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The cheering fantasies of Oliver Messel
Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch whimsy that sweetened and consoled – ‘a gossamer world of gilded enchantment’ as Roy Strong soupily put it. ‘Marie Antoinette would have felt at home in any of his settings.’
Like his rival Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel sums up an era
Posterity has not been kind to Messel. Only a little of his art has survived changes of fashion since his death in 1978: the Dorchester Hotel is currently restoring the VIP suite he dreamed up, and several villas in his beloved Barbados retain the appearance and atmosphere that he suavely devised for them. But aside from the Royal Ballet’s unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate the splendours of his 1946 vision of The Sleeping Beauty, the work he prolifically did for the stage, both in Britain and the USA, survives only in coffee-table books and the archives.
Perhaps the long lens of history will judge Messel’s most substantial theatrical achievement to be embodied in the nine operas by Strauss, Rossini and Mozart that he designed for Glyndebourne between 1950 and 1959. An expertly curated exhibition, running through the current festival’s season in the opera house’s foyer, pays these legendary productions handsome tribute.
Glyndebourne’s fête champêtre was Messel’s natural element, and his ancillary designs for the programme book and proscenium arch did much to establish what might now be described as its brand. Part of his genius was his understanding the village-hall scale of Glyndebourne’s stage. The palatial scenes of Idomeneo and Der Rosenkavalier had intimacy as well as spaciousness, while the servants’ quarters in Le nozze di Figaro and La Cenerentola were cutely cosy rather than dingy – Glyndebourne audiences in the 1950s weren’t in the mood for gritty realism, and Messel seduced them with a sumptuous yet subtle palette of pink, green, plum, turquoise, ultramarine and canary yellow.
Even if his initial sketches, dashed off in one session, were so impressionistic that seamstresses were hard put to interpret his intentions, he lavished as much imagination on costumes as he did on the scenery, relishing the textures of taffeta, chiffon and silk. Sadly few of these have been preserved, but a centrepiece of the exhibition is the Marschallin’s gorgeous midnight blue and salmon pink gown from Rosenkavalier, worn by two great sopranos, Régine Crespin and Montserrat Caballé. Props also engaged him: Messel may have drawn vaguely, but he was meticulous and resourceful in the atelier, hands on and dirty, making do and mending with the detritus of pipe cleaner, cellophane, sticky tape, papier-mâché, sequins, and staples to conjure up the silver rose for Rosenkavalier or the Countess’s mirror in Figaro.
He made do and mended with the detritus of pipe cleaner, sticky tape, papier-mâché, sequins and staples
A furiously hard all-night worker who paid fanatic attention to detail, he was not an easy-going collaborator and he found the director Glyndebourne assigned him, Carl Ebert, ‘rather hell’ – a view that was probably reciprocated. Designs would be presented as a fait accompli: he had the whiphand, and any criticism or request for alteration would send him into a sulk. ‘He thought he was perfect,’ recalled his long-suffering assistant Carl Toms.
But he wasn’t perfect, and time caught up with him. Come the Swinging Sixties, his camp caprices began to look over-contrived and fey, and his productions would inexorably be replaced by more visually robust statements. In the West End young lion designers such as Sean Kenny abandoned painted backcloths for a grittier aesthetic based on solid materials and revolving machinery, while Glyndebourne turned to Emanuele Luzzati, an Italian who dealt in vibrant primary colours that Messel would have considered vulgar. He was, in other words, not a classic for the ages. But like his rival Cecil Beaton, he sums up an era.
One tantalising glimpse of what his art looked like in performance remains: On Such a Night, a 40-minute promotional colour movie directed by Anthony Asquith, shows live scenes from the 1955 production of Figaro. The DVD is no longer on sale in the Glyndebourne shop, but copies can be snapped up on Amazon.
London’s best contemporary art show is in Penge
If you’ve been reading the more excitable pages of the arts press lately, you might be aware that the London gallery scene is having one of its periodic ‘moments’. A fair few spaces, mostly concentrated around Fitzrovia, have sprouted up since the pandemic, notable for their bacchanalian openings and tantalisingly gnomic Instagram posts. Their online presence is at best spectral: the most hyped of the bunch, a Smithfield gallery called Ginny on Frederick, has a holding page in place of a website. Still, I like a scene, and London Gallery Weekend, an annual June event, presented a good opportunity to investigate. Niso gallery, on New Cavendish Street, has put on a seductive showing of the Argentinian conceptualist Martina Quesada (open until 28 June). A highly referential exhibition, it is equal parts James Turrell and Lucio Fontana, the latter riffed on with a work that sees his emblematic canvas-slash gesture stretched out and knotted into the shape of a bellybutton.
The aforementioned Ginny on Frederick’s current number, a display of bizarre paintings by Okiki Akinfe (open until 26 July), manifests like a comic strip as imagined by some defective early AI platform and thence splurged on to canvases. The Essex-born artist paints animals, signage and body parts mutating into one another, at a disorienting remove suggestive of the viewer’s perspective of a video game. If that description doesn’t sell it to you, the deeply Estuary titles (‘She’s an Absolute Cow!’, for instance) might do the trick. Otherwise, Gallery Weekend promised countless, no doubt fascinating opportunities to see middling artists in conversation with art critics. But I didn’t go to any of these. Instead, I went to Penge.
Penge is a suburb best known for being 1) the childhood home of Bill Wyman and 2) a punchline beloved of 1970s BBC ‘comedians’. It is also fielding the best contemporary art exhibition going in the capital, courtesy of Tension Gallery (open until 29 June). Its subject is Mark Wallinger, and the reason for his appearance in SE20, I understand, is that after an unpleasant stint with Swiss mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, he wanted to give as big a ‘fuck you’ to Mayfair as possible. As well he might: Wallinger (b.1959) is about as interesting an artist as you’ll encounter today, and it’s the blue-chip art world’s loss. Since the 1980s, he has been addressing big subjects – class, religion, memory and politics – with a lightness of touch that in the hands of a lesser intellect might seem trite. Or worse: like something by Martin Parr.
Penge is fielding the best contemporary art exhibition going in the capital
Wallinger has, for instance: recreated the anti-war activist Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest encampment slap bang in the middle of Tate Britain; bought a racehorse and rebaptised it ‘A Real Work of Art’; and stalked a gallery opening dressed, for some reason, as a bear. Oh, and proposed a sadly unrealised southern analogue to Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ – a massive sculpture of a white horse that would have towered over the Ebbsfleet Eurostar tracks. His latest is somehow his most Wallinger-y yet. A split-screen TV broadcasts the first two bits of footage ever recorded in space, one by a Yankee astronaut, the other from a Soviet cosmo, who, we learn from the press bumpf, created the first work of art made in space, a sketch of a sunrise. The two are played simultaneously, to the strains of an aria from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux – the early American space programme was called ‘Gemini’ – and while there’s not much inference to be made that you won’t pick out yourself, the work is mesmerisingly beautiful.
‘She’s an Absolute Cow!’, 2025, by Okiki Akinfe. Image: Ginny on Frederick
I used to go on international press trips on a weekly basis, but the gig ain’t what it used to be and the furthest I got this month was Darlington – where, in 1825, a Quaker cousin of mine, Edward Pease, met George Stephenson and raised the capital to build the world’s first proper railway. I didn’t know this until I went up to see the efforts commemorating the line’s bicentennial. I thus have skin in the game, but: on a limited budget, the local councils and English Heritage have between them made a decent fist of this. The original line, disused since 1876, will become a walking path interspersed by works of art. I saw two, one of which, at Heighington, the world’s first passenger station, was really good. Kate Jackson’s mural stretches over the fence of the unmanned station, bearing the unmistakeable silhouette of an Intercity 125 and filled with painterly references: the driver’s window has a very Mondrian corner, while a numeral on one of the portholes pays homage to Charles Demuth’s ‘I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold’. It’s a restless interplay of circles and straight lines evoking the decorative art of the Festival of Britain: nostalgic, sure, but falling just the right side of twee. The anniversary falls in September, and you should visit; I will.
If you think all orchestras sound alike, listen to this recording
Grade: B+
These are gloomy days, so here’s a burst of melody and colour to cheer you up. Back in the LP era it wasn’t unusual for classical recordings to be put together like a concert that you might actually want to hear: a sequence of works by different but complementary composers, offering the possibility of a happy discovery. Come for the Strauss, stay for the Reznicek – that sort of thing.
This lively new disc from the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic adopts the same principle. The unifying theme is early-20th-century eastern European nationalism – the folksong-collecting variety, not the Archduke-assassinating kind. But it’s the opposite of monotonous. The Bartok is brusque and peppery alongside Kodaly’s cheerful nostalgia, while Enescu’s folk-fiddles flash and dart in the sunlight (the opening theme of his Romanian Rhapsody is based on a drinking song: what’s not to like?). The centrepiece is the Frescoes of Piero della Francesca: a luscious, colour-saturated triptych of tone poems that might be the finest symphony Martinu never wrote.
Anyway, the Turkish players go at this music with a will – wide-eyed, occasionally splashy, but sensitive to each shift of mood and texture (and in this repertoire, there are a lot). It’s marvellously translucent. Harps ripple within chords, the strings are springy and supple and the bassoons have soil under their fingernails – in all, a suitably tangy corrective to the jaded notion that all orchestras now sound alike. The Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic recently toured the UK, but I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never heard of their Italian chief conductor Carlo Tenan. If this recording is typical, he knows his stuff.
Jarvis Cocker still has the voice – and the moves
For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of the indie disco and student union.
Halfway through the first date of Pulp’s UK tour following the release of More, their first album in 24 years, I started thinking about Withnail & I. Watching the film repeatedly as a young man, the booze-soaked antics of the dissipated ‘resting actor’ and his addled supporting cast seemed like great larks, albeit in extremis. The last time I watched it, approaching 50, sober as a judge, it played as the bleak tragedy it had surely always been. To steal the title of a Pulp song: something changed.
The music of Pulp has always been scored through with melancholy and painful longing, but its emotional heft and essentially good heart is more evident these days. Singer Jarvis Cocker no longer hides behind so many layers of ironic distance. As he half-joked before ‘Help The Aged’, at 61 he now requires audience assistance to reach the high notes.
More is Cocker’s delayed, reluctant reckoning with adulthood. As he put it on ‘Grown Ups’, ‘We’re hoping that we don’t get shown up/ ’Cos everybody’s got to grow up.’ Love was once a source of shame and embarrassment, he told us, but he has finally reached a gentlemanly accommodation with it.
The shift was evident on new songs such as ‘Slow Jam’, ‘Got To Have Love’ and ‘Farmer’s Market’ – a terrific orchestral ballad – but also in the low-key sense of gratitude that emanated from the stage. Cocker came across as a warmer, less wary figure, tossing out grapes and sweeties to the front rows.
There were more obvious signs that we weren’t in 1995 anymore. The group’s core four – Cocker, Nick Banks, Candida Doyle and Mark Webber – nowadays resemble members of the history department of a Russell Group university who have decided to enliven the pre-retirement years by forming a band. They were joined by a string ensemble, a percussionist and several superb multi-instrumentalists, enabling Pulp2025 to shift seamlessly from the vast, corrupted Bond theme drama of ‘This Is Hardcore’ to a pared-down acoustic version of ‘Something Changed’.
In the midst of all that evolution, the trick was that it was all still very recognisably Pulp. Framed by purple velvet drapes, the set was a Sheffield bingo hall transported to an aircraft hangar, while an air of slightly shambolic indie-ism survived the transition to a slick arena show.
Cocker came across as a warmer, less wary figure, tossing out grapes and sweeties to the front rows
Cocker still has the voice and, perhaps more importantly, the moves. His hands pirouetted like a good actor playing a bad magician. He corkscrewed into the air when excitement got the better of him, such as the moment when ‘Common People’ exploded into life. The song, which should by now feel glossy with overfamiliarity, was instead a juggernaut of propulsive energy.
By then, they had played most of More. ‘Tina’ might be a classic Pulp title destined to be for ever waiting in vain to become a classic Pulp song, but much of the new material held its own among the gold-standard highlights: ‘Sorted For E’s & Whizz’, an exhilarating ‘Disco 2000’, ‘Mis-Shapes’, ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’ and ‘Babies’, as well as outliers such as ‘The Fear’ and ‘O.U. (Gone, Gone)’. Nothing on More could possibly have the impact of those songs, a point the audience instinctively understood. That was then, this is now. Both band and fans simply seemed appreciative of the opportunity for ‘one last sunset, one final blaze of glory.’
The Waterboys are also touring a new album, Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, a gonzo, genre-hopping 25-track sprawl that maps the life of the maverick US actor to the shifting currents of the postwar counterculture.
They played around half of it in Edinburgh, in a single suite that unspooled against a Hopper-heavy backdrop of black and white stills and saturated Super-8 video footage. It felt fresh, colourful, eccentric and ultimately celebratory.
On either side, they crunched out setlist staples such as ‘Be My Enemy’ and ‘A Girl Called Johnny’, which delivered power and punch without much in the way of surprises. The gig was at its best when the interplay between the musicians had space to stretch out. A reworked ‘This Is The Sea’ gathered an elemental power, and there was a nod to the recently departed Sly Stone during the still effervescent ‘The Whole Of The Moon’. Like Pulp, the Waterboys have seen over 40 years’ of active service, yet they are still evolving.
Astonishing ‘lost tapes’ from a piano great
These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was by the time he’d finished. Now she’s been killed again, this time by the guitarist Robin Scherpen, whose Ravel Reimagined offers us ‘a peaceful and serene soundscape’. Then there’s Rêverie from Nemo Filou, a trio whose cocktail-lounge noodling allows ‘the listener to drift off into bliss’, and Sleep Circle, a ‘re-recorded version of the 2012 project Sleep’ by DG’s in-house snoozemeister Max Richter.
But the funny thing is that over the past year I’ve spent more on DG products than I have for decades. Like its competitors, the company is frantically mining its back catalogue. That isn’t exciting: I don’t need fancy new packaging for CDs I bought in the 1990s. But there are also recordings remastered by Emil Berliner Studios, named after the man who founded Deutsche Grammophon in 1898 – and the results are stunning.
EBS revisits the peaks of DG’s catalogue, going back to the master tapes to recover audio information that was lost because the original sound engineers didn’t have the right technology to extract it, or messed things up at the mixing desk. Although many of these new remasterings have been issued as CDs, SACDs or downloads, the cream of the crop is available only as pure analogue vinyl. Trust me: you haven’t really heard Karajan’s Mahler Fifth until you’ve invested £80 in the ‘Original Source’ LPs and played them with the best stylus you can afford.
But now EBS has worked a digital miracle that you can hear on any streaming service. The Lost Tapes is an album of four Beethoven sonatas performed by Sviatoslav Richter in 1965, recorded for possible release but then mysteriously forgotten for nearly 60 years. They are taken from live concerts in France and Switzerland in which we hear the pianist at the top of his form in terrific sound – a frustratingly rare combination.
Richter felt suffocated by microphones and you can hear a lack of spontaneity in many of his studio recordings. In contrast, some of his supreme flights of imagination are found in live concerts captured by wretched equipment. For example, his legendary 1958 Sofia performance of Pictures at an Exhibition, praised by critics for its ‘staggering breadth of colour’ and ‘frenzied grotesquerie’, sounds muffled or strident, depending on how you twiddle the knobs.
In 1960 Richter made his American debut with six concerts in Carnegie Hall. Gripped by stage fright, under heavy KGB surveillance, he tore through Beethoven and Prokofiev sonatas, Schumann’s Novelletten and Rachmaninov Preludes with a mixture of savagery and feathery delicacy. The end of Beethoven’s Appassionata comes so close to breaking the sound barrier that you scarcely notice the finger-slips.
Alas, the microphone was in the hands of a clueless stagehand – and when Sony reissued the recordings on CD they drained the colour out of the abrasive but vivid LP originals. But I was lucky enough to stumble on a version beautifully renovated by an amateur from an internet forum, and that sent me down the rabbit hole of the vast Richter discography.
Thanks to years of obsessive-compulsive collecting, I can compare the four Lost Tapes Beethoven sonatas – opuses 31 no. 3, 90, 101 and 110 – with other Richter performances. The last of these, in A flat major, represents a unique milestone in the composer’s journey; Antony Hopkins once suggested that the transformation of the fugue subject into ecstatic rhapsody is the moment when Beethoven – and music itself – finally severed the shackles of the classical style. A fanciful theory, perhaps, but that’s how Richter plays it, the final bars exploding with joy.
Is it a finer performance than the one he recorded in Moscow in the same year? No – it’s almost identical, and the same is true of Op. 101 in A major, which Richter described as ‘horribly difficult… even riskier than the Hammerklavier’. To quote Jed Distler’s liner notes on this previously lost tape, we hear a ‘bracingly effortless traversal of the Finale’, in which the pianist ‘untangles the knotty counterpoint with insouciant ease’. Richter was on fire in 1965, and his achievement in Moscow is every bit as jaw-dropping. The difference is the sound; in all the sonatas the pounding of Richter’s left hand jolts you out of your seat and his ability to sustain a whisper at lightning speed defies belief.
It’s hard to think of other Richter recordings in which technique and sound quality are so gloriously matched. We’re told that Emil Berliner Studios removed the tiniest pitch fluctuations and audience noises, something that wouldn’t have been possible until recently and other technicians probably couldn’t replicate. So, all things considered, perhaps we should be grateful that some idiot at Deutsche Grammophon left these tapes gathering dust until precisely the right moment.
Style, wit and pace: Netflix’s Dept. Q reviewed
Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that’s for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff’s estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings.
As with Slow Horses, this is about enjoying the company of loveable misfits
But you needn’t worry about Dept. Q (Netflix). Though it is set in a police station in Edinburgh it bears about as much relation to contemporary Scotland, Scottish policing or indeed Edinburgh as, say, Midsomer Murders does to real-life English villages. Perhaps this is because – based on a novel by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and originally set in Copenhagen – it derives from the Scandi-noir genre where every other person in the bleak, washed-out countryside and pullulatingly corrupt modern metropolis is either a bent City bigwig, an occultic serial killer – who wears antlers on his head while drawing runic symbols in blood – or the disturbed victim of some Terrible Family Secret that will only be unravelled after a series of long car and ferry journeys to remote islands where no one wants to answer questions.
Our hero is DCI Carl Morck (Matthew Goode), whose statutory unique quirks are that he’s stupidly clever, incredibly grumpy and deeply traumatised having been shot in the head by the same masked gunman who crippled his colleague (and only friend) DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives). Everyone hates him; he hates everyone in return; but you’d definitely want him solving your case, even if it’s impossible, such as the one he’s investigating here.
I feel bad about describing it because it might give away the game about the rather ingenious temporal device that furnishes the first episode with its satisfying final twist. (Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want it spoiled.) Essentially, a woman barrister (Chloe Pirrie) has gone missing on a ferry and her case has been closed because there were no leads or witnesses and she is presumed dead. In actual fact though – oh, the horror! – she has spent the last four years imprisoned in what looks like the metal hull of a ship, where she is psychologically and physically tortured by a vicious old woman and her sidekick who bear her some-as-yet-undisclosed grudge.
See what I mean about our being in Scandi-noir territory? This is the sort of crime almost no one ever commits in real life because even if they had the motive the logistics would be just too complicated. That’s why, having hit you with this bizarre and deeply implausible scenario, the rest of the book/TV adaptation has to work so frantically hard to provide you with the convoluted psychological and organisational rationale necessary to persuade you that this hasn’t all been a huge waste of your time and credulity.
Not that I’m really complaining by the way. Just like with Slow Horses – whose set up this resembles quite a lot – Dept. Qisn’t really about the tortured MacGuffin of a plotline but about enjoying the company of loveable misfits. Besides Goode’s adorably hateful antihero detective, these include: Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), a deceptively gentle soul who used to be in the Syrian secret police; DCI Hardy (now bedbound but at least if he can still help solve crimes it might suppress his urge to kill himself); DC Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne), with her big red hair, bright red lipstick and mental-health issues. They work together in a dingy basement, forgotten since the 1970s, and, handily, have a decent budget because the cabinet secretary has apparently decided that it’s good for optics if there’s a dedicated department for solving cold cases.
All the other characters are, of course, similarly messed up. The missing woman’s brother William (Tom Bulpett) has mental-health issues on account of having had his head stoven in by a mysterious hammer attacker; Kelly Macdonald’s Dr Rachel Irving – aka meet-cute love interest – has been off men ever since jilting her bigamist husband at the altar; Morck’s teenage stepson wears a mask and plays death metal at full volume while playing video games, etc.
Yes, the crime bits are bit warped, morbid and voyeuristic (for my tastes anyway), but the cast are great, and it’s adapted and directed with such verve, style, wit and pace by Scott Frank, you can hardly not enjoy it – nor wish they’d get a move on with Season Two.
The artistic benefits of not being publicly subsidised
Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running scared and gripped by dismally risk-averse and short-termist attitudes. Free from the deadening metrics of diversity quotas and targeted outcomes, smaller more independent enterprises – London City Ballet and New English Ballet Theatre among them – can be lighter on their feet: they have inherited something of the pioneering spirit of Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois a century ago and they deserve support.
Another such is Ballet Nights – a series of one-off galas masterminded by Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, who doubles up as an embarrassingly brash compère, introducing each performer as though they were contestants at a rodeo. I wish he wouldn’t. But Devernay-Laurence has some sound ideas too: he can structure a programme, he knows the value of live music (even if it is restricted to a piano and string quartet), and he seems to have an eye for interesting dancers. The concert platform of Cadogan Hall offers him a less than ideal space, but with the help of some rudimentary lighting, he makes the most of it.
He is also evidently ambitious to present new and unfamiliar repertory rather than falling back on old chestnuts: the programme I saw featured several commissions and world premières, with only the balcony pas de deux from MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (rather perfunctorily executed by Reece Clarke and Anna Rose O’Sullivan) as an obvious sweetener. A couple of duds emerged, inevitably, and I didn’t think it was worth putting Eve Mutso to the trouble of resuscitating Peter Darrell’s flappy and flabby solo to Mahler’s ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’.
But I enjoyed much more Harris Beattie’s droll account of Richard Alston’s Dutiful Ducks and Constance Devernay-Laurence’s elegant narcissism in Christopher Wheeldon’s party piece I Married Myself. Best of all was William Forsythe’s Slingerland Duet, a tautly conceived dialogue, structured through complex torsions and danced here with seamless assurance by Gareth Haw and Sangeun Lee.
In a fullish and enthusiastic house there was little sign of the usual London ballet crowd; further performances are scheduled for July in Glasgow and September back at the Cadogan Hall. I am left with two related questions: where does Devernay-Laurence get the money for this, and how long can he keep it going?
Rosie Kay has lately been preoccupied with her worthy campaign to nurture an atmosphere of freer speech in the prissy world of the arts, but it’s good to see her return to the stage making intelligent dance. In Adult Female Dancer she presents a sort of autobiography in a recorded narration, to which she dances in counterpoint. Although this isn’t an altogether original idea (Jérôme Bel created something similar through Véronique Doisneau 20 years ago), Kay is warmly engaging as she explores early traumas and recalls hideous injuries in an effort to address her love-hate compulsion to keep dancing into painful middle age. It could be maudlin, but it isn’t. There’s no wallowing in self-pity, and uncostumed in white shirt and black tights Kay moves with an unaffected honesty that makes you feel she has nothing to hide or prove.
A longer piece, Fantasia, follows. Dressed first in outlandish tutus and then in shimmering tasselled catsuits, three barefoot female dancers pay tribute to the sun, moon and Earth – at least that’s according to the programme, because you could have fooled me. What I saw was a wittily eclectic, almost but not quite parodic homage to the classical symmetries of Petipa, the hopping and skipping of Isadora, and the deep-bend intensities of Martha Graham. Meaningful or not, it’s certainly a stylish and attractive choreographic exercise.
Superb: Stereophonic, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed
Stereophonic is a slow-burning drama set in an American recording studio in 1976. A collection of hugely successful musicians, loosely based on Fleetwood Mac, are working on a new album which they hope will match the success of their previous number one smash.
This is an absolute treat for anyone who appreciates subtle, oblique and quietly daring theatre
The studio could almost be an orphanage because the characters keep squabbling and bickering like siblings in need of a parent. The self-appointed leader is Peter (Jack Riddiford) who dresses in classic hippy mode with a kaleidoscopic shirt and a droopy moustache. But he rules the studio with a rod of iron. He asks the nerdy engineer, Grover, to spare him ten minutes to record a guitar solo but they end up working on it for ten hours. And still Peter isn’t happy. The more effort he puts into the album the more hostility he attracts from the other musicians who dislike his control freakery. Tensions mount. Hatred erupts. Love curdles as well. Peter’s affair with the lead singer, Diana, is falling to pieces and their difficulties culminate in an exquisitely painful scene. Standing at a single mike, they record a backing track while trading vicious insults. ‘I find you physically repulsive,’ says Diana, in a short pause between takes. ‘I’d like to set fire to your hair,’ replies Peter. But when they sing they create a heavenly sweetness. The point is well made. Bitter feuds can inspire great art.
The writer, David Adjmi, elaborates the script like a many-stranded documentary and he hides the emotional weight of each scene in a minor gesture or informal detail. He creates side plots that flare up and fade away inexplicably. And he includes awkward moments of flirtation that lead to nothing in particular. Just like real life. The show is a series of gossipy little mysteries as a well as a pin-sharp analysis of a band in the throes of a terminal meltdown. Great performances all round.
The most likeable character is Reg (Zachary Hart) whom everyone regards as an emotional cripple. His breakfast tipple is Jack Daniels and he snorts coke from a massive stash that gets passed around the studio like a bag of dolly mixtures. His frustrated girlfriend, Holly, orders him to sober up. And he does, miraculously. But not for long. Nia Towle (Holly) is the cornerstone of the group. A sweet, dependable charmer loved by everyone. But then she learns that Diana has signed a solo deal with Columbia – and she changes. Andrew R. Butler does heroic work as an assistant engineer, Charles, who has so little impact on the studio that his name remains unknown to every member of the band. A terrific running gag. His cameo performance completes the sense of richness and naturalism that distinguish this superb show.
The handsome costumes and hairdos are great to look at, and authentic in every detail. No hint of parody or pastiche. The lighting and the sets are more than exquisite. They’re calming and soothing. Relaxing even. That matters because the show lasts 200 minutes.
This is an absolute treat for anyone who appreciates subtle, oblique and quietly daring theatre that uses silence as a player in the drama. There are empty moments here where nothing is happening and everything is happening. If you get it, you’ll love it.
Marriage Material is a version of Cinderella set in the Sikh community in the 1970s. Surinder is an ambitious, intelligent teenager whose parents prevent her from studying and force her to work long hours in their corner shop. The family is dominated by Surinder’s violent, illiterate mother who hopes to marry her off to a randy young groom from an even more repressive clan of Sikhs. When a charming white boy asks her to join him for a knickerbocker glory, she sees her chance to escape.
The production, based on a novel by Sathnam Sangera, addresses some of the social problems faced by Sikhs in Britain. Many of them are self-inflicted. The intolerant characters refer to white people in derisive language but they seem shocked and offended when white people reciprocate. The males campaign vociferously for their ‘right’ to wear a turban at work, and yet they leave their heads uncovered at home and in the street. They refuse to wear turbans even at a pro-turban rally. Strange behaviour. Why agitate for a privilege they have no wish to enjoy?
The source of their bigotry is Surinder’s father who broods angrily and obsessively over the British Raj. He refers to England as a ‘disease’ and he makes it clear that he has little interest in co-existing with his white neighbours. Surinder is the only enlightened and tolerant member of the family and when she breaks free of their cruel insularity, she finds wealth, power and independence. This enrages her relatives who jeer at her ‘English’ persona. By ‘English’ they mean ‘successful’. Perhaps they don’t know what they’re saying.
Magnificently bloodthirsty: 28 Years Later reviewed
First it was 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle, 2002), then 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) and now Boyle is back at the helm with 28 Years Later, which is, as I understand it, the first in a new trilogy. This post-apocalyptic horror franchise could go on for ever. As the last film was generally (and rightly) regarded as a desultory cash grab, there is much riding on this one. The verdict? It’s entertaining but not outstanding. The biggest surprise is its tonal swerve into sentimentality. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, however, bring character and heft and, just to put your minds at rest, yes, it’s as magnificently bloodthirsty as ever.
Just to put your minds at rest, yes, it’s as magnificently bloodthirsty as ever
What you will most want to know is: 28 years after the ‘rage virus’ was let loose from a chimpanzee laboratory, where the hell are we? We’re on an island off England’s northeast coast where a group of survivors have retreated. The virus, we are told, has been contained in the UK while the rest of the world has abandoned us, which is mean. The film is also a family drama, with, at its centre, a dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a mum (Comer) and their son Spike (Alfie Williams). Spike is now 12 and must embark on a hunting trip to the mainland with his father to learn how to kill ‘the infected’. This seemed like madness to me, but there you are.
The ‘infected’ are not zombies as they’ve never been dead so can’t be undead – I’m a stickler for this sort of thing – but they’re certainly zombies to all intents and purposes, with their cravings for human flesh and blood. We have skinny, naked, screeching ones who lurch awkwardly (or sprint fast, best of both worlds) and fat, slow ones who crawl the forest floors like Sumo wrestlers with grievous psoriasis. ‘There are some strange people on the mainland,’ Spike’s father tells him at one point. You don’t say?
There’s jeopardy, jump scares and gory moments – such as intestines spilling out of mauled bodies – in freeze-frame. From what I could tell – through my fingers – one of ‘the infected’ gets an arrow straight to the penis, and while I’m not rooting for them, what an unpleasant way to go. I’d heard that ‘the infected’ had mutated to be more intelligent but I couldn’t see too much evidence for that. The tonal switch happens midway through, when it stops being a father-son story and becomes a sentimental mother-son one. Which means they go on a quest together that brings them into the orbit of Fiennes’s character. And while I daren’t say too much it does look as if he’s been Tango’d. The audience tittered when he first appeared but I hope they were appreciative (after Conclave, I can forgive him anything).
Boyles’s extensive use of an iPhone gives it the shaky look fans of the original will welcome, while the soundtrack features a brilliantly deployed, century-old recital of Kipling’s poem ‘Boots’. It could be smarter, with less of a kill-or-be-killed narrative, and I would have liked a crib sheet. Who gets to become a fat Sumo and who doesn’t? The second film made a big deal of some people becoming contaminated without symptoms, and that’s just gone away?
But Comer and Fiennes bring depth – and you can sense some fun was had. The ending, alas, isn’t an ending, but a set-up for the next one. I now realise the sequel was filmed simultaneously and is due for release in January. It’s called 28 Years Later: Bone Temple. That’s cheating, to my mind, and if it picks up where we leave off, shouldn’t it be 28 Minutes Later? Get a grip, lads. Get a grip.
The real reason birth rates are falling
Last week the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its State of World Population report. According to the Guardian: ‘Millions of people are prevented from having the number of children they want by a toxic mix of economic barriers and sexism, a new UN report has warned.’ Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of UNFPA, said: ‘The answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.’
Nonsense, of course. Does Africa (4.1 births per woman) have better family leave and fertility care and more supportive partners than Sweden (1.4)?
The reason for UNFPA’s counter-intuitive findings is simple. They have not ‘found’ (the word almost every report uses) the reasons people don’t have babies. They’ve found the reasons people say they’re not having babies. People say all kinds of things. Against a background of concern at low fertility, and asked why they’re not contributing more to maintaining population numbers, most people are unlikely to reply: ‘Because babies are hard work, and restrict my freedom to live the life of my choice.’ Of course they won’t! ‘I don’t want children’ sounds selfish. They’ll instead say that they’d like to have more children, but for one reason or another beyond their control are prevented from having a bigger family. Even taking that into account, I note from the figures for respondents’ answers to the survey’s core questions that only one in five said they expected to have fewer children than they’d like.
‘What they’d like’ is key. Face it. Modern couples are making a lifestyle choice in curbing procreation. Babies are thoroughly inconvenient. Pets (say reports) are substituting for children as they’re less trouble. Dog ownership is increasing.
I doubt that the science of polling could provide the honest answers we need, but I’ll take an intuitive stab at ‘explaining’ why the 21st-century world is having fewer children. Birth rates are falling not (pace UNFPA) because people feel less free to have bigger families, but because they feel more free not to. And it’s women I’m mostly talking about. The reason for falling birth rates is the emancipation of women.
Why assume we should be trying to grow the size of the economy in the first place?
Those thousands of years when hearth, home and motherhood were the limits of what a young woman could aspire to are gone. The cultural blocks on careers for women are being lifted, and that’s a good thing. But it has consequences. Even after making every effort to harmonise career with reproduction, even after nudging men into sharing domestic duties, after extending maternity and paternity leave (480 days in Sweden) and penalising employers for discriminating against mothers who interrupt work to care for babies, after state help with nurseries and daycare centres and the financial incentives some countries are now offering for having more children, even after all that, modern women want a life beyond the front door.
This is especially so for younger women starting out on a career. Later, with more seniority in the workplace, can come more flexibility and power to dictate terms. This is surely one reason professionally successful modern women now choose motherhood towards the end of the female reproductive lifespan. My mother was in her early twenties when her firstborn (me) came along. This allowed time for another five children, regularly puncturing the possibilities of career.
This is backed up by a stubborn failure to reverse fertility trends through governmental attempts to incentivise childbirth. South Korea, Hungary and France have offered families a shedload of goodies – tax breaks and bounties of every kind – to grow. The effects have been negligible. The doubling of available talent for the modern economy must be vastly beneficial both to productivity and the sum of human happiness, but it doesn’t encourage procreation.
Why, though, do UNFPA and a host of other official voices call falling birth rates a crisis? It’s only about ten minutes since world overpopulation, not underpopulation, was the popular cause for anxiety. Economists may answer that low birth rates mean either a contracting young workforce to support expanding numbers of an ageing population, or the continuous importation of young immigrant workers to fill the gap. True enough. But more babies mean – in the end – more oldies; and so do more immigrants, after a time lag. We can’t indefinitely keep shovelling more births and more immigrants into the economy to feed a (consequentially) swelling care sector.
If, then, we cannot fuel economic growth through babies and migrants, why assume we should be trying to grow the size of the economy in the first place? Let the country face a deficit of workers until employers pay more to bring more of the native population into gainful employment; let the increase in longevity level off, as it is doing. With later retirement, we could stabilise the proportions of contributors and beneficiaries and distribute the spoils of increased productivity among fewer people than if we carry on sucking in immigrants or succeed in cranking out more babies.
Of course, if world birth rates stayed below 2.1, humankind would eventually become extinct. But that’s for generations hence to ponder. For our own, there is no shortage of people – quite the reverse. And the fewer of us there are, the greater for each will be our share; and the more easily we could halt the despoilation of the planet. The world might become a nicer place to bring children into.
My thinking here is not new, and has been argued more capably by others for decades, but the current panic about depopulation, the suspect underlying premise that more people means more for each of them, and the political mantra that everything must depend upon ‘growth’, prompt me to pose again some very big questions.
Letters: How lads’ mags spawned OnlyFans
Bad lads
Sir: The articles on Britain’s relationship with porn were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. Fascinating in that Louise Perry and Michael Simmons’s contributions (‘Devices and desires’ and ‘Dirty money’, 14 June) provided a thought-provoking analysis of the extraordinary growth of the industry. Frustrating in the juxtaposition of these pieces with Sean Thomas’s delusional thoughts about ‘lads’ mags’ (‘Age of innocence’).
Mr Thomas seems to recall these publications with the same dewy-eyed fondness that folk of my generation reserve for Spangles and Bagpuss. He is unable to see the direct line that joins them to the worst excesses of OnlyFans. It’s all there in both – the same objectification of women, the betrayal of sex, the sad loneliness and repressed shame of the consumer, the denial of the negative effect on society and the castigation of those who wince or demur as dinosaurs or prudes.
The only difference between FHM and OnlyFans, apart from the magazine’s inability to grow its figures, is that the internet has enabled the production of and access to this sort of content on a much greater scale.
Michael Harrison
Belfast
Derby match
Sir: In her admirable exposé of the dirty deeds on OnlyFans, Louise Perry notes that two of its most depraved performers are ‘oddly’ both from Derbyshire. Perhaps it is more predictable than odd for some. Brought up in prim Peterborough in the 1950s, I was used to hearing that girls who turned to prostitution had ‘gone to Derby’ – which very often they had.
Christopher Gray
Oxford
Mass appeal
Sir: It is a pity that Damian Thompson (‘Critical mass’, 14 June) trivialises the issues vexing Pope Leo XIV as regards the treatment of the Tridentine form of the Mass. The current debate about the liturgy is not just about Latin. Indeed, the reformed liturgy (the Novus Ordo Mass) can be said anywhere, and in Latin, by any Catholic priest. And yet, as Damian rightly says, there is an increasingly vocal campaign, especially among Generation Z Catholics, for the tolerance and even the full legalisation of the Tridentine Mass. But this is not simply an argument about ‘bells’n’smells’ or even trying to preserve a beautiful and ancient liturgy. It is a war between the old pre-Vatican II Church and the post-conciliar movement which has been imposed on Catholics since 1965.
The Tridentine Mass expresses the traditional theology taught by the Church since the death of St John the Apostle and it cannot be allowed to coexist alongside the new theology (some would call it ideology) which the bishops are trying to enforce. Countless pronouncements by Pope Francis and Cardinal Roche have confirmed that we now have a theology which runs in direct opposition to that taught for almost 2,000 years until the Second Vatican Council. This is why there can be no tolerance of the Tridentine rite, which represents a flagship of opposition to the conciliar reforms. Latin Mass lovers are accused of opposing Vatican II and the New Mass, something they hotly deny. I would say that those who campaign for the Tridentine Mass and ignore the underlying doctrinal contradictions it represents are no more than romantics. It is for this reason that the Church authorities will sweep them aside.
Joseph Bevan
Dover, Kent
Pros and cons
Sir: Prue Leith makes many good points about prisons and charities (‘Jail break’, 14 June), but she doesn’t make the key one: that two-thirds of prisoners shouldn’t be in the sort of prisons they are. Of Britain’s 90,000 inmates, about 30,000 are extremely dangerous and should be kept away from the public. About 30,000 are mentally inadequate and should probably be under lock and key – but don’t need to be in Category A, B or C prisons where they are bullied and learn nothing, not least because most of them can’t read. The remaining third are addicts, and should be in rehabilitation centres where they might be cured.
Instead of building more high-security prisons at vast expense, we should build lock-up centres and rehab centres, both of which would cost less. I visited about 20 prisons when I helped Action For Prisoners’ Families, and they all told the same tale.
David Astor
Milton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire
Good hare day
Sir: Charles Moore’s thoughts about hares (Notes, 14 June) reminds me of the day I went to the local post office to obtain a licence to sell game. I needed this as I was proposing to sell hares, which were then plentiful on the Kent marshes. The woman behind the counter said she needed to ask me three questions. 1) Was I an innkeeper? No, just a farmer. 2) Was I the driver of a stagecoach? Definitely not. 3) Was I a higgler? Stumped by this question, I asked what one was. She said ‘someone who higgles for trade outside a cattle market’: in other words, picks up return loads of livestock after an auction. Again, no. She then asked for a very small sum and gave me my licence.
These requirements are set out in the 1831 Game Act and as far as I know are still in force. The three professions mentioned would all be capable of handling game illegally killed by poachers.
Stephen Skelton
London SW6
Animal instinct
Sir: Anthony Whitehead’s piece on lonely-hearts ads (‘Notes on…’, 14 June) reminds me of the glorious misprint I found in one posh Sunday paper: ‘Looking for a significant otter.’
Larry Spence
Girvan, South Ayrshire
Write to us letters@spectator.co.uk
Mark Carney, the mischief-making pin-up
Well, would you look at Mark Carney. Just three months ago I described the incoming prime minister of Canada and former governor of the Bank of England as ‘a fish-out-of-water technocrat’ who made little public impact over here and was swiftly forgotten after he left in 2020. When I once came across him hunched and dark-suited in the Pret queue at King’s Cross, midway through his Bank tenure, I actually felt sorry for him.
But here he is, beer-swigging in an Ottawa bar with Sir Keir Starmer; cutting Donald Trump short in a press call before the G7 meeting; shedding his eco-credentials to champion Canadian oil and gas; and generally looking the statesman at ease with his people. What happened?
A Canadian connection tells me the answer is all to do with Carney’s paternal ancestry in Ireland’s County Mayo: ‘He’s unleashed his inner leprechaun and he’s on a mission to make mischief for the big orange buffoon south of the border. What’s more, the ladies think he’s hot.’ It makes me wonder about his charisma-free Bank of England successor, Andrew Bailey, who has barely been seen in public this year. What leap on to the world stage might he be planning for his next career?
Fever in the air
Would a flurry of merger-and-acquisition activity in the banking sector constitute evidence of rude health – or a cyclical warning of troubles ahead? Metro Bank, the glossy but struggling high-street challenger, is being stalked by a private equity outfit called Pollen Street Capital. Santander last month rejected an £11 billion offer for its UK network from the reinvigorated NatWest. TSB, the former Trustee Savings Bank that was sold by Lloyds to Banco Sabadell of Spain a decade ago, is for sale again with its five million customers, while Sabadell itself fights off a takeover bid from its domestic rival BBVA. All across Europe, says one LinkedIn commentary, ‘bank M&A fever is in the air’.
Behind all this is a growing belief that expansion by takeover might now be a better use of surplus capital than share buybacks – and will deliver economies of scale in a sector that would benefit from consolidation to fight digital disruptors. The counterargument is that all banking mergers, especially across borders (as Sabadell discovered with TSB), are fraught with management conflicts and incompatible IT systems. And ambitious bidders who claim they’re building regional or global champions are too often tempted to overpay. Caveat emptor – and let’s hope the regulators stay ahead of the new game.
Flight risk
A news story with painful implications for London’s insurance market has reached a largely unnoticed turning point – though perhaps not a final conclusion – in the High Court. This is the £3.4 billion case of 147 commercial aircraft which had been leased to Russian carriers but were effectively stolen on 10 March 2022, days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, when Moscow legislators made it impossible for the planes to be repossessed by their lessors – of whom the largest is an Irish company, AerCap.
Insurers led by Lloyd’s of London refused to pay out on the lessors’ ‘war risks’ cover, but Mr Justice Butcher has now ruled that they must, on the grounds that the loss is not a commercial matter but the result of an act of the Russian state. As indeed it was: my man who tends the Kremlin vegetable plot tells me this was a carefully pre-planned heist which won promotion for the aviation minister responsible.
Meanwhile, the insurers are also being pursued in the courts of Dublin, the world capital of aircraft leasing. But the hope is that settlement will now be reached between all the western parties and their well-remunerated lawyers, while the lost fleet continues flying within Russian airspace for as long as its operators can source illicit spare parts.
A curious sidelight on the way the money world works is that I happen to be a trustee of a small Yorkshire charity which is awaiting a payout of a different kind, in the form of a legacy from a deceased benefactor who happened to be a Name on some of the Lloyd’s underwriting syndicates that insured the aircraft in question. So our transformational bequest will be reduced, at several removes, by the evil hand of Putin.
Pottery dame
In a birthday honours list on which business barely got a look in, I was delighted to see a DBE for the potter Emma Bridgewater, whose cheerful mugs and bowls fly the flag for the traditional craft of Stoke-on-Trent in defiance of foreign competition. After starting her venture 40 years ago because she could not find a cup and saucer she liked as a present for her mother, Bridgewater built it up to employ more than 450 people and achieve peak annual sales in 2022 of £38 million. But it has since fallen into losses and ‘workforce optimisation’, so I hope the gong encourages her to battle on.
I’m confident she’ll do so, having encountered her feistier side a couple of years ago in a ding-dong debate over dinner at the Aldeburgh literary festival. The trigger was a reference by me to another Stoke-on-Trent venture with a female chief: namely the Bet365 sports betting empire led by the UK’s highest-paid executive, Denise Coates, who I have also occasionally praised here for her entrepreneurial thrust and whose personal pay package is a multiple of the Bridgewater company’s entire turnover.
Insensitively, I argued that in the evolution of 21st-century capitalism, regulated online bookmaking is as worthy as manufacturing if it brings new wealth, jobs, tax revenues and philanthropic funding to the post-industrial Potteries. The riposte was fierce, but if there’s ever an opportunity for another round, I think I might add that honours, as it were, are now equal: Coates has pots of money but Bridgewater’s pots have made her a Dame.
Heaven is Angel Delight
Andrew Watts has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I once heard an American complain that, being married to an Englishwoman, he was regularly baffled by the contents of his kitchen cupboards – salad cream, Ambrosia custard and Robinsons barley water. It was ‘like industrial processed food but from the Shire’.
It is probably this quality of baffling foreigners that allegedly enabled drug runners to use sachets of Angel Delight – the ultimate English ultra-processed food, surely to be found on many a table in Hobbiton, if only for second dinner – to smuggle cocaine into Indonesia. What could be more natural than an Englishman carrying real artificial flavours in his luggage so he didn’t have to make do with nasi goreng and chicken satay? (When I went to Japan for a year, my luggage was filled with proper tea bags.) The Balinese police have, however, got wise to their MO, and three Britons have appeared in court charged with drug smuggling, for which they could face execution by firing squad if found guilty.
Angel Delight was invented in 1967 in the research department of Bird’s in Banbury – right in the heart of the Shire. The market research showed that there was a demand for a bland, creamy-textured instant pudding; and, of course, the dessert company bosses didn’t get where they are today without knowing a good thing when they see one. It hit sales of £2 million in the first year.
I’d be lying if I said that it tastes as good as I remember it; but whenever I eat Angel Delight I am taken back to my childhood in the 1970s. It’s not the flavour in itself – back then, Bird’s experimented with blackcurrant, peach and coffee-and-walnut flavours, which have rightly been consigned to the memory hole – so much as the memory of a midweek treat. No one ever planned to have Angel Delight, so there was never any burden of expectation on it; and we would often be ‘allowed’ to make it ourselves, which made it taste even sweeter than an Arctic roll from the freezer compartment. Attempts to add to it – I have heard tales of crumbling flakes over the chocolate version, or taking a blowtorch to demerara sugar over butterscotch for Angel Delight brûlée – only take that memory away. (I am not even going to mention the decadence of ready-made pots which I saw in the supermarket last week.)
The chef Kirk Haworth, winner of The Great British Menu, says that it is the combination of all these factors that gives Angel Delight its power: from the colour and the ‘mainstream’ flavours to its being ‘very attractive textually on the palate’, along with the fact that you don’t need to be a chef to make it. And, he says, everyone comes back to the first flavours that entered their palate. Last year, as part of a project to reinvent nostalgic classics, his evolution of Angel Delight was as a drink: ‘We aerated the flavours, and then we made the colours with desiccated coconut; it was playful and inner-childish but super light and fluffy, when we put gas into the mixture, almost like air.’
Kirk runs Plates London, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Old Street, with his sister Keeley. He has no children, but his sister does; has he introduced them to the delights of Delight?
He pauses. ‘No.’
My first ever blind date
Four of us go for lunch once a month. My hippy ceramist neighbour, Geoffrey, is a foodie and one of the best cooks I know. He was born a few years after the second world war and, along with his brother, who went on to become a Michelin-starred chef, developed an interest in food from his English, Belgian and Italian grandparents and Swiss mother. I couldn’t afford to heat the little painting studio downstairs this winter and have only sold one work since November, so our choice of restaurants has been necessarily modest. The menus include dishes made with items from the end of the butcher’s counter that I, vegetarian for most of my twenties, still avoid: pied et paquets (sheep’s feet and tripe stuffed with pork), tête de veau (boned and boiled calf’s head) and andouillette (a coarse and malodorous sausage made from colon).
Geoffrey loves this stuff. He often berates us for avoiding it, but even he wouldn’t eat andouillette in company because of the smell. Our favourite place is more expensive at €20-30 a head for three courses where they serve 12 fabulous oysters for €18, and, occasionally, andouillette. ‘It’ll be all right here. A really good one shouldn’t smell too much, but don’t worry, I won’t have it,’ Geoffrey says if it’s on, choosing hake or something else normal like the rest of us.
A while back a friend called. He was coming to the coast for a week and asked if I’d like to meet for lunch, his treat. Because he’s good fun, smart and unavailable – and therefore perfect, uncomplicated company – I said yes. In England recently, after my heavily pregnant middle daughter was discharged from hospital following a nasty bout of flu, and her husband and little daughter also became ill, I ran a field hospital for a week. Once they were on the mend they decided I needed a night out and put me back on Bumble. ‘This guy looks all right: your age, ex-naval officer, lives in a nice village,’ said my son-in-law, a Navy diver. ‘He writes a good sentence, Mum, and he goes to the gym,’ added my daughter. ‘All very well but is he clever and amusing? Does he read? And what does he smell like?’ ‘Mum, it’s just dinner. You don’t have to marry him.’
I swiped right. A first. Two days later we met in a pub restaurant. On the way I told my son-in-law that my date didn’t drink. ‘Well that’s not going to work,’ he said. I got there early and took a large gin and tonic into the garden and smoked two cigarettes. It was the first time in my life I’d agreed to meet someone I didn’t know. We collided awkwardly in the bar but he was friendly and pleasant. I relaxed. While we waited for food I asked him if he read. He had a thousand books, he told me, most of them on management. ‘Any novels?’ He thought for a while and remembered he’d read Wolf Hall last year.
I showed him a photo of my cave house in Provence and he showed me pictures of his house, a modern build in a pretty village in Wiltshire. Inside all was shipshape. The tasteful contemporary objects of uniform colour, the row of pictures painted by the same hand, 50 pairs of polished shoes and the huge rail of perfectly ironed shirts couldn’t have been more different from the live rock walls and barely contained bohemian chaos of my place.
I swiped right. A first. Two days later we met in a pub restaurant
I listened to him – he had an interesting story. But when he asked about me, I couldn’t stop talking about Jeremy. My date liked ballet. I like opera and Radio 3. He liked ballroom dancing. I like jumping up and down in a mosh pit. But it was a pleasant enough evening. In the car on the way back to my daughter’s house he put on the heated seats and played Olly Murs, whom he loved but I’d barely heard of. He was disappointed in my lack of enthusiasm for the music. A decent man, but romance wasn’t in the air.
No more dates for me. Lunch or dinner with pals and colleagues only. Back in Provence, I met my friend from the coast in a hilltop village restaurant. He suggested a kir royale to kick off, then said: ‘What will you have? I’m tempted by the andouillette.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I said, noticing for the first time that he was looking at me intently and had nice eyes. ‘Yes, I love it!’ ‘Show off. I’ll have the chicken, please.’
We were engrossed in chat and halfway down a good bottle of local white when the food arrived. The smell was worse than I could’ve imagined – slaughter-house offal bin with top notes of a 1980s surgical ward laundry basket: blood, pus, faeces and rotting toe. My favourite French cheeses, Époissesand Morbier, smell awful but taste delicious, so emboldened by the wine I asked if I could try the andouillette. ‘Half a teaspoon…’
It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever put in my mouth. I immediately spat it out on to my hand and, without thinking, put it back on his plate. ‘I’m so sorry.’ After a fit of the giggles and a glug of wine I composed myself. He leaned forward in his seat. His hand edged towards mine. ‘What?’ By way of an answer he looked into my eyes and sighed. Fumes of andouillette hit me square in the face.
Why must B&B guests give us advice?
‘You could mow all this lawn here and it would look a treat,’ said the arborist, returning from a stroll around the grounds, which were looking resplendent in the sunshine.
‘Yes, yes, mow the grass. Good idea,’ I said, for the builder boyfriend has told me I have to agree with the customers. No matter what they say, no matter how obvious their suggestions, just smile and say ‘Good idea.’
Old houses are like horses. Passing strangers feel ownership of them. Once they encounter them, they proclaim how they would care for them, because they decide from their soulful look that the owners must be neglecting them – when the truth is the owners slave day and night for them, getting nothing but a good kicking for their trouble.
So I had to bite my lip as this latest guest, from Wales, informed me that the lawns needed mowing. ‘Believe it or not, this is one week’s growth,’ I said. ‘Ireland, you see. Rain and sun. Rain and sun.’
‘How much land you got here?’ he asked. ‘Only seven and a half acres,’ I said, ‘and the horses graze most of it…’
‘You wanna get yourself some goats,’ he said, standing with his hands behind his back in front of the multicoloured hedgerows. The gardens were a blaze of exotic colour too, sloping away to two hilly fields where the four horses were grazing. It was a little picky to look at this sumptuous scene and point out the lack of goats as an issue.
‘Goats yes, good idea,’ I said. ‘We did think about goats, to eat the nettles.’
‘And you wanna put some yurts in. A big yurt in that circular garden there where you’ve got the bench. You don’t want a bench. You want a yurt. People pay good money for a yurt.’
‘Yurts, yes, good idea,’ I said. ‘We did think about yurts. Only he’s got quite a lot on, what with renovating an eight-bedroom house and two coach houses…’
‘And cut back all this lot here,’ pointing to my favourite tree. I said: ‘That’s a Chilean lantern tree.’ ‘Yes, cut all that back. You wanna get yourself some machinery.’
I told the BB and he said I should ignore it. Then the Welshman cornered him over breakfast and I could hear the BB saying ‘Good idea’ over and over. I knew what was coming. He waits until they’ve gone.
The arborist left on Sunday morning. Sunday, as it happens, is the BB’s day for mowing the grounds. With the guests gone, he got cracking with his enormous mower and had the acres of formal gardens looking manicured again in no time. When he finished, he stripped off for a shower in the downstairs bathroom and stood in the altogether shouting, in his best cockney ranting voice: ‘I tell you what eh. Thank God that Welsh fella came. His suggestion of cutting the grass has made an amazing difference. I kept wondering what that red machine was in the middle of the barn! You must send him a message and thank him.’
I could hear him ranting away to himself as he had his shower. ‘A right Einstein he was. He knows what he’s talking about. He should take over running the place.
‘I mean, he’s been here a night. He knows everything about it…’ And he veered into volleys of expletives, as colourful as the abundant gardens.
The builder b enjoys it. I don’t. I hear myself making low growling noises. The arborist’s girlfriend told me I should charge more. ‘That room was amazing,’ she said over breakfast. ‘The shower was lush. The house is gorgeous. Look at this message I just sent my friend: “Stayin’ in the most amazin’ Georgian country house. I feel like Jane Austen. You never seen anythin’ like it!” That’s what I said to my friend, that is. Why you charging so little?’
‘Because you won’t pay,’ I growled very quietly, as she sliced the butter block almost in half and pulverised it skilfully on to a single piece of toast. ‘People want a lot for their money,’ I said out loud.
The man from Hawaii also informed me I should be charging more. And he said it so often that in the end I told him he was right. The prices were going up. Whereupon he inserted this caveat to his suggested pricing regime. He wanted to book the best room in the house for another two nights, because he liked it so much, and he wondered if he could pay me a bit less, for cash.
‘Maybe,’ I growled. He said the only thing was, he was out of euros and he didn’t want to incur the exchange rate or have the bother of going to the post office in the village, so would I take dollars? ‘What?’ I shouted. ‘Everyone loves dollars,’ he said. ‘You can spend them when you visit the States.’
‘Listen here,’ I said, for he and I had struck up a good rapport. ‘You’ve gone from telling me to put my prices up to you don’t want to pay me what I’m currently charging to offering me dollars when I’m about as likely to get a trip to America as hell freezing over, so that’s the equivalent of not paying me at all. I’m never going to Florida, or New York, or Hawaii. I’m stuck here trying to run a West Cork B&B with customers demanding marble minibars and gold tea bags for €60 a night, and haggling me down while telling me I should put my prices up.’
‘Hey it was just an idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll book it online. You can send me a special offer, right?’
Is racing becoming too predictable?
An inquest into the Derby in the Oakley household was to be expected. Mrs Oakley, who bets about as often as you will hear Liz Truss say ‘I’m sorry: I got it wrong’, called me at Epsom this year asking for a fiver each way on Lambourn. Since the ten-time Derby winning trainer Aidan O’Brien had two more favoured candidates in Dela-croix and The Lion In Winter, I persuaded her to think otherwise and had some explaining to do after his Lambourn came home a comfortable 13-2 winner in the hands of the veteran jockey Wayne Lordan.
What has also surprised me is the downbeat tone of reactions elsewhere to this year’s Derby, with commentators bemoaning an overall lack of excitement and pizzazz. This extended to the comparatively few takers for the fairground rides and candy floss on the Hill which, as a long-time Epsom resident, I remember providing free entertainment for as many as 100,000. I doubt if there were 10,000 there this year.
But why quite so glum? Starkly forecast rain will have frightened many off the Hill. And an overall Derby Day crowd of 22,312 – down more than 40 per cent on the figure six years previously – is not altogether surprising with the current cost of living. Racing is in hot competition for the leisure pound, and a racegoer taking a partner and two children to an enclosure allowing access to the parade ring would have had precious little change from £300.
You could say that this year’s Derby lacked excitement as a spectacle simply because one horse went to the front at the beginning of the race’s two minutes 38 seconds of action, and stayed there with no rival ever looking like catching it.
But that still represented a skill to be admired. Lordan knew he was on a horse which was sure to stay the distance and he exploited that with acute judgment of pace, just like the great Steve Cauthen did with Slip Anchor in 1985.
As O’Brien put it afterwards: ‘Wayne went forward and every inch he got he was going to keep. He wasn’t going to give it back.’ Such rides take courage.
For me, Kieren Fallon was the best Derby jockey. His 2003 win on Kris Kin was described by trainer Sir Michael Stoute as one of the greatest Epsom rides and when I reread Kieren’s recollections of the race last week what struck me most was his remark: ‘The Derby is not won in the first five furlongs but it can easily be lost there.’
In that early pell-mell period, inexperienced three-year-olds racing sharply uphill face first a right-hand bend, then a tack left across to the rail. You must stay 12 furlongs to triumph but you also need the speed in those first five to achieve a mid-race position from which you can win.
What may be starting to affect attendances at racing’s big occasions is the growing predictability of the results, with the top prizes going too often to a small group of breeders, owners and trainers. At Cheltenham we call it the Willie Mullins factor: at Epsom on Derby Day it’s the continued domination of O’Brien and the Coolmore Gang of Magniers, Tabors and Smiths, who provide him with his equine ammunition.
Lordan knew he was on a horse sure to stay the distance and he exploited that with acute judgment of pace
It is an astonishing achievement that the modest 55-year-old Ballydoyle trainer has now had 11 winners of the Derby and also 11 of the Oaks, the fillies’ equivalent. But he doesn’t always do it in a predictable way. Pub quiz teams might have trouble recalling what unites a certain Padraig Berry and Emmet McNamara. In fact both, alongside such famous names as Michael Kinane, Ryan Moore and Johnny Murtagh, have won Derbies riding for Aidan O’Brien.
Small-scale punters who don’t like short-priced favourites should remember, too, that Berry took the race on the 40-1 Wings Of Eagles in 2017 and McNamara on Serpentine, another all-the-way winner, at 25-1 in 2020.
Should anything be done to stop the Coolmore domination? It neither should be nor sensibly could be. Plans are afoot to refigure the Derby from 2026 to boost its appeal, but restricting entrants in any way is not the way to go. Ronald Reagan once said about the US economy: ‘I’m not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to look after itself.’ So is the Derby.
The Epsom Downs are a unique test of horse and rider. I don’t want the Derby switched to a flatter course like Ascot or cut to a mile and a quarter like its French equivalent. Nor do I want geldings to be allowed to participate.
The Derby’s history has value, and while the others keep working at how to beat him, let us just continue enjoying O’Brien’s remarkable ability, and delighting in the fact that it is still the race Coolmore most wants to win.
Or, as O’ Brien himself says: ‘The whole thoroughbred breed hinges on the Derby. It’s what racing is about for everyone working in stables and on studs.’ Next year, though, I’ll listen to Mrs Oakley.
Bridge | 21 June 2025
A few years ago I went to Dallas with my team to play in the Summer National, the main event being the Spingold, a knockout tournament which attracts some of the best teams in the world. We did rather well and found ourselves in the quarter finals, and our opponents were Marty Fleisher’s team of world champs. Marty plays with Chip Martel, and before we started he announced that he thinks for a few minutes when dummy goes down, even if it’s a simple hand, to work out his plan. What a good idea, I thought. The next thing I knew, I went 4 off vul in an unusual NT auction, my partner telling me I could make it if I had come up with a plan: any plan would be better than none.
Imagine you’re sitting East and your partner leads the ♣️Q. What’s your plan?
It doesn’t look great, that’s for sure. We have nothing more than the ♣️A, hopefully the ♦️K and maybe a trump trick, but certainly not two at this vulnerability. That would mean an easy make and -620. This is not a plan, however – it’s a concession. We need to think outside the box.
Instead of giving up, use your imagination and return your ‘singleton’ diamond at trick two!
You don’t have a singleton – you know that, but declarer doesn’t. He’ll win in dummy and play a trump to your partner’s ace, who will hopefully play another diamond. Declarer can’t risk your ruffing away dummy’s ace – so will certainly finesse – and you can win the king and give partner the setting diamond ruff.
Did you find it – or something else? Maybe not, but without trying to formulate a plan to take four tricks, you’d have no chance at all.
Toppling Iran’s Supreme Leader could be a mistake
Are we already seeing an ominous mission creep in Israel’s blistering attack on Iran? First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s air assault was all about ending Iran’s covert nuclear weapons programme, a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency declared Tehran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Then, within a few hours of launching ‘one of the greatest military operations in history’, Netanyahu was telling Iranians that Israel was ‘clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom’.
Encouraging them to ‘stand up’ and overthrow the ‘evil and oppressive’ government of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he noted that Israel had been friends with Iran since the time of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, ruler of Persia from around 559-530 bc, and liberator of the exiled Jews of Babylon. Israel, Netanyahu said, would stand with the brave Iranian people.
So, as Iran faces its greatest external threat since the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, what are the prospects for regime change in Tehran and who might come next after Khamenei? Nicholas Hopton, director-general of the Middle East Association, and former British ambassador to Iran, Libya, Yemen and Qatar, is sceptical. ‘It seems to me that in appealing to the Iranian people, Prime Minister Netanyahu is possibly being either disingenuous or overoptimistic in hoping that will lead to regime change, or at least a regime more palatable to Israel and the West. The one thing likely to unite sentiment within Iran is opposition to external interference, as the country’s long, complicated history shows us.’
In other words, faced with an Israeli air assault that is progressively more damaging and humiliating – if the US joins in with bigger bombs, it will only get worse – the long-suffering, famously resilient Iranian people may start feeling the same way about Khamenei as FDR did about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: he ‘may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’.
We would do well to consider carefully what might follow a revolutionary regime that has been in power since 1979. ‘It’s more likely than not that a harder-line leadership, whether it’s an individual, a cleric, a secular leader or a group, would emerge, at least initially,’ warns Hopton. ‘Remember that the current regime was open to negotiations and engagement with the US and the West.’
Who will succeed 86-year-old Khamenei? Currently the Supreme Leader is said to be holed up with his family in an underground bunker in northeastern Tehran, or far beyond, safe for now from Israel’s astonishingly effective decapitating strikes – supposedly only Trump prevented a direct assassination attempt on him. Notwithstanding Netanyahu’s desire to remove the head of the snake, Khamenei’s poor health regularly invites predictions of his imminent demise and anxious consideration of the succession.
‘Declaring “regime change” as one of your goals makes the current campaign hostage to fortune’
With the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May last year, the field of potential successors has thinned distinctly in the interest of Khamenei’s 55-year-old son Mojtaba. Though he is a more unknown quantity and does not have the reputation for cold-blooded brutality enjoyed by Raisi, who earned his ‘Butcher of Tehran’ sobriquet for his role in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, Mojtaba is no shrinking violet. Widely seen as a hardliner, he is said to be a powerbroker with considerable influence over the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s muscle, and of course has backing at the very top. The secretive Assembly of Experts, the body which will select Khamenei’s successor, is heavy on hardliners and is thought to have been influenced in Mojtaba’s favour, but this does not rule out the possibility for surprises.
Mojtaba is not popular and lacks prestige. He does not have the formal religious qualifications for the role, but neither did his father back in 1989. Then, the constitution required the Supreme Leader to be a marja-e taqlid, a top-ranking Twelver Shia cleric. So that stipulation was removed, clearing the way for Khamenei’s appointment.
No one seriously expects that this sort of finessing and finagling will be beyond the ayatollahs when the time comes to choose the old man’s successor. Mojtaba is also associated with vote-rigging during the 2009 elections, the savage suppression of the anti-government protests which followed those elections, and the embezzlement of state funds. To this extent, he appears eminently qualified to lead the revolutionary republic: a nepo baby ayatollah.
Let us dwell on some recent western interventions. They suggest that we should be careful what we wish for
Also in the frame is Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, a close aide to Khamenei, chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council and a former chief justice of Iran with blood on his hands. His staunchly anti-democratic views put him firmly within the hardliner camp. Devoted to the doctrine of Velayat-e faqih, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, he has said that ‘votes do not bestow legitimacy on the government’. Larijani prefers divine authority, as mediated by male clerics of a certain age.
Reza Pahlavi, son of the last and ultimately despised shah, is also on manoeuvres, arguing that the end of the revolutionary regime is nigh. His candidacy – reports say he is ‘not necessarily’ looking for the restoration of the monarchy – has a tone-deaf shamelessness that is briefly entertaining, but the less said about him the better. He reminds me of the late Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, the charming, self-styled Crown Prince of Iraq who popped up in Baghdad in 2004 and did the rounds, claiming to be the legitimate heir to a nonexistent throne.
Of course, Netanyahu’s encouragement of a popular uprising may be bluster, but there is still no doubting the seriousness of this moment for Tehran in terms of regime survival. Ali Ansari, a professor of Middle East history at St Andrews, reckons Netanyahu’s tilt at toppling Iran’s leadership brings enormous risks and dangers. ‘To be blunt, declaring “regime change” as one of your goals makes the current campaign hostage to fortune and potentially open-ended. There is likely to be a reckoning for the regime, but this is only likely to happen once the conflict is over and the dust has settled – and not as a response to Netanyahu.’
What other clues are there to help assess the likelihood and desirability of a new leadership emerging in Tehran? History lessons can be boring because they distract from more exciting things like wars, but let us dwell for a moment on some recent western interventions. They might suggest that we should be careful what we wish for.
Let’s start with Afghanistan. In 2001, a US-led alliance swiftly removed the Taliban because they had been hosting al-Qaeda, the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks. That was the easy bit – and don’t forget that Iran offered to assist the US in that mission. But then there was a bit of mission creep and we decided it would be nice to have a western-friendly government in Kabul.
Cue 20 years of nation-building and a procession of puppet presidents, some – such as Hamid Karzai in his striped silk chapan coats and jaunty karakul hats – highly photogenic and adept at conning gullible western leaders. In rushed the international advisors on gender, good governance, human rights, anti-corruption, counter narcotics, security sector reform, agronomy, communications, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. But the ‘governments’ we propped up turned out to be little more than kleptocratic mayoralties in Kabul, the Taliban never gave up, and eventually we pulled the plug. Since 2021, the mullahs have been back in charge, waging war on women and girls and cracking down on anything resembling dissent with arbitrary arrests, detention, torture, amputation and extrajudicial executions. Job done.
Next, Iraq. In 2003, as we charged into war with Saddam Hussein, we were told that Iraqis couldn’t end up with a regime worse than that of the Butcher of Baghdad. So in we went and ousted him, only to hand the country over, first, to spectacularly venal Shia governments and the murderous terrorists of al-Qaeda – which hadn’t existed in Iraq before the invasion – next to Daesh, leaders of the short-lived ‘caliphate’, and ultimately to Iran, the West’s most potent adversary in the Middle East. Mission accomplished.
Roll on to Libya, 2011. Same script, different cast, this time featuring Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama, America ‘leading from behind’, i.e. not leading. In came the British and French jets, out went Gaddafi, dead in a ditch with a bayonet up his bottom, and then it was a case of civil war, warlords, militias, atrocities, and not much liberal democracy if we’re going to be really picky about it. The civil war is still raging 14 years later.
To this hapless trio of western campaigns, we might add the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015. That was also meant to be a lightning strike, to decapitate the Houthi leadership, but it hasn’t gone as well as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now Riyadh’s de facto leader, assured everyone it would. The civil war continues.
All of which is to suggest that when leaders launch ambitious military interventions and dangle the tantalising, headline-grabbing prize of regime change before us, a smidgen of caution is advisable. As for those hoping for a sudden outbreak of liberal democracy in Iran – or post-Assad Syria for that matter – Charles Gammell, a former Foreign Office official and Iran expert, has a stark warning. Given that the ayatollahs have already driven the opposition abroad, underground or into their graves, he doubts there are many suitable candidates left. ‘The patterns of repression, corruption and vice that we saw under the Pahlavi regime have simply been repeated – on steroids – by the Islamic Republic, and there is every chance that the psychological wounds inflicted by Khamenei and his ilk would produce an anti-western, anti-liberal and repressive post-Islamic Republic Iran. Beware those who promise the sunlit uplands of liberal democracy.’
Netanyahu referenced Cyrus the Great when launching a war that will define his legacy. The mullahs will be hoping he proves more like Darius I and Xerxes I. Both kings mounted audacious campaigns beyond their borders, only to find their well-laid plans doomed to defeat, destruction and nemesis.
How often do plane crashes have sole survivors?
Sole survivors
A 40-year-old British man, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was the sole survivor of the crash of an Air India jet shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad en route to Gatwick. A surprising number of aircraft disasters have had a sole survivor – at least five others where more than 100 were killed.
— On 16 August 1987 a four-year-old girl, Cecilia Cichan, survived the crash of North West Airlines flight 255 shortly after takeoff from Detroit; it killed 156. The plane’s wing flaps had not been extended (a suggested cause of the Air India disaster).
— On 6 March 2003, a 28-year-old soldier, Youcef Djillali, survived the crash of Air Algerie flight 6289 shortly after takeoff from Tamanrasset; 102 died.
— On 8 July 2003 two-year-old Mohammed el Fateh survived the crash of Sudan Airways flight 139, after the Boeing 737 crash-landed while returning to Port Sudan after an engine failure.
— On 30 June 2009, 12-year-old Bahia Bakari was the only one of 152 passengers and crew to survive the plunge of Yemenia flight 626 in the Indian Ocean – she was found clinging to wreckage hours later.
— On 12 May 2010, nine-year-old Ruben van Assouw survived the crash of Afriqiyah Airways flight 771 on approach to Tripoli – the only one of 103 passengers and crew.
Cheat sheet
How much benefit fraud and error is there – officially?
In 2024/25 £9.5bn (3.3% of the overall benefits bill) was lost to fraud. This was down on the £9.7bn (3.6%) lost in 2023/24. Losses peaked at 4% in 2021/22. However, in the 13 years to 2019 losses never exceeded 2.2%. In 2024/25, £6.5bn (2.2%) was put down to fraud, £1.9bn (0.7%) to claimant error and £1bn (0.4%) down to official error.
What a blast
If Iran were to succeed in gaining a nuclear weapon, it would become the 10th country currently known to possess one. The others are the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (although the latter does not acknowledge its possession of nuclear weapons).
— Three other modern-day countries once had nuclear weapons stationed on their soil: Ukraine, Kazakhstan and South Africa.
— South Africa is the only country which once possessed nuclear weapons in its own right and voluntarily relinquished them (the other two gained nuclear status as part of the Soviet Union). Its decision to abandon nuclear weapons in the late 1980s means there are currently no land-based nukes in the southern hemisphere.
My modest proposal
It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart our floundering economy.
The United Kingdom has made great strides of late in this area, recently overtaking France in the number of abortions performed annually, the figures showing the largest increase since this sort of stuff was legalised. The door, then, is already ajar. All we need to do is push a little.
Our elected representatives were intent on doing just that this week by voting for an amendment that will now decriminalise abortion right up to the day of birth. I don’t wish to seem churlish, but to me this demonstrates a marked lack of imagination and ambition. Why not extend the period at which abortions are legal to several months, or even years, after the birth of the child?
I understand that technically this would be known as ‘infanticide’ rather than ‘abortion’, but terminology should not stand in our way. There are plenty of left-wing ethicists, such as Pete Singer, who believe that infanticide is justifiable in many cases, using broadly the same arguments as those used to justify late-term abortions – that the foetus, or child, could not exist independently without its mother.
Yes, I hear you cry, this is the same Pete Singer who thinks it’s OK to shag dogs. But, as ever, you are missing the context and the caveats. Dr Singer believes that you may give your dog one only if it is part of a rich and caring relationship and does not involve coercion. I understand that it is sometimes a tricky issue to obtain written consent from a Dobermann Pinscher and that given the limited intellectual capacity of many dogs, they may not fully understand what they’re getting themselves involved in. But Dr Singer is, as I have said, an ethicist, so I do not feel sufficiently qualified in challenging his jurisdiction on this issue.
In any case, we are digressing. It is on the subject of infanticide that I’ve corralled Dr Singer into the argument and his advice here seems wholly sound. His views are nuanced – infanticide is justifiable only in cases of disability or, as he has put it, unwantedness. That is, if you’ve had the kid for a couple of weeks and decide it’s an absolutely ghastly creature and all too much like hard work, you are allowed to terminate its existence.
We have long jettisoned the archaic principle that sexual intercourse is in some way related to having a child
Pete does not offer advice on how to go about this business – poison? A rolling pin? Fed to the Rottweiler before your evening act of caring and consensual canine love? – but that’s because he has much weightier matters on which he must adjudicate. His position, then, is what we might call ultra-utilitarian. It seems to me he might entirely agree with Jonathan Swift on the efficacy of eating children to assuage starvation, and the fact that he may not have realised that Jonny was having a laugh does not, for me, diminish the value of his arguments.
Our abortion rate is soaring – and likely to soar still further if the likes of the Labour MP Stella Creasy get their way – although we still have some distance to go before we can match the achievements of the real abortion champions: countries such as Vietnam, Madagascar and Guinea-Bissau.
Decriminalising abortion from 24 weeks to the day of birth will undoubtedly provide a fillip to the market and, frankly, given what we know about a foetus at 24 weeks – it has eyelashes, eyebrows, hair on the head and lungs and would be able to survive with medical care were it to be prematurely born – there doesn’t seem to be a great moral difference, does there? Certainly not if you take the utilitarian view – and we should be honest here: what other view can there possibly be these days?
In a sense, aborting a child at nine months is no more shocking than being able to go shopping on a Sunday, a notion which once appalled the pious in our society but which we now take for granted as our human right – to be able to buy crap on Sunday, just like on every other day of the week. And we are a much happier nation as a consequence.
There are a few reasons for the huge rise in abortions recently. First, they are much easier to come by, as the medical clergy have become far more indulgent than used to be the case. Second, there has been the lessening of stigma regarding the procedure, especially now that we have banned those God-bothering dinosaurs from standing silently near abortion clinics praying and what have you. And third, because we have long since jettisoned the archaic principle that sexual intercourse is in some way related to having a child and that women (and men) who do not want a child would be best minded to refrain.
Oddly – and this is truly mysterious – although we have got rid of that old dictum and ensured that everybody, everywhere, can get hold of contraceptive devices in myriad forms at any time of the day or night, this has not resulted in a reduction of unwanted pregnancies. Quite the reverse. Those silly old things, morals, seemed to have exerted a certain influence back in the day. Luckily, today we know it is a human right to behave without a vestige of morality.
I should end with an apology to all the women readers who believe that men should not delve into the subject of abortions because it is something which doesn’t concern them. It is, after all, a woman’s body we are talking about, and she has a right to do whatever she wants with it. My only excuse is that as a columnist I very frequently write about things which have nothing to do with me directly, such as those rape-gang people. And at least the feminists urging decriminalisation know that I’m on their side.