Stone is the solution to many of our architectural problems

The story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ is hammered into us all from an early age. But its moral lessons obscure its more literal advice about building: skimping on materials is a false economy. It’s a lesson learned too late for schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac). Who would’ve predicted that concrete made cheaper by cutting it with air, puffed up like a Malteser, would end up crumbling like one too? It’ll soon prove that the initial cost savings of Raac will be wiped out multiple times over once the risk to life and expensive, disruptive repairs have been taken into account. Getting materials wrong almost cost the little pigs their bacon. Is it any surprise that we are returning to building in solid, dependable masonry?

While we build extensively in brick, tarting up mediocre developments in a half-hearted response to local context, stone masonry doesn’t require multiple mines for its ingredients, or energy and emissions-intensive firing; stone is simply quarried and cut to size, at a fraction of the environmental impact of brick, let alone that of concrete. For a construction industry charged with causing 40 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions, stone seems to be a no-brainer, lying readily beneath our feet.

I speak with the architect Amin Taha, who, along with his engineer collaborator Steve Webb, is among the leading evangelists for stone, and has been making the environmental case for using it as a load-bearing material. We meet at 15 Clerkenwell Close in London, the building that is his home, the office of his architectural practice Groupwork and his manifesto for stone architecture. Five years after its completion, it has settled in gracefully, with creeping vines colonising its façade. And what a façade – among drab offices and flats, Amin’s building retains its original, elemental radicalism: limestone blocks stacked into a grid of beams and posts, with the satisfying solidity of a megalithic structure. There is no mistaking this stone for some effete decorative veneer; it holds up the building, just as it did for the long-lost limestone Augustinian abbey that once stood here.   

Before we even start our conversation, Amin puts me to work, handing me a stone block to hammer open a crate of samples just arrived from a quarry in Spain. There is a garden next to the building, and Amin has been filling it up with bits of stone, gradually turning it into a sample library for architects eager to learn more about using the material.

Perhaps that learning is sorely needed. ‘Architects, and I’m no exception, are pretty badly educated about materials and their cultural and architectural history,’ Amin laments. He pins the blame on a moment in the 1790s when architects reinvented themselves as a gentlemanly profession. Eager to distance themselves from tradesmen, they abandoned tectonic, hands-on learning. Stonemasons’ apprenticeships were out. Instead ‘we’re just going to learn how to draw; preferably the classical orders, preferably Greek.’ The preoccupation with drawing still survives in architectural education today.

I ask if the fallen, half-carved Ionic column in front of the building references this. In fact, it’s one of multiple inside jokes, one of which refers to architects’ fetishisation of stone ruins, such as how Joseph Gandy’s paintings depicted John Soane’s then-unbuilt buildings as ruins-to-be. ‘They were saying: your ruins will be like the Romans’, they’ll be the legacy of a great empire.’

Does he think stone is still tinged with  conservative or even imperial connotations? ‘For some, stone was inseparable from edifices that represented attitudes that led to war. After two world wars, they wanted to sweep aside that past and embrace the new.’ In the heady haze of technology’s ‘white heat’, was Raac one embrace too far? ‘We all experiment in life, and we make errors.’ At least with stone construction we can rely on an experimental record dating literally back to the Stone Age.

For Amin, stone’s cultural baggage is trivial. ‘It doesn’t and shouldn’t have any political connotation. We can cut it out and do what we want: classical details, gothic revival, or something more contemporary.’ When viewing Amin’s building – a raw expression of how that stone is split and sawn according to the quarry master’s judgment – alongside the Portland stone classical pediments of St James’s Church across the road, it’s solid proof of the neutrality of stone in the culture war of architectural styles.

Embracing materials of progress – steel, concrete, glass – also meant losing quarries and skills passed down generations; stone now costs more than it should. But Amin can already see demand for its eco-credentials turning the tide. So why aren’t architects just using it? Amin traces the problem back to the same root: ‘We’ve trained architects to draw beautiful façades, effectively a piece of wallpaper that is tacked on to the structure.’ Design stages, planning, consultants and even fees are structured in a way that treats materials as interchangeable annotations on drawings rather than entirely different ways of building. Structural stone construction requires architects to go that extra mile.

Planners, too, quite literally had a bone to pick with the location of naturally occurring fossils in Amin’s limestone façade. I ask if the planning system, forged in post-war years around mass-produced building ‘products’, is a barrier for materials with natural variations. He agrees. Those in power would do well to remember that buildings deemed ‘officially beautiful’ by various housing ministers, such as the limestone Royal Crescent in Bath, were accomplished without overbearing planners.

While Amin’s building narrowly escaped its trumped-up demolition order from Islington Council in 2019, it will eventually reach the end of its life. But not so for the limestones from which it is built. Stone’s longevity and reusability is ancient wisdom: think about how bits of Roman column were reused as spolia in Renaissance Italian walls, or the importance of the ‘stone robbing’ of Norman castles to create places like Castle Combe. Why bother quarrying when you can use stone that’s already cut and carved?

It’s yet another traditional building practice being revived for sustainability reasons, further diluting stone’s environmental impact across multiple lives. I speak to Juliet Haysom, an artist and educator at the Architectural Association. Juliet’s brother Mark runs the family business, a quarry and masonry works, source of Purbeck-Portland stone, which has engaged 11 generations of Haysoms.

Juliet, with Aude-Line Dulière, was behind Placeholders at the London Design Festival 2021. As part of the controversial V&A extension by Amanda Levete Architects, the Aston Webb screen on Exhibition Road was opened up, and the fine Portland stone ashlars removed and left to languish in storage. These were rescued from being crushed into gravel by Mark’s business, who relocated the stones to his quarry in Dorset. The opportunity came for their return when Juliet and Aude-Line proposed reassembling the stones into street furniture outside the V&A.

Kensington and Chelsea council set out to spend about £1.25 million on ‘hostile vehicle mitigation’ measures on Exhibition Road, commissioning solid granite benches quarried in India, tooled in Italy, before being shipped to London. It’s perverse when stones that had come from that very road were ready to be used. When the Suez Canal obstruction delayed the new granite, through serendipity and Juliet and Aude-Line’s negotiations, Placeholders filled the gap.

I can’t see how new (probably machine-milled) granite can compare with the patina of age: the ashlars embody hours of Edwardian stonemasons’ skilled labour. They also bear witness to more than a century of London’s history: ‘That wall had retained the evidence of two incendiary bombs from WW2, with some stones having shrapnel patterns,’ says Juliet. Like in Venice’s patere – marble reliefs from the Byzantine mainland reused as wall decorations – repurposing stones is not just economical, but a material reminder of places, buildings and lives past.

It’s no surprise that our bureaucracies are a barrier here too. ‘Rather than requiring complete standardisation before permitting reuse, we need to trust the connoisseurship of those who work with stone,’ says Juliet. ‘There’s so much embedded expertise. How some stone is cut vertically or horizontally affects its appearance and strength. There’s skill needed to identify stone, which varies in properties within the same bed. It’s not a handbook or colour chart you can follow.’ As recent years have shown, building regulations themselves are far from infallible. Perhaps there’s deeper knowledge in a stonemason’s intuition we’ve yet to unearth.

As I scroll idly on Instagram, I notice one of Charlie Gee’s posts, a 20-year-old stonemason who has amassed half a million followers with videos flaunting his chiselwork and his chiselled physique. It seems this connoisseurship extends to sex appeal. If even Gen Z can rediscover this traditional material’s allure, then its comeback might as well be set in stone. 

Bridge | 07 October 2023

The Vilnius Cup – the Grand Prix of Poland – is a highly enjoyable, strong annual tournament, impeccably organised by Erikas Vainikonis. Thirty-two teams played to qualify for the eight-team final which team SUSHI dominated, cruising undefeated through the playoffs to claim the €3,000 prize by a big margin. Congrats to Nathalie Shashou and Nick Sandqvist and their A-list teammates Frederic Wrang and Antonio Palma.

Nathalie was on fire all through the final, as shown by the neat little hand above (see diagram).

Nathalie’s 2NT showed exactly 6-4 in the minors: with 6-5 or 5-4 she would have bid 3♣, and with 5-5 she would have jumped to 2NT over 1♥.

How would you play 3◆ when West leads a Heart to the Jack?

While we could, in theory, work out every play at the table, most of us are not that clever or that quick; Nathalie came up with a brilliant solution. Her best move after ruffing the Heart at trick one is hardly obvious.

She could try a Club to the Jack, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the defence will play three rounds of trump, and she will lose a Spade, two trumps and two Clubs, as she won’t get a ruff in dummy.

Nathalie neatly placed the Queen of Clubs on the table (!), and the defence was paralysed; they have to win and draw trumps  or she would get a Club ruff in dummy and even make a couple of overtricks. 

But now the Jack of Clubs served as an entry to take the Spade finesse, and all she lost was four tricks in the minors.

Suella Braverman is a force to be reckoned with

After Suella Braverman announced her candidacy for the Tory leadership on ITV’s Peston show in the summer of 2022 the liberal left laughed at the very idea. Someone even asked Robert Peston online: ‘How did you keep a straight face when Suella B said she’d stand for Prime Minister?’

Well, as Bob Monkhouse once observed of those who scoffed at his youthful declaration that he wanted to become a comedian, they’re not laughing now.

Braverman’s Conservative conference speech confirmed what her recent Washington speech suggested: that she has become one of the most compelling figures in UK politics, unignorable indeed for the British left who find themselves lapsing into paroxysms of rage every time she opens her mouth.

The Home Secretary has a talent for an explosive soundbite that will propel her to the top of the news agenda. In the Commons last year she referred to the small boats problem as an ‘invasion’ of southern England. In Washington last week she spoke of the multiculturalism so beloved of the metropolitan elite as having failed. Yesterday’s key provocation was a reference to the world facing a ‘hurricane’ of mass migration.

In an apparent recognition by Labour that its hysterical reaction to her language has in the past done it no favours with the electorate, the party’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper this time avoided going into full scale moral outrage mode. Instead, she claimed Braverman had ‘totally lost control’ of the immigration system and was ‘devoid of practical policies’. This was the very criticism levelled by the new darling of the Conservative conference Nigel Farage and also by Priti Patel, her predecessor at the Home Office.

Given the Tories have been in power for 13 years, the idea that radical language on big policy areas now is ‘just talk’ ought to have traction with voters. And yet I can’t see that working against Braverman. So uncompromising is she and so prepared to utter hard truths that the electorate will – and already has to an extent – pick up on the idea that she is having to work with one hand tied behind her back.

It is obvious that were she running Downing Street then she really would be prepared to do whatever it takes to stop the boats and to greatly reduce legal immigration as well. In the former case if that necessitated leaving the European Convention and the Refugee Convention too, or setting up a camp on Ascension Island and transporting illegal arrivals there, she is the one major figure the electorate knows it could count on not to shy away from such action.

And in the eyes of a big chunk of voters, especially the lost tribe of disenchanted right-wingers who voted Tory in 2019 and must be wooed back, that adds up to a powerful case for wishing she was prime minister instead of the incrementalist-in-chief Rishi Sunak.

Yet Sunak seems to understand that rather than be threatened by this Brexit Spartan who was instrumental in the downfall of Theresa May and Liz Truss and then in blocking a return for Boris Johnson, he can benefit from her newfound superstar profile.

Keeping relations with her on an even keel and not explicitly ‘slapping her down’ will ensure that at least some of the metropolitan left will continue communicating the idea to voters that the government is the most hardline administration Britain has ever seen when it comes to migration matters, rather than the total opposite.

Along with Sunak’s repositioning on net zero, his ending of the ‘war’ on the motorist and allowing Kemi Badenoch to spearhead an alternative war against woke extremism, this starts to look like clear blue water that can reinvigorate the Tory base.

If it works and he pulls off an unlikely victory next year then Sunak will gain hugely in authority and then no minister will be unsackable. If it doesn’t then off he will presumably pop to California, leaving Braverman to be someone else’s problem or quite possibly the leader of the pack.

The horses to watch in 2024

The definition of good luck in Russia is state security knocking at your front door and demanding ‘Ivan Denisovich?’ when you are able to reply ‘Ivan Denisovich lives two doors down.’ Sometimes you just have to be thankful it is someone else’s bad day. Steaming around the M25 on Saturday towards Newmarket’s Juddmonte-sponsored Cambridgeshire Handicap day, I suddenly noticed there was no traffic on the other side of the motorway. Soon I realised why: a huge overturned truck was blocking all three lanes. As I passed mile after mile of frustrated motorists, some leaning on their car bonnets for a smoke, I realised that if it had been on my side I would have been lucky to get to headquarters for the last race. Instead I knew my luck was in, and I would make it to one of my favourite fixtures with its three Group races for two-year-olds that start to reveal the potential champions of 2024.

The father and son partnership of Simon and Ed Crisford have been building quality for some time. Their Havana Grey colt Vandeek was unbeaten in three races and though some, including the maestro Aidan O’Brien, were ready to make excuses for O’Brien’s opposing River Tiber, who finished behind him in the Prix Morny in France, I was convinced that he would stay that way in the Group One Juddmonte Middle Park Stakes. He did so in breathtaking style, taking the lead a furlong out in the six-furlong contest with a real injection of pace which induced his jockey James Doyle to call him ‘a pure ball of speed’. Said James: ‘He’s an electric horse and he coped with the quicker ground well, which opens all sorts of options.’ For his jockey he is a sprinter in the making rather than a 2000 Guineas horse, but he doesn’t look like your typical chunky speedster. As Simon Crisford pointed out, Vandeek is a tall, leggy colt who stands over a lot of ground and there is one other factor that might help him stay further: his temperament. Vandeek is not only on form the best two-year-old we’ve seen anywhere this year, he is also the most relaxed. Said his co-trainer: ‘He was flat-out asleep today until noon. We couldn’t get him up to go to the races. His mind is so good and makes our job easy.’ The key to stable thinking will be whether they bring him back to try seven furlongs in the Dewhurst.

The Cheveley Park Stakes, the fillies’ equivalent so often claimed by trainer Aidan O’Brien, this time went to Porta Fortuna, trained by his son Donnacha. Donnacha has no doubts about Porta Fortuna’s staying potential and will run her next in the Breeders’ Cup juvenile fillies mile at Santa Anita but she is a filly who needs good ground to show her best. Said winning jockey Oisin Murphy: ‘Years ago, Donnacha and myself were training to be jockeys at Ballydoyle together so it’s good to come full circle.’ I was more impressed, though, by the run of Jeff Smith’s Ghostwriter in the Group Two Royal Lodge Stakes over seven furlongs. Already a winner at Newmarket’s July course and at Ascot, the handsome Invincible Spirit colt ran on well in the hands of Richard Kingscote. Trainer Clive Cox, as he is the first to admit, has been known largely for his success with sprinters and has never yet had a runner in the Derby. Now that could change. Said Clive: ‘This fellow is improving with every run. His dam won over a mile and a half and it’s possible he will get that trip too. This cements what we thought and the dream is alive for next year.’

The most rewarding victory for me, though, came with the result in the 34-horse cavalry charge that is the Cambridgeshire itself. Early in June, after a visit to the Lambourn yard of Daniel and Claire Kubler, I urged Spectator readers to watch out for their classy handicapper Astro King who had been unluckily denied victory in a York handicap in May when their favourite jockey Richard Kingscote ran into all sorts of traffic problems. Since then, Astro King had run second in the John Smith’s Cup at 50-1 and won the Sky Bet Finale Handicap, both at York. He had a tall order in the Cambridgeshire as the top weight carrying 9st 12lb but I was sure he had the class to make the frame and had backed him ante post at 16-1. Finding him at 20-1 on the day, as the hot favourite Greek Order shortened to 9-2, I kept the faith and doubled my bet. Given a beautiful ride by Kingscote, Astro King led inside the final furlong and held off a spirited challenge from Greek Order to become the first top-weight victor this century, giving his advancing yard their highest-profile success yet. Said a delighted Daniel: ‘There’s only one Cambridgeshire. We could have run him in a Listed race but they are worth £50,000 while this is £100,000 to the winner.’

The BB and I are escaping the Soviet States of Surrey at last

‘You’re only allowed one roll of packing tape per customer,’ said the lady in the local hardware store.

The builder boyfriend was holding five rolls, at £2 each, thinking it was reasonable to buy a tenner’s worth, or even that she might be pleased, in line with the normal rules of commerce.

But this lady and her husband are notorious for not allowing you to buy the precious things of their shop. I had to beg them to sell me six laundry bags a few weeks ago.

Now we had gone through all the tape we had bought from the self-storage firm where we got our packing boxes and we had to do a run to this local store for local people, in a small parade of shops in a chocolate-boxy Surrey Hills village.

After somehow managing to buy five rolls, the builder b made the mistake of informing the lady he might be back for more, whereupon she pulled her cardigan tightly around her and, as her husband looked up aghast from where he was stacking the already full to bursting shelves, she informed the BB: ‘You won’t be allowed back to buy more. You’ve already got too much. It’s one roll per customer.’

I managed to buy one plastic container for my desk contents, by convincing the man I didn’t want the largest box. ‘Those are the best ones,’ he said, doubtfully, when I pointed to the stack. ‘That’s fine, I’ll take one of the smaller ones.’

How anyone gets so insular an hour from the King’s Road is beyond me.

‘One roll per customer. Is this Russia or something?’ muttered the BB as we walked back to the car. ‘It’s the Soviet States of Surrey,’ I pointed out.

With the house sale through, the packing collided with the cancelling.

Nothing would let me cancel it online, of course. From BT to British Gas it was virtually impossible to close any accounts to go overseas because they all wanted a new address they could supply.

I started with the BBC licence fee because I thought I would enjoy that, but it turned out to be a joyless process. Cancelling was only offered in the smallest of small print and even then the only option looked instant. What if the builder boyfriend wanted to watch Bangers and Cash in the few days before we vacated?

I did not dare press cancel in case there was not an option after that to input a date you wanted to cancel from – because I bet they come round in that detector van the second you have the temerity to say you don’t want any more State Television.

I was going to have to ring a dozen hellish phonelines, or cancel every direct debit on the last day when Pickfords would be here and I would be going screaming mad.

The purchase of our house in Ireland was held up, because the solicitor had not yet had time to drive the contract to the client for him to sign. How wonderful.

I was careful not to demand they just email it, get him to sign, scan and email it back.

If Ireland was the sort of place where people did not go to see each other, we would not be going.

‘This will take as long as it takes,’ I thought, ‘because we are now on Irish time.’

But a week later, with all our packing done, and me and the builder boyfriend and the dogs sitting among the boxes watching reruns of Benidorm to celebrate our last few days of Freeview television that was nothing to do with the BBC but they wanted money for anyway, I did think: ‘Blimey O’Reilly will they ever get in the car and get the vendor to sign the papers?’

I texted the agent to say I was about to move into a motel and serve notice on our horses’ field. At some point, we would be camped on a grass verge near junction ten with our ponies tethered, like gypsies.

‘Storm Agnes is here and it’s pretty wild on the roads,’ she replied, as the builder boyfriend and I were doing the horses that morning. The BB looked up from chaining the gate shut as I read out her message. ‘Storm Agnes? They’ll be getting Storm Melissa soon.’

But the agent worked a miracle and the papers were signed in spite of the weather in the wild west Cork countryside.

Lots of lovely messages wishing us well with the move. But my favourite, which I will treasure always, is a card sent anonymously emblazoned with ‘Good Luck’ and a shamrock on the front, opening to reveal the scrawled message: ‘Go on then, get lost!’

It put a smile on our faces. I’m convinced it’s a good omen.

Why the Greeks invented virtue

I had a good talk with my NBF, Owen Matthews, at The Spectator’s writers’ party, and we agreed on the two subjects we talked about: Russia and women. I won’t exaggerate the enormity of our aggregate knowledge – and the way we have deployed it in our service, especially where the fairer sex is concerned. Suffice to say that it is far beyond the comprehension of most individuals who concern themselves only with money.

Speaking of loot, I have a gent’s bet with a friend that Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX infamy – accused of having stolen billions while attempting to recover his financial blunders – will get away with a wrist slap. Bankman-Fried maintains his innocence. The question no one seems to be asking is how his parents – a pair of Stanford University part-time law profs – could afford to post a $250 million bail for their bum-clenching, unkempt son. The latter’s bail has been revoked because he contacted future witnesses, so now the proud parents fly over every week in order to hold his little mitts. The trial starts this week.

Here’s the Bankman-Fried mother – a woman who would not look out of place in a remake of the Rocky Horror Show – wailing against those Nazis out to get her son: ‘This is McCarthyism in its relentless pursuit of total destruction.’ The way I see it, a mother has every right to defend her child, but not to blindly blame the law for going after what is alleged to be one of the biggest frauds ever.

But back to higher subjects than crypto loot; to Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in around 1500 AD, where intellectuals met and debated matters of importance. My NBF Owen Matthews might have felt at home with real Renaissance men, but I’m not so sure I would have coped. I might have managed in Athens, perhaps, because in the Greek agora they argued about reason, so I could wing it. But the Italians were talking about the physical world, about galaxies and stars and planetary systems that confuse me to this day. The genius of the Greeks was that they stuck to things they knew about, like turning basic self-awareness into a philosophy of the nature of time and place. Here’s Sophocles’ Oedipus: ‘Time destroys all things; no one is safe from death except the Gods.’ Chronos is the Greek word for time, but it was also the name of the god who devoured all his children. The Greeks thought life was too short – and it certainly was back then – and happiness too fleeting, and that’s the reason they never hesitated to make whoopee or postponed gratification.

Now there is no way I would embarrass myself by saying such things while sitting in the Piazza della Signoria in around 1500 with Renaissance guys and my new friend Owen Matthews. Perhaps Owen could hold his own by describing the vastness of Russian territories, and the untold riches that hide behind and underneath the vastness. What could poor little ole me say to impress them? That democracy leads to anarchy that requires one-man rule that leads to tyranny and so on? This cycle was called anakuklosis, revolution, as in a wheel. The ancients believed that man was held in the hands of fate, fate being a spinning wheel that raised some men to be kings and heroes and brought them down again after another spin.

How did the Greeks counteract the blind circumstance of the spin? Easy. They thought up virtue, virtue being the only force to overcome lady luck – or whatever you want to call it. Not bad for people without televisions, cars, mobile telephones, or even rap music; just a few flutes and harps. The emblem of virtue was first and foremost Hercules, slayer of monsters, all-round hero and symbol of the individual’s ability to determine his own fate. Again, the Greeks did not do badly for people who had never heard of Russell Brand. Virtue originally meant courage in battle, but it came to include integrity in all spheres. After a while, virtue vs fortune became the number one game, the superbowl of life. The Greeks saw everything as a contest: the philosophers against the forces of ignorance and darkness, as in the myth of Prometheus, Plato’s struggles against the forces of opinion.

I’ve read a lot about Russian history, but mostly recent Romanov stuff. All I can add to any American disinformation put out daily by the Military-Industrial Gangster Corporation is that when Napoleon invaded he was certain the Russian serfs would follow him to bring down the Tsarists. But although they were starving, the peasant serfs, slaves in reality, burnt their own crops denying the invaders sustenance. Napo could not believe the reports, and paid for his folly with 300,000 dead.

So, next time you hear that Russia is disintegrating, pick up a history book. Otherwise, London was fun, and after the Speccie party I went to Bellamy’s for a great steak dinner, offered to me by the innkeeper Gavin Rankin. My next stop in London will be Marina Lambton’s book party. I once slept in her bed but alas she was not in it. Her father Timmy (four million acres) Hanbury had assigned me her room during the cricket weekend. Because of her absence, I was almost voted man of the match.

The Republicans are telling the world they can’t govern

Congressman Matt Gaetz pulled the alarm but, unlike the stunt by his fellow House member Jamaal Bowman – who recently set off a fire alarm to delay a vote – there really was a fire. Gaetz set it himself, with help from seven other Republicans on the party’s populist right. Now the whole party has to deal with the smoking ruins. 

Because the majority party has only a slim edge in the House of Representatives, any small, cohesive group among them can wield huge leverage. They can threaten to sink legislation or oust the Speaker by voting ‘no’, knowing their party doesn’t have enough votes to carry the day without them (or help from Democrats). 

That’s exactly what this ‘veto coalition’, led by Florida’s Matt Gaetz, did. When they issued the threat to close the government a few days ago, the tactic failed, but only because Democrats voted with most of the Republicans to keep it open. Why did Democrats help? Because the White House told them to, knowing the president would pay a political price if the government shut down, even temporarily. That’s why Biden’s White House wanted the Continuing Resolution (CR) passed. 

When Speaker Kevin McCarthy called a floor vote on the CR, the right wing of his caucus was outraged, partly because McCarthy called their bluff, partly because they didn’t get the concessions they wanted. 

The vote on Tuesday to remove McCarthy as speaker was the populist right’s revenge. They secured only eight Republican votes against McCarthy, but that was enough. It is also a backhanded compliment to McCarthy’s Democratic predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, that she managed her caucus successfully with an equally narrow majority. 

Make no mistake: the entire Republican Party will pay an enormous price for this manoeuvre. It’s one thing to remove a speaker; it’s another to remove him without no obvious way to resolve the resulting impasse. Each day it lasts tells American voters, ‘Republicans don’t know how to govern.’ They know how to use a bullhorn. They know how to stop legislation. They know how to jettison a speaker. But they don’t know how to pass legislation or find a new speaker. That’s a disastrous message to send to voters. 

As the Republican House majority confronts this mess, they have only two conceivable paths to end it by selecting a speaker. Given their narrow majority, they need first, a candidate who wins votes in the Republican caucus and could be elected without any Democratic votes, and second, a candidate who wins a large plurality of votes in the caucus and becomes speaker because enough Democrats help them in the floor vote, either by voting with the Republicans or remaining absent. 

There are formidable roadblocks on both paths, which is why Gaetz’s move to dump McCarthy was the legislative equivalent of Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Scream.’ Or, to put it in a more American idiom, it was dumber than a bag of hammers. 

To see why it was such a futile, theatrical gesture, let’s consider each path. In the first one, Republicans settle on a candidate with near unanimity. That won’t happen, or at least not very soon. If it happens at all, it will occur only after days of building pressure from Republican voters and donors — and the party’s leading presidential candidate. Even then, the party might not converge on a unity candidate. Remember, moderates in the caucus can do exactly what Gaetz and his seven colleagues did; they can serve as a ‘veto coalition.’

In blocking candidates, these representatives on the centre-right wouldn’t be acting simply for spite. Over a dozen of them won in districts carried by Joe Biden. They fear any close association with the party’s right wing would sink them in 2024. Kevin McCarthy understood their dilemma, which is why he refused to give in to Gaetz earlier. 

What about the second path, the one in which a Republican retains the speaker’s gavel thanks to some Democratic votes or abstentions? That could happen, but it would come with two major consequences. First, it would leave Gaetz’s faction exactly where they were before driving out McCarthy. Their motto is ‘Damn this party for doing deals with Democrats.’ Indeed, McCarthy himself might return. The other consequence is that Democrats wouldn’t provide their votes for free. They would demand concessions. Whatever price the new speaker paid would infuriate some members of his caucus. That’s one reason the victor might keep those terms secret, as some allege McCarthy did to secure Democratic votes for the CR. 

Who loses in the mess? The whole country loses because its government is dysfunctional. The Republicans lose because they set the fire and can’t extinguish it. The Democrats win. They can advertise themselves as the party of stability and continuity, while Republicans are erecting a huge sign with the message, ‘We can grumble but we can’t govern.’

That message is a gift to Democrats, who are going into the next election with a sluggish economy, inflation, an open border, urban decay and an aged president. Biden’s unpopularity is surpassed only by his vice president. They needed a gift. And Matt Gaetz gave them a big one. 

Suella Braverman vows to shut asylum hotels

The blue-collar Conservative Common Sense Group’s event at Tory conference yesterday evening felt more like a celebrity visit than a political fringe. Following her conference speech, Home Secretary Suella Braverman was met with chants of ‘BRA-VER-MAN’ and rapturous applause from her Tory fanbase as she came on stage at the event, hosted by the Daily Express.

Excited cheers then broke out as she made her big announcement: that asylum hotels – currently costing the government around £8 million a day – would soon be closed down.

In her speech, the Home Secretary made a quick dig at Nicola Sturgeon’s gender reforms before asserting that she backed Rishi and was confident the Tories could still win the next election:

‘Let me also say that we can win the next election. Because Rishi Sunak is a common-sense conservative. Leading our country effectively, passionately, energetically displaying and setting out an inspiring vision of how great our country can be stabilising the economy, ensuring that long term decisions are being made in the interests of common sense Conservatives and the British people, whether it’s on net zero, whether it’s on taking on Nicola Sturgeon on her gender reforms.’

And yet the most pressing issue of the evening was not in fact policy related at all. Earlier today, Braverman was pictured standing on a guide dog’s tail in the exhibition hall.

Addressing the crowd – and the controversy – she therefore made a hasty apology ‘to all dogs’, and assured those listening that: ‘I don’t think any dogs were harmed in the filming of my visit’.

Let’s hope that’s not a tall tale…

Why does the BBC think we need a Today programme podcast?

Is there really room in the crowded market for a new podcast about politics, presented by two male Oxbridge graduates? The BBC thinks so: the team behind Radio 4’s Today programme is launching a new weekly podcast hosted by Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan. This is a ‘bold commitment from the BBC to continue to build the Today brand’, according to the, erm, BBC.

 In case you are waiting for the punchline or the big reveal, there is nothing different about The Today Podcast. Its presenters will ‘give their take on the biggest stories of the week’, though the audience is also promised a range of guests and ‘insights from behind the scenes at Radio 4’s Today’. Nevertheless, in a 56-second clip released on X (formerly Twitter) at the weekend, Robinson and Rajan took the challenge head-on and asked themselves what made the new show unique.

In Robinson, Rajan told us, we have a former BBC political editor of vast experience, who has travelled with prime ministers and knows the rhythm of British politics almost by instinct. Meanwhile, Robinson told us, Rajan is a former newspaper editor who understands how modern media works and is changing, ‘not old media-land’. Underpinning their complementary skills is the BBC, with all its ‘knowledge and expertise and experience’.

If Robinson and Rajan think the jostle of political podcasts lacks experience, eminence or star quality, they are wrong. Current BBC political editor, Chris Mason, co-presents the Newscast podcast, and Andrew Marr, who held the job from 2000 to 2005, appears on the New Statesman’s podcast, while his LBC show is also repeated in podcast form. As for former newspaper editors, it does not take long to find the opinions of Lionel Barber (FT), Alan Rusbridger (Guardian), George Osborne (Evening Standard) or, indeed, the same Andrew Marr, who edited the Independent more than 15 years before Rajan himself.

Relying on the BBC brand to sell this podcast is also unwise. I’m a fan of the BBC but there is a lot about the corporation which needs examining, not least its cack-handed senior leadership, obsession with diversity and inclusion and questions over its funding by a mandatory licence fee. Yes, it has produced and broadcast some of the best television and radio ever made, and the World Service, which reached 365 million people weekly, has an enviable global reputation for trusted and impartial reporting. But its image has suffered recently, with the chairman, Richard Sharp, resigning over his failure to disclose his involvement in a loan paid to Boris Johnson; its uncertain handling of accusations of impropriety against newsreader Huw Edwards; and a general feeling that the corporation has a fundamental London-centric, middle-class bias. 

Is Radio 4 just too late to the party with The Today Podcast? One of the most frequent criticisms of public-sector organisations is that they are unwieldy and slow to react to changes of direction. Because they are often bureaucratic and risk-averse, they cannot innovate and change at the rate of the private sector, often therefore lagging behind. The launch of this podcast seems like a perfect example of this phenomenon. What’s more, the BBC already has at least a dozen offerings in the field, including Political Thinking with Nick Robinson and, in recent years, Amol Rajan Interviews… But the strength of Today is surely that it is agenda-setting, that it is one of the major springboards for the day’s news, and taking away that immediacy from a weekly review of current events feels like tying one hand behind the back.

The field of political podcasts has a saturation point. Perhaps we have not yet reached it; we may not realise until it is too late, and there will be casualties. The mixed reception which greeted Political Currency with George Osborne and Ed Balls, both huge political figures and overseen by big producers Persephonica, suggests that the audience is at least approaching the stage of the fatal ‘waffer-theen’ mint. The danger for the BBC, and for its intrepid presenters, who will be given a can to carry if anything goes wrong, is not that the podcast will be bad. The trouble is that it needs to be much, much more than that for anyone to listen and care.

I’ve given up on my dreams… apart from the sports car

They say that, against all expectations, after the age of about 50 you actually get happier, and that much of this happiness is tied in with the merciful death of your dreams. Once over the hill – and I can vouch for this – you feel unrealistic visions that have guided you your whole life simply exit the stage, albeit with a few well-aimed parting kicks. You don’t lament their passing – young people may want an emotional switchback, but in maturity (well, relative maturity) you’ll happily (well, relatively happily) swap it for solid ground under your feet and a little stability of mind. Hope, thankfully, doesn’t always spring eternal. After your first half-century, it’s more like the stubborn dripping of a wonky tap.

One of the fantasies that has gone pop recently is owning a sports car. This has been on my bucket since about the age of seven. Sean Connery’s Aston Martin DB5, Purdey’s drophead MGB in The New Avengers, Roger Moore’s Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me: I collected nearly all of these in matchbox form as a child and wanted to own at least one of them when I grew up. Oh, for the open road, the roar of the engine, the needles on those dials which suddenly spring to pulsing life when you turn on the ignition.

Later, as I hit adolescence, there were the Brat Pack films of the 1980s where the late-teen characters often drove convertibles, as though you couldn’t really be fully, gloriously young without one. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the classic 1961 Ferrari California Spyder he and his friends manage to trash is essentially the film’s fourth character. The same goes for Andrew McCarthy’s Chevrolet Corvette C1 in Less than Zero. Both films would be gutted without these four-wheeled stars at their centre. Ferris Bueller would spend his day off waiting for taxis to arrive. Less than Zero would definitely be less than zero.

But in fact, my interest in luxury cars began even earlier. My grandfather was a self-made man, big in fertiliser, and had a succession of Daimlers to match. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in his Daimler Sovereign’s squashy leather interior – faintly scented with aromatic pipe-smoke – marvelling at the walnut dashboard and funny automatic gearstick, so different, so much nicer than my father’s Volvo. It was while taking the Daimler in for a service that my grandfather died of a massive heart attack, aged 76. Perhaps there are worse ways to go.

As I get older, all these cars seemed to have merged in my fantasies – the latest to have caught my attention is a Jaguar XK8. Produced from 1996 to 2006, it has a similar interior to grandpa’s Daimler, and a V8 engine to match anything driven by James Bond. It was the coupe version I lusted after, not the soft-top. Convertibles are so public and the gods would surely punish me for showing off so shamelessly. The coupe is still quite something – as gorgeous as an old Porsche, it can be picked up surprisingly cheap second-hand, and the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson – surely among the most beguiling women of our times – anointed the XK8 as her ideal motor. A slightly naffer man than me might well have snaffled one already and named it ‘Tara’ in her memory.

But I knew I would almost certainly never have the nerve to get ‘Tara’. Such a car must be earned, and earned morally, not just financially: it should be a reward to yourself for something marvellous you’ve achieved. I’d done little thus far to deserve an XK8, and nowadays you’d need a C02- offsetting gold card to flash at fist-shaking environmentalists as well.

And, I wondered, would I love the Jaguar just a little bit too much? There was a danger I might turn into a Swiss Toni figure, waxing it compulsively and telling fresh-faced acolytes that driving one was ‘like making lerv to a beautiful woman’. Would I end up buying one of those air fresheners shaped like a fir tree, swinging gonadically from my rear-view mirror? Such cars, I feel, should be scented with half-smoked Monte Cristos and Floris Santal, not synthetic pine.

‘You only live twice,’ goes the Bond song, ‘One life for yourself, and one for your dreams,’ and by the age of 50, you mostly know the difference. You’ll never own the Georgian mansion in the Home Counties, the pay rise of destiny probably isn’t coming, and Rachel Weisz is already married to Daniel Craig. But there is a little itchy part of you that still hankers after something opulent and enviable, at the top of its class. You want that walnut dashboard and to feel that V8 engine roar into life at your touch, perhaps want it even more as your own energies fail. ‘If not me then who?’ whispers a voice inside. ‘If not now, then when? Isn’t time running out?’

The trouble is, in some ways it already has. You’re more cautious and prudent at 50 and you see ahead – to huge insurance bills, credit-siphoning visits to the petrol pump, and the usual realisation that no material thing makes much difference to life as it actually feels. You dream less because you know your dreams aren’t reality in waiting. They’re simply the alternative existence of someone you are not.

So the usual formula applies. You want: a 1967 E-Type. You’d settle for: a ten-year-old Volvo. You get: a 1990s Ford Fiesta, bought from a local granny for its low mileage and the fact it’s never been driven over 30 mph. As for that Jaguar, it’ll just have to go into the very large file marked ‘Wonderful things that never happened.’ Perhaps I’d just have crashed the bastard anyway.

I hated counsellor training

In practically every respect, I’m a useless human being. This is not the vanity of false modesty – I really am worse than most people at most things. I’ve never picked up a musical instrument, a golf club or a foreign language; I can barely boil an egg and would find it almost impossible to paint a wall without stepping back and kicking two and a half litres of emulsion all over the carpet.

Yet I thought, in terms of life experience, that I’d make quite a good counsellor. I was one of five children with a father too sick to work. We lived on benefits, had free school meals and our clothes arrived in bin bags from the local church. It was a fairly bottom-rung start but I’ve since made a very decent living as a writer, including a stint doing some light counselling as an agony uncle for a women’s magazine. I’ve brought up two children and I’m still married to their mother. But more importantly, I wanted to help people. So when I signed up for an ‘Introduction to Counselling’ course, I was bursting with altruistic intent. Within minutes, however, all that enthusiasm had seeped out of me and I was visibly sagging in my seat.

The course was not for me or anyone remotely like me. In fact, it was all a bit public sector. The woman running it was perfectly nice but, as if reading from a script, the first thing she stressed was that the room we were in was a ‘safe space’ and that she would not tolerate racism, sexism or homophobia. Well, of course she wouldn’t. Any more than she’d tolerate murder, masturbation or playing the bagpipes. Why even say that? I could guess what was coming next and sure enough, it was something about ‘always respecting and never judging’.

It was then time to introduce ourselves. I have no wish to criticise the others in the class – they were good people with noble motives – but I did wonder whether some of them were properly equipped to assist those seeking emotional help and guidance.

Most seemed naive while others were clearly damaged, immediately talking about their own addiction and mental health issues. There were three or four whose first language was not English and one in particular struggled gamely just to make an introduction. There was a comedy moment when she said that, as a counsellor, she kept saying that she would ‘overlook’ the welfare of her clients when she meant ‘oversee’. I expected the moderator to gently correct her but of course she didn’t. All shall be respected; none shall be judged. And so it went on. And on. And on. I looked at my watch. It was 7.15 p.m. Three hours later, I looked at it again – it was 7.30. To accommodate its least able members, the pace of the class had slowed to a crawl.

The trouble was, I was at least 20 years older than anyone else and at a very different stage of my life. Put bluntly, I was in far more of a hurry. I wanted to work harder and faster. And given that this was just the introduction and full qualification would take about five years, I knew my career as a counsellor was over before it had even begun.

Now I know what you’re thinking; if I don’t even have the patience to sit through one class, how on earth would I have the patience to deal with vulnerable people who’d come to me for help? You may have a point but let’s not lose sight of a far more serious one: The BACP (British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy) approved courses simply aren’t designed for older, wiser, more grounded candidates. So the very people who might have made good counsellors are lost to the profession forever.

Instead, the courses seem to attract younger, quite troubled people, some of whom were plainly at a loss with what to do with their lives. They’ve undergone therapy in the past and clearly want to carry on receiving it.

But counselling is too important to be entrusted to the wrong people. It’s often the first port of call for those experiencing anxiety, stress or depression. A good counsellor can help solve these problems before they spiral into something more serious. From what I saw, the candidates who enrol for these courses are not going to be up to the job.

In the UK, there is a worsening crisis with mental health – especially as lasting damage of lockdowns becomes more apparent – and that needs to be addressed. The first step might be for BACP to design a fast-track course aimed at older people. And there has to be more rigour. If there were stricter entry criteria, including a proper interview, counselling may start to appeal to the people it so obviously needs.

The best thing about a counselling course is that it is, in the original sense of the word, inclusive – anyone can enroll. The worst thing about it is that they do.

My favourite restaurant serves rubbish food – and I still love it

One of my favourite restaurants of all time serves mediocre food, has a limited menu, and occasionally brings a dish containing none of the advertised ingredients.  Why do I love it so? Because the service and the ambience are both a delight. The warm greeting from the proprietor who always remembers his customers’ names; the attentive (but not fawning) waiter who immediately produces menus and water without being asked; and the sommelier who recommends a perfect aperitif before talking us through the wines in a matter-of-fact way that belies the usual ‘You can really taste the terroir,’ and ‘This one is like a summer’s day in Provence.’

The drinks and appetisers all arrive in exactly the correct order, and with the requisite 20-minute gap between courses. The cheese and dessert are properly paced, and if they have run out of sweet wine or port, someone will pop to the local store to pick one up without making a fuss. Water is topped up discreetly, but the wine bottle is left for the diners to help themselves, in a nice deep ice bucket within easy reach of the table.

The music is unobtrusive but adds to the calm but fun atmosphere, and the dining room is always at the perfect temperature. The linen is crisp and white, the tables big enough to hold the food (a rarity these days) and dinner is not served on square plates, shovels or flat caps.

When the bill is requested, it comes within a short space of time. There has been no ‘how is your food/are you enjoying your meal?’ interruptions.  They trust that you will send it back if you are not, and as I say, the food is mediocre, but it’s consistent and hasn’t yet poisoned me. When leaving the restaurant, there is always someone to open the door and bid you good night. That is why it is always packed with contented customers. Give me excellent service and a good atmosphere where you can sit back comfortably and know you will be properly looked after and want for nothing (except slightly better food, but you take the rough with the smooth).

Compare this to a very a la mode place I ate at recently and to which I will never return. The food was excellent. Sublime chicken liver pâté on the lightest fried polenta; garlicky croutons piled with silky, buttery field mushrooms; trout with smoked cod roe; slices of tender ribeye spiked with salsa verde, and a tiramisu that almost floated off the plate. But it was all soured by the poor service, bad attitude of the staff, and truly dire atmosphere.

On arrival, the maître d’ was nowhere to be seen and the front desk was empty. I was made to feel like we should get on our knees and kiss the floor of this sacred space. When we were eventually seated there was no sign of a menu so after 15 minutes I decided to go and look for them myself. ‘Sorry, madam, we are very busy,’ I was coldly informed when finally, somebody came to take our drinks order. Enough time had passed for us all to have made and changed our minds several times and so also began to order food. ‘My colleague will be coming to take your food order, madam,’ I was told, condescendingly.

The drinks arrived 20 minutes later, and by this point, I was raging. When permission was granted for us to order our dinner, he uttered the dreaded words, ‘There are no appetisers and main courses as such. The kitchen sends out the dishes as they are ready.’

I asked why. I wanted to know whether this was because they wanted to surprise the diners with the chef’s own experience of which dishes should follow the next. I wanted them to reassure me that this was in the plan and had something to do with customer satisfaction as opposed to merely convenience for the kitchen. I didn’t get an answer.

The music was too loud, the toilets were so far away that they had a separate postcode, and the waiters walked around with their noses so far in the air that I imagine they were all be wearing neck braces by the end of the night. During the meal, we were repeatedly asked if we were enjoying our food. It would have been a better use of the waiters’ time to ensure we were enjoying our evening. But where were they when you needed a top up of wine? Our bottle was left in a cooler a bus ride away from our table.

I would never go back to that restaurant again, even if they comped the entire meal. I felt patronised, dismissed, and unwelcome. The restaurant was run for the convenience of the management and no attempt was made to hide that fact. But the restaurant with the happy, smiling staff, brisk service, and mediocre/occasionally pretty bad food? I’m heading there this evening and can’t wait. It is true that they don’t have a great chef, but perfection is all in the mind.   

Kevin McCarthy ousted as US Speaker

Kevin McCarthy has been ousted as the House speaker after losing a vote 216-210, becoming the first speaker ever to lose his role through a vote and the shortest serving speaker to date.

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz had forced the motion to vacate, due to his dissatisfaction with the deal McCarthy struck at the weekend to avoid a government shutdown.

Seven other Republicans voted with Gaetz and the Democrats to boot McCarthy from his leadership position: Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ken Buck of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Eli Crane of Arizona, Bob Good of Virginia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Matt Rosendale of Montana, who is currently running for Senate there.

Sunak set to scrap HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester

Rishi Sunak will tomorrow confirm he is scrapping the HS2 link between Manchester and Birmingham, Coffee House understands. The prime minister will make the announcement in his conference speech as part of an argument about responsible government. He will, though, try to soften the political blow by detailing alternative rail projects in the north of England using the money. 

The row about HS2 has dominated the Conservative party conference, with Sunak insisting only today that he wouldn’t be rushed into making a ‘premature’ decision about the future of the line. It seems he has now made that decision – or he has managed to stick to his own media grid which planned to announce the decision tomorrow, rather than rush it out when the news started to leak early. Sunak sees refusing to bow to the demands of the 24 hour news cycle as a virtue, but this does mean he has spent more of conference discussing what he isn’t doing than the things he wants the public to thank him for at the next election. A week of rumours about the high speed line hasn’t taken the pressure out of the political row, either. 

All eyes will be on West Midlands mayor Andy Street, who has refused to rule out resigning if the project is scrapped. Mayors are supposed to be an independent voice for their regions but Street has already framed the potential decision to scrap the northern link as being the end of levelling up and a snub to the future, undermining the party conference slogan about long-term decisions for a brighter future. 

Even Tory MPs who don’t really care one way or the other about HS2 are hoping that tomorrow’s speech gives their voters some sense of why they should stick with the Conservatives at the next election. They say that the mood on the doorstep in recent months has gone from anger to a desire for reassurance from the Tories as Labour has so far failed to entice voters. The big news tonight might be about what Sunak wants to scrap, but he also needs to give voters a vision of what he wants to do, too. 

Lee Anderson unleashed at Tory conference

Dogs bark, cows moo and Lee Anderson shoots his mouth off. The firecracker that is the Tory deputy party chairman took to the ConservativeHome stage on the Tory conference fringe this afternoon, and he certainly didn’t hold back.

Speaking to Anand Menon, director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, the plain-talking Anderson fired off his thoughts on a number of topics, ranging from how he went from Labour to Tory and from hating to loving Margaret Thatcher, to his famous moniker ‘30p Lee’.

Asked whether he would ever consider rejoining the Labour party, Anderson branded it a ‘ridiculous question’. He didn’t stop there though: ‘The working classes for the Labour party –  we were useful idiots.’ Later on, he added, ‘None of them have done a decent day’s work in their lives, not one of them.’ A one-time Labour councillor, Anderson recalled how his colleagues had wanted to open a book of condolences to the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro when he died in 2016. ‘I think the word that you use for these people is “nutters”.’

In unsurprising news, the GB News host said he agreed with the Home Secretary that ‘multiculturalism had failed’ but heaped praise on leader Rishi Sunak too for ‘sacrificing a nice, peaceful, rich life to come and put up with all this nonsense that he puts up with in this place and all these idiots all the time.’ Noble stuff Lee. Admonishing those MPs who will ‘say and do anything’ to get into power, he mused aloud that ‘a dictator is a good idea – if they’re a good dictator. But there’s no good dictators are there?’ Quite…

On HS2, he was blunt, branding the high speed rail network ‘a load of nonsense’. Jokingly, he then asked the audience ‘Is there anyone from Bradford here?’ before quipping to roars of laughter from the audience, ‘Would you want to get there any quicker?’ He had harsh words for benefits claimants too, telling them to ‘just crack on and get on with it. Stop whinging.’ Expanding onto the issue of food poverty, on which he claimed to be ‘speaking from a position of strength’, he said ‘We didn’t go on Facebook or TikTok and moan and say “I’ve got no food”, because my mum and dad’s philosophy was simple: they’re our kids and we’ll feed them.’ 

Addressing the cost of living more broadly, Anderson didn’t mince his words. ‘This is not an impoverished island. This is a wealthy country and the opportunities here are limitless in the UK,’ he said. ‘If you want something, you can go and get it. You need to get off your arse and go and get it for yourself.’

Quizzed about last week’s debacle featuring his GB News colleague Dan Wooton and Laurence Fox, Anderson claimed not to have seen the footage of them talking lewdly about the journalist Ava Evans because he was on holiday in Spain at the time. However, he called their actions ‘wrong’. Ever the showman, Anderson acknowledged that he knew he was ‘quite divisive’, but said it was all part of doing his job properly as an MP. ‘If I can’t say it, then you’ve not got a voice. So I’ll carry on being divisive.’

Does he know any other way?

Unequivocally Japanese: The Premonition, by Banana Yoshimoto, reviewed

Who are you without memory? This is the question that sits at the heart of The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, best known for her 1988 novella Kitchen, which was a smash hit in Japan and adapted for film. The Premonition is a similarly slender work and one that casts a delicate spell.

Nineteen-year-old Yayoi has the perfect family – doting parents and a brother she adores – but she feels unsettled, as if she’s forgotten something vital in her past: ‘There, in the midst of such a beautiful evening, my heart must have been full of that premonition.’ Looking for answers, she goes to live with her eccentric aunt Yukino, who she feels is a ‘siren to those of us who had lost part of our childhood’, and the answers she discovers change her life forever.

Born Mahoko Yoshimoto, the author chose her pen name due to her love of banana flowers, which she thinks ‘rather cute’ and ‘androgynous’. For fans of Haruki Murakami, the gateway author to Japanese literature, Yoshimoto’s style is more linear and less labyrinthine. The texture of the world Yoshimoto builds is terrestrial; there are no parallel universes or talking to cats, despite a lead character with telepathic abilities. And yet between Yoshimoto and her translator, Asa Yoneda, there is something otherworldly. The language of The Premonition is heady (‘the greenery stood smoky in the dark’) and the narrative is peopled with oddballs who eat fruit curry and snow peas, drink whisky and stay up all night watching Friday the 13th movies on repeat. There’s synaesthesia (‘it smelled of darkness’), nostalgia, tragedy, heartbreak and waif-like Japanese women who eat a lot.

In a creative landscape that is increasingly homogenised by an Anglo-American style, it’s refreshing to pick up literature that has not lost its thisness. The world that blossoms from Yoshimoto’s text is unequivocally Japanese, in the aesthetic vein known as mono no aware, which roughly translates as ‘the pathos of things’ or ‘a sensitivity to ephemera’. But beneath the poetics, Yoshimoto’s books confront serious themes: suicide, prostitution, death, alcoholism and incestuous desire. The Premonition is about upbringing and nature vs nurture. As Yayoi says: ‘It’s kind of tragic, I thought, that we can never completely escape our childhood.’

The novel taps into anxiety about memory, childhood and the peculiar feeling that there’s a hidden truth about ourselves we’ve forgotten, and if only we took pains to find it we might finally feel at home.

What Britain owed to Gracie Fields

Simon Heffer is the supreme Stakhanovite among British writers. Where the original Stakhanov moved 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift, within the past decade Heffer has produced four massive volumes of modern British history, each little less than 1,000 pages. Alongside them he has edited three equally voluminous diaries of the waspish socialite MP ‘Chips’ Channon, as well as writing regular reviews and columns. Hats off to the master!

In this latest and final volume of his tetralogy chronicling the British century between Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 and Neville Chamberlain’s reluctant declaration of war on Germany in 1939, Heffer once more treats us to his vast knowledge and trenchant opinions on almost every aspect of the nation’s state, from high politics to crime and popular entertainment. It is an astonishing achievement of narrative history, and if it has an old-fashioned feel, it’s in the best sense of that phrase.

The author is a political animal with strong cultural interests, and while the bulk of this detailed work concerns the day-to-day struggle for control of the country at a crucial moment of change, he never neglects the parallel worlds of music and literature – devoting many pages, for example, to the fairly obscure writer Humbert Wolfe, and several more to one of his heroes, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Each volume of these histories has an overarching theme – the ‘arrogant swagger’ of the Edwardian era, for instance, masking a deep anxiety about the future of British power. The narrative arc of this book explores how the country was dragged kicking and screaming into fighting a second world war soon after the first had left a bereaved nation firmly wedded to pacifism.

Heffer peppers his prose with extracts from the diaries and letters of contemporary witnesses, including Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes and the eccentric novelist John Cowper Powys. These illustrate how the statistics he marshals on every page affected people at the time, though members of the Bloomsbury set were hardly ordinary folk.

We usually view the interwar period as the roaring 1920s – girls with bobs dancing the Black Bottom – giving way to the grim 1930s: unemployment and hunger marches under the deepening shadow of war. Heffer presents a more nuanced picture, reminding us that for every Jarrow marcher beset by jobless near-starvation, there was a southern suburb enjoying ever-rising levels of prosperity and increasing leisure time filled with weekly visits to the cinema or lido.

The iconic figure who bestrides these two Britains is Gracie Fields, the Rochdale lass who sang her way from the music hall to the silver screen and ended her days in the lap of luxury on Capri. ‘Our Gracie’ not only gives Heffer his title, but epitomises for him the warm, resilient spirit of the common people who endured every hardship and injustice inflicted on them but managed to survive in some style.

Although Heffer writes from a High Tory perspective, he is more properly a classic Liberal. His 19th-century political hero is the upright anti-imperialist Gladstone rather than the slick chancer Disraeli. As such, he keeps a compassionate eye on the have-nots comprising the majority of the population, and deeply disapproves of unprincipled politicians such as Lloyd George, even when he successfully negotiates Ireland’s independence.

The book culminates with the premiership of Neville Chamberlain and the run up to war. In the great debate on appeasement – whether the high-minded PM was a far-sighted statesman striving for peace while preparing for war or a naive dupe who allowed Hitler to lead him by the nose – Heffer is scrupulously fair. Using aircraft production figures and the like he proves that Chamberlain followed a contradictory policy of rearmament while hoping against hope that the Führer could be persuaded to take the path of peace. In the words of one of his ministers, Chamberlain ‘walked into the thieves’ kitchen thinking it was the Carlton Club’. For his part, Hitler thought the PM a schlappschwanz (limp dick).

For those with the time and stamina to ascend this mountain of words, Heffer’s tetralogy offers a commanding view of a century that saw Britain at the summit and then beginning its descent. I think the word is ‘magisterial’.

What makes other people’s groceries so engrossing?

When you think of a collector you might imagine, say, Sir John Soane, Henry Wellcome, Charles Saatchi or Peggy Guggenheim, the fabulously wealthy, amassing their statuary, paintings and penis gourds in order to furnish their Xanadu palaces or display their good taste and fortune for the benefit of the nation. But there are other kinds of collectors: normal people.

Most of us at some point have had a little collection on the go – stamps, pebbles, gonks, succulents, Pokémon cards. I remember at school there was always great competition for Panini football stickers: everyone seemed forever to be in search of the elusive Kenny Dalglish.

Of course there will always be hoarders of knick-knacks, old tools, novelty nut-crackers, Northern Dairies milk bottles and goodness knows what else. I know someone who collects toenail clippers and another who collects snow globes and embroidered slippers – a mini V & A in the making. My uncle Dave used to search for those Bell’s Whisky ceramic decanter things. Charles Kane he most certainly was not: Dave was a minicab driver from Basildon.

Paper ephemera is perhaps the most delightful and affordable stuff for the average person. It’s cheap, durable and doesn’t take up too much space. No need for your Hearst castle, or even a drinks cabinet or shelf above the sideboard: you can keep your collection of pre-war bus tickets in a ringbinder in a drawer. The curator Ingrid Swenson preserves her collection in a dozen black presentation folders.

Swenson has amassed other people’s shopping lists. Her book is a beautifully produced catalogue of this collection, though catalogue is perhaps too strong a word. It’s just a small, dense, thick book full of colour reproductions of the hundreds – in excess of a thousand – of shopping lists found by her at the Waitrose on the Holloway Road in London over a period of about ten years, plus a few pages of explanatory text. You might think such a book would be simply silly: at best, an early Christmas stocking filler. But in fact it’s unputdownable, like a series of notes towards Beckett’s short plays. I found it much more interesting than some of the novels on the current Booker shortlist.

‘Almonds, asparagus, chillis, wine in Whitstable.’ ‘Milk, bread, eggs, rolls, veg – green beans (org), TURK.’ ‘Scallops Sardines Bread Broc (2) Soup PorridGe.’ It’s not difficult to understand why this stuff appeals. There’s the obvious odd aesthetic value: the vast array of colourful Post-It notes, the index cards, the backs of envelopes; and the incredible range of handwriting on display. (One important lesson from the book: penmanship has gone to pot.) But there’s also that rare glimpse into other people’s private lives: someone’s entire world, in Swenson’s words, ‘captured in a single, modest entity’. It undoubtedly helps that Swenson refrains from offering any grand theory or set of interpretations in her commentary. There’s no mention of Walter Benjamin, tempting as that must have been, no pontificating about cultures of consumption and obsolescence, no banging on about our archives of the self. She suggests merely some of the information that we might wish to infer from the limited data that the lists provide: age, gender, dietary habits, profession. Who exactly is buying ‘moose bread pastries chicken vodka + fags’? Or ‘Salt Nibbles Milk Cherrios Bunnies Burger Buns’?

She may not labour the point, but hers is undoubtedly a heroic task. We all know that in the end most of us will leave no trace; there’ll be little or no evidence that any of us ever existed. And, besides, the written shopping list as a part of our everyday lives is disappearing:

As life becomes more digital, more efficient and more ecologically aware, the shopping list as a quotidian fact of life, like so many everyday items, sounds and smells, is gradually dying out.

Swenson has been gathering our remnants, in several senses.

Behind all collections one can catch a glimpse of the collector: even today, Sir John Soane seems to inhabit every inch of his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Swenson reveals in the final pages of her book that the shopping list project – begun in 2014 when she picked up her first crumpled note – ended last year, after she left her job of 23 years and embarked on life as a freelancer, and no longer found herself visiting Waitrose as often. If nothing else, Shopping Lists provides a reminder of a world that was – a time when ordinary Londoners could afford to buy, say, mozzarella and beer. Extraordinary.

The difficulties faced by identical twins

Despite being a twin myself, I wasn’t necessarily disposed to love William Viney’s Twinkind, a book for which the phrase ‘lavishly illustrated’ might have been invented. Much writing on twins intended for the general reader (including recent fiction such as Brit Bennett’s bestselling The Vanishing Half) has been produced by non-twins, or writers who have twins in their family. The emphasis is often on how twins appear to the singleton majority, lazily depicting them either as freaks of nature or prodigies of psychic connection. Indeed, Twinkind’s visual component seems to be asking the reader to look at twins from the outside, while its title appears to encourage us to see twins as a species apart. It was refreshing, then, to find that Viney is an identical twin, and approaches twins from the experience of actually being one.

Split into three sections, ‘Myth and Legend’, ‘Science and Progress’ and ‘Spectacle and Prophecy’, the monograph is interspersed with a comprehensive and well curated selection of twin-related art and artefacts, from Yoruban wooden masks to Hollywood movie posters. These are never intrusive, and instead form a subtle and sometimes comic commentary on Viney’s frequent insights into the cultural history of the subject. Admitting that ‘writing about twins means reconciling my own limited experience of being a twin with the vast diversity of twin experience in written and visual records’, he nevertheless has much to say on living in the world as a genetic copy of another human being: ‘Being a twin is a baffling and powerful combination of effort and ease… twins are always learning about what your curiosity looks like.’ What Viney sets out to do is explore exactly how this abiding curiosity arose.

Starting at the beginning of recorded history, he observes: ‘In many creation stories twins are deities… makers of life and the cosmos… They are mythology’s great catalysts. Everywhere, twins kickstart storylines.’ While the book reiterates the familiar tales of Castor and Pollux and Romulus and Remus, it also features less familiar pairings such as Apollo and Artemis, or the Ashvins, heroic horse-riding twins from the Rigveda. He suggests twin myths are often ‘products of political circumstances’, citing how Romulus and Remus are claimed by both Rome and Siena for their foundation stories, while the trope of the Evil Twin ‘represents a longer, more ancient dualism, which uses twins as bearers of cosmic wickedness and destruction’. Along the way, he addresses the deep-rooted ‘fears that twins are abnormal, kill the sick, pollute or damage livestock and crops, arise from adultery, are cursed and embody evil’, reminding us that their venerated status in certain cultures arose only recently.

In the second section, Viney laments that twins are used mainly as ‘monitoring instruments’ in science, while rarely being consulted on their attitude to this. While it’s accepted that ‘twin lives are a means to generate data’, he reveals that this is only a relatively new phenomenon, begun in northern Europe towards the end of the 19th century and ‘industrialised as a set of research methods at the beginning of the 20th century’. We learn some startling statistics and facts: there have never been more twins on Earth than now, with about 1.6 million twin pairs born each year. Also, that the creation of monozygotic identical twins (from a single cell that divides) is hardly seen in other mammals. ‘The nine-banded armadillo is the only other creature that produces twins in a similar way.’ Viney admits that twins offer a ‘rare form of experimental control’ and addresses the moral responsibility that comes with this, invoking the legacy of Mengele’s notorious experiments at Auschwitz. The consequences of twin studies are political as well as scientific: ‘They affect how twins and other human groups are respected.’

The book’s most compelling section explores how twins have been appeared in literature and film, covering the doppelganger trope in E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charlotte Brontë, Dostoevsky and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the offensive caricature of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The lines Viney quotes from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (as Antipholus of Syracuse sets off in search of his brother) most accurately convey the existential experience of being a twin: ‘I to the world am like a drop of water/ That in the ocean seeks another drop.’ He also cites the Duke’s lines from the close of Twelfth Night (when Viola and Sebastian are reunited) that encapsulate how twins appear to singletons: ‘One face, one voice, one habit and two persons/ A natural perspective that is and is not.’ In his indignant discussion of films such as Dead Ringers and the Schwarzenegger-DeVito romp Twins, Viney stops just short of using the phrase twinface: ‘The history of cinema involves people pretending to be twins, single-born people without lived experience that strive to play up to what screenwriters, directors, executives and their audiences expect from twin characters.’

Twinkind is an impeccably researched visual treat, and one that is necessarily partisan. As the author laments: ‘Twins are often treated as two persons that occupy the social position of one being.’ Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, that their unique individual experience of being in the world was acknowledged too.

How the Aeneid was nearly destroyed

According to legend, Vergil declared of himself ‘Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.’ (‘Mantua bore me, Calabria took me; now Naples holds me: I sang of pastures, fields, and leaders.’) In her rigorously researched biography, the American classicist Sarah Ruden shows that this is largely true – even if the author of the Aeneid was in fact born 30 miles from Mantua, in a little village called Andes, in 70 BC. 

Ruden must necessarily rely on Vergil’s most influential biography, written by Suetonius more a century after his death. And there’s no reason to doubt the skeleton of Suetonius’s life: that Vergil was unmarried, with no children; both his brothers died when he was young; his father went blind; and he also had a half-brother, Valerius Proculus, through his mother, who is thought to have remarried after her husband’s death.

There are debates about Vergil’s background. Suetonius says he had lower-class parents; but some critics have suggested his father was from the grand equites class. And in later life Vergil certainly moved among the great and the good, including the greatest of them all – the Emperor Augustus.

Vergil assumed the toga of manhood at 15, went to school in Milan and studied philosophy in Naples rather than Athens (the usual gap-year destination for smart Romans), but his genius elevated him into elite circles. In Naples, he lived near other literary grandees, although he often withdrew to Sicily and Campania.

Suetonius also suggests that Vergil was gay. Not only was he unmarried but he was ‘of desire more inclined than usual towards boys’. Vergil was nicknamed ‘Parthenias’ (‘Virgin’), a pun on his name, which sounded like virgo, Latin for the Greek word parthenos, meaning a sheltered, unmarried girl. All in all, he comes across as a deeply sympathetic figure: gentle, shy, chronically ill and a genius, his intellectual powers increasing as he grew older.

The Appendix Vergiliana, a collection of his early poems – if they are all by him – has been much criticised, as Ruden shows in her careful analysis. But then came the Eclogues and the Georgics, showing his gift for singing about the pascua, rura – those pastures and fields. And then there was the masterpiece, the Aeneid, which Vergil was still polishing when he died in Brindisi in 19 BC, aged 50. On his deathbed, he asked for his scroll cases which contained the Aeneid, wanting to burn them. Luckily, Augustus overruled him.

Even though the Aeneid wasn’t finished, Vergil was already celebrated by the time of his death. Just before he died, he set off for Athens to finish the epic. There he bumped into Augustus and accompanied him to Megara, where he caught his final illness in the intense heat. He refused to postpone that fatal voyage to Brindisi, where he died on 21 September, when southern Italy can still be punishingly hot.

Ruden is a considerable scholar, who conveys the brilliance of the Aeneid concisely – although I could have done with more Latin. Even non-Latin readers like little chunks of the lovely language. She ably translates Rome’s paramount mission, as described in Book 6: ‘Sparing the conquered, striking down the haughty.’ But how much more stirring the Latin is: ‘Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.’ Ruden is also guilty of the great fault of modern academese – using too many Latinate words, one shared by classicists and non-classicists alike – and comes up with sentences such as: ‘The Platonic angle, the idealisation of impulses that were basically pederastic, also manifests.’

She lays out the known details of Vergil’s life clearly enough, but the problem comes with her attempts to fill the gaps. She declares: ‘As a translator of Vergil… I probably know better than anyone alive how it feels to spend time as he reportedly did.’ This belief in her genius sparks her into extreme conjecture (‘Perhaps the poet committed virtual suicide in a handy but discreet way, simply by sending his litter away or refusing a drink or a dip in cool water.’) So it’s hard to agree with her when she robustly says: ‘I would not push my own speculative reconstruction of events.’ She would – and she does, far too often.