Lebedev: ‘You blew my cover!’

Lord Lebedev, the proprietor of The Evening Standard, has been using the paper to wage his own ‘major inquiry’ into free speech. ‘I’ve donned my body armour and I am ready,’ he wrote in an article launching the campaign.

One of Lebedev’s free-speech interviewees was Azealia Banks, the ranty singer. According to Lord Leb, Banks occupies ‘an increasingly rarefied place in the pop pantheon: that of a woman who says it like it is.’ 

She certainly made good on that claim. In a post-interview social media tirade she called Lebedev by turns ‘a homosexual,’ ‘a Gay Party Boy,’ ‘Evegghead cornball’ and a ‘wannabe James Bond but really serving nothing more than Austin Powers.’ 

In this interests of cutting to the chase, I asked Lebedev – a man who Private Eye routinely refers to as ‘two beards’ – whether there is any substance to her claims. ’OMG AZEALIA YOU BLEW MY F**ING COVER!!!’ he replies. 

Banks also claimed Lord Lebedev, 43, was ‘getting a f**king liquid cheek lift on the Zoom call.’ ‘He was really in there getting the Lady Gaga Born This Way elf style pointy collagen cheek injections during the call,’ she said. 

To this, Lebedev impishly responds: ‘She may be interested to know I was also getting penis enlargement injections out of camera shot.’ 

How’s that for free speech in action? Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation, to give him his full title, seems to get kick out of being mocked by famous people. Despite Azaelia Banks’s rude rant, he says about the singer: ‘She answered pretty much every question I had, and even ones I didn’t… I find it interesting how she seems to have transcended cancel culture, by being so facetious that people can’t keep up with her gibberish spoken at great speed. She’s outplayed cancel culture at its own game.’

Has Banks’ kickback not put him off? ‘There were no surprises – on the call, at least. She was consistent with what I expected from her, which was a rollercoaster.’ 

In his interview with Banks, the pair discuss guns, Trump’s 2024 presidential bid and big tech. Lebedev is generally very good at enlisting celebrities to help support his newspaper’s campaigns and charitable endeavours: Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson once joined him for a sleepover to raise awareness of homeless veterans, and singer Elton John once shaved off Lebedev’s beard for Comic Relief. 

Usually the slebs speak kindly about Lebedev in return for the exposure. But Banks didn’t seem to appreciate being weaponised in his war on cancel culture: ‘No real politician on todays date with two major wars happening would embarrass themselves by dragging up some LATE 2016 ass discourse about “cancel culture,”’ she said. 

But Lebedev seems almost touchingly committed to his cause célèbre. 

‘Fear has made people think twice before they speak their minds. Social media has become a space that enables extreme abuse as well, because faced with the risk of being sued, sacked and stung, many no longer feel comfortable emitting a basic opinion, even in a private space. People don’t know what they can and can’t say anymore. Though the narrative around cancel culture peaked some years ago, it still hangs like a dark cloud and permeates the culture at large. At The Standard, we want to see the tide turning.’ 

Although he has many causes — Londoners will have read about his unrelenting desire to save the elephants — his passion for free speech is clear. In 2012, he arrived at the Leveson inquiry carrying with him copies of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and John Milton’s Areopagitica, a speech made in 1644 on the liberty of unlicensed printing. At the time he said: ‘I have spent over £75m of Lebedev money over the last three years funding the Evening Standard and the Independent, so it’s really expensive, it’s a really expensive element of democracy that needs to be preserved at all costs.” 

Lebedev, who also owns the online-only The Independent, bought the Evening Standard with his oligarch father, Alexander, in 2009. Alexander Lebedev, the former KGB intelligence officer, is no longer involved in the titles. 

Lebedev’s other major shareholder in The Independent is Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel, an investor from Saudi Arabia. 

I ask Lord Lebedev what he thinks is the biggest threat to free speech. ‘I would say self-censorship. It’s almost worse than censorship because we enforce it upon ourselves. And it’s far more widespread because it filters into the private sphere, beyond the court of public opinion. The fear of being singled out is paralysing, and we now live in a society where that is too often the norm.’ 

Cancel culture, he says, ‘has existed since forever: Ancient Rome had damnatio memoriae, a practice by which they would erase the memory of an individual. With our enquiry at the Standard, we’ve sought to explore how that phenomenon has creeped back into existence. I’ve just noticed in the past ten years, how this has made people less joyful. People have less fun. Friends who used to be exuberant and confident are now less open. We have lost our mojo.’ 

Lebedev himself seems to have regained his mojo somewhat. He has just hosted his beloved theatre awards at Claridges for the first time since the pandemic. In his publication’s post- event coverage he was, as is customary, pictured in a comically large number of the photographs from the night, beaming alongside his famous friends, from Elton John to Sir Ian McKellen, with whom he owns a pub. 

And he has continued to press on with those free speech interviews, the most recent of which was another front-pager with neuroscientist philosopher Sam Harris. Has Banks’ kickback not put him off? ‘She is outrageous and, sometimes, outrageously funny,’ he says of Banks. ‘There were certainly some lighter moments during the interview, but there were no surprises. She was consistent with what I expected from her, which was a rollercoaster.’ 

Banks, meanwhile, has accused him of ‘relishing each and every opportunity to throw shade at trans women under the guise of “free speech”. 

‘You and all of the idiots making censorship and cancel culture seem like this tyrannical thing is because you simply want the right to spew pretentious and irrelevant shit about other adult’s sex lives, when you cannot even live truly in your own,’ she raged.

Lebedev, you sense, will no doubt just be pleased that someone is talking about his campaign. And about him. It’s a good job he donned that body armour. 

Mary Sue, I hate you!

Christmas means different things to different people; for Mary Sue, it will be yet another excuse to queen it over her friends. Her Christmas pudding will have been made from scratch, her carefully curated tree decorations will tell myriad stories of a perfect home life, her tasteful National Trust Christmas cards will have been sent out on 1 December. To queen it over her acquaintances, enemies and admirers, rather – for Mary Sues have no friends. They’re far too awful.

Do you know a Mary Sue – a self-adoring paragon of virtue who can only ever admit to faults which are actually boasts in disguise? Mary Sues are ‘perfectionists’ or ‘too passionate’ – but never, ever lazy or liars, envious or spiteful. In job interviews, asked for their worst quality, they’ll simper ‘I’m too conscientious’. Other giveaways are ‘I’ve only made one huge mistake in my life – I once thought I was wrong about something, but it turned out I wasn’t’ and ‘My fault is that I tell it like I see it – I’ll say it to your face, not behind your back’ and ‘My greatest weakness is my sensitivity.’ The words they use most about themselves are ‘kind’ and ‘empath’ – about others, ‘unkind’ and ‘narcissist’. They’re that friend you’re thinking of letting go because they can’t seem to give their opinion on anything from Monopoly to monogamy without delivering a mini-lecture; they use the words ‘as part of a loving, committed relationship’ so much, so sanctimoniously that they make you want to run out and join a dogging community before going to live in a free-love orgy-house. Mary Sues are that annoying.

Occasionally men can be Mary Sues too; one thinks of Prince Andrew saying that he kept seeing the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein as it was the ‘honourable’ thing to do or Saint Gary ‘Gandhi’ Lineker saying anything. But they’re far less common, as virtue is encouraged and prized more in women than men; in male heroes, their vices are generally absorbed into what goes towards making up the desirable bad boy trope. A man can be both a hero and a cad – see James Bond and numerous others – but a woman cannot, hence the Mary Sues willingness to make an unaware fool of herself by presenting an idealised facade.

So most famous real-life Mary Sues are female – and they’re quite a varied bunch. Many Labour women – Yvette Cooper, Lisa Nandy, Stella Creasy, Jess Phillips – seem more determined to demonstrate their #Bekind credentials than make themselves unpopular by actually standing up for women in every arena from toilets to trophies. Holly Willoughby, before Queue-gate. Teresa May, running through a wheat field was the worst thing she ever did! Gwyneth Paltrow, the Mary Sue pin-up poster girl. But the biggest Mary Sue of all is Meghan Markle. In the book Finding Freedom, her Groom of the Stool Omid Scobie records breathlessly:

that Meghan’s willingness to help others and her drive to excel meant she often was deemed ‘fake’ by classmates at school who felt it was impossible for anyone to be that ‘perfect’… a good friend of Meghan’s called her Grace Under Fire, because despite whatever pressure she was under she didn’t fall apart… not partying like most of her normal college kids, her friends would never run into Meg, as they called her, at a bar in the middle of the week. Friday nights, when her sorority sisters were all going out to parties, Meg was headed to professors’ houses to babysit… extremely organised, Meghan immediately impressed Harry with her packing skills. She has always taken pride in being a great packer – going as far as layering dryer sheets in between her clothes to keep them smelling fresh.

We’re not worthy! I became aware of Mary Sue Syndrome quite recently when a Facebook friend messaged me that I was ‘the least Mary Sue writer ever’ on the occasion of my re-posting an account of a trip to Amsterdam in 2017 which I wrote for this magazine. I could see his point; there are many of what I think of as faux-confessional writers around but, whether it’s an account of a bad romance or a fertility failure, these hackettes always emerge as plucky little heroines, more sinned against than sinning. In the interests of being interesting – a far more desirable goal for me as a writer and a person than being popular – I painted a truly monstrous if accurate pen-portrait of myself in the Amsterdam essay; being very vain (a sin a Mary Sue would never confess to) I was eager to read about this awful type which I was not.

According to Wikipedia, Mary Sue has her origin in a 1973 story by Paula Smith, the heroine of which was one Lieutenant Mary Sue who parodied idealised female characters prevalent in sci-fi fan fiction at the time.

Thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise; ‘Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet – only 15 and a half years old.’ Captain Kirk came up to her. ‘Oh, Lieutenant, I love you madly. Will you come to bed with me?’ ‘Captain! I am not that kind of girl!’ ‘You’re right, and I respect you for it. Here, take over the ship for a minute while I go get some coffee for us.’ Mr. Spock came onto the bridge. ‘What are you doing in the command seat, Lieutenant?’ ‘The Captain told me to.’ ‘Flawlessly logical. I admire your mind.’

Since then the term has broadened out to describe ‘a woman who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and/or generally lacking meaningful character flaws.’

But Mary Sues aren’t just famous and fictional; they walk among us. Though I wouldn’t tolerate any in my circle, my more patient friends came up with many examples. Michele Kirsch, the award-winning writer of Clean, worked for many in her time as a cleaner;

They play it both ways. They say in a bragging sort of way that they have OCD and shrug helplessly in a silly lil ole me sort of way. But there’s is a fine line between perfection and pathology – who decides which is which gets a lot of money. They’re the sort of people who study your skirting boards and are privately judging the fact that you are not a 5 am-er, who gets up an hour early to do the Peloton machine then meal prep for a week. And make a TikTok about it. Whilst having stage 4 cancer.

My friend T says: ‘I knew a young woman years ago who was really fun – then she got accepted into police training college and turned into a Mary Sue. She drove everyone mad by checking their car tyre treads with a 10p coin; the letter of acceptance from Hendon unleashed her inner Stasi.’ L told me:

A rich Mary Sue of my acquaintance knew full well that relatively, my life was a struggle, financially and time-wise, bringing up a child solo. She had her husband and her ex living with them. Both men quite literally did everything for her; she took on ‘laundry’ alone as she loved doing laundry well. Weekly she’d text me from a trip out they were all doing in the camper saying ‘I’m wrapped up so warm in my blankets with a hot choccy while xxx and xxx have taken the kids for a paddle/adventure/whatever. So pleased to be getting on with my book.’ Where to start? But ‘choccy’ alone deserves of a stiff gaol sentence.

C says: ‘Choirs are full of them – usually retired teachers or senior nurses who love bossing people around, lining us up and telling us that our clothes are unsuitable.’ From J:

I felt guilty for years about all the birthday cards that came through the post from a neighbouring Mary-Sue, until I realised that was all she ever did; when I needed proper help, she refused. A private income and/or rich husband can create a particularly nasty MS; one called me when I went back to work after baby saying it was ‘much too soon’ even though she knew I was sole breadwinner.

A few misguided feminist writers have attempted to rehabilitate Mary Sue, on the grounds that she gives teenage girls a chance to see themselves as heroines of their own story; there’s even a website called The Mary Sue which took its name as an effort to ‘re-appropriate’ the term. But if virtuous perfection is a goal girls are encouraged to reach for it sounds like yet more of the over-achieving which notoriously ends in tears, eating disorders and anxiety which are already epidemics among girls.

No one wants their daughter to grow up to be a Mary Sue; they’re dishonest prigs – a toxic combo. Though they would never admit it, they adored the pandemic; all that elaborate masking and performative ‘social distancing’ and ostentatiously doing tests before they went anywhere. Now they’re reduced to plaguing the rest of us on social media; announcing themselves smugly as ‘girly swots’ while being as thick as mince, or declaring that they’re ‘a Highly Sensitive Person’ (‘You might be highly touched by beauty or emotionality. Highly sensitive people tend to feel deeply moved by the beauty they see around them’) while stomping over everyone else’s sensibilities. Even their flaws make them better people; they never have Tourettes, kleptomania or flatulence. Which all adds up not to perfection at all, ironically – but to being profoundly boring. So with the party season upon us, keep your eyes peeled for incoming Mary Sues and if you see one – identifiable by her flickable hair, her self-satisfied smirk and her castrated husband – run.

Inside the fading beauty of Crowland Manor

Ceramicist Sophie Wilson’s Christmas decorations at her Lincolnshire manor house are calmingly analogue. For her, there are no flashing lights, tawdry tinsel or store-bought baubles.  

‘I love to have bare trees around, and always have a huge one in the main kitchen, big enough so I can tilt my head back and gaze up at it,’ she says. ‘The tree in the playroom, though, will be on just the right side of horrible, festooned with two decades’ worth of my children’s art projects and the old fairy, with the rolling eye – all the things that flood me with memory.’ 

Over the years, says Wilson, a mother of five, and founder of 1690, through which she sells her delicate sgraffito-slipware ceramics, her decorations have become less and less energy-consuming, and more pared back. ‘We need a lot less than we think we do,’ she muses. ‘In fact, not buying something is the most sustainable choice. Living at Crowland Manor has taught me that.’

For Wilson, the four-storey manor house – in the town of the same name, deep in South Holland’s fenlands – is not just a family home and workspace, but a way of life. Among a nation of seemingly renovation-obsessed Brits, she has studiously avoided remodelling and sanitising the Grade II* listed 16th century home, which dates back to the dissolution of Crowland Abbey in the 1530s, and was the subject of a major extension and refurbishment in 1690 (thus the name of Wilson’s business).  

Behind a Palladian façade of red brick and limestone quoin dressing, with Georgian and Victorian additions, 6,460 sq ft of interiors feature a grand 18th-century dog-leg staircase, a Diocletian window and untouched panelling, pilasters, pediments, tiling and cabinetry. The Wilson family use just a third of the 23 rooms: floor plans take in several cavernous reception spaces, including a traditional Great Room, two kitchens, at least five bedrooms and a series of perfectly unchanged 16th-century former servants’ rooms. Reached by their own staircase, they are a purist’s dream, with their building materials of lath and plaster and fenland reed intact.  

‘Some spaces have been utterly abandoned for centuries, so neglect is actually what has preserved Crowland’s integrity,’ Wilson says. ‘I was immediately aware of the noise, laughter and sorrows of all the people who have lived here over the centuries. I didn’t want to crowd them out by changing things.’ 

On first spotting the manor online in 2014, however, Wilson admits to a string of expletives. Based in East London, she had been searching for an affordable house in the capital big enough for her and her brood but had no luck. ‘I widened the search by 50 miles and immediately struck on Crowland. I knew then that nothing else would compare. Which was slightly tricky, as it’s in a rural spot, and at the time I didn’t drive.’ 

Once she had cleared the house of furniture left by the last owner, and given it a deep clean, she became aware, she says, ‘of the way every room in the home is full of the most beautiful pools of light’. The colour scheme she had inherited, of raspberry pinks, burnt reds and minty greens, was, however, at first startling. ‘It was an act of audacity to keep it,’ Wilson says, ‘but it was right for the house.’ She has since augmented the palette with shades by Atelier Ellis, Paint & Paper Library and Abigail Ahern. 

Essentially, she has had to carry out some substantial works. ‘The house had been standing in a pool of water for over a century,’ she says, ‘so it was vital we repaired the drainage system around the house and rerouted all the water away from the building.’ 

She also added a hot water feed to the kitchen and replaced a broken-down Aga, for which no parts were available, with an Esse Ironheart, and installed a small hob for cooking in the summer months. ‘I object to space-shuttle appliances in homes,’ Wilson says. 

With central heating in just one-half of the ten-chimney house, she prefers to use the solid fuel woodburning stoves for warmth. ‘It’s a lovely economy to just heat the rooms you are using,’ she says. ‘Then at night we just leap straight into bed with an electric blanket – that’s true luxury.’  

Her concessions to modernity are a speaker to blast music and the requisite tools for communication: an iPhone and a laptop. One of her sons’ decisions to install a huge Ikea carpet in his bedroom is, she says, a bridge too far.  

With scaffolding currently surrounding the rear of the home and the need for extensive roof repairs, Crowland Manor is, like the carefully crafted platters, caddies, and dishes that line Wilson’s scullery-turned-studio space, an ever-evolving work of art.

But its next phases of restoration will be for its new owner – who preferably has deep pockets. Having sworn she would only ever move if she fell in love, that is exactly what has happened, and Wilson has put Crowland Manor on the market for £450,000. ‘I am going to live with the man I want to marry, so we are all moving to Dorset,’ Wilson says. ‘We are planning on renting a historic lodge, which serendipitously comes with an outbuilding once used by a potter.’  

She is convinced her fenland home will magnetically attract just the right person and has a message for them. ‘When I first moved in, a builder gave me some fantastic advice. He told me the restoration of the house would be like a long-term relationship, so I should take it slowly. To not be overwhelmed by what needs to be done, but to simply live in the good rooms – and to close the door on those you are not quite ready to look at.’

Crowland Manor is for sale with Inigo; 020 3687 3071, inigo.com 

@1690store, 1690store.com 

Harry and Meghan named ‘biggest Hollywood losers’

At last, official confirmation that Harry and Meghan are the world’s most unpopular couple – by their local newspaper, no less. This month, Hollywood Reporter has ranked Harry and Meghan among its biggest losers of the year. Still, at least the dynamic duo haven’t sunk completely into irrelevance just yet…

Launching a scathing attack on the royal renegades, the magazine speaks for much of LA when it writes that:

After a whiny Netflix documentary, a whiny biography (Spare – even the title is a pouty grip) and an inert podcast, the Harry and Meghan brand swelled into a sanctimonious bubble just begging to be popped – and South Park was the pin.

Ouch. A particularly painful read for the dilettante Duke and Duchess who, after sacking off their regal duties almost four years ago, set up camp in Montecito with the aim of becoming A-listers. How sad that the Bible of Hollywood has now rejected them too. Still, at least it neatly caps off a year in which Tinseltown turned on the two of them.

First there was South Park, which labelled them a ‘dumb prince and his stupid wife’ in a takedown of their ‘World-Wide Privacy Tour’. Then came the wrath of Spotify, with the company reportedly ‘underwhelmed’ with their output, before one of its chiefs publicly slated the royal ‘grifters’ and dropped Meghan’s podcast Archetypes. It had been rumoured that Harry had tried to offer up podcast ideas of his own, primarily interviews on childhood trauma with the Pope and, er, Vladimir Putin.

Even the charitable sector seems to have fallen out of love with them: donations to the Sussex’s charity the Archewell Foundation have declined by £8.7 million in the last year. In fact only two people donated about a million dollars each. So much for all publicity being good publicity…

Vladimir Putin bores the nation

From time to time, the tsar must listen to the complaints of his subjects. Having dodged this duty last year, Vladimir Putin has an election looming, so held a press conference. While he punished his viewers in the process with a performance of stupefying boredom, nonetheless today’s event gave us a sense of his election strategy.

Once a year Putin traditionally held a press conference and also his Direct Line event, a kind of town hall at which he would field questions from around the country. Both were marathon events that peaked at over four and a half hours, respectively, and they were opportunities for him not just to connect with his people but also demonstrate his mastery of his brief. A key element of the Direct Line events was always his seizing on local issues and demanding action of the local authorities, which also meant that citizens and communities vied to get their concerns aired. One third father of the nation, one third details-oriented national CEO, one third the micromanager willing to give his underlings a kicking when they weren’t up to scratch. It has to be acknowledged that he could be quite impressive. 

Over time, Putin clearly became bored, and in 2020, the two were combined, and last year neither ran at all, as the spinning of Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine proved too great a challenge. This year, it was again run as a hybrid event, lasting 4 hours 4 minutes, with a mix of carefully-curated questions from around the country and interventions from invited journalists in the room. 

Even by the standards of these events, it was a dull four hours, as if Putin was turning the tables on the rest of us. Eggs took an unexpected central stage, with a text about the price of eggs in Dagestan popping up early on the screen behind Putin, that showed a running series of messages sent in by viewers, and later a grandmother raising their price overall. Of course, this is an important topic for people struggling with a cost-of-living crisis that, depending on region, often makes Britain’s look benign. Putin responded in characteristic way, combining a barrage of statistics with some smutty testicular innuendo, saying he had asked the minister of agriculture ‘how his eggs were doing.’

Yet quips apart (and they were few and far between this time round), Putin showed striking little empathy – real or manufactured – for the people who begged for his intervention and understanding. Although there are already moves to try and buy off certain sectors before the March elections – and an 18 per cent increase in the minimum wage from January – there is little sense that Putin will really be playing the benevolent father of the nation.

Instead, he is likely to be the stern wartime leader. Certainly he gave no hints of any willingness to negotiate any kind of an end to his invasion. He suggested that things were going well for his forces all along the front line, reasserted his historically-dubious claim that the Ukrainian port city of Odesa was really Russian and even revived the notion that this was a war with the goal of ‘de-Nazification.’ Even Moscow’s own cheerleaders and spokespeople have been backing away from this idea, so in that respect Putin was actually out-hawking them.

There was the inevitable fawning from Russian journalists, the most cringeworthy being the man from occupied Lugansk who said that he had no question as people in his region have ‘nothing to complain about’ and every one of them would want to shake Putin by the hand. Questions like ‘When will the war end? When will there be peace in the skies? When will peace talks begin?’ coming up on the screen demonstrated that the majority of the Russian people may not be especially keen on the war, though, but Putin refused to give such questions any serious attention. Instead, the war was, is and will be, a new organising principle for his regime. Russians must tighten their belts, do their duty without complaint, and accept the new reality. After all, as one young reporter from the Russian Far East said, while expressing his delight that Putin is running for president again, ‘we all support your decision, because as far as I can remember, you’ve always been in power.’ So mote it be.

The huge cost of Scotland’s ‘free’ tuition fees

‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotland.’ So read the words carved into a stone outside Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh unveiled by Alex Salmond while he was first minister. But as the SNP’s education policy begins to unravel and the budgetary pressures build at Holyrood, how much longer before the Scottish government starts to revisit its practice of subsidising students, even middle-class ones who can well afford to pay tuition fees?

From the vantage point of a Scottish sixth former, the system north of the border looks great. Unlike their English cousins, Scots attending Scottish universities pay no tuition fees. Scottish students do have to pay their living costs, but even so, according to the Student Loans Company, Scottish students graduate with average debts of £15,430 compared with £44,940 for English students. But that presupposes that Scottish students can get into university in the first place. Scottish universities have a strong incentive to favour students from abroad, or from elsewhere in the UK.

Free tuition is gradually starving Scottish universities of cash. While English universities, too, have an incentive to favour overseas students over UK ones because they can charge them what they like rather than the £9,250 set by the government, in Scotland the situation is markedly worse. Give a place to a Scottish student and a Scottish university has just £7,610 a year available to educate them – made up a teaching grant which works out at £5,790 per pupil plus a shadow tuition fee (paid by the Scottish government rather than the student) of £1,820 a year.The overall per-capita funding of Scottish students in Scottish universities has fallen by 19 per cent in real terms over the past decade, according to a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Not of course that spending more money would necessarily lead to better quality education, as the SNP has proved with schools. In 2000, soon after devolution, Scottish schools led the UK, with higher Pisa rankings than in England, Wales of Northern Ireland. They were still just about ahead in 2012 after the SNP introduced its Curriculum for Excellence, which downplayed the importance of knowledge in favour of instructing students in what are supposed to be transferrable skills. But those skills certainly are not transferring themselves into high Pisa scores. In maths Scottish pupils now trail English ones. The only consolation for Scotland is that Labour-run Wales is a little bit worse. It is certainly not down to a lack of money. Scottish schools now receive an average of £1,300 per pupil per year more than their English counterparts.

Scotland was once revered for its Enlightenment. The high value put on education was still visible at the beginning of this century. Yet under the SNP the Scottish education system has undergone a dis-enlightenment.

The IDF’s death toll is rising

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have suffered their deadliest day since the 7 October massacre. Nine soldiers were killed, including the Golani Brigade’s 13th battalion commander, during a coordinated Hamas ambush in the Shujaiyeh neighbourhood of Gaza city. The attack was a rare success for Hamas, but despite the painful blow to the IDF, troops still have high morale and the Israeli public continues to support the war – at least for now.

The scene of the ambush is no surprise: Shujaiyeh is a small, densely-populated neighbourhood. Before war between Israel and Hamas broke out, it was home to roughly 100,000 people. Many inhabitants have fled, but the area remains strategically important to both sides, not least because of its proximity to the border with Israel. The town is only half a mile away from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, where Jews were slaughtered and kidnapped during Hamas’s attack on 7 October. Israel believes that Shujaiyeh is a Hamas stronghold where the terror attack was planned and coordinated from. 

Despite the widespread destruction and the constant shelling by the IDF in the area, Hamas has maintained its ability to attack troops. Most assaults are carried out by small groups of terrorists who emerge from tunnels. The IDF has already managed to kill many Hamas commanders and destroy lines of communications, meaning that most attacks are uncoordinated. But, as Tuesday’s attack showed, the risk to Israeli troops remains high.

Israel believes that as many as 20,000 Hamas terrorists are continuing to operate in Gaza. Many are lurking in tunnels, hoping to buy time until Israel comes under enough pressure to change its tactics. That pressure is certainly building: the Israeli government is facing calls from the American administration and its European allies to reduce the number of Palestinian civilian casualties. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far resisted demands to conduct the war in ways that minimise Palestinian casualties because restricting the army will reduce its ability to fight Hamas. 

But if American pressure grows, and if the Israeli public show signs of war-weariness as casualties mount, the IDF might be instructed to reduce the number of troops in Gaza and perform more limited targeted operations against Hamas, rather than combing the streets, buildings and tunnels, which places ground troops’ lives at risk. Limited operations may also be preferable to Israel’s allies because they would reduce civilian casualties and help humanitarian efforts.

The government also faces considerable public pressure to reach a temporary ceasefire deal with Hamas in return for the release of hostages. Although Israelis want to see Hamas lose its hold over Gaza, hostages are a priority as they live on borrowed time. Those who were freed in the previous ceasefire deal have told of the torture they have experienced, as well as starvation, no access to medical treatment and an inability to maintain basic levels of hygiene that have caused diseases while in captivity. Israel also claims to have evidence of sexual abuse of hostages. Hamas has also been executing hostages, making their release even more urgent.

Despite this, Netanyahu seems to be in no rush to reach another deal with Hamas. His priority is to keep the military operation going. Netanyahu believes that military pressure is the primary way to force Hamas into a deal. 

Although the Israeli public stands firmly in its support for the IDF, the same cannot be said about Netanyahu. Public anger against Israel’s leader is building. Many now believe that Netanyahu should concentrate on setting clear, realistic goals for the war and its aftermath and even set a timetable for his departure. For now, Netanyahu refuses to do so. But if the death toll of Israeli soldiers – which has already reached over 100 – continues to rise, he might soon have little choice but to change tactics in his war on Hamas.

In search of a second epiphany

When I go home to America next week for Christmas, I’ll go to church – the one my family and I used to attend every Sunday, a few towns over. I visit intermittently throughout the year when I’m back home, but I always go on Christmas Eve. The routine is the same: I sit quietly in the pews, sing along to the carols, and hope to have a second epiphany.  

I had my first epiphany – that God exists – when I was a child. This, I’m sure, is the result of having two religious parents who raised me in the church. When I tell my British friends that I was brought up a Methodist, they tend to flash me a nervous look. I must assume that going to a Methodist church in the UK means something different than it does in liberal Connecticut. Mine is the kind of church where people hug you longer and harder if you haven’t shown up in a while; where the pastor tells you that hell is more of an allegory than it is a place any departed soul actually ends up.

When, as a teenager, I was confirmed, I ‘accepted Jesus into my heart’ as they asked us to do. But this was a formality. I had already accepted God’s existence years ago. Believing in a higher power has never been the hard part. It’s everything that follows as a consequence of having faith which I find difficult. 

For many people in my life, their faith in God gives them strength and comfort. For other people I know, not believing in God also seems to provide some degree of assurance: there may be no light at the end of the tunnel, but they feel no pressure to reach it either. I imagine it’s trickier to be agnostic, to grapple with the doubt of it all. My late godfather, who was fairly sure there was no God, would still pray every day. ‘Just in case,’ he would say.  

I envy them all. Each of these options seems better to me than where I’ve ended up. Somehow, I’ve managed to develop a belief in God that comes without the comfort.

When I was ten, six months after my mom died (she had been in and out of hospital for a year already), it finally really hit me that she was never coming home. That’s when my one-way shouting matches with God began. Looking up at the ceiling, I spared no insult.

‘Thanks a lot,’ I would yell, with all the perfectly delivered sarcasm and anger of a pre-teen. ‘Why didn’t you bother to perform a miracle?’ I knew He could hear me, that I wasn’t yelling into the abyss. That made it so much worse.

Why do we look up when talking to God? He’s supposed to be everywhere. Yet I struggle to find evidence of his interventions up, down, or anywhere else. ‘If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him,’ says Job when it’s all going pear-shaped. ‘On the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.’

It probably comes as no surprise that these are the verses in the Bible I’ve turned to most over the years. Yet they provide no solace. A man sees his life fall apart and ends up with a shiny new second family. What about his ten children who get offed along the way? Job’s faith may finally reward him, but the ratio of happy to dreadful endings doesn’t exactly inspire hope. 

I understand we need to suffer, that some types of trials and tribulations are necessary to grow our character and reaffirm our faith. But do we need to suffer so much? Surely broken bones, heartbreak or a life cut short by 20 years is enough to test us. There’s simply no making sense of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or children who don’t make it to their first birthday – especially if you know there’s a power out there that could stop the cruelty.

So far, my hardships have fallen on the tolerable side of the line. When I was young, grown-ups used to insist that I had had a terrible time of it. I could sense their uneasiness when I told them I was actually very blessed. Yes, I had lost my mom, but I was raised by a wonderful dad, in a supportive community. Many people experience so much worse. Looking back, I was largely correct. But I wasn’t blessed, I was just lucky. 

Suffering is short, I’m reminded, and God understands what we go through, having sent his son to live, die and suffer among us. Perhaps this makes me a little less lonely, but it also deepens my frustrations. God understands our pain yet still stands aside? He sends his sympathy, not his strength? 

I once found consolation in the idea that God didn’t answer my childhood prayers because he was busy performing miracles on a much greater scale. As a grown-up, I look around and see little evidence that He was up to much else.

A friend tells me I need to turn to the Serenity Prayer: to acknowledge and accept what I can and cannot change. This isn’t my problem, I explain: as a lowly little human, I am under no illusion that the world’s problems are in my control. My issue is with the Omnipotent One, who has thepower to change things. The God who can make the lame walk and raise people from the dead could surely have spared those babies in the kibbutzim. That He didn’t doesn’t make me believe any less. It makes me angry. 

Every year, when I return home for Christmas, I take that anger to church. I sit in the pews I ran around as a kid, looking out the window into the garden where Mom is buried. I pray for a second epiphany – one that not only allows for faith, but for some joy and peace to creep in too. 

Alexa, do you love me?

My husband and I got a Peloton bike for the usual reasons: because we were time-poor, money-rich and feeling fat. And we kept using it for the usual reason: because we wanted to please the gorgeous ghosts in the machine.

The American fitness brand Peloton employs some of the most beautiful, athletic and charismatic people ever to have lived. Their job is not actually to teach an effective class to the viewers at home on their stationary bikes, or to make their users healthier and slimmer (I have accomplished neither). Rather, it is to give an impression of warmth and intimacy while staring at a silent camera lens in an empty room.

My favourite coaches (since you asked) are Tumi, Ally, Emma and Denis, the last of whom has a particularly passionate following among older ladies. His fan club, ‘Denis’s Menaces’, has more than 16,000 members on Facebook and sells T-shirts emblazoned with the word ‘MENACE’.

Sometimes Peloton classes are held with an audience in the room, cycling along with the viewers at home, and diehard fans will show up in the front row with T-shirts honouring their coach. I don’t like it when that happens. It reminds me that Denis and I do not in fact have a precious and unique relationship, and that really I am just a fan, like all these other crazy women.

My relationship with Denis is a parasocial one. That is, it resembles a social relationship, in that I feel a sense of affinity and familiarity when his face pops up on screen. But we are not actually friends, for the simple reason that he has no idea who I am (unless, of course, he is a Spectator reader – in which case, Denis, do get in touch).

We are living in the age of the parasocial relationship, which is not to say that this is an entirely new phenomenon. Celebrity pre-dates radio, television and even print media. But modern technology – in particular, on-demand audiovisual entertainment – is particularly effective at conjuring the impression of social intimacy.

The term ‘parasocial’ was coined in a 1956 paper by the sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who argued that television offered the potential for a new kind of relationship. ‘Often [the TV star] faces the spectator,’ they observed, ‘uses the mode of direct address, talks as if he were conversing personally and privately.’ In other words, the viewer could easily get the impression that this collection of pixels was talking directly to them, and a one-sided relationship could thus develop.

The television of the 1950s had nothing on the podcast for parasocial effect, not least because headphones exaggerate the impression of intimacy due to a phenomenon called ‘in-head localisation’ – that is, they make it seem as if the voices are coming from inside your head. The point of the podcast is not to convey information, since text is a far more efficient medium for that purpose. Chris Williamson, host of the wildly successful podcast Modern Wisdom, describes his job as that of a ‘vibe architect’, a phrase I often think of, both while recording my own podcast and while consuming other people’s. Like most listeners, I turn to my favourite podcasts when I long for a specific vibe: that is, when I want to experience the pleasure of spending time with friends without any of the effort of brushing my hair, leaving my house, or being nice.

The age of the parasocial relationship has affected children just as profoundly as adults, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Research suggests that beloved TV characters can perform the same function as imaginary friends, encouraging children to practise social skills even while alone. Our two-year-old has a passionate love for the children’s media star Zog, an orange dragon who looks and behaves more like a chubby labrador than a monster. Does he believe that Zog is ‘real’? Yes, maybe. Having seen Zog walk and talk on TV, our son now pretends to feed, dress and soothe the cuddly toy version to sleep. This strikes me as a nice (and cute) example of a parasocial playmate.

But parasocial relationships can easily become weird, particularly for young children, since they are even less capable than adults of psychologically separating them from real ones. One 2021 study of families who owned an ‘artificial intelligent conversational agent’ – e.g. an Amazon Alexa or Google Echo – found that a majority of children under the age of six believed their AI servant to be alive, and would ask it questions based on that assumption. (My favourite example was ‘Alexa, are you a princess?’)

A perennial debate on the parenting forum Mumsnet concerns whether or not children ought to be taught to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to an Alexa. There is definitely something displeasing about seeing a child speak rudely to an apparently anthropomorphic agent. But, then again, perhaps we should be teaching our children to maintain a healthy distrust for AI? A famous line from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets could be applied just as well to modern technology as it can be to magical objects: ‘Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.’

You don’t have to be a full-on millenarian about the threat from super intelligent AI to believe that parasocial relationships ought to be treated with caution. The 2013 film Her presents a particularly plausible vision of one possible AI future. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a lonely man who falls in love with the disembodied voice of his AI personal assistant, played by Scarlett Johansson. This AI is entirely unlike HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that the only threat she presents is in her niceness – she is such pleasant company that her owner no longer feels the need to spend time with flesh-and-blood people and so becomes increasingly reclusive, along with many of his friends and neighbours who have also fallen in love with a computer program that can’t love them back.

The pleasure of the parasocial relationship lies in the fact that, unlike a real relationship, it is effortless, voluntary and uncomplicated. And therein also lies its peril.

NHS waiting lists are still far too high

The NHS waiting list has fallen, although not by much. The number of patients waiting has fallen from 6.5 million to 6.44 million, while the number of ‘waits’ for procedures and treatments has fallen by just 60,000, from 7.77 million to 7.71 million. On the face of things, this sounds like good news: it is the first fall in the waiting list since November last year. But look a little closer and there isn’t all that much to celebrate. There are still half a million more waits now than at the start of the year. 

Today’s numbers are bleak. A number of NHS targets are being missed: most concerningly, waits of over 78 and 104 weeks should have been eliminated by now. Instead, there are 10,500 and 190 patients waiting on these lists respectively. The government is fast approaching its deadline for the abolition of 65-week waits – yet there remains over 107,000 on the list. And another NHS target – that 92 per cent of patients should be seen within 18 weeks of referral – has not been met. A little over half of all cases currently meet this threshold. Although small improvements have been seen, patients are still being left waiting far too long for healthcare.

Accident and emergency departments attendances are at 2.1 million and departments have seen just under 70 per cent of patients within four hours of presentation – a worsening situation on last month – while there were over 144,000 A&E waits longer than 12 hours. It’s not just inconvenience this causes: A&E-related excess deaths have risen by almost a third in one year. 

Long waiting times are likely to be made worse by winter. The health service is becoming more overwhelmed with seasonal viruses. Last week, the numbers of flu patients in hospitals increased by two thirds on the week before, while more than 500 patients were in hospital with norovirus, almost a quarter higher than the previous week. Bed blocking remains a serious issue for NHS hospitals: there are approximately 13,000 patients fit for discharge who remain in hospital each day. 

Meanwhile, staff absences have increased to an average of 49,020 a day last week, more than 2,000 higher a day than the week before. It comes at a time when staff continue to feel disheartened by their pay and working conditions, and the BMA has planned seven days of walk-outs over the Christmas period. 

On the surface, today’s figures suggest that Sunak may just possibly be on track to getting waiting lists under control. But the overall waiting list figures are deceptive: there remain far too many patients left waiting to be seen in emergency departments, waiting to be seen after referral and waiting to leave hospital wards. The health service is still struggling. 

How to make an Old Fashioned, by Kendall Jenner

This Old Fashioned is my go-to for the holiday season. The rich and complex flavour of the tequila pairs so well with bitters and orange. It’s made to be savoured and is a classic Old Fashioned with a twist. I made this cocktail with my mom over the summer for National Tequila Day. It has become one of our favourites ever since.

Ingredients

• 75 ml 818 Tequila Añejo
• 1 sugar cube
• 2 dashes of Angostura bitters
• A splash of water
• A twist of orange peel
• 1 cocktail cherry

Preparation

1. Add bitters, water and sugar to glass.
2. Muddle to make a paste.
3. Add ice cube and tequila.
4. Garnish with a cocktail cherry and orange peel.

Enjoy!

‘I am working night and day’: Rishi Sunak on Jilly Cooper, immigration – and his plan for the next election

This Christmas, Rishi Sunak will be reading Tackle!, Jilly Cooper’s new bonkbuster. Cooper sent the Prime Minister a signed copy after she discovered – through The Spectator – that he is a fan. Tackle! is about an equestrian-turned-football manager who inspires a ragtag team to unexpected victory. ‘If you want to score, you’ve got to be a player,’ declares the cover. ‘It is literally on my bedside table,’ says Sunak when we meet in his office in 10 Downing Street.

‘This is the first year in a long time that I have actually read some fiction,’ he says. ‘I read these lovely books, which is good escapism for me.’ One is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (about gaming geeks) and the other is Lessons in Chemistry (about a female chemist fighting misogyny in the 1950s).

Perhaps it is not surprising that he is turning to escapism. The Tories end this year in a miserable position. The party has failed to dent Labour’s 20-point lead, Sunak’s personal ratings have slumped, and his backbenchers are in a rebellious mood.

A little over a year since he became Prime Minister, and with an opinion poll deficit that no party leader has ever recovered from, is Sunak enjoying the job? ‘Yes!’ he replies enthusiastically, without pausing for breath. ‘Of course, it’s hard. I knew it was going to be. I did it because I care about service, I care about this country and I thought I could make a difference. I believe that every single day. I come down here every day and I am really lucky; I get to work with an incredible group of people. I feel that I’m making progress so I can sit here and say: “Do you know what? Of all the things I said I would do, I’ve made progress.” And that is fulfilling.’

What progress? ‘I have always said I’m a Thatcherite in the truest sense. As Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher said: cut inflation, cut taxes. That’s what we’ve done! We have delivered more tax cuts in one fiscal event than at any point since the 1980s.’ This will be his narrative for next year’s election: he took difficult decisions, they worked, and so he has been able to cut taxes.

The slight problem with his argument is that taxes are not just rising but are higher than any post-war government has dared push them. Some of this is due to corporation tax rises, but the biggest tax hike was to freeze the thresholds, which will trap four million more low-paid workers in income tax, with three million more being taxed at the 40p rate. Can he really fight an election talking about his National Insurance cut without admitting that it doesn’t do nearly enough to offset these rises?

‘That’s a really glass-half-empty way to look at it,’ he responds. ‘You’ve got to differentiate. Look, why is the tax burden as high as it is? It’s because we had a once-in-a-century pandemic and we had a war in Ukraine, both of which necessitated an enormous response from the government.

‘I think it’s completely fine to have said the government should not have responded to help everyone with energy bills, the government should not have responded during Covid… If one person had consistently said that throughout, totally fine.

‘[But] nobody did, not a single person said that you shouldn’t have done all those things. I was very clear at the time, we should do those things but let’s be clear that that will have consequences and we will have to pay that money back and yes, like a Thatcherite and actually just a good Conservative, if you borrow money it does have to be paid back.

‘The choice at the next election is between me and Keir Starmer. A Labour party that wants to borrow £28 billion a year is not going to control welfare or public spending. A Conservative party is going to do those things – and cut your taxes instead.’

The welfare point is one he’s keen on. As chancellor, he was struck that a third of all UK households were in receipt of some kind of benefit. It was a sign, he thought, of the extraordinary expansion of the welfare state. The situation became even worse after the Covid lockdowns, when Britain was the only major country in Europe not to recover its pre-pandemic workforce. What does he think went wrong? How could 18 per cent of Manchester and 20 per cent of Liverpool and Glasgow be on out-of-work benefits in the middle of a worker-shortage crisis?

‘Because the welfare system is not working as it should,’ he says. ‘Over the last decade we haven’t reformed those rules [to qualify for welfare]. Three times as many people today are being told that they don’t have to work because of ill-health than were a decade ago. I don’t believe our country has got three times sicker.’

Plans to tighten the welfare criteria are, however, not due to be implemented until April 2025. If the problem is urgent, why are the fixes so slow in coming?

‘Again, I think that’s a glass-half-empty way to look at it, because no one was doing any reform in this area until I started it as chancellor,’ he says. Some changes ‘take time because they are very large system changes – you are dealing with a very complex system… Our priority, going forward, is to control spending and welfare so that we can cut taxes. We are in a position to be able to do all that because we have got inflation down. The economy has turned a corner and that means that there can be a gear shift in how we approach taxes.’

The trebling of net migration after Brexit has led to another gear shift in government policy. From April next year, visas will be granted only to those in the highest-paid third of earners (£38,700). Foreigners who come to the UK initially to study and hope subsequently to make their way up the salary scale will face deportation. Sunak says the government ‘will work through the transition of the people who are already here’ in a ‘fair and sensible way’, but he won’t apologise for the policy.

‘In all these areas there will be hard cases, but if you want to bring the levels of legal migration down, you have to be prepared to make some difficult decisions.’ Nevertheless, his former ally Robert Jenrick quit as Sunak’s immigration minister this month accusing him of making the wrong decision when it came to how to stop the boats. He said he believed that the government’s new illegal immigration bill did not provide the ‘best possible chance for success’. Sunak doesn’t want to go into the timeline of events that saw his former friend leave office: ‘You won’t expect me to get into all of that,’ he says, before adding: ‘We’re always sad to lose people from government.’

Yet he still talks as though his plan to ‘stop the boats’ is working. ‘If someone had said to me, “You are going to have reduced the number of small boat arrivals into this country by a third”, after they had quadrupled in the last few years… I think someone would have said, “What are you smoking?”’ (Though of course no one will be smoking anything at all if Sunak’s generational ban goes ahead.) He may regard 30,000 small-boat crossings, down from last year’s 45,000, as a success, but his pledge in January was to end illegal arrivals entirely. In retrospect, were the words ‘stop the boats’ a mistake?

‘No, I think it’s a straightforward phrase,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows what I wanted to do. I do ultimately want to stop the boats, because there isn’t an acceptable amount of illegal migration.’ If Sunak can get his Rwanda Bill through the Commons and Lords, how soon will flights take off? He won’t be drawn. ‘I’m keen to crack on with it,’ he says. Sunak has consistently refused to rule out withdrawing from the ECHR if his bill fails. But he does say that Rwanda won’t accept deportees who have no legal recourse to Strasbourg. The arguments over the Rwanda scheme are causing deep divisions within his party, and he is trying to pre-empt rebellion. ‘What the country wants is a practical government that is making a difference to their lives and changing things for the better, not a debating society,’ he says. ‘People are frustrated that the pace of change is not fast enough. I get that. I am working night and day, tirelessly, to keep making a difference.’ The demands of the job, he says, means he has cut his daily workouts ‘down to once a week’.

Sunak is keen on spin classes. When he took his summer holiday to the US, he used it as an opportunity to take many exercise classes, including a Taylor Swift-themed SoulCycle ride. (He is a self-confessed ‘Swiftie’, his favourite of her albums is ‘probably 1989’ and says he had a ‘very enjoyable time’ at her Eras concert during the trip.) One fellow rider posted a video on TikTok saying she had seen the PM’s security at the class and mistakenly thought the pop star herself was about to attend. ‘I would be quite dis-appointed as well,’ Sunak laughs.

The PM’s critics say that while he may be hard-working, he is uninspiring. He has been accused of being ‘tetchy’ – most recently during his diplomatic spat with the Greek Prime Minister over the Elgin Marbles. What does he think of the allegation? ‘I don’t understand that,’ he replies. He points to his leadership campaign. ‘That wasn’t an easy time for me, I was taking a lot of criticism and flak. But I just fought hard for what I believed in – every day, seven days a week for six weeks. I’m the same person now, I am fighting for the things I believe in. There’s nothing tetchy. But I am passionate. When things are not working the way I want them to work, of course I’m going to be frustrated.’

A new surprise ally in government is David Cameron, now Lord Cameron. Even before he was made Foreign Secretary, Sunak consulted him over Gaza. ‘It was clear to me that the international picture is complicated and challenging. And it’s not looking like it’s going to get any easier any time soon,’ he says. ‘At the same time, there was someone in public life who had almost unrivalled experience and relationships. He wanted to come and help me win an election.’ This is the first hint that Sunak sees Cameron as an asset on the election trail.

The assumption behind that thinking is that it will be Sunak who will lead his party into that election. David Frost, a former cabinet member, has suggested the Tories could need yet another change of leader before the campaign starts. What is Sunak’s message to any Tory MPs spending the Christmas break thinking of mutiny?

‘We are going into an election year. We have got to make this about the choice between me and Keir Starmer, about the Con-servatives and the Labour party. There is a very clear choice that we can present to the country when we are united.’  

The literary canon of P.G. Wodehouse

When T.S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, it was seen as a masterpiece of modernism. It was, but it was also a work steeped in cultural tradition. This was made apparent in the ‘Notes on The Waste Land’ with which Eliot supplemented his poem. In them, he glossed its literary echoes – the Upanishads, Dante, Chaucer, Mallory, Shakespeare, etc.

Another master of the modern who came to his greatest flourishing between the world wars was P.G. Wodehouse. Though seven years older than Eliot, Wodehouse first achieved real fame at much the same time, after the publication of The Inimitable Jeeves in 1923. Like Eliot’s, his work’s modernity, making such innovative use of the main literary traditions of the West, would have been unimaginable in the 19th century. But Wodehouse produced no ‘Notes on Jeeves’, or on any of his oeuvre, to guide the potentially perplexed reader. Had he done so, he would have risked over-explaining, thus killing his main intended effect, which was to make people laugh.

For this reason, there is a strong case for maintaining a Wodehousian silence about the Master’s references; but I have decided that two arguments point the other way.

The first is that many of his cultural allusions, wholly familiar to the English middle classes, especially English public schoolboys, from the 19th century to the 1980s, are now forgotten. They need rescuing, or rather, for scholars have ploughed this furrow, re-rescuing. 

The second is that, in the 21st century, the word ‘comedy’ tends to mean a left-wing person standing up to swear and shout against fossil fuels, Boris Johnson, ‘homophobia’ and so on. In the 20th century, by contrast, comedy involved being funny. That art now requires elucidation before it is, as Wodehouse might have put it, ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre, and spats’. Being funny requires artistry. It is a demanding craft practised only by a skilled few, like dry stonewalling.

Samuel Johnson famously complained of the 17th-century Metaphysical Poets that, in their work, ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. But what Wodehouse saw, as Johnson perhaps did not, was that such yokings can be funny. For his art, the joke of the yoke lay in the contrast between the epic, romantic, scriptural or classical sublimity of the original words from great literature and the invariably farcical situations he described.

In the case of Wodehouse’s best-known creations, the idle aristocrat Bertie and his valet Jeeves, the joke has an added layer. In the great tradition of master/servant comedy, Bertie is the damned fool and Jeeves the learned sage. Thus: ‘“Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,” said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.’ That is a quotation from the fool in King Lear, and perhaps a nod to Robert Browning’s poem of that name. Bertie likes to repeat and apply such quotations, but he mangles them as he does so. He often believes that Jeeves himself invented them.

This deployment of the high style occurs in most Wodehouse, but Jeeves and Wooster display it most clearly. To illustrate this, I have used only one book, his novel, The Code of the Woosters, first published in 1938, and widely regarded as Wodehouse’s most successful full-length work. It concerns the troubles which ensue when Bertie is persuaded by his beloved Aunt Dahlia to steal a silver cow-creamer from the grim Sir Watkyn Bassett. Unusually for Wodehouse, the book also contains political satire. The vast and preposterous Roderick Spode, associate of Sir Watkyn, is the bullying leader of an extremist movement (this is the late 1930s, remember) called the Black Shorts.

The opening page of The Code of the Woosters contains two literary references of the sort described.

The first immediately establishes the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster. Bertie is in bed with a hangover. He summons Jeeves under the impression that it is evening. Jeeves explains it is morning. ‘Are you sure?’ asks Bertie, ‘It seems very dark outside.’ ‘There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’ The quotation Jeeves deploys is from Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’, unattributed.

‘Season of what?’

‘Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.’ [Note the comic effect achieved by inserting the ‘sir’ at just that point.]

‘…Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?’

The second reference is Biblical. Wooster needs Jeeves’s bracer because of carousing the night before: ‘I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head – not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones.’ In the Book of Judges (4:21), Jael slays Sisera who, as commander of King Jabin’s army, had been oppressing the Israelites, while he sleeps. According to chapter four, verse 21, she ‘smote the nail into his temples and fastened it to the ground… So he died.’

By my count, The Code of the Woosters contains 85 such references, including some that are repeated and varied, such as ‘quills on the fretful porpentine’ (Hamlet), or the frequent comparison of Bertie with the heroic Sydney Carton in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. (‘Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’ ‘Sidney [sic] Carton, miss.’) Such invocations are mostly classical, Biblical (or from hymns) or literary. A few are proverbial with no known original, or references to historical legends, such as Isaac Newton exclaiming ‘Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowst what thou hast done’, when his dog –with whom Bertie ruefully compares himself – ate the notes of his scientific discoveries.

There may, of course, be allusions I have failed to detect. Some words sound like literary references but I cannot source them, such as the phrase ‘hoggish slumber’, much favoured by Wodehouse. It sounds Shakespearean, but isn’t.

The actual code of the Woosters, the motto by which Bertie says his family lives, is ‘Never let a pal down’. The literary code of the Woosters is much more complicated.

Decoding Wodehouse’s quotations, echoes and allusions by author or other source, I find as follows:

The Bible (always the Authorised Version): 15 references (four Psalms, two passages from Matthew’s Gospel, one from Luke’s; two from Judges; and one from Proverbs, Job, Isaiah, Exodus, Daniel and the first Epistle of Peter); plus three hymns.

Shakespeare: 14 (from Sonnet 33, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest).

Keats: three.

Dickens: three.

Shelley: two.

Byron: two.

Tennyson: two.

Longfellow: two.

Kipling: two.

Robert Browning: two.

Matthew Arnold: two.

Troubadour poets: two.

Juvenal: two.

And one reference each to Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Goldsmith, Homer, W.E. Henley, Leigh Hunt, Marlowe, Baroness Orczy and Felicia Hemans. Then there are mentions of, rather than quotations from, Damocles, Archimedes (who comes up a lot, always in his bath), ‘Venus from the foam’, the Mona Lisa and the painting ‘The Soul’s Awakening’ by James Sant RA; plus remarks on the nature of Greek tragedy.

This range of reference and the relative numbers of mentions almost perfectly reflect the hierarchy of knowledge that would have been imparted to children, particularly boys, in all good schools.

So does Wodehouse’s choice of quotations. He almost always picks the passages which were best-known and recited young. Thus the words of Byron which appear are nothing sophisticated or sensual from Don Juan, but the most famous line from ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’: ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.’ The presence of Felicia Hemans is attributable to the only lines she wrote which everyone knew (from her poem ‘Casabianca’): ‘The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had fled.’ Baroness Orczy’s work is cited (not by name) because Bertie recalls a historical novel ‘about a Buck or Beau or some such cove who, when it became necessary to put people where they belonged, was in the habit of laughing down from lazy eyelids and flicking a speck of dust from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at his wrists’. Bertie claims he ‘had had excellent results from modelling myself on this bird’.

Most readers were sufficiently familiar with the story to work out that he was talking about The Scarlet Pimpernel. But part of the joke was also that dimmer readers would resemble Bertie in only half-remembering what they had once heard, and would enjoy laughing at themselves about that.

Bertie is, in a way, much affected by literature. Its words lurk in his mind (if that is the right word for what he calls his ‘bean’), having been put there either by his school or by Jeeves and almost never by reading the book in question (though he did win the Scripture Prize at prep school – ‘a handsomely bound copy of a devotional work whose name has escaped me’).

The words often surface, but confusedly. When Jeeves asks his master if he plans to obey Aunt Dahlia and steal the cow-creamer, Bertie answers: ‘That is the problem which is torturing me, Jeeves. I can’t make up my mind. You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait on something? You know who I mean – the cat chap.’ ‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would”, like the poor cat i’the adage.’ (See Macbeth, Act I, scene vii, Lady Macbeth speaking.)

Once lodged in Bertie’s bean, an image tends to recur, slightly modified. He later plucks up his courage to enter the small drawing room of Sir Watkyn’s country house and remove the silver cow from its case. ‘My frame of mind,’ he records, ‘was more or less that of a cat in an adage.’ He fishes out the cow-creamer, but is surprised by Roderick Spode, whose shotgun was ‘pointing in a negligent sort of way at my third waistcoat button’. Later still in the book, Bertie’s goofy friend Gussie Fink-Nottle is found ‘doing the old cat-in-an-adage stuff’.

Not every image needed Jeevesian elucidation, however. Thus the village policeman, Constable Oates, is ‘prowling in the rain like the troops of Midian’. Readers required no reminding that these Midianites are to be found in J.M. Neale’s Victorian version of the old hymn by St Andrew of Crete, ‘Christian, does thou see them’. Similarly, when Bertie declares, apropos of the ruthless Stiffy Byng, ‘Kipling was right. D. than the m’, he knew this was all he needed for readers to recognise the line ‘The female of her species is more deadly than the male.’

I come back to Eliot, and to the Metaphysical Poets. In an essay published in 1921, the former praised the latter as the last writers who did not suffer from the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ characteristic of more modern times. The Metaphysicals had the gift, he wrote, of ‘constantly amalgamating disparate experience’. I would argue that Wodehouse had that gift, though in quite a different form and for entirely non-metaphysical purposes. That is one of the reasons why he is funny, comedy being the chief register of the disparate. A world which has now almost passed loved him for it.

I would also argue that he bestowed that gift upon Bertie Wooster. A well-equipped  ‘poet’s mind’, wrote Eliot, ‘is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences’. In Wodehouse’s hands, this is true not only of poets but of his most famous fathead.

As I said, The Code of the Woosters begins with two images drawn from great literature. It ends with two more.

Having, thanks to Jeeves, defeated Spode and Sir Watkyn, and secured the cow-creamer, Bertie retires to bed, switches off the light and reflects: ‘Jeeves was right, I felt. The snail was on the wing and the lark on the thorn – or, rather, the other way round – and God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.’ That is Bertie’s version of ‘Pippa Passes’, by Browning.

He ends with an image drowsily drawn from his memory: ‘…presently the eyes closed, the muscles relaxed, the breathing became soft and regular, and sleep, which does something which has slipped my mind to the something sleeve of care, poured over in a healing wave.’ The reference is from Macbeth, Act II, scene ii, in which sleep ‘knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’. Thus are the successful pinching of a cow-creamer and a bloody Shakespearean murder committed out of power hunger ‘yoked by violence together’.

‘This is a massacre of thoughts’: the exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on his cancellation

This should have been a busy holiday period for the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. His exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery was due to open last month and others were planned in New York, Paris and Berlin. They have all now been cancelled because Ai himself has been cancelled – not by the Chinese Communist party this time, but by the ‘free’ West.

Weiwei had posted on X (formerly Twitter) his thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war. However, his comments appeared to more generally attack Jewish influence and power. He wrote: ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world. Financially, culturally, and in terms of media influence, the Jewish community has had a significant presence in the United States. The annual $3 billion aid package to Israel has, for decades, been touted as one of the most valuable investments the United States has ever made. This partnership is often described as one of shared destiny.’

Soon after Ai’s comment was posted, the Lisson Gallery released a statement: ‘There is no place for debate that can be characterised as anti-Semitic or Islamophobic at a time when all efforts should be on ending the tragic suffering in Israeli and Palestinian territories, as well as in communities internationally.’

The gallery says the decision was mutual but Ai tells me this is not true. He says he simply received a notification from it and that the gallery never explained its rationale. He sees the cancellation as an attack on freedom of expression, for which he has been fighting all his life. ‘It mirrors an authoritarian culture, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in China and the tragic events in Germany decades ago, to put it more solemnly,’ he said.

I met Ai before the cancellation, at his new home in Montemor-o-Novo, around an hour’s drive from Lisbon. ‘It’s so simple – extremely simple,’ he said of his life in Portugal. ‘It gives me the possibility to say goodbye to the very extreme, intense life.’ Looking back, I realise he spoke too soon.

He showed me his new studio rising from the fields, a near replica of his old Shanghai facility, which was demolished by the Chinese authorities. He thought it might make a good store for 30 tons of buttons he obtained from a Croydon button factory, and which had been destined for landfill. ‘I have this sort of romantic thinking about buttons,’ he said, showing me the screensaver on his mobile phone, a black-and-white photo of a dark hole in the earth. For five years, this dugout was home for him and his father, a renowned poet condemned as an enemy of the state and exiled to China’s far west. ‘If we lost a button, we couldn’t replace one. We were so poor. So that was always on my mind.’ He has no real plan for the buttons, not yet. ‘Honestly, I never have a real plan. Fortunately or unfortunately there’s always something that leads my curiosity.’

The Lisson Gallery show would have been a chance to indulge his love of Lego. His plan was to recreate some of his older works in Lego blocks, together with such recent images as the explosion that ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipeline, the giant spy balloon shot down over the US coastline and the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan. ‘I think it’s very convenient to use these 40 colours to make all those sophisticated images related to political arguments, aesthetic judgments or history and social commentary,’ he said. Though his relationship with Lego, the company, was not always so good. In 2015, the Danish toymaker refused his studio’s request for a bulk order, saying it ‘cannot approve the use of Legos for political works’. The Lego ban coincided with the announcement of a new Legoland park in Shanghai. The company later reversed its policy after an outcry.

Ai has often been scathing about what he sees as western hypocrisy and double standards – and the latest cancellations have re-kindled that anger. Before he went into exile in 2015, he was frequently given the cold shoulder by western galleries or museums which were looking to expand their businesses in China. ‘For that little money, they revoke all their integrity,’ he said. The Chinese government has pressured museums and galleries around the world not to show his work. ‘I often hear museums tell me the [Chinese] embassy called them to say you should not show this guy’s art.’ It is something he has learned to live with. ‘I just ignore it if people display my art or don’t display my art. It doesn’t matter to me.’

He’s particularly scathing about Elon Musk, who received multiple favours from the CCP to set up his Tesla factory in Shanghai and sings the praises of the Chinese government. Musk owns X, the platform that used to be Twitter, and Ai has on his phone an animation he created, the X spinning and turning into a swastika. It was deleted from X but was still available on Instagram. ‘It’s so creepy. I mean it looks so ugly,’ he said.

Ai helped to design the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which he saw as a symbol of openness, though he soon regretted doing so after the CCP turned it into a stage for crude propaganda. Still, it gave him some protection not enjoyed by other dissidents, as did his international standing and his father’s acclaimed status. His luck ran out in 2011, when he was grabbed by police as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong.

Ai was held for 81 days, mostly in solitary confinement, amid vague allegations of ‘economic crimes’. He says the experience taught him a lot about the absurdity of the CCP and the power of humour. ‘With authoritarianism, you cannot fight with it, because they love you to fight with them, they are so powerful. But if you laugh about it, they hate it, because they are so laughable. They do not know how to fight with you.’

When he was released and put under house arrest, the authorities installed 15 cameras around his house, which he decorated with red lanterns. He then installed four webcams inside his home to livestream his every movement, as a mockery of the police surveillance. The stream was viewed 5.2 million times before he was ordered to shut it down. He told the police he was only trying to help. ‘I asked them: don’t you want to know who I sleep with or who I talk with or what I am doing at my work table? I can show you 24 hours a day.’

When his passport was returned in 2015, he applied for a business visa for the UK, where he had a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. At first his application was turned down. It was at the time of Britain’s so-called ‘golden era’ of relations with China and just ahead of a visit to the UK by Xi Jinping, during which the then prime minister David Cameron hoped to drum up business. Only after a political outcry did Theresa May, then home secretary, intervene, grant the visa and apologise. ‘Unbelievable, but still believable,’ he recalled. ‘It’s bureaucracy – people don’t care.’ That year he went into exile in Berlin, where he has a studio, later moving to Cambridge before settling in Portugal.

He says his most difficult project was after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, when thousands of children died because of substandard school construction. He set about documenting the names of the children, and at one point he was detained and beaten, nearly dying from a brain haemorrhage. He collected more than 5,000 names and built an art installation out of children’s backpacks, and another from 90 tons of steel reinforcing bars recovered from the wreckage, which formed part of his Royal Academy show. ‘I was prepared to die,’ he said. ‘So many times our team was arrested, about 40 times. Beaten, threatened… They all think I was crazy, but it’s OK to be crazy for a while.’

Ai’s greatest influence, particularly on his early work, came from Marcel Duchamp, who pioneered the use of ‘ready-mades’ – repurposing everyday manufactured objects, twisting and distorting their meaning. ‘I love his attitude. He is so detached and witty. My ready-made is an authoritarian state like China. So you can easily turn it upside down.’ Often that involves the use of artefacts on an enormous scale – such as his installation ‘Spouts’, part of the MakingSense exhibition at the Design Museum this year, which consisted of a field of 250,000 porcelain spouts from teapots and wine ewers, crafted by hand during the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 ad). If the pot was not perfect when it was made, the spout was broken off. The work is a commentary on freedom of speech, where the spouts, or mouths, of dissidents have been removed.

As we drank tea in the shade of the veranda of his sprawling villa, a bird squawking in a nearby cage, ignored by a cat lazing on a chair beside us, it felt as if reality and politics were a world away. Yet politics underpins almost everything Ai creates, whether that is sculpture, films and documentaries, writing, or architecture. One of his most famous works, ‘Study of Perspective’, is a literal middle finger to authority: a photograph of himself flipping off Tiananmen Gate. He has made documentaries about the Hong Kong democracy movement and the refugee crisis. One of his films consisted of unedited and slightly surreal footage of the police interrogating him. He made a replica of the cell in which he was incarcerated for 81 days.

Ai has been vocal in his support for Palestinians since he travelled to Israel and Gaza in 2016 while filming Human Flow, a feature–length documentary about the global refugee crises. In a recent email, he tells me of Gaza: ‘What unfolds there falls far below ethical standards and challenges the comprehension of human behaviour that an ordinary person can accept.’ The Israel-Gaza war has deepened his pessimism about the state of a world which he says is dominated not by wisdom, but by stupidity.

An irony of the decision to axe his show is that the Lisson Gallery praised Ai’s ‘support of freedom of expression’ in its statement. This has only deepened Ai’s anger. His art has been displayed and celebrated across the western world, but ultimately he says he can live without ever exhibiting – but not without free thinking and the ability to express his opinions.

‘In western society, there is a palpable sense of fear now where individuals feel restrained from expressing their true thoughts, fearing potential consequences,’ he says. The issue at hand reflects a cultural tendency to reject differing opinions in pursuit of a presumed moral superiority: ‘I perceive this not only as an assault on free speech but as a massacre of thoughts. Those who suffer are individuals with independent thinking, and those who prevail are forces pushing human civilisation backwards.’

Black holes are changing our understanding of everything

One thing upon which my friend Jeremy Clarke and I always agreed is the value of seeing the world from different points of view. In that sense we partially agreed on everything. This essential skill needs to be learned, and I assert that nature is a wonderful teacher. Perhaps the most surprising and bamboozling example can be found in the study of black holes.  

Here are two apparently contradictory properties of black holes. When viewed from the outside, time stops on the event horizon – the boundary that marks the black hole’s edge, beyond which light cannot escape – and anyone attempting to cross into the interior would be seen frozen there forever. From the perspective of an astronaut falling into a supermassive black hole, however, nothing unusual happens as she travels across the horizon and into the interior, although she would be trapped in a flowing river of space carrying her to oblivion.

At the heart of the black hole lies the singularity. It is tempting to picture this as an infinitely dense point in space. More correctly, it should be viewed as a moment in time – the end of time, according to Einstein’s theory, because it lies inexorably in the future of all those who cross the event horizon, just as tomorrow lies inexorably in your future. This was known to physicists before anyone had ever observed a black hole. If it all sounds confusing, you are in good company. Einstein’s contemporary, Sir Arthur Eddington, commented that ‘there should be a law of nature to prevent stars from behaving in this absurd way’. Well, there isn’t, they do, and we must face the consequences.  

In the early 1970s, a series of papers, including the evocatively titled ‘Black Hole Explosions’ by Stephen Hawking, laid the foundations for a 50-year intellectual struggle known as the black hole information paradox. The paradox concerns the fate of things that cross the horizon and, according to the Einsteinian picture, meet their fate at the end of time. The problem uncovered by Hawking is that black holes do not live forever. Using the other great pillar of 20th-century physics – quantum theory – Hawking showed that black holes glow, albeit extremely faintly. So important was this discovery that Hawking’s equation for the temperature of a black hole is now chiselled on his memorial stone on the floor of Westminster Abbey. The essential point is that anything that glows must lose energy and therefore shrink, and Hawking’s calculation showed that a black hole gets hotter and hotter as it shrinks until, one day in the far future, it vanishes, leaving only Hawking radiation behind. 

The paradox occurs because, according to Hawking’s calculation, the radiation that remains is devoid of all information; it is as featureless as it is possible to be. The implication is that no trace of anything that ever fell into the black hole is left when the black hole has gone. But – and here is the paradox – according to quantum theory, information is never destroyed. Leonard Susskind, one of the pioneers of black hole physics, wrote in his memoir The Black Hole War: ‘Stephen claimed that information is lost in black hole evaporation… if this was true, the foundations of our subject [physics] were destroyed.’ The reason he, and pretty much everyone else, was worried about information loss is that all the known laws of physics are deterministic. If we know everything there is to know about something – the universe, for example – then we expect to be able to calculate what that thing was doing in the past and what it will do in the future. This is what we mean by determinism. But if the countless millions of black holes that populate the universe are cosmic erasers that delete information, we need a radical rethink.  

The outline of a solution to this existential challenge to physics has been discovered over the last few years, and it has (and I write this without casual hyperbole) profound consequences for our picture of reality. 

Let’s return to an astronaut diving across the horizon and into the black hole. From her perspective she crosses the horizon and approaches the singularity, but before she arrives, she is ‘spaghettified’ – ripped apart and scrambled into her atomic constituents by powerful gravitational tidal forces. At this point, Einstein’s theory breaks down as space and time dissolve away in unfathomable violence. When Hawking’s quantum calculations are added to the mix, however, a different picture emerges. If a colleague watches from afar, he concludes that his intrepid friend was vaporised by highly energetic Hawking radiation before she crossed the horizon. Which picture is correct? Is the astronaut spaghettified or vaporised? We now believe that both views are valid. This wild idea is known as black hole complementarity. Let us call it a Third Way. 

In 2019, two groups proved that Hawking’s 1975 calculation was incomplete, and all the information contained in everything that fell into a black hole throughout its lifetime ends up imprinted in the Hawking radiation. Key to this discovery was the realisation that the inside of the black hole is, in a sense we don’t yet understand, the same place as the outside. One speculative picture holds that the singularity can be seen as a tangled mass of quantum wormholes connecting the interior of the black hole to far-distant regions of space and time outside the event horizon. Whatever the explanation, the outcome is the same. The astronaut is spaghettified from one perspective and vaporised from another, but either way the information about the astronaut ends up imprinted in the Hawking radiation. Reality may be strange, but it is logically consistent. 

This ‘dual’ picture – two radically different and yet equivalent views of reality – hints that space and time as we perceive them are not fundamental properties of the universe. It seems that they emerge from, to borrow another phrase from Einstein, something deeply hidden – a quantum theory in which there is no space and no time. And, in an intriguing twist, it appears our reality may be encoded in the underlying quantum theory using a method that computer scientists have discovered that allows for information to be encoded in the memory of quantum computers in an error-tolerant way. I do not think this is evidence we live in a simulation, but it does suggest our universe behaves like a quantum computer. In the 20th century, one might have concluded that God is a mathematician. A 21st-century understanding suggests ‘The Old One’ may be a computer geek.  

Wherever this research leads, the lesson from nature is clear. Looking at a thing from different points of view is not a luxury but a necessity if we aspire to develop a deep understanding. And I assert that this is a universal truth, whether one’s interest is in understanding black holes or running a country. 

Ivy League universities must be depoliticised

In writing about the RedBird IMI bid for the Telegraph Group and The Spectator, its opponents – your columnist very much included – emphasise the danger that the real buyers, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, could use their purchase to put political or commercial pressure on the British government. But there is also a danger the other way round. If Abu Dhabi owned the titles, I would not put it past any British government (of any party) to put pressure on the Arabs. ‘Look here,’ I can imagine some prime minister saying: ‘Of course, we’d like to sell you a stake in our power stations/electric vehicles/5G networks [or whatever], but it’s very difficult for us to help while you let your titles criticise us so unfairly.’ That would be the sort of language any Gulf state would understand.

If a future British government did frame such requests, they would probably convey them to Dr Sultan Al Jaber. Dr Sultan is IMI’s main man of business, and a man of many parts, being his country’s minister of industry and advanced technology, head of its renewable energy company and of its national oil company, and therefore perfectly placed to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds as head of the COP28 in Dubai which ended this week. He is also the country’s former chief censor (not, of course, so named) and something of a diplomat. In St Petersburg in June, Dr Sultan was among those who met President Vladimir Putin ‘to build bridges and foster positive partnerships to ensure regional and international security and stability’. He will instinctively recognise the need for any British papers which his company owns to be flexible wherever the interests of his country are seriously engaged.

To my surprise, I felt a twinge of sympathy for the three Ivy League presidents (what we would call vice-chancellors) who appeared before the House of Representatives education committee last week. All were accused of giving answers which refused to declare student calls for genocide of the Jews as an automatic breach of their universities’ codes. One has resigned. Another, Dr Claudine Gay, has since explained herself by saying: ‘Some students have confused a right to free speech with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students.’ There surely is a free speech issue here: it would be difficult and undesirable to draw up a list of things, however revolting, that students may not say. Dr Gay was not flat wrong to try to distinguish between free speech and inciting violence against or harassment of Jewish students. The trouble is, however, that these three presidents – and most elite US universities – lack credibility. They have allowed their institutions to become intensely political in the framing of ‘decolonised’ curriculums, recruitment of academic staff, student admission policies etc. Harvard even has separate graduation ceremonies for black students, Hispanic students and gay students. In a question not so widely reported, a black Republican congressman asked the President of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, whether it was all right to segregate student dormitories on grounds of colour, as MIT does. Professor Kornbluth said it was because this was ‘positive selection’ not segregation: the black students (there are, of course, no all-white dorms permitted) could share ‘common experiences and support’. The way Ivy League universities are run today is prejudiced intellectually, culturally and practically against white students and most especially against Jewish ones. So the defence of free speech offered by presidents who obsessively police ‘micro-aggressions’ was justifiably not believed. The problem is not best dealt with by punishing students for uttering repulsive views, but by purging the universities of the systemic politicisation and unfairness created by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies so they can become proper academic institutions once again. 

Auberon Waugh died nearly a quarter of a century ago, aged 61. I remember reading, not long before his death, a piece in which he calculated that no matter how long he lived, he would not be able to drink all the wine in his cellar. I felt sad to read this, and I later worried that his realisation had helped him lose interest in life, rather like the tears Alexander the Great supposedly shed when he had no new worlds to conquer. Although I am now six years older than Bron ever was, my cellar has no risk of achieving such superfluity. Bron was a buff (though he scorned wine buffery, saying ‘Just drink what you enjoy’) and accumulated huge reserves, thanks to his work for the Spectator Wine Club. I am an ignorant amateur. But my drinking habits have changed with the years. I still love wine, but more than one glass makes me feel rotten. So although I could in theory drink all the wine I possess, I shan’t. Since the rest of my family – except for one element who is more interested in quantity than quality – also drinks little or nothing, should I give up on a cellar, and just get a few bottles in when guests come? No, and Christmas reminds me why. It is to do with the curious fact about good wine (reflected in the policy which treats it as a wasting asset and therefore does not charge capital gains tax on onward sale) that it improves with age yet also perishes. I like good wine’s resemblance to a life well lived – the need to exercise patience to achieve maximum pleasure. It is therefore the right thing with which to toast the people you love. An empty cellar is a life-denying thing, like a cold hearth.

In matters of health, marketing is all. So I hope by next Christmas to make available for sale tiny phials of a liquid preparation based on an ancient Celtic recipe which distils the life-giving properties of spring water. If placed on the tongue, its label will explain, its subtle taste, extracted from a mash of natural grains, boosts calm and wellbeing. I shall call it Usquebaugh.

I’m a Tory trapped in a Labour voter’s body

I’ve been on tour around the UK with my stage show about identity called A Show All About You. In Edinburgh it coincided with the last weekend of my retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy. I dropped in for an hour and sat on a bench so people could come and sit next to me to chat. Someone said on viewing my exhibition, which deals with many social issues, that they could not tell which way I vote. This pleased me. In my stage show I talk a lot about the tense relationship between our conscious intellect and our embodied intuition. I describe myself as a Tory voter trapped in a Labour voter’s body. I also talk about the dangers of ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, then I ask the audience if they would support proportional representation. Everywhere I go people are overwhelmingly in favour.

Another game I play with my audiences is to ask them to respond instantly and intuitively as to whether certain things are Tory or Labour. Hanging baskets and David Beckham, always firmly Tory, cargo bikes and further education always rock-solid Labour. One question I’m tempted to ask is: ‘Culture – Tory or Labour?’ I quite often find myself in the company of museum directors. I like to tease them by asking: ‘When is your next Tory exhibition?’ (I once made Oliver Dowden, who was then culture secretary, choke on his asparagus by putting this question to Maria Balshaw, director of Tate.) A slightly embarrassed laugh often follows. For they know as well as I do that they frequently host shows that could be interpreted as left-wing but rarely if ever stage exhibitions that are intentionally right of centre. I offer to correct this imbalance by installing a large Tracey Emin-style neon sign on the front of the museum saying: ‘Who the hell do you think pays for all this?’

An important part of my art is printmaking. Every so often I have to go to the printmaker’s studio to sign a batch of fresh etchings or woodblocks. On my most recent visit I signed a small special edition which I am donating in support of the Labour party. The edition is of a piece called ‘Vote for Me’ in multiple shades of red. It’s a self-portrait of me dressed up as Margaret Thatcher. Next to me on the table is a pile of books mainly on the subject of England and Englishness. The top one, though, is a volume I bought as a very young nascent transvestite entitled How to Be a Woman Though Male. It was written in the 1960s as a how-to book for the gender non-conforming. I found it completely useless.

After my gig at the delightful Tyne Theatre & Opera House in Newcastle there was the usual patient gaggle of fans waiting for signatures and selfies. A woman came up to me and thrust a printout of a close-up photo of one of my works in my face. It was from a large etching called ‘The American Dream’ about the culture war in the US. It was of a detail smaller than a credit card from a print the size of a dining table. It showed a jet fighter with the letters GBTQI+A written on it. I recall viewing a proof of this work at the printers and noticing the error. ‘Why have you left off the L?’ the woman spat. ‘It was a mistake,’ I replied. ‘No it wasn’t,’ she corrected me. I tried to explain that my daughter is gay so I was hardly going to leave out the lesbians deliberately, but she stormed off, still sure in her indignation. It made me wonder: ‘Has she just sat through my show and absorbed nothing?’

I’m not sure whether to feel honoured or miffed that my wife and I are included on Nicky Haslam’s 2023 list of common things, alongside ‘grieving’ and ‘the Northern Lights’. I think I’ll take it as a compliment, as whenever I’ve met him he’s been a delight and we have bonded over a shared interest in rubber fetishism.

Like Nicky, I still enjoy a posh do such as the trustees dinner at the British Museum. I’m a recently retired trustee and our current chair, George Osborne, came over to chat. It being two days after the announcement that his old mucker David Cameron was to be ennobled and become foreign secretary, he confirmed he was a bit bored of that topic. I can’t recall what else we talked about as I was at least three glasses in at that point. I have over the years chatted at parties to many of the architects of our current political situation – Farage, Gove, Johnson, Cummings, Cameron, Hancock – but don’t expect any revelatory nuggets of gossip. I can never remember.  

The case for photo-bombing

A few months ago, I visited Angkor Wat, the majestic temple in present-day Cambodia that once stood at the centre of a vast empire. As the five towers of the palace came into view, I was, despite the intense heat, fully immersed in the beauty of the place. I imagined how excited a visitor from a faraway land in the 12th century, full of anticipation for a meeting at court, would have felt arriving at what was then the largest settlement on Earth. And like that imaginary visitor, I felt propelled forward, impatient to cross the moat that separated me from the edifice, to get a closer look.

At that moment, I heard a confident American voice. ‘Excuse me,’ the man shouted, as he crouched on the floor, phone in hand. ‘I’m taking a picture.’ I took a few steps back, joining about a dozen people waiting patiently in the scorching sun for the man to take a photo of his wife. As I stood there, I kept thinking: ‘Why are all of us doing this?’

Much the same happened in other towns and temples I visited on a recent trip to Asia. Whether in Seoul, in Hanoi or in Luang Prabang: at a dozen beautiful sites, it felt as though half the visitors were focused on taking pictures, while the other half were reduced to walking around in elaborate patterns that would, if you traced them on a map, resemble the perimeter of a badly gerry-mandered electoral district.

The question of whether we should feel the need to stop what we are doing when other people are taking a photograph has become an ever-present dilemma. It is a question with admittedly low stakes but one that seems to me to have, if not exactly a moral, then a certain modicum of aesthetic significance. It goes to the heart of how each of us experiences the world and what kind of engagement with our physical surroundings we should collectively prize.

Should people be able to take a picture of their loved ones without running the danger of being ‘photo-bombed’? Or should everybody else be able to visit beautiful sites – or, if they happen to live in a city that attracts a lot of tourists, go about their daily life – without having to dodge the videos and photographs that others are taking?

One approach to thinking about this is a term I have loved since first hearing it: obsolete design. It has, for instance, been decades since computers used floppy disks. And yet the button you click to save a file remains a depiction of that long-gone object. The save icon is a prime example of obsolete design.

It seems that there are also forms of obsolete behaviour. Before the advent of digital photography, film was expensive. By walking through your picture, a stranger would make you waste a precious resource. Worse, unless you happened to be using a Polaroid, it was impossible to check on the spot how a photo had come out. You might not even realise that some stranger had ruined your picture until you got the film developed – at which point it would be too late to take it again. All of that provided a strong reason for people to go out of their way to avoid inadvertently photo-bombing each other.

Today, virtually everyone uses digital photography: taking a picture on an iPhone is free. If some stranger is visible in the first picture you take, you have only to wait a few seconds until they move on and take another one.

The risk of a bad surprise has also been eliminated. It now takes minimal effort to inspect your photograph on the spot. So you can make sure you’re happy with what you’ve got well before you fly back home.

At the same time, the advent of digital photography has made it harder to avoid interfering with others’ pictures. Because it has become so much cheaper to take and share pictures, the average person takes many more videos and photographs than in the pre-digital age. Even if the number of visitors to a famous tourist spot or a particularly cute café has not grown in the past few decades, the number of people who are taking pictures at any one time has skyrocketed.

In the past, there were real reasons why we should all try to avoid interfering with each other’s photographs. Since then, the cost of being photo-bombed has fallen, and the cost of avoiding photo-bombing others has risen. The social norms which developed in the age of analogue photography have become a form of obsolete behaviour in the age of the iPhone.

What’s more, besides the practical case for photo-bombing, there is also a more aesthetic case to be made. As I felt on my recent travels, the ease of taking pictures creates a great temptation to experience any sight, no matter how awe-inspiring, mediated through the small screens of our smartphones. When I saw beautiful temples or ancient ruins, I knew full well that I would, if I ever needed a visual reminder of them, be able to call up perfectly composed, professionally taken photographs with a quick Google search. And yet I could not resist the temptation to interrupt my contemplation of their beauty to take my own mediocre snap. The ubiquity of digital photography makes it much harder for any of us to marvel at the wonders of the world.

It would be bizarre, impractical and authoritarian to forbid tourists from taking pictures at beautiful sites, just to help them have a more meaningful experience. The one thing that we can do is to shift our norms in a small way. The least we can do is to stop guilting people into prioritising others’ ability to take a photo over their own opportunity to feel in communion with a beautiful place.

The right to photo-bomb should not be misconstrued as encouragement to be an asshole. If you can easily avoid walking through someone’s photograph without disrupting your enjoyment of a place, you may as well do so.

But for the most part, it is time for a change of attitude. The next time I am rushing through the streets of London or visiting a special place like Angkor Wat, I will do my best to ignore all the people taking pictures. You should claim the same freedom for yourself.

Interest rates may start to fall – but not yet

The Bank of England has held interest rates at 5.25 per cent for the third consecutive time. This was the expected outcome of the Monetary Policy Committee’s latest vote, but it wasn’t unanimous. There were six MPC votes to hold rates but three to raise it to 5.5 per cent. No one voted to cut. This speaks to the biggest challenge the Bank faces right now: how to balance getting the inflation rate back to target without tipping the economy into recession. But markets expect the next movement to be downwards – so much so that mortgage rates are already falling in anticipation.

The MPC today urges markets not to get ahead of themselves and says that inflation risks are ‘skewed to the upside’. This is why it continues to lean in a slightly hawkish direction. And while rates may be falling internationally, UK inflation is expected to be stubborn – and above the 2 per cent target all next year. Even now it remains more than double the Bank’s target (4.6 per cent at the last count).

With a return to target not expected until 2025, Andrew Bailey, the Bank's governor, has made clear that rates are expected to stay high for some time, not least because of the lag (the rate rises that took place mid-way through the year are still working their way into the system). Today’s minutes from the MPC make the same point, noting that ‘monetary policy will need to be sufficiently restrictive for sufficiently long to return inflation to the 2 per cent target sustainably in the medium term, in line with the Committee’s remit.’

So if rates are on the way down, it won't be anytime soon. The Bank is walking on a tightrope, as evidenced by yesterday’s monthly GDP figures, which showed a 0.3 per cent contraction in October, and zero growth in the three months leading up to October. The concern going into the new year is that the more recent rate rises further weigh down the economy, leading to repeated contractions.

As is often the case these days, the country’s economic problems also morph into its political problems. The government pledged at the start of the year to halve inflation and also to get the economy growing – but the long slog to achieve the former (which largely sat with the Bank, not ministers) has made it harder to achieve the latter. There are ways for government to pursue growth despite higher interest rates, but many of these areas (including housing or healthcare reform, which are both long overdue and could dramatically boost GDP) remain politically off-limits for this government, which has been busy carving out factions and highlighting divisions within the party.

If GDP data continues to disappoint, that will put pressure on the Bank to rethink rates. But its main priority is to get inflation back to target: one that it has failed on miserably over the past few years, and that (for the sake of its credibility) it cannot stray from now, even if it means more economic pain in the process.

Did England lose its mind in the pandemic?

My dog Sonny broke my finger earlier this year. He’s a Chart Polski, which translates as ‘Polish sighthound’, and he’s one of about 700 in the world. I was trying to stop him from going after a deer. Even with a muzzle, he could’ve felled it. Chart Polskis hurl themselves in front of the deer’s legs to trip it with their impossibly strong necks. On this occasion, Sonny, who I named after the boxer Sonny Liston, pulled me down a mountain. Because of my broken finger, I came up with a new temporary playing technique. I figured that if the jazz great Django Reinhardt could play guitar with two fingers, then I could have a go on the violin with three. I played a couple of gigs in Germany and no one noticed the difference. Either that’s an indictment of my playing or their knowledge as an audience. A lot of musicians have their fingers insured, but I’ve never bothered. Why pay some monkey behind a desk to do nothing?

I live in a little village in the Pieniny mountains, in the south-east of Poland. Christmas celebrations here begin on 24 December with Wigilia, a meat-free, booze-free supper served when the first star appears in the sky, followed by Shepherd’s Mass in the village church at the end of the evening. Most years I play with a local highlander band at the mass. These guys have all got so-called real jobs, but in their spare time they play the most glorious traditional music. Sometimes kids of 12 or 13 come up to play with them, so the music is handed on to the next generation. I’m not Catholic, but I like being part of the community here because it’s so small. My Polish isn’t great, so during the sermons, when I don’t have a clue what’s being said, I look around, admiring the beauty of the church, while other band members break their abstinence by sneaking out the back for homemade vodka between songs.

There are only about 80 households in our village and now there are also 40 or so Ukrainian refugees, mostly women and children who don’t know if they are going to see their husbands or fathers again. Poland has taken in more Ukrainians than any other country since the war began – one and a half million – and the new arrivals are proving to be a bit of a strain on health services, social security and education. Yet even in a small, tight-knit village like this one, I don’t sense any resentment whatsoever. A friend of mine who normally rents his spare rooms to families for holidays has decided to give up this chunk of his income while he looks after Ukrainians. A year and a half later, he doesn’t give it a second thought.

What interests me is the emotional intelligence of music, not the formal aspects, which might be why I like old film music so much. I’ve been playing Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence a lot lately. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who composed the music for the 1983 David Bowie film, is a beautifully sensitive musician and I have an affinity with his music in the same way that I have with Bach or Jimi Hendrix. I’ve not written a film score before but it’s my ambition to do so. I’m used to working with moving images. When I’m back in England I practise playing along to Judge Judy (not that there is much relationship between Bach and Judy). Cricket is also great to play to because it’s so slow-moving. I can take my eyes off it for a minute and when I look back nothing has happened, except one batsman has got a bit fatter.

That said, I don’t go back to England very often these days. During the pandemic I was so grateful I lived in the mountains among people who don’t give a toss about whatever the World Health Organisation is saying. You can’t tell a highlander what to do. Nobody wore masks or adhered to any lockdown and the police never bothered to do anything about it. While I was carrying on with my life as normal, I read with horror the stories on the BBC about people reporting each other to the authorities for going out jogging twice in a day, or for sitting too close to someone on a park bench. It’s as if some people were envious of the Poles for having lived under communism and they were desperate to become little informants themselves. I have to believe the dire picture I formed of home wasn’t the truth. People weren’t ratting on each other for going jogging, were they? Did everyone really stockpile toilet paper?

Another reason I’m avoiding England at the moment is there seems to be an attack from all directions on people enjoying themselves. You can’t say the wrong word or you’re banned from the media. You can’t drive more than 20 miles an hour in built-up areas, even though that’s actually more dangerous because you’re nervously watching your speedometer instead of the road. Oh, and if you’re young you’re never going to be allowed to smoke. In a way I love Rishi Sunak’s idea because it’s so wacky. I never thought he had a personality before but now I see he’s a comedian.

My village has a small music club in a converted sheep barn which is half the reason I moved here. It’s a completely crazy idea that it would be a success in this remote part of the world, and yet it is. It’s always full up and the crème de la crème of jazz musicians from Poland and Germany come and play. I feel so lucky that I don’t need to get on an aeroplane or drive for miles when I want to try out new music in front of a live audience. I can just trudge down the hill with my violin.