also life peers, like me. In the case of Lord Pitkeathley of Camden Town, his mother, Baroness Pitkeathley, sits beside him on the Labour benches.
Labour is permanently wrecking our constitution for partisan political gain
For Rawls, this was an argument for redistributive taxation – because we’ve done nothing to deserve our natural gifts, we aren’t entitled to keep the income that flows from them. But it’s an equally good argument for life peers to be denuded of their voting rights alongside the hereditaries. Indeed, I’d go further. For the hereds, it’s perfectly obvious they’ve done nothing to deserve their voting rights, which is why they bend over backwards to prove themselves worthy. As Goethe said: ‘What you inherit from your father must first be earned before it’s yours.’ The life peers, by contrast, think of themselves as national treasures who merit their elevated status, which is why they put in fewer hours. In other words, both groups are equally undeserving, but because the hereds are more self-aware and do more to compensate they should be retained and the life peers thrown out.
I don’t suppose that argument will land either. For me, the best reason to keep the hereds is that they’re a living connection to Britain’s past, as well as to the history of the second chamber. Their presence as legislators may not be ‘rational’, but everything about our constitution is gloriously irrational. Far from imposing order and sanity on our system of government, the pinch-browed modernisers are just imposing their own prejudices and in the process removing those bits that work best. The House of Lords doesn’t work in theory – Sir Keir and his hatchet men are right about that. But it works in practice and they should bloody well leave it alone.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Catriona Olding
The Battle for Britain | 12 April 2025
The Premier League is rubbish
Of the 73,738 benighted souls who pitched up at Old Trafford on Sunday for the Manchester derby – presumably even some, mostly City supporters, from Manchester – how many reckoned they’d got value for money? This was a dire game, devoid of energy, skill and flair. The most exciting thing was probably a low-key sit-in at the end to protest at United’s seat pricing. Even the term ‘derby’ was rubbish: as far as I could see, only one player of note – City’s Phil Foden – was Mancunian. Which is still more than the number of regular starting players from Merseyside in the recent Merseyside ‘derby’.
The Premier League likes to boast that it’s the greatest show on Earth. Well if so, it had better make sure there is actually something to put on show. Brentford’s 0-0 draw with Chelsea was, by all accounts, a total bore and scarcely worthy of a place at that great cathedral of sport, the Gtech Community Stadium.
Part of the problem this season is that the closing weeks of the league have been reduced to a tedious Liver-pool victory parade that diminished Fulham’s doughty win last weekend to a mildly diverting curiosity.
Meanwhile, injuries to entertainers such as City’s Erling Haaland and Kevin De Bruyne, not to mention a resurgent FA Cup and a mouth-watering Champions League, have made what has been going on behind the runaway leaders in the title ‘race’ only mildly more interesting than dogs fighting over a rubber bone.
Forest have been fabulous of course, as have Bournemouth (sometimes) and even Brighton and Fulham. But this still feels like a drab Premier League, partly because Chelsea, Spurs and Manchester United have been largely dreadful. This, in turn, means the table feels slightly bonkers: big clubs struggling and small clubs not knowing they’re small. Anyone can beat anyone.
City, long English football’s glittering centrepiece, have been a shadow of themselves. I would have said it was always worth watching any City game for the sheer pleasure of seeing De Bruyne spraying meticulous 60-yard passes with jaw-dropping precision. Now he’s going too. Sad, though maybe not before time, judging by his flat showing against United.
And it’s not just the top of the table that’s sorted. The two teams going down with the already doomed Southampton will be – almost certainly – Ipswich and Leicester. They are the three clubs who were promoted from the Championship last season. And repeat ad nauseam: top three and bottom three just swap places. So the Prem becomes essentially a 17-team league. And without jeopardy, sport is pretty meaningless.
If you want to put on a show, it’s quite difficult if the game stops every ten minutes for a lengthy deliberation
At the same time, over-intricate playing from the back has become predictable and frankly boring, while technology has killed spontaneous celebration. If you do want to put on a show, it’s quite difficult if the game stops every ten minutes for a lengthy, painful deliberation about whether Marc Cucurella’s hair played Bryan Mbeumo onside. A great football match should be 90 minutes of nonstop action. These days, thanks to the pedantic practice of ‘let’s look for something illegal that happened two minutes before the goal’, a game can run to nearly two hours of stop-start frustration. Will semi-automated offsides, due this weekend, help? I very much hope so.
The police are getting younger, part 94: Luke Littler became the world darts champion at 17; then Kiwi Sam Ruthe became the youngest person to run a four-minute mile last month at the age of 15; now a 14-year-old from Poland, Michal Szubarczyk, could become the youngest to qualify for the World Snooker Championship. What next? A nannies’ pen at the Crucible?
Dear Mary: Should weddings be ‘no ring, no bring’?
Q. An old friend who is extremely generous and loyal has the most infuriating habit. Despite being efficient in other ways, she doesn’t seem to have a functioning address book or contacts on her iPhone. She recently had a huge book launch and for weeks ahead was emailing me repeatedly for emails or mobile numbers. I responded patiently, sometimes even giving the same details three times. Recently I wondered if she actually does have the details but it was simpler to get me to look up things up. I want to put an end to it without being rude. What should I do?
– E.S., London W11
A. Next time you could convey the nuisance impact of such serial badgering by gushing: ‘What fun! Why don’t you get all the names you need details for together and send them to me as an omnibus request? Then I can get someone in to help me look them up all in one go.’
Q. We have a house in Spain, and last year a couple of friends (both single) asked to stay for a few days as they were travelling in the area. When they left we were looking forward to a couple of days on our own, but then they rang from the airport to say that, due to a technical hitch, there would be no flights for three days and they were coming back as all the hotels were booked up. We had to remake the beds and go and buy more food. It slightly ruined the end of a blissful summer. What could we have done, Mary?
– Name and address withheld
A. You would have had no option other than to use the Bible-approved response of welcoming them back. However you might have turned the intrusion to your advantage by confessing you had set aside the days to tackle boring admin. Since you would be distracted by their marvellous company, could they bear to help? Then you could have conjured up some chores.
Q. Weddings are so expensive, especially as they seem to go on for eight hours with a sit-down dinner and dancing. What is the etiquette about asking ‘other halves’? There is sometimes a ‘no ring, no bring’ policy but, if guests then go on to get married, it’s a shame that they weren’t included in the celebrations.
– A.E., Pewsey, Wiltshire
A. It is perfectly acceptable to ask other halves to join the wedding party after dinner. The dance floor is already paid for and the only expense is their drinks. Most people who don’t know a marrying couple that well are relieved not to have to hire kit and sit through the formalities. Meanwhile, full guests are reinvigorated by the arrival of ‘fresh blood’ later in the evening.
Smart even for Chelsea: Josephine Bouchon reviewed
Josephine is a Lyonnaise bistro on the Fulham Road from Claude Bosi. It is named for Bosi’s grandmother and is that rare, magical thing: a perfect restaurant. Bosi runs Bibendum (two Michelin stars, and in Michelin House) and Brooklands at the top of the appalling Peninsula hotel (two Michelin stars). He opens a second Josephine this month in Marylebone, which needs it since the Chiltern Firehouse, always a restaurant that felt like Icarus with a kitchen, burnt down to rubble. I haven’t eaten in Brooklands – I wish the Peninsula were an island, so that it could float to Victoria and then away, being an oligarchic monstrosity. But my instinct is: this is the good stuff.
When you feel love in a restaurant, you are in the right place, even in Chelsea
The exterior is painted navy blue: it has been washed by a maniac. It is smart even for Chelsea, which is always absurd – it’s the awful closeness to Fulham that corrupts it. I am 40 minutes early and arrive during a rainstorm, and I know I am in a perfect restaurant within seconds, as you do, because the diner’s instincts for security are the same as a child’s. I am settled immediately with the prelude: real French bread, (unsalted) butter, lumps of deep-fried pig fat (grattons Lyonnais) in a terra-cotta bowl, which taste better than they sound, being pork scratchings.
The interior is as perfectly wrought as a stage, which it is. There is a ruby red curtain at the entrance to repel the street, dark wood walls, a pale mosaic floor, fine lighting, posters for the long-dead of Lyon. I think Bosi loved his grandmother very much, and when you feel love in a restaurant you are in the right place, even in Chelsea. This is an idealised bistro, but all great chefs are dreamers.
Still, nothing is perfect. By nothing I mean common people. The tables are tightly packed and to get up for the loo I have to push ours out. As I try to push it back, the woman at the next table – dining with a recently separated man (a diarist’s instincts cannot die) – moves into my spot and starts wiping her coat. I cannot push the table back so I just stand and stare at her, a portrait of invisibility. As the manager catches my eye in sympathy – all managers of perfect restaurants have variations on Sauron’s eye – the recently separated man turns to me and hands me his empty wine glass. When he learns I am not a waiter, he apologises and forgives himself instantly, because he is a handsome man and forgiveness has never been denied him. Personally I think coat-wiping woman is making a mistake, but you can’t save everyone. And this is why I never come to Chelsea.
Still, you should come to Chelsea for Josephine, because the staff are kind – the teenage waiter laughed when he saw me gawping because he was eating Birds Eye fish fingers and chips for his lunch – and the food is wondrous. My companion says Josephine thrives here because it is near the Royal Marsden Hospital, and I think he is right.
We eat soupe à l’oignon, which I can never get enough of; ris de veau aux morilles; a gratin dauphinois so good I look at its picture afterwards, like a dog who licks a smell; choux à la crème as big as a tennis ball; baba au vieux rhum, which delights my companion because it reminds him of the Disco Age without the heartbreak; plateau de fromage from a board delivered to the table, from which you help yourself; too many scratchings and too much French bread. We stagger out at teatime. We would have stayed longer.
‘Trillions’ doesn’t add up
‘Oh no, darling’ said my husband, stirring from torpor in his armchair, ‘only about seven ounces of you is bacteria – about the same amount as those little bottles of milk we had at school.’ I had been talking about billions, trillions and quadrillions and had suggested that our bodies’ cells were outnumbered ten to one by bacteria. But since 2016, apparently, the reliable estimate is of 30 trillion human cells with 38 trillion bacteria wandering about inside us.
The language of those large numbers remains ambiguous. In 1974 Harold Wilson, the prime minister, refused a request by a Tory MP for ministers to use billion only in its British meaning of ‘one million million’. ‘No,’ Wilson said. ‘The word billion is now used internationally to mean 1,000 million and it would be confusing if British ministers were to use it in any other sense.’ That has stuck. Rachel Reeves’s headroom may remain £9.9 billion, but that will be 9,900 million, not a thousand times more. The current sense, however, removes the logic of the names billion and trillion. In the first edition of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690), a table gives: ‘Sextilions. Quintilions. Quatrilions. Trilions. Bilions’. Never mind the spelling, the million squared was a billion, as indicated by the prefix bi-; the million to the power of three was the trillion, indicated by the prefix tri-, and so on. Today we must ignore the prefixes and remember that the American economy at $29 trillion is only $29,000,000,000,000.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, the NHS’s national medical director, said recently: ‘For a while there have been warnings of a “tripledemic” of Covid, flu and RSV this winter, but with rising cases of norovirus this could fast become a “quad-demic”.’ He knows a pandemic is so called for affecting all (pan) the people (demos). If one wanted a prefix meaning ‘three’ or ‘four’, you would reach for the Greek tri– and tetra-. Or if you called it hexademic, it would be a fever that affected Six Nations, like rugby.
Who’d be a bishop today?
In his recent interview with our American edition, The Spectator World, Donald Trump is reported to be faced by a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he sits at his Oval Office desk. ‘A lot of people say, why do you have FDR?’ Trump says. His answer is: ‘Well, he was a serious president, whether you agree with him or not.’ He does not state what he particularly likes about FDR, though one might guess that his capacity to be elected president four times is an attraction. Surprisingly, perhaps, FDR is not anathema to all Republicans. He even appeals to their isolationist strand, because of Yalta. At that fateful conference, it was Roosevelt who gave Stalin what he wanted, despite Churchill’s protests, thus sealing the fate of Poland and much of eastern Europe. After the war, Republicans such as Dewey, Arthur Vandenberg and Eisenhower managed to face down the isolationist strand, but it never quite went away. In the late 20th century, it was kept alive by Pat Buchanan (still with us) and has gained new pro-Russian life in the Putin era thanks to figures like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and, more witlessly, Steve Witkoff. Some go so far as to blame Churchill, not Hitler, for his ‘craven, ugly’ and ‘Zionist’ second world war. Carlson has encouraged this. Is Trump’s heart (if he has such an organ) in that camp? The peace of Europe may turn on the answer.
A Times leader on Monday was sub-headed: ‘Europe must accept that the age of protection is coming to an end.’ These words illustrate the double meaning of the word ‘protection’. In another sense, America is entering the age of protection with what can accurately be described as a vengeance.
As Holy Week approaches, spare a thought for John Perumbalath. He was Bishop of Liverpool for less than two years, but then in January was forced to resign because of two accusations, one of sexual assault and one of sexual harassment made against him on television. I emphasise the ‘on television’ bit (Channel 4 News), because both accusations had been made earlier and investigated by the National Safeguarding Team of the Church of England. The Church’s official statement on the matter said that ‘no safeguarding concerns were established’. Once Channel 4 repeated the allegations without any new evidence, however, the church authorities fell all of a heap with terror. No bishop publicly supported their colleague, though nothing was proved against him. With that lack of support, Bishop Perumbalath decided, though protesting his innocence, that he must go.
It has been a sad pilgrimage for this gentle and friendly man. Born in Kerala, the most Christian part of India, and trained for the priesthood in Calcutta, John Perumbalath came to England more than 20 years ago. One might call him a reverse missionary to the English heathen. He cannot have realised how brutal and primitive are our native church’s forms of justice, where an accusation of sexual abuse is taken as proof of guilt. Nor could he have imagined that he would be publicly denounced by a fellow bishop. The Rt Revd Beverley Mason, the suffragan Bishop of Warrington, claimed he had harassed her while in a room full of clergy. On any normal evidential basis, her uncorroborated accusation seems highly interpretive and utterly unprovable. Could it all be based on a cultural misunderstanding? Did the Right Rev Bev, accustomed to the chilly reserve of her fellow white English bishops, misread the warmer greetings of a smiling Indian? It must have been disappointing for her not to have been made Bishop of Liverpool herself (she held that role in an acting capacity at the time), but that is no reason for the high priests of the C of E to shun the man the process had preferred to her. In the current culture, you would have to be unusually brave or foolish to become a male bishop in England. Mere accusation can condemn, and no colleague dares call for due process. Given that the founder of the Church was killed on Good Friday because of false accusation, I do find this development shocking.
A similar wrong is done by the newish custom that anyone arrested in connection with a sexual crime is automatically suspended from his or her position. The Labour MP Dan Norris was also, until the latest development, the chairman of the League Against Cruel Sports, but one must stoutly resist the natural suspicion that this makes him a rapist or child abductor. Yet Labour has suspended him as if arrest equals guilt.
This column’s hero, Viscount (soon to be abolished) Stansgate, raised an important question in the House of Lords last week. It seems that funerals are happening longer and longer after death. I had noticed this trend and assumed it related to the efficiency of refrigeration these days, but Lord Stansgate’s question fastened on something else. After Dr Harold Shipman murdered his patients and then certified their deaths as being from natural causes, there was a ‘something must be done’ feeling. People called medical examiners were created by statute, as was the Office of the National Medical Examiner. The consequence is delay as the necessary information is passed from certifying doctor to medical examiner to the bereaved. Something else emerged from Lord Stansgate’s question. It seems that ‘faith groups’ – Jews and Muslims – are fast-tracked because of their religious preference for immediate burial, circumventing bureaucratic impediments. In itself, it is good that they should be dealt with expeditiously, but the authorities should not use it as an excuse to dawdle over the certification of dead Christians, atheists and agnostics. If these delays continue, it would be logical to convert to Islam on one’s death bed (Jewish conversion, I believe, has no such emergency provisions) and thus avoid the funeral traffic jam.
Would you steal from a restaurant?
‘You wouldn’t steal a car…’ began the early noughties anti-piracy video. ‘You wouldn’t steal a television… You wouldn’t steal a handbag.’ No, but it seems from reports from restaurants, you might slip some silverware into a handbag if you’re out for dinner.
In February, Gordon Ramsay revealed that nearly 500 cat figurines had been stolen in one week from his latest restaurant, Lucky Cat. The maneki-neko cat models – said to bring good luck – cost £4.50 each, which makes that a loss of more than £2,000 for the restaurant in just seven days.
What is it about dining out that means we think pocketing property is acceptable? People who would never dream of running out on a bill or palming something from a shop seem to have no compunction when it comes to the liminal space of restaurants.
Restaurant theft is not a new phenomenon. Quaglino’s, the fashionable Conran restaurant in St James, marked the tenth anniversary of its opening by offering free champagne to any patron who returned one of the 25,000 ‘Q’-shaped ashtrays which had been stolen during the restaurant’s first decade. Bibendum, another Conran restaurant, was once said to lose 15 of its Michelin-man butter dishes every week.
Fred Smith, head of beef (yes, really) at the steak restaurant Flat Iron, tells me that since its first restaurant opened more than a decade ago, 20,000 of the distinctive miniature cleavers it uses in place of steak knives have been ‘accidentally removed’ by diners. It’s not just the tableware, either; anything not nailed down is seemingly up for grabs, which explains why everything from hand soap to picture frames are now screwed to the wall. In 2012, Jamie Oliver revealed he had been forced to weld on all the flush handles of the Thomas Crapper lavatories at his Jamie’s Italian restaurants because patrons kept unscrewing them and taking them.
It’s not just the tableware, either; anything not nailed down is seemingly up for grabs
According to research conducted by Nisbets, the catering equipment supplier, 17 million Britons say they have stolen an item from a pub or restaurant, while three million claim that every item of crockery, cutlery, glassware and table linen they own is stolen. This seems pretty farfetched, but when I ask my network if anyone has a stealing sin to confess, I am inundated. I am shocked by the number of people who tell me they’ve pocketed a Brasserie Zédel napkin. (Zédel now sells them online at two for £15, diplomatically stating: ‘If you’ve ever ended up with one in your bag or your house “by accident”, you may be pleased to know that we are now selling the Brasserie Zédel napkins.’) Many who confess their crimes say that their theft was to mark a significant occasion, with the item seen as more of a souvenir than a trophy. Others struggle to justify their kleptomania; responses range from the contrite to the brazen.
Is there anything that can be done to stop the thieving? James Ramsden, co-founder of the now-closed east London restaurant Pidgin, remembers chasing a punter down the street after spotting them nab one of the silver pigeon claws that the restaurant used to present the bills. And the supper–club pioneer Kerstin Rodgers tells me of watching a diner put a limited–edition napkin into her bag during an Olympics-themed pop-up, and of sneaking under the diner’s chair to retrieve it. But it’s a tricky one in hospitality, where a confrontation is likely to turn sour, and where the cost per item is relatively low, even if those costs start to mount.
Some places make a virtue out of the swiping: Wahaca, the Mexican street-food restaurant, held ‘spoon amnesties’ whereby its brightly coloured spoons could be swapped for tacos, while The Ivy restaurants have ‘stolen from The Ivy’ printed on the bottom of their chopstick holders. Fred Smith admits that the stolen Flat Iron cleavers probably get people talking about the restaurant if someone spies one on a friend’s cheeseboard at a dinner party. To an extent, it almost works as passive marketing for the bigger restaurants, but smaller businesses are forced to give in. Ramsden explains that the demise of the Pidgin claws was brought about by light-fingered diners: ‘At £20 a claw, it wasn’t worth it, so after a couple of years we stopped having them made.’
When Quaglino’s started flogging its ashtrays as merchandise, the thieving miraculously stopped. There are two schools of thought as to why this might be: the more moral one is that once a concrete price was put on the ashtrays, patrons struggled to justify the pocketing as anything other than theft. The other answer is that, where previously you could only boast one of the ashtrays if you’d dined at the restaurant, once they went on sale, anyone could have one. The cachet was gone. We may be a nation of shoplifters, but we are also a nation of snobs.
Olivia discusses rising restaurant thefts on the latest Edition podcast alongside an anonymous caller who admits to pinching from some cafes…
How Starmer plans to weather Trump’s storm
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Keir Starmer has struggled to set the agenda. The latest attempt came with the Spring Statement, but events soon overtook that when the US President announced his mass tariffs, which could derail Rachel Reeves’s spending plans.
It is not yet 100 days into Trump’s secondterm, and ministers have already had to adjust rapidly to the new normal. Even without the unpredictability of decisions from the White House, government communications have proved challenging. The long-standing No. 10 director of communications, Matthew Doyle, recently stepped down. At a recent away day, his successor James Lyons spoke on the importance of moving to digital platforms such as social media and podcasts as well as traditional outlets. It reflects the changing media landscape in the US. As one government source puts it, MAGA has ‘gone all in’ on X.
Comms is just one of the government’s problems. The more immediate challenge is how to react to a global trade war which shows little sign of abating. In the grand scheme of things, Britain was well treated on ‘Liberation Day’ – in the lowest tariff band of 10 per cent. UK officials credit Starmer’s diplomacy, but there were other factors. ‘The point was made that the UK should get something for making the right choice in 2016,’ says a figure in Trump’s orbit.
Britain was at least prepared for tariffs. ‘We’ve always taken the view we should treat Trump seriously – he’s spoken about tariffs so much, this guy is clearly going to do it,’ says a government source. Ministers weren’t surprised, even if some of Trump’s supporters were. ‘The guys walking down Wall Street wearing MAGA caps must be confused now,’ says a party figure.
The trickier task is predicting what Trump might do next. ‘On the one hand, you can use tariffs for the reindustrialisation of the US to bring back manufacturing,’ says a government source. ‘On the other hand, you can remove tariffs if these countries sort out trade deficits.’ There’s an alternative theory: it’s the Trump show, it doesn’t need to make sense.
Inside No. 10, the hope is that Trump sees a purpose in negotiating. The plan is simple: don’t stop talks until all tariffs are lifted. Negotiations started months ago but are now moving at ‘light speed’ compared with the normal pace of trade discussions. There are questions about how mutually beneficial a new ‘economic deal’ will be and whether it will just be about making big concessions to Trump. Tech policy is a key part of the discussions. Both the Digital Services Tax, under which big tech companies pay 2 per cent of their UK revenues, and the Online Safety Act, which aims to curtail the reach of such businesses, are under review. Both are bugbears of US tech billionaires – including Elon Musk.
It is the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds who is leading the negotiations at cabinet level, but government sources say that behind the scenes he is working closely with Reeves and Starmer. Reeves is also in regular contact with her US counterpart, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary. The pair may meet later this month when the Chancellor visits Washington DC.
The government is still trying out its Trump whisperers. Much of the work inevitably falls to the Prime Minister, but there are other key players. Peter Mandelson, the new British ambassador to Washington, is taking on a central role in the trade talks, pushing US officials and aides towards a deal. In London, Jonathan Powell – Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and Starmer’s national security adviser, who is profiled in Paul Wood’s article – is working on US relations along with the Foreign Secretary David Lammy. Lammy’s ties to Trumpworld figures are evident. He recently spent an afternoon with the Vice-President J.D. Vance, and he knows Elbridge Colby, the foreign policy specialist confirmed this week to the Pentagon. Then there is Varun Chandra, the Prime Minister’s special business adviser, who has also joined in the discussions. Between 2019 and 2024 he was a managing partner of Hakluyt, the consultancy founded by former MI6 intelligence officers.
The hope is that a deal can be agreed by the end of the month, but aides are avoiding talk of deadlines for fear of increasing tensions. There is no wish to have the type of negotiations that dominated Brexit: all the drama of ‘going into the tunnel’. There are also concerns about last-minute demands on agriculture: the Tories are poised to attack if so. However, Minette Batters, formerly of the National Farmers’ Union, has been hired to advise Labour on rural affairs, which suggests any big free-trade capitulation on agriculture is unlikely. Batters previously railed against a trade deal over American chlorinated chicken.
Starmer and his aides hope there are political opportunities here, but the pitfalls are more immediately obvious. While Britain may have got off lightly compared to others, a global trade war will still hurt the economy and could remove Reeves’s fiscal headroom. This week, Starmer insisted that he would keep Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT. Labour MPs would not get behind further spending cuts. Some fear a work-around: Reeves’s pledge may not rule out freezing current income thresholds if things get tight. Her credibility would be shot if she changed her fiscal rules. ‘You would need a different chancellor to do that,’ says one MP.
However, the perception that the world is becoming more unpredictable gives Starmer a bit of room to act. The announcement this week about the relaxation of electric car targets was long planned, but it could be brought forward under the guise of adapting to the changing politics. ‘Keir has been saying for a long time that a new settlement is required,’ says a government source. ‘Globalisation brought a lot of benefits to this country, but it also had a negative effect in areas. How can we get GDP higher? The answer has to be to create blue collar jobs and use industrial strategy.’
Trump has created an environment that forces decisions to be made. Or as one Labour veteran puts it: ‘Keir started off in politics as the king of international law, and now he is having to embrace the nation state.’
Impeccable history of the free market – and from the BBC too
The launch of Radio 4’s Invisible Hands series has been both blessed and cursed by timing. It tells the story of Britain’s ‘free market revolution’, just as President Donald Trump overhauls the free trade consensus of the past 40 years and world leaders grapple with how to respond. The problem is the hypotheticals posed at the start of the first episode – that free market capitalism ‘might be in crisis’; that ‘the global free market might be under threat’ – are already out of date. It’s settled. Free trade is out, tariffs are in. Welcome to the trade wars.
The world could do worse than look to the ‘Invisible Hands’ for a solution to the crisis. This is the name of the small group of characters whose free-market convictions tore down Clement Attlee’s socialist vision for Britain and shaped the country into a world-leading example of capitalism in action. The series is told through the biographies of these men (and one notable lady) – individuals and moments that changed the course of economic history.
We see how the tragic death of a young soldier inspires a brother, Sir Antony Fisher, to continue the fight for freedom long after the second world war is over. Fisher, a poultry entrepreneur and veteran, establishes the Institute of Economic Affairs after reading and meeting Friedrich Hayek. The free-market scholar tells Fisher to expand and educate the ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’ – the journalists, commentators, intellectuals who ultimately shape nations. To engage with politicians, too.
Enter Keith Joseph (episode two: ‘The Mad Monk’) and Margaret Thatcher, who take those free-market teachings into the heart of government. The series makes them out to be the ‘weirdos and misfits’ of their day. It’s not completely unfair, nor is it an unkind telling of their stories. Their ideas were considered radical and idealist, until the public realised what they could achieve. And they took the fight to the public: Joseph squaring off with student Marxists, Thatcher’s government using page three to advertise the sale of BT shares when the company was privatised.
Countless histories of Britain’s free-market transformation end up being hit jobs. The first few episodes of Invisible Hands suggest the series is not one of them. This is no great surprise. The host, journalist and broadcaster David Dimbleby, did not become a national treasure by picking sides.
Of course, there are moments of editorialising. Joseph is called a ‘fully paid-up member of Fisher’s cult’, and Thatcher is described as ‘singing from the Keith Joseph hymn book’. It’s a strange way to describe belief in a system that has never relied on myth to make its case (it’s not the free traders that insist ‘real capitalism has never been tried’).
But on the whole the first episodes are balanced. The third episode, ‘Selling the Silver’, starts with all the legitimate gripes that people today have with critical services run by private companies: rising energy costs, dirty rivers, cancelled trains. Then we go back to the mid to late 1970s, when the state ran those services ‘supposedly for us’ – and ran them into the ground.
Dimbleby recounts his own, miserable experience of trying to install a phone line in his home. It’s not the only time we are presented with the Dimbleby of years past. We hear the former Question Time presenter as a young reporter, talking on BBC’s Nationwide about the oil shortages in the 1970s. We hear parts of his interview on Panorama with Joseph in 1975 (Joseph was so nervous about selling the free-market message, Dimbleby says, he was sick before the show).
Invisible Hands is a genuine history lesson – well researched, impeccably produced. It does not moralise, or tell its listeners what to think – not yet, anyway. Just one curiosity stands out. For a series dedicated to tracking the rise of ‘free markets’ in Britain and throughout the West, the term is never properly defined. It remains an elusive, almost magical concept: a faceless magician conjuring up some prosperity spell.
‘Free market capitalism,’ our host says at one point, ‘is the theory that the best way to run our economy is not through government control, but instead, by handing power to the free market.’
The word that should replace the repeated phrase is ‘people’. It’s countless people whose free will and choices make up a strong economy.
Ironically, the ‘Invisible Hands’ in this podcast are the politicians and intellectuals calling the shots. But the metaphor comes from Adam Smith who used the phrase in the 1700s to make the opposite case: that individuals, not central planners, uplift societies and economies.
That is what Trump and his tariffs are up against: not just gut instinct but centuries of evidence. History isn’t on his side.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Richard Bratby
Van Morrison is sounding better than ever
There is a website called setlist.fm which allows its users to vicariously attend pretty much any concert. Search the name of an artist and a comprehensive history of their live performances will appear, spanning decades long gone to the hour just past.
Setlist.fm is both a useful resource and a massive spoiler-fest; the music equivalent of skipping to the last page of a book. Those planning to see a band can discover in advance most of the songs they are likely to hear. Those whose interest starts waning mid-gig can check to see how many songs are left. Those who stayed at home can soothe themselves with the thought that the artist failed to play all, or indeed any, of their favourite tracks.
Had I not physically attended Van Morrison’s concert at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on 30 March, had I instead glanced only at the raw data via setlist.fm, I would have been pleased to note a pivot away from the glut of skiffle and early rock’n’roll covers Morrison has tended to favour in recent times. Even so, I would not have been hugely excited by the choice of material. Aside from a closing ‘Gloria’ – which, according to the website, Morrison has performed 1,004 times in his solo career, the first occasion being at the Café De Hip in Deventer, Holland, on 9 March 1967 – he played not a single song of his own from the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, the focus fell on his 1980s and early 1990s catalogue: ‘Northern Muse (Solid Ground)’, ‘Did Ye Get Healed?’, ‘Someone Like You’, ‘Have I Told You Lately?’, ‘Real, Real Gone’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Days Like This’. Solidly soulful and lushly meditative stuff, rather than truly transcendental. I might have congratulated myself on saving a few quid – Morrison’s gigs have become very expensive – and scrolled on.
Thankfully, concerts don’t exist on a webpage. They live and breathe in the moment. The setlist.fm entry for Van Morrison on 30 March 2025 will never convey the way he seemed, in his 80th year, an artist reattuned to his own brilliance; the way he sang more intuitively than I have heard him sing in a long while, snapping into the rhythms, channelling the intent of the songs; and, memorably, wringing every last drop of feeling from one word – ‘crazy’ – during a stirring rendition of Ray Charles’s ‘What Would I Do’, which Morrison recorded on his 1984 album A Sense of Wonder.
It can never show how he huffed hungrily into the saxophone and harmonica, as though filled up with music and desperate to get it out; nor the ways in which he worried away at his superb nine-piece band, jabbing a finger at each member to demand countless solos. He paid particularly close attention to the bassist, who was asked to jump into action on so many occasions I began to wonder whether the poor chap had pilfered the last croissant at the breakfast buffetthat morning.
The pedestrian blues stomps from Morrison’s more recent oeuvre – ‘Ain’t Gonna Moan No More’, ‘Little Village’ – lie lifeless on the page, but here they roared into life, reimagined as extended exercises in nuance and dynamics. Likewise, there was an urgent snap and crackle to his interpretation of Junior Wells’s ‘Snatch It Back & Hold It’. Even the moments where Morrison eased into cruise control came from left field, such as a jaunty tea-dance version of ‘Have I Told You Lately?’, which sold a sweet song short.
Setlist.fm does correctly record that, regrettably, nothing was aired from Morrison’s forthcoming album, Remembering Now, which may well be the best record he has made since the era he was revisiting. Otherwise, you really had to be there.
Making a return to the fray after a two-year absence, at the second of three intimate Art School shows Glaswegian singer-songwriter Joesef, aka Joseph Traynor, sang likeable songs of quotidian desire and non-lethal heartbreak.
He proved an engaging performer, leaning into the raucous hometown goodwill with humour and humility. As the spring nights begin to stretch out, Joesef’s cottony electro-pop and lightweight funk, fluttering falsetto and ear for a good tune – new single ‘Stephanie’s Place’ vied with old favourite ‘It’s Been a Little Heavy Lately’ for best in show – will no doubt find its small hours niche in cool clubs and flat-share kitchens.
In common with many of his contemporaries – Arlo Parks springs to mind – the overall effect leaned towards polite and slightly pedestrian optimism. There was no shame in a cover of ‘Thinking of You’ by Sister Sledge being the best song of the evening, but I left wishing that Joesef would push his obvious attributes into a few more interesting areas.