The reactionary bohemian: Jeremy Clarke was one of a kind

A world without Jeremy Clarke is a glummer place. The author of this magazine’s Low Life column for 23 years, who died on Sunday morning, was a spirited writer of the old school. He loved a rollicking good time, a beautifully turned phrase, a good gossip, casting an observant eye over life’s absurdities, and England. He despised the hypocrisy of the progressive middle classes, big egos and TV boxsets.

He had quirkily conservative views, but friends of all classes and races, a deep knowledge of an unusual range of subjects, including rural matters, and a cheerful modesty that belied his talent as a writer.

I played a small part in his becoming a professional writer when I saw a hilarious piece he wrote in a London student magazine about a trip to Africa and gave him his first regular writing job as the Modern Manners columnist for Prospect magazine in 1995. That led to a column in the Independent on Sunday,and in 2000 he was pinched by Stuart Reid, deputy to Boris Johnson at The Spectator, to write Low Life, after the death of Jeffrey Bernard. (Sweetly, he always felt guilty about leaving me for the brighter lights of the Spec.) But, along with travel writing in the Telegraph, and later the Mail, and pieces in the Sunday Times, he briefly achieved his dream of earning a comfortable living as a writer.

It was a dream that began in the library of Jeremy’s sixth-form college in Southend. He had always been a bright boy with a love of words but neither Benfleet primary school nor his grammar school near Epping had inspired him academically. But that evening in the library a favourite English teacher, a raffish ex-journalist, happened to be standing behind him as he was surveying the books. The teacher plucked out a volume and said to Jeremy: ‘Read this.’ It was Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. And so began a lifelong love of Waugh and English satirical fiction and a determination to become a writer.

Just a few weeks ago, as he lay on his bed in the upstairs room of his home in Cotignac, looking out on to the blue skies of Provence and the Massif des Maures mountains, he returned to Waugh, watching YouTube videos of his literary mentor interviewed by Elizabeth Jane Howard.  

Their clipped upper-class accents contrasted with his own Essex twang and, as he always insisted, lower-middle-class upbringing. His father John was a bank clerk turned sales rep and heavy drinker; his mother Audrey, with whom he always remained close, a nurse and devout Christian.

After Jeremy was seduced, aged 17, by Waugh’s silky, sardonic prose, he adopted a kind of restless double life that lasted a couple of decades. He took odd jobs often inspired by the literature he was reading – factory jobs (Steinbeck), assistant in a mental hospital (Kesey). His affable manner helped him fit in everywhere, but he rarely let on that he went home after his shift to immerse himself in literary novels, lest he be considered soft. 

In the early 1980s his mother moved him, plus sister Vivien and brother Jim, to Devon, where she opened an elder care home in Strete. He began a psychiatric nurse training course but was thrown out for bad behaviour – he was not the settling kind either in jobs or relationships. ‘The truth is, Dave, for much of my life I’ve been a drunk and a bum,’ he would say with a smirk. Actually, he belonged to that select English tribe: the reactionary bohemian.

In the West Country he worked as a binman for several years in Salcombe, the most fashionable of Devon seaside towns, bought and sold a house, notched up two convictions for drink driving and one for possession of amphetamine sulphate, became a father to Mark after a one-night reunion with Sarah, a much younger ex, and not long after that disappeared to the Democratic Republic of Congo on a four-month tour. He was inspired to go to Africa by a patient in Audrey’s care home and by reading Eugene Marais, the polymath, naturalist and morphine junkie (something Jeremy was condemned to echo in the final months of his life).

Africa was a revelation in many ways, most importantly because he discovered he was just as clever and much better-read than the graduates on the trip, so was inspired to go to university. ‘I came back altered and made a conscious decision to join the bourgeoisie,’ he wrote.  

He first had to acquire some A-levels, having left school with just two O-levels, and having done so applied to read English at Waugh’s old Oxford college, Hertford. Foolishly, they turned him down, so instead, he went to SOAS to study African history. He spent much of the time attending English lectures at nearby UCL, where he was spotted by Karl Miller, head of the English department, after he read a review by Jeremy of a book on ferret husbandry. Through Miller’s contacts, notably the then literary agent Alexandra Pringle, Jeremy was briefly touted as the next big thing and even secured a £50,000 advance for a book. He spent a chunk of the advance and never wrote the book.

But from the mid-1990s he did have his Prospect column as a showcase, often featuring eccentric characters from Audrey’s care home, which led to the Spectator column and regular travel writing. They were mainly happy, if chaotic, years for the football hooligan aesthete from Leigh-on-Sea. He eschewed being a wage slave or a traditional parent and lived much of the time with his mother in Devon, helping around the care home.

He could thus focus on drinking, drugs, sex, following West Ham United, travel and, most important of all, honing his writing skills. He had a darker, self-destructive streak too. Extreme drunkenness, a long on-off relationship that caused him much pain, a car accident that may have been a half-hearted attempt to kill himself. And maybe, underneath it all, a self-doubt that might account for the slender Clarke literary legacy. However, his failure to ever write a proper novel probably has as much to do with his writer’s perfectionism. Even before his health deteriorated, it would take him two days to write his Low Life column.

Eventually the wanderer found a happy anchor to his existence with the love of his life, Catriona Olding. They first met at a Spectator party in 2011. Jeremy had announced in one of his columns that he would offer free tickets to the publication party – for a book collection of his columns – to the ten people who came up with the worst-taste jokes. Catriona was one of the winners and came down from Scotland, where she lived with her sculptor husband and three daughters. They hit it off but remained just friends for several years, exchanging occasional emails about books and poetry and jokes. 

Then Catriona’s marriage disintegrated and the way was open for them to fall stupidly in love. It wasn’t quite that simple. Catriona was spending most of her time in Cotignac, in the Var region of Provence, in a house built into the rust-coloured rock that looms over the pretty village once famous for its silkworms and now for quinces. Jeremy was still in Devon, among other things helping to look after his two beloved grandsons, Oscar and Klynton. 

They managed to spend about half their lives together at this time, mainly in France, but just as the gods had sent Jeremy settled contentment with Catriona, they also went and spoiled it by chucking in prostate cancer too (first diagnosed in 2013). The cancer retreated for a few years, which must have been the best of his life, in that bucolic Provençal setting, with many local friends and visitors, his column, lots of drinking, and Catriona, who was painting, cooking, caring, managing property, and chattering with him about their shared love of books.

At the end of 2019, Audrey died and he moved to France full-time. He slipped in just before new post-Brexit rules came in (he was a proud Brexit voter) and the Covid shutters came down. The cancer spread, and with it an extended entanglement with the mainly generous French medical system, as Low Life readers know well.

For several months he knew that the game was up and he faced his end with fortitude and cheerfulness. By chance I was staying close by for several weeks in March and April, and was able to share laughter and reminiscences even as the pain and indignities of his illness bore down on him and Catriona. Luckily for Jeremy she is an ex-nurse.

His columns, while always bathed in a kind of noble lightness, began to reflect his loss of hope. I was, oddly, lying next to him on his bed when I received an email from The Spectator asking me, in the light of his writing more explicitly about his imminent end, to write this tribute. I thought the better of telling Jeremy, but he would have seen the funny side. 

He was just recovering from staggering back from the Cotignac town hall, where he and Catriona had tied the knot in a civil marriage. It was one of the last times he left the house and soon after he was restricted to his bed. My partner Kate baked a wedding cake with the West Ham crossed hammers symbol for Jeremy and a mini painting of the Provence countryside for Catriona. 

He was religious in a quiet way, inherited from Audrey, and had the Book of Common Prayer by his bedside. He welcomed visits from the local nuns on more than one occasion, though the final time they came he did admit that he was not sure he believed in God. He gave his heart to Jesus for a couple of years at SOAS, and was even celibate for a while, but the relationship was never going to last. 

Still curious and intellectually lively in the shadow of death, he immersed himself in the literature, diaries and music of the first world war. He sent me a note saying he was listening to George Butterworth’s ‘Banks of Green Willow’ and had discovered that when Butterworth was killed at the Somme, his commanding officer had not known he was one of the most promising composers of his generation. 

Jeremy – or Clarice as he was known to his school and West Ham mates – was a modest man and appreciated modesty in others. He seemed genuinely surprised, when he started writing about his illness, how many devotees of the Low Life cult there were. People wrote to him in their droves (including a minor royal).  

One of the last big chuckles I was glad to provide him with was recalling one of my biggest boobs as editor of Prospect magazine. Paul Barker, the former editor of New Society, had written a piece with the phrase ‘Books do furnish a room’. Not, at the time, knowing this was a reference to a novel by Anthony Powell, I thought it was a slip of the pen and excised the redundant ‘do’. Barker was furious. Jeremy, a Powell fan, and class-conscious to the end, thought it comical that someone with my expensive education could commit such a howler. 

Books certainly did furnish Jeremy’s rooms, great tottering piles of them everywhere. He even liked to smell them. Farewell Jeremy, you loveable English eccentric, and I do forgive you for leaving me for the higher calling (and better parties) of The Spectator.

INVITATION: Readers are invited to a memorial service for Jeremy at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in central London on the morning of Monday, 10 July. Details are yet to be confirmed but anyone who might like to attend can register their interest here.

Letters: Britain’s net-zero ambition problem

Zero ambition

Sir: How extraordinary that Ross Clark (‘Carbon fixation’, 20 May) can look at the cut-throat competition to capture the economic gains of the future and conclude that Britain’s problem is an excess of ambition.

The USA stands alone as the only G7 nation not to have a net-zero target in law, but is nonetheless spending billions to achieve it. The country’s Inflation Reduction Act has proved so popular with the market that it is leveraging trillions more of private investment than previously expected, the majority in Republican-led states. Likewise China may lack a legally binding target, but enjoys a comfortable lead in core technologies following decades of investment. Meanwhile the EU, whose net-zero target covers its 27 member states, is racing to catch up, while UK business urges the government to get into the game.

Surely the opportunity of a post-Brexit Britain is to rise to the challenge of building the industries of the future, not to shrink from it?

Professor Thomas Hale
Blavatnik School of Government
University of Oxford

Lessons from Taiwan

Sir: Kate Andrews notes in her ‘Letter from Taiwan’ (20 May) that the government runs a surplus, and returns cash to residents. It is not alone. Hong Kong did that in 2011 (more than £1,000 each) and continues similar schemes to the present day. It does this with no VAT, a salary tax at 16 per cent and no taxation on investment income or gains. The state provides the same services as the UK, only better. Its health system, for example, delivers superior outcomes at a lower cost. Trying to understand how, the only thing I can conclude is that it shows what can be done with a well-functioning civil service.

Michael Bracken
Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire

Exorcise the British way

Sir: I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Watts’s piece on Anglican exorcists (‘Who you gonna call?’, 13 May), which probably answers a question I have been researching (with a friend, Matthew Hartley) for some time: why, in Protestant-majority America, have Catholics cornered the Hollywood exorcism market? Only Catholicism’s muscular form of Christianity seems up to the job of facing down demons. Over here, the Anglican lack of certainty, and concern for mental health and human rights, would probably bore Pazuzu into returning whence he came. Based on Watts’s amusing piece, and with Fr Jason in mind, may I appeal for a new niche of British cinema to counter Hollywood – the Anglican exorcism movie, including rain, anoraks, custard creams and things Not Quite Right, and perhaps directed by Edgar Wright, Ben Wheatley or the Inside No. 9 team? It may lack the head-spinning, but it would be grounded, humane, curious and funny: the way we tend to do things round here.

Andrew Mitchell
Bourne, Lincolnshire

Church services

Sir: In his review of Peter Ross’s marvellous new book, ‘Steeple Chasing’ (Books, 13 May), Matthew Lyons says that Britain’s churches need to survive. Indeed they must. But for that to happen, there needs to be a co-ordinated plan and consistent funding from government and national heritage bodies. The Heritage Stimulus Fund provided much needed post-Covid funding for some buildings, but it was a one-off. Heritage Lottery funding for churches has fallen nearly 80 per cent over five years. The lottery now wants to do more, but the task is immense: there around 900 churches on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register and the backlog of major repairs is growing at perhaps £75 million a year. We calculate that church buildings contribute more than £55 billion annually to the UK’s economic and social good. The value of their history and heritage is priceless.

Sir Philip Rutnam
Chairman, The National Churches Trust
London SW1

Making tracks

Sir: I’m sure that all my former colleagues in the industry I worked in for 18 years would want me to point out that we have a third ‘big industry’ in ‘Derbytania’, to go with Toyota and Rolls-Royce: namely the railways, including the train manufacturer Alstom (formerly Bombardier), together with numerous specialist consultancy firms and many other supporting businesses (Matthew Parris: ‘Could Derbyshire survive on its own?’, 20 May). The significance of the rail sector here was underlined by Derby being selected for the headquarters of the new Great British Railways by the government in March.

James Rollin
Belper, Derbyshire

King of America

Sir: Taki postulates that had George Washington accepted the crown of newly independent America, he’d have become George I (‘High Life’, 20 May). Actually, America had already had three monarchs called George. So America would have had a George IV before us – just not the same George IV.

Jeremy Stocker
Willoughby, Warwickshire

Armed forces

Sir: I was in the army serving in Croatia and Bosnia in 1993. The ownership of automatic weapons by the ordinary population (‘Bullet points’, 20 May) just seemed to be wholly normal. Weddings were celebrated by a cavalcade of cars with young male guests firing Kalashnikovs into the air. Once we became used to this novel social weapon usage, we were able to relax into our role as peacekeepers.

Michael Wingert
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

Write to us: The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
letters@spectator.co.uk

Regulators should not roll over for Revolut

Since we launched our Economic Innovator (originally ‘Disruptor’) awards in 2018, I’ve had enjoyable contacts with well over 100 entrepreneur-led high-growth companies picked as finalists from across the UK. Most I met at convivial pitching lunches; the rest told me their stories by Zoom or phone. Only one chosen finalist has ever shunned both the lunch and the opportunity for a call: it was Revolut, the London fintech venture that’s currently hustling for a UK banking licence.

Revolut’s 38-year-old Russian-born founder Nikolay Storonsky has built a serious disruptor, valued in 2021 at $33 billion. Though Schroders – as a Revolut shareholder – has marked that figure down to $18 billion, it still bears comparison with Barclays and NatWest at £25 billion each. Storonsky was and is a busy man, but I also sensed a certain dismissive arrogance and I suspect the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) has a similar feeling. Why should a banking regulator hasten to licence a business whose auditors were unable to verify ‘the completeness and occurrence’ of three-quarters of its 2021 revenues; which has yet to present clean 2022 accounts; and which has parted company in the past year with, among others, its chief financial officer, UK chief executive and heads of risk and compliance?

Storonsky’s response is to call the PRA ‘extremely bureaucratic’ while threatening to apply for a licence in France or Spain instead – and to list Revolut on the Nasdaq exchange in New York rather than in London. He was due to meet Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch this week and has made mileage out of Jeremy Hunt’s praise for Revolut as ‘a shining example of our world-beating fintech sector’.

The spin is that PRA box-tickery, like the Competition and Markets Authority’s blocking of the Microsoft-Activision merger, is evidence for Big Tech’s view that the UK is ‘closed for business’. The truth is we should be glad to have sharp-pencilled regulators: Revolut should stop grandstanding and prove it meets City standards.

The hard stare

S.P. Hinduja, who died a fortnight ago, did not live to read this year’s Sunday Times Rich List – which placed his family top for the fifth time, with a fortune of £35 billion. Indeed, having succumbed to dementia, he had probably been oblivious of such matters for some time. And even though my sole encounter with him was one of the stickiest of my career, I felt sadness for him at the end.

Back when the Hinduja brothers (two in London, one in Geneva, one in Bombay) were still a new-rich mystery, chiefly known for having prospered in Iran, I was commissioned to write a profile for the Sunday Telegraph and invited to brunch at their communal apartment in Carlton House Gardens. While the second brother Gopichand (G.P.) held forth about the ‘hubs’ of their industrial conglomerate, S.P. glared through big spectacles and asked repeatedly: ‘What will you write about us?’ When I asked him in return to explain the family’s Vedic philosophy, he spoke tersely of their sharing of worldly goods and their urge to avoid media attention: ‘Be silent, be generous, be modest.’ Then the hard stare again.

What I did write about them provoked a fierce letter from their lawyers but also, oddly, a place on their Christmas card list. Subsequently I watched their fortune multiply – and read with surprise about a court battle between S.P. and his siblings over his claim to be sole owner of Hinduja Bank in Switzerland. As his mental state declined, a judge threatened to place him in a local authority nursing home before a family truce made that unnecessary.

Attention now turns to the Hinduja Group’s latest flagship venture: Raffles Hotel at the Old War Office in Whitehall, opening shortly, which G.P. has described (a touch immodestly, you might think) as ‘my greatest legacy to London’. But when I enter its grand portals I’ll still feel S.P.’s baleful gaze – and recall his fellow billionaire Warren Buffett’s remark that ‘money can’t change how many people love you’.

Caricature and parable

One of my first commissions for The Spectator, long ago, was to write about domestic insurance premiums – rising sharply at the time as large insurers took a battering in every category of claim. How dull a topic was that? But how lucky I had just read Martin Amis’s London Fields, from which I borrowed and elided two poetic passages to light up my piece: ‘In these days of gigawatt thunderstorms, multimegaton hurricanes and billion-acre bush fires… burglars were forever bumping into one another… There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways…’

How lucky too, to have shared these pages with Jeremy Clarke, whose exquisite column (9 April 2022) on his prison-officer son’s debt problems – illuminating the cruelty modern capitalism sometimes inflicts – moved me close to tears. Business and finance, potentially dry as dust, are always best explained in caricature and parable. That, at least, is the principle of this column.

Lunch in Lugano

You may wonder why I haven’t tipped any restaurants lately. The answer is that inflation has rendered my quest for the sub-£30 set menu all but meaningless because with service, cover, water and coffee, I’m too often in sight of £50 without a sniff of the wine list.

But I’ll praise St Jacques in St James’s (£29 for two courses) for a delicious skate wing with shredded ham and broad beans. And I’ll offer the cautionary tale of Iberica’s Victoria branch, which boasted a £20 four-choice tapas offer on its website but presented only an à la carte menu until I insisted, then charged £12.50 for a modest glass of Fillo da Condesa Albarino that retails at less than £15 a bottle.

It’s coming to something when there’s better value in Switzerland: a captain of industry in exile swears by the business lunch at the Ristorante AnaCapri, opposite Lugano railway station, for 19.50 Swiss Francs. 

Stunts, gimmicks, tricks, hot air: snapshots from the edge of modern dance

This month I’ve been venturing into the further reaches of modern dance – obscure territory where I don’t feel particularly comfortable. In its hinterland is the Judson Church in New York: it was here, during the early 1960s, that young Turks such as Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton began investigating the idea that dance need not involve formalised gestures or what primary school teachers call ‘movement to music’, but could grow instead out of quotidian activities such as running, jumping and walking. From that point of departure, the journey has become ever more extreme and contorted, traversing the realms of performance art and installation, often politicised and sometimes pornographic.

The Korean Howool Baek doesn’t want us to see her face. At The Place, she sat cross-legged on the ground with her back to the audience and allowed parts of her body to do the talking and thinking. Her shoulder blades jostled for attention, her fingers strummed a nervous tune, her splayed limbs seemed to take on a will and character of their own, almost as though they were in rebellion against the trunk that attempted to control them. It was a weirdly compelling spectacle, followed by a short film in which three dancers, multiplied by the magic of CGI and bent double so that only mops of hair are visible, became a plague of marauding aliens stomping through Berlin landmarks such as the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. I thought this madly funny, but everyone else in the audience remained po-faced.

At Sadler’s Wells, the GoteborgsOperans Danskompani presented Damien Jalet’s Skid – a big international hit since its première in 2017. The stage is filled with a square white platform (covered with plastic, presumably greased in some way) slanted at an angle of 34° – the limit at which humans can stand upright. What ensues is a thrilling fight against gravity, based in what Jalet calls ‘a poetics of surrender and resistance’, pivoting on ‘the attempt to climb and the fear of falling’.

Skid’s first section rehearses a hundred playful and poignant ways to slide down a hill, fast or slow, solo or tagged, diving or spinning. A black-clad fascistic phalanx on its knees then makes a more determined assault that disintegrates into chaos. A final section movingly shows a lone naked man struggling out of a womb and making his hesitant yet heroic way up the slope, only to fling himself into the abyss behind when he reaches its pinnacle – a simple metaphor for the efforts of all humankind. Skid also resonated with terrors familiar to every skier or mountaineer as they peer down a precipitous valley. A dozen dancers master the challenges with staggering aplomb.

Stunts, gimmicks, tricks, hot air? I don’t deny there were elements of repetition and longueur in both events, but at least one could see what point they were trying to make. At the Barbican, the American Trajal Harrell refuses to elucidate any defined purpose or meaning. The first part of his Porca Miseria, ‘Deathbed’, ends with something like a funeral cortège, but otherwise offers a catwalk parade of casual lawless improvisation, a ritual without rules or shape in which non-binary hippies wait for the spirit to move them, clothed in bits and bobs from a dressing-up box and idly picking up on fragments of music like children playing a private solitary game. This spectacle is not without its moments of wistful poetry and eccentric charm, but with a running time of 75 minutes, it demands more of one’s attention than it merits.

So these are snapshots of what is happening on the borders of dance. An aesthetic of graceful curves and classical symmetries that dates back to the Renaissance seems to be reaching exhaustion: is the future only a chaos of unanswerable questions and random choices?

Are surgical museums such as the Hunterian doomed?

I have a soft spot for specimen jars and skeletal remains. Museums of natural history, surgical pioneering or anthropological oddities have always struck me as equally suitable for lunch breaks and first dates as for serious study and research. As far as public and casually accessible encounters with mortality go, these kinds of museums are the most straightforward way of confronting the realities of human nature. But whether we should have this kind of casual access is now increasingly being questioned.

Telling history through displays of human remains presents a challenge for curators. They are responsible for contextualising exhibitions to ensure that the remains don’t become a dehumanised spectacle, while knowing they ultimately lack the ability to guarantee beyond doubt that their message will hit its target.

Last November, the Wellcome Trust decided context wasn’t enough. Its ‘Medicine Man’ collection, which had tried its best ‘to tell a global story of health and medicine’, closed after 15 years. Apparently, no effort to contextualise or to highlight marginalised stories of medicine could make up for the fact that a colonial legacy was granted the spotlight: ‘By exhibiting these items together – the very fact that they’ve ended up in one place – the story we told was that of a man with enormous wealth, power and privilege,’ Wellcome tweeted.

It sounded like a death knell for the private collections of long-dead white men. Meanwhile, the Royal College of Surgeons was busy with a six-year project redesigning the Hunterian Museum’s new exhibition space – which finally reopened last week – to tell the history of surgery and house the collections of the 18th-century anatomist, physician and surgeon John Hunter.

Born in Scotland in 1728, John Hunter became the founder of scientific surgery and operated on prominent figures of his time, including Adam Smith, David Hume, William Pitt, Thomas Gainsborough and even the infant Lord Byron. Hunter built a teaching museum in his house on Leicester Square, where he kept his 14,000 specimens gathered from all over the globe and brought in cadavers for dissection – possibly forming the model for the fictional Dr Jekyll’s laboratory and residence.

In 1813, the collection was moved to a newly erected building off Lincoln’s Inn Fields in Holborn where the Hunterian Museum has stood since. The museum’s central Long Gallery, designed to resemble the early modern Wunderkammer, is its crown jewel. Previously called the ‘Crystal Gallery’, the hall’s glass cases shine a delicate light on 2,000 physiological and pathological specimens, arranged in rows of pale yellow lumps of flesh, organ and bone. While I was surprised to spot jars labelled ‘Homo’ sitting beside a seagull stomach or a sloth foetus, this is illustrative of Hunter’s interest in comparative anatomy, grouping specimens together based on a shared level of complexity.

While the Hunterian Museum’s collection of human tissue enabled great scientific contributions, ‘it is also where some of those closely involved in the western “colonial project” developed sinister and awful ideas on racial theory,’ said Dawn Kemp, director of museums and special collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. A collection of human skulls from Hunter’s collection, for example, demonstrates the impact of geography and climate on humans’ physical variations, but proponents of scientific racism took these as proof that white people were biologically superior to other races.

Do museums still risk perpetuating these ideas? The Hunterian Museum holds its modern visitors in better faith, judging by the direct but low-key commentary of its placards on colonialism. Still, the ghosts of such misunderstandings certainly haunt today’s curators in concerns over how to minimise exoticism with context – and whether this is possible at all.

Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, for example, has faced trouble with context. Its handwritten labels themselves read like artefacts – many of the 50,000 objects on display still bear their original labels from a time when words like ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ were part of a common vocabulary. The museum is in the process of revising its public texts, but its decision to remove its tsantsas – ten ‘shrunken heads’ from Ecuador, some of which turned out to have belonged not to humans but to monkeys and sloths – cited audience research showing that, despite the written interpretation of the display, visitors mostly came away thinking that the point of the display was to show a ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ or ‘gruesome’ foreign culture.

While the purpose of displaying human remains is generally educational, the resemblance to the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ still stands. People enjoy gawking at oddities, which are often acquired by dubious means. The Hunterian Museum’s board of trustees decided to remove the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the 7ft 7in ‘Irish Giant,’ from display for the first time in 200 years. On his deathbed, Byrne requested to be buried at sea to prevent surgeons from getting hold of his remains for dissection. Hunter reportedly bribed a funeral-goer with £130 for his body.

Besides removing Byrne’s skeleton, the Hunterian Museum has added new galleries dedicated to modern medicine. Admittedly less visually stunning than the Long Gallery, the stories these rooms tell are more moving. Barbara Hepworth’s drawing ‘Concourse (2)’ captures, with great tenderness, a surgical team operating on her daughter in 1948, the year the NHS was founded. The final room displays the native heart of Jennifer Sutton, who underwent a life-saving heart transplant in her twenties. She was diagnosed with a congenital heart condition which her mother tragically died from during her own transplant operation.

These testimonies to human care sharply contrast with the story of Byrne’s stolen remains, which the museum still keeps for research, highlighting the disconcerting relationship between learning and looting – after all, the practice of anatomy in Hunter’s time was largely enabled by Resurrection Men who robbed the shallow graves of the poor. Now, two-and-a-half centuries later, there is still no clear guide for how museums should deal with controversial and questionably obtained objects. Earlier this month, the realisation that repatriated Benin bronzes might go into the private ownership of Nigeria’s royals forced governments and institutions to discuss whether removal and restitution are clear-cut moral obligations, or if they come with conditions.

But the Hunterian Museum concentrates on the life-affirming work of medicine rather than its doomed Eurocentrism. The care and cooperation captured in Hepworth’s drawing reminds visitors of the human compassion that undergirds surgery, and that there is often someone’s mother, father, child or spouse waiting anxiously for good results, which, thanks to pioneering surgeons and research institutions, we can increasingly hope to receive.

Spooky, classy dystopian sci-fi: Apple TV+’s Silo reviewed

Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have been lying to us about the true nature of reality. This time – in Silo – the lie concerns the nature of the world outside the enormous silo in which our heroes and about 10,000 other survivors have been hiding for the past 100-odd years since some nameless apocalypse. Is it really as dangerous as the Powers That Be say? Or is this an illusion, maintained over a century of relentless official propaganda, designed to keep the enclosed populace frightened and in check?

Silo began life in 2011 as a self-published short story by Hugh Howey – called Wool, not Silo – which he put out through Amazon’s Kindle Direct. But his writing proved so popular that he landed a $500,000 print deal, as well, of course, as selling the film rights, which led to this all-star TV adaptation.

‘The books are SO much better,’ I’m informed by someone who has read them. Well, of course they are. When was this ever not the case? Perhaps you should read them first, but if you haven’t the time or patience I’d say you’ll find the TV version more than intriguing, well-acted and well-realised enough to merit your commitment.

Sure, there are one or two mildly irksome wokeries, such as the implausibility of the main female character, Juliette Nichols. Because of her amazing mechanical skills and physical prowess, Juliette works with the horny-handed sons of toil at the bottom of the silo, where her special task is to maintain the giant turbine on which everyone’s life depends. If such a woman existed in this or any other reality, I imagine she would resemble a Bulgarian shot-putter. Instead, she is slim, elegant and well-spoken and played by the half-Swedish, half-English actress Rebecca Ferguson.

Also, it’s a bit slow in places. I’ve just watched episode four and, no spoilers, I didn’t find myself thinking at the end: ‘Well, that was gripping and eventful and advanced the plot considerably.’ And sometimes it goes too far the other way by seeking to generate ersatz, standard-blockbuster-movie tension, like the laboriously enacted scene where the turbine threatens to break down and it’s a race against time before the whole thing blows…

But – and this is a very important but – I’d say it’s definitely not a show to skip. It has a first-rate cast including Harriet Walter, Iain Glen, David Oyelowo, Tim Robbins and the former rapper Common, and lots of money and effort has clearly gone into the world-building – the look and feel, the direction, the score, and so on. It oozes class rather than early Doctor Who and you do get emotionally invested in the whole Silo concept and in the big question of what really is happening in the world outside, as well as the smaller one of who is committing all these murders that newly elected Sheriff Juliette is required to solve.

I particularly like some of the spooky traditions that have evolved in the Silo over the years, such as the one where if you ever express aloud the desire to leave the Silo that’s it, you’re out. It’s like a death sentence. You’re put into a condemned cell, then kitted out in space gear, and out you go watched by those ghoulishly enthralled Silo denizens who have managed to bag a seat in the café that contains the only viewing window. Its glass is clouded with dust and the condemned, should they so wish as their final act, are encouraged to wipe it clean. Then they walk on a few paces, apparently unharmed, until, all of a sudden, they clutch their throats and drop dead within sight of the now-appalled onlookers. There they lie as a grim warning to all within as to the perils of seeking illusory freedom.

While you’re waiting for the next episode to drop, you can keep yourself entertained watching Sanctuary, a Japanese drama about an uncouth, reckless, violent, disrespectful young man who decides, for want of anything better to do with his life, to try to make it as a sumo wrestler.

The protagonist Enno (played by Wataru Ichinose) is so scowlingly unattractive that it’s quite hard to sympathise with him. Also, as is so often the way with east Asian drama (I have the same problem with Korean series), the cultural norms are so bizarre and unfamiliar it’s often hard to tell how you’re supposed to respond: are you watching Benny Hill-style slapstick or the Tokyo equivalent of Our Friends in the North social realism? But that’s part of what makes it so watchable and different. You also learn a lot about sumo, the most interesting point for me being that although sumo wrestlers look enormously fat, when they retire they often turn back into trainers who look no different from skinny businessmen.

Dazzling – if you ignore the music: Beyoncé, at Murrayfield Stadium, reviewed

Scheduling open-air concerts in mid-May in northern Europe is a triumph of hope over experience. I last spent time with Beyoncé – I’m sure she remembers it fondly and well – in 2016, in a football stadium in Sunderland on a damp, drizzly, early-summer English evening of the type that even strutting soul divas struggle to enliven. I don’t think it was merely the weather which left me underwhelmed by her brutalist attack, the sheer choreographed drill of the show, the lack of engagement, of spontaneity, of joy.

By then, Beyoncé was no longer seeking to be regarded as a mere pop star. She had recently taken on the unearthly qualities of an alien presence, entirely unrelatable, tilting for something far more culturally significant than a spot in the charts. She re-cast herself as cross-genre auteur, icon, uber-feminist, woman scorned and furious black rights’ campaigner. She did it with conviction. Plenty seemed persuaded.

Fast forward seven years and Beyoncé is both more totemic still and yet even less of a pop star than ever before. She doesn’t sell the most records, she has a dearth of tunes you can whistle on the bus, and she tours infrequently. Her most recent record, Renaissance, after which the tour is named, landed with the usual fawning fanfare but hasn’t really penetrated. It doesn’t seem to matter. She is simply Beyoncé, and that appears to be enough.

In Edinburgh, the weather was much the same as in Sunderland. Mild, damp, grizzly-grey. But something had changed. The mood felt more attuned to the Renaissance theme of celebratory transgression, its smorgasbord of black musical history powered by liberation, self-love and escape. There were nods to Rose Royce, Sade, Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar, the Jackson 5, Megan Thee Stallion and Donna Summer. The mood palette was Christmas with Liberace: silver, tinsel, sparkle-a-go-go. Designer chintz.

The sheer scale of the production made for a dazzling spectacle. Beyoncé skidded around on a moon buggy. Lasers fired across the stage. As a finale, she soared high above the audience on a horse (not, alas, a real one). The HD video screens were vast, bigger than any I’d ever seen, making Beyoncé seem even more larger than life, defying us to believe that the person in front of us could be real.

The music? The music in a stadium show is always liable to sound muddy, imprecise and lacking in nuance. Mixing a live band with electronic beats, the bottom end went deep and low; hardly subtle, but effective for the rhythm-based attack of the Renaissance material. The set was broken into themed sections – political songs, with a hip-hop bent; sultry boudoir songs, with a bed – each one featuring a fresh set and costume change and titled like an over-priced celebrity fragrance: ‘Opulence’, ‘Anointed’… you get the picture.

The songs? Beyoncé isn’t really about the songs, a fact she seemed tacitly to acknowledge by omitting some of her more memorable ones. There was no ‘Single Ladies’, ‘Halo’, ‘Diva’, ‘Survivor’ or ‘Drunk in Love’. Instead, she performed pretty much all of Renaissance and a smattering of tracks from her past work. She frequently indulged in the frustrating trait of performing a verse of one track before veering off into something else.

With a few exceptions, the songs weren’t going to cut it. The singer, however, was a different matter. You can argue about the depth and profundity of Beyoncé’s cultural significance till the cows come home, but there is ultimately no denying the power of her physical presence and her voice. For all the spectacle, this turned out to be a singer’s show.

She began, having risen to view through the stage floor, with a bunch of ballads, starting with Destiny Child’s ‘Dangerously in Love’ and moving through the big emotive gears on ‘1+1’. Check the pipes, she seemed to be saying. Though Renaissance is her club record, she spent most of the night on the fringes of the dancefloor, watching the fun rather than participating. She shimmied infrequently, becoming the still centre as the million-dollar mayhem unfolded around her. The exception, and it was a notable one, was when she led her diverse troupe of dancers through their paces on ‘Break My Soul’, where the three-pronged B-stage came into effective play. There was even a glimpse of human frailty during the frantic ‘Heated’ when she stumbled on a lyric. She giggled; everyone else on stage looked a little nervous.

I’d be tempted to go and see Beyoncé again in another seven years. Perhaps the sun might shine next time. Even better, by then she might be ready to come in from the cold and let her music, rather than the hoists, HD screens and horses, do more of the heavy lifting.

Looking for a male role model? Check out the silverback gorilla

One so often hears about famous people who are horrible when they think no one important is looking – barking at assistants, or snapping at waiters – that it’s heartening to learn of the opposite: kindness in circumstances that promise little obvious reward. The author and filmmaker Jon Ronson had just such a story last week about his pick for Radio 4’s Great Lives series: the late Terry Hall, lead singer of the Specials and Fun Boy Three, and an attractively morose and compelling presence on the 1970s and ’80s music scene. 

The 12-year-old Ronson was at the front of an ‘excitingly feral’ Specials gig in Cardiff when he conceived ‘on a whim’ of the daring plan of pretending to faint, so that bouncers would lift him to watch the show from the side of the stage. They did exactly that, and then things got even better: before the music began, Hall – ‘the coolest man in the world’ – walked over and asked Ronson if he was okay.

The vignette shines a telling light on both involved: Hall, who even in the thick of pop stardom was keeping one eye out for those in trouble, and the pre-teen Ronson, already displaying guile camouflaged by vulnerability, a combination that would later serve him well on the human safari of his journalism, stalking unpredictable characters such as Omar Bakri Muhammad and the Reverend Ian Paisley.

In retrospect, however, Ronson thinks there might be a haunting reason why Hall had a protective attitude to ‘wayward children’. Aged 12, Hall was abducted by a teacher into a paedophile ring on a trip to France, where he was abused, an experience that he described on the heart-breaking 1983 Fun Boy Three song ‘Well Fancy That!’. Lifelong struggles with mental health ensued, yet humour persisted: his bandmate Lynval Golding remembers him as ‘such a funny guy’.

Great Lives is a pleasing format at the best of times, engagingly presented by Matthew Parris, but I found this episode particularly affecting, as touchingly melancholic as Hall himself. It pungently evoked what now seems a lost world: the life of pre-internet teenagers, heavily obsessed with bands, books and subversive little plots to escape the boredom of the house. In today’s era of branding and boasting, one almost wonders if a pop star such as Hall – modest, droll, ambivalent about fame – could exist. No sooner did a band of his tremble on the verge of international success than he seemed to want to break it up. Yet he was also in healthy possession of practical courage: confronting neo-Nazis from the stage at gigs, for example, or talking frankly about mental health long before most people did. Ronson puts it nicely: ‘I think he was intent on quietly leaving a good footprint.’

Hall died last year, but he would have made a good subject for the TV presenter Rylan Clark’s debut podcast, in which guests discuss their idea of masculinity – a concept both vague and resonant enough to be conversationally fruitful. ‘Does the average bloke even exist any more?’ asked Rylan, who elsewhere is partly famous for the dazzle of his tan and teeth, and here proves a warm but quick-witted host. First up was Hamza Yassin, the wildlife cameraman, presenter and former winner of Strictly Come Dancing. He fondly recalled his Sudanese doctor father transgressing his culture’s gender norms by serving up coffee when his mother had female friends round, to their consternation. But Yassin also thought he’d been born in the wrong era, because mostly he felt like an old-fashioned gent: on a date, he said, he would insist on paying. ‘Which animal is getting masculinity right?’ Rylan asked. The silverback gorilla, Yassin said, because it sleeps on the ground to guard the females and young while they slumber in nests in the trees. As a role model, the silverback takes its responsibilities seriously. Sadly, it’s also endangered.

If being a man in the 21st century seems complicated, the life of a medieval female mystic was even more politically fraught. In Free Thinking Shahidha Bari talked to two writers, Claire Gilbert and Victoria MacKenzie, who have recently delved into this world in their respective novels I, Julian and For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain. Gilbert’s novel is narrated in the engrossing voice of Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century anchoress who wrote the first book by a woman in English, Revelations of Divine Love. In it, Julian detailed her ‘shewings’ or visions of Christ, which had started during a serious illness; Gilbert, in turn, found herself consoled and inhabited by Julian’s voice during two-and-a-half years of gruelling cancer treatment in the time of Covid. 

The anchoress’s cell certainly provided Julian with what Virginia Woolf said every female writer needed – ‘a room of her own’ – although rather an extreme version, since its occupant was bricked in. But if Julian was an intense, prayerful presence, her contemporary Margery Kempe – the subject of MacKenzie’s book – was more rumbunctious. A turbulent ‘oversharer’ and mother of 14 children, Kempe’s earthier visions included quasi-erotic experiences with Christ. Yet this was an era when female mystics had to tread carefully or face charges of heresy, as Kempe sometimes did. At one point she even went to visit Julian in her anchorhold, seeking advice and validation. Centuries later, it was fascinating to peer into such spiritually charged, treacherous times, and imagine these two trading confidences through a tiny window.

Ugly and humdrum: Brokeback Mountain, at @sohoplace, reviewed

Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and places it over his nose. Then he inhales. Who is this elderly vagrant? And why is he absorbing the scent of an abandoned garment? Two hours later, at the play’s close, we finally learn that the old man, Ennis, is sniffing a shirt that once belonged to Jack Twist who became his lover while they worked as shepherds in Wyoming.

Yes, shepherds. The ‘gay cowboy’ label is a misnomer because the lads are ranching sheep, and their affair belongs to the half-forgotten days of homosexual persecution. The precise year, 1963, is signalled to us with a clunky line from Jack about JFK’s decision to escalate America’s involvement in Vietnam. ‘It might get better before it gets worse,’ opines Ennis. And that’s the last we hear of politics.

Alone in the hills, the lusty shepherds spend a couple of scenes furtively ogling each other’s bodies during their morning ablutions and then bang! They make love inside a scout tent whose diaphanous fabric is tastefully lit from within so that their coition is presented in a suggestive outline without any hint of onstage porn. Students of European cinema will recall that the same device was used in the 1969 classic, Carry on Camping, starring Terry Scott and Barbara Windsor.

The shepherds pound each other senseless all summer, then they split up, get married, start families and embrace tedium in the suburbs. Over a 20-year period, they meet intermittently for hasty and hyper-athletic sexual trysts but they’re unable to live as a normal couple. Both shepherds are plainly tedious as characters. Ennis rarely speaks and Jack talks non-stop but says nothing of value. In this respect they resemble Alec and Laura in Brief Encounter. But the lack of personality doesn’t matter because it’s their predicament, not their characters, that excites our sympathy.

The shepherds consider escaping to Mexico where they might pursue their affair in private but they choose to stay in the Midwest and to enjoy brief, risky encounters whenever the opportunity arises. Perhaps something in their natures craves the exquisite torment of forbidden love.

The show is marred by some puzzling choices. The set looks unappealing, even ugly: the tramp’s scruffy bedsit is supplemented by a filthy kitchen unit and a disorderly campfire. Why no hint of Wyoming’s ravishing landscapes? During pauses in the action, a band of five musicians tootle forth a series of blues melodies but the shepherds themselves don’t break into song. The presence of these costumed musicians diminishes the rawness and immediacy of the drama and makes it feel like a civic exhibition staged for a crowd of yawning aldermen in a town hall. On press night, at the curtain call, the crowd erupted with ecstasies of delight that hardly seemed justified by the humdrum quality of the entertainment. Yet the actors had to keep returning to the stage to acknowledge fresh waves of applause. This was baffling, to one viewer at least.

Bleak Expectations is a Dickens spoof narrated by a different celebrity each week. At press night, Sally Phillips did the honours, script in hand, not always accurately. The central character, Pip Bin, is a young squire whose cosy childhood is wrecked by the death of his father during a plundering expedition to the ‘south Indies’. Pip’s mother, mad with grief, spends the rest of her life ironing sheets and spouting proto-feminist slogans: ‘Votes for linen!’

Pip and his sisters, Pippa and Poppy, are preyed on by an evil rotter who plans to marry Pippa and to steal Pip’s inheritance by sending him to a corrupt school whose headmaster murders rich young pupils on their 18th birthday. Pip discovers the plot, evades execution and becomes an entrepreneur. He’s about to make a fortune from a waste-disposal device, ‘the Bin’, but an American rival, Mr Trash Can, sues Pip for infringing his worldwide patent on an identical gadget. You get the idea?

 It’s a frivolous, punning Milligan-esque satire whose targets are safe and easy to attack. The script features political speeches by Pippa and Poppy who deplore the lack of opportunity for women in the medical profession. But the show unwittingly perpetuates the prejudice it seeks to disparage. The female characters are a monochrome posse of halfwitted, gabbling dollybirds whereas the male figures are a lot more varied, and give the cast far richer opportunities to display their gifts. Marc Pickering is on excellent form playing a sadistic pervert, Whackwell Hardthrasher. Dom Hodson shines as Pip, the charming but unthreatening goofball. John Hopkins is superb playing the hypocritical predator, Gently Benevolent. He gets big laughs from lines that most actors would just throw away. Hopkins is among the finest comedians on the English stage.

I may never recover: Sisu reviewed

When I went into the Sisu screening I knew only that it was a Finnish film, so was expecting an arthouse drama, maybe featuring bearded men in nice fisherman knits and herrings being salted, rather than this hyper-violent, viciously bloody exploitation flick from which I may never recover. It is a swift 90 minutes and will please those who desire this experience, and it is clever in its simplistic, empty way. But if it’s not your genre, you will almost certainly find yourself praying: ‘Dear God, I’ll never tell another lie if you just make this end.’

The film begins with a title card saying that ‘Sisu’ is a Finnish world that can’t be translated. It then says that ‘it means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination’, so I’d say it can, but I’m not getting into a fight about it with any of these people, as they may drive a large blade through my skull or crush my torso under a tank tread. Never mess with these types is my advice.

It’s set in 1944 during the second world war as the Nazis are retreating from Finland but not quietly without a fuss. They’ve adopted a scorched-earth policy and are burning villages to the ground. They are set on leaving as much destruction as possible behind. The landscape is bleakly devastated and deserted but here is a lone fella (Jorma Tommila) panning for gold. He is grizzled, bearded, grimy, dirt-etched. He squints into the winter sun like Clint Eastwood, which is our first clue, right there, that he’s a badass. He has a horse and a dog, a Bedlington terrier, bizarrely (the campest, least macho dog I can think of, apart from a poodle). He finds a tiny nugget of gold, starts digging, uncovers the motherload and fills his saddlebags. But as he journeys he encounters a convoy of Nazis in tanks and trucks led by their brutal commander Bruno (Aksel Hennie), and they fancy the gold for themselves. The set-up is simple: they take his gold, he wants it back. And when he gets it back, they want it back. It’s that, over and over. As severed limbs fly and necks are broken, crunchingly.

The fella, we learn via the Nazi’s radio, is Aatami, a retired Finnish commando who has killed more than 300 Soviet soldiers. Now that he’s suffered the massacre of his family he has nothing to lose. Aatami is one of those silent protagonists – he doesn’t say a single word until the last moments – who is also a one-man army. The fun, if you can call it that, which I wouldn’t particularly, is in wondering how he’ll get out of it this time. It becomes more and more preposterous. A hanging scene (oh God), an underwater scene (oh God), bear no relation to physics as commonly understood. But it is wilfully preposterous. It’s an action film that, in its way, is laughing at action films and all their absurdities and how they must keep outdoing themselves. It’s a John Wick, Rambo, Die Hard, Tarantino-ish knock-off, if you like, but is knowing, and clever in that way. It’s always winking at its audience and saying: ‘Look. Look how far we’ll go.
Happy now?’

 Written and directed by Jalmari Helander, it is handsomely filmed with a suitably menacing score and is economical, moving briskly from one set-piece to the next.But it’s essentially meaningless and I didn’t care about anything, only the Bedlington. It is divided into chapters and the final one is called: ‘Let’s Talk About This Like Grown Ups.’ I’m kidding. It’s titled: ‘Kill ’Em All’. I may recover one day, but I haven’t as of yet.

Alert, inventive and thoroughly entertaining: Scottish Opera’s Carmen reviewed

Scottish Opera’s new Carmen begins at the end. ‘Take me away: I have killed her,’ intones a voiceover and as the prelude swaggers out, José is in a police interrogation cell, where an investigator is attempting to piece together his story. In other words, it’s CSI: Seville. In converting Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto into a police procedural, director John Fulljames has created a Carmen that’s ideally gauged to a TV-literate audience: told in flashback, with any confusion swiftly cleared up by spoken dialogue that never feels clunky because interrogation is central to the genre.

And unless you want to be surprised by the dénouement, it works a treat. Is that whopping spoiler really such a big deal? I’m in two minds: Opera subscribers might roll their eyes, but a significant proportion of any given opera audience will inevitably comprise first-timers. Of course the cliché-busting updated Carmen is itself one of contemporary opera’s great clichés. Barring Ellen Kent’s touring productions (she boasted that every orange tree on stage bore genuine Seville oranges), I’ve never actually seen a Carmen set in 19th-century Spain. It’s been tracksuit bottoms, greasy sideburns and plastic chairs all the way. True to form, Fulljames’s smugglers are gun-running terrorists and the soldiers are incompetent but brutal security guards.

But Fulljames is far too skilled a director to make these familiar gambits feel routine. Since we already know where we’re going, he harnesses the strengths of his cast to make the journey as compelling as possible – a process that gets a long way on a central pairing as magnetic as Justina Gringyte (Carmen) and Alok Kumar (José). Gringyte’s voice is as smokey and as insinuating as it was in ENO’s 2020 revival of Carmen (Calixto Bieito: 1970s leisurewear, sleazy dive-bars, etc) but it seems to have grown even more satisfyingly rich and dark in the bottom register. Consonants rasp on her tongue like burned caramel. 

Kumar’s tenor is not pretty-pretty but it is certainly ardent. There’s something in the way he socks those top notes towards the gods which makes it plausible that this nice lad in his leisurewear could be capable of ultra-violence. Then there’s Hye-Youn Lee – a very sweet and vulnerable Micaela – and Phillip Rhodes, a rare Escamillo (Fulljames allows him to remain a bullfighter) with both the physical charisma and vocal chops to feel legitimately seductive. When Christopher Cowell’s English translation is good, it’s very good, and the score (slightly cut) gets its due from Dane Lam, whose conducting never drags or sags but gives Bizet’s melodies room to fly.

The result is a briskly paced but very lyrical Carmen, with the interrogation sequences moving the story smartly along and projections displaying the assembled evidence – polaroids, tarot cards, bullfight tickets – on the back wall of the abstract set, as the Investigator (Carmen Pieraccini, in a wholly spoken role) assembles her incident board. It sounds obvious, in retrospect, but clichés only become stale if their context is unimaginative and Fulljames’s reinvention is alert, inventive and wholly invested in its premise. The audience in Glasgow appeared gripped, and Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh are in for a thoroughly entertaining night when it goes on tour.

Deborah Warner’s Wozzeck, meanwhile, begins with someone taking a shit on stage. Seriously: there’s a row of loos and a luckless chorus member has been delegated to drop his kecks and… well, anyway, point taken. We’re about to stare directly at the squalid underbelly of the human condition, which is kind of the deal when you buy tickets for Wozzeck. What’s really upsetting about a great performance of Berg’s opera isn’t the cruelty so much as the beauty – the brief, desperate flickers of human warmth or of natural wonders; the hopeless intimation of a more compassionate world elsewhere.

That’s certainly what emerged from this performance, with the master lieder-singer Christian Gerhaher colouring every syllable as a grizzled, puzzled Wozzeck, Anja Kampe upsettingly tender and radiant as Marie; and Peter Hoare and Brindley Sherratt playing the Captain and the Doctor respectively as stinging, carping caricatures. Pappano’s quicksilver conducting and Hyemi Shin’s shifting, sliding sets evoked the shadows and apocalyptic blazes of Wozzeck’s troubled imagination. Glinting shards of string tone, red-raw scars of light and skeletal trees all worked together to sketch the inner and outer landscape of a collapsing mind.

It was often piercingly beautiful, and I’ve been trying to analyse why it failed to generate the overwhelming emotional impact that you’d expect. Possibly Gerhaher was just too self-aware. And as with her Peter Grimes, there’s something reductive about Warner’s habit of presenting the working class as undifferentiated, animalistic thugs. It’s an impressive piece of work nonetheless. Oh, and if you’re the individual who applauded, ostentatiously, before the last note had even started to fade, then you, sir or madam, are an arse.

As seductive as Chagall: Sarah Sze’s The Waiting Room reviewed

Exiting Peckham Rye station, you’re not aware of it, but standing on the platform you can see a mansard roof with ornamental railings silhouetted against the sky like a French chateau. Designed in the 1860s by Charles Henry Driver, architect of Sao Paolo’s Estacao da Luz, it once covered a vaulted waiting room which, after an intermediate existence as a billiard hall, was closed to the public in 1962. In short, it is just the sort of hidden space to tickle the fancies of impresarios-at-large Artangel, who have made it the site of the first UK installation by American artist Sarah Sze.

It’s not Sze’s first commission for a travel hub: her multimedia sculpture ‘Shorter than the Day’ – a fragile sphere spangled with photographs of the New York sky at different times of day – was installed at LaGuardia airport last year. ‘Metronome’ belongs to the same Timekeeper series, the difference being that its images are moving. While Sze’s New York timekeeper appears to stop time, her London one – a hollow hemisphere dotted with blank pages on to which scraps of video are projected – appears to accelerate it. There are a lot of flames – candles, a roaring fire, a volcano and an orange sun rising (or setting in reverse) like a fireball – interleaved with brief glimpses of vegetation: combustion trumps photosynthesis in what feels like a doom loop. Animals appear trapped somewhere in between, an ostrich running endlessly on the spot and a grounded pigeon feebly flapping its wings. Framed by the bricked-up arches of the waiting-room windows, the swirling colours projected on to the surrounding walls are as seductive as a Chagall stained-glass window but more unnerving. The age of the smartphone, says Sze, has unleashed ‘an extreme hurricane’ of imagery – and knowing that pictures snapped by visitors to her installation will be joining an estimated five billion smartphone photos taken a day is not reassuring.

One reason Peckham Rye needed such a big waiting room was that it was a junction for the Crystal Palace in Sydenham before that popular attraction went up in smoke in 1936. By coincidence, the original Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 is the subject of the latest commission by Art on the Underground for the disused platform at Gloucester Road Tube station. Monster Chetwynd’s Pond Life: Albertopolis and the Lily celebrates gardener-turned-architect Joseph Paxton, the pioneer of biomimicry architecture who based the revolutionary modular structure of the Crystal Palace’s glass roof on the radial spokes and flexible ribs of the leaf of the Victoria Amazonica lily he successfully cultivated at Chatsworth. Chetwynd, who has a soft spot for pond life, has taken the lily-pad as the inspiration for a row of five commemorative reliefs featuring frogs, tadpoles, water boatmen, dragonfly larvae, turtles and newts, all apparently helping with the manufacture of Paxton’s fabulous prefab modules. There is also a salamander sheltering under a lily-pad parasol. Context is provided in a lo-tech film in which Chetwynd plays a Fact Hungry Witch flying in on a broomstick – with a Socialist Goblin riding pillion – to question experts on the history of Paxton’s masterpiece. Asked whether the expansion of the British Empire can be separated from Victorian technological innovation, Antoine Picon, Harvard professor of the history of architecture and technology, answers firmly: ‘No.’ A bonus was that the surplus from the Great Exhibition’s six million ticket sales went into founding Albertopolis’s museums.

Your average Tube traveller doesn’t share the Fact Hungry Witch’s curiosity; on the morning of the unveiling the only person I saw looking at Pond Life was a tourist. Nobody looks at anything on their home patch: when you see someone looking about them with curiosity, chances are – if they’re not a burglar – they’re a tourist or an artist.

The Japanese-born artist Jiro Osuga has spent much of his life looking at parts of the urban fabric the rest of us ignore and giving them a surreal twist in paint. For his latest exhibition, Departures, he has transformed 160m² of Flowers’ east-London gallery into an airport. Everything is recreated at scale: check-in desks, departure gates, travellator, café, duty-free shop, baggage-reclaim carousels. The giveaway is the smell of oil paint and the presence among the travellers of some very odd customers: a robot asleep across three seats, a Roman in a toga descending an escalator, two octopuses pushing a luggage trolley, a group of ancient Egyptians awaiting boarding. Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ gazes out across the tarmac; Ford Madox Brown’s forlorn couple from ‘The Last of England’ sit glumly awaiting embarcation (see below).

© Jiro Osuga, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

The departures board lists flights for Ithaka, Xanadu, Gomorrah, Paradise, Hades and Nowhere. Among the wines and spirits in the duty-free shop there’s a small bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME’. One suspects the artist of having sampled it. It isn’t full.

In praise of goths – the most enduring of pop subcultures

More than 40 years on, every town still has them, wandering the streets with pale skin, more make-up than you can find in Superdrug, swathed in acres of black fabric. Goths, rather unexpectedly, have turned out to be the great survivors among pop subcultures. Others have risen and faded, but the goths – laughed at, ignored, dismissed – have endured, seeing their style and their musical tastes slowly incorporated by everyone else (there’s even a goth version of hip-hop, known as ‘horrorcore’).

Goth was a fitting name for the music: overbearing and foreboding; delivering ecstasy through the building and releasing of tension rather than through major chords and primary colours; drawing on punk, Bowie, the Doors and the Stooges. But it wouldn’t have been called goth without the aesthetic, a see-what-sticks mélange of the sexy and dangerous – a bit of Byron, De Sade and Crowley, a dollop of the kitsch 1950s LA celebrity Vampira, and anything else that came to hand.

The idea that this music was gothic was there from the beginning – in 1980, NME described the first album by goth heroes Bauhaus as ‘Gothick-Romantic pseudo decadence’ – but it only became a catch-all for every band with back-combed black hair during 1983 and 1984 (the NME had tried naming the nascent scene ‘positive punk’ but it didn’t catch on). Since then, though, only historians have thought of goths as anything other than people with a love of kohl and snakebite and black.

But this year they’ve been dragged from the dark corners into the spotlight. There’s a new box set, Young Limbs Rise Again: The Story of the Batcave 1982–1985, compiled of music played at the Soho club night that was instrumental in spreading the word of the subculture. The music writers Cathi Unsworth and John Robb have both written epic histories of the goths (hers is Season of the Witch, his Art of Darkness) that recount the histories of the bands and dig into their inspirations (often non-musical – the original goths loved their romantic poets and the doomed pre-Raphaelite maidens). There are other books coming, too, by musicians – one from Lol Tolhurst of the Cure, one from Wayne Hussey of Sisters of Mercy and the Mission.

The Batcave was set up by the members of the band Specimen to give them somewhere to play, and quickly became a magnet not just for thrillseekers, but for scene-makers – the likes of Nick Cave and Siouxsie and the Banshees were among the visitors. ‘The people who were coming were doing stuff: in fashion, in music,’ says Jon Klein, who played guitar with Specimen and, later, the Banshees. ‘Marc Almond was a regular, so was Lemmy. Boy George used to come down a lot. There were no paps, so it wasn’t a place where people would get hassled.’

Central to it all was that goths, more than most subcultures, were about reinvention. Anyone who has ever had a goth friend knows the transformation that happened once the clothes and make-up went on. ‘It levelled the playing field between really pretty people and normal people. If you could make yourself up and dress up, you could change the way you were perceived. People lost their inhibitions. They felt more confident and happier in their skin,’ says Klein. ‘I used to harp on about how you could change the world if you could change your own world, but I do wonder who expected it to last this long.’

‘The look was a suit of armour, and it scared off the beerboys,’ Cathi Unsworth says. ‘Once I adopted that look, boys who had been horrible just shut up. Women like Siouxsie were role models. They were brilliant and uncompromising and wanted women to be empowered. They wanted to help women along with them.’

But while the Batcave was the high-fashion end of goth, its truest expression was in the regions and the provinces, especially in West Yorkshire – particularly Leeds – where bands such as Sisters of Mercy, Southern Death Cult (later Death Cult and, later still, arena stars as the Cult), March Violets, Skeletal Family and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry were embracing and promoting the darkness.

It was provincial, John Robb suggests, because it was a grassroots subculture – driven by the participants rather than by the media. ‘The music press at the time was channelling post-punk,’ he says, ‘but people had their own ideas about what they wanted to do. All these small towns had their underground clubs. There were convergent evolutions – people knew about the Batcave, but the Phono in Leeds came first. I like the way it was self-created, even though the London media liked to have control of things. There’s something amazing about creating culture in isolation – about a band like Bauhaus arriving fully formed from Northampton, where there might have been ten people creating amazing culture.’

Goth culture became especially closely linked with Leeds. When I went to university there, in 1987, there were students who had chosen to study there specifically because it was Goth City. That, Unsworth says, was thanks to a nexus of people and events: not just the Phono (commemorated in the Sisters of Mercy song ‘Floorshow’), but also its DJ, Claire Shearsby, who helped inspire the Sisters’ singer and leader, Andrew Eldritch, and the F Club, the local punk night of no fixed abode that brought together the people who would form the core council of Goth City.

The Yorkshire bands were perhaps the key to why goth became such a dirty word in the British music press. At a time when music writing was becoming staunchly opposed to ‘rockism’ – denouncing the crimes of the pre-punk generations – the Yorkshire bands were unashamedly rock, even if they pulled it in new directions (Sisters of Mercy were the first major rock band to employ a drum machine, Doktor Avalanche, instead of a human drummer).

‘What was interesting with Sisters was the idea that it was both ironic and brazen at the same time,’ Robb says. ‘There was that Yorkshire stubbornness – “No, we like rock!” Whereas in Manchester and Liverpool, for young bands it was all about “not being rock”.’ At the other end of the M62, for example, Echo and the Bunnymen – a band who drew on many of the same influences as the goth bands – were explicitly proclaiming themselves ‘anti-rock’ by putting Pete De Freitas’s drum kit at one side of the stage rather than back centre, like everyone else (it seems extraordinary, now, to think how much such tiny distinctions mattered).

By the late 1980s, goth had become its own caricature, helped along by the sneering music press. But it never disappeared. The clubs continued to exist, the clothes continued to sell, and the music begin to intertwine with other styles to fill stadiums and arenas – Depeche Mode more or less reinvented themselves as a goth band with synthesisers, for example. And the goths – like that other much-mocked tribe, the metalheads – kept to themselves as their world got bigger and bigger.

It will always hold appeal, Robb says. ‘It’s the darkness. People have always told ghost stories and embraced the melancholy. It was not a morose scene; there were lots of parties and good times.’ It’s a point echoed by Unsworth: ‘It annoys me that it was seen as stupid and morbid. It was creative and inventive and hilarious. Otherwise why would people still be attracted to it?’

Jon Klein still sees the effects of what he was doing 40 years ago as a young man. He recalls painting the logo for the Batcave’s membership cards in Tippex, taking just seconds to doodle something. ‘For our 25th anniversary, we did a festival in Lithuania and a guy turned up with that logo tattooed on his neck, carefully replicating the fading Tippex.’ He laughs with wonder at how the world turns.

Bridge | 27 May 2023

It’s not unusual to get distracted at the bridge table, but sometimes that distraction takes peculiar forms. Last month, I was lucky enough to be on a team with the Swedish women’s gold medallists Jessica Larsson, Kathrine Bertheau and Sanna Clementsson – three of my favourite people. They had flown to Bristol to join me and another friend, Paula Leslie, for the Spring Fours.

At 23, Sanna is by far the youngest of us, and is enviably talented: she was just 19 when she became the youngest ever women’s world champion. As if that wasn’t enough, she is also training to be a doctor. Which is why I was surprised to learn she has an odd quirk: an intense aversion to people’s feet (even her fiancé’s). During the weekend, she emerged from a match looking queasy. An opponent had kicked off his sandals and placed a bare foot up on his knee, not far from Sanna’s nose. Sanna was far too polite to say anything – but it made for a tortuous hour, and much complaining afterwards about the unsightliness of toes. Thankfully, though, it wasn’t enough to put Sanna off her game: nothing would stop her taking full advantage whenever an opponent – ahem – puts a foot wrong. Here she is in action:

East led the ♠K to Sanna’s ♠A. She cashed the ♥A and played another heart, which East ruffed. East can of course defeat the contract by switching to a club – but instead, East played the ♠Q. Easy for Sanna from here! She ruffed with the ◆4, played the ◆5 to the ◆K and ran the ♥10. West covered with the ♥Q, and she ruffed with the ◆A, played the ◆8 to the ◆Q, ruffed another heart with the ◆J – and finally played that beautifully preserved ◆2 to dummy’s ◆3 to discard two clubs on her last two hearts.

I have found heaven in West Cork

A bay mare was standing over a foal curled up sleeping at her feet. Yawning and struggling to keep her eyes open, she was snoozing herself in the sun-drenched paddock of a small white farmhouse.

If I had stopped the car to admire the scene every time the scene was this perfect, then I would not have made a mile’s progress on my third house-hunting trip to Ireland.

In the country lanes, drivers slowed and waved to me on every bend. A cyclist put his foot on the ground and grinned as though genuinely pleased to see me. Everyone here has time. That’s how it seems anyway.

In a market square, I sat on a bench and sipped a takeaway coffee bought in a supermarket. ‘How are you today?’ said the lady, like she really wanted an answer. All the shop windows say ‘Closed on Tuesdays’; the restaurants are ‘Open Friday and Saturday nights’. Good for them.

A short drive up the lane and I was early for my appointment to view what turned out to be more of a holiday home. And the 18 acres, while picturesque, were being pounded by the run-off from the hillside above, pouring through a land drain.

I went from there to another farm that was derelict but somehow inhabited. In one room was the largest heap of plastic bags stuffed with empty Guinness cans you ever saw. Hundreds of them. The agent shook his head solemnly. ‘Poor bloke,’ I said. We stood chatting about mortality for a while.

After shaking his hand to say goodbye, I decided to drive inland to a complete wild card. I left the West Cork coastline to drive almost vertically up a steep range and down the other side. I landed in a valley with Mount Hillary in front of me. At a crossroads, a sign advertised dancing on a Sunday night: in the open air, at the crossroads.

I often feel I’m not house hunting for a particular place, more a time, and if this is not going back in time I don’t know what is.

I turned by the agent’s sign on to a smaller road, then another sign sent me down an even narrower lane, with grass in the middle. I hadn’t passed a car for a good 20 minutes. I was in the middle of what some might call nowhere. And very nice it was too. I drove on and another agent’s sign marked the driveway, lined with apple trees in pink blossom.

A man was painting the white wall at the side of the gate as a little girl in a full-skirted dress, her hair in plaits, played beside him. I put down my window. ‘Are you the owner?’ He was. I apologised for the intrusion, said I had rung the agent last minute and he’d be here in an hour. Would he mind if I looked around? I added that I thought the place was heaven.

He smiled, looked puzzled: ‘Really?’ And the little girl laughed. To them, perhaps, it was just ordinary. He said it was his sister’s farm. ‘Go on in, the back door’s open.’

‘I might just sit in the car and eat my lunch until the agent gets here,’ I said. ‘Oh, go on into the house and use the kitchen if you like.’

It was a bungalow, dated but liveable. I wandered back out into the sun and down a track to find an old farmyard, and beyond it 45 acres framed by a distant mountain on each side. The fields were emerald. Cows grazed in them. The sound was of birdsong, nothing else. When another wily old agent arrived, he talked me into it in no time. I sent the builder boyfriend pictures and he agreed.

But in Surrey a day later, an offer from the buyer interested in my cottage was so low it made the whole thing seem impossible. And all I could think about were the practicalities, like loading the horses on to a lorry for a sea crossing. I was driving along the lane to my house worrying, when a car came up behind me.

I didn’t know what was happening until I heard the young guy inside screaming through the open window. He tailgated me, swerving from side to side. I pulled in. But instead of going round, he stopped, got out, and told me he was going to kill me for slowing him down.

A farmer friend rounded the corner in his tractor and I flagged him down. The boy racer lost his bottle and fled. The farmer said: ‘The same thing happened to someone else down here the other day. Are you all right?’

Back at home, I wrote the low offer on a piece of paper and scribbled my calculations around it.

Goodbye, my dear Low Life colleague

He bore his death sentence more gracefully than most heroes I’ve read about. As the end approached, his columns showed no self-pity or regrets. Meticulous detail was Jeremy’s forte, and atmosphere. Oh, how I envied his ability to convey the mood of a place, the setting that he was writing about. He could replicate a conversation in a pub as if he had recorded it, and it never once sounded made up. 

He was the patron saint of the poor but happy. Unlike his predecessor Jeffrey Bernard, who weekly lamented about being broke and ill, Jeremy was the exact opposite, describing his cancer towards the end like a disinterested scientist quoting from a medical case. The first time we met, just after he had begun writing his column, he bowed because of my high ranking in a martial art and called me ‘sensei’ – teacher in Japanese. I laughed and it was the start of a beautiful friendship, one that culminated when we both went on a Spectator-sponsored cruise with readers from Venice down to Crete and on to Piraeus. 

But years before the cruise, his humour and sense of mischief and fun had made me his greatest fan. It began at a Spectator garden party, at which the then prime minister David Cameron was present. Out of the blue Jeremy produced a bottle of absinthe, the liquor that drove Van Gogh crazy enough to chop off his ear, and was known to have killed hundreds if not thousands. I immediately indulged, so much so that the sainted editor came over like a schoolmaster and warned us about the evils of alcohol. After a while, and now very much in our cups, Jeremy proposed some coke. Let’s do it, I said and we headed for the bathroom. Once inside a cubicle, we heard someone come in and when we emerged looking worse for wear we encountered a Spectator reader, well dressed, a gentleman, about 40 to 50 years of age. He did look a bit shocked, seeing two long-time contributors coming out of a tiny loo. Jeremy did not give it a thought, unlike sensitive ole me. ‘We’re in love,’ I stammered, and Jeremy caught on and planted one on my cheek. The gentleman’s eyes bulged a bit but he said nothing. ‘That’s a reader we just lost,’ said Jeremy. 

At a rather pompous dinner I gave when Chiltern Firehouse first opened, I took the private room and seated Jeremy and his lady between Leopold and Debbie Bismarck. I was told afterwards that the pair were in stitches as Jeremy commented on life in general. Towards the end, I sat next to him and he asked me not to name the lady with him because ‘her husband can tear me apart with his bare hands, and he reads you’. I followed his instructions and got a thank-you note from Jeremy who had begun karate lessons by then. I watched a bit and he was gifted. My only advice to him was to loosen up. 

During another Spectator party, Jeremy, Professor Peter Jones and I were outside 22 Old Queen Street while the scrum was inside. By this time, Jeremy had received the bad news about his health but you wouldn’t have known it by the jokes he was telling us. That is when I took him aside and offered to send him to the States where top cancer experts could offer a second opinion and top treatment. He thanked me, of course, but never even contemplated it. He was very English, Jeremy was, and told me he would stick with his oncologist with whom he got along, and so on. I don’t know if going to America would have made a difference, but I do know Jeremy would have felt alone and more of an object over there.

I once had a conversation with him about art and literature as corrupters of morals, and, although not as adamant as I am about rap and movies, he half-heartedly agreed. I was saying that bad manners and violence all derive from what we watch and listen to. After a while, Jeremy looked ambivalent and asked what was so ennobling about Macbeth or Madame Bovary? He was on a higher level than yours truly and had touched the true core of the discussion. 

Now on to his writing: at times it was weirdly elegiac yet impersonal, as when he visited first world war battlefields. The pub, however, was his canvas, his ne’er-do-well buddies and fellow drunks the on-the-spot sketches. Jeremy’s rhythm and style were unique as he projected his everyday life on to the page. The prose was muscular, yet sensitive, the brooding happy and carefree. He let it all out and it sounded true. His writing had a physical yet spiritual element. To me, though, he sounded haunted, and I am sure the demons were there – well-oiled but there nevertheless. His was a metaphysical study of pubs, drinking, friendship and self-destruction.

He also had the look of suffering about him, however much he tried to hide it with jokes. Were his prodigious powers of recall of drunken conversations at four in the morning made up? Who cares – it was writing at its best. Something else that, to my mind, made Jeremy a unique human being was his magnanimity of spirit. He never once, in all those years, had anything unpleasant to say about anyone. His inability ever to write negatively of others did not extend to himself. I once told him he was saintly, and he gave me a wintry smile and looked embarrassed. The sensory deprivation of pub life and of friends must have cost him a lot towards the end. Thank God he had a good woman like Catriona with him.

I want to finish on a happy note. Jeremy was at his best when describing ridiculous situations, and this one reminded me of the scene where the Marx Brothers squeeze more and more people into a tiny cabin. It is no exaggeration to say that, when I read it, I burst out laughing, then reread it again and again and kept laughing. I will obviously not ruin it by telling the story using my own words, but here are the basic facts: he is inside a tiny loo with his bum against a rickety door that is being pushed by three burly Spaniards eager to do a number two. In the tiny space between him and the loo is a Spanish lass trying to cut some coke and snort it. The men outside are desperate and demand entry while trying to kick the door down. But the Spanish lassie is just as desperate to snort the white powder. She’s having trouble cutting it because it’s hard as a rock and keeps asking Jeremy for all sorts of instruments to crush it with, which he does not possess. On and on he goes, she unable to cut the coke, he begging her to hurry up, the Spaniards driven crazy to get inside. Oh yes, Jeremy also plays the peacemaker trying to appease the Spaniards dying for a you-know-what, and also desperately, but always very politely, telling the lassie to get it over with.

Ten years later I still cannot forget the scene and the way he brought it to life. This is the second time I’ve lost a Low Life colleague, one whom I loved, unlike the former one whom I liked. My bad luck has been that both Low Life writers wrote like a dream. Especially Jeremy. Goodbye, old friend, I shall miss you, and, as we say in Greece, may the earth that covers you be soft.

INVITATION: Readers are invited to a memorial service for Jeremy at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in central London on the morning of Monday, 10 July. Details are yet to be confirmed but anyone who might like to attend can register their interest here.

Inflation falls to 8.7% – but pressures remain

Since the start of the year, politicians and central bankers have been promising a collapse in the inflation rate. But monthly data kept rolling in, and the rate remained in double digits. This put even more pressure on the data this morning, published by the Office for National Statistics, with the Bank of England (BoE) making clear in its last report that April’s figures would turn the corner on price hikes. Unlike its previous predictions in this inflation saga, it seems the BoE has managed to get this one right.

Prices rose 8.7 per cent on the year to April – still a staggeringly high figure, but down from 10.1 per cent in March. The main driver of the rate fall was gas and energy prices, as last year’s hefty uplift to the energy price cap fell out of the annual estimates. The collapse in energy bills is stark: with monthly gas prices ‘falling by 1.0 per cent between March and April this year, compared with a rise of 66.8 per cent between the same two months a year ago’.

While the drop in the inflation rate follows the BoE’s latest set of forecasts rather neatly, this has not so much restored the Bank’s credibility as proven an exercise in damage limitation. The rate fall is actually less than expected (the consensus was closer to 8 per cent) and remains more than quadruple the Bank’s target. And while a fall in energy costs was baked in, price rises in other areas continue to off-set those falls somewhat: food inflation is still skyrocketing, with the rate down by just 0.1 per cent on the year between March and April, from 19.1 to 19.0.

Most importantly, core inflation (which excludes food and energy) actually shot up: from 6.1 per cent on the year to 6.8 per cent, reaching its highest level since March 1992. This is the figure that will concern the BoE most, as it suggests inflation may be far more embedded than originally thought, at a much higher rate.

Price hikes around services – rising from 6.6 per cent on the year to 6.9 per cent – suggest that consumer demand remains relatively high, with the weight of the Bank’s interest rate hikes still not fully felt. Capital Economics estimates this means another 0.25 per cent rate hike; although the dovish tendencies of the Bank could mean that the Monetary Policy Committee uses the headline rate to try to justify holding rates at their next meeting in June.

But those ‘persistent pressures’ that the Bank has warned about several times remain glaringly obvious. The last BoE report forecast the inflation rate would get down to around 5 per cent by the end of the year (the IMF’s new forecasts this week also expect the rate to hover around 5 per cent on the year in December 2023). That’s going to be near impossible with core inflation stuck above 6 per cent, and seemingly on the rise. While the headline news today will reflect a more positive headline rate, today’s update proves yet more evidence that underlying inflationary pressures are far worse than anyone originally expected.

‘Protect the NHS’: The nanny state is waging war on life’s pleasures

British political discourse has barely progressed since David Cameron told voters in 2010 that he represented the ‘party of’ our revered healthcare service. 

Over the past few weeks we’ve heard pledges – all clearly with an election in mind – ranging from the inconsequential to the ridiculous. Tired promises about community-led treatment. Receptionists-turned-‘care navigators’. School leavers working as doctors. But more often than not, they have been laced with the same pernicious message: that it is the behaviour of the British public that must change, rather than our healthcare model. That people must be regulated, even though failure is in the NHS’s DNA.

This is nothing new, of course. For years, the anti-smoking lobby told us that cigarettes were a drain on the NHS. We were led to believe that alcohol had a similar effect, even though the costs incurred by treating smokers were significantly outweighed by tobacco duty (and premature mortality), while drinkers subsidise non-drinkers. 

Now, Sir Keir Starmer is ‘putting prevention first… right across society’. This is a recipe for nanny statism: on Sunday, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting hinted at higher sugar taxes to ensure we ‘live more healthily’. Starmer dismissed the idea, only to declare yesterday his intention to clamp down on ‘junk food’ advertising. This is a familiar paternalist fallacy: that increased regulations on businesses will have no impact on prices for consumers. 

Our expanding waistlines have long presented a conundrum for the killjoys. On the one hand, during last week’s European Congress on obesity, the case was made for reclassifying the issue as ‘chronic appetite dysregulation’. This, researchers said, would remove the stigma and reflect that it is an inherited ‘disease’. 

Fat shaming has become an equality issue, ever since the European Court of Justice in 2014 classified being overweight as a disability. In a case involving a Danish childminder, who was dismissed because he could not perform his duties due to his size (he weighed more than 25 stone and required help from a colleague to tie up the children’s shoelaces), the then-advocate general concluded that obesity may amount to a disability in circumstances where it is ‘severe’. And down the slippery slope we started.

Then again, a new Imperial College London study has found that obese patients cost the NHS twice as much as those of a healthy weight. Tracking 2.8 million patients for a decade or more, researchers found an average of £1,375 a year is spent on the heaviest patients compared with £638 for those of a healthy weight. (It is worth mentioning that per capita spending on the NHS is around £3,000 a year.)

The public health lobby reconciles these two issues just as Starmer has done: by blaming ‘Big Food’. If you eliminate the notion of personal responsibility and place it squarely at the industry’s door, you can both lament the cost to the NHS of treating obesity while sympathising with those who over-eat and under-exercise. Of course, there are some people for whom losing weight is impossible for medical reasons. For most, however, this is not the case.

Margaret Steele, from the School of Public Health at University College Cork, neatly summarised the paternalists’ position by warning that those with ‘chronic appetite dysregulation’ find it harder to resist the temptation from an environment that ‘throws so much food at us’. But does it? Does it ‘throw’ food at us? Are shills for ‘Big Food’ really walking down the street firing meals into our mouths with bazookas?

The average supermarket stocks more than 20,000 products. McDonald’s offers salads containing just a few hundred calories. The public health lobby appears to believe that we are only ever presented with ‘junk food’. This is the delusion which has launched a crusade in which the only solution to a failure of regulation and taxation is more regulation and taxation. With a straight face, the Institute for Government last week suggested that, if we remain squeamish on the taxing of junk food specifically, then taxes in general will have to increase. After the sugary drinks levy was introduced, obesity rates for both children and adults went up. Britons responded to this and Public Health England’s food reformulation scheme by consuming more chocolate, ice cream and biscuits.

We learned during the pandemic that there was virtually no control the government could exert over our lives that couldn’t be justified as ‘protecting the NHS’. In European nations with social insurance systems, people know that they subsidise the lifestyle choices of others – and some disapprove of it. But they wouldn’t exclaim, with a straight face: ‘How dare you put a burden on our system, which is the envy of the world!’ As long as that remains the case here (and recent crackpot proposals suggest there is little political appetite for change) the war on life’s pleasures will persist. 

Alex Salmond’s firebrand reinvention is hard to take

In power, Alex Salmond was, according to the senior lawyer who successfully defended him against a series of sex charges, ‘an objectionable bully’. Out of power, he breezed into a new career as a presenter on the Kremlin-funded propaganda channel, RT. He maintained his relationship with the broadcaster until the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Salmond deserves to be yesterday’s man. He’s utterly discredited, both morally and politically – and yet, he’s back. The current crisis in the SNP, still under investigation by Police Scotland as a result of fraud allegations, has given Salmond an in. Suddenly, every TV channel and radio station in the country wants to hear from Nicola Sturgeon’s mentor-turned-enemy. It has become hard to avoid hearing Salmond on some programme or other, expressing his deep sorrow that things had gone so badly wrong under his treacherous successor.

Salmond and Sturgeon’s relationship (previously businesslike rather than warm) was destroyed by allegations of inappropriate behaviour levelled against him by female civil servants. Sturgeon stood by the accusers and Salmond would never forgive his former protégée. Fast forward a few years and now he’s the self-styled statesman who popped up on Question Time last week to tear apart the SNP’s record in government while positioning himself as one true leader of the Scottish independence movement. His Alba party, he said, was ‘not relying’ on the SNP to progress the independence movement.

The former first minister seeks to rouse the nationalist tribes under the fundamentalist wheeze that all pro-independence parties unite around single candidates in every constituency. He believes that each of these would-be MPs should pledge to initiate independence talks with the prime minister of the day after the election. And there are other firebrand touches to this latest iteration of Salmond. He gained considerable coverage over his assertion that, had he still been First Minister, he’d have refused to allow the transportation of the Stone of Destiny to London for use during the coronation of Charles III. Aye, sure you would’ve, Alex.

But for all this talk, it should be noted that Salmond’s current position on constitutional matters stands in stark contrast to the one he used to advocate. Before he led the SNP from the fringes of Scottish politics and into government, 20 years and more ago, Salmond won the argument that his then party should take a gradualist approach. It was time to tone down the Braveheart stuff and make a pitch to middle Scotland. Salmond is no idiot: his approach worked and the Nats won the first of four consecutive Holyrood elections in 2007 while his strategy lifted support for independence from below 30 per cent to around 45 per cent. 

Yet now we are invited to believe Salmond, once king of the gradualists, has suddenly become a rootin’-tootin’, true-believin’ fundamentalist firebrand while he criticises the SNP for not being bolder with their approach to a second Indyref. Having lost the backing of the SNP’s moderates (people who demand a referendum only every other day) who stuck with Sturgeon and who now endure the leadership of Humza Yousaf, Salmond’s next option was to gather the disaffected into his new Alba party, to say angering things to angry people who’ve bought into a story of Scots victimhood.

As the SNP crisis rumbles on, Salmond has found himself back in the political mainstream. He’s treated as a key player – and if that means spouting the sort of stuff he’d have condemned as madness just a few years ago, then that’s just the game, isn’t it? I’m all for second chances but it’s difficult to square the idea of Salmond as statesman with the man described by his own lawyer, Gordon Jackson KC, during his trial. In remarks that would lead to his resignation as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Jackson was overheard saying of his client:

‘I don’t know much about senior politicians, but he was quite an objectionable bully to work with in a way I don’t think Nicola [Sturgeon] is. I think he was a nasty person to work for… a nightmare to work for.’

If that’s not enough to permanently damage Salmond’s credibility, then his professional relationship with RT should be. That he took a single ruble from Putin’s spin machine should be a matter of unlivedownable shame. I have had, I’m afraid, quite enough of this airbrushing of Alex Salmond’s recent history.

The inconvenient truth about heat pumps

In Britain’s battle to cut carbon emissions, the government sees heat pumps as a key weapon. Unveiling the latest energy efficiency plan in March, energy secretary Grant Shapps doubled down on Boris Johnson’s offer of a £5,000 grant for anyone willing to install one. These smart bits of home technology work by transferring thermal energy from the air, ground or water. They are powered by electricity, which can be generated from solar or wind power, providing cheap and fossil fuel-free heating and hot water. So what’s not to like?

The concept is nothing new. In 1856 the Austrian scientist Peter von Rittinger worked out a technique for drying out salt in salt marshes using an early iteration of the heat pump, and in 1951 the Royal Festival Hall in London opened with a water source heat pump fed by the Thames. 

Yet despite their obvious attractions, domestic heat pumps remain outliers. According to the European Heat Pump Association there are now around 20 million air and water source heat pumps in operation in Europe, providing heating to about 16 per cent of residential buildings. The other 84 per cent of buildings are heated the old-fashioned way. In the UK, 55,000 heat pumps were fitted in 2021. During the same period, 1.5 million people installed new gas boilers.

Heat pumps became a political hot topic that same year when Johnson, then prime minister, announced he wanted to phase out gas boilers and offered substantial grants to anyone who would replace one with a heat pump. This, he hoped, would result in 600,000 heat pumps being installed every year by 2028. Offers of free money tend to go down well with the public – consider how insane the housing market went during the pandemic stamp duty amnesty. But the silence in response to this £450 million offer has been deafening. 

The latest figures from Ofgem show that fewer than 10,000 installations were completed under the scheme between May 2022 and March this year. The reason for this lack of uptake is simple. If you drill down into the reality of heat pumps, the idea of a £5,000 cheque from Downing Street starts to lose its appeal. For a start, a heat pump costs, on average, about £10,000. For an air source model that rises to around £20,000. You can buy a decent, energy efficient combi boiler for about £2,500.

And what ministers seem unable – or unwilling – to grasp is that heat pumps are not simple, plug-and-play options. To start with, you need space. An air source heat pump requires around 10 square feet of outside space – bad luck, flat-owners – plus new pipework to deliver the heat it produces. Homeowners also need space indoors for a heat exchange unit (of about the same size as a normal gas boiler) plus a hot water cylinder (which those with combi boilers can often do without).

Ground source heat pumps are even greedier, space-wise. The most cost-effective system involves digging shallow trenches in the garden. These need to be around 100 metres long and up to two metres deep, meaning that anyone with a less-than-sprawling garden can forget it. And even those with plenty of space can come up against obstacles – Blur singer Damon Albarn has reportedly received complaints from parish councillors that the sight and sound of the two ‘intrusive’ heat pumps outside his Devon farmhouse could disturb walkers on the nearby footpath in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

If space is not an issue, your existing radiators could be. Heat pumps have far lower flow temperatures than boilers, which means they require a much larger radiator surface area than a normal boiler does. This means either supersizing your radiators (impractical, ugly) or installing underfloor heating (expensive, disruptive). And of course there is no point producing lots of lovely, clean heat if your house isn’t well insulated. Think not just loft insulation but also wall and floor insulation, and double, ideally triple, glazing.

Collectively these practicalities mean that the only time installing a heat pump is going to be feasible is during a major renovation of a substantial house or a self-build – which means the only real beneficiaries of this flagship policy are well-off home improvers, grand designers and property developers. Ordinary, regular people living in ordinary, regular homes don’t have a hope.

The problems don’t even end with cost and space. Buying a heat pump isn’t like choosing a new phone. Professional advice on the type of system you should have, its size, how it should be installed, where, how to set it up and work it and how to maintain it is alarmingly patchy. If you want a heat pump you’re going to have to be prepared to brush up your GCSE physics and get your head around the technology because you are going to need to ask the right questions and work a lot of this out for yourself. Any errors will be expensive; while many homeowners adore their heat pumps there have certainly been cases of amateurs lumbered with bulky, expensive and inefficient heat pumps for want of good advice. 

So why is the government still so sure that heat pumps are the great white hope in our battle against carbon emissions? Perhaps the answer can be found at the school gates, where many affluent mums ditched their previous status symbol of choice – a four-wheel drive – in favour of earning brownie points on the middle-class dinner party circuit with tales of how much they love their Kia e-Niros. 

Politicians also love to burnish their green credentials, and the government’s constant pressure to ditch gas boilers and embrace heat pumps feels like it stems largely from a desire to prove themselves to be at the cutting edge when it comes to green technology. Promoting loft insulation – which is lacking in almost a third of Britain’s 25 million homes with lofts, according to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and is cheap and easy to install – is a far less sexy rallying cry.

But beware of ministers bearing gifts. A chronic lack of policy thinking-through puts anybody idealistic enough to attempt to harness heat pump technology at risk of being left – literally – out in the cold.