Monumentally good: John Francis Flynn, at the Dome, reviewed

John Francis Flynn is monumentally good. He’s kick-yourself-for-missing-him good. He’s so good that when he spoke between songs in the upstairs ballroom of an old Irish pub in Tufnell Park, it was almost a disappointment: how could the man making this extraordinary music be so normal?

Flynn is part of a cohort of Irish musicians revisiting traditional music. There’s the Mary Wallopers, in broad terms the most Pogues-ish. There’s Lankum, shortlisted for the Mercury Prize for their eyebrow-raising, droning experimentalism. There’s Lisa O’Neill, subdued and stern. And there’s Flynn, whose music dances from the unadornedly old-fashioned and Irish – the ‘Tralee Gaol’ played solo, on tin whistle – into something entirely different. He recast the American folk song ‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground’ into something new and different, part Nick Drake, part post-punk; the English sea shanty ‘Shallow Brown’ became something of a meditation, stately and glowering, owing more to post-rock’s imposing stillness than to the records that usually carry the writing credit ‘Trad Arr.’.

It’s of course far from unprecedented to combine folk with other music. More recently we’ve had the Gloaming, the Irish-American folk supergroup who in the 2010s became diaspora superstars. They also played something that sounded like it had been spliced with post-rock. But the Gloaming’s post-rock elements were the kind that soundtrack BBC nature documentaries about the awesome majesty of Iceland. They came from the stirring, wondrous end of things, the Sigur Ros end. What Flynn has taken from post-rock is the sort of stuff that soundtracks Netflix series about surviving in a world of reanimated corpses. His songs come from the paranoid, grubby end of things, the Mogwai and Slint end. These were songs that could draw blood.

‘My Son Tim’, a cry against the conscription of young Irishmen to fight against Napoleon, was punctuated by screeches, wails and walls of electric guitar from Brendan Jenkinson, as if Gang of Four were jamming with the Wolfe Tones. The interjections of the band were crucial – they are the shards that slash at the songs Flynn sings. Not that it is all violence: Caimin Gilmore’s upright bass-playing was sometimes reminiscent of Danny Thompson’s work with Pentangle, fluid and sunlit.

The rise of Flynn, Lankum and O’Neill is also a testimony to the enduring worth of record labels that have a genuine musical vision. All three are signed to the UK indie label Rough Trade, which has for 46 years released records because Geoff Travis and Jeanette Lee, who run it, love them rather than because they anticipate buying helicopters with the proceeds. They have produced hits and misses along the way, but at the moment Rough Trade is in a purple patch.

Margo Price might also thank the people who release records out of love. She spent several years not getting very far in Nashville before Jack White signed her to his Third Man Records and released her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. I saw her play at a pub near King’s Cross off the back of that record, and she and her band were brilliant, playing hard country and revelling in the recognition of her talent.

She’s not quite so country any longer, skewing more towards an idealised, West Coast, drivetime sound all mid-pace and melodic. At Koko, she even wore a floaty, floor-length dress for the full Fleetwood Mac effect, before swapping to sequins and cowboy boots to finish the set in her older style. But though the songs were terrific, the band decent, her voice great, and though she worked the stage like a trouper, something didn’t quite click.

I put this down to geography. I was near the top of the room, the space above me was deserted and it’s hard to feel engaged when you’re at the edge of a crowd with emptiness behind. But friends downstairs reported the same feeling of distance, as if they were performing at the crowd rather than to the crowd. Some of it, too, comes down to taste. Regular readers may be aware of my almost obsessional hatred of occasional additional percussion. Price, unfortunately, loves hopping behind a drum kit and walloping along with the band.

Still, there’s no denying her talent. Like Jenny Lewis, Price is someone who would have been a star were she a couple of generations younger but her unfortunate luck is to live at a time when her style of music no longer occupies the cultural centre.

Lucid and lean: Metamorphoses, at the Theatre Royal Bath, reviewed

Literate, thoughtful and serious, Kim Brandstrup ranks as one of the most honest and honourable of contemporary choreographers. A proper grown-up, scorning bad-boy sensationalism or visual gimmickry, he compensates in solid consistent craft for whatever he may lack in striking originality, and the double bill he presented earlier this month as part of Deborah Warner’s season in the chapel-like Ustinov Studio behind Bath’s Theatre Royal is quietly and characteristically satisfying.

Its subject matter draws on that bottomless source, classical myth. First comes a version of an episode in the saga of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur, focused on Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne and the return of the Minotaur as a ghost, haunting his sister Ariadne who was complicit in his murder. Brandstrup is good at telling stories: his choreographic language is lucid and lean, without superfluity or contortion, and the action is forcefully articulated. Matthew Ball may be too palpably a nice guy to convince me as a self-centred cad of a Theseus, but Kristen McNally makes Ariadne’s grief hotly vivid and, as the disembodied Minotaur, the astoundingly lithe and resourceful Tommy Franzen scales walls and swings off perches with supernatural simian grace.

The second half of the evening turns to Cupid and Psyche, the fable of the mortal maiden seduced in her sleep by an amorous god whom she never sees. Brandstrup explores this idea through an extended duet for Ball and Alina Cojocaru, their faces nuzzling and their limbs gently entwining as they move towards the light and perhaps a revelation of the true nature of one another. Their sensuality is touching, so tenderly and delicately rendered.

My major gripe relating to both pieces is the way that music is treated: like so many choreographers today, Brandstrup uses it more as a casual soundtrack or backdrop than something organically necessary, the soil out of which the dance grows. A hotchpotch of Bach, Schubert, Gubaidulina, Pärt and folk tunes has been cooked up; one might as well fling Josquin des Prez and Taylor Swift into the mix for all that they enhance anything we see on stage. And a minor grumble: can we have a moratorium on the title ‘Metamorphoses’? Like ‘Frankenstein’, it’s become a tired cliché indiscriminately employed, whether it’s Ovid or Kafka who is invoked. But with such fine performers and numinous environments conjured by designers Justin Nardella and Chris Wilkinson, this was a beautiful event.

A second visit to the Resolution Festival of new choreography at the Place introduced me to further rookie talents, all of them with something substantial to impart.

Jasmin Saulo marshalled a squad of consecrated squaddies, oiled, bare-chested and fired up by ritual. But their strength seems to be fading: at least that’s how I saw it – the programme note suggests a quest for a healing of ‘the cracks of a broken soul’.  The plight of two isolated males ensued. Bald Jameywamey sits forlornly on a chair, clutching a bottle of water. When he stands up and starts to move, his body is sinuously elastic but on the edge of existential despair; at any moment one feels he might give up and collapse in a heap, another broken soul. Somehow he keeps going, failing better, as Samuel Beckett put it. Then comes Fabio Pronesti, a sullen and hirsute Italian who stares resentfully at the audience and flicks through his book of childhood memories: playing with lighted matches, crawling on all fours, running round the stage like a boy chasing the wind in order to fly his kite. In a final fadeout, he takes an unconscionably long time to pour himself a drink, creating a huge puddle as the glass overflows. God knows what it all means – we can’t hear his mutterings – but he is strangely riveting.

An endurance test that I constantly failed: Occupied City reviewed

Occupied City is Steve McQueen’s meditative essay on Amsterdam during Nazi occupation, with a running time of four hours and 22 minutes. There is no archive footage. There are no witness testimonies. It’s not The Sorrow and the Pity. It is not half-a-Shoah. Instead, this visits 130 addresses and details what happened there between 1940 and 1945 while showing the building or space as it is today. It should have its own power – what ghosts reside here? What was life like for the Jews who were deported from this square and perished at Auschwitz? – but I watched it from home via a link, as I had Covid, and after the first hour started to wonder: if I die will it be from the virus? Or the boredom?

McQueen has made some excellent narrative contributions to cinema and television – Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave, the Small Axe anthology for the BBC – but he is also a Turner Prize-winning visual artist and this is more at the visual-art end of the spectrum. The full cut will, he has said, be 36 hours which I can imagine as an installation running on a loop in a museum so you can spend ten minutes in front of it and then move on. Ten minutes is probably all you need. It is based on the book, Atlas of An Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, written by his wife, Bianca Stigter. The book is an encyclopaedia with each entry describing a different address where a family lived or a rally was held or a Jewish prisoner was forced to scrub floors with a toothbrush. This is that encyclopaedia, filmed. It was an endurance test, which I constantly failed.

It is narrated throughout by the Dutch-British actress Melanie Hyams who reads out every entry in a stony, affectless voice. The facts should speak for themselves, McQueen seems to be saying, but after one, two, three, four hours it just becomes numbing and repetitive. It opens with the hallway of a residential apartment, bathed in a golden light as the resident gets on with her day. Here, we are told, a Jewish publisher and his family committed suicide the moment the Dutch army surrendered to the Nazis. We hear about atrocity after atrocity – here’s the girls’ school that housed the secret police and became a site of torture; here’s the house where Jews in hiding were ratted on by their gentile neighbours – accompanied by modern footage that McQueen filmed between 2020 and 2022, during the pandemic. Often, after a site and what occurred there is described in detail, we’ll be told that the structure was ‘demolished’. So this building is not that building. If a point is being made I don’t know what it is.

Things aren’t presented in chronological order and if you are not acquainted with the city it’s impossible to work out how events might relate geographically. It’s also impossible to keep focused. I’d be watching a dog that had just been let off the lead in the park when I’d realise (guiltily) that I hadn’t been listening to the commentary. So I’d double down on listening to the commentary and then be unable to work out what I was looking at. It was as if the film was fighting itself. Meanwhile, McQueen is constantly seeking to make connections between the past and the present. He even, at various points, seems to be associating government lockdowns with life under a brutal occupation, which is as facile as it is offensive.

There is no interrogation or insight. At one point we are told: ‘The Netherlands lost 60,000 of its 80,000 Jewish inhabitants, the highest percentage in occupied countries.’ Lost? Like keys you’ve put down somewhere? Why not say they were ‘murdered’?  And why were more Dutch Jews murdered than those from France or Belgium? I felt, afterwards, that I still didn’t know what exactly had happened here.

There are moments of great beauty – a family sledging in the snow; teenagers entwined in the park; the woods at dusk – but it’s variable and some shots will put you in mind of Look North. A far better film is Stigter’s documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2022), which examines three minutes of footage from a pre-war village in Poland before it was decimated by the Holocaust. It says more in its one hour running time than this does in what seems like days, and is currently available on multiple streaming platforms (including BBC iPlayer) – I’d direct you to that.

Cheekface are uplifting and witty but also very punchable: It’s Sorted reviewed

Cheekface are apt to divide opinion rather sharply. There are those who believe that the Los Angeles indie nerd-rock three-piece dissect late capitalism and the American psyche with an uplifting and insightful laconic wit. And then there are those who want to punch them repeatedly in the face, especially the singer Greg Katz – punch them and punch them until there is nothing left but broken teeth. I get that. I swing between both camps.

In this respect, and several others, they are rather like Weezer, except a little less cute. In the end people decided that a punching was probably the right option for Weezer and they may, after time, decide the same for Cheekface.

What we have here is half-spoken, half-drawled slacker vocals atop a sparse guitar, bass and drums ensemble which, weirdly, brings to mind the B-52s. There is a decent pop sensibility at work, unquestionably – catchy power pop choruses come and go with rather greater regularity than Weezer ever managed.

And then there are the words. Cheekface are, of course, lefties who satirise everything and see the value of nothing. Occasionally this is funny, as on the parody of US suburbia ‘Popular 2’, when Katz sings: ‘Ask away – is it punk to complain/ The salad’s mostly iceberg when it’s meant to be romaine?’ The closest they get to a love song is on ‘Largest Muscle’ – ‘Your tongue is your largest muscle/ You talked so much you had to get corrective surgery.’ Too often, though, the know-it-all snarkiness grates: the system allowed to you to buy your expensive guitars and preppy T-shirts, you spoiled children. That’s when you feel like reaching for the knuckledusters.      

How does Larry David get away with it? Curb Your Enthusiasm reviewed

As Curb Your Enthusiasm begins its 12th and apparently final series, one key question remains: how does Larry David get away with it? While many entertainers are sent into exile for ancient tweets far less tasteless than the average episode of Curb, the show sails on – providing extended comic riffs on incest victims, Holocaust survivors and even fat women, while enjoying pretty much universal acclaim.

Perhaps it helps that the jokes are funny – and that many of them are on David. You could also argue that his heartlessness about say, the bereavements of people he doesn’t know (and some that he does) is only an unusually honest version of our own. Nonetheless, the feeling persists that he’s mysteriously been given a free pass, the world having decided that he’s someone to whom the normal rules don’t apply.

And this, I’d suggest, is one of the many reasons why the show is such a delight. It’s not just a beautifully constructed, constantly inventive sitcom, but also a much needed holiday from the censoriousness we’re forced to live through most of the time – not least because David never seems to be deliberately causing offence so much as being indifferent to the notion of offensiveness.

For anybody who’s managed to miss Curb over the past 24 years, David plays a version of himself he refers to as ‘TV Larry’ who’s still extremely rich from having created Seinfeld and still the model for George in that show: neurotic, spiteful, obsessed with the tiniest of everyday problems. (Even David’s wealth, incidentally, doesn’t appear to be held against him.) At the same time, he somehow comes across as an everyman – or maybe an everyolderman, sometimes angry, sometimes just bewildered at the strange modern world he finds himself in.

A long-standing sitcom device is an aging bloke convinced that he’s the last sane person left – the traditional twist being that he’s the one who’s mad. In Curb, David takes it a stage further. TV Larry may be undeniably bonkers, but nor is he wrong to think that everybody else is. He’s also spookily unlucky in the classic comic way. This mix of culpability and blamelessness was again on wildly enjoyable display in Curb’s return, when Larry agreed to be a highly paid guest at a party held by a millionaire fan. The only requirement was for him to be ‘cordial’. So what could possibly go wrong – especially as he knew that cordiality ‘means to be polite, not to tell people what you really think of them and what assholes they are’.

As ever, he did his best ‘in the circumstances’, as he put it, ‘of a person who hates people and yet has to be amongst them’ (as pithy a definition of TV Larry as any). But as ever, his best failed spectacularly, with Larry getting into any number of baroque scrapes and his bad luck ensuring that he accidentally insulted anybody he didn’t insult on purpose. Meanwhile, in the usual neat Curb way, a series of Chekhov guns sighted in the early scenes were fired one by one.

I still don’t know how Larry David gets away with it – but I’m grateful that he does.

At first sight, Seth MacFarlane’s new sitcom Ted is aiming for a similar lack of cosiness. The show is based on MacFarlane’s 2012 film of the same name, which featured John Bennett, who as a child had successfully wished for his teddy bear to come to life. Now he was in his thirties, the bear remained his best friend as well as a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking fan of prostitutes.

In the TV version, we pitch up in 1993 when John is 16 and he and Ted are living with his family. For a while in the first double episode, the humour largely relied on a toy bear swearing and using mild racial slurs – surprisingly funny, it turned out. Left at home while John was at school, Ted then searched in vain for the dad’s porn collection (‘Twenty-five years of marriage and no porn? I’d kill myself’) and hired three prostitutes called Cupcake, Peaches and Beef Stroganoff. And yet, the longer the show went on, the clearer it became that, for all the determinedly non-PC gags, Ted is, at heart, unexpectedly sweet. The friendship between boy and bear is genuine and rather touching – and by the end Ted had even made his peace with John’s woke cousin Blaire.

In theory this should make for a somewhat awkward watch: a show that can’t decide how daring it wants to be. In practice, MacFarlane shifts between the gears with such joyful freedom – and so many great one-liners – that we’re more than happy to ignore the occasional sound of grinding.

An unmistakable hit: Till the Stars Come Down, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Till the Stars Come Down is a raucous, high-energy melodrama set at a wedding in Hull. The writer, Beth Steel, focuses on three female characters and virtually ignores the men in her story which is just as well because her male characters all talk and act like planks. Her women are full of courage, craziness and fun.

We meet Sylvia, the anxious bride, who fears that her family won’t accept her Polish spouse, Marek. Her sister, Hazel, is facing a romantic crisis because her husband has stopped paying her attention in bed. And sexy Maggie harbours a secret that’s bound to spill out during the drunken festivities. The three shrieking women exchange ribald gags. Maggie remembers an attractive man who ‘looked at me like I was a potato in a famine’. Hazel tries not to laugh too hard in case she wets herself and spoils her finery.

The jabbering women are joined by Aunty Carol, who wears a purple hat the size of a bouncy castle and calls for bucks fizz all round. The decibel levels soar as she treats the girls to a selection of her bons mots. Cheddar, she says, ‘smells like Satan’s armpit’. After the ceremony, the sit-down meal is less frenetic and the script turns into a public information broadcast. We’re given preachy messages about how to think and behave. Our hearts must always be open to migrants such as Marek (even though he informs Sylvia’s family that English workers are lazier than Poles). A male character warns us against eating pork because, he says, pigs are clairvoyant and can foresee their doom when they arrive at the abattoir. A drunken uncle laments the closure of Yorkshire’s collieries in the 1980s but he fails to mention that the miners expected sky-high wages for extracting coal that was available cheaper overseas.

The plot gets more interesting when an illicit embrace is witnessed by a notorious gossip. This device is used three times in all but it doesn’t matter as it keeps the story motoring forward. After the interval, there’s more padding in the shape of drunken horseplay, improvised romantic songs, and an unfunny re-enactment of a Tarzan movie. Never mind. Further infusions of alcohol are taken and the plot gets started again. Playgoers who enjoy the sight of inebriated northerners swearing, screaming, vomiting and punching each other will love the second act. Aunty Carol (Lorraine Ashbourne on sparkling form) distinguishes herself with this item of personal reminiscence: ‘Last time I puked up I wiped my bottom on candy floss.’ On press night she was involved in an unscripted mishap that began with the removal of Hazel’s underwear as the women collapsed during a drunken dance. The pants were tugged clear of Hazel’s ankles and thrown haphazardly into the crowd where they hit Anne-Marie Duff in the face. She shrugged off the incident with a graceful smile. (Best performance of the evening.)

The play concludes with a messy and intriguing twist involving an accusation of sexual assault which may have been invented. A fine ending to a sometimes crass and ill-disciplined show. There was a particular atmosphere at the curtain call which rarely materialises in a theatre. But the signals are impossible to misinterpret. This is a hit. West End, easily. Broadway, maybe. Pack your bags, girls.

Broken Water is another play that focuses on three powerful women. It opens with the characters seated on chairs, telling us what happens as childbirth begins. The women address us individually and although they live on the same street in London they have yet to become friends. This artful script reveals its riches slowly and obliquely, offering hints and half-clues along the way. The questions keep coming. Why does Olive speak so tenderly of her son, David, who seems to have been fathered by a teenage rapist who attacked her in a disused factory? What will happen to Philippa, the publishing executive, who spent 20 years raising three children and who now can’t get a lowly job at an online magazine? And how did young Linda, happily married to a hard-working Cockney, end up with no children at all? These little mysteries are all set forth, elaborated on and resolved with consummate skill.

Some of the details make your heart ache. Olive waggles her hands in the sea and imagines that her son, far away in Canada, can see the ripples in a mountain lake. But he can’t. An unimaginable tragedy swept him out of Olive’s life.

The outstanding performer is Sarah Hadland, as Philippa, the spikey but tender mother of three, who recalls her glory days as a hot-shot yuppie in the 1990s. She has to choose between unemployment and part-time work serving drinks in a café. She takes the waitressing job and loves it despite herself. Like everything in this production, it’s a beautifully judged surprise.

Will Rachel Reeves scrap the private equity tax break?

I’ve been reading – so you don’t have to – speeches recently addressed to a hot-ticket gathering of business leaders at the Oval cricket ground by Sir Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. The nub is a promise to hold corporation tax at the current rate of 25 per cent for the duration of the next parliament, combined with a warning that ‘levelling up of workers’ rights’ will cause companies’ labour costs to rise. Then there’s all the usual guff you’d expect from a government-in-waiting about infrastructure and skills; plus an unusually warm tone towards the financial services sector, including a pledge not to reinstate the EU-inspired cap on bankers’ bonuses that was abolished by Kwasi Kwarteng.

In essence, Britain’s boardrooms now believe Labour can’t lose the forthcoming election and the City’s chieftains – the likes of Sir Douglas Flint of abrdn, Nigel Higgins of Barclays and Sir John Kingman of Legal & General – have been lining up to join its advisers. So there’ll be lots more supping of Labour’s ‘proudly pro-business, pro-worker’ porridge in the months to come.

But at least there’s one scrap worth watching. Back in 2021, Reeves pledged to close a loophole that allows partners in private equity firms – whom she accused of ‘asset-stripping some of our most valued businesses’ – to pay 28 per cent capital gains tax on ‘carried interest’ profits rather than 45 per cent top-rate income tax. Some 2,550 individuals are reckoned to benefit to the tune of £400 million a year, so it looks like an easy symbolic win for Reeves. And she’s not wrong in the sense that private equity is too often seen as a ruthless profit-extractor rather than a patient investor helping promising companies to grow.

But private equity’s fat cats are fighting back, threatening to invest less in the UK and move themselves abroad if their tax bonanza is taken away. In the current mood of cosying-up, I suspect Reeves will back off and compromise – a manoeuvre still known in Labour-speak, I believe, as seeking the third way.

Brothers apart

I’m sorry to see the billionaire Issa brothers falling out with one another. Sons of Gujarati immigrants who settled in Blackburn, Mohsin and Zuber Issa started with a single set of petrol pumps, built Euro Garages (EG) into one of Europe’s biggest chains of filling stations and convenience stores, and in 2020 – in partnership with the TDR private equity group – acquired the Asda supermarket chain from Walmart for £6.8 billion. Criticised though they have been for the scale and complexity of their debts, they are living proof that bold entrepreneurs from modest origins can make it big in British business.

The reported rift has to do with Mohsin divorcing his wife of 30 years to pursue a new relationship. Sources say the younger Zuber now wants to sell his personal stake in Asda in order to focus on EG – and whatever the unravelling, the brothers apart will be less potent than together.

Meanwhile, a curious detail catches my eye: Mohsin ‘is said [by the Daily Mail] to have moved out of the family compound near Blackburn and into a nearby mansion, which he bought for £18.2 million’. I can’t see a stately home or landed estate currently for sale anywhere in the north-west for more than half of that price. Has he bought a whole postal district?

Tunnel power

Le Shuttle through the Channel Tunnel is never a beguiling experience. But at least the lavatories have improved, I noticed on my recent trip. And after 30 years of debt restructurings and corporate upheavals, so have the finances, with record 2023 revenues in the operating company Getlink (formerly Groupe Eurotunnel) of €1.8 billion and a 58 per cent share of the cross-Channel passenger car market, as holidaymakers despair of delays and fare rises on competing ferry services.

What’s most interesting is €558 million of those revenues come not from traffic but from sales of electricity transmission capacity via the tunnel’s ElecLink interconnector, rolled out without fanfare in 2022. Incapable as we seem to be in addressing the UK’s long-term energy gap, you might think that means power constantly being piped from France to Kent. But in fact it’s often the other way, what with French nuclear stations out of action for repair and the giant ArcelorMittal steelworks at Dunkirk about to switch to electric arc furnaces (ahead of Tata at Port Talbot) in the cause of decarbonisation. Either way, the interconnector is a belated smart use of a great engineering feat that few of us have ever learned to love.

Green Alps

Maybe what Mohsin Issa has really bought – in a moment of folly – is an up-yours-brother chalet in the French Alps. I say folly because, at €15 million or so for a family-sized new-build in an exclusive location and with a full suite of ‘wellness facilities’, such extravagances can only shrink in value as the climate warms and the pistes retreat.

Even in the supposedly prime skiing days of late January, my lodgings in the Haute-Savoie resort of Megève looked out on snowless green pastures to the south while thin slush, boosted by artificial snow cannons, barely covered the lower slopes to the north. Some reports claim that the European ski season has shortened on average by as much as 38 days since 1970 and that lower-altitude stations such as Megève – among perhaps one in three of all Alpine resorts – could become completely unviable within a few years.

What’s more, you’ll pay a 1.5 per cent annual French wealth tax on the value of your chalet and you’re highly unlikely to meet an unsanctioned Russian oligarch (or underinvested Gulf sheikh) who’s eager to buy you out. In short, however rich you are, I wouldn’t blow it on Alpine assets if I were you. But I’ll happily join you for champagne and charcuterie on the terrace of the Ideal 1850 restaurant, with its panoramic and still unmelted vista of Mont Blanc.

Why did Shakespeare find pancakes so funny?

The English have been eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday for a very long time. Originally it was a way of using up eggs before the Lenten fast: the Saturday before Ash Wednesday was called Festum Ovorum or Egg Saturday, when all the eggs would be collected in preparation for the pancake making.

Shrovetide in early modern England was a time for mischief and merriment, a chance to indulge. Feasting, games and blood sports featured – especially cockerel throwing, whereby boys would charge passers-by to try to land a hit on a pinioned bird with a cudgel.

On Shrove Tuesday the church bells rang out, calling parishioners to confess their sins and receive penance – to be ‘shriven’. The bells rang while wives and cooks were making pancakes in the kitchen. Eventually pancakes had their own bell in churches all over England. Thomas Hearne writes in the 18th century: ‘It hath been a custom in Oxford for the scholars of all houses, on Shrove Tuesday, to go to dinner at 10 clock, at which time the little bell call’d Pan-cake Bell rings.’ A few of these bells remain intact: there is the Fritter bell in Maidstone and the Old Pancake Bell in Northamptonshire.

Because of the association with mischief and indulgence, pancakes aroused resentment in some Protestant hearts. A poet named John Taylor wrote in 1620 that the sound of the Pancake Bell ‘makes thousands of people distracted and forgetful either of manners or of humanitie’. His suspicion of pancakes is almost superstitious: he believed the batter was made not just with eggs and flour, but with ‘tragical magical inchantments’, concoted by ‘sulphory necromanticke cookes’.

The Elizabethans’ Shrove pancakes were made with beef and dipped in mustard. Pancakes and mustard also feature in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: Touchstone makes a long and convoluted joke about them which, these days, has lost its comic value. But Cambridge scholar Juliet Dusinberre explains the joke could have brought the house down if the audience had been eating pancakes and mustard during the performance.

Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were at Richmond Palace for Shrove Tuesday in February 1599, performing three plays for Elizabeth I. Dusinberre suspects As You Like It was one of them and if so it is likely Will Kemp debuted the role of Touchstone. Kemp left some time in the spring or summer of 1599; consequently scholars have assumed Shakespeare wrote Touchstone for the new fool, Robert Armin.

But Touchstone’s quips about pancakes do have a whiff of Kemp about them. He was a renowned improviser and it is perfectly likely that he came up with the pancake joke off the cuff and Shakespeare added it to the script later. A court performance at Richmond Palace would have been a perfect opportunity for Shakespeare to trial As You Like It before debuting it for a wider audience at the new Globe that summer.

If Kemp’s pancake joke didn’t land, no matter – Armin was waiting in the wings to replace him. It might have been Kemp’s last laugh before he and Shakespeare parted ways forever.   

Ukraine is in a bind over mass conscription

00:00 09:36

Svitlana Morenets has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In the second world war, the average age of a combat soldier was 26. In the Falklands, it was 23. For Ukrainian soldiers, it’s 43. The war in Ukraine has been, so far, fought mostly by fathers so their sons and daughters can rebuild the country when the fighting ends. But resisting Russia has cost so much and has continued for so long that the Ukrainian army is depleted. What to do next is a question that’s not just dividing the country but its two foremost leaders: President Volodymyr Zelensky and Valery Zaluzhny, the head of the military.

Ukraine’s 600-mile front line is being defended by 880,000 soldiers, according to Zelensky. Most of them have had no rest from fighting since the start of the full-scale war two years ago. Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s iron general, who played a key role in repelling Russian attacks and reclaiming around half of the territory initially seized, wants to recruit up to half a million more men. Building up reserves will allow the military to replace those exhausted by fighting, injured and dead. Russia plans to conscript 400,000 more soldiers; Ukraine needs to respond to this challenge. Zelensky, however, has not only refused Zaluzhny’s proposal but intends to remove the general from his post, saying a ‘reboot’ of the Ukrainian government and military command is required.

Zelensky’s objection is partly on the basis that 500,000 new conscripts would come with a hefty price: at least £10 billion for training, pay, clothing, food and equipment. That’s about a quarter of Ukraine’s government spending for this year and almost half the military budget. Western aid cannot be used to pay soldiers, and given Ukraine’s deficit, Zelensky has said the recruitment drive is unaffordable. ‘It takes six civilians paying taxes to provide for one soldier,’ he said recently, urging the six million Ukrainian refugees living abroad to return home and pay taxes to provide for those already fighting.

While Zelensky’s logic makes sense at a time of wavering western support, delaying mass conscription puts an even heavier strain on the existing forces. Last week, Russian forces in Donetsk Oblast entered the city of Avdiivka, which they have been trying to capture for a decade. They are now only a few hundred feet away from the main supply route of the Ukrainian defenders. The Russian breakthrough can only be prevented if Ukraine deploys infantry reserves with experience in fighting in urban areas.

The fate of Kupyansk, a city in the Kharkiv region, also hangs in the balance. Russia is said to have assembled 40,000 troops, 500 tanks and more than 600 fighting vehicles for an assault. Just 20,000 Ukrainian troops will defend the city. The case for re-inforcements is clear, given Moscow’s ambitions to seize the entire Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and a part of Kharkiv Oblast up to the Oskil river, all in time for Putin’s re-election next month.

While Zelensky may not accede to Zaluzhny’s demand for 500,000, he does agree that boosting conscription is inevitable. ‘You either work or you fight,’ he said in his New Year speech. More Ukrainians will be called up, but how many, and from which demographic, is a subject of intense debate. Zelensky has shied away from discussing it.

Some opposition party figures have resorted to populist tactics, advocating for the conscription of ‘MPs and oligarchs’ children first’. Some refused to vote, saying the new regulations were too repressive. Others have proposed a more generous enlistment policy: doubling salaries for conscripts, for example, or giving them free flats when they are discharged. It’s a fantasy, of course: the money doesn’t exist.

A 72-page draft conscription law was meant to have been passed last month, but the parliament was afraid to vote it through because of a public backlash. Last week, MPs were handed a new version of the bill with minimal changes, and there appears to be no option to avoid voting for it this month.

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Under the new law, the minimum conscription age will be lowered to 25, from 27. Summonses will be sent online and distributed in person. All new recruits will be trained for two to three months, while those aged 18 to 24 will be obliged to undergo five months of military training. The minimum salary is set at 20,000 hryvnias per month (£420), a figure that can go up to 120,000 hryvnias (£2,500) depending on where soldiers are posted and at what level.

The topic of mass mobilisation has led to a rapid decline in public confidence across all government institutions – the parliament, the President’s office, and the defence ministry. No one wants to be the proponent of conscription and so a blame game has started in Kyiv. MPs from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party have been instructed to direct questions to the military: let the generals face the backlash. The President had been expected to host the press conference announcing the new mobilisation rules and to field the difficult questions. In his place was Zaluzhny, holding his first-ever press conference.

Zaluzhny, whose approval rating is far higher than Zelensky’s, said it was not his job to decide who was drafted. ‘We are an army,’ he said. ‘Our focus should be on fighting, not interfering in the lives of civilians.’ The politicians behind the policy were nowhere to be seen. The public sees the news from the front and knows that the choice is between conscription or Russian occupation, but that doesn’t make it easier. The gap in Ukraine between those who are fighting and those who aren’t is wider than ever. The soldiers can’t understand why it should be only their war, and why the reinforcements that are desperately needed aren’t arriving in greater numbers. Civilians were hoping the war could be fought without them, which partly explains their adulation of the soldiers.

‘I have been on the front line for a year and already feel extremely exhausted,’ says Fedir Rudyy, a soldier in the 72nd brigade that is defending Vuhledar in Donetsk region. ‘It’s even more difficult for my brothers who have been here for two years… this reduces both fighting ability and morale. When there is no one to replace you, it becomes almost impossible to go on leave.’

Joining the army was seen as a one-way ticket: those in uniform would stay until they were injured or dead. Fearing the draft, at least 25,000 fighting-age men have fled Ukraine. More than 18,000 have been caught trying to cross the border. It’s a vicious circle: the tougher it gets on the front line, the more civilians want to avoid it, so the worse the manpower shortages become.

The new enlistment rules promise that soldiers who serve 36 months can go home and be immune from enlistment for two years. However, Zaluzhny has said this would be possible only if Ukraine prepared a sufficient number of trained reserves and there were no escalation on the battlefield. Enlisting soldiers would also be easier if people could see that the injured were well looked after, but this is not the case. One poll showed three-quarters of soldiers worry about being abandoned by the state if they were injured or once the war is over. They fear they will be unable to find a job in the future. ‘To mobilise more people, you need to show that those who have done their duty live a post-army life with a clear conscience, benefits, opportunities, social security and respect,’ says Sergeant Borys Khmilevskyi, an instructor in tactical medicine.

Those who dodge the draft can expect harsh penalties, such as losing the right to travel outside Ukraine or drive a vehicle, the confiscation of assets and even imprisonment. Some military men are talking about the need for further ‘tough mobilisation’ tactics. Anatolii Stuzhenko, commander of the 118th brigade, went so far as to suggest that those who avoid service should be ‘shot in the knee’ and need to know they will rounded up by Russians if the war is lost. ‘If we fall, all these couch potatoes will be swept into a pile.’ His words reflect the desperation soldiers feel while Ukrainian politicians fret about the unpopular draft law.

In what will probably be his last essay as the army chief, Zaluzhny wrote that it was time to accept that western sanctions against Russia have failed. Moscow’s ability to ‘mobilise human resources’, he said, contrasts with ‘the inability of state institutions in Ukraine to improve the manpower levels of our armed forces without the use of unpopular measures’. Ukraine’s only means of gaining an advantage over Russia is to change the rules of the war by using technology and DIY drones, to ‘master the entire arsenal of relatively cheap, modern and extremely effective assets that are rapidly developing’. He thinks this must be a homegrown industry, mindful that allies’ resolve may weaken and supplies may dry up.

Zelensky may not have appreciated being given this advice in public, but it was a salutary reminder for him. As commander-in-chief, he will bear the responsibility for how this war ends. While General Zaluzhny will be regarded as a national hero for the rest of his life, the President’s legacy will be determined by what is left of Ukraine.

I’m embarrassed by modern Britain

I’m not sure I recognise this country any more. Characteristics that I grew up with have been eroded to the point of disappearance. What were those characteristics? I’d say they included a certain doggedness – an indefatigability, a quiet strength and resilience. Where did they go?

A little over two years ago, when Sir David Amess was murdered, I remarked here on the appalling ‘tribute’ that his colleagues paid in the parliamentary session given over to eulogies to their recently butchered colleague. Of course the MPs all spoke warmly of the man, but you might have come away with the idea that he had died of natural causes. Nobody saw fit to mention that his killer – Ali Harbi Ali – was an Islamic extremist. Nobody saw fit to call for the rooting out of this ideology. Instead they wittered on about the ‘Online Safety Bill’, which had absolutely nothing to do with Sir David’s murder.

Of course some people said then – as they always do – that it would be wrong to jeopardise a trial or tar a whole community. This despite the fact that when Jo Cox was also brutally murdered nobody had any problem describing her killer’s foul ideology, or of tarring all Brexit voters with her murder. Anyhow, the killer’s trial came and went and nobody has had anything more to say after it than they did the day after his murder.

Then came the news last week that the Conservative MP Mike Freer was stepping down from politics after threats. The MP listed a number of causes. It turns out that he was one of several MPs Ali Harbi Ali had been thinking of targeting. Freer has also come under repeated harassment because of his support for Israel. He was sent death threats by a group called Muslims Against Crusades and said that an arson attack on his constituency office was ‘the final straw’.

Yet once again his colleagues seemed to have nothing to say. People lamented the sad fact that he was stepping down, but there was no especial outrage. This seems strange to me. It strikes me that had it been far-right extremists who had been targeting Freer, MPs might have had something to say. They might even – rightly – have said that this country should do everything it can to stop far-right extremists attacking MPs. But this was different. The hatred comes from a different direction, so they were silent. Freer himself gave an interview last week in which even he tried to get around the truth of his own situation. He refused to identify the ideology of the people who have been targeting him and even said in one interview that he didn’t know what had motivated Ali Harbi Ali to kill Sir David Amess.

Although I know it is a darn fool position to stand up for someone more than they appear willing to stand up for themselves, let me make an observation. The people targeting Freer are Muslim extremists. It is possible that they include some far-left anti-Israel lunatics. But generally when it comes to the violent bit it’s going to be the Islamists. Yet even now neither Freer nor our political class in general seem willing to make such obvious observations. You get an idea why whenever you see them interviewed.

Last week we also learned of the case of Abdul Ezedi, the 35-year-old suspected of carrying out an alkali attack on a mother and her daughters in Clapham. Newsnight ran a segment on this particular form of cultural enrichment with the Conservative MP Caroline Nokes as a guest. Asked to comment on Ezedi’s asylum status, Nokes announced grandly that she thought it ‘wrong to comment on that’. She proceeded to talk about the risk of ‘microaggressions against women’.

Similarly, in an interview with Trevor Phillips, the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan was asked how it was possible that someone turned down twice for asylum, who had already committed more than one sexual offence, had then been granted refugee status? And what was Keegan’s answer? ‘This is not really about asylum.’

Of course it isn’t. It never is. Just like violence is never about Islamism. We live in a society where people seem utterly incapable of identifying problems in front of them.

I experienced a touch of this myself this week. Last Sunday I was due to speak to a capacity audience at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. The event was a fund-raiser for an Israeli university which lost a number of its students on 7 October. A number of its other students have since re-enlisted in the army and are losing their education. So the fundraiser was to help these students back into education when the war ends.

But word got out that this was an ‘IDF fundraiser’. Various Islamists got active. Theatre staff reported that they were worried about turning up because of threats. Staff from another theatre were drafted in, but somebody leaked their emails and they were threatened in turn. On the morning of the event the theatre pulled out. They had one job – to let the show go on – and they failed. We managed to transfer to the only venue able to be secured, which was a nearby synagogue. But a bunch of Islamists kept trying to find out where the event had relocated to, and meanwhile stood outside the old theatre shouting abuse at me through a megaphone.

I had imagined that in such a situation the Metropolitan Police might be called in. That the authorities might agree that violence and intimidation cannot be rewarded. I’d have thought that in a city where you can openly call for violence against Jews, Jews might be allowed to gather to support other Jews. But no. Chased to the synagogue they were.

As I say, I remember a different Britain. A Britain where Margaret Thatcher stood in Brighton after an attempt on her life and told the world that the men of violence must not be allowed to win. But we don’t live in that society any more. We have decided that the men of violence are winning, and that we must as a result all just keep our heads down. Well that’s not my Britain, and I trust it’s not yours either.

How to (correctly) make a Cornish pasty

When it comes to traditional food, there is always regional pride to contend with. Many recipes are intrinsically connected to the area from which they have sprung: Pontefract cakes, Chelsea buns, Lancashire hotpot, Welsh rarebit. They represent heritage and tradition – edible history. You must tread carefully to avoid offending regional heritage, or just making silly mistakes. I certainly feel on safer ground making pronouncements from my Salford home on Eccles cakes than I do on Ecclefechan tart.

But when it comes to the Cornish pasty, the people of Cornwall have taken ownership a step further. In 2011, the Cornish pasty was granted Protected Geographical Indication by the EU, which dictates where – and how – a true classic Cornish pasty can be made. This is the same protection enjoyed by products like champagne, Parma ham, and Comté cheese.

It wasn’t easy for the Cornish to gain this geographical protection – it was a nine-year process – but it’s understandable that they felt it worthwhile. Cornish pasties are thought to represent 20 per cent of the region’s food and drink turnover, with more than 100 million consumed per year, a truly mind-boggling number. Today, following Brexit, things are slightly different: the UK has brought in its own Protected Geographic Origin scheme. But the principle is the same: the status guarantees a product’s characteristics or reputation, authenticity and origin, although only within the UK.

In the pasty’s earliest days, there was nothing intrinsically Cornish about it. Pasties were commonplace across the UK in the Middle Ages, with every region having its own variety. They make sense: a handheld pie made from cheap ingredients, they are filling, nutritious and economical. Essentially they are their own packaging, and can be slipped into a pocket at the beginning of the day. They were particularly popular with those working long, hard days, such as miners and farmers.

This led to the most distinctive feature of the Cornish pasty: the pasties of Cornwall are crimped on their side, and sit flat, as opposed to being crimped along the top and sitting perkily upright. This meant that miners whose hands were covered in tin or copper dust, in environments where arsenic levels were high, could use the crimped edge as a handle and then discard it. Supposedly, this pleased the ‘knockers’, the spirits which lived in the mines.

How to make a Cornish pasty correctly? First, it must be filled with potato, swede, onion and diced – never minced – beef. The proportions of these components are codified: no less than 25 per cent vegetable content and 15 per cent meat content. The filling must be uncooked when it meets the pastry. No other substantive fillings are permitted,but you can add small amounts of other ingredients to aid ‘succulence and flavour’. I keep it simple (and tread carefully) with a little butter, some salt, and lots of black pepper.

The pastry itself must be ‘golden’ and ‘robust’ and should be ‘D’-shaped. Beyond that, there is uncharacteristic leeway. The pastry can be shortcrust, rough puff, or classic puff. I favour a 50/50 butter and lard crust which creates a crisp, short pastry that can be easily handled. A slow bake is required to allow the constituents to retain ‘discernible’ texture and taste, but also attain a fusion of flavour. Thankfully, cooking the fillings from raw, encased in this sturdy, tightly crimped pastry, does most of the work for you.

Even if you subscribe to all of these requirements, the whole thing must be assembled in Cornwall in order to call it a Cornish pasty (although not necessarily baked there). Which means that if you’re baking this in your kitchen at home, unless you’re lucky enough to live in Cornwall, your pasty can’t truly be a Cornish pasty. We’ll have to settle for a Corn-ish pasty.

Takes 30 mins, plus chilling
Makes 5   
Bakes 1 hour

For the pastry

• 500g strong white bread flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 125g chilled lard
• 125g chilled butter
• 150ml cold water

For the filling

• 400g diced beef
• 300g waxy potatoes
• 200g swede
• 2 onions
• 50g butter
• 1 egg, beaten
• Salt and pepper

1. First, make the pastry. Place the flour and salt in a large bowl, coarsely grate the butter and lard into it, and give it all a good stir. Add the water bit by bit – you may not need it all – until the ingredients come together into a dough. Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for at least two hours.
2. Peel and evenly dice the veg, about 1cm across. Chop the beef into similarly small pieces.
3. Roll the chilled pastry on a lightly floured surface, not too thin, and cut out five 23cm rounds (I cut around a plate). Pile the filling up in the centre of the rounds, first the onion, next the potato and swede, then the beef. Season with salt and pepper, and dot with a little butter.
4. Preheat the oven to 200°C. Paint the edge of the circle with egg wash. Fold the pastry over the filling to meet the other edge, gently cupping your hand over the filled section to expel any air and neaten the hump. Crimp the join by pushing down on the pastry edge with your finger, then twisting the next section, rolling it back on itself. Continue along the entire edge.
5. Paint the top of the pastry with egg wash. Make two vents in the centre of each pasty. Transfer to a lined tray, bake for 10 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 160°C and cook for another 45 minutes. Enjoy hot.

The reality of food banks

00:00 04:33

Lloyd Evans has narrated this article for you to listen to.

The old man next door asked me to collect his parcel from the food bank. ‘Sure,’ I said. I joined a queue of 20 starvelings outside a chapel in the East End. Most were migrants carrying rucksacks or bags for life, and there were a few Cockney mums with fidgety nippers in tow. Everyone in the queue had a mobile phone – which is normal these days – and most were dressed for the Olympic Games in Adidas sprint shoes, Nike jogging pants and Reebok breathable weightlifting shirts. I felt distinctly under-dressed in my Oxfam castoffs. Despite their keep-fit attire, many of the applicants seemed to be on the corpulent side, and one or two had stepped proudly out of the closet and were openly obese. Good for them.

After waiting in a gale for 25 minutes, I was ushered into a brightly lit Anglican chapel which had been systematically stripped of any reference to Christ, the cross, the commandments and so on. Nailed to the walls were abstract posters bearing mottos for zombies: ‘We Are All One’ and ‘My Spirit Shall Bring You Life’.

 I filled in a form and took a seat opposite an elderly adjudicator whose wrinkled face was hidden by a surgical mask. ‘Is English your first language?’ she asked. I told her that I was collecting food for an elderly neighbour and she queried the reason I’d given on the form. I wrote ‘debt’ as it sounded better than ‘grinding poverty’ or ‘starvation’. She said: ‘Let’s put “rent arrears” as it’s more sympatico.’ ‘OK,’ I said, ‘but why?’ She misheard me. ‘Sympatico,’ she explained. ‘It’s Italian.’

She showed me the options on a laminated sheet with the words and symbols printed adjacently, as pub signs are, to help the illiterate. Shampoo and loo-roll were offered along with sanitary towels, moisturiser and other women’s toiletries. I could have got some pet food too. The mood among the staff was gushingly, and exhaustingly, friendly. ‘Mia! What a beautiful name,’ yelped a volunteer from a nearby table where a Ukrainian refugee was being processed.

On the other side of me, a Sri Lankan male handed his passport to a volunteer who noticed that he’d recently turned 30. ‘Congratulations for last week,’ she beamed. The birthday boy didn’t appear to understand her, even though he claimed to be studying engineering at a London university. To complete his paperwork, she asked him how he’d travelled to the food bank. ‘On foot or by public transport?’ He frowned uncertainly and said: ‘Yes.’ When she’d finished transferring his answers to the computer, she handed him the form with a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s yours. Take it with you,’ she said. ‘Throw it in the bin. Do whatever you like with it.’ She mimed ripping it up, as if to assure him that the food bank wasn’t a front for the secret police.

The terms of trade were tougher than you might imagine, and the system is designed to thwart scroungers. You can collect a three-day supply of food but you can’t return for at least a month. So the notion that anyone in Britain is ‘reliant’ on food banks must be a myth. The banks themselves prevent dependency.

I joined a third queue at a delivery point across the road and collected my free goody-bag. It looked like the contents of a dead bachelor’s pantry. Packets of powdered soup and butterscotch mousse. A pound of caster sugar. Plastic pouches filled with rice and lentils. A can of ‘Del Monte quality halved pears in light syrup’ (which looked quite tasty in the picture). For energy, I was given a kilo of ‘wheat biscuits’ from Morrisons which a performing elephant might enjoy. The fresh veg was limited to a bag of fist-sized yams. Finally, for pudding, I got a family pack of four Mars bars. In Tesco, my haul would have set me back about £18 which is the sum you’d earn working on the minimum wage for 90 minutes. And that’s how much time I spent in the queue. Financially it was the same as having a crap job for an hour and a half.

When I got back, the old guy was at home with his son and daughter and he asked me to call again later. Perhaps he was embarrassed to admit that we’re on speaking terms. Fair enough. Or maybe he wanted to conceal his straitened circumstances from his family. Anyway, I felt a little stung by his rebuff so I wolfed all his Mars bars and ate his Del Monte halved pears in light syrup. Then I simmered his yams for ten minutes but they dissolved into a puddle of reddish phlegm so I slung them into the garden for the foxes to fight over. No takers. Even vermin are too sniffy for my cooking.

I’ll do anything to get a decent plumber

The plumbers come and go, but mainly go, and I am now so desperate for a bath that I will do anything for a man carrying a pipe wrench.

If only I had more Botox in my face and my highlights done, I found myself thinking, as we sat at the kitchen table one night rowing about the seemingly impossible problem of trying to get tradesmen who are also farmers on EU subsidies.

The bathrooms in this old Georgian pile are so cranky they might as well not be there. In fact, it would be better if they weren’t. The heating and plumbing is a death trap. We found an old log burner in a back snug that was venting up a chimney stack passing through the main bathroom and when the builder boyfriend took the stud wall out he found a mass of smouldering black timber, half on fire, half dripping in damp, with a tangle of electrical wires wrapped around it for good measure.

Evidently, the previous owner waited so many years for a plumber that he kept taking matters into his own hands. He probably never did succeed in persuading one, because there is a sweet spot here
relating to a very precise sum of money and size of job, whereby the thing is worth a fellow devoting to it just such time and tax allowance as will not interfere with his agricultural hand-outs.

Added to which, the Irish very sensibly do not like old houses. They prefer a nice concrete bungalow with uPVC windows, and easy to wipe down plastic railings out front. When you first see these dwellings you regard them as blots on the landscape.

Pounded by enough wind and rain, however, you start longing for an ugly modern bungalow that holds the heat, and brings in the boiler and solar panel subsidies, which are almost as good as the farming ones.

I understand this now I am permanently covered in mud but also because I have talked to so many plumbers. Most of them walk into our crumbling country house, look horrified and tell us we’re mad.

Some give us hope, banter, and promises about when they can start. Those ones never answer our calls again. One fellow didn’t speak. He walked round the house in one swift circuit and back out the door without uttering a word. Another told us his mental health would never stand it. He was a former caretaker at a school and was looking for a job that would boost his self-esteem after a breakdown. I told him working with the builder boyfriend shouting obscenities down a ladder would do the opposite of that.

But then I found a guy on Facebook who was particularly chatty. When he came to look, he joked that the English couple he was currently working for were rich as Croesus. Money was no object. They had even sent to London for more labourers.

The builder b started to laugh along with him, but I had a better idea. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s how we feel. We’ve decided to throw money at it. Also, we don’t care when you come or how long you take to do the job. Spread it out over a year if you want.’

The BB went to argue and I gave him my ‘shut your trap’ face. ‘You’re not going to get a good deal here,’ I told him later as he berated me. ‘We are going to have to let someone take our pants down and treat us like idiots. It’s the only way.’

What I didn’t tell him was that if the promise of stupidity didn’t work I was going to start flirting with this guy.

I‘m so fed up with the makeshift electric shower dribbling three strands of water on me that every plumber who comes through the door looks like Mel Gibson. So the BB better not force the issue.

He knows only too well that when we first moved here he tried and failed to get hay until I got a delivery by bursting into tears on the phone one night to the biggest hay dealer in the west of Ireland. ‘Please help me,’ I sobbed, and he did.

‘Face it,’ I told the BB, as we argued over the plumbing. ‘You’re not getting anywhere here by knowing what you’re talking about. You’re going to have to leave this to me.’

A few days after me showing him how daft I was, the plumber answered my call. A few weeks after that he said he might be able to start work the following week. One evening that week, when the BB happened to be in London, he said he might pop round. And I sat on the sofa all dressed up, listening out for a car.

Viazi the dog had a lucky escape from a baboon

Viazi is a Samburu mongrel bitch with a curly tail. She is one of the most delightful, wonderful creatures I’ve known in my life. Her energy is boundless, she is always cheery and she’s been my great friend. When our collie Sasi had her litter of puppies in a heavy thunderstorm on the farm before the pandemic, we assumed Jock the labrador was the father. It later became evident that Sasi had been jumped by a roving Samburu cattle dog. We found homes for all of the puppies except for this little girl, who was as brown and as round as a baked potato – so we named her Viazi, which in Swahili means ‘potatoes’. I suppose our son Rider loved Jock the most, Claire and our daughter Eve loved Sasi, and I was left with Viazi to love.

It has been an adventurous life for her. On our very long walks across the farm, the dogs always have an antelope, African hare or flock of guinea fowl to chase after. Sasi used to go like a bullet, but as she has grown older, Viazi has taken over as the one who leads out in front. We have been lax in our training and cannot stop them when we encounter a herd of plains zebra, which buck and kick their hind legs out as Viazi barks at their tails.

Several times we have had run-ins with snakes, including the Ashe’s large brown cobra, the largest of all the spitting cobras. These can be 10ft long and they have a habit of slithering into the house on hot dry days.

I’ve seen a neighbour’s dog blinded by cobra venom, but ours have miraculously managed to dodge the flying spit and the serpents end up either dead or in flight from the barking pack. The only thing Viazi fears is Echo, one of the cats, though she gets on well with the other felines, Bernini and Omar.

One day Viazi took off on a mission at full speed and as she got close to a thorn tree, we saw there was a sub-adult leopard in the branches. Viazi did not check her stride and the leopard then went into full retreat across the savannah – but not before taking a swipe at the dog, opening a nasty gash along her flank.

The vet later said Viazi was lucky to survive, because had the leopard been an adult, she would have been killed. Cat wounds can also turn bad very quickly. Leopards love the taste of a dog and there is a big, old male cat around here who returns regularly to the farmstead after dark to sniff around near where the pets sleep. A couple of years ago, a leopard, probably that same one, ate a man on a nearby farm and stored his remains in the high branches of an acacia.

But this is how we came closest to losing Viazi. I was out doing my rounds on the farm when I heard the bark of apes somewhere in the bush up ahead. A troop of about 30 baboons often wanders in and out of the farm. We rarely bother each other, though once when the children were little I happened upon a big dog baboon sitting in a tree in the garden, quietly observing Rider, evidently planning how to seize and eat him.

Baboons are formidable animals, with big teeth, very sharp dirty claws and a simian bloodlust. On this day out with Viazi, before I knew it, she had torn off ahead of me into a thicket and a few seconds later I heard a loud yelp. When I finally caught up with her, she had deep bite wounds and long claw gashes along her flank. She was bleeding badly as I took her home to the farmstead. Everybody else was away and I called my neighbour Tom, who sent over some lidocaine and a veterinary stitching kit.

I cleaned out Viazi’s bloody sides, soaked the injuries with Betadine and jabbed her with antibiotic, but I had no idea what to do with the needle and thread by myself. I couldn’t pinch her wounds together and stitch at the same time. After fiddling about and losing valuable time getting nowhere, I got a tube of superglue, squeezed this along the gash lines and pulled the wounds together. Incredibly, the glue held and I was able to get Viazi to stay quietly in our bedroom to recover. Within days she bounced back, though now she looks highly impressive with large chunks of fur all gone and long scars down her back and sides.

Bridge | 10 February 2024

The Reykjavik Bridge Festival, held annually at the end of January, is one of the great treats of the bridge calendar, and this year it was twice as good: Thomas Charlsen decided to hold his terrific World Bridge Tour (WBT) just preceding it to make it easier for teams who wanted to play both.

In a sea of world-class talent, the outstanding performance of young Danish superstar Dennis Bilde was breathtaking. He was not only on the winning team in both events, but also walked away with first place in the pairs.

Here he is working his magic to make the opps go wrong (see diagram).

Contract 3NT by South

Almost all tables were in 3NT, which is an interesting contract: you have to be a bit careful not to set up a long Heart for West, or lose two Diamond tricks. About three out of four tables made it, while the rest went down. But that’s not the story today!

Dennis always has a throng of kibitzers watching him play and he did not disappoint. On this hand he was West and started with the Ace of Spades to have a look around. This wouldn’t normally be a very attractive lead, but on this occasion he knew his partner had next to nothing, so taking a look at dummy was not a bad idea. He continued at trick two with the 10 of Spades (!) round to South’s King.

Declarer tested Clubs and then knocked out West’s ♥A. Dennis won and continued with the ♠2. Declarer put in the 8 and East – whose interest in the hand had so far been minimal, suddenly found himself taking the setting trick with the ♠9!

Should South have got it right? I’ll leave that for you to work out!

Do asylum-seekers really want to convert to Christianity?

Slightly bored last Thursday afternoon, I converted to Islam to see what it was like. All I had to do was intone the Shahada – ‘La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun Rasul Allah’ – and then have a nice shower with some Head and Shoulders to wash away the deluded Christian filth that had hitherto cloaked my physical being, the musty detritus of a decadent creed. I have to say, once converted, it didn’t feel terribly different inside but on the plus side I was immediately offered several senior posts with the BBC and the Arts Council which I may or may not take up.

Bored again on Friday, I decided to renounce Islam, which I did by reciting the Shahada backwards: ‘hallA lusaR nudammahuM, hallA alli ahali aL’ and having another shower – at which point a small shaitan with glowing red depthless eyes materialised by the sideboard and told me to ‘Stop taking the piss, sunshine.’ Theoretically I am dead meat, as Sharia law insists that the punishment for apostasy should be execution, which fact the shaitan kindly explained to me. It is not the most easily forgiving of religions, which is perhaps its greatest strength. When, on that Thursday, I renounced Christianity all that happened was a kind of hologram of Justin Welby briefly flickered in front of me and said: ‘Ah well, no use crying over spilt milk. Jesus won’t mind, so long as you still carry out your waste recycling diligently and don’t mis-gender anyone. Have a nice day.’

Meanwhile, on the good ship Bibby Stockholm, the Muslim asylum-seekers are queuing up to convert to Christianity. At least 40 migrants have made the metaphysical journey from Muhammed (pbuh) to Jesus Christ (and him, too, although not as much, obvs, if you are a Muslim), the consequence perhaps of having watched Welby talking on TV and understandably having been smitten by the power of his word, the intellect, the consistency of thought and so on. Or maybe the process was more epiphanous and their bodies really were somehow suddenly suffused with the spirit of our Lord and saviour, as well as his offer of regular welfare benefits, child support and a council flat. You may have heard a church elder, David Rees, boasting about the conversion rate in an interview with an almost dumbstruck Ed Stourton on the BBC Sunday programme. Dave said there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that these young men were entirely genuine in their wish to be accepted into the body of the church and heaven forfend anyone saying otherwise. He added: ‘Obviously, we need to make sure that they believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit and repent of their sins and also they want to start a new life in the church. So those are the sort of questions that we ask them, and they have to give a public testimony, at their baptism, which they did in their native language, and it was translated into English. There were no qualms at all about the content of that testimony, which was clear and conclusive about their faith in Jesus Christ.’

Dave was convinced because he had a translator who had been to Iran, he said. This left me open to ponder several possible explanations for this remarkable exhibition of credulousness. There are three possible scenarios. The first is that Dave really is thicker than a large slab of Osmium, a man deprived of almost all the normal human critical faculties. The second is that Dave is basically doing the same gig as the aluminium siding salesman in Barry Levinson’s rather lovely film Tin Men and that he does not really care if his clients actually buy into the whole Holy Trinity shebang, because he’s basically just working on commission.

The third is that Dave and the rest of these idiots, including the one who decided that the Afghan asylum-seeker Abdul Shokoor Ezedi would make a model Christian, is motivated by a fashionable loathing of the Conservative party and indeed anybody else who thinks that immigration, legal or illegal, needs to be controlled. Let everyone in, it’s what Jesus, as well as Jeremy Corbyn, would have wanted. Having met quite a few people from the evangelical Alpha course – members of which carried out these ‘conversions’ – I am reasonably convinced that the answer is scenario number one. But maybe scenario number one with a certain whiff of scenario number three in there as well.

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The reason these migrants are lining up to embrace the Church of England and thus in the future – theoretically, at least – spending every Sunday listening to some mithering halfwit spewing out hand-wringing tendentious progressive bollocks with no relevance to the Bible whatsoever – is that they have been told by the real enemies within, the ‘refugee’ NGOs, that this will greatly improve their chances of securing asylum. The people in these NGOs are the same people who are perfectly content to see more and more migrants lose their lives in fantastically dangerous cross-Channel journeys in an inner tube, because at least some will make it to Dover and that will cause trouble for the Tories. The people who think that borders should be entirely open, being not possessed of the intellectual capacity to understand what would happen if they really were.

Much like the lawyers and the same NGOs who oppose sending illegal asylum-seekers to Rwanda – or, let’s be clear, anywhere else – for processing and thus contribute towards the deaths of more migrants as they mass to cross the Channel. These people are entirely devoid of moral or rational agency – and yet we allow them to thwart, quite brazenly, the government’s attempts to solve this crisis. Me? I would remove the charitable status from any NGO which was found to have encouraged migrants to claim asylum. But maybe that’s just the vestigial tail of a more resolute religion still wagging in my brain.

The need for the monarchy has never been greater

The natural reaction to this week’s news that King Charles III is suffering from cancer has been one of concern and compassion. As the Prime Minister said, consolation can be drawn from the fact that the illness has been caught early and that Charles is continuing with his duties – albeit stepping aside from public-facing engagements for the time being. But it hasn’t taken long for conversation to stray on to other questions: might it be better for him to step back from all duties? And perhaps at some point he should give way to Prince William?

Such an idea is to be resisted. Charles III is the oldest monarch to take the throne in British history, and there are obvious health implications. But the King has long been an advocate of the British tradition of monarchy: that it is not a job from which one retires. The crown comes before the person.

Abdication has become a common feature in other European monarchies. Margrethe II of Denmark recently decided to step down, having previously ruled out the idea. But in Britain it has happened only once in modern times, when Edward VIII, a fairly young man at the time, put his relationship with Wallis Simpson ahead of his duty as a monarch. Going further back in history, Edward II and Richard II were forced out and James II fled. In more than a thousand years of monarchs, none has simply retired and handed the throne to a younger generation.

Just because something hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean it can’t of course. Pope Benedict XVI broke a convention of 700 years when he resigned due to ill health. Charles III has already broken the rule that forced his great uncle off the throne: he is married to a divorcée, and is himself on his second marriage. Times change, and monarchies change with the times.

To introduce the idea of retirement, however, would diminish the status of monarch to that of a job, reducing it to the level of our here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians. That the British monarchy is so strong and has survived into the 21st century in spite of huge social change and the less than ideal behaviour of some members of the royal family is largely down to the remarkable example of Elizabeth II. Duty, she told us on her 21st birthday in 1947, would guide her whole life, whether it be long or short – and she meant what she said.

There has never been any evidence – no matter what Netflix’s overimaginative writers may have postulated – that abdication was ever on the late Queen’s mind. She kept working until shortly before her death: her last official duty, ironically, being to receive a new prime minister whose brief time in office only served to emphasise the difference between the role of head of government and that of head of state.

In her determination to carry on until the end, Elizabeth II reminded us that some of the happiest, most settled times for Britain have been towards the end of long reigns.

Charles III’s reign is necessarily going to be far shorter than his mother’s, but there is little to suggest that the King sees his role any differently to how his mother viewed hers. He showed that he had little time for the proposition that the monarchy should ‘skip a generation’ and go straight to William. Were he even to mention the possibility of abdication, it would reduce him to a lame duck. Every speech, every anniversary, every doctor’s appointment would lead to speculation: is this the moment when Charles III steps down?

None of this is to say that the King should be forced to make public appearances when he is unwell, or that he should feel obliged to keep to the schedule of a much younger man. In the United States there is understandable concern about an ageing President Biden’s ability to cope with the heavy workload of constant and crucial decisions. But the role of the British head of state is completely unique. Just as Charles himself stood in for his mother at the last State Opening of Parliament of her reign, he has a willing heir who is ready to step into his shoes when he is needed.

The potential back-up is not vast, however. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have opted out of royal life and Prince Andrew has been obliged to relinquish his royal duties after scandal. Buckingham Palace certainly needs to be thinking about how to ensure that the royal family is broad enough to cope with illness, incapacity and any additional withdrawals from life as a working royal. As our politics becomes more divided, the need for the unifying force of the crown – one that crosses borders of race, country and class – has never been greater.

Like everyone else this week, we wish the King a quick recovery. And most of all, we look forward to many more years of the reign of Charles III.

Éric Zemmour: ‘I am not intending to conquer Europe’

Two years ago, Éric Zemmour was the most talked-about man in France and a serious contender to be the ninth president of the Fifth Republic. A controversial journalist turned incendiary politician, he vied with Marine Le Pen for second place behind Emmanuel Macron in the polls. Crucially, he seemed to have something she lacked – an ability still to appeal to the Catholic bourgeoisie while tapping into widespread anger at mass immigration.

But then Russia attacked Ukraine, the mood of Europe changed, and Zemmour’s political fortunes sank as quickly as they had risen. He finished a distant fourth in the first round of the presidential election, with 7 per cent of the vote. The experience did not put him off running for high office, however, and today he is back in campaign mode looking ahead to the European elections in June and beyond.

He rejects the idea that his 2022 campaign was a failure. ‘I would call it a huge victory,’ he says. He points out that, having founded his Reconquête! party only a few months before polling day, he still won more votes than Les Républicains and the Parti Socialiste, the two parties which governed France from the time of Charles de Gaulle to the advent of Macronism.

Zemmour squarely blames Vladimir Putin’s invasion for derailing his candidacy. ‘The media talked about little else,’ he says. His big political theme – what he calls the Islamification of France – was blocked out by more immediate existential fears about a major war in Europe. ‘There was a rally–around-the-flag effect,’ he says. His poll scores took a nosedive from late February onwards. Zemmour’s criticisms of Nato and past praise for Putin got him into political bother. He was also accused of being heartless because he initially said that France should be wary of an ‘emotional response’ when it came to accepting Ukrainian refugees.

Zemmour concedes that he gave his opponents too much ammunition. He has written a book in which he explores his mistakes. Yet he baulks at the suggestion that his pugnacious, journalistic style makes him ill-suited to politics, and he’s adamant he’s not giving up. ‘I fight against the Islamification of my country and the continent,’ he says.

Zemmour talks a lot about ‘the Great Replacement’ – a controversial term invented by the novelist Renaud Camus – and he knows that sounds alarmingly racist to many in Britain. ‘It shocks in France, too,’ he says. ‘I am the only one in the political class to use it. Mme Le Pen refuses to use it. She pretends that it has connotations of a great conspiracy… we always have to invent some fascist, Nazi or whatever else origins to everything. There is none of that.’

Camus coined the phrase, he says, ‘to explain the historical phenomenon which witnesses the replacement of a white Christian – or a Judeo-Christian population of Greco-Roman culture, as General de Gaulle would have described it – by a Muslim population that comes from Africa’.

‘French women these days give birth on average to 1.1 to 1.6 children per woman,’ he says. ‘Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian women have about 3.5 children. In France, we do not allow ethnic statistics, in England you do, and we can see that in London only 37 per cent of the population now belongs to the category you call “white British”.’

It’s difficult to stop Zemmour, whose grandparents were Jewish Berbers from north Africa, when he’s in full flow. He hasn’t much time for the argument that Britain has been better than France at dealing with immigration. ‘The French and the English have battled against each other for the best part of a thousand years and still we manage to fight over the best way to kill ourselves,’ he says. ‘So the English say, “No it’s my multicultural model that is the best” and the French say, “No it is my model, the assimilation turned integration model”. In truth, both models have failed. Assimilation is only possible individually. We cannot assimilate populations.’

For him, assimilation means adapting to your host country with the zeal of a convert: ‘It means you change your story, consider Napoleon to be your father and Joan ofArc to be your grandmother, and live like a French man who has been here for a thousand years.’ That seems to be the creed by which Zemmour himself lives. He talks proudly of his Arabic-speaking father, yet he adopts the manner of a 19th-century homme de lettres. He says ‘chère madame’ when responding to women, and his speech, studded with literary and historical allusions and the occasional imperfect subjunctive, has a formidable Gallic grandeur.

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Zemmour admits he hasn’t a firm grasp of British affairs, though his intellectual self-confidence permits him to say: ‘England is a republican monarchy whereas France is a monarchical republic.’ He spies similarities between the UK Supreme Court’s obstruction of the Rwanda scheme and the recent rejection of most of the French government’s immigration bill by the Conseil constitutionnelin Paris. In Rishi Sunak and Macron, he says we see ‘politicians pretending’ to care about voter concerns ‘when they really think that immigration is good because it will solve economic problems’. In both their cases, too, ‘we are experiencing the takeover by judges over the democratic representatives of the people, which are the parliaments and the politicians’.

This is a long-standing theme of Zemmour’s work: in 1997, he wrote a book called Le Coup d’Etat des Juges. Today he believes that Britain’s Brexiteers made a grave mistake in assuming that their political sovereignty could be seized back from Europe when it is in fact ‘the judicial oligarchy’, French in origin, that is busily suffocating democracies the world over, from Donald Trump in America to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. ‘In France, since the Middle Ages, the judges come from the church and they consider themselves priests,’ he says. ‘Before it was the Catholic religion. Now it is human rights – but it is always a religion. And they are there to impose that religion on politicians, who must submit.’

Zemmour’s oratory may be powerful, but his party remains far behind Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in the polls. Still, he believes that the decade-long struggle of populism against centrism, as represented by Le Pen vs Macron, is giving way to a new clash of right against left, as an emergent conservative patriotism aligns itself against a dangerous fusion of Islam and socialism.

His concept of ‘Islamo-gauchisme’ might also sound batty to some British ears. Medieval concepts of Sharia do not appear to reconcile themselves naturally to the progressivism of the 21st century. But Zemmour insists that the connections between ‘le woke-isme’ and Islamism are becoming increasingly apparent, ‘since both are allied against the West and western civilisation in order to destroy it’.

He places Le Pen on the wrong side of this new Islamo-left vs new right divide. She represents the ‘somewheres vs anywheres’, he says, referring to the work of the British academic David Goodhart, whereas he stands for a more epoch-defining battle against what he calls the ‘invasion or maybe even the colonisation’ of Europe by an antithetical religion. Unlike him, Le Pen believes that ‘good Islam’ can be separated from ‘bad Islamism’ and she is a protectionist whereas he believes in free markets. ‘She does not see herself as right-wing,’ he says.

Doesn’t Zemmour’s reputation for controversy serve to make Le Pen more acceptable to the French middle classes? ‘Non,’ he says flatly. Instead, he regards the rise of Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Geert Wilders in Holland as evidence that he is on the right side of history. Zemmour wants to enlist elements of the British right into this movement, too, even if he accepts that Nigel Farage (whom he met a couple of weeks ago on his visit to London) and the Reform party do not share his criticism of Islam. He met Kwasi Kwarteng too, though the former chancellor found him disturbingly ‘obsessed with Islam’ in a way that is ‘not relevant to the UK’.

As part of what Zemmour calls ‘this ideological evolution’, he’s joined forces with Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s niece, who will lead Reconquête! into the European elections. Maréchal may not win a majority of French seats, but with the backing of other conservative groups across the continent, the new right may well emerge as a majority bloc in the European parliament. ‘I am not intending to conquer Europe, let me assure you of that,’ he says. ‘What I am saying is this is the division which will impose itself all over Europe, and is in fact already happening.’

Sunak should apologise, says Brianna Ghey’s father

Brianna Ghey’s father has called on Rishi Sunak to apologise for his ‘degrading’ comments at Prime Minister’s Questions. Peter Spooner told Sky News:

For the Prime Minister of our country to come out with degrading comments like he did, regardless of them being in relation to discussions in parliament, they are absolutely dehumanising. Identities of people should not be used in that manner, and I personally feel shocked by his comments and feel he should apologise for his remarks.

As reported earlier, Sunak didn’t edit his oft-used script about the number of things Keir Starmer has flip-flopped on at PMQs today, despite having just heard that Brianna Ghey’s mother Esther would be in the public gallery. He did, at the very end of the session, pay tribute to Ghey as ‘the very best of humanity’, but didn’t withdraw his joke about Starmer struggling with ‘defining a woman – although, in fairness, that was only 99 per cent of a U-turn’.

This is just the latest example of Sunak’s tendency to go into broadcast mode to the extent he forgets to show his humanity. Brianna’s murder had, in part, a transphobic motive and to not edit a script with the knowledge her mother was supposed to be in the gallery (she actually arrived a bit later and missed the exchange) seemed unthinking.

Once again, the trans debate has ended up being nastier than it needs to be, and politicians have a hugely important role in shaping public discourse. It is also a misreading of many of those who hold a gender-critical position, who don’t think it’s very funny that Labour has had such agonies over biological sex and gende, either. The gender debate is too serious for it to become part of a silly joke that’s trotted out at Prime Minister’s Questions, and Sunak doesn’t help the very people he claims to represent – those who are concerned about the erosion of sex-based rights – to be so flippant. 

Keir Starmer’s shameful behaviour at PMQs

‘Apologise!’ This was the bogus battle-cry that rang out repeatedly at today’s PMQs. Rishi Sunak was asked to genuflect to his enemies and show contrition for fictional sins. The trouble began when Sir Keir Starmer told us that the mother of Brianna Ghey, a transgender girl killed in February, was present in the public gallery. ‘As a father, I can’t even imagine the pain she’s going through,’ he said, strangely placing himself at the centre of somebody else’s nightmare.

Sir Keir, unaware of what was about to transpire, then mounted a routine attack on Rishi’s unfulfilled pledges. The PM called this ‘a bit rich’ coming from a Labour leader who had broken ‘almost 30 promises.’ He gave a list including pensions, reform of the peerage and ‘defining a woman – although in fairness that was only 99 per cent of a U-turn.’ 

Sir Keir saw his chance. He pretended to be so incensed by Rishi’s quip that he could barely speak. ‘Of all the weeks to say that!’ he said, gasping breathlessly from the depths of his outrage, ‘when Brianna’s mother is in this chamber. Shame!’

The Speaker rose to quell some noise on the backbenches and as Sir Keir sat down, apparently close to tears, a hand settled on his right shoulder to offer him comfort and solace. The hand belonged to Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor. She caressed the shoulder-pad of his tailored suit and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Sir Keir nodded weakly at her, acknowledging her sympathy. It might have been a scene carved by Michelangelo. Sir Keir then stood up and lambasted the PM for unseemly conduct.

‘The role of the prime minister,’ he pronounced loftily, ‘is to ensure that every citizen in this country feels safe and respected.’ This was an invitation to his backbenchers to pursue Rishi further over trans rights. 

Sir Keir went on to complain that Rishi had ‘casually made a £1,000 bet in the middle of an interview,’ referring to Piers Morgan’s attempt to corner the PM by offering to pay £1,000 to a refugee charity if the Rwanda scheme succeeds before the general election. Whether or not Rishi accepted this bet is open to question. Probably not. But he shook Morgan’s hand on TV and that strengthens the impression that he accepted Morgan’s terms. This prompted Stephen Flynn of the SNP to ask Rishi to acknowledge his error.  

‘The public are used to Tories gambling on the lives of others’ he said, and he declared that Rishi had ‘accepted a crude bet regarding the lives of asylum-seekers… Will he apologise?’

Rishi rebuffed him and stuck to the policy issue. Flynn reacted with quiet fury. ‘The Prime Minister does himself no favours,’ he said and added that the bet had been contracted, ‘just hours before he withdrew cost of living support worth £900.’ And Flynn glanced up at the public gallery and offered his ‘heartfelt sympathies to Brianna’s mother.’ Clearly he expected Rishi to apologise to her as well. Many in the House appeared to agree. 

But would he? The chamber remained unsettled and testy for the rest of the session. All it required was a backbencher with the wit to put the PM on the spot. Liz Twist, MP for Blaydon, did just that. She laid it on the line to Rishi.

‘Apologise to Brianna’s mother for his insensitive comments.’ 

Rishi was in trouble. He’d been skewered good and proper. But Twist ruined her ambush. Rather than sitting down and letting Rishi answer, she pursued her prepared question about the mishandling of a regeneration project in the north-east. Rishi wriggled free. 

At the end, he dealt with the issue in his own time and in his own words. He said that Brianna’s mother had reacted to an ‘unspeakable and shocking murder’ by demonstrating ‘the very best of humanity.’ 

This was a distasteful exhibition by Sir Keir and Stephen Flynn. Misuse of the public gallery, and the exploitation of grieving relatives, should be reviewed by the House authorities.