A condensed history of ‘vape’

Last year, Oxford Languages’ word of the year was goblin mode. Apparently 300,000 voters decided upon it, but I haven’t heard anyone use it.

It rocketed into view after someone posted online a fake headline about the break-up of Julia Fox and Kanye West after a month together. ‘He didn’t like when I went goblin mode,’ it read. Fox later made it clear she had said nothing of the kind.

It means ‘self-indulgent, lazy, or greedy behaviour that rejects social norms’. I suspect goblin mode is a vogue term that will disperse like the morning mist.

Talking of mist, vape has made another advance in establishing itself in the language. The Local Government Association has called for disposable vapes to be banned by next year. Here vape means the little machines used for vaping. Vaping has been in use since 1980, first for inhalation of nicotine vapour from a cigarette-shaped tube, and from 1998 for inhaling vapour generated by heating a liquid. Scientists like to insist that steam is colourless, but ordinary English-speakers call water vapour steam, and call the formation of condensation (on car windows, for example) steaming up. They also speak of hot food smoking when it gives off water vapour.

Smoke and vapour were conflated by King James I in his Counterblaste to Tobacco while arguing that smoking produced the very symptom its defenders claimed it relieved: phlegm. ‘Even as the smoakie vapours sucked up by the Sunne, and staied in the lowest and colde Region of the ayre, are there contracted into cloudes and turned into raine and such other watery Meteors: so this stinking smoake being sucked up by the Nose, and imprisoned in the colde and moyst braines, is by their colde and wett facultie, turned and cast foorth againe in waterie distillations, and so are you made free and purged of nothing.’ King James would see in vaping a confirmation of the theory that he embraced regarding cold and wet humours.

Blitz

Nine wins in a row. What are the chances? That’s how Magnus Carlsen began on the first day of blitz (fast) chess at the the Zagreb Grand Chess Tour. My guesstimate is that Carlsen wins no more than half of his blitz games against the standard of opposition that he faced in Croatia, where his toughest rivals included Alireza Firouzja, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi. So I think you would be more likely to see a coin land on heads nine times in a row than for Carlsen to repeat that achievement. (In slower games, where decisive games are less frequent, his chances would be lower still.)

Of course it took some luck here and there, as blitz chess always does, but the former world champion looked dizzy with delight, beaming like a child and describing his achievement as ‘really special’. On the second day of blitz he scored ‘only’ 6/9, but combined with a strong showing in the rapid event that was enough to leave the Norwegian as a comfortable winner in the combined standings.

His most striking game was this one, played in the rapid event, in which an imaginative tactical shot from Duda backfires thanks to a brilliant riposte.

Magnus Carlsen-Jan-Krzysztof Duda

Grand Chess Tour SuperUnited Rapid, Croatia, July 2023

1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nf3 d5 4 g3 dxc4 5 Bg2 c5 6 O-O Nc6 7 Qa4 Bd7 Being greedy with 7…cxd4 doesn’t work out well here: 8 Nxd4! Qxd4 9 Bxc6+ Bd7 10 Rd1! Bxc6 11 Qxc6+ bxc6 12 Rxd4 leaves Black with a blighted pawn structure. 8 Qxc4 cxd4 9 Nxd4 Rc8 10 Nc3 Nxd4 11 Qxd4 Bc5 12 Qh4 Bc6 Grandmasters of Duda’s calibre suffer calamities in the opening only very rarely. But it happened in a game in Dusseldorf earlier this year, where Wesley So played 13 Rd1, which Duda met with 13…Qb6. After 14 Bxc6+ Rxc6 15 Bh6! Black was in huge trouble, e.g. 15…O-O 16 Bxg7! Kxg7 17 Qg5+ is awful, while 15…Bxf2+ 16 Kg2 only exacerbates the problem. Duda tried 15…Bf8 but after 16 Rd3, his position was already beyond repair, since his king could not escape the centre. This trap has been known at least since the game Portisch-Radulov in 1978, claiming 20 victims, including several grandmasters. 13 Bxc6+ Rxc6 14 Rd1 Qa5 Duda is ready with his improvement on the game mentioned above. The purpose of placing the queen on a5 is that 15 Bh6 O-O 16 Bxg7 Bxf2+! works out fine for Black, as after 17 Kxf2 Kxg7 the g5 square is guarded so the position is equal. 15 Bg5 Be7 16 Rac1 h6 I suspect that Duda was trying to lure Carlsen into a trap here, but it backfires spectacularly. Better was 13…O-O, when 14 Ne4 Qe5 15 Nxf6+ Bxf6 16 Bxf6 gxf6 is about equal. 17 Ne4 Rxc1 17…Qe5 was the lesser evil, but 18 Rxc6 bxc6 19 Nxf6+ Bxf6 20 Bxf6 gxf6 21 Qb4 is grim to behold. 18 Rxc1 Nxe4 19 Bxe7 Qd2 (see diagram) Duda’s point is that White cannot win a rook: 20 Rc8+ Kd7 21 Rxh8 Qe1+ 22 Kg2 Qxf2+ 23 Kh3 Qf1+ 24 Kg4 Qf5 mate. 20 Bg5! Spectacular. The h6-pawn is pinned, while after a queen exchange on g5 White could collect the Rh8 with Rc8+. 20…Qxe2 21 Be3! Nd6 22 Qd4 also wins easily. All that remains is the move Duda tried: Nxg5 21 Rc8+ Ke7 22 Rxh8 Qxe2 23 Qb4+ Kf6 24 Qf4+ Kg6 25 Kg2 With a safer king, Duda would be in with a chance, but Carlsen soon creates decisive threats. e5 26 Qe3 Qxb2 27 h4 Ne6 28 Qe4+ Kf6 29 Re8 Qb5 30 Rb8 Nc5 31 Qd5 a6 32 Rf8 Black resigns

The pleasures of pebble-spotting

P-p-pick up a pebble. Feel its weight in your palm. Roll it over under your thumb. Any good? Not sure? Shuck it back on the shingle. Plenty of fish in the sea and more pebbles still on the shore.

In The Pebbles on the Beach: A Spotter’s Guide, Clarence Ellis, pebble-spotter par excellence, opens with the words: ‘Most people collect something or other: stamps, butterflies, beetles, moths, dried and pressed wildflowers, old snuffboxes, china dogs and so forth. A few eccentrics even collect bus tickets! But collectors of pebbles are rare.’ We are not talking about the common or garden or indeed communal garden collector of pebbles – the sort with a wheelbarrow and a trowel. A true pebble-spotter does not make off with cartloads to resurface the driveway. ‘Let us hasten to add,’ Mr Ellis hastens to add, ‘that we mean discriminating collectors.’

Men such as Jim Ede, founder of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, who made his house a home for modern art, sculpture and pebbles. ‘The Louvre of the Pebble,’ the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay called it. Ede was particular about pebbles. ‘You find a perfect pebble once in a generation,’ he proclaimed. At Kettle’s Yard he assembled a spiral of nearly perfectly spherical pebbles. When a friend of a friend sent him a pebble she thought would do, he sent his regrets: ‘Mighty kind,’ but ‘I’m an awfully difficult pebble fiend’. The pleasure wasn’t in the possession so much as the spotting, the stooping, the picking up, the polishing with a pocket handkerchief.

In the introduction to his biography of Augustus John, Michael Holroyd raises the question of ‘invasion’ – the ways a subject gets under a biographer’s skin. While writing a biography of Ede, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, I became a pebble fiend and an awfully difficult one at that. And so, when we find ourselves on the coast and my husband looks out to the far horizon and breathes the salty air and says ‘Just look at that sea!’, I grunt and go back to squinting at the beach beneath my feet.

Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore did their best to better pebbles with their sculpture, knowing it was a game that they could only lose. ‘Many people select a stone or a pebble to carry for the day,’ said Hepworth. “The weight and form and texture felt in our hands relates us to the past and gives us a sense of a universal force. The beautifully shaped stone washed up by the sea is a symbol of continuity, a silent image of our desire for survival, peace or security.’ Or just a summer holiday souvenir. Whitstable – 2014. Hastings – 2017. Mousehole – 2023.

If you’re lucky, you might find a hag stone: a pebble with a hole worn through it, otherwise known as an adder stone and thought to ward off nightmares, witches and snakebites. A friend finds carnelians on his nearest stretch of Norfolk sand. ‘Best,’ he says, ‘on a sunny winter’s day. You need low light to catch the translucence’. But let’s stop there. We are not lapidaries, nor are we panning for gold. We are pebble-spotters, plain and simple. But there is no prize so precious or semi-precious as a practically perfect pebble picked up on a public beach.

Dear Mary: Should I tell my boss I swiped his champagne?

Q. I have got myself in a pickle. My boss was given a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal by a client. It came in a very smart presentation box. I thought it would be funny to open it and replace the champagne with a bottle of fizzy water. My boss duly took it home and I waited several days, expecting him to come in one morning laughing and saying: ‘Where is it?’ Alas, silence. So in passing I nudged him with a grin on my face and said: ‘How was the champagne?’ He then told me he had fallen out with a childhood friend and they had not spoken since Christmas, so he had wrapped the box and sent it to the friend – and the friend thought it was a snide prank. I have not had the guts to come clean, and the champagne remains in my desk drawer. What should I do, Mary? – H.R., London SW7

A. You have no option but to come clean. Do this by making a filmed confession. Wait till your boss is in the right mood, then send it via WhatsApp and stand in the room while he watches it. The advantage of this method is that your boss can forward the clip directly to the offended party. Meanwhile, insist on delivering the Louis Roederer by hand so you can apologise in person for your childish prank. Don’t worry. The debacle will help repair their relationship, as it will give them a new shared reference to laugh about.

Q. New friends have been to stay with us for a couple of weekends. They have asked us back to their seaside cottage, but mutual friends have told us their guest bed is catastrophically uncomfortable. We keep refusing their invitations but it is becoming awkward. Any ideas?

– A.N., Hereford

A. Say you want to make the bedroom they stayed in at your home as comfortable as possible for guests. Could they be frank about anything that could be improved. Pillows? Lighting? Give the unbidden promise that you will do the same when you stay at their cottage. Go there for one night only. In the morning gush that you were so happy to be with them that you hardly noticed the problems with the bed. Seriously, though, other guests who don’t adore them as much as you do might find it hard to sleep in it. Quickly resume gushing.

Q. A lovely client asked me to her villa for a week’s chilling. I thought it would be informal but I’ve seen the guest list and I just don’t have the clothes and no way could I afford to buy them. It’s too late to cancel. Help!

– B.B., London SW1

A. Go anyway and claim your case has been lost in transit. The secret law of house parties is that other guests will be delighted to lend you clothing.

Write to Dear Mary atdearmary@spectator.co.uk

The Battle for Britain | 22 July 2023

Why your summer holidays might be doomed

The first LNER train I booked on Sunday from Durham to London was cancelled due to ‘action short of a strike’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, but I instantly admired it. It’s so impressively confusing. With a strike, you know whose side you’re on. You can look up the salary of a train driver, for instance, discover that it’s £70,000 after only a few years of training, and become icily indifferent to their plight. But action short of a strike? What is it?

Action short of a strike, ASOS, turns out  to be an ingenious way of screwing your boss while still getting paid. ‘It means members can incorporate strike action into their daily working life,’ says TESSA, the Transport Salaried Staff Association. Simply work the bare minimum and the inevitable result is confusion and delay, as the Fat Controller used to say, and as I found out on the second train I booked.

About an hour after that train left Durham it slowed and stopped in a field. ‘There’s been a failure on the electric line,’ said the loudspeaker, ‘but don’t worry. The driver will start up the diesel engine.’ A few minutes later the train began to move again. ‘See?’ I said to my seven-year-old. ‘What do I always tell you? You’re lucky. In the old days, we would have sweltered here for hours, no back-up engine, no phones.’ I never miss an opportunity to tell my son how much worse it was in the old days. He finds it uplifting.

Shortly after that, the train stopped dead just as it was leaving Thirsk station. The lights went off, the sockets died, the air con failed and the temperature began to rise. Other trains whisked past, so clearly the first fault was fixed, but we stayed put. Word from the next coach was that switching to diesel had somehow screwed both engines, but because there was no further communication from LNER no one knew for sure. In fact, at no time in what turned out to be a nine-hour detour did any LNER staff member offer passengers any information or any help. Action short of a strike. I’m warning you. It’s going to be a summer of fun.

At Durham station a disabled lady and her mobility scooter had been lifted on board with great bustle and care. The outing was a gift from her daughter, she’d told us. After two hours on the train with no information, the lady was scared. Would another train crash into us? How would she ever get off? Eventually our driver appeared, a woman of 30-odd, smiling: ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ she said, holding up her hands as if to say ‘My bad!’.

‘Please… are we safe?’ asked the dis-abled lady, but the driver didn’t stop. Action short of a strike. ‘Let me see what I can find out online,’ I said to the lady: there was bound to be something on social media. But all the LNER Twitter feed showed was a cartoon of a to-do list with the word ‘nothing’ on it, and the words: ‘That Sunday feeling!’ As I watched, another passenger posted a message: ‘This is appalling. Our train is without power at Thirsk station. We’ve been without it for two hours. People are fainting. Do something.’ After a moment, the LNER Twitter account tweeted again: ‘Did you know it’s #WorldEmojiDay?’ ‘Here’s the #Azuma emoji for your consideration. Which one would you choo-choose?’

‘Is this what it was like in the old days?’ asked my son. ‘Not really, darling, no.’

For something to do, my son and I walked down the train into the back coaches, which were still at the station platform. Every passenger was puce and sweating. An angry man had found an LNER guard and was grilling her. ‘Why can’t you open the doors and let some air in?’ She looked as if she might cry. ‘It’s impossible,’ she told him: ‘The automatic system won’t allow it because part of the train has left the station. Some of the doors would open on to the track. What if someone fell?’

‘What if that pregnant woman collapses? What if someone dies of heat exhaustion?’ said the man. Shortly afterwards the doors opened just fine and we all spilled out.

For the next two hours on platform 2 of Thirsk station there was a mood of old-fashioned solidarity among all 500 or so the passengers of the doomed Azuma. Children played tag on the platform edge while the adults marvelled at the lack of assistance. The LNER staff paced the platform briskly back and forth, trailing customers, trying to pick up enough speed to make questions impossible while not actually breaking into a run. I’ve seen horses do the same thing to stay ahead of flies. Pinned to the lapel of one guard’s waistcoat was a badge: ‘Be kind. I am someone’s daughter.’

At the far end of the platform, the driver had stopped for long enough to collect a circle of passengers. ‘You have three options as I see it,’ she said, ‘and none of them are good. You can hope that this train starts up again, but I can tell you it won’t. You can go over the bridge and catch the next train back north again, or you can get a taxi to York.’ The last option sounded best but it was out. No Thirsk taxi was prepared to take any passenger to York station for love nor money. Someone offered £200 for the 30-minute trip but nothing doing. In 2023 the usual rules of supply and demand are suspended.

‘But what does LNER advise us to do?’ As the sun began to sink, the voice of an older woman cut through the chat. It was the sort of voice that wears kirby grips and brooks no nonsense from spaniels. ‘I understand it’s not your fault, but you are nonetheless a representative of LNER. What is the plan?’ The crowd nodded gratefully in agreement and turned back to the driver. It was like watching the old world pitted against the new. ‘There is no plan!’ said the lady driver with that same odd smile. ‘You’re on your own. There’s no help coming, no bus or anything. You can ask LNER for compensation, but I’d be surprised if you get anything.’

Action short of a strike. The strangest thing was how pleased she looked.

Where have the world’s highest temperatures been recorded?

Swing when you’re winning

What are the biggest UK by-election swings?

— The 1983 Bermondsey by-election saw a 11,756 Labour majority turned into a 9,319 majority for the Liberal party – a result widely attributed to the Labour candidate, Peter Tatchell, coming out as gay during the campaign. The Labour party under Michael Foot was also extremely unpopular – and had its then biggest defeat in a general election four months later.

— The Clacton by-election of 2014 saw a 12,068 Conservative majority overturned into a Ukip majority of 12,404, with the Conservative share of the vote falling from 53% to 25%. However, it was unusual in that the Ukip candidate, Douglas Carswell, had been the sitting Conservative MP.

— The Lincoln by-election of 1973 was held in similar circumstances, with Labour MP Dick Taverne resigning and standing as a Democratic Labour candidate. A Labour majority of 4,750 was turned into a Democratic Labour majority of 13,191 – but with the same MP.

By degrees

Rishi Sunak claimed that students are being ‘ripped off’ by poor university courses. Which courses offer the best, and worst, employment outcomes five years after graduation? (% in sustained employment or further study vs median earnings)

Highest earning

Medicine/dentistry 92.5 – £52,900

Economics 85.7 – £40,900

Engineering 87.6 – £36,100

Veterinary 91.2 – £35,600

Maths 87.4 – £35,400

Lowest earning

Performing arts 87.4 – £21,200

Creative arts 82.2 – £22,300

Media/journalism – 84.4 £24,100

Sociology 86.4 – £25,600

Sport/exercise 88.4 – £25,000

Hot pursuit

Some were forecasting that the world’s highest temperature record would be broken. What are the existing records?

—  58°C (136.4°F): El Azizia, Libya, 13 September 1922. Dropped by the World Meteorological Organisation in 2012 as it believes an inexperienced weatherman might have misread a thermometer.

— 56.7°C (134°F): Furnace Creek Ranch, Death Valley, US, 10 July 1913. Still recognised by the WMO as the highest recorded temperature on Earth, but questioned by some on grounds it might have been measured during a sandstorm.

— 55°C (131°F): Kebili, Tunisia, 7 July 1931.

— 54°C (129°F): Tirat Zvi, Israel, 21 June 1942. Claimed to have been misread.

What’s gone wrong for Ron DeSantis?

It’s widely acknowledged that, as governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been a success. As a presidential candidate, however, he has been a disaster – at least, so far.

Last weekend, amid reports that his bid for the White House was floundering, DeSantis sacked a dozen of his staff and scaled back his travel plans. He may have raised some $20 million between April and June, but some of the biggest Republican donors, who flocked towards him at the end of last year, are starting to turn away. His campaign is now concerned about funds running out.

DeSantis disputes the ‘doom and gloom’ characterisations of his candidacy. When a politician starts complaining about the media’s ‘predetermined narratives’, however, the real message is clear: he knows he’s losing. The polls tell the story: in March, DeSantis was only around ten percentage points behind the inevitable frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump. Today the gap is more than 30 points (Trump is on 52 per cent, at least; DeSantis is dipping below 20).

Trump is relishing his adversary’s slide, naturally. ‘DeSanctimonious is a terrible candidate,’ he declared last weekend, in that glee-dressed-as-regret tone he so often deploys when discussing his failing rivals. ‘I think he’s out.’

Where did it all go wrong for Ron? After the midterms in November, DeSantis was widely tipped to be the man to stop Trump winning the nomination again. He had won re-election in Florida, historically a closely contested swing state, by a staggering 20 points. He was Trump-like in his politics but more professional, less toxic – not crazy. Trump is 77, so the relative youth of 44-year-old DeSantis seemed another point in his favour, especially as America grapples with the fact that Joe Biden, its 80-year-old President, is not in full control of his faculties. ‘DeSantis is Trump, but you get two terms,’ said one Republican consultant.

Inspired by such logic, various billionaires, the would-be kingmakers of the American right, began throwing huge sums in DeSantis’s direction. Rupert Murdoch liked him, which meant Fox News, the nation’s most powerful media network, started boosting his credentials. Murdoch’s New York Post called him ‘DeFuture’ on its cover page alongside a Kennedy-esque photograph of Ron, his photogenic wife Casey and their neatly dressed little children.

This was all something of a ‘sugar high’, as DeSantis admitted at the weekend. (‘Welcome back to reality!’ snapped the Trump campaign’s official ‘War Room’ account on Twitter.) It’s clear now that, as one Trump campaign insider puts it, ‘there was a lot of wishful thinking that we were moving into a post-Trump era. But Trump has long had a solid 35 per cent of Republican support and it was always going to be difficult for anyone to get past that’.

Still, until at least late May, DeSantis’s backers could credibly argue that he had a reasonable chance. Yes, Republican voters clearly preferred Trump, but it was early days and, historically, frontrunners for the party’s nomination have tended to fade away as the primary season warms up – look at the now almost forgotten campaigns of Scott Walker in 2016, Newt Gingrich in 2012 or Rudy Giuliani in 2008.

DeSantis hadn’t even announced he was running, yet he commanded between 20 and 30 per cent support in many Republican polls. As soon as he did declare, it was said, the political momentum – the ‘big mo’, as George H.W. Bush called it – would push him on. One of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, appeared to have jumped on board too. He arranged for DeSantis to launch his candidacy alongside him in a great whizz-bang ‘Twitter Spaces’ stunt on 24 May.

Unfortunately, that sort of online campaign hype has an unpleasant habit of blowing up in a candidate’s face. Inevitably, the Twitter Spaces launch was a calamity. For the first ten minutes, the sound kept cutting out. Even once the technicians got DeSantis’s voice working, his audio feed was embarrassingly intermittent. DeSantis managed to deliver a barrel-load of platitudes about how ‘democratic society needs robust debates’. Then he droned on about his achievements as governor. It wasn’t just awful. It was hilariously dull – and that, it turns out, is DeSantis’s biggest problem.

‘Personality and charisma are important in politics,’ says a Trump insider. ‘Ron DeSantis speaks as though he is at some thinktank luncheon. The question comes down to: do you want boring Trump? And the answer is no. People will always choose the candy bar over the spinach.’

DeSantis, an introvert, sounds like an automaton and becomes most robotic when trying to convey passion. Last weekend, during an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in Iowa, he boldly predicted that he would triumph in a contest for the White House against California’s governor Gavin Newsom, the man many expect to replace the ailing Biden on the Democratic ticket next year.

‘I’m very confident that the freedom in Florida is what more people would choose rather than the public defecation on the streets of San Francisco,’ he said. You can imagine his team chortling at the line in rehearsal. But the words came out awkwardly. He also said that under his leadership Mexican criminals bringing fentanyl across the border are ‘going to end up stone-cold dead’. It sounded forced, even psychotic.

‘His campaign is run by dorks for dorks,’ says the Trump insider, and it’s easy to see his point. Murdoch, for one, has reportedly gone off him. According to reports, he ‘has privately winced’ at DeSantis’s ‘anti-woke’ messaging. Fox News has duly started making more critical noises about DeSantis. The editorial board of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has not rushed to his defence.

Americans like to compare political campaigns to businesses: the candidate is the product and if the product is flawed, the campaign will fail. That’s DeSantis’s problem: people aren’t buying him as president.

He tries to evade the ‘Boring Trump’ label by outflanking Donald to the right. He has conspicuously courted liberal hostility by adopting a more conservative position on abortion, for instance, and making sceptical noises about the efficacy of the Covid vaccine. In doing so, however, DeSantis finds himself speaking to a ‘conservative movement’ which, while still significant and well-funded, lacks the kind of mass appeal that Trump inspires.

DeSantis can prove the courage of his convictions by signing a bill banning ‘fetal heartbeat’ abortions. But even in the more God-fearing parts of America, celebrity tends to trump religion and consumerism trumps everything, so Trump trumps all. Trump is a world-famous brand. In Bellville, Texas, ‘Trump Burger’ is a popular fast-food restaurant. There are successful Trump merchandise stores in many parts of America. In other words, Trump the product sells.

Besides, if right-wing radicalism is what voters want, Trump’s promise that ‘I will be your retribution’ in 2024 is surely more enticing than DeSantis’s hammy talk about Florida being the state where ‘woke goes to die’.

None of this is to say that DeSantis can’t win. If Trump goes to jail – and he could – Republican voters might reconsider their support (equally, they might not). DeSantis, a master of detail, may end up thriving in the debates. He may end up doing better than polls currently suggest in Iowa, the first state in the Republican nomination process, on 15 January. Iowans voted for Ted Cruz over Trump in the 2016 caucuses.

But 2024 is fast approaching, Trump’s support is now more entrenched, and Ron’s time is running out. Those fickle donors are turning their attentions to Tim Scott, the African-American senator for South Carolina. There’s also renewed buzz around Vivek Ramaswamy, the energetic businessman turned candidate who speaks winningly about America’s ‘spiritual crisis’. Meanwhile, Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, are still sucking up votes that might otherwise go to DeSantis.

It’s precisely the scenario anti-Trump Republicans have long feared: 2024 as a rehash of 2016, when a plethora of candidates all tripped over each other trying and failing to block the Orange One. ‘DeSantis has failed to clear the field,’ says one political adviser. ‘Now he finds the field is catching him.’ If that happens, Ron may well find himself remembered as another Scott Walker, a promising governor whose career was cut short by a failed tilt at the White House. He was DeFuture once.

Susan Hall wins Tory mayoral race

The Tories now have their candidate to take on Sadiq Khan next May. Susan Hall, the right wing member of the Greater London Authority, has today defeated Moz Hossain by 57 per cent to 43 per cent in a ballot of Conservative members across the capital.

Hall, who led the GLA Tories for six years, was initially seen as an outside shot for the candidacy back in May. But she impressed the party board in London to make the final three. After Dan Korski dropped out following an accusation (which he denies) of groping, members were faced with a choice of either her or an electoral novice in Hossain. Her strategy for the nomination was based on winning councillors’ endorsements and running a punchy, pugilistic campaign against Khan. ‘The one he fears’ was their tagline, based off the duo’s exchanges at City Hall.

Labour has been quick off the mark to try to paint Hall as a hard-right extremist. ‘She doesn’t stand up for women and she hates London’s diversity’ was the reaction from a Labour spokesman to her victory today.

Hall’s selection over Hossain – an immigrant himself – could mean that identity figures more in this race than in 2021. Sadiq Khan’s team will seek to portray her as antithetical to the image of London as an outward-looking, liberal city. The staunch Brexiteer has never been shy about her views, which include support for the Rwanda scheme and the Truss mini-Budget. Just as Hall’s campaign will try to make the contest a plebiscite on Khan and Ulez, so too will Khan’s supporters seek to make it a referendum on the Conservative record after 13 years in government.

Hall faces an uphill battle in these next ten months. Labour is consistently ahead by between 15 to 20 points in the national polls; its lead in London is even greater. In the short term, Hall’s challenge will be to pivot away from appealing to the membership to instead pitching herself to all Londoners, especially those who are disaffected with the national party. This will likely involve making much of her ‘blue collar’ background as a mechanic and small businesswoman and campaigning on the key issues of crime, Khan and Ulez. The electoral potency of the last of these could be demonstrated as early as Friday morning when we get the results of the Uxbridge by-election and find out if Ulez opposition is actually a vote-winner for the Tories.

Tory floundering over China is a gift to Labour

Earlier this month, a Chinese spy reportedly tried to enter a private House of Commons meeting with Hong Kong dissidents. The alleged spy claimed to be a lost tourist, and there was a brief stand-off before he quickly left. The area was far from those usually visited by tourists, and some Hongkongers, fearing for their safety, covered their faces during the event.

‘I believe this man was a [Chinese Communist party] informer,’ said Finn Lau, one of two pro-democracy activists at the meeting who have CCP bounties on their heads. ‘This is one of the remotest committee rooms in parliament. And it is on the top floor. It is not a coincidence that a random Chinese tourist was outside the room at the exact right time and was attempting to access the event.’

If the man was a spy, his actions were almost insultingly brazen. However, that should come as no surprise after last week’s scathing condemnation of the government’s China strategy by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, which struggled to identify anything that might be remotely described as a coherent policy. The committee said China is engaged in a ‘whole of state’ assault on the UK and concluded that the government had been asleep at the wheel while Chinese spies ‘prolifically and aggressively’ penetrated every sector of the economy. ‘Confusion and obfuscation prevails in Whitehall,’ said the former Tory leader Iain Dun-can Smith when the committee’s findings came out. ‘It is as damning a report on British foreign policy failure as I can remember.’

The government’s muddled and ineffective approach to China is a gift to Keir Starmer’s Labour. And the cannier members on the opposition’s front benches have realised that Labour has been presented with a giant policy vacuum it can fill.

On Monday, in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute, Britain’s leading defence and security thinktank, Yvette Cooper did her best to casually steal Tory clothes on national security. ‘We can’t just sort of drift,’ the shadow home secretary said of the government’s China strategy. ‘It is so serious to our national security, not just today, but for many years into the future… the government is failing to get ahead of the economic risks to our domestic security, which has meant that our response to a fast-changing security landscape has often been disjointed, disorganised and delayed.’

Labour, Cooper said, would counter with an ‘all of state’ defence, with close cooperation between the Treasury and the Home and Foreign Offices to build technological and economic resilience to Chinese interference. ‘We’ve been too slow to identify where risks lie, and how and where to safeguard national infrastructure,’ she said.

It wasn’t long ago that Labour and national security could barely be uttered in the same sentence. After all, this was the party of ‘Beijing Barry’ Gardiner, whose office received £500,000 in donations from an alleged CCP ‘agent of influence’ and employed the agent’s son. Gardiner was a shadow minister on the opposition front bench under Jeremy Corbyn, a man for whom foreign despots could almost do no wrong as long as they shared his crude anti-Americanism.

Cooper is perhaps over-eager to compensate for the Corbyn years, and there’s certainly an element of opportunism and the luxury of opposition to her pronouncements. But Labour is starting to sound tougher on China than the Tories, and the shadow cabinet appears to have grasped the scale and extent of the threat from the CCP more fully than their floundering government counterparts.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves calls her approach ‘securonomics’. In a speech in Washington DC in May, she said that the war in Ukraine and the struggle to obtain PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed the vulnerabilities of supply chains that ‘prioritise only what is cheapest and fastest’. She warned that the globalised system can be ‘gamed by countries like China who have undercut and ignored the international trading rules’ and, in the process, ‘we have allowed the production of critical technologies to slip from our grasp – costing us jobs and compromising our security’. It is easy to dismiss her approach as part of a broader agenda of greater protectionism and state intervention in the economy, but on China she aligned Labour closely with Joe Biden’s administration which, like Donald Trump’s before it, has tried to reduce America’s reliance on cheap Chinese industry.

Reeves endorses what has become known as ‘friend-shoring’, the shifting of critical supply chains to more pro-West countries. ‘Nations who share values and concerns, and who want to seize the opportunities of tomorrow, can and must work together to boost our collective resilience and security,’ she said.

Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has also taken a strong stance on China, especially on issues of human rights. Earlier this year, he said that if Labour formed the next government he would ‘act multilaterally with our partners’ to seek recognition of China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide through the international courts. Two years ago, Labour backed a Commons motion accusing China of genocide against the Uyghur Muslims, more than a million of whom have been detained in ‘re-education camps’ where there have been well-documented allegations of torture, slave labour, forced sterilisation and sexual abuse. The government has resisted using the term ‘genocide’.

When a Hong Kong pro-democracy protestor was last year dragged into China’s general consulate in Manchester and beaten by CCP officials, including China’s consul-general in the city, the government’s response was described as a ‘complete mess’ by Catherine West, Labour’s shadow foreign minister for Asia and the Pacific. She joined Tory backbenchers in calling for action. Instead, the government dithered for two months until China, which had refused to hand over CCTV footage and waive diplomatic immunity, voluntarily withdrew six diplomats.

When the Hong Kong government this month placed a bounty of one million Hong Kong dollars (around £100,000) on each of eight pro-democracy activists – three of whom now live in the UK – West demanded that sanctions be placed on leading members of the Hong Kong government. ‘Will the government grow a backbone and live up to our moral and legal obligations to Hongkongers both here in the UK and in Hong Kong?’ she asked. The Foreign Office minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan ducked the question, reiterating how generous the UK has been to the 160,000 settlers from Hong Kong who have arrived since the CCP crushed the ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement under its authoritarian National Security Law in 2020.

The government appeared to have different priorities. Two months ago, investment minister Dominic Johnson was despatched to Hong Kong to trawl for cash. He was the first UK minister to visit Hong Kong since the CCP crackdown and his trip dismayed pro-democracy activists. Last month Trevelyan was photographed smiling alongside Liu Jianchao, the visiting head of the CCP’s international liaison department. Liu is one of the more thuggish of Xi Jinping’s henchmen. He has been described as China’s chief dissident-catcher, in charge of party operations targeting critics across the world. Asked about the meeting, Trevelyan said: ‘We consider it important to engage with our Chinese counterparts, where appropriate, to protect UK interests and to build those relationships.’

Last week’s Intelligence and Security Committee report should be seen as the culmination of a series of increasingly strident public warnings by the heads of the UK’s intelligence agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, about the breadth and scale of Chinese espionage and influence operations. It should worry Conservative election strategists that Labour now appears closer to the position of the agencies than the traditional party of national security does. And it is not lost on Tory backbench critics of the government’s China policy that their own position is closer to that of Labour’s.

Rishi Sunak has tried to brush away the report’s findings by claiming they were mostly historic and that his government is now more robust on China. There are certainly more tools in place, such as the ability to vet investments and to advise academia on national security. The government intervened in eight attempted takeovers of UK firms by Chinese buyers last year. However, the process has been criticised as opaque and lacks any independent oversight.

Sunak describes his approach to China as ‘robust pragmatism’, while Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who is expected to visit Beijing soon, says he wants a more constructive but robust relationship – whatever that means. It is hard not to conclude that the Tory strategy is not to have a strategy, to fumble along in pursuit of Chinese money, while sending out confused and contradictory signals, avoiding any serious offence to Beijing. It is all starting to sound a lot like a retread of the disastrous Cameron-Osborne years. And while Labour’s policy is far from fully formed, at least on the opposition benches there is emerging something that can be described as a strategy.

Canada’s assisted dying horror story

My favourite Martin Amis novel was his 1991 book Time’s Arrow. It is a pyrotechnically brilliant work in which all time goes backwards. On publication it was criticised in some quarters because the novel includes a reverse version of the Holocaust and some thought Amis was using the Holocaust as a literary device. As so often, these transient critics didn’t get the point. It is hard to say anything new about the Holocaust or find any new angle on it.

But Amis managed, because towards the end of the novel (that is, at the beginning of the Holocaust) one of the characters starts to worry about the bodies that they are bringing out of the crematoria. They used to pull fully formed bodies out of the ovens, but increasingly he notices that the people they are pulling out are deformed. Eventually they are pitifully so. The character starts to wonder whether it is worth the effort.

I thought of that brilliant, provocative smack when I read this week of Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) act. Lovely, liberal Canada actually legalised ‘assisted death’ in 2016, but only for people with terminal illness. As long-term readers will know, this is a slope that I have worried about for some time, for there is a slipperiness to it. Sure enough, two years ago Canada expanded the law to encompass people who had non-terminal conditions. As of next year the criteria will expand again, this time to take in people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness.

You could see this coming. After all, we live in an era which – rightly or wrongly – sees mental illness as being on a par with physical illness. Politicians, celebrities and even royals have spent recent years doing their level best to raise awareness of mental illness and stress how debilitating it can be. All of which may be true. But that ground starts to move awfully fast once a state has said that incurable physical ailments are enough to send you to the knacker’s yard.

Right on cue various people have said that they are looking forward to the right to top themselves next year: Lisa Pauli this week spoke to the media to announce her desire to take advantage of the new law. The 47-year-old suffers from anorexia, and has done since the age of eight. She says she weighs 6st 6lb, goes for days without eating and is too weak to carry groceries back from the shops without stopping. ‘Every day is hell,’ she told Reuters. ‘I’m so tired. I’m done. I’ve tried everything. I feel like I’ve lived my life.’

You may think that a 47-year-old who feels that they have lived their life is a 47-year-old in need of help. But for whatever reasons, Pauli obviously has not got the help she needs in her life, and so here she is looking forward to March next year, when, through the largesse of Justin Trudeau and his super-compassionate, ultra-liberal government, a cure will be found for her anorexia.

You can expect Canada to find a lot of other ailments to cure in the years ahead. Just last year a Canadian armed forces veteran who has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sought support from Veterans Affairs Canada. An employee of the agency asked him if he had considered taking advantage of the new euthanasia options available in Canada. The veteran in question said that this was suggested unprompted.

Veterans Affairs Canada subsequently issued a public apology for the interaction. But it isn’t hard to see future veterans having the same solution pushed on to them. Veterans can be very costly. You send them out to fight, kill and possibly die for their country. Many of them see their best friends and comrades blown to pieces in front of them. It’s the nature of war, and a tough thing to get over. PTSD is especially tough. And it seems a logical enough step to decide that something so hard to cure might have a simple answer, all the difficult ones having been tried – or not.

It is a Canadian twist on a Belgian horror I pointed out here last year. That was the case of Shanti De Corte, a young woman who, at the age of 17, had been caught up in the 2016 Brussels airport attack and had seen a number of her classmates die. Last year she opted to be ‘euthanised’. Alleged members of the cell who carried out the 2016 attack are still on trial in Belgium, but whether or not they are found guilty none of course can be given the death penalty. Because Europe, like lovely, liberal Canada, does not believe in the death penalty for criminals. Only for victims.

And so it does seem likely that at some point after March Canada will be able to go down a similar hell-path. As well as being able to kill the victims of crime and terror, they will be able to kill (or award ‘medically assisted suicide’) to people of any age who suffer from anorexia, depression, PTSD or a growing smorgasbord of other debilitating ailments. And in time a temptation will linger over Veteran Affairs Canada, and among many other organisations and medical professionals. It appears to be difficult to take care of your veterans in a country like Canada. It is costly and time-consuming to look after their needs and troubles. Perhaps MAID will be the obvious answer to soldiers who have seen terrible things in conflict – just as euthanasia was the logical answer to seeing your classmates killed in Belgium.

Naturally I must stress, as does the Canadian government, that this ‘complex and deeply personal issue’ will ‘reflect Canadians’ needs’ and ‘protect those who may be vulnerable, and support autonomy and freedom of choice’. It all starts from such a kindly place. It’s all about bodily autonomy, you see, and freedom – including freedom of choice. That’s why the Canadian government is giving out information for all those who will become eligible for euthanasia in March. It reads like the preparation for the starting-gun of the world’s greatest race. And perhaps it is. These bodies and souls are, after all, horrifically disfigured, mangled things. Perhaps it is right to wonder whether it’s worth the effort involved in bringing them to life?

Letters: Biden is alienating Britain

Joe Shmoe

Sir: Your piece ‘Not so special’ (Leading article, 8 July) was right. Joe Biden doesn’t like us and a brief 45 minutes with Rishi Sunak last week doesn’t change that. In Saudi Arabia last year, Biden compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Britain’s past in Ireland. This was outrageous – what about the US historical treatment of Mexicans, Cubans and Filipinos, and Biden’s friendliness towards IRA terrorists? Britain enjoyed excellent relations with the US under Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, all of whom had Irish ancestry, and it is self-indulgent and a dereliction for this President to make his chosen personal background an issue, as he does.

Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with the US through all the major conflicts of the 20th century, save Vietnam, and has long been the US’s most reliable ally. In Ukraine, it is Britain that the US has been able to rely on, not the EU or Germany or France, and certainly not Ireland, which is ‘neutral’. Biden’s stance over British policy in Ireland has been misguided and ignorant – and he is testing the lifelong Atlanticism of Britons like me. The EU’s customs border in the Irish Sea breaks the Good Friday Agreement as much as any Irish land border would.

Gregory Shenkman

London SW7

Serving notice

Sir: In an otherwise most interesting article on the game of padel, your correspondent William Skidelsky is incorrect in saying that the game was invented in 1969 (‘Anyone for padel?’, 8 July). Although certain modifications may have taken place in the intervening period, my partner and I won the padel mixed doubles title on board the Holland-Afrika Line ship Bloemfontein on a voyage from Southampton to Cape Town in September 1957. The prizes, I recall, were a small Holland-Afrika inscribed plaque to each of us and a bottle of champagne, available at that time in the first-class saloon bar at a cost of six shillings per bottle.

Antony Johnson

Mapperton, Dorset

Into the red

Sir: Matthew Parris is right to fear the chilling effect on free speech which a Keir Starmer government would have (‘Don’t write off Rishi’, 15 July). However he fails to point out that the Conservatives have been doing Starmer’s job for him for 13 years. They are obsessed by the Online Safety Bill and the urge to hand sweeping powers to the Chinese-controlled WHO in case of a future pandemic. And now we learn that CCHQ has cancelled a Conservative councillor for quoting the Bible in support of his objections to Pride month. At this rate, Starmer’s administration will only need to stage a mopping-up operation.

Richard North

Via email

Beyond dense

Sir: Lionel Shriver argues in her column (‘The unspeakable truth about housing’, 1 July) that scarcity of accommodation inflates prices and that increased numbers in the population magnify the problem. It is relevant to the problem to look at the levels of population density in different regions of the UK. England, with 439 people per sq km, is second only to the Netherlands (503) in density, Europe-wide. Within the UK, the most recent available figures show that the north-west is the most densely populated region (526, above the figure for Netherlands) while the south-west is the least densely populated region (240). If the influx continues at anything like the present rates, these densities might affect where the newcomers are housed.

Mallory Wober

London NW3

Last words

Sir: A comment by Charles Moore in last week’s issue (Notes, 15 July) encouraged me to write. He wrote, apropos the wonderful memorial service for Jeremy Clarke, that ‘we columnists wonder, in dark moments, whether our readers actually exist’. Jeremy’s wife Catriona told us at the service how much it meant to Jeremy, in his last years especially, that readers wrote and told him of their deep regard for his writing (beautiful) and his honesty (humbling). So I thought I ought to come out of the reader closet and tell Charles Moore that his words are the first I read in The Spectator when my copy arrives. They are always measured in tone and full of sound sense.

It is too late to write and tell Jeremy Clarke how wonderful I found his column each week, so this note is the next best thing, along with being able to pay my respects at the superbly organised and moving service you arranged. A deep bow to Fraser Nelson for his tribute at the start of the service and for making sure that we the readers, as well as Spectator staff, had the opportunity to acknowledge our debt to Jeremy.

Alex Stewart

Cambridge

A fitting farewell

Sir: Thank you to everyone at The Spectator who contributed to such a fitting memorial for the late Jeremy Clarke. It was wonderful to meet so many fellow readers paying tribute to a man we loved as a friend, yet few of us had met. We couldn’t have been the only ones to choke back tears as Catriona gave her poignant eulogy and spoke of their snatched moments of joy, such as dancing together in spite of Jeremy’s paralysis. While celebrating this man of words, we thought Jeremy might have been pleased to note the impeccable grammar of Spectator subscribers. Behind us, a gentleman asked about the slight delay in proceedings: ‘For whom are we waiting?’

Lauren Mappledoram and Andreas Strongolou

London N10

Roman politicians were the ultimate gossips

The ancients were as fascinated by rumour as, to judge by recent events in Russia and the BBC, we are. Homer called rumour ‘the messenger of Zeus’, with a fondness for racing through crowds. Virgil described it as a winged monster, with an unsleeping eye under every feather, a mouth and tongue never silent and an ear always pricked, combining truth with lies and distortions. Ovid saw it as a sort of clearing-house ‘from which the whole world is in view’ – a structure of echoing brass, with thousands of entrances and exits, echoing back, and so increasing the volume of, the ‘murmured whisperings’ it picked up.

Roman politicians were well aware that rumour was an important force in creating public opinion. ‘The slightest breeze of rumour’, said Cicero, could change everything. So when Cicero in 51 bc left Rome to become governor of Cilicia, with civil war brewing between Pompey and Caesar, he asked his friend Caelius to keep him up to date with everything by letter – ‘the Senate’s decrees, the edicts, the gossips, the rumours’ – which Caelius did, on one occasion reporting the rumour that Cicero had been murdered! Rumours might be ‘headless and authorless’, said Cicero, but they demonstrated public reactions to events and were crucial in helping politicians to decide what steps to take next.

Politicians also exploited them. While Pompey was returning from his conquest of the East in 62 bc, rumours spread of his plan to make himself king of Rome. His rival Crassus did all he could to further the rumours, and so worsen Pompey’s reputation, by threatening to leave Rome and take his money and children with him. At election times, candidates for office could even try planting rumours about opponents to see what sort of reaction they elicited.

Given the number of electronic means of communication today, it is not surprising that rumour plays such a part in our political life, perhaps even larger than it seems. After all, what are all those daily ‘think’ pieces, hariolating so confidently about the future, but a form of rumour?

What Britain can learn from Romania

Romania gets a bad rap here, associated as it often is with organised crime. In recent years around half a million Romanians have settled in the UK, making them the fourth largest group of foreign-born residents. But the irony is that as Romanians head to Britain in search of a higher standard of living, we Brits should really be booking our flights to Romania to remind us of how our country once was.

Romania has everything: fascinating medieval towns, unspoilt countryside, vibrant major cities and a 150-mile coastline. There are even still horses and carts on the roads. But the appeal is more than that: it’s the spirit of the place. If you want to go back to 1988 or even 1978 then a Wizz Air flight east is like a time-machine.

Cluj-Napoca – or Kolosvar, to give it its Hungarian name (this part of Romania, Transylvania, was ruled by Hungary for several hundred years) – still has the old-fashioned speciality shops that have sadly vanished from our own high streets. In Strada Matei Corvin I find a watch repairer. A master craftsman wearing an eyeglass diligently repairs my wristwatch, puts in a new battery and fits a new strap for the princely sum of 70 lei (just over £12). I was quoted between £40 and £50 back home and told the job wouldn’t be worth doing.

Next door is an old-style tobacconist which reminds me of the one Ronald Colman goes into in the film Random Harvest and which helps stir his memory. The prices again are in stark contrast to the UK. A packet of 20 Camel yellows costs around £4, Sailor’s Pride pipe tobacco is about the same price, and large Cristales cigars, around £10 each in England, are just ten lei (£1.70).

Romania is old-style too when it comes to common courtesies. Everyone I approach for directions is kind and helpful and most go beyond the call of duty. No one is in too much of a hurry to talk; everyone seems to be on your side.

My first encounter with locals is at the bus stop into town just outside the airport. I ask two young female students how I purchase a ticket from the machine. I show them my ten lei note, but they are most concerned to check first that the machine will give me change. (Two tickets cost six lei, just over £1.)

A charming middle-aged lady checks on her phone to find out where the bus back to my hotel goes from after I lose my way, and even misses her own bus to help me. I ask a bus driver where the minibus to the Turda salt mine departs from, and instead of a quick ‘It’s over there’ brush-off he actually gets out of his seat, closes the door and walks down the road to show me. Later, another driver tells me not to validate my ticket. On Friday nights all public transport in Cluj is free.

Everywhere one looks in Cluj there are churches. Absolutely magnificent churches. The most famous, and most imposing, in the central Unirii Square, is the gothic St Michael’s Church, the second largest church in Transylvania. Inside I marvel at the baroque wooden carved pulpit, the beautiful windows and the vast nave, 50 metres long and 24 metres wide.

Romania is a staunchly Christian country, with more than 80 per cent of its population identifying as Eastern Orthodox and around 5 per cent as Roman Catholic. Its Christian heritage is reflected in its public holidays. Whitsun is still officially commemorated, and there’s a bank holiday on 15 August for Assumption Day.

You don’t have to spend long in the country or in the company of Romanians to discover that family ties remain strong. Parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren come before everything else. Note how the millionaire tennis star Emma Raducanu, whose father is Romanian, opted to recover from surgery at her beloved granny’s communist-era flat on the outskirts of Bucharest. She could have gone anywhere. Divisive ID politics and US-style culture wars have not arrived here yet: both the main right-of-centre and the main left-of-centre party espouse moderate social conservatism.

There’s another irony here, especially for paleo–conservatives such as Peter Hitchens: there is probably more to like in Romania and other European countries which suffered under communist rule for decades than in those which didn’t.

That said, as in other post-communist nations, adjusting from a state-owned planned economy to capitalism has understandably brought difficulties. Romania may be a great value destination for Brits, but for the locals prices are still high in relation to wages and, as in Britain, they’ve been rising rapidly since the Covid lockdowns, with inflation running at around 10 per cent.

Tourism is one thing that could be boosted, as there is so much to see. If it was in America or western Europe everyone would know of the fabulous Turda salt mine with its vast Jules Vernesque underground chamber, where there’s a panoramic wheel. If you like, you can play subterranean ping-pong and mini-golf.

On the bus back, I talk to a Romanian who works in Yorkshire and who has been visiting his relatives back home. He tells me how hard it is for people, particularly the elderly, to make ends meet. He blames the war in Ukraine for the spike in energy prices and says the conflict ‘needs to end soon’. At the airport I chat to a very nice young woman from Iasi, a city in the east of the country, who now lives in England with her husband-to-be from Cluj. She tells me that there is still some nostalgia for the Ceausescu era, despite the totalitarian rule, as families – the most important thing for Romanians – stayed together.

I am invited to the couple’s wedding in St Michael’s Church and the party afterwards, and look forward greatly to attending.

Save our railway ticket offices!

‘Always be cheerful’ – a motto to which I’ll return in the final item – speaks to my natural demeanour. But when asked whether I see grounds for optimism in the UK business scene, I’ve struggled lately to find anything positive in the near-certain advent of a Labour government, the agonisingly slow retreat of inflation and the damage of still-rising interest rates. Nevertheless, let me take a step back.

In an ONS survey this month, four times as many respondents (36 per cent) thought their business performance would improve over the next 12 months compared with those who thought it would decline (9 per cent). There were also upticks in expectations for manufacturing output and in consumer confidence. And while food inflation stays sticky (not helped by Russia’s new blockade of Ukrainian wheat), there’s a fair chance that falling energy prices will bring overall UK inflation down to a less strike-provoking 5 per cent by year-end.

As for this week’s headlines about ‘the biggest drop in UK household wealth since the second world war’, they refer largely to falls in bond prices to which most households, I suspect, are oblivious. And house prices – down just £905 last month and still 2.6 per cent higher than in January, according to Rightmove – continue to confound doomsters who cry out for what they seem to think would be a cleansing crash.

So I’m an optimist despite everything? Not quite, not yet. But there’s always two sides to a story.

The last jobber

A salute to Brian Winterflood, the City’s ‘Last Jobber’ – to borrow the title of his biography by Brian Milton – who died last month. Having joined the stock exchange as a boy messenger in 1953, Winterflood became not only one of its pillars but also one of its great democratisers. Born in East Ham with no silver spoons in sight, he decided stockbroking ‘was not for the likes of me’ and became a jobber, or market-maker, initially with the firm of Bisgood Bishop and later under his own name.

In the 1980s he led the creation of the Unlisted Securities Market for smaller company shares – which evolved in 1995 into Aim (the Alternative Investment Market). I have myself described Aim as ‘probably… a more important development’ for London equities than ‘Big Bang’ in the previous decade. In the view of the veteran broker Charlie Peel, co-founder of Peel Hunt: ‘Without Brian, Aim would not have thrived.’ As for Winterflood’s style of business, it was well summed up by another City disruptor, the money broker Michael (now Lord) Spencer: ‘A pretty steely edge with slightly old-world courtesy… A very tough guy, but with charm.’

Save the ticket offices

On the proposed closure of 1,000 railway ticket offices, I find myself agreeing, unusually, with the fashionable capitalist-basher Noreena Hertz, who called it a ‘de-humanising shift’. I speak as one who travels 20,000 miles annually by train and for many years always used ticket offices in preference to machines that baffled me or rejected my credit cards.

At York, I warmed to the Scottish chap with thick glasses who knew the timetable backwards and I recall the Polish manager called Thomas, who came out from behind the counter and drove me to Tesco to buy jump-leads because my car had a flat battery in the car park. At Thirsk, an amiable fellow called Steve plays soothing Baroque music through the tannoy. At King’s Cross, I’d say the chances are 50 per cent helpful response, 50 per cent hostile RMT member who can’t be arsed – but you can’t win them all.

Latterly I’ve mastered the Trainline and Grand Central ticketing websites, probably saving myself £1,000 a year, but that requires online dexterity as well as certainty as to where and when you want to go. Many rail users have neither – and the prospect of sitting in unmanned stations listening to remote cancellation announcements should fill us all with the utmost gloom. The travelling public would be right behind the unions’ call to save ticket office jobs, if only the unions cared a jot for the travelling public.

Handbag madness

If I were a Nile crocodile, I’d be happy to end my days as an Hermès Birkin handbag – one example of which, with diamond and gold fittings, sold at Sotheby’s last year for $450,000. If I were Victoria Beckham, who reportedly owns more than 100 Birkins, I’d be rejoicing at the prediction from Baghunter, a platform for buyers and sellers of rare bags, that Birkins will rise in value ‘eight to ten times’ over the next half-century.

What a mad example of super-rich status-chasing and value-delusion – yet no madder than, say, the market for Damien Hirst’s colour-dot prints (yours on eBay for £28,000) or any art sold as digital ‘NFTs’. And how mean that the house of Hermès, for all the millions it has made out of the late style icon Jane Birkin’s name, paid her an annual royalty of just £30,000 (for 2011, that is, according to Vogue), which she passed on to charity.

Still, at least handbags have functional purpose. If I were still in the pantomime dame business, I’d be happy to have a capacious – and to my eye rather comical – Birkin from which to produce feather dusters and strings of sausages.

Look up, look down

Following my criticism of last week’s dreary Mansion House speeches, here’s a handy tip. A family friend – a second world war Arctic convoy veteran, no less – spoke wittily and well at his recent 100th birthday lunch. When I congratulated him, he said: ‘D’you know who taught me public speaking at petty officer school after the war? It was Lt Philip Mountbatten, before he was Duke of Edinburgh. When you stand in front of an audience, he told us, always remember “ABC-XYZ”. What’s that stands for? Always be cheerful – and examine your zip.’

The bliss of Phuket’s Millionaire’s Mile

Many of my friends, stranded by the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, have temporarily given up their film projects and settled down to write that hopeless novel which they could never finish before. Those film projects were more alluring – more necessary – than the lingering novels because they at least held out the prospect of one day bringing them, the openly despised writers, to the kind of fantasy scenarios towards which they have worked all their life. For some, a timbered Elizabethan priory in Sussex; for others a tropical villa perched on a headland with a constant blue bar of sea to make the approach of death feel philosophical. (I’m in the latter category.) It’s a dream both childish and rooted in childhood. It’s a fantasy of safe harbour, you could say, after the storms of anxious careers.

But where would this hypothetical villa be exactly, if the studio bosses ever see reason? Since I live in Thailand, this resting place of splendour and reclusive aloofness can only be in Phuket. But there are many Phukets. I don’t want my last days to be spent with half-naked Aussies on choppers partying with fire eaters on a beach littered with stoned bar girls. I don’t want the infamous Kingdom of Lights installation on Kamala beach suddenly ruining my silent nights with son-et-lumière searchlights and Harry Styles songs. I want my villa to be East Egg all the way, a distant lighthouse and a green light only. But with the strike, the money has come to a standstill. I stand in solidarity and all that, but the prospect of a villa has suddenly receded and this is a critical disappointment. It’s back to the desk in Bangkok, the air pollution, arguments with the landlady and election protests. Real life. This is the point of course: to remind writers that they will never earn $240 million a year. They will never really earn anything.

One night I got a call from a Frenchman in his seventies who claimed to be a close friend of a boy I’d played rugby with at Cambridge. They were now both hedge-fund millionaires in Singapore. Bernard suggested dinner at ‘JP’, my local French joint, owned by the former nightclub owner of that name, a man of vast proportions known as a former national rugby player. We got pretty high on the Côtes du Rhône. As I staggered out the door at last to find my motorbike, exhausted by French rugby lore, Bernard cried: ‘Wait! I have a villa in Phuket you can stay in if you like. It’s empty in July. Qu’est ce que tu dis, toi? Gratis pour un écrivain.’

I pretended to decline – rugby honour – but this week I was impatiently on the plane to find the villa located on Phuket’s Millionaire’s Mile, which winds its way south of that same Kamala Beach. The plane ride had been alarming. A new typhoon, this one named ‘Talim’, was on its way from the South China Seas. By the time I arrived at the villa Talim’s sullen rains and gusts of violent wind were shaking the silver trumpet trees.

But first the villa. I was expecting a room in the usual Phuket mansion popular with Russian oil magnates, British criminals and, well, hedge-fund masters in Singapore. A staff of eight awaited me in traditional Thai uniforms. They wai-ed in unison. It was already night and the braziers were lit. A garden of looming palms was in song. Writers’ strike be damned, I thought. My friend Joan Juliet Buck recently wrote that writers in Hollywood earned on average $12.50 an hour. Could it be? In that case I had better seize the current opportunity.

I was shown into a property that was not a villa per se, but a whole headland built along a series of bluffs bristling with agaves. There were several pools. Houses with Thai-style eaves, or chofahs, open air sala, ornamental ponds. A whole complex of rooms filled with antique Buddhas. From their terraces, the cliffs plunged down to a raging sea. At the end of a flight of steps cut into them there lay a private beach.

Thai architecture is specifically intended to complement Buddhist themes. It is designed to calm and assuage. I took the master suite and set up a desk with a view of the sea – waves whipping in slow motion against black rocks for miles. There I sat on the first day, unable to think of anything to write. At night I sat alone by the pool while the staff barbecued sea bass and made me anchan blue pea cocktails. I wondered if millionaire lives ended like this, in the exact way that I had always imagined. Butlers, mosquitoes, the calm of long-unused pools. Somerset Maugham and J.K. Rowling too.

The days passed. I wrote nothing. Gradually all the voices in my head went dead. It was blissful. The storm came and the headland became the house in Rebecca,but with no inhabitants except me. One night when the storm had abated a little and the geckos had stopped going crazy, the Kingdom of Lights came on behind Kamala Beach and giant searchlights struck the low clouds above Millionaire’s Mile. I rejoiced. It was something new to look at. The staff apologised and I joked that at least there was no Harry Styles. Their faces fell. They were all girls: what was wrong with Harry Styles booming into the lonely nights? I never heard him, the winds were too loud.

But I began to miss the white wall behind my desk in Bangkok and the view of skyscrapers shrouded in yellow dust. As Raymond Chandler once wrote in a letter from Lake Tahoe: ‘There was nothing to do, and I did it.’

Bridge | 22 July 2023

Bridge isn’t a game you can master quickly. Quite the opposite: with every new level you reach, another looms above you. The higher you climb, the more humbling it is: possibilities you didn’t even know existed reveal themselves, yet remain beyond your grasp. Frankly, even Sisyphus wouldn’t swap places. Recently, one of the clients I play with asked how long it takes to become an expert. ‘Without wanting to discourage you,’ I replied, ‘it’s taken me 30 years to get this bad.’

Reading helps. But in my opinion bridge books often underestimate how slow and difficult the learning process is. Books for beginners are generally fine, but those labelled ‘intermediate’ tend to expect too much too soon. The most basic techniques have yet to be drummed in: if you push players to move on, nothing will stick.

It’s the same with lessons. Not long after completing a beginner’s course, a friend of mine booked an intermediate one. On only the second day, they were asked to solve this problem:

At IMP scoring, the ♣️J is led. There’s only one safe line: play the ♠️10 at Trick 2. This caters to either defender holding ♠️Qxx. They can’t duck it, but winning gives declarer an entry to dummy (the ♠️J), and a losing club goes on the ♦️A. But can you really expect an inexperienced player to see that? And if they can see it, I’d love a game!

How I incurred the wrath of my iPhone

As I sat down to dinner in a lovely old country pub my reservation was cancelled by my iPhone, which was having a tantrum.

The owner of this restaurant was serving us with a smile, we had been shown to our table, drinks and menus had been brought. But the buzzing lump of metal in my bag was adamant this was not happening.

I was experiencing one of those moments where reality splits into two: the one you are experiencing and the one your phone claims you are.

A lot of people obediently accept the phone’s version no matter what. This is presumably why drivers follow their satnavs into garden walls, or swerve along the motorway looking at pictures of dogs on Facebook.

‘It’s coming up on the left,’ said my friend as we were looking for a farm shop not long ago. She was glued to her iPad in the passenger seat. ‘It’s here,’ I said, turning right into the entrance. ‘No, no, it’s on the left further on!’ she insisted. She was on Google Earth or something similar, looking at what I was looking at through the window on a screen, which she insisted was more reliable.

She was still staring at her iPad and arguing that the farm shop could not be where it was as I parked and went inside.

Because I am a mad conspiracy theorist who does not trust technology more than the actual flesh and blood reality I can see around me, I ignored my phone as it badgered me in this restaurant.

The reason for its tantrum, I believe, was something to do with me disobeying it by refusing to activate Do Not Disturb. I have it on silent anyway, because I can’t be doing with the impertinent thing.

It once played back a recording it had taken, without my knowledge, of me and a friend spending the day together, photographing his vintage cars. When you’ve got ‘live’ camera on, it can tape you, unless you know how to disable that. So it had packaged up a montage surprise, complete with a replay of our private conversation. Very pleased with itself, it was. I said nothing.

Technology is friendly enough while you don’t argue with the decisions it takes on your behalf. Not so when you disagree.

When we entered the restaurant, my phone vibrated to announce the commencement of my reservation, the knowledge of which it had plundered from my diary. Or perhaps after the restaurant texted me the previous day to say ‘press 1 to confirm’, the phone was able to start monitoring my evening out. In any case, it got hold of it, and started informing me it was happening – because I might not realise otherwise?

When it disturbed me by ordering me to activate Do Not Disturb, I ignored it. But by swiping away its suggestion twice, I made the phone angry. It retaliated. Perhaps it considered the Do Not Disturb was for it, not me. Perhaps it fancied the night off, and had plans. Maybe it was looking forward to compiling a ‘Pet Friends’ montage of all my recent photos and posting them to every contact in my email box.

Whatever it was planning, it was furious I had ruined its night.

I can think of no other reason why, five minutes later, it emailed: ‘Reservation cancelled!’ Such a petty, stupid little act of defiance. No doubt there are people who would have taken it seriously, ripped a strip off the restaurant staff and stormed out. I’m amazed how far down this road we have gone.

I do a bit of Airbnb and the other day a guest knocked on the door so lightly that I didn’t hear him. Even though I had left it ajar, he didn’t push the door and come in. He stood outside on his phone contacting Airbnb support in California.

I then found myself at my laptop going through an online resolution process about him being outside the door.

I did ask this chap, after a team in San Francisco managed to get him through the door via remote digital intervention, why he didn’t knock again, louder. He was in his thirties, working in tech, an inhabitant of the virtual world. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to do that,’ he said.

And so an Airbnb Support Ambassador ‘reached out’ to try to resolve my guest’s issue – I wish people would just contact me instead of reaching out – and a flurry of messages on their website proliferated as they thanked me profusely for working with them. I was told I was ‘the best part of the Airbnb community’ because I had typed the words ‘He’s here now. Don’t worry. Thanks.’

The emails were still coming in the next morning, long after the guest had checked out.

The death of sportsmanship

Now that Wimbledon is over, a few thoughts about youthful brains showing traces of horse tranquillisers, angel dust and cannabis, the ingredients that spell ‘moron’. I mean those sporting idiots who booed Victoria Azarenka after she lost the tiebreak 11 to 9 in the third set to the charming Ukrainian Elina Svitolina. Here’s Vica – a woman, a mother, a wonderful player and, through no fault of her own, a Belarusian – being booed for going along with the decision of Ukrainian players not to shake hands with Russian or Belarusian opponents. When a Ukrainian player refused to shake hands during the French Open last month, the public booed her, not her Russian opponent. The frogs were right. Since when does the accident of birth make one a pariah? I’ll tell you: since it became unacceptable for anyone to hold different opinions from the mob, that is to say, today.

The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, yet a Soviet player, Alex Metreveli, was a cheered finalist against a Czech winner, Jan Kodes, 50 years ago (1973) at Wimbledon. Back then a player was not held in contempt for his or her country’s policies. The greatest sporting gentleman ever to compete was Baron Gottfried von Cramm, who represented Hitler’s Germany but was cheered to the rafters by Wimbledon crowds – he was a three-time finalist – for his fair play and courtesy on the court. But I suppose there were fewer idiots back then among the Brits.

Cramm, whom I got to know well in the Sudan and hit balls with every morning, angered Hitler in 1935 when, at match point in Germany’s favour against the US in the Davis Cup, he told the referee that the ball that went out winning the tie for Germany had tipped his racket, leading to the point being awarded to the Americans and an eventual victory. Today he’d be called a loser, a sucker, and many other adjectives for his impeccable sportsmanship.

History is being rewritten daily by those who hate our past and our achievements, and that includes sportsmanship. Applauding a double fault was never on at Wimbledon, but it was done in America even as far back as 50 years ago, so the Brits have finally caught on. And how many times have we heard bores telling us that sport and politics don’t mix? They sure mixed last year when accidents of birth disqualified a hell of a lot of good players from playing on grass. Which brings me to that other contest, the mano a mano between Putin and Zelensky, one that I fear will escalate and might put Putin in a corner that will leave him only one route out, the N-way.

Mind you, this is high life, a column that stands above politics and cheap political predictions. And a good after-dinner party game would be the one that has people guessing who is making lotsa moolah from the war. It’s a tricky one, I know, libel laws being what they are, and with a free press under attack everywhere, especially in the UK after the Huw Edwards story, but the facts are that the usual suspects are making a killing – pun intended – as the war goes on. Who are these suspects? The military-industrial complex in the States, whose lobby is the second most powerful after the Israeli one in DC, has to be among the biggest winners, as $1.6 trillion a year is spent on war and the ordinance needed to wage it. There are also rewards for those who schedule wars and conflicts and defend wars in the media.

I cannot name these people because they live in the shadows, and like spies they operate in secret. But there is an international war-creation cabal in the US, Britain, France and Germany, and of course their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukraine seems to be provided with enough arms and ammo to keep the game going, with Zelensky demanding more and more weapons. What I would like to see is serious people such as Ben Wallace demand that Zelensky sit down and talk peace or else.

Let’s face it. Putin wants to talk but cannot lose face by asking for it. When one takes into account that the developing world is neutral at best in the war between Russia and Ukraine, why is it so difficult for Ukraine’s supplier, Uncle Sam, to order the ex-comedian and present hero to everyone but me to sit and talk and instantly stop the slaughter?

Writing in last week’s Spectator, Colin Freeman got it as right as anyone has up to now about the war. If Russia implodes, Crimea will not matter. Putin, however, is still in power and will stay there, according to Taki, the world’s greatest military authority. And what does the greatest military strategist expert think? That’s an easy one: this war could have been the shortest in history were the usual suspects not making a killing. Only last week, a journalist who had been in Ukraine recently told me how controversial Zelensky has now become with those deeply involved in the war, heroes we never read about. Zelensky is hogging the headlines, demanding weapons and aid non-stop, depleting the West’s supply of ammo, while thousands of those unmentionables I mentioned above get richer. Churchill said it’s better to jaw than to fight, and that’s what the West should be insisting on. But that’s like whistling Dixie up in Harlem, a no-go.

Should be called Ken: Barbie reviewed

Finally, the Barbie film is here, for which we must be thankful, as the tsunami of pre-publicity meant you probably felt obliged to lock your bathroom door so the trailers didn’t follow you in there.

It’s a film that wants to have it all ways. Let’s parody Barbie but also isn’t she a feminist? There’s of lot of zeitgeist appeasement going on here. But the production values are sensational and there are some excellent jokes, even if Ryan Gosling’s Ken leaves Margot Robbie’s Barbie standing. They should have called this Ken, but I guess that’s not going to help bring down the patriarchy.

This is the first project from Mattel Films, the toy company that hopes to create a cinematic universe like Marvel. It currently has several films in development, including a Polly Pocket one, and I’m already fearing what the marketing people will do.

This is written by indie darlings Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, and directed by Gerwig. It opens with a prologue narrated by Helen Mirren saying that before Barbie was invented in 1959, the only dolls that existed were baby dolls, as little girls were meant to aspire only to motherhood, but then: ‘Barbie changed everything because Barbie can be anything. Thanks to Barbie, feminism has been solved.’ I did laugh but also shouldn’t it be: you can be anything so long as you acquire the right body image issues first? (Joking – sort of.)

Cut to Barbie Land, because there’s a land where Barbies live? Apparently so. And here’s our Barbie, Robbie’s Barbie, living in a Dream House, showering in her Dream Shower and wearing hot outfits. The artifice is wonderful. When she opens her Dream Fridge we can see the contents are painted on. This is a place where the Barbies run everything and are doctors, vets, lawyers and astronauts although I didn’t see one spreadeagled nude with a limb missing, so they missed a trick there. The Kens, meanwhile, are fed up of playing second fiddle. ‘She’s everything. He’s just Ken,’ says the film’s poster. Gosling’s Ken only gets to have ‘a great day’ if Barbie looks at him. Poor Ken. Plus, I think, he must be traumatised by all the girls who have looked down his trousers and been disappointed.

But what’s this? Barbie, it seems, is having an existential crisis. Her arched feet go flat. She thinks about death. She’s told she’s ‘ripped the portal’ between Barbie Land and the real world and has to go to LA to find whomever is playing with her and I didn’t really get it. I think you have to have a PhD in physics to get it. Barbie does not like LA where she has gone out of fashion and ‘little girls hate me’ but Ken, who discovers that men run everything here, is delighted. Meanwhile, the head of Mattel (played by Will Ferrell) must catch these escapees to ‘put them back in their box’ even if I wasn’t sure what danger they represented. This becomes quite caper-y, which is a drag.

Gerwig has a keen eye for exaggeration, self-irony and knowingness. When Barbie fears she is losing her prettiness, Mirren’s narrator interrupts to say: ‘Filmmakers, don’t cast Margot Robbie if you want to make this point.’ It is funny, but also an example of playing it all ways? Call yourself out before anyone else does? Yet it’s entertaining enough, and while Robbie is perfect visually, Gosling manages to bring some real vulnerability and heft to poor gelded Ken.

Now I must apologise to Oppenheimer film fans as I won’t get to it until next week. I’ve also been locking the bathroom door against the trailers for that.