Spectator competition winners: Henry James and other well-known writers look for love online

In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice.

To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on such an app. This led me to wonder how other writers might set themselves apart in the online dating scrum.

A shout-out to Paul A. Freeman’s Kipling (‘If you can eat steak rare when all about you/ Are ordering their sirloins darkly singed…’)’ and Max Ross’s Wordsworth (‘Sadly I wander lonely as a cloud/ And so I seek some kind companionship…’). Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Paul D. Amer and Philip Roe also caught my eye, but the winners earn £30.

That affairs of the heart may call on wellsprings of spontaneous emotion is not to be doubted. Ardour has its place. Yet how incautious we are if we jump at the promptings of what may well be an ignis fatuus – that is, a strong but ephemeral attraction, one might even say a gamble – such as the social mix inevitably throws up. Thus why not submit myself to the indelicacy of a catalogued auction mart, so to speak, where the appraisal of personality can be studious and distant?

Friends whisper that risk can never be eliminated even by a ‘dating culture’ with its own lexicon of protective codes. Forthrightness demands the admission that it can reduce jeopardy, with the added commendation that it promises to be of paramount service to the single gentleman fatigued by the orthodox round of visits and occasions who wishes to ‘hook up’ with kindred souls.

Basil Ransome-Davies/Henry James

Heaven-bent, I yearned to be alone,
Sole-minded, and in my passion all-obsessed –
In prayer and honest toil my soul was blest!
Yet now my yen for solitude has flown.

Before I grasped God’s grandeur – my vocation –
I praised the skylark and the nightingale;
Today my prayer-filled, Popish words entail
Days spent in heaven-enforcéd isolation.

I’m racked with demon-doubts, I fear I’m gay,
Close-folded peace has given way to strife,
My heart is drown’d in dread lest I should stray.

I seek a chaste companion, not a wife
But one who’ll turn the fall of dark to day
And bring some joy to my tormented life.

Sylvia Fairley/Gerard Manley Hopkins

I am the very model of a 19th-century gentleman
My smile reveals that I subscribe to what you’d call a Dental Plan
I love a woman’s company, my chat is never saccharin
I’m very energetic though my working life is knackerin’
My appetite is hearty and I like to eat a mutton whole
And there’s a scarlet flower always peeking from my buttonhole
You may be charmed to hear that I possess a rich and mellow tone
I own a private letterbox and latterly a telephone.

If you succumb, you need not fear that I turn out tyrannical
For in my acts of passion I am never puritanical
Surprise me when I’m bashful and observe me as I coyly start
Though not, I beg, when I am trading words with Mr D’Oyly Carte
I own a Tintoretto and a Maes, whose art had style and zing
And watch me clear the floor to dance an Eightsome Reel or Highland Fling
I’m whistle-clean and fragrant – for no gentleman is soapier
And if you love a library, mine is a cornucopia…

Bill Greenwell/W.S. Gilbert

Name: Sam. Sex: if unavoidable. Height: unexpectedly variable according to age. Appearance: gaunt as Easter Island statuary. Likes/dislikes: irrelevant. Purpose: Nil. Except. Except I seek another, despite futility of endeavour. Why? Amelioration in part or whole of loneliness during portion – precise duration to be determined – of indefinite deathward trudge. Someone, in short, else. With whom to exchange silences, share turnips (else carrots), fail to stave off that which cannot be staved off, only hastened and even then, with insufficient reliability. Desired properties of other: alone as self, if possible, so as to facilitate mutuality of experience. Unaffianced or of long-standing viduity. What might we not do together? Not play chess, for example. Not drink Irish whiskey. Not admire the landscape paintings of Jack B. Yeats. Not gaze into the temporary infinities of one another’s eyes. Click to connect with me. Connect to click with me.

Adrian Fry/Samuel Beckett

Young and easy, happy as the grass is green and prince of the apple towns: irresistible male, bard and cherubic bawd, heedless and carefree, all too ready to embrace a woman willing to run all the sun long through the hayfields high as the house, lovely as water – but not too watery in the wanton waywardness of Welsh whisky-down ways.

My appetite for Time’s playthings is only restrained by lacking all that is golden in the mercy of his means but with your gold we could be honoured among foxes and pheasants, drunk through all the lamb white days. I will write you dreaming wicked by the jolly-rodgered sea down the valleys of the windfall light if you will bring the means to mirror the magic and majesty of our bottle-bobbing billygoat where the mornings are all singing.

Boathouse (sleeps two) though sleep is far from my thoughts. Say yes.

D.A. Prince/Dylan Thomas

No. 3305: Sonnet on sonnets

You are invited to submit a sonnet entitled ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets’. Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 21 June.

No. 755

White to play. Nunn-Gaprindashvili, ECU Senior Championship, Acqui Terme 2023. The former women’s world champion Gaprindashvili has just played 16…Nc6-a5. Which move did Nunn play to capitalise on this mistake? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 12 June. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Rg2! Then 1…Kf3 2 Qa8# or 1…Kf5 2 Qe5# or 1…Kd5/d3 2 Qd4#

Last week’s winner Emmett Smith, Caterham, Surrey

Over the top

One of the quirkier books on my shelf is titled Kingwalks: Paths of Glory (Seirawan & Harper, 2021, Russell Enterprises). King safety is a fundamental imperative for chess – after all, checkmate is the aim of the game – so the exceptions where that instinct is best overridden tend to be rather appealing. Probably the most famous example is the game Short-Timman, from Tilburg 1991, in which England’s future world championship challenger marched his king far into enemy territory to assist with a mating attack. But Kingwalks identifies plenty of other possible motives for these adventures. King evacuations (vertically, or horizontally) in the face of an attack are common, but a king might also run away to prepare an aggressive pawn storm on the wing it has vacated. Or a king may act boldly in anticipation of an exchange of queens.

By default, kings get tucked away near corners for their own safety, so it is unusual to see a king needing to get out of the way of its own pieces. Elaborate manoeuvres are extremely rare, such as in the game Oll-Hodgson, Groningen 1993, in which Julian Hodgson moved his king from g8-h7-g6, clearing a path for Rd8-h8-h5-f5.

But a curious case arose in the following game from the ECU Senior Championships, which concluded in Acqui Terme last weekend. Almost 20 moves earlier, White sacrificed a rook and hounded Keith Arkell’s king from the kingside all the way to a7. Now it is safe, and Arkell remains a rook up, but both players were down to about a minute or so, and it remains far from obvious how to combat the passed pawns on h5 and e6. 55…Nd2 looks tempting, but 56 Qg7 dodges Nd2-f3+ and prepares to trundle the h-pawn forward. Careful analysis shows some subtle ways to win, e.g. 55…Qg8+ 56 Ng6 appears to restrain the queen, but then 56…Qd8 57 e7 Qd7! 56 e8=Q Qg4+ and mate follows.

But Arkell’s solution was no less effective. Noticing that his queen might instead enter the game down the a-file, he took a radical step to enable that.

Povilas Lasinskas–Keith Arkell

ECU Senior Championship 50+, 2023

55… Ka6! 56 Qg7  A mistaken attempt to prevent what follows, which Arkell ignores, seeing that his king will be safe on c4. 56 h6 was a more challenging alternative. But after 56…Kb5 57 h7 (or 57 e7 Rb2! prepares Qe8-a8-a1) 57…Qa8 58 h8=Q Ra1+ 59 Kh2 Qa2+ 60 Ng2 Qb1 61 Kh3 Nf2+ 62 Kg3 (or 62 Kh2 Qg6!) 62…Qg6+! 63 Kxf2 Ra2+ and mate follows. Kb5 57 Qxb7+ Kc4  White’s queen is overworked, and cannot guard g8 and a8 simultaneously. 58 Qf7 Qa8 59 e7 Qa4 60 Ng2 Ra1+ 61 Kh2 Qd1 White resigns since 62 Kh3 Qh1+ 63 Kg4 Qxg2+ wins quickly.

In the over-fifties championship, Arkell finished in a seven-way tie for first place on 6.5/9, narrowly missing out on a medal with an unfavourable tiebreak score. John Nunn was top seed in the over-65s championship, and took the gold medal with the strongest tiebreak from a group of five players on 7/9. One other member of that group was the strong English amateur Terry Chapman, who could count himself unfortunate only to be awarded fourth place on tiebreak.

The puzzle is taken from Nunn’s final round win against Nona Gaprindashvili, the Georgian former women’s world champion.

Is This Morning really ‘toxic’?

‘I know the antidote to toxicity,’ my husband shouted, waving a copy of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, even though there was nobody to shout down.

Toxicity has become a fashionable word, particularly since the resignation of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Toxic is to poisonous what erotic is to sexual: an elevated term. Over the past fortnight it has been deployed in that storm in a television set: the fall of Phillip Schofield.

Someone called Dr Ranj Singh declared that the culture at This Morning – the ITV programme that is generally on when one is waiting at an airport – had ‘become toxic’.

Schofield, a presenter of the show for 21 years, said before he resigned: ‘Some people may be toxic and see toxicity everywhere because that’s the lens they are looking at the world.’ ‘My friend, the toxicity is not about me or anyone else,’ responded Eamonn Holmes, another television presenter, ‘the toxicity is with you.’

According to tabloid newspapers, tension between the two increased when Schofield published a memoir, Life’s What You Make It, in 2020, which repeatedly spelt Eamonn Holmes’s first name with only one n. I’d have thought that with two ls in Phillip he’d have seen the danger.

Toxic came into English in the 1660, but toxin only in the 1890s. Toxic derived from toxicum, the Latin form of the Greek toxikon ‘pertaining to a bow’, which Pliny explained from the bow-strings used to collect dew-like poison. In reality toxikon was short for toxikon pharmakon, ‘arrow poison’. But the element pharmakon, originally meaning ‘poison’, was dropped, with the archery element toxikon, left to signify poison on its own. (Toxophily, love of archery, was suggested by Elizabeth I’s Greek tutor Roger Ascham, though the regular Greek formation would have been philotoxy.)

As for curing toxicity, Pliny, in Philemon Holland’s translation, declares: ‘It is generally thought, that for the venome called Toxicum, there is not a better counterpoyson than dogs bloud.’

Dear Mary: how do I stop guests contaminating my butter?

Q. I spent day two of the Lord’s Test Match last week in the Grandstand. Shortly after play began, the adjacent seats were occupied. He, largely silent, was innocuous. She, of unpleasingly shrill-toned voice, wittered on inanely at high volume, barely pausing for breath, until they left late on. Destined to sit next to someone like this for an entire day, how does one politely invite her to behave more decorously, without causing extreme offence?

– P.R., Highgate, London

A. Dear Mary’s cricket consultant, L.G. of Fosbury, steps in to advise. ‘The answer to this problem is to buy the headsets available at all cricket grounds that allow you to listen to the TMS commentary as you watch. This honestly combines the best of all possible worlds, as you can experience the thrill of watching live with the pleasure of listening to the sensitive and intelligent commentary of Aggers, Daniel Norcross and Isa Guha among others. (Either that, or wear your own headphones with your device tuned into TMS.)’  

Q. I have moved in with three flatmates in New Cross. We often get invited to parties in east London, nowhere near train or Tube stations, and have to take it in turns not to drink so we can travel by car. This causes endless rows between us, as nobody wants to spend whole evenings without a single drink. How can we resolve this amicably, Mary?

– W.F., London SE14

A. You will find a Zipcar within walking distance of your flat, which you can use to go to the parties at a fraction of the cost of a taxi. It is a simple process to join Zipcar. You can park it near the venue, all drink as much as you want, and split the cost of a cab home between the four of you, thus preventing any future fallings out.

Q. Some of my children, step-children and other favourite guests – even my beloved brother-in-law – often upset me by diving straight into our butter dish with a dirty knife, leaving an unsightly mess for the rest of us to cope with. What I tend to do is remove the butter dish well in advance of all meals and ask family and friends at the appropriate time if they need any butter. If they do, I serve them myself straight on to their plates. My problem is that guests often complain that they would prefer to help themselves.

– Name and address withheld

A. This offence has been widely reported. To pre-empt it, experienced hosts still use butter paddles – the traditional means by which to shape butter into uniform pats with ridged sides, commonly known as butter balls. Serve them on a large dish with plenty of space between each ball. In this way guests help themselves to individual balls and cannot contaminate the adjacent supplies.

The Battle for Britain | 10 June 2023

I’ve been radicalised by Just Stop Oil

Last month I went to Lord Frost’s superb lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation about the harm net zero will do to the British economy. He pointed out that the government is completely unrealistic about the economic cost of the policy, which former energy minister Chris Skidmore claimed last year could boost GDP by up to 2 per cent, thanks in part to cheaper household energy bills. (As Frost said: ‘Good luck with that.’) This is even more Pollyannaish than Labour’s energy review in 2003, which at least acknowledged that achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 would cost 2 per cent of GDP. When ministers are pressed on how the economy will cope with problems such as the intermittency of wind and solar power and the mind-boggling expense of creating adequate battery storage, they are reduced to muttering that ‘something will turn up’.

The fact that our political masters have embarked on such a ruinous course would have seen them turfed out of office in decades gone by, Frost said. But the problem today is that the intellectual climate is highly collectivist. Vast swaths of the electorate believe the purpose of policy-making is to tame markets, not liberate them, and are convinced that the 2008 crash was caused by the free enterprise system rather than bad regulation and poor central bank decision–making. In the mainstream media, anyone expressing scepticism about the impact of anthropogenic global warming is viewed with intense suspicion.

During the Q&A that followed the lecture, I asked Lord Frost if we should take a leaf out of our opponents’ book and set up a militant anti-green-activist group. The eco-protestors say their reason for disrupting major sporting events and holding up traffic is to stop people ignoring the ‘climate emergency’, a rationale I’ve always found baffling, since the professional-managerial class talk about nothing else and the public is bombarded with environmentalist propaganda 24/7.

But net-zero sceptics like me genuinely are a beleaguered minority, unable to get a hearing in the public square. In fact, we are exactly who the eco-protestors imagine themselves to be – concerned citizens desperately trying to draw attention to an impending disaster, but dismissed as ‘alarmists’ by policy-makers. So while the antisocial behaviour of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain makes little sense – they’re like pro-communist protestors in Soviet Russia – similar antics by climate contrarians could make an impact. If I unfurl a giant banner outside the Green party’s Brighton headquarters saying ‘Just Stop Snake Oil’, people might sit up and take notice. At the very least, it would draw attention to the fact that there is another side to this debate.

Not surprisingly, Lord Frost wasn’t convinced. It was bad enough having to contend with the eco-loons wreaking havoc on our roads and bridges, he said, without the provisional wing of the Global Warming Policy Foundation adding to the chaos. In any event, he didn’t think that trying to disrupt the Derby did the other side’s cause much good. Wouldn’t it be better to let them continue to lose friends and alienate people? By all means ridicule them, he said. But for God’s sake don’t imitate them.

I’m not so sure. Judging from the reluctance of juries to convict eco-protestors, the public seems pretty sympathetic. Yes, commuters may be unimpressed by someone lying in the road when they’re late for work, but many admire the activists’ courage and commitment. According to an Omnisis poll published last year, two-thirds of people support taking non-violent direct action to protect Britain’s environment and 75 per cent are in favour of installing solar panels on farmland. More recently, Ipsos found that 84 per cent of Britons are concerned about climate change and more than half think we should aim to achieve net zero sooner than 2050. It looks to me as if the tactics of the pink-haired militants are succeeding.

So who’s with me? We could start by daubing red paint on the Belgravia homes of the billionaire backers of these ‘anti-capitalists’ protestors. Then rush the stage at Coldplay’s next concert – their tour is called ‘Sustainability: Music of the Spheres’ – and rip open some packets of green powder. And to conclude our first campaign, next time there’s some international green boondoggle in London I will lead a group of sceptics on to the main runway at Farnborough so we can lie down and prevent all the leading advocates of net zero landing in their private jets. ‘How dare you?’ Greta Thunberg will ask. To which I’ll reply: ‘Who dares wins.’

What terfs get wrong

The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as drug-users instead snorted up cocaine’s great gift of untrammelled narcissism. And yet the desire to live in a weird fantasy land did not quite disappear – far from it. Today, if you tell people that you are a pink giraffe, they are compelled by society to believe you and not judge you as being a deluded lunatic.

We no longer need Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey or the ghastly Timothy Leary: we have created a counter-rational fantasy world for ourselves without the help of acid or psilocybins. This much is evident every day on social media and in our newspapers. Often it’s just the little things that convince you there is a general derangement at large – such as a talk given in Cambridge recently by someone called Leah Palmer of the Scott Polar Research Institute: ‘Queering the Poles: How queer voices are changing how we think about the Arctic and Antarctic regions.’

Very queer voices, in my book, and those that might not find very much resonance with Scott himself. Nor am I sure how Pope John Paul II or Lech Walesa would feel about ‘Queering the Poles’. But there are people like Leah are in their little victimhood silos, believing the North Pole belongs to them, believing that they have special agency when it comes to snow and polar bears.

Less immediately ludicrous, at first sight, was a story from one of our junior schools. Neither the school nor the people involved were named. What happened was that a boy handed around to his classmates invitations to his birthday party. All but one of the kids in the class received an invitation, and the child who didn’t asked why this should be. ‘Looks like you didn’t make the list,’ the birthday boy reportedly replied, a little snarkily. One can imagine that the excluded little chap was somewhat hurt by this, and indeed his mother contacted the school, full of righteous fury. The school decided that henceforth, when party invitations were being handed out, they had to go to all the children in the class, and that’s that.

But what if one of the children in the class was a detestable little shit? What if the dislike felt for him was very soundly based? Should the celebration be compulsorily marred by his presence? What if the excluded kid was a ruffian? Why should the parents of the birthday boy be forced to invite him into their home?

I suspect that when I was at school, if such a thing had happened and the mum had rung the head bleating, the answer would have been along the lines of: ‘Well, tell him not to be a detestable little shit, then.’ Today, though, nobody is a detestable little shit; none of us is to be judged, especially not by our peers. I think this is deluding, especially for the DLS, who will continue through life thinking that his unsavoury characteristics and nasty behaviour should not remotely prevent him from enjoying all the treats and benefits of his peers. Meanwhile, not being invited to a party now joins that rapidly expanding bunch of stuff known as ‘bullying’.

And then there’s J.K. Rowling and her Twitterspat with the lefty singer Billy Bragg. Arguing the toss about the lesbian – but trans-sceptical – feminist Kathleen Stock and her speech at Oxford University, Bragg made the point that just as with transgendered people, lesbians too feel ‘at odds with their biological reality’. Bragg was speaking in support of those who wished to ban Stock from speaking at all, and of course I believe this standpoint to be odious and arrogant. But on the narrow point – that both lesbians and the transgendered feel themselves at odds with biological reality – he is incontestably correct. There is no gay gene.

Oh, but the odium poured down on his head by Mrs Dumbledore (and indeed, by her various semi-house-trained dementors). His assertion may be, she tweeted, ‘the most homophobic and misogynistic thing Billy Bragg has tweeted yet, which is a high bar’. And so this woman – who has endured years of the most revolting abuse from the trans lobby for her principled refusal to get with the programme and accept that trans women are every bit as authentically women as, er, women – resorted to exactly the same kind of ectoplasmic lefty abuse when her viewpoint was challenged.

I have a lot of respect for the way in which Rowling has fought her corner, and by the same token nothing but contempt for the largely talentless cast (especially Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe) of the Harry Potter films who hung her out to dry because they wanted to protect their horrible image of being right-on air-headed luvvies. But her response to Bragg showed that Rowling is also bunkered down in her utterly spurious victimhood silo and when challenged resorts to precisely the same deluded grammar. Never mind if what Bragg said was misogynistic and homophobic. Those words have simply become insults and have no connection anymore to reality. But what if he’s actually correct?

When you examine what he said, it is, as I mentioned, pretty much beyond argument. An awful lot of these terfs behave similarly, of course – they wish to be considered kosher to the left on every aspect of the culture wars except transgenderism, not realising that the grammar they once used to castigate men and straight society is now the very grammar being used against them. They helped to build the foundations for this epic intolerance of rational thought – and every so often the old ideology rears its head again and we are reminded that their embracing of rationality goes only so far, before evaporating with a gentle phhutt like a cigarette being extinguished in a lukewarm cup of coffee.

Who sat on the first TV sofa?

Sofa so good

Phillip Schofield has said that his career on the TV sofa is over. Who first sat on one? 

– BBC Breakfast, first broadcast on 17 January 1983, famously featured a red leather sofa which presenter Frank Bough told his audience was the ideal way to present a news programme. But the history of the TV sofa goes back a lot further. The Tonight Show, first broadcast on NBC in 1954, featured one from 1964 onwards – a surviving clip from that year shows presenter Johnny Carson standing in front of a blue cloth-upholstered sofa.

Death and taxes

How much does inheritance tax raise, and how many people pay it?

– In 2021/22 the tax raised £6.1bn. This is double what it raised a decade earlier. The analysis for how many people paid is a little behind, with the most recent figures available for 2019/20. In that financial year, 3.76% of deaths resulted in a tax burden. This is higher than a decade earlier, but not as high as the peak of 5.9% in 2006/07.

– In 2019/20 agricultural and business property relief was worth £2.8bn – i.e. that was the extra tax which would have been payable had the reliefs not existed. A further £1.6bn was avoided through legacies to qualifying charities and registered clubs.

– Female-owned estates paid more than did male-owned estates, to the tune of £240m. This is a reflection of wives more commonly outliving their husbands.

Ashes wins

Who has the better record in the Ashes?

– Since their inception, Australia have won 34 series and England 32. In spite of being inaugurated as a mock funeral of English cricket after England lost to Australia in a single test in the summer of 1882, England won all of the first 8 series. Australia won 8 series between 1989 and 2002.

– England lead in whitewashes, having 4 times won all the tests in a series. Australia have achieved this feat three times.

Bunking off

How bad is absenteeism from schools?

– In the current academic year to the week commencing 15 May the overall absence rate was 7.4%. This was made up of authorised absence (5.1%) and unauthorised (2.3%). The overall rate was 5.9% in primary schools and 9.1% in secondary schools. Some 22% of pupils were classified as persistently absent, having missed more than 10% of available sessions. About 17.5% of primary school pupils and 27.1% of secondary school pupils fell into this category.

Is it time for Britain to leave the WHO?

Since declaring Covid-19 to be ‘over as a global health emergency’ early last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has made it very clear that it has no intention of reforming. At its World Health Assembly two weeks ago, North Korea was among ten nations elected to sit on the WHO’s Executive Board, thereby giving Kim Jong-un’s totalitarian state the power to appoint WHO regional directors and potentially vote for the next director-general. The World Health Assembly did not censure North Korea for its countless human rights abuses, which include starving its own people. Instead it singled out Israel for criticism.

A few days later, as Russian bombs fell on Ukrainian families, the WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, met Putin’s deputy health minister to discuss what Dr Tedros described in an ill-advised tweet as Russia’s ‘work to advance maternal and child health’. Dr Tedros also found time to meet the president of Fifa, perhaps the only international organisation that has faced more allegations of corruption and incompetence, to sign a four-year extension of its Memorandum of Understanding.

With Covid-19 fading as a health threat, the WHO is keen to get back to talking about its real priorities. In April, it published ‘Reporting about alcohol: a guide for journalists’, an alleged ‘fact sheet’ largely written by neo-temperance campaigners which falsely claims that ‘there is no evidence for the common belief that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts can help people live longer by decreasing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or other conditions’. There is, in fact, a mountain of such evidence built up over decades.

Last month, the WHO published a report claiming that artificial sweeteners do not help people lose weight and may cause cancer. Last week, Dr Tedros declared that switching from smoking to vaping should not be seen as harm reduction and that e-cigarettes are ‘a trap’.

The WHO appears to have strayed further from its mission to protect health under Dr Tedros. Its failures during the pandemic are well known. The WHO denied that there was human-to-human transmission of Sars-CoV-2 taking place long after there obviously was. It did not declare a pandemic until 11 March 2020, weeks after the official criteria for a pandemic had been met. It denied that the virus was airborne despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and it told the public that face masks should not be worn by healthy people before suddenly flip-flopping and supporting mandatory mask laws. Dr Tedros claimed that stigma was more dangerous than the virus, applauded China’s ‘commitment to transparency’ and launched a bizarre attack on Taiwan, which he accused, without citing evidence, of being racist towards him.

One of Dr Tedros’s first acts as director-general was to appoint Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador. It was an early sign that the former health and foreign affairs minister of Ethiopia’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist political party responsible for numerous human rights abuses, might not have the soundest political judgment. The appointment was rescinded after a worldwide public backlash, but the fact that it was ever made says a lot about this broken and morally bankrupt organisation. How many WHO officials, from the executive board to the press office, nodded through the idea of celebrating a genocidal tyrant? Didn’t anyone think it would be a bad look? Does the WHO have any checks and balances at all?

There is an argument that the WHO has to engage with some of the world’s worst regimes to keep them onside. Lines of communication must be kept open and information must be shared. It would do no good for the WHO to kick the likes of Russia and North Korea out of the club. This is not the Eurovision Song Contest, after all.

But there is a difference between engaging with nasty dictatorships and publicly applauding them. Refusing to allow Taiwan to attend the World Health Assembly is arguably a necessary piece of realpolitik to keep China in the big tent, but did Dr Tedros really have to say, in January 2020, that China was ‘setting a new standard for outbreak response’ and that the Chinese Communist party’s partial and belated sharing of information about the virus was ‘very impressive and beyond words’? Did Dr Tedros’s predecessor, Margaret Chan, really have to say that North Korea had a health service that ‘most other developing countries would envy’ and remark positively on the low rates of obesity in that wretched country?

When Dr Tedros became the first African to lead the WHO, there were hopes that it would get the organisation back on track fighting infectious diseases – Margaret Chan had often seemed more interested in starting fights with what she called ‘Big Food, Big Soda and Big Alcohol’ than dealing with Ebola and Zika. Alas, Covid-19 showed the WHO to be as flat-footed as ever and as the pandemic fades in the rearview mirror, the organisation has returned to its comfort zone of flapping about western lifestyle issues.

There are legitimate questions about whether artificial sweeteners contribute significantly to weight loss in practice, but what purpose is served by suddenly advising people to avoid them, especially when the standard of the evidence in the accompanying WHO report is described by its own authors as ‘low certainty’ and ‘very low certainty’? How credible is this advice when the WHO is still telling food and drink companies that replacing sugars with artificial sweeteners is one of the ‘most cost-effective and overarching initiatives that can help to prevent NCDs [non-communicable diseases]?’

As for vaping, the WHO has always been hostile and has become even more trenchant since the billionaire nanny statist Michael Bloomberg started funding it. Bloomberg, who is now a WHO goodwill ambassador, makes no secret of his desire to wipe e-cigarettes off the face of the Earth. On 2 June, Dr Tedros said in a press conference: ‘When the tobacco industry introduced electronic cigarettes and vaping, one narrative they tried to really sell is that this is part of harm reduction. It is not true. It actually is a trap. Kids are being recruited at early age, ten, 11, 12 to do vaping and e-cigarettes because they think that it is cool because it comes in different colours, different flavours and so on. Then they get hooked for life. And most actually move into regular cigarette smoking.’

This is simply untrue. The tobacco industry did not invent e-cigarettes. Vaping was well established by the time tobacco companies entered the market. All credible health agencies, including the Royal College of Physicians, agree that e-cigarettes are vastly safer than smoking and are a textbook example of harm reduction. There is no evidence that most children who take up vaping become smokers. On the contrary, underage smoking has virtually disappeared in the UK and the USA as vaping has become popular.

The WHO is currently working on a Pandemic Preparedness Treaty, and there has been paranoid talk about a world government enforcing lockdowns and travel bans. In truth, the treaty is a largely bureaucratic affair which does not mention such ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ at all. The WHO does not have the means to force such policies on member states even if it was minded to (and it is against travel bans in any case). The problem with the WHO is not that it is looking forward to the next pandemic but that it lacks the competence to tackle infectious diseases and is constantly meddling in issues that go far beyond its original remit.

The organisation achieved some great things in the 20th century but it cannot dine out for ever on eradicating smallpox. It cannot expect to be taken seriously while it cosies up to some of the world’s worst regimes.

Or perhaps it can. Member states talk about reform but that talk is never followed by action. Dr Tedros was comfortably re-elected last year. Last month’s World Health Assembly saw member states agree to increase their financial contributions by 20 per cent, no questions asked. This sent a message that the WHO can do what it wants – and so it does. At times it feels as if it is actively trolling the public to see what it can get away with, to see how far it can push member states before one of them finally says: ‘Enough.’

The UK is a particularly soft touch. It is the biggest single donor to the WHO’s Core Voluntary Contributions, handing over un-restricted grants to be spent however the agency likes and making no meaningful attempt to get it to clean up its act in return. When Donald Trump threatened to withdraw US funding in 2020, the UK immediately stepped up with a 30 per cent increase in its own funding.

It seems unlikely that the UK will use its largesse to demand transformational change at the out-of-control WHO, but it should. If the UK doesn’t have the stomach for the fight, other countries should take the lead and, if the WHO continues on its downward spiral, they should have the courage to pick up their money and walk away.

How women became essential to the mafia’s survival

The Calabrian mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, were once something of a side-show compared with the more famous Sicilian mafia. Now they are the largest criminal organisation in Europe. Last month, European police arrested more than 130 ’Ndrangheta members in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Spain in a coordinated swoop codenamed ‘Eureka’. Almost all have been charged with drug-dealing, money-laundering or crimes of violence.

The ’Ndrangheta traditionally specialised in kidnapping, operating in the inaccessible region of Aspromonte, the toe of Italy, for centuries out of reach of the forces of law and order. In the 1990s, the Italian government decided to build a steel plant and a port in Calabria. The steel plant never opened and the port, at Gioia Tauro, looked like another white elephant. But it was able to receive the largest container ships in the world, and the ’Ndrangheta saw their opportunity. Two million containers a year now pass through Gioia Tauro – and it is estimated that 80 per cent of Europe’s cocaine does too.   

Like other mafia organisations, the ’Ndrangheta is intensely conservative; it hates the state and loves private enterprise, it reveres the family unit and the extended clan structure. While a man gets rich and gains a reputation for himself, his wife stays at home, looks after the children, spends his money and goes to church. Often the only confidant beyond the women of the family is the village priest. 

Women are the silent but essential collaborators of the mafia. The men are united by the ties of kinship. In a profession where it is hard to trust anyone, one trusts one’s sister’s son and one’s wife’s brother; nephews and brothers-in-law abound in mafia history. The connection between the men is provided by the women. It is the grandmothers, the mothers and the aunts who hold the clan together and establish if a youngster is un bravo ragazzo, a good boy, someone to be trusted. In the recent operation, the police drew up a family tree of the various factions of the ’Ndrangheta, showing who was related and connected to whom – an essential way of understanding how the organisation works.

A bravo ragazzo might be a messenger boy by the age of ten, perhaps charged with delivering drugs in his early teens; within a few years he will aim to establish a name for himself. Consider Don Salvatore Cappello, who, aged 14, won renown for stealing the Bishop of Trapani’s pectoral cross, snatching it from around the episcopal neck. By the age of 16, young criminals like Cappello are on the way to getting married, almost always to a girl from a dependable family, recommended and introduced by a mother, grandmother or aunt. Cappello, thought responsible for 200 murders, went down at the age of 31; he was sentenced to life but left behind him a wife and four children. One understands the trajectory of his career, but what was in it for her? 

In the first place, money is a major inducement. In the south of Italy, a land of grinding poverty for hundreds of years, where the last famine was in the late 1940s, where unemployment is endemic and where families are haunted by the memory of living in a single room and children going barefoot, knowing you have plenty of money is deeply reassuring. 

Marrying a mafioso also means having an uxorious husband who wants children. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, but the alpha males of the mafia are very keen on having babies; they know that they may well be dead or in jail before long. The idea that there will be children to inherit and carry on the family name is important. Women are the guarantee that the family reputation will continue into the next generation.  

It would obviously be hard to live with a man who is responsible for 200 murders or the tide of cocaine flooding Europe, but the mafia wife never asks about her husband’s work any more than he would dare criticise her cooking. Of course she knows, but she has chosen not to know. This is the most powerful omertà of all, the silence one practises with oneself.  

If you have killed 200 men, it might be hard to live with the memory, and here the mafia wife performs her greatest task of all. With her, you are an attentive husband, a doting father to the children, someone who compliments her pasta sauce in the most extravagant terms; you put up with her demands and her little temper tantrums because you are a normal loving guy. You are not a monster; you are the man she loves. She, the mafia wife, makes it possible for you to delude yourself.  

She and the children go to church every Sunday; they go on pilgrimages; they all fervently pray for you. Things may turn out badly – you might end up in jail or dead, most do – but in the long run everything will be fine, because your family will ensure your eternal salvation. You may not believe, but they do, and that is enough for God, the one who hears the prayers of women and children. As for her, kneeling in church with her Gucci bag and her children next to her, praying for her husband, that is what Italian women have done for centuries. 

It doesn’t always work that way, though. Santa Puglisi, daughter of a mafia boss, was married to a mafia man a year her senior, widowed at the age of 22, and shot dead in 1996 while praying at her murdered husband’s tomb. With her at the cemetery in Catania was a cousin, Salvatore Botta, aged 14, killed at her side, and another cousin, aged 12, who escaped. That was unusual; most mafia wives live peaceful lives, unaffected by the violence which is their husbands’ stock in trade.

The inversion of history

It is 18 years since the last Colditz drama on British television, which apparently means we need a new one. And the times being what they are, it appears that the drama will have to reflect the values of our little cultural-revolutionary period.

Like most adaptations of already well-known stories, this one will be based on a book by Ben Macintyre. He is a fine popular regurgitator of history who has previously brought to public notice such things as the hitherto untold story of a spy named Kim Philby. The television adaptation of that book, A Spy Among Friends, was well-acted, though marred by having a working-class northern woman as an MI5 officer. To make her even more saintly she was also married to a black man who had come to Britain to give his life working for the NHS.

This whole strand of the story, you may be surprised to hear, was fictional. But that is the way with these things now. You can’t just have a nice spy story about British heroes and villains. If it is set in the pre-multicultural era, everything must be retrofitted so that the past more exactly resembles the present.

Viewers of the forthcoming Colditz have even more treats in store. Last weekend Macintyre told the Hay literary festival that the adaptation of his latest book would dismantle the ‘mythology’ of Colditz. This ‘21st-century narrative’ view of events at the camp will apparently especially focus on the ‘appalling racism’ at the castle. Not the appalling racism of the German guards, mind. Rather, the appalling racism of the British officers imprisoned there. Douglas Bader, for instance.

Macintyre told his Liberal Democrat audience that Bader – perhaps this country’s most celebrated Spitfire fighter ace of the war – was ‘a monster… racist, snobbish, brutally unpleasant to anyone he considered of a lower socioeconomic order’. These are just some of the important elements that will apparently blow apart the ‘myth’ of Colditz. I hope that people without legs point out that Bader was one of theirs and tell Macintyre where to stick it. This might be the only way to fight to a stalemate.

The Colditz news came at an interesting time. Within hours of that story breaking, I learned that there are to be no such people in history as the Anglo-Saxons. Cambridge University has apparently decided henceforth to teach that they did not exist as a distinct ethnic group. It is part of what the university describes as an effort to undermine ‘myths of nationalism’, specifically an effort by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic to make its teaching more ‘anti-racist’ and ‘dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism’.

I wish that someone had thought of that a couple of decades earlier. Instead of sweating through the night trying to memorise all of Beowulf to pass my Anglo-Saxon translation exam, I could have just said: ‘No such people ever existed. As an anti-racist I know this to be true. Therefore I am dismantling this exam.’

Of course the uniting oddity of these efforts to dismantle, problematise and indeed disappear our history is that it is only our own ‘myths’ – and truths – that must be so dismantled. It is only we who must have any heroes who demonstrated extraordinary heroism and stoicism ripped from us.

Likewise, it is the ‘first peoples’ of these islands who must be disappeared. I do not notice anybody trying this on any other nationalities. It might be thought slightly rude to go to Australia, say, and tell the Aboriginal peoples that they need their ‘myths’ taken away from them and oh, by the way, your ancestors didn’t exist. Try it with some Native Americans and see how far you get. Yet so long as those being robbed of their history are white and British, it’s all fair and good. All part of some kind of ‘levelling’ that is being attempted in our society.

One sign that it fits into some grander project can be told from the fact that while our own history is being rewritten or erased altogether, we are inventing myths that favour other groups. Consider the recent Netflix series in which Cleopatra was played by a black woman. The doolally, race-obsessed Americans responsible for the series decided that Cleopatra was not a Macedonian, but an African. In fact she was a sort of early, prototype African–American. Needless to say, the decision to cast her like this was inspired by another of the most recognisable characters of our age: the ‘strong woman’. Our age has an extraordinary desire to show young women that there were strong women – and especially strong African-American women across history. Especially in Ancient Egypt. As they say: ‘Yas, Kween.’

That Cleopatra actually was an absolute monarch and owned many slaves is apparently not the point. We are simply meant to accept the narrative that it is not sufficient to claim black Americans built America – now they must be said to have built the world. Always in a very kind and caring way, of course.

I cannot be the only person who notices the asymmetry at work here – the effort to rip apart our own myths and truths while inventing wholly new myths about other groups of people. The former always being negative, the latter always being only ever positive.

Naturally all this is an insult to the very idea of historical truth. But it is also a specific insult to the British public. I don’t know how many people are in favour of the heroes of Colditz being turned into racist monsters. But I doubt that there will be many who favour this while African-Americans are turned into gods of Ancient Egypt. A certain unfairness seems to be at work. So let me suggest that we right it. Here would be my deal. We are allowed to have our heroes and you are allowed to have yours.

The kids aren’t ‘trans’ – they just don’t want to grow up

If we rule out the notion that people have ‘gendered souls’ at odds with their biological sex – and we do, absolutely, rule that out – then there still has to be some explanation for the unstoppable rise in the numbers of young people who call themselves trans. A survey of secondary school teachers in England has found that nearly 75 per cent say they now have at least one trans pupil. What’s behind it?

Well here, to celebrate Pride month, is my theory. I’ve spent many terrible rubber-necking evenings in the online trans world and my strong impression is that the whole phenomenon is (amongst other things) a desperate desire to remain childlike. We’ve scared the kids so much with talk of fascism, racism and the planet’s imminent demise that they just don’t fancy growing up. The eternal puberty of transition, painful as it is, offers them a way out, a way to be looked after for ever.

I owe this thought to Dylan Mulvaney, the social media celeb. Dylan is the trans woman (i.e. man) who was paid to promote Bud Light in what might well be recorded as the most disastrous publicity stunt in marketing history and lost Bud Light 60 per cent of their sales in a week. He made his name documenting his transition on TikTok, under the brilliantly aggravating title ‘Days of Girlhood’. He poses in ladies’ pants and has real skill with a brow pencil, so it makes perfect sense that he has also been called in to the White House to meet Joe Biden. ‘I feel very very strongly,’ the President told him, ‘that you should have every single solitary right including use of your gender identity bathrooms in public.’

It’s to Dylan’s credit that terfs like me find it almost impossible not to follow his antics. Terf stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, and it’s a weird, almost symbiotic relationship that we angry terfs have with trans activists; a toxic co-dependency. We grind our terfy teeth in fury at Dylan’s parody of ‘womanhood’, but we stay glued to his social media, and so his popularity grows.

In one clip I saw, Dylan said to camera that ‘I recently told my parents that I might be a little bit interested in women and that was a big shock for them considering the past ten years of coming out as gay then queer then non-binary then trans.’ Dylan laughed hysterically and I looked at his post-op face, his shaved jawbone and flat Adam’s apple, the expensively softened features, and thought: it’s not a woman that Dylan wants to be so much as a child.

Look at his hunger for attention; the delight in shocking his parents. He’s not 26 so much as six. It’s often pointed out that a trans woman’s idea of femininity is an ugly stereotype, all overdone make-up and peachy frills. Dylan does love a party dress. But isn’t that pretty childish too? Girls love sequins and unicorns. Then they grow up.

Women I admire such as Helen Joyce (the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality) will insist that for many men, dressing up, then transitioning, is a sexual fetish, not childish at all. But perhaps it can be both. Andrea Long Chu is an American writer who was compelled to transition, he says, after becoming obsessed with a genre of pornography called ‘sissy porn’, in which straight men are forced into lacy dresses like reluctant seven-year olds. I’m very sorry to bring it up. But this isn’t some backwater of the internet; Chu is mainstream. He just won a Pulitzer for his book containing his thoughts on what it means to be female – and sissy porn, it turns out, is horrifyingly popular.

If I haven’t yet mentioned the girls, it’s only because I think they’re a more obvious case in point. Girls who want to be boys now account for the vast majority of trans kids. Many of them are autistic, almost all suffer from anxiety. But given the ubiquity of violent porn and all the talk of choking and slapping, given the drag-queen aesthetic, is it really any wonder they want to beat a retreat?

All the breast-binding and the mastectomies look to me more like an attempt to back out of puberty than to be masculine. The dream aesthetic for girls who want to transition seems to be Justin Bieber when he was 16, but looked ten. In all my scuttling about online I’ve never found a genderqueer teen girl who aims to look like Clint Eastwood.

Last week, for this magazine, I interviewed the American psychologist Jean Twenge. We discussed the depressing state of Gen Z’s mental health and the need to pry the smartphones from their grabby hands. What we didn’t address in that conversation was her ‘slow life’ theory – that each new generation extends childhood and delays the age of responsibility. If teens in the West these days don’t drink, date or have sex as much as previous generations, it’s not because they’re more mature, but because they’re developing later. Today’s 16-year-olds aren’t, for the most part, socially or emotionally ready to get smashed or laid.

Twenge says that ‘a slow life strategy is going to be more likely in a safe environment, where people have fewer children and people live longer and expect to start their own families later and to have their education last longer. And that’s a pretty good description of today’s environment. Overall, I think these trends are a net good. However, parents also need to recognise that older teens in particular need more experience with independence.’

But what if slow life theory is also an explanation for the explosion of trans kids? What if Gen Z has pushed the cult of childhood too far and is simply refusing to grow up? I’m not denying that there are activists who dream of ‘queering the world’, or that Stonewall isn’t effective. That wouldn’t seem fair to them in this of all months. But it’s possible that what the trans kids really long for is escape.

Can cloning bring endangered species back from the brink?

This spring, San Diego Zoo’s Wildlife Alliance proudly announced the arrival of Trey, a newborn colt. Trey is a Przewalski’s horse – the last wild horse species on the planet, and one of the least pronounceable (say ‘zhuh-varl-skis’ and you’ll be close). It was another small conservation victory. But Trey is particularly unusual, because this little pony is a clone.

Trey is genetically identical to Kuporovic, a stallion whose cells were cryonically preserved in 1980. He’s also a genetic twin of Kurt, the first ever cloned Przewalski’s horse, born in 2020. This is big news in the cloning world: until now, cloning has only produced one individual from an endangered species. Kurt was bred by the Wildlife Alliance, cloning firm ViaGen and Revive and Restore, a ‘genetic rescue’ organisation based in California which aims to reshape the conservation landscape with radically high-tech solutions.

One scientist described Trey’s birth as ‘an enormously hopeful, unprecedented step’: he will reintroduce genetic diversity to a shrinking species which has survived, barely, by inbreeding. But can this really be all it’s cracked up to be? Isn’t it too late for our battered ecosystems to start mucking around with cloning?

Przewalski’s horses (aka ‘P-horses’) are Mongolia’s sacred national animal. After tens of thousands of years roaming free across Eurasia, they found their former range limited, partly by good weather. After the last ice age ended, European steppes were replaced by forests less hospitable for grazing, and the horses retreated east.

A report by the Russian geographer and explorer Nikolai Przewalski introduced the horses to European science in 1881, noting their shyness, speed and sensitive noses. But habitat loss to farming, mining and harsh winters over the next few decades led to the species being declared extinct in the wild in 1969. After 160,000 years, Przewalski’s – still the only horse never domesticated by humans – became exclusively zoo-based.

By the 1950s, the breeding population had fallen to 12. The remaining horses had to be bred up, but zoos didn’t exchange their animals often enough and stallions were mated with their own daughters or granddaughters. By the mid-1970s, after a catastrophic genetic bottleneck, a few hundred had been laboriously inbred, a pale imitation of their wild ancestors.

A studbook was established in 1977, plus a foundation advising on breeding to increase diversity. Then the next phase began – teaching the horses how to live independently in the wild. Slowly, Przewalski’s horses were released into reserves across Mongolia and Hungary. The zoo-born animals had low immunity and often died in the winters. Nevertheless, the species clambered from ‘extinct in the wild’ to ‘critically endangered’ in 2008, then to simply ‘endangered’ in 2011. This double-downlisting was a huge victory for conservationists, as reintroduction doesn’t always go this well. Today, there are about 2,000 Przewalski’s horses, either in captivity or at reintroduction sites. But their genetic stock is still limited.

Cloning may come to the ‘genetic rescue’: the process imports genes from a distant population to buck up an inbred one. The problem is that with some species like the P-horse, there are no distant populations; except for the fact that as Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology at UCSC and board member at Revive and Restore, puts it: ‘Forty years ago people had the brilliant idea to preserve these tissue samples in a way that meant the cells were still alive.’

Shapiro advocates cloning to boost diversity, but grants that cloning is simply part of an overall conservation package. John Ewen, a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London, is more circumspect. While he thinks it’s ‘potentially useful as a conservation tool, how much it’s actually going to be critical for preventing extinction of this species, I’m not sure’. Instead, ‘it’s habitat and potential environmental catastrophes and climate change that are going to be the critical determiners’.

Of the world’s ‘national animals’, 35 per cent are threatened with extinction. So are thousands of less charismatic species: 12 per cent of birds, 23 per cent of mammals and a thumping 32 per cent of amphibians. Wild species are going extinct at a thousand times the natural rate. How viable is cloning, then, considering the huge number of endangered species? Shapiro’s argument is that we must get freezing now in order to have options in the future.

The scientists who cloned Kurt and Trey have done something potentially very useful for the P-horse’s genetic stock. Ewen is cautiously welcoming about that – but then again, ‘genetics is just one element of it’. Another way to regain diversity is by breeding populations to a much bigger size so that such diversity returns naturally.

Even more hotly debated than cloning endangered species is the idea of resurrecting extinct ones. Another biotech outfit, Colossal, is keen on bringing back the woolly mammoth – in reality more an ‘Arctic-adapted elephant’, Shapiro explains. She disagrees with my suggestion that these efforts might soak up existing conservation budgets, limiting other species’ chances of survival. She’s very clear that ‘I’m not saying we should do these things instead of traditional conservation’, and observes that Colossal has just raised $225 million from biotech fans who never invested in conservation before.

Shapiro’s optimism is infectious, and she agrees that habitat conservation is vital too: ‘The goal is to help species alive today adapt to their changing habitats so they can stick around.’ Bring on the next step: by gene-editing particular species, like the black-footed ferret or the American chestnut tree, we can make them tougher and more likely to survive – often so as to survive the problems or pestilences we introduced them to in the first place. It all sounds rather like the old lady who cloned a spider to catch a fly, but further intervention might be the best hope for the future. Perhaps many other endangered species – including the delicate, charming Przewalski’s horse, which has trotted right to the edge and looked over – might make their way along the narrow path back.

Is anywhere safe for Paul Kagame’s critics?

After weeks of travelling – first Paris, then Kinshasa – I was looking forward to my evening at L’Horloge du Sud in Brussels. Known for its poisson liboké (fish wrapped in banana leaf) and other African specialities, the restaurant is popular with the city’s African diaspora. I’d been invited by a Pan-African thinktank to discuss my book on Rwanda.

It was not to be. The day before, I got a call from the Benin journalist due to chair the event. He sounded rattled. The restaurant owner, he said, had been receiving complaints from pro-government Rwandan groups in Brussels, along with threatening emails and anonymous calls from Rwanda itself. His organisation was telling the owner to hold fast, but in its history of staging contentious African debates, it had never experienced this level of intimidation.

‘Tell him this is just the way dictatorships silence debate,’ I said. ‘Plenty of African governments do it.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ said my would-be chair, his voice rising. ‘They are accusing you of being a well-known négationniste. They are threatening to take the owner to court and say they are ready to wreck the place.’

Ah yes, négationnisme – ‘genocide denial’ – in theory, a crime under Belgian law. As a journalist who in 1994 walked through churches and classrooms in Rwanda where hundreds of men, women and children had been macheted and shot, I have never felt remotely inclined to deny the genocide. I saw the bodies; on a bad day, I can still recall the whiff of putrefaction. Why on earth would I deny an episode upon which I once reported?

But that misses the point. Négationniste has become a term used by the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to refer to anyone who dares to criticise President Paul Kagame. If I was being surreally libelled, so, routinely, are respectable academics, journalists and – even more grotesquely – members of the Tutsi minority whose families were targeted for elimination by Hutu militiamen and Rwandan army soldiers back in the day. I can only imagine how a Tutsi who lost loved ones in 1994 feels at being slurred in this way for voicing concerns at Kagame’s escalating authoritarianism.

The irony was striking. My book – now out in French translation – focuses on Kagame’s post-genocide track record of ‘trans-national repression’: the systematic targeting of Rwandan dissidents, journalists and human rights activists who have fled the country – a campaign that extends from hounding on social media to assassination.

With every anonymous phone call and retweet denouncing me as a ‘tropical Nazi’, the regime in Kigali was actually confirming my book’s central thesis. More bizarrely still, it was attempting to silence a British journalist just when the Home Office’s agreement to send unwanted asylum-seekers to Rwanda was being challenged in the Court of Appeal: clumsy timing, to say the least.

But subtlety has never been Kagame’s or the RPF’s strong point. And when it comes to trying to close down events, they have plenty of form. In April, a book launch planned by my French publisher in Paris was scratched when management at the hotel concerned suddenly decided it could not guarantee security. In South Africa last May, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) cancelled a planned seminar with just eight hours’ notice after complaints from Rwandan officials. The ISS is one of the few independent thinktanks on the African continent and its executive director – a man who might be expected to feel strongly about free speech – promised me at the time that the event would be rescheduled once the Rwandans identified someone willing to join me on a platform. Surprise, surprise, no name was ever forthcoming.

And that’s the point. However seemingly intellectually self-assured – and for defiant self-confidence it’s hard to beat Kagame and his ministers – dictatorships are allergic to challenge of any kind. As Professor Filip Reyntjens (a Belgian Rwandan expert also, of course, smeared as a négationniste) marvelled on Twitter: ‘Isn’t it weird that not a single RPF supporter, Rwandan or foreign, dares engage in a contradictory debate? They all chicken out… without exception.’

Predictably, L’Horloge du Sud’s owner decided it was all too much. A triumphant flyer circulated on social media with the words annulé pour cause de négationnisme plastered across my face.

But the Conseil Panafricain de Belgique thinktank rose gloriously to the occasion. It promptly announced that the event was being relocated to a hall on the other side of Brussels. That was a decoy address. A three-man posse – Togolese, Congolese and Guinean – politely checked bona fides on the pavement before directing arrivals to the correct location nearby.

Our event was packed – standing room only – and the copies of my book sold out. At the end I asked the chairman, Olivier Dossou, if the minders had turned away any potential saboteurs. ‘We reckon there were three. They looked Rwandan, they were asking for “the well-known négationniste” and they were extremely insistent. Too insistent.’ Next time they staged a Rwandan event, he said, the organisers would be primed.

What’s shocking is how this bullying is carried out, absolutely routinely, on foreign soil, in country after country, by an African regime heavily dependent on foreign aid and international philanthropy. Exploiting EU legislation originally drafted to outlaw racism and xenophobia, Rwanda tries to impose its narrative in any country where it happens to have a diaspora and an embassy. Too often, it succeeds.

If Suella Braverman has her way and the Court of Appeal agrees with last year’s judges’ ruling that the Rwanda asylum scheme is legal, hundreds of people fleeing political persecution in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea could in theory soon be headed Rwanda’s way. The mind boggles.

Letters: we don’t need a Covid inquiry

Toothless inquiries

Sir: You rightly say that inquiries in Britain have become a form of cover-up (‘The politics of panic’, June 3). This is clear as we contemplate the delay in reporting on the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the £200 million spent on the Bloody Sunday report published 38 years after the event, the seven-year delay in concluding the Chilcot inquiry, and the shaming fact that Sweden has reported on its handling of Covid before our inquiry has even begun. 

Instead of spending costly parliamentary and civil service time and astronomical sums on expensive lawyers and experts looking backwards and learning too little far too late from inquiries, our resources should be employed to focus on the future to resolve the long-term problems that are neglected by politicians who seek re-election every four or five years. Their priorities should include national security, stemming sewage and water leaks, fixing our broken justice system, social care, the NHS, potholed highways, cladding on tower blocks and asbestos in classrooms, instead of leaving these problems for future generations to deal with while parliamentarians kick the can down the road by setting up yet another useless and toothless inquiry to no productive purpose at unacceptable taxpayers’ expense.

Trevor Lyttleton

London NW11

Electric dreams

Sir: We do not need a protracted and futile post-Covid inquiry – Lionel Shriver has summed everything up in four pithy phrases in her latest article (‘Let’s rise up in our road rage’, 3 June). ‘Economically self-destructive, socially disastrous, politically despotic and medically idiotic regime’: case closed. Now let’s move on to deal with new items of idiocy, focusing on ‘net zero’. In the fixation with electric cars, has anyone considered how people dependent on secondhand cars are to remain mobile for work in future? I don’t anticipate a thriving market in secondhand electric cars.

I live in a care home in a delightful part of west Suffolk, where no public transport system exists. The staff have to use their own vehicles, all of which are secondhand petrol- and diesel-engined. They are also suffering under the burdens of rising fuel costs for their cars and domestic heating. Additionally, they are at increasing risk of being seriously inconvenienced by road flooding because of dwindling funding of drainage from local authorities and the Environment Agency. Perhaps they will have to depend on horses in future – but of course horses are flatulent creatures, so methane discharges will increase. 

James Dent

Brent Eleigh, Suffolk

Hainsworth Mill

Sir: I was intrigued by Martin Vander Weyer’s suggestion (Any other business, 13 May) that the Hainsworth Mill at Pudsey should become part of a British luxury group to rival the likes of LVMH. My great-great-great-great grandfather Abimilech ‘Old-Bim’ Hainsworth started the business aged 14; 240 years later, my extended family and I currently have no plans to sell. If Martin hasn’t had the opportunity to visit the mill, I’m sure it could be arranged the next time he is in Yorkshire.

Charlie Hainsworth,

Zurich

Sitzpinklers

Sir: I was much amused by Toby Young’s comments on sitzpinkling (No sacred cows, 27 May). As an adjunct, I quote a maxim well known to physics students: ‘No matter how you shake and squeeze, the last few drops go down your knees.’ This was jocularly and erroneously known as Archimedes’ last principle.

John Blakey

Heaton Moor, Greater Manchester

Sitting comfortably

Sir: While some men may baulk at the idea of sitting down to pee, sleep experts recommend ‘not waking up the brain’ when getting up in the middle of the night for that call of nature. Not turning on lights, keeping one’s eyes half-closed, sitting down to pee, and washing hands can all be done in the dark, thus minimising sleep interruption. 

Bob Day

Adelaide, South Australia

Cheese injury

Sir: I read with amusement the article by Mark Mason on British folk sports (Books, 3 June). Last week we advertised for sale on eBay a wheelchair in very good condition. The same day we received a message from a gentleman from Texas. He was staying in Cheltenham and had travelled over to take part in the cheese rolling on Cooper’s Hill and as a result had broken his ankle in three places. He was delighted with his acquisition and the fact that he was treated in the local hospital without charge. He was last seen happily drinking in the local pub.

Martin Sobey

Evesham, Worcs

Banana break

Sir: I was with Charles Moore in Ukraine (Notes, 3 June) and had the pleasure of filming him eat a banana while my friend Kolya demonstrated how to operate a semi-automatic safely (the perils of not scheduling a lunch break). Charles mentions that Ukrainians affectionately Ukrainianised Boris Johnson’s surname to ‘Johnsoniuk’. This is also a play on his Instagram handle, which is @borisjohnsonuk. Ukrainians are not ones to let an invasion get in the way of a good pun.

Benedict Westenra

By email

Crüelty

Sir: Michael Hann’s savage disdain for Mötley Crüe (Arts, 3 June) is shared by Half Man Half Biscuit. Their song ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ contains the lyrics: ‘Help Mrs Medlicott, I don’t know what to do,/ I’ve only got three bullets and there’s four of Mötley Crüe.’

Richard Briand

Leek, Staffs

If inheritance tax can’t be scrapped let’s change it for the better

I’d happily jump on the Telegraph bandwagon for the abolition of inheritance tax, even in the company of Liz Truss and Nigel Farage. The urge to provide a cushion of capital for children and grandchildren is an honourable one. Recipients of already-taxed cash from deceased relatives are arguably less likely to be burdens on the state in their own later lives, just as the state is unlikely to spend the same money, if confiscated, in efficient ways for the greater good. And to argue against inheritance is to put socialist hostility to wealth ahead of the worthy aim of family betterment. Enough said.

The trouble with this campaign, however, is that it’s also a call for a £7 billion tax cut for the better-off, which simply isn’t going to happen. Certainly not ahead of the next general election; perhaps only in some imaginary golden future of fiscal surplus and Tory swagger. I don’t even hold out hope for an uplift in the £325,000 IHT threshold that was frozen in 2010 and should be £450,000 by now to keep up with inflation but will stay where it is, by Jeremy Hunt’s decree, until 2028; as will the additional £175,000 ‘residence nil-rate band’ for homes bequeathed to direct descendants.

But still there’s room for creative thinking. Why not, for example, use IHT to address the issue of future burdens on the state more directly, by creating an additional nil-rate band for capital passed into descendants’ pension pots – to remain there untouched until retirement age? If that device became a catalyst for a new habit of pension-building among the young who currently save nothing, could anyone object?

Our people are missing

‘A renewed CBI for our members, our stakeholders and our people’ was a headline that helped the business lobby group win its ‘vote of confidence’ on Tuesday. It was the title of a 28-page manifesto setting out commitments to internal reform, improved governance and more effective external focus, and ‘our people’ – meaning the CBI’s 250 staff, as in ‘Chief People Officer’, meaning personnel director – were mentioned in almost every paragraph.

But if the verbal pitch carried the day, corporate psychologists must have been more intrigued by the document’s cover artwork – depicting green woodland against a melancholy rural background, with a graphic line looping overhead to descend in the midst of the trees. Maybe it was meant to suggest ‘sustainable growth’, though not in an industrial sense. More obviously, it said ‘not out of the woods yet’ or simply ‘lost’. But given that there are no people in the photo – nor indeed, apart from president Brian McBride and director-general Rain Newton-Smith, anywhere else in the prospectus – the strongest subliminal message was ‘no one would give permission for their face to appear in a CBI document’. One way or another the emerging rival, British Chambers of Commerce’s ‘Business Council’, looks the better horse to back.

UK specialists wanted

In any global share portfolio managed from London, the proportion of UK equities held is likely to be well below 10 per cent – and if the investor has strong views on relative prospects in rival markets, closer to zero. That’s not unpatriotic: it’s a reflection of how the world sees us.

But a plethora of current reviews and proposals aimed at making our capital markets function more efficiently in support of stronger UK economic growth – including ideas for consolidating smaller pension funds into megafunds that might invest in private equity and infrastructure as well as high-tech listed UK companies – all tend to agree that City skills have diminished in one vital respect. We no longer have a critical mass of specialist fund managers and research analysts devoted to the search for value in UK assets and patiently engaged with the companies and projects they invest in or follow.

Let me therefore salute Richard Buxton, who is due to retire this summer from the Jupiter UK Alpha fund after delivering average annual returns of 8 per cent for his investors over the past two decades.

Buxton believes in holding a limited number of UK blue chips, often unfashionable ones, for the long-term: his largest stakes included Glencore, Drax, BP and Shell in the energy sector and both Lloyds and Barclays in banking. He expresses strong views on corporate governance and boardroom pay – favouring long-term equity awards with restricted rights to sell, rather than the typical bonus-plus-three-year-incentive plans which (he argues and I agree) encourage executives to shoot unwisely for short-term performance.

Buxton has also been a reliable source of pithy quotes. I particularly relished his dismissal last year of Unilever boss Alan Jope’s doomed £50 billion bid for GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer healthcare arm: ‘The idea of letting the goons at Unilever run [the GSK business] is laughable.’ I hope Buxton finds a new City platform. He’d be a great non-executive director for a ‘UK future’ megafund.

A crowd of bow ties

At a celebration for the life of Lord (David) Young of Graffham, in the ornate if mildly incongruous surroundings of Freemasons’ Hall, there were many references to his lifelong belief in enterprise as a force for good and his personal enthusiasm for digital gadgetry. We were also reminded that Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand minister was a man of distinctive sartorial style, his family’s choice of bow ties as the dress code for the crowded occasion enabling him, as one speaker noted, to deliver a posthumous sales boost to the very old-tech sector of dicky-bow makers.

Our Economic Innovator Awards are likewise eclectic in welcoming entries from every kind of business – and founded on the Youngian idea that there is no area of life which entrepreneurship cannot make better. A gentle reminder that the closing date for entries is next Friday, 16 June.

The Ancient Greeks would have been horrified by Just Stop Oil

What would ancient Greeks have made of the current protests relating to the oil industry and identity reassignment? Very little indeed.

The Greek invention of democracy (‘people power’) emerged in the late 6th century bc after strong popular demand for more political control over tyrants and oligarchs. The result was a system in which all male citizens over 18 debated and determined all political questions in the regular Assemblies. Most official posts were held, usually for one year, by citizens who presented themselves for selection by lot (voting was considered meritocratic, not democratic), with serious consequences for failure.

Anyone who wished to wield power could do so only through his capacity to persuade a majority of the all-powerful Assembly. This is where free speech came in. Every citizen had a right to an ‘equal say’ (isegoria) in the Assembly to express his views or propose a motion. Likewise, every citizen had a right to parrhesia (literally, ‘saying everything’), i.e. an unconstrained frankness of public utterance. But these were ‘rights’ only because a (rescindable) law made them so.

So any Greek who wanted to Just Stop Olive Oil had to Just Persuade The Assembly. To ‘persuade’ people by frustrating their normal life was to use force, inviting force in return, when the point of democracy was to replace force with peaceful agreement. 

As for those urging gender changes on children who rather feel like it, a Greek’s reaction – incredulity and outrage apart – would probably have been to wonder how banners, uproar and silently glueing yourself to tarmac would persuade anyone, or indicate at all how the community would benefit. Such tactics do not win debates, let alone respect. 

But debate is the last thing these people want. They have different tactics: cancellation and the fear that generates, especially among the young, of speaking out. Maoist re-education seems to be working rather well.

The trouble with returning the Benin Bronzes

Once, museum curators saw their job as collecting, conserving and displaying to the public works of art or humbler objects that were beautiful, interesting and representative of a time and a place. Now many of them want to get rid of, or at least hide away, objects that they pronounce shameful. Cambridge University, under its present administrators, has been following the fashion. The Fitzwilliam Museum has taken down a painting by Stanley Spencer – ‘Love among the Nations’ – on the grounds that ‘Raised on the moral rightness of British imperial rule, Spencer imagines civilisation firmly in the West and savagery in its colonies’. So that’s you dealt with, Spencer.

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology – a small treasure-house of objects from round the world – decided to dispose of 116 ‘Benin Bronzes’. However, what was planned as the rapid ‘restitution’ of ill-gotten gains seems to have run into difficulties and has been postponed until October. No reasons have been made public, but it seems likely that those who made the original decision have suddenly realised that it raises issues more complex than they supposed.

The Cambridge authorities were keen to go along with the Benin Dialogue Group, which after originally advocating a programme of loans, has for some time been promoting complete transfer of ownership. The university agreed to this in principle even before a formal request had been made. When that request came, in January 2022, it was in the name of the ‘Federal Republic of Nigeria’, and the clear understanding was that the bronzes would become state property to be held in a public museum.

The main Cambridge proponent was Professor Nicholas Thomas, the director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, whose interests ‘range widely over art in Oceania, European travel, colonial histories, museology and the history of collections’. His report to the relevant university bodies stated that in a ‘colonial intrusion’ motivated by a ‘trade dispute’, a British force ‘sacked the city and assembled loot’. The hierarchy of university committees, culminating in its highest ruling body, the University Council, duly rubber-stamped the decision to hand over the bronzes.

At no point does any African specialist seem to have been consulted. Nor did any of the committees see the necessity of obtaining a proper valuation of the artefacts being given away. This was, said the ‘Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Community and Engagement’ who presented the final case, difficult to do. Yet the total value might well be considerable, even by Cambridge standards: surely running into the millions.

The reason for this summary decision was clear – the bodies concerned were persuaded that they had a ‘moral obligation’ to give away these 116 works of art. Not only that, but there were questions of publicity. As other museums were doing the same, Cambridge risked ‘being out of step’ by delaying.

The question of ‘moral obligation’ is crucial. The university specifically recognised that it had no legal obligation to donate the objects to Nigeria. The moral argument was also used to persuade the Charity Commission to approve this huge ex gratia gift. Much, therefore, turns on the circumstances of the 1897 expedition.

To describe it, as a ‘trade dispute’ leading to the ‘sack’ and ‘looting’ of Benin by a British force is, as some readers will know, rather economical with the truth. The expedition was a response to the massacre of a peaceful diplomatic mission and a large number of African porters. The ‘trade dispute’ was an act of aggression against neighbouring peoples by the Oba (king) of Benin. Benin itself was a violent, slave-holding and slave–raiding society. When the punitive expedition reached Benin, it found hundreds of dead and dying slaves, some beheaded, crucified or disembowelled. The expedition’s shocking sketches and photographs exist. The British expedition (mainly African soldiers) ended the Oba’s mass human sacrifices and liberated many slaves.

As was then legal, the expedition’s commanders seized the Oba’s personal treasures – carved ivory tusks as well as the famous bronzes – to defray its costs, and doubtless to weaken the Oba’s cultic power. Some bronzes, many of them busts of royal ancestors, were covered in the blood of sacrificed slaves.

This, it might be thought, would affect any assessment of ‘moral obligation’. Other recent developments do so no less clearly. Last week at Cannes, the Restitution Study Group (RSG), representing descendants of West African slaves, premiered a short film asserting their moral right over the disposal of these objects, made of brass the Obas gained by the sale of their ancestors. The RSG vehemently objects to the bronzes being returned to the successors of slave owners and traders in Nigeria, and instead wishes them to stay in western museums where they are accessible to all, including the descendants of the slaves whose bodies purchased them, and where the shocking story of the bronzes can be fully explained as a memorial to those who suffered.

The RSG claim was given added force by the President of Nigeria’s decree that the bronzes obtained from western museums would be given to the present Oba of Benin as his personal property. This has already caused backtracking by museums in Germany which were also involved in ‘restitution’. For the slaves’ descendants, donating the bronzes to the Nigerian state would be bad enough, but to give them to the Oba adds insult to injury.

If ‘moral obligation’ cannot be seen as absolute, or even plausible, then other things must be considered, such as the security and accessibility of any donated or loaned works of art. As a major collection of bronzes assembled by the colonial authorities for the Nigerian state at independence seems in large part to have disappeared (one choice item was illegally presented to the late Queen and is now in the Royal Collection), to agree to the unconditional handover of Cambridge University property appears indefensible. Perhaps the university has belatedly realised this. It should explain itself to its members and to the public, who might otherwise conclude that it cannot be trusted with the treasures in its care.

Bridge | 10 June 2023

It’s a great idea to set a thriller in the world of high-stake bridge, and my friend Helen Erichsen has pulled it off brilliantly. Her debut novel, Murder by Natural Causes (Muswell Press), is about a young, amoral contract killer named Cilla, who the reader can’t quite help rooting for.

It’s a page-turner from start to finish, whether or not you play bridge; but there are delicious added elements if you do. The setting is London’s famous rubber bridge club TGRs (where the gamblers among us have passed many a crazy hour). Some well-known players make a cameo appearance, such as Zia Mahmoud and Nick Sandqvist. Others are disguised – and Helen has offered a game with her husband Espen Erichsen, a world-class pro, to anyone who can spot them all. If he’s unavailable, I’m sure people would be delighted to partner Helen instead – she has plenty of England caps, and is a former European Mixed Teams champion. On this deal, Cilla would have been proud of her creator’s subterfuge (see diagram).

West led the ◆10. Helen knew a club finesse would probably lose to East (who had opened), and a heart switch would spell defeat. So she resorted to deception. She won with dummy’s ◆A , then insouciantly cashed the ♣A and played a low club. East, assuming Helen had no more clubs and was trying to ruff out the ♣K for a heart or diamond discard, ducked. Helen won with the ♣J, cashed the ♠A, crossed to dummy with a trump and played the ♣Q. When East covered, she ruffed, played a third trump to dummy and discarded a heart on the ♣10.