Keir Starmer’s Israel problem is growing

It wasn’t so long ago that Keir Starmer was being widely praised for keeping his party united and on message over Israel at Labour’s conference in Liverpool. But fast forward a few weeks and the Labour leader is under pressure over his stance on Israel’s right to defend itself following the terror attacks by Hamas on 7 October.

The trouble started as a result of an interview Starmer gave to LBC soon after the attacks. Speaking in Liverpool, LBC’s Nick Ferrari asked Starmer whether ‘cutting off power, cutting off water’ was appropriate as a response to the atrocity. The Labour leader replied:

‘I think that Israel does have that right…It is an ongoing situation. Obviously, everything should be done within international law.’

The clip has since gone viral and led to a backlash from his own side. Around 23 councillors have resigned over his comments. In Oxford, the party has lost its majority on the council as a result, with eight councillors quitting.

Starmer has faced pressure from his own MPs to clarify his position. The Leader’s Office has attempted to do this, saying he meant only that the country had a right to self-defence. Starmer also embarked on a visit to the South Wales Islamic Centre in Cardiff and tweeted to say he made it ‘clear it is not and has never been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines. International law must be followed’. However, a response was issued on behalf of the centre by the Muslim Council of Wales expressing ‘dismay’ and suggesting Starmer’s statement had misrepresented the visit.

Many in the Labour ranks think Starmer is not showing sufficient support for the people of Palestine. On Tuesday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar was much clearer in his criticism of Israel, accusing the country’s government of a ‘clear breach’ of international law in Gaza. It comes as Labour politicians usually supportive of Starmer fear that his handling could allow groups similar to George Galloway’s Respect party to take up the space left empty by the Labour leadership.

Later today, Starmer is due to meet with Muslim MPs in his own party to discuss Labour’s position on Gaza. Some of those involved want an apology from the Labour leader. As Stephen Bush and I discuss on the latest episode of Coffee House Shots, the electoral risk is that many Muslim voters – upon whom Labour relies heavily in certain seats – simply stay home or, where they can, switch to parties with more supportive positions to Palestine.

Starmer has tried to use his support for Israel as a way to show Labour has shaken off the anti-Semitism allegations that dominated Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But his comments means that the row risks becoming his worst party management problem to date.

A beginner’s guide to witchcraft

Next year, Exeter University will offer an MA in Magic and Occult Science: the first of its kind in a British university. The new course has led to newspaper headlines about a ‘real-life Hogwarts’ and questions as to whether magic is as worth studying as say, economics. The course director, Professor Emily Selove, refused my request for an interview – with polite apologies, although one could hardly expect the convenor of Exeter’s Centre for Magic and Esotericism to be anything but esoteric.

A similar tension, it turns out, is at the heart of the debate about the degree. For all the media snideness, the most serious objections come from Britain’s growing magical community. In the 2021 census, 95,000 people said they believed in Paganism, Wicca or Shamanism, up from 70,000 in 2011.

Bob Osborne has devoted years to studying the paranormal, particularly around his Cornish village of Zennor, publishing his book Zennor: Spirit of Place earlier this year. He confirms that many magical practitioners are deeply opposed to the course: ‘It’s the popularisation of ancient doctrines that have been hidden for centuries, passed down through a succession of secret societies and bloodlines who have been “initiated”. Adepts have this information, but if the public experiment with rituals it could go very wrong.’

Since Professor Selove won’t speak to me, I decide to explore the south-west’s magical community myself. I meet Bob in the Tinners’ Arms in Zennor. The pub is purportedly haunted by a tin-miner, and there are reports of glasses being raised by poltergeists, even when everyone present is sober. The barman has a pentagram around his neck.

Bob’s main complaint about the university course is the phrase ‘occult science’. He is very much of the opinion that it is an art, not a science. We sit in the pub and he draws connections between the writers and artists who lived in Zennor, such as D.H. Lawrence, Peter Warlock and the occultist Aleister Crowley. He then offers to show me a house above the village probably used by Crowley for rituals. Of course we go: walking through the bracken to the top of Zennor Hill, where huge outcrops of granite look down over the landscape. Beneath this carn is Carn Cottage. There is, in fact, no proof Crowley stayed here, but that has not stopped the abandoned place becoming a site of pilgrimage.

Ivy is insinuating itself through the walls and ceiling, and some of the floorboards have been pulled up to reveal bare earth beneath. Others are daubed with magical symbols: pentagrams in circles, and complicated sigils. I take a photograph of one and tweet it to a folklore expert. He tells me it is not any magical figure he recognises and is ‘almost certainly someone playing silly buggers’. On the walls are more pentagrams, inverted crosses and a surprisingly well-rendered Peter Griffin from Family Guy. There is a huge hearthplace, with evidence of recent fires. ‘I once came and someone was slaughtering a goat there,’ Bob says.

What we do know about this cottage is that in 1938, local magistrate (and neo-pagan) Katherine Laird Arnold-Forster visited and had a fatal cardiac arrest. What caused this in a healthy 51-year-old is subject to more speculation. ‘One of the more outlandish – but not totally unbelievable – stories,’ Bob tells me, ‘is that Crowley summoned an 8ft-tall reptilian creature, with horned wings, and the sight of the demon gave her a heart attack.’

On the way back to the village, Bob asks me how much the Exeter MA pays its lecturers. He may be coming round to the idea of teaching the subject to anyone with an undergraduate degree and a spare £12,000, but many of his friends are still very much against the course. ‘They hate all commercialism of the occult – some of them are still angry about the museum in Boscastle.’

This, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, grew out of the personal collection of Cecil Williamson, neo-pagan warlock and MI6 agent. Oddly, the ‘career opportunities’ section of the Exeter prospectus mentions museums and academia but not espionage, although there has always been a connection and – Bob hints heavily – there still is. When I drive into Boscastle village, the valley is covered by mist rolling in from the sea. I feel, not for the first time in Cornwall, that I am in the opening scene of a folk-horror movie.

The museum’s exhibits are eclectic – from Crowley’s wand to mass-produced pin cushions for sticking pins into the Kaiser’s arse to help the war effort. The creepiest items are those which were not so much collected, as offloaded on the museum – including a poppet (a doll representing a person for magical rituals) which ‘emitted such strongly negative energies’ that it was expelled from its previous museum. There’s also a weighing chair to weigh those suspected of witchcraft against a Bible, but it is sensibly chained to the ground to avoid any accidental modern witchfinding.

Boscastle is only 60 miles from Exeter, so I combine my trip with a visit to a conjuring show. Professor Brian Rappert, the conjuror-in-residence at Exeter Phoenix arts centre, is a sociologist whose main interest is deception, especially in the context of diplomacy and the security services. Next year, he will also be a lecturer on the magic course. The Phoenix’s marketing refers to what he does as ‘entertainment magic’, to distinguish it from magical magic – which, if unwieldy, is less twee than calling the latter ‘magick’, as Crowley did when he wished to emphasise he wasn’t doing children’s parties.

Brian’s is an extremely intimate show. He gathers half a dozen of us round a baize table, rolls up his sleeves and starts shuffling cards. The lights go down, and it feels even more like a seance. After each ‘effect’, as he calls them, he opens the conversation, seminar-like, to discuss the way in which our minds deceive us, or allow us to be deceived.

When I look down at the hand I have shuffled myself and see that he has somehow changed the order of the cards, it is more eerie than anything I saw at Zennor or Boscastle. Professor Rappert refuses to share the knowledge of how it is done. Maybe for that, you need to sign up to the course.

The sad death of the pony ride

Pony rides were once a staple of every village, church and primary-school fête. A brusque, horsey mother would swing you up into the saddle, and the patient pony would trudge up and down while you clung to its mane, before it was the turn of the next child in the queue. No one ever plonked a hard hat on your head. There were certainly none of those restrictive body protectors that children are encased in now, bundled up like scarab beetles.

These days, I am that horsey mother. When we moved to the country from London after the lockdowns, ponies were top of my shopping list – above a replacement for the wheezy boiler and a fancy range cooker. We now have a miniature Shetland pony called Ollie and a donkey called Mouse.

Buying a house near the church came with certain responsibilities, we discovered. Could you, the vicar asked, bring the donkey to the village Nativity? Of course. Mouse has now starred in a few events at the church, including the Palm Sunday procession – where he delighted younger members of the congregation by leaving his own tribute to Our Lord in the porch.

So providing pony rides for the church fête seemed at first like just another formality we were very happy to fulfil. My sons were excited about leading Ollie and Mouse around. They made signs and squabbled about how much to charge (more than a pound, but less than a fiver, they decided).

Then the rumblings started. ‘We need to do a risk assessment,’ the churchwarden emailed. ‘Can you check with your insurers that you are covered?’ I quietly suggested that we leave insurers out of it. As a sop, I could bring a selection of crash hats for the children to wear. And even that, I felt, was a bit ridiculous for a beach donkey and a pony the size of a large Labrador.

But it wouldn’t do. ‘The PCC [parochial church council] is concerned that insurance should be in place,’ came the reply. ‘Could you check your policy?’ We have public liability insurance through the Pony Club, but I thought it unlikely this would cover taking money for rides – even for the worthy cause of the St Michael and All Angels’ roof.

I sought advice from a thread on an equestrian forum. The responses were unequivocal. ‘DON’T TOUCH WITH A BARGEPOLE!’ and ‘PUBLIC LIABILITY NIGHTMARE!!!’ were typical. One advised: ‘Be aware you MUST have a riding school licence, even if only for one day or for charity.’ ‘I was asked to do rides at our primary school,’ said another, ‘and used insurance as a get-out.’

By now this looked increasingly appealing, but was also a sad development. I was that child once, stroking noses and longing for a pony of my own. Pocket-money rides at the village fête were the start of a lifelong love affair. It was Winston Churchill who noted that: ‘There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.’

‘Couldn’t the church council just extend their cover?’ I asked. I received a stern and lengthy response from Ecclesiastical, the church insurers. They explained that they would indemnify the PCC if a member of the public were to be scalded or get food poisoning from refreshments at the fête – but not in the case of ‘accidental bodily injury’ caused by our pony or donkey.

I argued that neither of them would hurt a fly, let alone a small child. Ollie comes into the kitchen on birthdays and eats cake off the table. He was dressed up as a bat for Halloween. Both he and Mouse have delivered Christmas cards to neighbours. The worst the donkey has done is to lock me in the feed shed for two hours while my husband was on a Zoom call. But all this was to no avail.

Wearily, I rang round brokers. The cheapest cover I could find under a ‘Pony Party Policy’ was £680 – and that was dependent on a full risk assessment of the animals’ temperaments and experience. It is also considerably more than I paid for the donkey. At £3 a go, Mouse would need to give 227 rides just to earn the insurance money back. Oh – and had we checked if we needed a licence with the local council?

At this point I admitted defeat. If the PCC could get hold of some sheep hurdles, I said, then we could at least do a pony petting corner. But the PCC felt this still posed ‘a risk to children’, so without appropriate insurance it was a no-go. Thanks to some grey, faceless underwriters, the ponies stayed in the field and local children missed out on their rides.

I started to understand why, according to the British Horse Society, 250 riding schools have closed since 2018 due to punitive insurance and business rates. If parents can find a riding school – and the British Equestrian Federation has just issued a warning that the industry is on ‘the brink of disaster’ – they can expect to pay at least £40 for a plod around a sand school. The riding school we found on first moving to the countryside was so risk-averse that they wouldn’t let the boys groom or tack up their ponies, or even touch them before they got on. It’s what spurred me on to horse ownership.

As for Mouse making an appearance at this year’s Nativity, I’m not feeling optimistic now that insurance must be factored in. Mary may have to travel to Bethlehem on a micro scooter.  

Homer’s take on theology

The Hamas charter does not mince its words: ‘The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’

A return to the ancient pagan gods would surely be an improvement, but the modern world adopts the Hamas line. Consider the current deities of the bigots whose opponents, hiding behind a clearly sacrilegious belief in rational argument, must be condemned to eternal cancellation. The Greek and Roman gods of myth were far more accommodating.

Take Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the first works of what we call western literature (c.700 bc). When the heroes talk about the gods, they refer to their power and unpredictability – but in the gods’ presence they react as if to powerful humans who might be friends or enemies. They do not see the gods as numinous, venerable or incomprehensible beings. Indeed, in a famous scene in the Odyssey, Athena and Odysseus almost josh with each other.

As for fate – which usually means ‘death’ – the poet calls it up or ignores it simply for dramatic purposes. The heroes are aware of its existence and fully accept it, but that does not stop them behaving like heroes right to the end.

The world Homer depicts is one which maintains a dramatic balance between man, fate and gods, allowing men to pay a full and free part as independent beings. Gods simply required ritual acknowledgement. Concepts such as sin, blasphemy, belief and days of judgement are entirely absent. Homer did not do ‘theology’ in our sense of the word. Homer’s great work broadly reflects ancient Greek thinking about the gods, who had no interest in constricting the scope of human investigations into anything, e.g. was Allah right? Are the Jews hiding behind stones and trees? Why does Hamas hide in underground tunnels?

How the BBC scapegoated Martin Bashir

00:00 05:15

Jonathan Maitland has narrated this article for you to listen to.

I have become rather obsessed with Martin Bashir and his downfall. Three years ago, I began researching for a play based around his infamous 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, which he secured by forging bank statements and reinforcing her belief that there was an Establishment conspiracy against her. When I started writing I thought I would soon understand him. But he still baffles me. When we corresponded recently via email, he suggested playing himself on stage or, failing that, what about Idris Elba? I couldn’t tell if he was joking.  

I knew Bashir pretty well back in the day. We were fellow reporters at the BBC and ITV for 13 years. He even joined my covers band Surf’n’Turf on percussion, and very good he was too. He was a world-class flatterer, forever telling people how brilliant they were and how it was his life’s ambition to work with them. Most saw through his smoke-up-the-fundament routine, but plenty didn’t.

What fascinates me is how exactly he finally managed to win Diana’s confidence. The document-forging got him through the door, but how did she come to trust him enough to let him make her pasta and pesto in her kitchen? And why did he become the Malcolm X of journalism, getting the story by any means necessary? How did he justify it to himself? 

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first. Bashir’s methods were wrong and maybe sociopathic. As well as forging documents, he fed Diana a series of lurid (and possibly libellous) stories during his intense pre-interview wooing of her. So I’m not defending him. But as with most scandals, the truth is less Manichean than the received wisdom of Diana=angel, Bashir=devil.

It is absurd, for example, to blame him for her death, as some have done. Had he not tricked her into the interview, they say, she would have remained part of the royal family, had professional security, and lived. Leaving aside the fact that this denies Diana any agency – she desperately wanted to do an interview, it was just a question of who with – there are surely more plausible scapegoats: the chauffeur Henri Paul; Mohamed Al-Fayed’s security team; the paparazzi. Or the dysfunctional, vengeful institution that chewed her up and spat her out.

To blame Bashir is also to absolve the bigger sinner: the BBC. As with Jimmy Savile, senior executives knew about the wrong-doing but failed to act. I am not for one moment comparing Bashir’s actions to Savile’s. But there are similarities in the way both scandals were handled.

When Bashir admitted his forgeries to the then BBC head of news Tony Hall, just months after the 1995 interview, he was forgiven instantly. Hall – and this would have been a tough call, admittedly – should have sacked him and apologised publicly. Instead, the BBC continued to pat itself on the back for its scoop and pretend all was well until 2020, when the investigative journalist Andy Webb re-ignited the story. After the Mail on Sunday had carried news of the forging in 1996, hear-no-evil-see-no-evil BBC execs dismissed it as a tabloid smear, motivated by commercial interests. It turned out the terrible tabloid was right all along. 

But the 1995 interview isn’t just a go-to example of dodgy journalistic practice. It is much more valuable than that: the perfect lens through which to examine Diana and to understand her more. On the one hand, it shows her extraordinary bravery in single-handedly taking on a powerful institution. On the other, it demonstrates her acute lack of strategic judgment. After she went in all guns blazing about the future King, it was never going to end well. As her former aide Patrick Jephson argues, if she’d been diplomatic, and forgiven his extracurricular activities for the sake of her country and her boys, she’d have won the PR game 5-0. Quite possibly she would have become queen.

The most important issue of all, obscured by all the Bashir bashing, is how the interview was effectively banned. Prince William has decreed ‘it is my firm view that [it] holds no legitimacy and should never be aired again’. Well, it’s my view – and that of many media executives – that his edict, immediately and cravenly agreed to by the BBC, is blatant censorship. The interview is an important historical document. It highlighted issues like depression and self-harm which, until then, were rarely discussed.

So why are the BBC and William behaving like this? There’s dramatic irony here. The son Diana brought up to have the courage to speak out silenced his own mother for having the courage to speak out.

Letters: We shouldn’t look down on those who attend AA

End the war

Sir: Timothy Garton Ash’s article on Ukraine evokes echoes of the first world war, with interviews of brave soldiers who have lost limbs in Russian minefields (‘Europe’s problem’, 21 October). He acknowledges that Ukraine’s losses have been huge, yet supports bullish calls for the war to continue ‘for years, or even decades’.

The big lesson we should take is that Ukraine’s offensive has been a dismal failure. Large quantities of western hardware lie burnt out on Ukraine’s steppes. The Russians are well dug in. They have many more troops than Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin is prepared to sacrifice them if need be. Without direct use of western forces, which would be a dangerous escalation, recovery of all Ukraine’s lost territory is no longer a realistic option.

Continuing support for this war is unlikely to be a winning formula for the candidates in the 2024 US elections, especially as America has other urgent calls for its assistance. Putin’s downfall would indeed be a war aim worth our support, were it not that his replacement would most likely be a Prigozhin type. Garton Ash exhorts us that ‘Europe needs to lead on economic, social and political support’. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Europe has the resources to make up for the billions of dollars in aid supplied by the United States to Ukraine, were it to be withdrawn. US aid to Ukraine since the start of the war is equivalent to over a third of the EU’s total annual budget.

The West needs to encourage Zelensky to accept Ukraine’s loss of territory and negotiate a speedy end to this brutal war.

Richard North

Hayling Island, Hampshire

Israel’s response

Sir: At no stage in Douglas Murray’s article (‘Glorying in slaughter’, 21 October) does he concede that some criticism of Israel’s collective punishments may be valid. This attitude is counterproductive. A textbook strategy for terrorists is to commit an outrage so horrific that it triggers a disproportionate retaliation, with atrocities that are even worse than the original outrage. This impels those in the middle ground towards supporting the ultimate goal of the terrorists. If Hamas has been following this gameplan, it has been triumphantly successful. Al Jazeera is now beaming the agonies of Gaza’s civilians to households all around the Middle East, as well as to its worldwide audience of more than a billion people. In a harbinger of the future, Israel has already lost the nascent friendship with Saudi Arabia. Israel is a small, demographically challenged nation, surrounded by enemies. If it is to survive in the long term, it will need friends other than just the United States.

John Hatt

Sedbergh, Cumbria

Perceptions of the EU

Sir: Your leading article, ‘European disunity’ (21 October), gets many things right – especially the rejection of lax immigration policies, technocratic overreach, and the increasingly diverse nature of the EU’s membership base. However, it underestimates the extent to which European populations, including voters of the far-right, remain committed to the membership of their countries in the EU, as well as the EU’s own ability to adapt and neutralise Europe’s far-right.

While the EU is changing, surveys show a substantial degree of stability in perceptions of it across the bloc in recent years, comparable to their levels before the financial crisis. They remain much more positive than during the trough observed around 2012-13. It is not just financial dependence on Brussels that keeps continentals in; it is also the recognition that their interests are better served by continuing to exercise their voice in what is fundamentally an intergovernmental body than by rushing for the exit.

Dalibor Rohac

Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC

A new start

Sir: I wish Lloyd Evans well on his road to recovery (‘No life’, 21 October). I hope he is not being prematurely smug. He is certainly patronising and possibly irresponsible in his disdain for AA.

I think of myself as a typical lifelong reader. I do not self-flagellate. I do not wallow. I am none of the things Mr Evans describes so disparagingly (ex-con, vandal, bodybuilder, etc). Nor was Steve, whom I met at AA. His last relapse killed him. Like many, he attended AA because he had nowhere else to go. Like everyone, he was there for a reason, not to give a performance. For him and for others, it was sadly not enough. However, for many, AA is a successful new start in lives which are being ruined. Many members never drink again. They rebuild. For them, meetings become their own community inside another which has often rejected them. Many attend for years and – believe it or not! – have fun and make friends.

It is too easy to look down on AA. However, society offers little else to those who, through alcohol dependency, frequently have almost nothing left. What they do have is the honesty to admit that it is the right time to stop drinking and the courage to do something about it. Not everyone is blessed enough to have a ‘Frank Skinner moment’: but those who have humility at least have a chance.

Keith Allen

London SW12

Magic Wanda

Sir: In his fine review of the new recording of Goldberg Variations by Vikingur Olafsson (Arts, 14 October), Damian Thompson writes that when Glenn Gould recorded his first version in 1956, the only competition was a recording by Claudio Arrau. He forgets the version which introduced the Goldbergs to many thousands of listeners and held sway from the mid-1930s – by Wanda Landowska.

Hugh Van Dusen

New York

Write to us letters@spectator.co.uk

Does the Met know what jihad means?

Ever since the atrocities in Israel more than two weeks ago, I have had one main thought. Yes, Israel has its problems. But we also have ours. Subsequent weeks have borne that instinct out. For years I have noticed that in all the wars and exchanges involving Israel – no matter the actual size or scale of the conflict – the reaction at home grows worse each time, not least in our institutions.

Last weekend there were massive demonstrations against Israel in London, as in cities across the West. And I say ‘against Israel’ with care. These protests have not been dedicated to finding a compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Few acknowledged Hamas’s massacre. Still the crowds just turn up, as they are expected to again this Saturday.

The odd deluded fellow-traveller can be relied upon to turn up too. Among them last Saturday was the current frontrunner for ‘fast learner of the year’: someone briefly hoisted a Pride banner in the sea of Palestinian and Hamas flags, only to have it torn from their hands and smashed to the ground. But that’s because, as they/them may have noticed, not all love is reciprocated.

Still, even for someone who has expected the worst for years, last Saturday was sobering. In Belgravia a rally organised by the extremists of Hizb ut-Tahrir called for ‘Muslim armies’ to ‘liberate Palestine’. Other protestors in London called for an Islamic state, for ‘Allah’s curses’ on the ‘infidels’ and ‘the Jews’ – and for ‘jihad’.

Thank goodness we have a police force. Or do we? For their part, the Metropolitan Police spent the day in a variety of ways. These included threatening to arrest a couple of lads who appeared with the English flag. The police warned them that if they said anything even ‘borderline racist’ they would be arrested. At the same time, Met officers stood idly by as the streets rang with calls for jihad.

At least their colleagues in the rapid linguistics response unit were hard at work. The Met’s Twitter account announced: ‘The word jihad has a number of meanings. We have specialist counterterrorism officers here in the operations room who have particular knowledge in this area.’ Likewise, a former detective superintendent at the Met, Shabnam Chaudhri, explained to the media that ‘jihad means a lot of different things to many different people’. Which may be so, but when an angry bearded maniac shrieks about jihad on London’s streets you can generally take it as read that he’s not threatening to have an intense inner theological struggle.

Elsewhere at the demonstration, a young man climbed up some scaffolding and set off flares. The Met’s numpties stood at the bottom, patiently waiting for him to come down, only to then hand him his flag back and send him merrily on his way. Not an English flag of course – because that would be provocative – but a Palestinian one. This is Britain in 2023.

I cannot help but compare this with the treatment of certain other protests in our country in recent years. For instance, some readers may recall the murder of Sarah Everard by a member of the Metropolitan Police. Since a number of women across the country – including the now Princess of Wales – felt the murder of Ms Everard especially keenly, there were flower-layings in her memory, and a vigil on Clapham Common. But the vigil took place in a time of Covid lockdown and so the Met went in like the cavalry, arresting several of them. To give them their due, the Met proved to be a crack squad when it came to breaking up candlelit vigils of quiet women.

Earlier this year police in Birmingham moved in when they found Isabel Vaughan-Spruce in the neighbourhood of an abortion clinic in Kings Norton. Vaughan-Spruce may be a Christian campaigner, but she isn’t exactly the Westboro Baptist Church. She wasn’t standing outside abortion clinics telling everyone that all aborted babies are fags or the like. All she was doing was silently praying within a certain distance of an abortion clinic. Not even mouthing it – she was praying in her head. But officers from West Midlands police told her that ‘engaging in prayer’ was an ‘offence’. Looking back at it, Vaughan-Spruce should have evaded arrest by shouting ‘Jihad! Slay the Infidel’ and so on. Had she done so, the police would have doubtless stepped back, apologised and bade her a pleasant rest of the day.

I wish the police were the only force in this country to have such a problem. But unfortunately the rot appears to be everywhere. Last weekend a Tube driver in central London was videoed leading passengers in pro-Palestinian chants, and saying over the Tannoy system how much he would have liked to have joined the passengers at the march. Lots of people whooped with joy on the train. I’m glad I wasn’t a Jew in the carriage that day.

A certain amount of stink was made online after the video emerged. Transport for London (TfL) responded that they had no way of identifying the driver. How could it possibly know who its employees are and when they clock on, after all? That was until the Sun and other media outlets made such a fuss that TfL discovered they do actually keep records of their employees, and had suddenly found and planned to investigate the driver in question.

Once again, it is worth keeping in mind some of the things that TfL forbids on its trains. These include (though are not limited to) the advertising of junk food or gambling and any posters which advertise being ‘beach body ready’. Staring at other passengers is banned. You are also, of course, not allowed to drink alcohol on the Tube. Which would suit some of the travellers to Saturday’s protests very well. After all we can’t have antisocial behaviour in modern, diverse Britain, can we?

Mind games: why AI must be regulated

During my time in No. 10 as one of Dominic Cummings’s ‘weirdos and misfits’, my team would often speak with frontline artificial intelligence researchers. We grew increasingly concerned about what we heard. Researchers at tech companies believed they were much closer to creating superintelligent AIs than was being publicly discussed. Some were frightened by the technology they were unleashing. They didn’t know how to control it; their AI systems were doing things they couldn’t understand or predict; they realised they could be producing something very dangerous.

This is why the UK’s newly established AI Taskforce is hosting its first summit next week at Bletchley Park where international politicians, tech firms, academics and representatives of civil society will meet to discuss these dangers.

Getting to the point of ‘superintelligence’ – when AI exceeds human intelligence – is the stated goal of companies such as Google DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI, and they estimate that this will happen in the short-term. Demis Hassabis, of DeepMind, says some form of human-equivalent intelligence will be achieved in the next decade. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT’s creator), reckons he’ll achieve it by 2030 or 2031. They may be wrong – but so far their predictions have usually been right.

So you see the conundrum. AI that has the power to damage society is being created by people who know the risks but are locked in a race against each other, unable to slow down because they worry about becoming irrelevant in their field. Yet, even though they aren’t slowing down, all the major lab CEOs signed a letter earlier this year saying that AI was a nuclear-level extinction risk.

The dangers are real. Two years ago, an AI was developed that could, in a few hours, rediscover from scratch internationally banned chemical warfare agents, and invent 40,000 more ‘promising candidate’ toxins. And as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei testified to the US Senate in July, Large Language Models such as ChatGPT can already help with key steps in causing civilisation-scale harm through biological weapons.

As superintelligent AI develops the ability to interact with the world without restrictions and oversight, the range of possible harms will only grow in ways that we can’t foresee. Just this week, a letter co-written by two of the three ‘godfathers’ of AI, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, warned that AI systems could soon plan, pursue goals and ‘act in the world’.

If you went back in time and asked people how humanity should approach creating something vastly smarter than itself, a sense of caution would likely be a central suggestion. Yet as superintelligence comes nearer to being achieved, there are huge financial interests in Silicon Valley for the race to move even faster.

It is concern over the speed of progress that lay behind the British government’s decision to establish its new £100 million taskforce, hoping that it will give the answers to what the UK should do about the looming prospect of superintelligence. The AI Taskforce is modelled on Kate Bingham’s Vaccine Taskforce. But it faces a bigger hurdle than Bingham’s did. When that was launched, everyone knew the goal was to roll out a vaccine to combat Covid. This was something tangible – and obviously there was a sense of urgency that Covid needed to be tackled. There is, by contrast, no consensus among governments about whether AI is a big risk, let alone if states need to regulate its development.

The firms producing AI are not keen on proper outside regulation. They prefer to evaluate themselves with self-selected partners. They refer to this as ‘evals’, which involves the companies assessing the risk of their models only after they’ve been created. Sure, this has some benefits, but it’s retrospective; it does nothing to slow the race, and means there’s no external oversight of what they are creating. As it stands, when (rather than ‘if’) superintelligence is achieved, the technology – and the oversight of it – will be controlled by a few private companies. That’s not in anyone’s interest.

The government should push for more oversight, so that the next generation of AI will not be released without a proper audit of the risks. It should also set up an independent body to appraise them.

Given the political paralysis in the US, and the lack of expertise in other countries, regulation is reliant on goodwill by the tech companies, not on binding rules. This runs the danger of ‘regulatory capture’, whereby the AI companies effectively write their own tests and regulations – marking their own homework, in other words.

At the moment, AI is allowed to grow in ways we can’t understand. That these machines can grow without human input is cheaper, faster, and easier for the firms, but also more dangerous. One suggestion is that the government should control the development of AI through an international collaborative lab, so that there are multiple actors involved rather than a lone company.

Big tech wouldn’t like this, as it would be more expensive and make the work harder. But it would go some way towards stopping things running out of control. The government could also promote the idea of capping the computing power used to train models, so their development ceases being so exponential. The taskforce should argue for enforcing physical security around advanced models, such as implementing ‘kill switches’ to ensure they can’t escape and evolve on their own if they seem to be posing a problem.

The government has done a decent job of being ahead of the curve just by hosting an international summit. But this doesn’t change the fact that there needs to be a global consensus on what civilisational risk we are prepared to take in developing AI – and who should be responsible for making the decisions. These are going to be some of the most important questions of our time.

Jeremy Hunt should stick to sensible pledges – it’s too late for big moves

Imagine you’re Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, drafting your Autumn Statement for delivery in three weeks’ time. Bookies’ odds for a Tory general election win have moved out to six-to-one (against Labour’s dead-cert one-to-seven) following by-election wipe-outs. The Lib Dems look set to nab your South West Surrey seat if you don’t stand down anyway. And you can’t give your back-benches red-meat tax cuts because public borrowing for this year could run £30 billion higher than forecast.

Releasing the pension ‘triple lock’ to save money would alienate older Tories. Inheritance tax giveaways that might please them would be campaign gold for Labour. A stamp duty cut would do nothing for floating-vote home-buyers facing mortgage costs that will stay high as long as inflation does. In short, there’s nothing splashy you can do to save the government or your own career.

So you might as well do sensible things to help the nation by helping employers face the threat of recession. The Federation of Small Businesses has a shopping list that includes extending business rate relief for retail, hospitality and leisure; making skills training for the self-employed tax deductible; boosting housebuilding with new brownfield development reliefs; and forcing large firms to pay smaller suppliers quicker. No headline-grabbers, but useful tweaks before you go.

Miracles for slimmers?

‘Could obesity drugs take a bite out of the food industry?’ asks a Morgan Stanley research report, highlighting the startling – and, to some observers, scary – impact of appetite-suppressing medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy. These drugs, we’re told, can reduce calorie intake by 20 to 30 per cent per day, with patients cutting back sharply on ‘high-fat, sweet and salty’ snacks as well as fizzy drinks and booze. So why frightening?

Because Morgan Stanley thinks 24 million Americans could be taking the drugs by 2035, Elon Musk and ‘TikTok influencers’ having enthusiastically endorsed them. There’ll be rising clamour for them over here too, Ozempic being currently available through the NHS only for Type 2 diabetics and Wegovy for limited numbers of weight-loss patients.

Potential gastrointestinal side-effects are already well known; more importantly, as National Geographic put it, the drugs’ ‘relatively recent approval means researchers still don’t know what the effects of taking them long term might be’. Another report, from Fortune, found that Novo Nordisk, the Danish maker of the two drugs, had purchased ‘more than 457,000 meals’ last year at a cost of $9 million to educate doctors about its products. The company told Fortune it ‘follows the highest ethical standards as well as all legal and regulatory requirements’ – and with so much at stake, it’s bound to face negative spin from food and drink industry lobbyists and weight-loss competitors.

Observe, for example, how shares in WeightWatchers International have plunged as those of Novo Nordisk have soared fivefold. Maybe these really are miracle medicines and maybe your plump columnist ought to pester his GP for them. But experience surely tells us every ‘blockbuster drug’ story merits highly quizzical scrutiny.

Cross-Channel arrival

I’m intrigued by Evolyn, a rail start-up that aims to launch a rival to Eurostar in 2025 – the first time a competitor has sought to make serious use of the Channel tunnel’s ‘open access’ principle and its capacity for almost double the current Eurostar traffic load.

Behind Evolyn is the rich but secretive Cosmen dynasty of transport operators from Spain, who hold a stake in what used to be the National Express bus and rail business, now called Mobico. Other backers have yet to reveal themselves and there’s some mystery over whether Evolyn has yet ordered a dozen trains from the French manufacturer Alstom.

Nevertheless, if its first offering from London to Paris succeeds, a more ambitious Ryanair-style rail disruptor connecting to other European capitals would be a welcome addition to the travel landscape. Even better, and as consolation for the collapse of HS2, how about an entrepreneurial revival of the ‘Regional Eurostar’ project on which £320 million was fruitlessly invested in the 1990s in the hope of running direct cross-Channel trains from Glasgow, York and Manchester? Or if that’s too ambitious, why not a northern terminus for Evolyn on a fast line to St Pancras, repurposing that middle-of-nowhere monument to bad infrastructure planning which is East Midlands Parkway? The moral, in transport as in so much else, is never stop dreaming of better.

City chaps remembered

News of the deaths of two well-liked City men who triumphed over disability stirs memories of the Square Mile as I first knew it, so different from today. Donald Cameron of Lochiel was my benign boss at Schroders in the late 1970s, when youngsters like me gave more attention to the Times crossword than to the next deal, unaware of the forces of change that would electrify London’s financial arena a few years later. Afflicted by multiple sclerosis, Donald returned to the Highlands cheerfully to fulfil the roles of clan chieftain and lord lieutenant from his mobility scooter: ‘the most loved man in these parts’, a neighbour tells me.

Likewise, a recent packed memorial service at St Luke’s in Chelsea heard how David ‘Chappers’ Chaplin overcame birth defects that left him with short arms and prosthetic legs, to become an ebullient private-client fund manager and the leading light of JO Hambro (now Waverton) Investment Management. His career began in 1971 with a job interview at the grand stockbrokers Rowe & Pitman, whose pipe-smoking senior partner Julian Martin Smith – from the school before the old school, as it were, and a Chaplin family friend – asked only three questions: ‘How are your parents?’, Had any good shooting this year?’ and ‘When can you start?’ Those were the days.

The miracle of watching a great string quartet perform

Joseph Haydn, it’s generally agreed, invented the string quartet. And having done so, he re-invented it: again and again. Take his quartet Op. 20, No. 2, of 1772 – the first item in the Takacs Quartet’s recital last week at the Wigmore Hall.

The cello propels itself forward and upward, then starts to warble like a bird on the wing. The viola sketches in a rudimentary bass line; the second violin – higher than the cello on paper, but actually playing at a lower pitch – shadows the melody in its flight. The first violin? Nothing: the leader (or so you might imagine) of the group is entirely silent until finally, blissfully, he isn’t. It’s the opposite of how a string quartet is supposed to begin, and it’s perfect. Haydn had completed his first really convincing quartet – cracked the formula, if you like – in 1769. Just three years later, left alone with Prince Esterhazy’s court musicians in a Hungarian swamp, he’d come further than some composers travel in a lifetime. 

The Takacs Quartet laid the whole miracle out there, plain and (deceptively) simple. Andras Fejer, the group’s cellist, is also its sole original member – the only survivor of the team that Gabor Takacs-Nagy assembled in Budapest in 1975.

But Takacs-Nagy’s successor as first violin, the Leamington-born Edward Dusinberre, has been in place for well over half the group’s existence, and by this stage of the game – when most aficionados would probably agree that the Takacs is the finest string quartet now performing anywhere in the world – their playing is seamless. Yet it’s the opposite of anodyne. Half the fun of seeing a string quartet playing live is watching the interpersonal dynamics on stage: decoding the body language, the little nods and sideways glances that hold it all together. 

There’s plenty of that with the Takacs Quartet. Fejer – the founding father, and (again, as you might think) the living bearer of all that tradition – sits calmly in the middle: undemonstrative, and playing with a mellow, amber tone. Dusinberre, at the opposite end of the ensemble, doesn’t exactly echo Fejer’s manner – a first violinist can hardly be expected to hold back – but he soars, gleaming above the fray, carrying himself with an assurance that an earlier age might have called aristocratic.

It’s the second violinist, Harumi Rhodes, who’s the livewire – dispelling any misguided notion that second fiddle is second best. She darts glances, she leans forward; at moments of high excitement she almost bounces right out of her chair. She plays off the group’s newest member, the viola player Richard O’Neill – who, like all the best quartet viola players, knows how to make his presence felt before you even notice that he’s entered the conversation. 

And then you close your eyes, and it’s as if all that life and all that individuality suddenly balances, merges and becomes one – one flow, one stream of sound in which the differences between these four artists don’t vanish, by any means, but fall into perspective: precision plus expression plus absolute naturalness and ease. That might sound a bit Zen, but perhaps that’s where we are now with string quartet playing at the highest level.

Historically, string quartets have not always been the healthiest professional environments. One ex-member called the post-war Smetana Quartet ‘a golden cage’, and the players of the Griller Quartet, notoriously, were barely on speaking terms. In Moscow, in 1945, the founding members of the Borodin Quartet pricked their fingers and signed their first contract in human blood. 

But we live in more egalitarian times, and whenever I’ve talked with 21st-century quartet players, it’s noticeable how well adjusted – how basically normal – they appear, compared with artists who’ve chosen the solitary path of the international soloist. The Pavel Haas Quartet recruited a new viola while playing five-a-side football; the members of the Dudok Quartet (a young Dutch ensemble) arrived for their interview on bicycles, bringing chocolate cake.

Significantly, many of the more interesting current violin soloists have formed their own quartet side-projects: like Tamsin Waley-Cohen’s Albion Quartet, and Alina Ibragimova’s Chiaroscuro Quartet. Clearly, quartet playing nourishes a certain kind of musician. I interviewed Dusinberre and Rhodes once; they were as perceptive as you’d imagine. But they also seemed – it has to be said – like a lot of fun.

Anyway, imagine that sense of flow – of perfection at play – sustained throughout Bartok’s Fifth Quartet and Ravel’s F major Quartet. You might suppose that Bartok without any audible technical struggle would be Bartok without teeth. I’m here to tell you that it’s as lucid and as life-affirming as Mozart. And Ravel: well, it’s all about that tension between classical refinement and vibrant sensuality, so you can probably join the dots there yourself. To misquote Kenneth Clark, I’m not sure how to define civilisation, but I think I can recognise it when I hear it.  

Basic, plodding and lacking any actual horror: Doctor Jekyll reviewed

Tis the season of horror, as it’s Halloween, which we celebrate in this house by turning off all the lights and pretending not to be in. (We look forward to it every year. It’s nice occasionally to go bed at around 5 p.m. and pretend not to be in.) But I thought I’d show willing by at least reviewing a horror film so it’s Doctor Jekyll, starring Eddie Izzard. It’s the latest from Hammer, which you didn’t know was still around, but is.

I have a fondness for these films as they were always on TV during my teenage years, with Peter Cushing creeping around some crypt, hammy and campy – ‘Good heavens, man! The lady you saw has been dead for 300 years!’ – rather than terrifying. Doctor Jekyll, however, is so basic and plodding that even I, squeamish as I am, was hoping a bludgeoning would happen soon. 

Hammer has changed hands quite a few times since its Vincent Price/Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee heyday – ‘I won’t be back…but something will!’ – and is now owned by the suitably named theatre impresario John Gore. Directed by Joe Stephenson, the film stars Scott Chambers as Rob, an ex-junkie who has just done time for a burglary. He has a baby daughter whom he has never seen, as she was born when he was in prison, and is sick in hospital, perhaps terminally.

You think the penal system is too soft in this country? Get this: one of the conditions of his parole is that even though his daughter may well be dying (leukaemia), he can’t visit her unless he has a stable job. This is why he is desperate to find work and hang on to it, and ends up as a carer for Dr Nina Jekyll. This promises to offer ‘a new twist’ to the tale, which, I suppose, amounts to Jekyll now being a woman, as played by Izzard who is ‘gender fluid’. Yet as this doesn’t feed into the story in any way, or bring any depth – I don’t want much depth; just a hint – it feels random rather than meaningful.

This Dr Jekyll is a reclusive pharmaceutical billionaire who lives in an isolated mansion where, in this instance, the (bad) paintings are of greyhounds with bloodied rabbits at their feet. Rob’s first encounter is with the stern, ice-cold housekeeper, played by Lindsay Duncan, who has now reached the stern, ice-cold housekeeper stage of her career. (Happens to us all; Mrs Danvers awaits every woman.)

Dr Jekyll has a blonde ponytail and walks with a limp and speaks obtusely and, gawd, it’s slow. The running time is only 90 minutes but for the first hour it’s just Rob pootling around the house and a few non-scary jump scares as drums drum and cellos thrum. If not a bludgeoning, could someone at least stub a toe? 

Dr Jekyll does, eventually, finally, reveal her murderous alter ego, Rachel Hyde, who appears when she smokes a cigarette that burns green at the end, but we’re also told she inherited this condition from her grandfather, the original Henry Jekyll, so which is it? Inherited, or some drug in the funny cigarette? I couldn’t make head or tail of it.

Towards the end it becomes a home-invasion yarn, as well as a body-possession one, and someone’s innards do splatter up a window pane – at last! – but by then I was in a bit of a coma. The dialogue is mostly rudimentary, and doesn’t mine any nostalgia beyond the retro titles. Chambers’ performance isn’t bad exactly, but his character is so damp and hapless you’ll want to bludgeon him to death yourself, while Izzard often favours the panto route. You’re better off staying at home while pretending not to be in. It’s a lot more fun.

Surprisingly addictive and heartwarming: Netflix’s Beckham reviewed

If you’re not remotely interested in football or celebrity, I recommend Netflix’s four-part documentary series Beckham. Yes, I know it’s about a famous footballer who happens also to be a celebrity and who, furthermore, is married to the famous model/celebrity/whatever who used to be in the world’s most famous girl band, the Spice Girls. But trust me, you’re going to be hooked.

One of the things that hooked me was the way it enables you to play catch-up on all the David and Victoria Beckham stories you pointedly ignored during the past three decades because, damn it, that pair were quite overexposed enough already without needing any of your attention wasted on whatever nonsense they’d got up to lately – Beckham’s goal, for example.

Previously my inexpert opinion on Beckham was that while he was probably a decent-ish footballer, he wasn’t nearly as good as the best foreign ones (Zidane, Ronaldo, etc). But then I watched the footage of the amazing – nay legendary, I now learn – goal he scored while a 21-year-old with Manchester United and realised: ‘No, hang on. Maybe some of the fuss was justified.’

The goal, against Wimbledon, was scored from the halfway line, which is unusual in football because by the time the ball has covered that distance there’s normally a goalie ready to stop it. Pele once tried this trick but never achieved it. Beckham succeeded because he’d been practising for it his whole life. Self-confessedly thick academically and with zero interests beyond football, young David had spent every spare hour that God sent playing with his ball in his Chingford garden and learning to curve it on target with unerring accuracy. Hence that film title Bend It Like Beckham. Hence his popularity with his teammates because, with corners and such like, he was particularly good at placing the ball either in the net or in exactly the spot where someone else could put it in the net.

So, not just a pretty face. And also, someone very sure of his talents, and happy to take the occasional calculated risk. The risk here was that if his cheeky gamble failed he would undoubtedly incur the wrath of his scary boss/surrogate father figure Alex Ferguson, the gum-chewing tyrant who wanted all his players to live like monks, play as a team and submit to his every command. Even years on, his former protégés talk about ‘the Manager’ with fear and reverence and terror that he might be lurking off camera waiting to storm in and bite their head off.

In the version of events presented here, Beckham was undone by his dedication to the beautiful, talented woman he’d fallen in love with when he’d first glimpsed her on the telly, and courted assiduously on long Porsche journeys, even if she could only see him for ten minutes. But Ferguson wanted goal-scoring machines, not besotted, distracted, tired Romeos who, when not canoodling with pop stars, were preening themselves in Brylcreem adverts. It was the beginning of the end for Beckham and Man U, which was hastened when Ferguson chucked a football boot at his head, requiring stitches.

Beckham felt more wanted at his next home, Real Madrid, where he was part of a super-team of superstar lads – known as Galacticos, including Figo, Ronaldo and Zidane – and lived his best life of quality footie, male bromance and possibly the odd bit on the side, including one Rebecca Loos. Posh, needless to say, wasn’t having it. America was much more her style, but unfortunately it was the one country in the world that didn’t do first-class football.

But it’s amazing how persuasive an intransigent wife and a deal supposedly worth $250 million can be. In return for having his mouth stuffed with gold and pleasing his missus, Beckham effectively agreed to be gelded and humiliated by signing up to LA Galaxy. This meant playing on rubbish pitches, with amateurish, ill-paid players who didn’t have the skill to take advantage of his glorious crosses. He must have felt like a unicorn penned in with retired Blackpool beach donkeys. I doubt the parties thrown for him by Tom Cruise and Will Smith quite compensated.

After a bit more to-ing and fro-ing, including a brief stint at AC Milan which reminded him what he had sacrificed, Beckham retires to his lovely home in the Cotswolds where he divides his time between beekeeping, eating delicious morsels he has cooked on his beloved grill and smooching with his adoring wife to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton singing ‘Islands In the Stream’, while their gorgeous, well-balanced, better-spoken children squirm lightly in the distance.

I’m sure some of this stuff is true. But how much you can’t be sure because the series was executive produced by the Beckhams, was made by a chap – Fisher Stevens – who is evidently a close friend and has been so carefully burnished and whitewashed that it has even gone to the trouble of showing faked, amended versions of the newspaper reports on David’s love affair, giving the impression that it may not have happened.

Still, it makes a jolly enjoyable fairy story with a heartwarming ending and a moral which says that if you put family first you’ll live happily ever after.

The case against re-recording albums 

In 2012, Jeff Lynne released Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra. Except it wasn’t. It was 11 new re-recordings of classic ELO songs – which isn’t the same thing at all. Lynne, bless him, believed that having gained more experience as a producer, he could now improve the songs that made him famous. ‘You know how to make it sound better than it did before,’ he said, ‘Because I have more knowledge… and technology.’ Sheesh. How wrong can one man be?

Pop music is all about the definitivearticle. Not only the bold prefix attached to its greatest practitioners – Beatles, Byrds, Wailers, Temptations, Fall, et al – but the notion of a defining recording of a song. The stage is the place for revision: to jam, change the words, the rhythm, the feel. The studio version, by contrast, is sacrosanct; these things are called ‘records’ for a reason, after all. They capture a moment by becoming a moment themselves, an aural photograph – sometimes sharp and clear, sometimes beguilingly out of focus. However much an artist might wish to recreate the original, or fix any perceived flaws, the results will always feel like Photoshop.

This week Taylor Swift continues the programme of recording new versions of her first six albums. She has got to 1989, for my money her best record, originally released in 2014. The planet’s biggest pop star has been up front about the reasons for this exhaustive and rather exhausting enterprise.

Swift signed to Big Machine Records in 2005, aged 15. By the time that contract expired in 2018, she had become a superstar yet Big Machine, not atypically, retained ownership of the master recordings of her albums. (Using her Big Time clout wisely, in her new contract with Republic Records, Swift secured ownership of all future masters.) Big Machine was sold to Ithaca Holdings, a private-equity group owned by music mogul Scooter Braun. Swift has no love for Braun, who manages her nemesis, Kanye West. The feeling is reciprocal. When Braun sold her recordings to another company, Shamrock Holdings, for $300 million in 2019, a reported stipulation of the sale was that Shamrock could not sell them back to Swift.

Swift wants ownership of her work, which seems reasonable, but is unable to get it. Instead, she is recording her first six albums again – sweetened with copious unreleased tracks – and encouraging fans, radio stations, streaming platforms and film and TV companies to default to the new versions rather than the old.

This, in effect, is the law of the corporate music jungle playing out as a personal beef. Fans cheer on Swift for taking a principled stand – which requires them to buy the same material for a second time – while (mostly) preferring the originals they fell in love with.

The implied premise of Swift’s re-recording programme – that the original versions are somehow tainted, and the new ones more authentic – contravenes the unspoken agreement an artist makes with their audience. The song is not the record, and the record is not the song. The record is a mythical ‘other’. Within those three-minute symphonies, ‘every scratch, every click, every heartbeat’, as Elvis Costello put it in ‘45’, is imbued with meaning. Poke around with the time-space continuum at your peril.

This is not a new thing. Frank Sinatra and Chuck Berry re-recorded their old material for contractual reasons. If you bought best-of albums by the Cure and Kate Bush in the mid-1980s, you would find versions of their earliest hits – ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ respectively – with a new vocal replacing the old one.

This kind of revisionism has simply become increasingly common since the bottom fell out of the record market, and licensing became more significant to an artist’s income stream. A couple of years after Lynne, Blondie re-recorded their biggest hits on Blondie (4)0 Ever. Having laboured under a terrible record deal in their earlier days, this was an attempt to get new versions out there that might make them some money.

Debbie Harry might reason that the average Spotify user doesn’t much care which version of ‘Sunday Girl’ they are hearing, and she might well be right. Pop is undergoing a process of classical music-fication. Analogous to the demise of the physical single, there has been a shift away from the idea of a definitive reading of a piece of music. If you can’t hold the damn thing, it could be anything. Technology has made it easier to cut and paste, to elide past into present with barely a glitch. AI will finish the deal. Plausible versions of classic songs can now be created by a bot. In time, fewer people than you might think will care, or even notice.

The Guardian’s questionable Holocaust article

Oh dear. The world’s wokest media outlet is at it again. When they’re not moralising over artists or misattributing quotes, there’s nothing more the Guardian enjoys then a ritual round of Israel-bashing. A vintage example has been offered up today on its website. Barely a fortnight after more than 1,400 Israelis were butchered by Hamas terrorists, it has published an article claiming that Israel is misusing the history of the Holocaust.

According to Israeli academic Raz Segal, President Biden was wrong to reference the historic suffering of the Jews in his response to the attack of 7/10. Segal argues that the ‘weaponisation of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep’ and that the American President’s words constitute ‘a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state.’

Segal concludes his 1,400-word spiel with ‘a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli bombing campaign.’ The article concludes with the claim that ‘the history of the Holocaust… points to the importance of accountability.’

I’m not convinced Thomas Heatherwick is the best person to be discussing boring buildings

Architects are often snobby about – and no doubt jealous of – the designer Thomas Heatherwick, who isn’t an actual architect yet still manages to wangle important building commissions. And he knows this. In his documentary for BBC Radio 4, Building Soul, where he examines what he calls the ‘blandemic’ in today’s architecture, he asks to interview fellow Spectator writer Jonathan Meades, who responds: ‘The last person who should be doing a series on urbanism is a designer.’ Heatherwick wears this as a badge of honour.

Indeed, qualifying as an architect is no guarantee of quality – check out the past nominations for the Carbuncle Cup, the now defunct prize for the ugliest building in Britain. Some of the best constructions, moreover, have been built by unqualified architects. Look at the work of Italian maestro Carlo Scarpa, who, in an act of poetic justice, redesigned the Venetian courtroom where he had faced trial for practising architecture without a licence.

But by focusing on this sideshow – reductively blaming everything on a culture of complacent and mis-educated architects – Heatherwick’s documentary misses the point. He almost completely ignores the power of the actual boring stuff: finances, procurement, planning, building regulations and law. This is what the qualified architects he employs have trained years for and have to navigate on a daily basis.

Heatherwick shares research from ‘neuro-aesthetics’, urging us to follow the science proving that curves are more stimulating; that blandly designed façades cause stress. His interview with a Syrian architect even suggests that relocating the people of Homs ‘from the ancient city into bland tower blocks’ was ‘a major leading factor’ of war. While fixating on the actual buildings and not, say, the housing and social policies that give rise to them is somewhat tendentious, Heatherwick rightfully draws attention to the psychological impact of architecture.

His concern with the combined cost to wellbeing, environment and planetary resources of the many boring buildings that are unloved and prematurely demolished is a reasonable point. But this argument is perhaps not best made by the designer of The Vessel in New York, his disastrous, extravagantly pointless 16-storey staircase to nowhere. I wouldn’t labour the point about architecture’s impact on mental health had I too designed a building that had to be closed after it became a suicide hotspot.

Heatherwick also takes aim at the ‘cult of modernism’, especially Le Corbusier, the Franco-Swiss architect, the alleged cult leader. He is blamed for infecting architects and planners with dogmas that demanded they reject architectural history, abolish streets and build in straight lines. Heatherwick is not wrong in highlighting Le Corbusier’s advocacy of those ideas, albeit in his early career writings, which he consistently disregarded (can one not forgive the follies of youth?). Le Corbusier was, however, a furious self-promoter. And it’s telling that Heatherwick, who has perhaps fallen for the fawning press coverage that named him ‘the Da Vinci of our times’, has also fallen for this ‘great man theory’ of architectural history.

All this self-flattery overestimates the power of the architect and planner. When he speaks with Simon Jenkins about how Covent Garden faced being flattened in order to make space for a dual carriageway, and brainwashed planners get the blame, it feels a tad trite. A much earlier plan, devised by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire to plough baroque boulevards through the historic City of London, failed not for the architect’s lack of trying. It didn’t succeed because landowners had already rebuilt along existing medieval boundaries, and the cost of acquiring their land was too high.

The reason why postwar planners and architects could do what Wren couldn’t, and flatten swathes of Britain in the name of obsolescence, was thanks to new planning laws that unbridled their worst instincts. Planners gained not only exclusive discretion to permit what was built but also unprecedented powers to forcibly buy up property at existing land values. If Le Corbusier is to be blamed, so must Clement Attlee’s Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

On cost, Heatherwick pleads for limited budgets to be spent better with the blissful naivety of someone who’s only ever been commissioned to design flagship buildings and not social housing. It smacks of hypocrisy when his firm and groups associated with his firm earned £2.8 million for the non-existent Garden Bridge folly. He showcases the work of Amin Taha (whom I interviewed earlier this month for The Spectator) as an example of an architect who adeptly sidesteps constraints to create fascinating buildings. Yet this is what makes Taha’s work exceptional: it takes outstanding willpower, imagination and labour to cut costs, while spinning the multiple plates of aesthetic concerns, profitability, placating planners’ whimsical tastes and complying with the ever-growing tangle of red tape.

In other words, while building less boringly isn’t impossible, the system is rigged against it. If Heatherwick really wants to stop the ‘blandemic’, perhaps he should apply his much-vaunted original thinking to reforming the actual boring stuff – starting with the planning system. Maybe then, architects wouldn’t need to flatten the curves.

Why did this brilliant Irish artist fall off the radar? 

Sir John Lavery has always had a place in Irish affections. His depiction of his wife, Hazel, as the mythical figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan, which appeared on the old ten shilling and subsequently on the watermark of the Irish pound notes, meant, as the joke went, that every Irishman kept her close to his heart. He was indeed Irish – born in Belfast – but was at home in Scotland, and was the best known of the spirited group of painters called the Glasgow Boys. Yet he lived most of his life in London, was friends with Winston Churchill (they took a painting trip together) and also with Michael Collins, the Irish Nationalist, with whom Hazel was, ahem, close. If ever there were a man who embodied the interconnectedness of Britain and Ireland, it was Lavery.

But France loomed large too. He trained in Paris, hero-worshipped the naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage and was part of the cosmopolitan group of artists who congregated at Grez-sur-Loing in the 1880s, where every laundry maid must have been stalked by men with canvases. There’s a lovely picture by Lavery of ‘The Bridge at Grès’ (1901), showing the play of light on a stretch of the river.

That painting comes at the start of a splendid exhibition of his work at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, which, appropriately, will then travel to Belfast and Edinburgh. It’s called Lavery. On Location, and there were a bewildering number of locations – France, Ireland, Scotland, Tangiers (where he wintered for decades), Germany, Switzerland and, at the end of his life, New York and California. The man who began as a naturalist with impressionist ways – painting outdoors, obsessed with the play of light on surfaces and focusing on everyday subjects – ended painting skyscrapers, Shirley Temple and young women sunbathing in Palm Springs on the eve of the second world war.

The thing about Lavery was that he started poor, very poor – and he never glamorised poverty. He was orphaned when he was three and spent his early years on his uncle’s farm in Northern Ireland, where the little Catholic boy learned to run from the Lambeg drums of the Protestant neighbours. He was then sent to Glasgow, where he was even poorer – he later said he took bread left for the pigeons. But there he took up the chance of art lessons offered by the philanthropic Haldane Academy for working men (the forerunner of the Glasgow School of Art). Although childhood poverty meant he was keen to earn what he could, he plainly also felt at ease with working people – see the sprightly ‘Phil the Fluter’ whom he painted in Kerry in 1924. 

When you think of Lavery you think portraiture, often willowy women like his American wife, which is probably why he’s fallen off the radar; he paints in continuity with the past (he spent time copying Velazquez) and can’t be numbered among the moderns. But so what? He’s brilliant at capturing light and motion; his North African painting resembles the Spanish master of light, Joaquin Sorolla. In this show you see the sheer scope of his activity: landscapes, the Glasgow dockyards, war work – he was belatedly made a war artist towards the end of the Great War – mountain scenes (there’s a terrific vertical view of the Jungfrau), dancers in Tangiers, the aesthetic interiors of American millionaires. 

He evolved over time, embracing modernity as he found it, but his first influence in France was formative. Bastien-Lepage, whom he met once, advised him to ‘select a person – watch him – then put down as much as you can remember. Never look twice… you will soon get complete action’. He had an astonishing ability to capture people in motion, and you see as much in ‘Played!!’ (see below), an 1885 picture of a young woman in straw hat and flounces returning a thundering serve on a tennis court.

Although the exhibition focuses on landscapes and people in places, there’s plenty for fans of the portraits, including a wonderful one with his only child, Eileen, his arm protectively around the back of her chair, while the pretty child gazes out, unperturbed. Close by is a painting of her mother, Lavery’s first wife, ‘An Irish Girl’ (1890), whom Lavery met when she was a London flower girl – the family claimed that this inspired Shaw’s Pygmalion. He married her thinking she was Irish and called Kathleen MacDermott and was taken aback after her death to discover that she was Welsh and called Annie Evans. Either way, her tubercular beauty was striking.

A Radio 3 doc that contains some of the best insults I’ve ever heard

A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the programme on the early music revolution were discussing the backlash they experienced in the 1970s while reviving period-style instruments and techniques. Soprano Dame Emma Kirkby remembered one critic complaining that listening to her performance was ‘as about as interesting as eating an entire meal of plain yoghurt’. Another critic, writing in Gramophone, pronounced the strings of the new ensembles ‘as beautiful as period dentistry’.

Those strings were mostly made of animal guts. There was, as one of the musicians interviewed recalled, ‘a DIY atmosphere’ to the movement, which developed alongside a spate of others in 1973. A fresh interest in medieval and renaissance music and historical treatises had spawned an appetite for ‘authenticity’. Singers turned to the Tudor-centric Clerkes of Oxenford for inspiration. Other musicians were awakened to the folly of making 18th-century music sound like 19th-century music by using metal strings. Their solution was to do away with modern instruments and excessive vibrato and plumb the depths of a more prosaic playbook.

To many professionals, this represented little more than ‘pointless archaeology’, for the results were seldom sparkling. Listening back, one of the members of the newly formed Academy of Ancient Music confessed that their sound was ‘a bit ropey’ but had ‘a certain dash and pizzazz’. To a conservatoire-trained ear it was little more than ‘mouse music’. Imagine the critics’ annoyance when the mouse-musicians scored a Decca LP.

Listening to the interview-rich programme, presented by a jolly yet unobtrusive Sir Nicholas Kenyon, it was clear that we were meant to come away thinking this movement hugely revolutionary. But was it not inevitable that gut-strings would enjoy a renaissance, as fashions changed?

Still, the programme was hugely entertaining. The bitchiness of the critics and holier-than-thou nature of the retorts of the historicising musicians had me smiling throughout. It was all very well for sceptics to frown upon the newcomers as besandalled brown-rice eaters, but the newcomers could simply look down at their gut-strings and say: ‘If they were good enough for Bach, they are good enough for us.’

Bach is apparently a favourite among the bee community. In Five Cellos: Lost and Found, also on Radio 3, musician Kate Kennedy played some Bach on a cello in which some 400,000 bees have taken up residence. We had to take her word for it, but as she began Bach’s First Cello Suite, the bees froze like a rapt concert audience. They have been inhabiting the instrument on a Nottinghamshire estate ever since an apiarist-physicist, Martin Bencsik, invited them in. Their own playing isn’t up to much – as the wind blew through the instrument it sounded like microphone interference – but they seemed to enjoy being played to. Some nice relaxation after a long working day.

This was one of the lighter episodes in the series of five which aired in The Essay slot last week. The theme of ‘lost cellos’ led us to some truly haunting locations. In episode one, Kennedy travelled to a Lithuanian ‘fort of death’ where Jewish-Hungarian musician Pal Hermann was killed during the second world war. The story of his lost Gagliano cello was extraordinary. I won’t spoil it here, only note that it is still missing and bears an unusual inscription, ego anima musica sum (‘I am the soul of music’), on its side. In another episode, Kennedy interviewed Auschwitz-survivor and cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 98, who as a child was recruited to the camp orchestra.

At the beginning of the series, and at passing moments throughout, Kennedy reflected on her own life with the cello and the sense of loss she feels at being limited in the ways she can now play it due to injury. The concept of an instrument as an appendage is so familiar that it felt clichéd until each story was told in full.

Kennedy interviewed both Pal Hermann’s daughter and Lasker-Wallfisch, whose voice, we were told, is a ‘low Marlene Dietrich mezzo’. The decision to report their words rather than play the recordings was understandable. It would be inadequate to call their stories moving. If you come to the series doubting the importance of music and the inseparability, as Kennedy described it, of musician and instrument, these accounts will irreparably change your mind.

If only Caryl Churchill’s plays were as thrillingly macabre as her debut

The first play by the pioneering feminist Caryl Churchill has been revived at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Owners, originally staged in 1972, feels very different from Churchill’s later work and it recalls the apprentice efforts of Brecht who started out writing middle-class comedies tinged with satirical anger.

Churchill sets her play in the cut-throat London property market where prices are soaring and tenants are apt to be evicted if they can’t cover sudden rent rises. Marion is an estate agent who secretly buys a house occupied by her former lover Alec who is married to Lisa. Their third child is on the way. Marion hatches an evil plan to kick the family out and to claim Alec back as they sink into financial ruin. A secondary plot develops when Marion attempts to adopt Lisa’s new baby so that she can pass it on to her husband, Clegg, a psychotic butcher who longs for a son to inherit his business. This baffling and over-complex narrative is very carefully paced and the bizarre elements are set out in manageable pieces so that everything makes sense.

Offbeat comedy lubricates the moving parts. Marion employs a hopeless geek, Worsley, who longs to kill himself but keeps getting it wrong. He slashes his wrists and survives. He takes overdoses of pills without result. His many attempts to gas himself come to nothing. He spots an advert for the Samaritans and, misunderstanding the nature of their mission, asks them to send an adviser to facilitate his suicide. The mood of the piece is cruel, amoral and thrillingly macabre. Clegg, for example, plots to murder Marion by shooting her in the head or by starting a fire that may kill Alec, Lisa and their babies. No one raises any ethical objections to this plan. Lisa is raped by Clegg but she barley notices the moral niceties of their union because she’s preoccupied with keeping hold of Alec and her kids.

The characters bear a strong resemblance to the Cockney grotesques created by Joe Orton in the 1960s. And the quirky dialogue sounds like the sort of chitchat that Alan Bennett is always overhearing at bus stops. Clegg is jealous. He fears that Marion practises dancing with unknown male partners. ‘Dancing can be dangerous,’ he says, ‘and needs to be watched.’ When Lisa gets her face slapped she reacts by swearing violently, which Clegg finds offensive. ‘I don’t like to see a woman use language.’

Cat Fuller’s set features a row of nine front doors, squashed up shoulder to shoulder like a gang of thugs or a line of policemen. This surreal touch is not hard to interpret. Laura Doddington gives a whirlwind performance as the vicious and yet curiously likeable Marion, whose desire for children has been diverted into a crazed lust for Alec.

At the play’s close she delivers a visionary speech about empires being founded on heaps of blood-drenched corpses, but this is a rare deviation from the play’s central preoccupations. The themes it tackles are universal: love, greed, ambition, parenthood and families. Had Churchill continued to write in this accessible, crowd-pleasing vein she might have become as popular as Mike Leigh or Carla Lane (whose BBC sitcoms were watched by millions). Instead, she succumbed to the praise of crosspatch feminists who annexed her talent and ruined what they claimed to admire.

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet about Shakespeare’s son who died in childhood has been lavishly adapted for the stage. The central character is Anne Hathaway, whose family name was Agnes not Anne. Apart from that, we learn no new information about her at all. The production is dominated by its sumptuous visuals. Every character, from the milkmaid to the forest urchin, is decked out in a brand-new costume tailored by the RSC. Since the setting is Stratford-upon-Avon, the actors speak with Ozzy Osbourne accents (although some don’t bother). The key location is Shakespeare’s newly refurbished kitchen-diner, a miraculous confection of honey-coloured joists that looks like a million-pound barn conversion. Alas, the show itself is a thumb-twiddling dud. The dramatist, Lolita Chakrabarti, defames Anne as a surly hysteric who wastes her time cooking, gossiping, preparing herbs, minding the sick and scolding the young. The emotional mood in her lovely kitchen is relentlessly sour. The women constantly swear, scream, slap and biff one another.

To avoid all this brutality Shakespeare wisely scoots off to London to make his fortune – although he pops back for Christmas and funerals. Anne has three children and each birth scene involves volcanic eruptions of petulant screaming. ‘I can’t do this,’ she bellows as her waters break yet again. ‘This is unreasonable.’ When Hamnet dies, Shakespeare collapses with grief but Anne isn’t convinced. ‘Where’s your despair?’ she yells in his face. The Bard beetles off to London, pronto. Who wouldn’t?

No one should trust the camera in the age of AI

This war is being fought with pictures more than words. The poignant shots, often selfies, of families, children, even babies, who were to become victims of Hamas butchery, the wailing mothers and children on stretchers in Gaza, the missile strikes and collapsed concrete buildings. We know politicians on all sides lie, but photography is a mechanical process; these pictures must, surely, be the truth?

Almost all these photos have been taken with mobile phones. To a rough approximation, everybody now has a smartphone. There are said to be seven billion smartphones in use around the world – there are only eight billion people. (Sales of what we used to know as cameras have crashed by 85 per cent.)

On these devices, it is said, 93 million selfies are taken daily. People don’t, on the whole, manipulate smartphone shots, but they do post them online as faint slivers of their own truth in an otherwise manipulated world. ‘These are me,’ say the photos, even if the person has already been riddled with bullets.

Some smartphone pictures are grisly images of the aftermath of violence. These are ways of circumventing the reluctance of the old, familiar media to show the most graphic images of war. Precisely because of their forbidden quality, we feel these must be the truth.

But never such innocence again. I asked Tim Marshall, war-hardened correspondent and distinguished author, about the truth or otherwise of all this. ‘This is not the first conflict in which mobile phone pictures have featured, but it’s the first in which so much horror has been live-streamed or uploaded and seen by so many.’

But after this war is over, the horror, innocence and honesty will be lost. ‘This may also be among the last conflicts in which images, such as those of the brutality on show on 7 October, can be confidently believed. We will soon need seriously high-tech tools to tell us what is real and what is AI-generated.’

Technology cheats, and increasingly often simply lies. Sometimes benignly, as in art photography. This was most spectacularly and well meaningly demonstrated by Boris Eldagsen when he won a photography competition. He declined the prize because this was not a photograph, it was an AI-generated image.

But spend a little time on the AI-image generator Midjourney and you will see the less benign possibilities of this new tech. Midjourney produces images on demand. When the writer Sean Thomas was recently playing around on the site, attempting to create plausible AI fakes, he discovered something quite disturbing. Among the verbal prompts that the platform was offering – prompts that indicate what images other users have been asking Midjourney to create – he came across the following:

a colour photo of a single child sitting in destroyed house rubble in Palestine, a hauntingly beautiful portrait capturing the resilience and innocence of a child amidst the devastation…

‘Who is asking for an image like this? And why?’ wondered Thomas. ‘Could it be someone hoping to create images that they can later pass off as real?’ The ‘photo’ that this prompt elicited was almost entirely convincing.

In truth, however, photography has never been wholly innocent. In the days of film, photographers were adept at darkroom alterations. These quiet enhancements, improvements on the limitations of the cameras of the time, seemed harmless enough. More dubious was the way some shots were staged, turning them into theatre.

Robert Capa’s sensational Spanish Civil War photo of a soldier being shot – legs crumpling, arm with rifle flung wide – was said to be the most moving image of the 20th century. It is now generally agreed to have been staged. The soldier did die but elsewhere and in less heroic circumstances.

Photographers have been cheating since the camera’s infancy. As far back as the American Civil War photos have been fabricated, usually by shifting corpses and cannon balls around to make a more satisfying composition than mere violent death ever could.

Definitely staged was Joe Rosenthal’s photo of marines hoisting the US flag in 1945 on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. The flag was certainly raised but Rosenthal later rearranged the soldiers into more thrilling postures, a victorious image that has been remade for postage stamps and sculptures.

The point about these shots is that they were intended to look real. One entirely forgivable exception is a manipulation by  our greatest living war photographer, Sir Don McCullin. In 1968 he took a picture of a dead Vietnamese soldier with his possessions – bullets, photographs, etc – arranged around him. Though clearly posed, it was also a very effective expansion of the idea of death. No manipulated heroism here, rather something far more terrible: the now meaningless detritus of a human life. ‘Everything matters,’ McCullin once told me, ‘everything I look at.’

Other manipulations are simply intended to impress. Nobody emerges from a fashion photographer’s studio looking as they do in life; lighting, make-up and software turn them into idealised versions of themselves. Anything but the truth. ‘The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph,’ said the studio photographer Richard Avedon, ‘it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.’

We have now moved on even from that excess. Teenagers apply make-up and put on just the right clothes in order to take selfies designed to catch the attention of an effectively infinite audience on Instagram. Here is a further loss of innocence, the do-it-yourself glamour shot.

‘That taking a picture of yourself,’ writes Will Storr in his book Selfie, ‘and displaying it to the world for comments and likes has become such a lasting phenomenon says a great deal about who we have become.’

To say that photography has lost its innocence – an innocence born of the photographic genius of Julia Margaret Cameron or Eugène Atget – is to wildly understate the issue. From Cameron we can be fairly sure that this is what Tennyson looked like; from Atget that this really is Paris.

‘The Daguerreotyped plate is infinitely (we use the word advisedly) more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe. Alfred Stieglitz, the supreme photographic aesthete, went even further: ‘In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.’ In war such subtlety is liable to go unnoticed.

The manipulative process, then, far from being a modern development, is, in fact, a throwback. Current photography, in becoming entirely plastic and malleable, is moving back to the realm of painting, an aestheticised interpretation of the subject.

But to go back to the war, does this mean we have to accept that photographs should never be mistaken for the truth? And that we must rely instead on AI to establish the facts of the case? Artificially intelligent software is now available that will detect AI manipulation of photographs – robots in pursuit of robots. As Tim Marshall says, only high-tech tools will lead us out of the confusion.

Or will it? Israel produced photographic proof that they did not attack the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza; others, with equally sophisticated-sounding technology, claim to have proved the opposite. Nothing was resolved so we are condemned to believe nothing more than what we want to believe, a grim and deadly prospect.

Deadly because those family selfies, those wailing mothers, those blood-soaked babies will continue to intensify our feelings, to confirm our prejudices. Competing AIs will make opposing claims on the truth. Justifications for slaughter will always be available. The AI gods will never ease our pain. ‘We will only compound the horrors,’ wrote Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, ‘if we pretend to be instantly certain about them.’

So perhaps we should give in to the confusion. Welcome the triumph of what the artist Hito Steyerl has called the ‘poor image’. Embrace the unreliable and unverifiable. Perhaps a world in which the photograph is liberated from performing the role of conveying fact is a better one: more humble, less judgmental. Less dangerous too. War after all thrives on certainty. If no photo can be trusted, no photo can be exploited.

The death of trust doesn’t mean the death of photography. All those Renaissance crucifixions or the Goya horrors are as terrible as they are beautiful. But they do not claim to be the literal truth. Perhaps, in the end, journalistic photographs – or whatever they are called in the future – will just have to be similarly accepted as possible truths and photojournalists, like painters, will become image-makers rather than seekers after documentary fact. This is perhaps not such a terrible fate.

Did Sir Keir mislead a mosque?

In his eagerness to stand with Israel, it seems Sir Keir might have slipped up. For a fortnight now Labour has been rowing about his comments in an LBC interview in which Starmer seemed to justify a water and electricity blockade of Gaza. Since then, it’s been damage control galore, amid an exodus of outraged councillors quitting the party in disgust. Starmer is due to meet Muslim MPs today to discuss their concerns about all this.

The Keirleaders will just be hoping that today’s pow-wow goes better than Starmer’s previous peace mission. On Sunday he visited a mosque before sharing a selection of HQ-approved images of him shaking hands and flashing smiles, along with a tweet declaring that ‘I was grateful to hear from the Muslim community of the South Wales Islamic Centre. I repeated our calls for all hostages to be released, more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, for the water and power to be switched back on, and a renewed focus on the two state solution.’

Unfortunately, not all agree with Starmer about the purpose of his visit and his subsequent post. For furious members of the South Wales Islamic Centre have now published an open letter in which they claim that the leader had ‘gravely misrepresented our congregants and the nature of the visit’ in his tweets, which it said ‘put [the centre] and the wider Muslim community into disrepute.’ Steerpike put all this to Labour’s overactive press office but, alas, they declined to provide a comment.

It’s not even the first time that Starmer has blundered on a visit to a place of worship. Two years ago he took a ‘totally unacceptable’ trip to a controversial church that LGBT campaigners had criticised. Forget the comms, perhaps it’s the ops team that needs an overhaul…