Drama in Astana

As I write, six of 14 games of the world championship match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren have been played in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the score tied 3-3. By the time you read this, events will have moved on, so any prognosis would be futile. One ought, so to speak, to wait until the bread has risen. But the games in Astana have been so compelling that a quick peek is irresistible. Four out of six have been decisive – an extraordinary volume of bloodshed by the standards of recent world championships. Initially, Ding looked listless, as if overwhelmed by the occasion. ‘Nepo’ won game two, but by game four Ding had pulled himself together, when an elegant exchange sacrifice helped level the score.

Nepomniachtchi looks stronger since his defeat against Carlsen in Dubai. This time, he brushed off his setback in the next game. The first diagram shows a key moment from game five. Nepo’s active pieces confer a serious advantage, and his kingside breakthrough shows magnificent vision.

Ian Nepomniachtchi-Ding Liren
Fide World Championship (5), Astana 2023
(See left diagram)

37 g5! The threats of f5-f6 and g5-g6 make this pawn hard to ignore. hxg5 38 Rg4 Ra8 I suspect Ding chose this after eliminating the alternatives. 38…f6 meets with a stunning refutation: 39 Nh4! gxh4 (else Ng6+, Re4+ etc) 40 h6! gxh6 41 Qg8+ Ke7 42 Rg7# No better is 38…Qe7 39 Nxg5 Qb7 40 Qxb7 Rxb7 41 f6! gxf6 42 Nh7+ Ke7 43 Re4+ Kd8 44 Nxf6! and the h-pawn carries the day. 39 Nxg5 Ra1+ 40 Ke2 Qe7+ 41 Ne4 The attack is decisive. Qe8 42 Kf3 Qa8 43 Qxa8+ Rxa8 44 f6 g6 45 hxg6 fxg6 46 Rxg6 Ra2 47 Kg4 Rxb2 48 Rh6 Kf5, Rh8+ and Ng5 mate are looming, so Black resigns. But the pendulum swung back the next day.

Ding Liren-Ian Nepomniachtchi
Fide World Championship (6), Astana 2023

1 d4 Nf6 2 Nf3 d5 3 Bf4 c5 4 e3 Nc6 5 Nbd2 cxd4 6 exd4 Bf5 7 c3 e6 8 Bb5 Bd6 9 Bxd6 Qxd6 10 O-O O-O 11 Re1 h6 12 Ne5 Ne7 13 a4 a6 14 Bf1 Nd7 15 Nxd7 Qxd7 16 a5 Qc7 17 Qf3 Rfc8 18 Ra3 Bg6 19 Nb3 Nc6 20 Qg3 Qe7 21 h4 Re8 22 Nc5 e5 23 Rb3 Nxa5 24 Rxe5 Qf6 25 Ra3 Nc4 26 Bxc4 dxc4 27 h5 Bc2 28 Nxb7 Qb6 29 Nd6 Rxe5 30 Qxe5 Qxb2 31 Ra5 Kh7 32 Rc5 Qc1+ 33 Kh2 f6 34 Qg3 a5 35 Nxc4 a4 36 Ne3 Bb1 37 Rc7 Rg8 38 Nd5 Kh8 39 Ra7 a3 40 Ne7 Rf8 41 d5! The win is close, but 41 Nf5 Qg5! covers g7. Ding’s pawn advance serves a subtle but brilliant purpose. a2 42 Qc7 Threatening Ne7-g6+. Kh7 43 Ng6 Rg8 44 Qf7! (see right diagram) The big reveal. Thanks to the pawn on d5, White threatens 45 Qxg8+ Kxg8 46 Ra8+ followed by mate with Rf8 or Rh8. Mate also follows after 44…Bxg6 45 hxg6+ Kh8 46 Qxg8+! Black resigns

How to find the Holy Grail

If you visit Valencia Cathedral, you will find, in the old chapter house converted into a chapel, the Holy Grail, made up of a humble agate stone and kept safely behind glass. But if it is really the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper (and the Vatican recognises the possibility that it is), why are so many people still searching for it?

There are too many theories about its true location to keep track of. Could it be in the Basilica of San Isidoro, León, given as a present to the King of Spain by an Andalusian emir? Was it taken to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea and buried, causing a spring to flow that offers eternal youth? Is it hidden in a secret room in the Vatican? Or was it discovered by the Nazis in Spain, and is now kept somewhere by their descendants?

The author and Grail-hunter Christopher Dawes believes he might have it at home on his mantelpiece in Brentford. ‘I actually brought something back that might be it, but how do you prove it? The cup is supposed to give you eternal life if you drink from it. So if I’m still here 100 years from now, then I found it. A fella from Hounslow said he’d found it there. I’d have been really annoyed if he had. We went all the way to France, and it might have been just a short bus ride away from Brentford all the time.’

There are holy relics all over the place (more than 30 nails from Christ’s Cross in Europe alone). But the Grail is different. It is associated with the search for spiritual purity and eternal life. The world of Grail-hunters is one of conspiracy theories, myths, dreamers and dealers in ancient artefacts. ‘As you start to get closer to the Grail there are hundreds of stories, things that are lost that we don’t understand,’ Dawes tells me.

Part of the appeal of Grail-hunting is that it is such a homespun enterprise. ‘The only kit necessary is a hat, practical footwear, and a decent walking stick,’ says professional Grail-hunter Robert Stanley. ‘An interest in medieval metaphysics is also handy. You need the unshakable faith that just sometimes miracles actually happen. Of course, ground-penetrating radar would be nice too.’

Most hunters I speak to seem to have got into it by accident. Stanley became so hooked that he gave up his flat and comfortable life and moved to the heart of the action in the Occitania region of France, where the heretical Cathars might have squirrelled away the Grail – and where he was the researcher for a proposed Channel 4 documentary about the ‘real raiders of the lost ark’. The programme never happened – but Stanley lives there still, more than a decade later, and the Grail has taken over his life. For a while he was the only English-speaking guide taking daily groups of Grail tourists up the nearby mountain of Montségur to the site of a Cathar fortress. ‘We get around 150,000 visitors here. Looking for something they can’t define, all hoping to make sense of life.’

It sounds like harmless fun, but there’s a worrying side. Stanley tells me that near this holy mountain, there are often suicides – perhaps of people who pinned everything on having a mystical experience when they got to the top.

Strangely, just about all the hunters I spoke to no longer really believe that there is one definitive Grail to be found. One enthusiast, Stefan Hager, is pretty clear about it: ‘I am not interested in the material existence of a cup or whatever, even one held by Christ. It is about the stories that have survived centuries, the quest – and it is something very pure.’ Even a hardened old hunter like Hamilton White, an artefact-seller who came across a hoard of Templar treasure, has his doubts. ‘I don’t think it’s a physical thing. I used to before I got into it. But now I think it is a concept, about attaining happiness and contentment.’

The modern Church, so managerial in its language and aspirations, is largely uninterested in Grail-hunting. It wasn’t always so. The writer and Anglican theologian Charles Williams, who influenced J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, kept a secret notebook full of his jottings and thoughts on the sacred chalice and even thought of setting up a new Order of the Grail. He saw the hunt for the Grail as a noble and spiritual pursuit.

I think if Williams or Lewis or Tolkien came across modern-day Grail-hunters, they would understand, even applaud the sentiment. They understood the need for epic stories which stand at odds with our rational secular world. Father Chris Phillips, the priest at the Shrine of Our Lady church in Willesden, agrees. ‘Lewis understood the deep magic at the heart of the world. The Church has become dry in the way it speaks, in its liturgy. We need to talk about deeper things, mystery and beauty. The Grail story has all of these.’

The sad thing is that if we ever did find the definitive Holy Grail, it would end up in a museum as an artefact stripped of its sacramental power. ‘We’d probably be embarrassed by it,’ says the Dean of Southwark, Andrew Nunn. ‘Medieval Christians and those caught up in the Grail knew it as a place of study, art and poetry. We have lost the sense of the numinous and a language that sets the heart on fire.’

Dawes nearly shook off the Grail fever when he moved away from the hunt he started with the punk rocker Rat Scabies nearly 20 years ago. It was a hunt he undertook because ‘he had nothing better to do’ and it involved 18 months of intense activity and numerous trips to France. ‘I miss it. I miss the fun of it. When you can’t find your glasses or keys it is just annoying. I never found the hunt for the Grail annoying. One day Rat and I are going back. We promised we would do when we got old. I’m old now.’

Meanwhile, just when I feel that I myself might be shaking off the odd power of the Grail, no longer thinking about coincidences or dreaming of King Arthur, I have a conversation in a pub with a fellow priest, and find myself talking about the romance of it all. ‘Snap out of it, Steve,’ he says. ‘If I found the Grail, I’d get a certificate of provenance and authenticity, then stick it on eBay.’ That can’t be right, can it?

The pointlessness of renaming the Brecon Beacons

Putting out fires

The Brecon Beacons National Park Authority said it was renaming the park because the word ‘beacon’ implies carbon emissions and ‘does not fit with the ethos’.

— Many hills in Britain carry the name ‘beacon’ thanks to chains of fires which were lit up to warn of approaching invasion. In Devon alone, 39 beacon sites have been identified. Most famously, beacons were lit in July 1588 to warn of the approaching Spanish Armada after it was spotted off Land’s End, although there is no record of how many fires were lit nor how quickly it took the message to reach London.

— Not that the name of the Brecon Beacons really appears to be changing at all. The replacement Welsh name is Bannau Brycheiniog – where Brycheiniog means Brecon and Bannau ‘Beacons’.

Carbon trails

A report by Sustainable Aviation, which represents the UK aviation industry, suggested some passengers will be priced off planes if the industry is to hit its target of eliminating net carbon emissions by 2050. How polluting is a journey from London to Glasgow by various forms of transport?
In kg CO2 equivalent per passenger

Plane               157 kg     Train                 28

Motorbike      93             Electric car       26

Petrol car        88             Coach                22

Diesel car       85

Source: Department for Transport

Rocket science

How does SpaceX’s Starship measure up to the Saturn 5 rockets which powered the Apollo missions?

                         Saturn 5 / Starship

Height           110.64m / 110.87m

Weight        187 tonnes / 300 tonnes

Diameter         10.1m / 9m

Thrust       34.5 Newtons / 74.5 Newtons

Maths maths

Rishi Sunak wants us to stop making jokes about being bad at maths. But are we really less qualified in maths than in English? The number of grades awarded last year at GCSE level (where 9 is the highest grade):

                 English language / Maths

Grade 9            25,705 / 31,855

Grade 8            44,955 / 51,310

Grade 7            70,135 / 60,440

Grade 6          111,300 / 77,675

Grade 5          123,135 / 121,870

Grade 4          111,955 / 126,020

Grade 3          124,175 / 98,130

Grade 2            52,975 / 83,725

Grade 1            24,255 / 54,020

U                        9,330 / 17,955

Source: Ofqual

Why WhatsApp could quit the UK over the Online Safety Bill

WhatsApp, Signal and five other messaging services have joined forces to attack the government’s Online Safety Bill. They fear the bill will kill end-to-end encryption and say, in an open letter, that this could open the door to ‘routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages’. The stakes are high: WhatsApp and Signal are threatening to leave the UK market if encryption is undermined. This intervention comes as the Lords begins their line-by-line committee stage scrutiny of the Bill today.

Encryption provides a defence against fraud and scams; it allows us to communicate with friends and family safely; it enables human rights activists to send incriminating information to journalists. Governments and politicians even use it to keep their secrets from malicious foreign actors (and their colleagues). Encryption should not be thrown away in a panic. 

The government has responded to these concerns by declaring that the bill ‘in no way represents a ban on end-to-end encryption’. This is technically true but deceptive. The bill gives Ofcom the power to require services to install tools (called ‘accredited technology’) that could require surveillance of encrypted communications for child exploitation and terrorism content.

Advocates claim this is possible without undermining encryption – by installing tools for scanning for certain content on a user’s device.  However, just as one can’t be half pregnant, something can’t be half encrypted. Once a service starts reading messages for any purpose the entire premise of encryption disappears. A paper from fifteen computer scientists and security researchers in 2021 explained it is ‘moot‘ to talk about encryption ‘if the message has already been scanned for targeted content.’

With respect to child exploitation material, messages could be checked against the PhotoDNA database. But that only contains historic photos and videos and cannot be stored on devices. It means creating a software vulnerability, that could be exploited by malicious actors, and sending data back to a central database to check whether it is a match. Alternatively, companies could use machine learning to detect nudity, which would need to be reviewed by authorities. But that has a high rate of failure. Just last year, a father lost their Google account and was reported to the police after sending a naked photo of their child to a doctor. 

Some contend that privacy should be sacrificed in the fight against child abuse. But there are clearly limits to this logic. Few would consent to the state putting CCTV in everyone’s bedroom to crack down on the abuse of children. But that is effectively what a technology notice could mean: a CCTV camera in everyone’s phones. Ofcom could even be able to require the use of scanning technology without independent oversight (unlike the Investigatory Powers Act, which at least requires authorities to seek permission from a tribunal and is, generally, targeted against a specific individual rather than mass surveillance).

Message scanning is open to serious mission creep. There will be enormous pressure to scan communications for other purposes, from ‘disinformation’ in the UK to any unsanctioned material in authoritarian countries. This is why platforms, who do not want to create a vulnerability in their product or set a global precedent for their billions of users, really could leave the relatively small UK market because of the bill. The shutdown of WhatsApp in particular would be a political disaster for any government, and not just because ministers and MPs would lose their main communications platform; millions of people who use it across the country will also lose theirs. 

Ironically, one of the services that could be forced to leave the UK is Element. They are a UK-based start-up that provides secure communications channels for organisations, including the UK government defence establishment. A British success story no longer able to operate in their home country hardly screams Rishi’s science and tech superpower.

Child exploitation is abhorrent. It is well-understood that most child sexual abuse happens within the family and, to a lesser extent, with locals in a position of trust. There are also ongoing concerns around sexting, sexual extortion and revenge porn. None of this can be resolved through message scanning. 

Professor Ross Anderson of the University of Cambridge explains that we cannot expect ‘artificial intelligence’ to replace police officers, teachers and social workers in child protection. ‘The idea that complex social problems are amenable to cheap technical solutions is the siren song of the software salesman and has lured many a gullible government department on to the rocks,’ Anderson writes.

Ultimately, message scanning only serves to distract. It wastes policymakers’ and law enforcement’s time while doing little to protect children and threatening fundamental freedoms.

Matthew Lesh is the Director of Public Policy and Communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs

Ireland’s violent men of peace

It was from the Northern Ireland conflict that I first learned how language – like everything else – can be warped utterly. Take the late Martin McGuinness, not to mention his still-living, libel-hungry comrades.

For almost three decades they put bombs in public places, shot random people in the head and tortured others to death. After 30 years of this they received a wonderful career-end bonus. They became ‘men of peace’. Suddenly McGuinness and co were not to be criticised. Instead they were applauded for laying down their weapons. Before long they were travelling the world talking about ‘conflict resolution’. They won elections by pushing aside all those who had been against shooting people in the head from the start. Now if you condemned these killers you were ‘anti-peace process’.

Since we are going through the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, it seems worth remaking this unpopular point. Last week we saw Joe Biden in Ireland chumming up with Gerry Adams. Soon afterwards, the Clintons were in town to celebrate the peace process. So a dissenting note is overdue.

A President Biden Selfie. pic.twitter.com/4NiiiUWlvU

— Gerry Adams (@GerryAdamsSF) April 13, 2023

Earlier this month somebody wrote to the Spectator letters page to stand up for John Major. I didn’t know he had fans. But this well-meaning reader claimed that I should not be so down on Sir John because, after all, he ‘was instrumental in establishing the foundations of peace in Northern Ireland’. What Major should in fact be credited with is rescuing Sinn Fein-IRA at the exact moment it had lost. He proved a master at resuscitating terrorists.

As any historian of the conflict must know, by the time the IRA came to the negotiating table they had become operationally incapable. They had been penetrated by the British army and British and Irish intelligence agencies at almost every level. Their Army Council had been infiltrated, not least by my much-missed friend Sean O’Callaghan. IRA recruiters such as Denis Donaldson were working for the UK security services. Even the head of the IRA’s internal ‘nutting squad’ (who interrogated and murdered suspected informers) was a British agent. Freddie Scappaticci, who was named as the secret agent ‘Stakeknife’ 20 years ago, died of natural causes at his home on the mainland last week.

So as I say, a tougher man than Major might have snuffed out the IRA all but completely. Instead, at the very moment it was at its weakest, the British government helped to elevate that gang of murderers to positions they could never have dreamed of. Suddenly the Nationalist moderates like John Hume lost all the clout they had, as surely as David Trimble and moderate Unionists ended up losing to the awful Ian Paisley.

The peace that Major and Tony Blair helped to bring about had undoubted benefits. For 25 years Northern Ireland has been relatively peaceful. Sectarian violence is still commonplace and the province remains a tinderbox. But at least the daily killings and bombings have slowed down. That we haven’t had another 3,000 dead deserves notice, and credit.

Nonetheless, this needs to be seen alongside some ugly truths – such as the fact that the men of violence were rewarded, given portfolios in government and made international statesmen, while people who never took up guns were left by the political roadside. Worse, the actual sources of the conflict were not put to rest. They were put on hold.

It has always been my view that the IRA would be back, as they were at intervals throughout the 20th century. And not just because of ‘British occupation’. In my opinion, Northern Ireland should be governed by whoever it wants to be governed by. At present its people want to remain within the United Kingdom. The problem is that the ghastly story Sinn Fein-IRA preached throughout the Troubles is preached still.

Take the current Sinn Fein President and leader of the opposition in the Irish parliament. Some years ago Mary Lou McDonald could be found at Fairview Park in Dublin. That park contains one of Europe’s few statues to a Nazi collaborator. The IRA leader Sean Russell was returning to Ireland in 1940 from a training session laid on by Nazi Germany when he died of a perforated ulcer on the U-boat carrying him home to his native land. (Because remember that when the Luftwaffe were bombing our cities, so was the IRA. In 1939 and 1940 the IRA were busily setting off bombs in London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester.) He was then buried at sea.

So after the war who did the peace-loving Republicans in Ireland put up a statue to but this IRA terrorist and Nazi sympathiser? It has stood there ever since. I have visited it myself. When it has been vandalised (which has happened a few times) the Dublin authorities always make sure it is repaired. Unlike, say, the statue of the unforgivable Edward Colston in Bristol.

McDonald paid her respects to Russell in Fairview Park, at a ceremony to celebrate him, because that’s what you have to do to rise within Sinn Fein. You have to praise Nazi collaborators, terrorists and other ‘men of peace’. Because the poisonous folklore of Irish Republicanism remains.

Of course it has some poisonous opposites on the Unionist side. But the acts of violence stretching from well before 1916, though the Nazi collaboration, to the civilian bombings and the disappearance of innocent mothers of the 1970s to 1990s (here’s looking at you, Gerry) all happened because the poison tree has never been uprooted.

These days it can be seen in the youths who don’t remember the Troubles but nevertheless go out in the Creggan with petrol bombs. It can be seen in the sputterings and smiles of American Democrats like Joe Biden, the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and the disgusting former congressman Peter King

The poison tree is not currently in full flower. But it will be again, seeing as the conditions are all there. Everybody thinks it’s gone, but its bloody bloom will break out again some season – because youths brought up with the worst stories and heroes will have forgotten what their grandparents learned the hard way. That heady Irish cocktail of romance, lies and boredom is still intoxicating. And those of us who oppose it will continue to be called ‘anti-peace’.

Meet the aristocrat plotting Macron’s downfall

Can a modern revolution emanate from the political centre or, more unconventionally, from the heart and mind of an aristocrat who places republican values above factional allegiance? This was the question that propelled me more than a hundred miles east of Paris – while another day of mass demonstrations unfolded in the capital and across France – to the post-industrial town of Vitry-le-François to meet Charles de Courson, the French parliamentarian descended from Norman nobility who nearly succeeded in bringing down the government of President Emmanuel Macron with a no-confidence vote on 20 March.

The interparty revolt led by De Courson’s small group of nonaligned deputies in the National Assembly had been triggered by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne’s invoking of Article 49.3, a frankly dictatorial clause in the constitution that permitted the government to impose an increase in the French retirement age from 62 to 64, rather than put it to a vote she almost certainly would have lost.

​On 6 April, the grey and rainy day I interviewed De Courson in his fief, the 5th Assembly district in the department of the Marne, the decision by the Constitutional Council to validate the pension reform was still two weeks away, and Monsieur le Député, dressed in a dark suit, black jersey and tie, seemed reasonably happy with the outcome of his work so far. His staff had suggested lunch at Le Grillardin, a noisy, no-frills restaurant on the Place d’Armes, where the only indication of De Courson’s recent fame was that we were placed by the front window, comfortably away from the din of a packed house. De Courson ordered the French equivalent of soul food, a blanquette de veau on special.

Even though the no-confidence vote had failed by nine votes, De Courson considered the close call a personal ‘victory’ because it had split the centre-right Les Républicains and summarily ended talks between its leader, Éric Ciotti, and Borne that were aimed at enlarging Macron’s rickety governing co-alition. Nineteen of 61 LR members had defected from their party line and supported the no-confidence motion, a stunning act of rebellion that was the most significant story of the day and the principal reason Macron’s authoritarian reign was in danger.

Until De Courson made his ‘motion de censure’ speech on behalf of his grab-bag parliamentary group LIOT, most of the media’s attention had been focused on the anti-Macron bellicosity of the unruly leftist group NUPES, and the somewhat surprising opposition to his pension reform by
Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement Nationale. Le Pen’s group introduced its own no-confidence motion, but the NUPES wouldn’t support a proposal brought by its sworn ideological enemy. Then LIOT put forward its own motion, a pragmatic solution acceptable to all opposition parties, and with it De Courson’s remarkable speech – remarkable because of its eloquent economy and clarity, which were a refreshing alternative to the often florid and frequently sarcastic rhetoric of French politics. De Courson read his speech through his wire-rimmed glasses, hardly ever looking up at his applauding supporters, not even when the president of the Assembly cut off his microphone because he had exceeded the ten-minute limit.

​‘I learned this from the Jesuits in middle school,’ De Courson said. ‘A good speech has an introduction, an outline, and a conclusion.’ He describes this style as containing no ‘fla-fla,’ which means no ornamentation, nothing fancy. And, indeed, there was nothing fancy about his motives for placing himself at the centre of the storm. ‘Macron’s position on the retirement age works to the advantage of the extremes. If we continue like this, in four years it will be Marine Le Pen against [leftist Jean-Luc] Mélenchon in the second round’ of the presidential election, a contest he believes Le Pen would win. De Courson cited a recent poll that showed Le Pen defeating Macron with 55 per cent of the vote if last year’s election were rerun today.

‘So my idea with my group was that we have to halt the massacre’ – by bringing down the government and forcing the President to call new elections. De Courson has learned to take seriously the threat from Le Pen, and her popular appeal, over the past 15 years: she carried 57 per cent of his district’s vote last year against Macron, up from 53 per cent in 2017. ‘This was the only industrial city in the Marne and it experienced all the vicissitudes of industrial restructuring – leaving by the wayside people of modest means.’ This made them perfect targets for Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-free-trade and anti-immigrant message.

For the wine producers of adjacent Champagne, Le Pen was popular for different reasons. De Courson imagines some of his constituents saying: ‘We’re sick of paying taxes, of working to feed the loafers. Nobody wants to come to work anymore.’ So it’s no surprise that his commanding 72 per cent victory in the legislative election in 2017 shrank to 63 per cent last year.

But De Courson’s calculation wasn’t just political or tactical, since his sympathies tend to the left of centre on social and economic issues. In his no-confidence speech before official France, he declared that the pension reform ‘in reality crystallised all the injustices’ inflicted on ordinary people and denounced the government’s ‘hijacking of the spirit of the Constitution’.

Across the table at lunch, he decried Macron’s ‘Hegelian conviction about power…this belief that while he doesn’t know anything, that while he has never run anything in his life, that because one obtained power through unlikely circumstances, well, now one can do anything one wants. This Hegelian concept of power is destructive to a democracy. He has done everything to eliminate the intermediary bodies, local collectivities, unions, everyone. And he finds him-self naked before the people.’

And then there’s Macron’s psyche, a portrait in selfishness: ‘The total lack of a social dimension – total. When you look at his life, he has never devoted one hour to others.’ I asked De Courson if Macron was a narcissist, but he preferred to describe Macron as ‘bourgeois’. ‘His wife is an heiress, if you will. He has lived in a protected milieu. It’s true he didn’t get into the [ultra-elite] École Normale Supérieure, but afterwards he did Sciences Po, he did École Nationale d’Administration, and he surrounds himself with people like him, which is a fundamental error.’ This puts Macron in opposition to people from inferior social classes. ‘When there is a boy who says to him, “I don’t have any dough”, and he responds, “You only need to cross the street to that restaurant, they’re looking every-where for workers”, you see the behaviour of a filthy rich man who has never, ever taken care of anyone else – of people in difficulty.’

​Despite sounding rather ‘left’ in his critique, De Courson isn’t calling for insurrection and, unlike so many other towns and cities in France, Vitry-le-François was quiet the day we met. Ever the stickler
for procedure, De Courson had quickly followed his performance in parliament with a formal challenge to the pension reform in front of the Constitutional Council, arguing that the government hadn’t adhered to the rules for proposing a law intended to ‘rectify the financing of social security’. But on 14 April,the council, a group of nine appointed, not-very-independent-minded ex-politicians, jurists and bureaucrats, dashed any hope that procedural challenges would change anything. They not only upheld the essentials of the new law, but also rejected the call for a nationwide referendum, which polls suggest would decisively defeat the pension reform.

De Courson had already despaired of reaching political compromise – during the three-month crisis before the no-confidence vote, he claimed that the government had refused serious negotiation with its opponents. One of his ideas that was never considered: instead of raising the retirement age, ‘you can ask the French to work more days of the year to finance the pension system: you say, listen, we have 12 holidays in France – maybe we abolish one of them to finance pensions’. This compromise sounded reasonable, and politically astute coming from a former councillor in the French Court of Auditors, but De Courson at 71 has no interest in running for president or assuming a ministerial post other than in the Ministry of Finance.

Macron clearly isn’t listening to politically moderate critics like De Courson and seems to feel he has nothing to lose by hardening his stance. Although he had ten days to act, he signed the pension reform into law almost immediately after it was ruled valid, another provocation. De Courson had told me that ‘the government is hanging by a thread’ because just ‘eight or nine additional LR deputies could bring down the government at any moment’ with a new motion of no confidence. For now, the protest against Macron has shifted largely to ‘the street’ or, as De Courson politely corrected me, ‘the people’.

At lunch, before we got to present-day politics, De Courson talked at length about his family’s past, and nearly cried several times as he recounted his father Aymard’s Resistance service in the British Prosper network; his maternal grandfather Léonel de Moustier’s Assembly vote in 1940 against suspending the Constitution and granting Marshal Pétain dictatorial power in the wake of the German invasion; and his grandmother Germaine’s deportation to a German concentration camp. Léonel died at Neuengamme in July 1944; Germaine died at Ravensbrück in January 1945. De Courson didn’t mention that his deputy ancestor, the Marquis de Saint-Fargeau, voted for Louis XVI’s execution in 1793. Hegelian or otherwise, I’m not sure Macron realises what he’s up against.

How the junior doctors’ strike could have been avoided

Easter and Passover coincided this year, so we’ve been in America visiting my in-laws. Four years ago, in the spirit of the holiday of liberation and exodus, we had all travelled to the Ukrainian village outside Lviv from which my father-in-law’s family emigrated. In just a few short generations during the 20th century, people there found themselves labouring under the Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Nazi and Soviet yokes. The disastrous human consequences are laid bare in Bernard Wasserstein’s poignant new history, A Small Town in Ukraine. Now Russian missiles intermittently rain down, partly enabled by sanctions busting and dirty money. When President Zelensky addressed the British parliament a couple of months ago, he drove past luxury flats overlooking our Ministry of Defence and reportedly owned by Putin’s former deputy prime minister. They are just the £11 million tip of a £6.7 billion iceberg of dodgy UK property. In the Lords this week, a cross-party coalition is trying to strengthen the Economic Crime bill and shut the ‘London laundromat’. Russia must compensate Ukraine for its illegal invasion. A good place to start would be converting frozen illicit assets into Ukrainian reparations.

My first visit to Washington was as a student at the height of the Iran-Contra affair. A friend got us into the Oval Office, and I particularly remember Ronald Reagan’s desk toy. As the Cold War reached its denouement, his small wooden spinning ‘decision maker’ was marked ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’ and ‘scram’. Amusing, but not totally reassuring. Now this Easter it’s my turn to show my daughter around. So it’s irritating to find Smithsonian museums still operating pandemic-era ticket restrictions discouraging spontaneous visits. Not so the Lincoln Memorial, with its open-to-all sculpture of craggy Uncle Abe, and marble inscriptions of his second inaugural speech and Gettysburg address. What he lacked in Instagrammable good looks he made up for in tweetable concision. But his sobering texts remind us that the Civil War began just 85 years after the founding of the republic. With the United States arguably as divided now as it was then, can the Union hold? On balance I think it can. For better or worse, conflict is intrinsic to America.

From DC we head to New York, avoiding airports for the much less chaotic train. In the margins of a board meeting I’m attending on the Upper East Side, I squeeze in a visit to the exquisite Neue Galerie, and its restituted Nazi-looted art. Ignore the hyperbole praising its patron, and ignore the overhyped medieval armour (have they not seen Glasgow’s Burrell Collection?). Instead lose yourself in the anchor piece of the museum – Gustav Klimt’s sensuously gilded portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Now back in London, and it’s clear the health department’s industrial relations strategy isn’t going to plan. Having tried to tough it out, their attention switched to the Royal College of Nursing, hoping other union dominoes would then fall. But the RCN is still reeling from a CBI-style sex scandal, and its members have ignored their own leaders and narrowly voted no to the latest pay offer. Paradoxically the government’s wider NHS pay deal now hinges on the pragmatism of Labour-affiliated unions such as Unison, which has voted in favour. Matters are even messier when it comes to the junior doctors. Theirs is a rear-view-mirror claim for pay restoration after a decade or more of real-terms erosion. So unlike the nurses, improvements in the forward inflation outlook make less difference to their negotiating stance. As with striking doctors in many other countries, medical dissatisfaction also has deeper causes. These include legitimate concerns about pandemic burnout, staffing levels, career flexibility, and – thanks partly to the European Court of Justice – the loss of the ‘firm’ apprenticeship model in place of shift working.

Could the current lose-lose standoff have been avoided? By last autumn it was obvious that inflation was far higher than assumed by the independent NHS review bodies, so their original recommendations wouldn’t stick. At that point they could have been asked, exceptionally, to make an improved 18-month pay recommendation. That might have drawn the sting, while preserving their legitimacy. Had it been coupled with the government’s long-awaited NHS workforce plan to expand and reform training, frontline staff might have seen light at the end of tunnel. Now if further strikes drag on, at the very least waiting lists will worsen. The nuclear option of withdrawing cover for emergency services and urgent cancer care would be unconscionable.

To end on a more positive note, at 1 a.m. on Tuesday I find myself with other members of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme outside Wellington Barracks opposite Buckingham Palace. The Household Cavalry have invited us to observe their mounted rehearsal for the coronation, under cloak of darkness. The martial precision and logistical complexity of ‘Operation Golden Orb’ is extraordinary. That excellence shouldn’t, however, obscure the fact that at the time of the last coronation in 1953, our armed forces were more than four times larger than today. With the world as it is, we’re going to have to grow them once again.

I shed a tear for the SNP

For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers.

Gloating in such a manner is odious and juvenile and so I simply shook my head sadly and even shed a tear when I heard that the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie, had been arrested. In fact I spent most of the day beneath a shroud of tears, having learned that the mega campervan parked outside Peter Murrell’s mum’s house had been bought for ‘campaigning purposes’ during the pandemic – and then read the transcript of Nicola Sturgeon’s Putinish lecture to members of the SNP’s National Executive Committee who had dared to question the state of the party’s finances.

The tears failed to cease when the party’s inept new leader, Humza Yousaf, insisted that there was no reason for Sturgeon to resign her seat, because we have ‘moved past the time’ when wives can be held responsible for the actions of their spouses. Yousaf, I think, is an idiot – but then so too are the Scottish police if they continue to display a complete lack of curiosity about what little Ma Sturgeon knew and when. Are we really to believe she had not the slightest idea anything whatsoever untoward was taking place? That she did not know about the existence of the campervan, or how it had been bought, or why it spent so long at her mum-in-law’s house?

Perhaps she didn’t – but one way or another, don’t the rozzers think it might be interesting to find out, by talking to her for a bit? Apparently not. Such is the sway Sturgeon held over that benighted country that while the coppers feel they have a right to peer closely at her barbecue, they cannot quite bring themselves to have a word with her directly. It is most odd.

I was a little wary of writing about the misfortunes befalling Scotchland because whenever I do some SNP halfwits who adhere to the trendy new discipline of Critical Scotch Theory get themselves terribly worked up and demand that I am arrested for hate crimes. But needs must. It seems perfectly clear from south of the border that the leadership contest should be rerun, given that Sturgeon et al knew exactly what was coming down the pipeline and wished to get the election over and done with, all the better for their supposed ‘continuity candidate’, poor old Humza. The party’s members may have been rather less inclined to opt for continuity if they had known that continuity involved a very close relationship with the police. The truth is that Kate Forbes was effectively cheated by the leadership of the SNP – and this alone should require the resignation of wee Krankie.

The whole business is having its effect in the opinion polls, with the SNP vote down from a high of 55 per cent two years ago to 39 per cent today: that figure is surely destined to fall further. Labour has gained most of those disaffected votes but the Tories, too, are performing well.

The other problem with ‘continuity’ is that the policies which Sturgeon pursued are not terribly popular with the electorate, despite the party’s huge dominance this century. People vote SNP because they wish for Scotland to be independent of the UK, which is a perfectly respectable aspiration. It is this sense of Scottish identity, its otherness from Englishness, which the voters north of the border find appealing, especially when it is reinforced with a bit of Anglophobic dog-whistling (at which Sturgeon and co have been adept). There is no indication whatsoever that the electorate found her progressive politics, which led to Scotland becoming perhaps the wokest country in Europe, remotely attractive.

Indeed, a recent opinion poll carried out for UnHerd showed that of the top ten most ‘trans-sceptical’ constituencies in the United Kingdom, all bar one were in Scotland – and the other was in Wales. (Incidentally, the most sceptical of the Scottish constituencies were from the Roman Catholic west coast, rather than the Wee Free Presbyterian redoubts.)

This tallies with a previous opinion poll in the country relating to gay marriages and gay adoptions, in which 69 per cent of Scots thought that the ideal circumstances for the raising of a child were for the mother and father, of different genders, to be married. Similarly, 71 per cent disagreed with the suggestion that defending traditional marriage was discriminatory towards gay men and lesbians.

The Scots still self-identify as left-wing, however – and that’s because (rightly in my opinion) they do not consider indentitarian issues to be necessarily of the left, even if it is the liberal left from which they most frequently emanate. The picture is much the same in England, and particularly in those Red-Wall seats won by Boris Johnson in 2019. There, they had no great argument with the left-wing economic policies put forward by John McDonnell, but were brought over to the Conservatives partly by Brexit and partly by Jeremy Corbyn’s hideous wokeness and especially his lack of patriotism (as Sir Keir Starmer well understands).

The problem in Scotland is that in an attempt to counter the Nats’ dominance, the other major parties tagged along with all the idiotic woke stuff – when, in truth, it was really only the prospect of independence which cleaved the voters to the SNP. Currently, then, there is a vacuum in Scottish politics the size of Colin Beattie’s stomach.

How to lose sales and alienate people

In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward off mice, the parent website urges shoppers tired of corporations latching onto fashionable left-wing causes to dramatise their displeasure through product boycotts.

The idea is a bit goofy. Yet the app could appeal to a far more than niche market. Only 8 per cent of the US public self-identifies as far left. That leaves a fair whack of folks prospectively unenthralled by progressive corporate posturing. This month, the brewers Anheuser-Busch sent the prancing trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney a customised case of Bud Light, each tin printed with the image of this would-be female exhibitionist. Thanks to Mulvaney’s subsequent TikTok video, in which the parodically feminine convert to my sex preens in a bubble bath slurping from Budweiser’s freebies, Bud Light sales have plummeted. Collective public disgust hived £4.8 billion from Anheuser-Busch’s market value in just a few days.

Nike is next. The sportswear company has also partnered with Mulvaney, who’s been leaping about on camera doing awkward, sissified calisthenics while wearing a Nike running bra. But the purpose of a running bra is to firmly support breasts, and Dylan Mulvaney doesn’t have any breasts. In kind, a recent Honey Birdette lingerie advert features a man wearing a lacy red push-up bra and suspender belt, his tights failing to suppress what Mulvaney dubs ‘the bulge’. ‘My crotch doesn’t look like other women’s crotches sometimes, because mine doesn’t look like a little Barbie pocket,’ the influencer has observed – as if the part of a woman from which children emerge is a cheap bit of plastic. Mulvaney’s urging on TikTok to ‘Normalise the bulge!’ has even offended the trans icon Caitlyn Jenner.

While the rumour on Twitter that Tampax has also engaged Mulvaney as a sponsor is erroneous, the company did send the male-anatomied show-off multiple free boxes of tampons. As I recall, during my reproductive years Tampax never posted me any free tampons. At least such a welcome giveaway (they’re expensive!) would have made biological sense.

What are marketing people thinking? On the off chance you’ve never seen the chancer’s videos, Mulvaney has made a public spectacle of his year-long transition to becoming not-really-a-girl. The 26-year-old’s version of being female is so exaggerated, writing large the most pathetic aspects of stereotypical femininity, that for anyone with genuine XX chromosomes the play-acting is grievously insulting. Make-up caked, pinkies raised daintily upward, heels lifted high and out to the side, he flits prissily on a 20-foot run. This is the sort of ‘girl’ who throws underhand and five feet too wide, who’s afraid of worms, who hates getting dirty, who cries all the time, who squeals at minor celebrities, who can’t pound a nail or open jam jars and who jabbers incessantly about frocks, skincare products and periods. Had I watched one of these performances in a state of innocence, I’d have mistaken the video for an anti-trans piss-take.

This once little-known actor may well be a calculating opportunist cashing in – accumulating more than £1 million so far – on a warped trend. Racking up nearly 13 million followers, the fellow (yes, ‘his’, ‘he’, ‘fellow’; go ahead, Met, arrest me) is doing terribly well from pageantry watched nearly a billion times online – many can’t-look-away views, as in my case, drawn for being so horrific. In a way, then, you can’t blame the guy. You can blame companies perversely attaching themselves to an influencer who offends a large proportion of their customers.

Budweiser has traditionally targeted men, and whatever pronoun we use to cite the character, Mulvaney makes a poor excuse for a fishing, shooting, pub-crawling bloke. The brand’s image is no-nonsense, down-home and working-class. Why alienate your commercial base merely to appeal to a narrow Gen-X demographic, most of whom can’t yet legally drink? Anecdotally, a Missouri bar manager reports that sales of Bud Light in his venue halved in a week; a sports bar owner in Massachusetts claims his Bud Light sales are down by 80 per cent.

I’ve observed this pattern before regarding publishing houses more obsessed with ‘diversity’ than with producing books people want to buy. Intoxicated by hip left-wing causes, corporations lose sight of their primary purpose: profit. Granted, boardroom ideology is doubtless skin-deep. These affected displays of what currently passes for virtue must be motivated by the same cynical opportunism that drives Mulvaney. But since when do we need to remind companies to make money? Their social engineering strategy is backfiring spectacularly. So maybe these marketers aren’t cynical enough.

Which brings us back to ‘Woke Alerts’. Conventionally, it’s the left that deploys product boycotts (think Israel), and it’s the left that has contrived online rating systems to suppress right-of-centre opinions. The Corporate Equality Index rates companies on their alphabet-people policies. The Global Disinformation Index punishes websites for not toeing the progressive line. Consumers’ Research is using the same tactics to fight back.

Personally, I would see it vastly expand its new service. Know those advisories at the beginning of Netflix films, ‘Includes sexually graphic scenes and drug-taking’ etc? Before Channel 4’s Naked Education, which in the interest of body-positive ‘acceptance’ all but urges young women to chop their breasts off, let’s see ‘Woke Alert!’ pop up on-screen. Before the BBC News? Woke Alert! At the entrance to National Trust properties, shameful cesspits of colonialism and links to slavery? Woke Alert! Outside the Wellcome Trust’s exhibit claiming milk is racist? Woke Alert!

Look, I know we’re all sick to the back teeth of the word ‘woke’, but at least it’s uni-syllabic and punchy, and most of us know what it means. Besides, we wouldn’t have to use the tiresome shorthand nearly as often if there weren’t so bloody much of it about.

This season of bank panics may not be over

‘March madness’ was a tag applied with hindsight to last month’s scare provoked by the unconnected collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse. Nothing systemic there, said the wise men. But this week began with another rumble, as reputable US institutions, including State Street of Boston and the stockbroker Charles Schwab, reported large deposit outflows, while shares in others dived.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England was assessing whether to raise the state guarantee of bank deposits from its current £85,000 to avert social-media panics. But the problem is becoming circular: as interest rates rise, depositors are keener to move money around in search of higher yield. The bigger the state guarantee, the lower the risk of doing so –and the more exposed out-of-fashion banks will be to sudden outflows. No one ever knows where crowds will surge next, but this spring’s madness may not be over yet.

Not building back

I long ago stopped introducing myself as ‘Boris Johnson’s business editor’, though I believe I’m the only person on the planet ever to have held that title. Likewise, I’ve never met anyone who boasted of being a member of Johnson’s Build Back Better Business Council, established in 2021 but which, we’re told, is about to be scrapped as ‘increasingly irrelevant’ by Rishi Sunak.

To be fair, the Council’s own report included quotes from the likes of Alan Jope of Unilever and Thierry Bolloré of Jaguar Land Rover praising its efforts to advance a ‘green growth’ agenda. But the world knows (and I can attest) that Johnson had no interest in business issues; and arguably no UK government since Margaret Thatcher’s has listened to captains of industry and commerce as much as to City fat cats, many of whom also happen to be party donors.

Is Sunak different? Some say his attention is caught only by the sort of tech ventures he used to back as a California-based investor. Others raise an eyebrow at his choice of the Morgan Stanley veteran (and archetypal Davos Man) Franck Petitgas as his ‘business and investment adviser’. The sin-binned CBI no longer has a dialogue with No. 10, while ‘Business Connect’, a conflab of ministers and company chiefs hastily convened for next Monday, looks like a patching-up job after the pain caused by the recent Budget.

One way or another, Conservatives need to do a lot more building back before the mainstream of UK business decides that Starmer’s Labour is a better bet.

Nuclear lessons

There are several lessons for UK energy security from the coming into commercial service of Olkiluoto 3. Finland’s first new nuclear power plant since 1982 is (according to operator TVO) its ‘greatest climate act’. While the Germans – sticking doggedly to the anti-nuclear policy that left them so exposed to Russian energy supplies – chose the same day, 16 April, to unplug their last three reactors, Finland is now ‘almost self-sufficient in energy’ and looking forward to an era of stable prices. The new facility should run for 60 years and, reassuringly to those worried about spent nuclear fuel, it sits alongside a network of tunnels being bored deep in the bedrock as a safe repository.

Not surprisingly, nuclear power has an 83 per cent approval rating among Finns. Yet this flagship took 14 years beyond its original four-year timetable to complete, having suffered endless disputes with its French and German contractors, and ballooned in cost from first estimates of €3 billion to a final €11 billion-plus. Nuclear power remains the only viable answer to our own baseload energy gap, but every example elsewhere reminds us how difficult it is to deliver.

Closed on Mondays

France is a very fine country – I thought, as I motored to the Dordogne and back over Easter – but how right President Macron was to press home his controversial retirement-age reform, signed into law last week. Leaving behind striking doctors, failed ‘smart motorways’ and unfilled potholes, I whizzed through the queue-less Eurotunnel into a land of politesse and high public investment (and, of course, a penchant for violent protest, though I saw none) where British expats praise everything from the comprehensiveness of healthcare to the efficiency of retail banking. But as longevity rises, how can any nation seriously claim it’s entitled to stop work at 62?

Even Macron’s imposition of two more years’ toil clearly won’t solve the imbalance between rising pensioner numbers and shortage of productive workers. One result is that most of France now shuts down on Mondays, creating an extra hole in economic output – and an irritation for travellers.

This week’s restaurant tip, Le Bistronome, was the only place I could find to eat on Easter Monday at Montreuil-sur-Mer. Its stuffed veal shoulder was succulent, but guess what: it closes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Night-train romance

Other things the French do well these days include television drama (Paris Police 1905) and talk radio. On a long, dull section of autoroute I was charmed by a discussion of the romance of rail travel – ‘le train, c’est un voyage; l’avion, c’est un deplacement’ – and the coming launch of Midnight Trains, a deluxe sleeper network radiating from Paris across Europe. Also in the offing, I discover, is the Good Night Train from Brussels to Berlin. If low-carbon ventures such as these flourish as short-haul flying withers, might we see a revival of the never-started Eurostar overnight service from York to the continent?

What bliss that would be – if it’s not blocked by post-Brexit border bureaucracy. The sublime Venice-Simplon-Orient Express, I note, is suspending its London-to-Paris leg ‘ahead of the introduction of enhanced biometric passport controls’.

Letters: The reincarnation of Anne Boleyn 

Pension point

Sir: I have just read Kate Andrews’s article on junior doctors’ pay (‘Sick pay’, 15 April). While not wishing to get drawn into the rights or wrongs of their strike action, may I point out that in respect of the NHS pension scheme, for the sake of balance, the employee’s pension contribution also needs to be taken into account? The employer may well pay a 20 per cent contribution, but a junior doctor on a salary of either £29,000 or £37,000 (both figures quoted in the article) will pay 9.8 per cent of salary with a consequent reduction in take-home pay.

John Etherington

Wilsden, West Yorkshire

Coach trip

Sir: It was good to see mention of the Speaker’s state coach in your leading article (‘Reign or shine’, 15 April). The coach, which was retired in 2006, has been restored but languishes at Arlington Court in north Devon, where it is part of a national collection of vintage coaches. It would be excellent if it could be used at the coronation, as it was in 1953, as well as at Charles’s wedding in 1981. Even if there are technical reasons why it should not perform its traditional function, surely it is time it was returned to its proper place, the Palace of Westminster, where it could be seen by a wider public?

Simon Gordon

Harbertonford, Totnes, Devon

Word on the streets

Sir: Your leading article did not point out that street party applications for the coronation had to be in by a far earlier date than was required for the late Queen’s Jubilee. This would account for some of the numeric disparity. Local political bias is pertinent perhaps.

Terence P. O’Halloran

Stainton by Langworth, Lincolnshire

Love over law

Sir: I suppose that Dan Hitchens would label me ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’, although I am uncomfortable with such easy labels. His article (‘The lost shepherds’, 8 April) seems very much to favour those he would label as ‘conservative’. No doubt most of them would also be uncomfortable with such labelling. On the specific issue of same-sex relationships he, and many others, would regard my position on this as ‘a departure from the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scripture’; a craven attempt to ingratiate ourselves with the zeitgeist. I do not believe that it is any such thing. Rather, we seek to tease out, for today’s world, what it means to do to others what we would want them to do to us (Matthew 7:12). We recognise that throughout history most societies have caused pain, isolation and even suicidal thoughts to those for whom same-sex attraction is part of their very being. The church meekly proved a faux-theological justification of something it had never felt the need seriously to consider. Frankly, that was inexcusable, and still is.

This seems to me to be a classic case of putting ‘law’ first and forgetting the much deeper command to love, to nurture the best in people, and allow them to thrive as fully rounded beings. As St Paul puts it: ‘The letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Revd Canon Timothy Kinahan

Helen’s Bay, Northern Ireland

When deterrence fails

Sir: Paul Wood makes some excellent points (‘Shadow play’, 15 April). Chinese diplomacy in brokering the normalisation of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is indeed a stunning upset but, as he rightly concludes, one that may have the net result of making all-out war in the Middle East more likely. His analysis raises a fundamental question: how did we get here? The answer surely lies in the West’s abject failure, since 2003, to deter either Iran’s nuclear programme or the expansion of its regional influence via proxies. Iran remains, in the words of the US diplomat Dennis Ross, an exporter of drones, missiles and failed states, to which we can also add state-directed lethal activity, including against the UK. The Iranian regime has never been more emboldened to continue this activity. The lessons of the Cold War are that deterrence only works if it is conducted in a consistent manner and led by responsible states that are possessed of and prepared to use meaningful sticks. None of that applies in the Iranian case; western attention may understandably be trained elsewhere, but for as long as the Iranians see no cost attached to their actions, the threat of another Middle Eastern war will only increase.

Jamie Lyon

London NW1

Head case

Sir: Bernard Cornwell’s recollection of letters he received in response to the publication of his book The Winter King (‘Letter from America’, 8 April) included one which stated: ‘I have read your book and regret to tell you it is mistaken, I was Guinevere in a previous existence.’ This reminded me of the story of a visitor to the Tower of London who approached one of the Yeoman Warders, announcing she was the reincarnation of Anne Boleyn and asking to be directed to the scene of her execution. His response was kindly but brief: ‘I thought you would know that.’

Graham Keating

Hale Barns, Greater Manchester

Unaccompanied minors

Sir: I read with interest Mary Wakefield’s article about overworried parents (‘Help! I’m raising a snowflake’, 15 April). In 1952, I went from my prep school in Kent with my best friend to stay with his parents in Cologne. Two little 12-year-olds, travelling on their own by train, ferry and then another train. Parents at both ends of the journey perfectly content to let us do so. I vividly remember being violently seasick after eating a Dover sole on the boat to Ostend.

Today such a journey is unthinkable, and no doubt the parents would be publicly castigated if not criminally charged as well. How happy and lucky we were.

Robin Hunter-Coddington

Chiswick, London

The problem with St Paul

On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for a world religion. In online posts beneath my column came hundreds of comments from Christians protesting that I’d misunderstood the Crucifixion’s meaning, which was (they said) the ultimate victory. Triumphantly, Jesus redeemed our sins. Or ‘atoned’ for them. Along with atonement and redemption, expressions like ‘ransomed’, ‘forgiven’, ‘pardoned’, ‘paid for’, ‘healed’ and ‘washed away’ recurred, as well as ‘sacrifice’ – Jesus’s blood-sacrifice to expiate the world’s sins: a kind of reparation. The notion of release – from slavery, debt or imprisonment – suffuses these responses.

In the context of human sin, what do those words actually mean? I’ve been thinking and reading around the subject. In a faithless age many readers will find such exploration arcane. But we remain essentially a Christian country, and over the last week I’ve understood that the doctrine of Redemption through Christ’s crucifixion is central to our national religion; and an outsider’s view – I’m an unbeliever – may be worth setting out.

Confronted by the literature, one fast concludes that faith has developed a private language that’s almost impossible for non-believers to understand. I’m also coming to believe that many lay worshippers intone the words without really asking what they mean. I return below to the question of meaning.

First, though, the question of authority. Where does the doctrine of atonement through Christ’s crucifixion find its roots? To my great surprise I find no anchorage for the teaching in anything we believe Jesus said. It just isn’t there! There are claims made for him, but none by him. It appears to be years later that the doctrine was developed. Decades after Christ’s death the Letter to the Hebrews (9:11-28) uses the example of animal sacrifice to suggest that the self-sacrifice of the Crucifixion was the ultimate act of expiation. But it is really St Paul to whom we can trace the repeated and insistent claim that the death on the Cross was a triumphant redemption of all our sins.

In short, it was Paul who invented the Church’s teaching about redemption on the Cross. A brilliant researcher, Morgana Edwards, and I have made a sweep through biblical repetitions of this claim, and amid more than a score, almost every one is from Paul. Paul never met Jesus.

I admire Paul immensely as a writer, a thinker, a leader and a man. He comes across as a troubled, almost tormented figure. I warm to his tetchiness. I understand his nervy approach to women. I share his reproachfulness. I long to know what was the mysterious ‘thorn in my side’ of which he complains. And I’m left astonished by his energy. But the Church does not teach (does it?) that this all too human figure could never have been wrong.

We must surely set Paul in context. He was a missionary, a proselytiser. Jesus had left followers unclear whether he wanted to explode the Judaic belief that the Jews were God’s chosen people, and instead to convert all mankind: a revolutionary opinion for a Jew of his time, which, if he held it, we might expect him to have set forth. Paul was a man on a mission to do just that, across the world.

Preaching to Gentiles, Paul needed what was (in today’s marketing parlance) an offer: a unique selling point. That offer was salvation – but from what? From something (I suggest) which Paul knew troubles everybody and always will: our own misdeeds. He was selling them relief – a saviour and a God who offered, through his own self-sacrifice, a universal pardon; not sin by sin, person by person, calculating each individual balance sheet, but a complete wiping-clean of the slate, no questions asked. We are all saved.

In that sense the Crucifixion offered not justice, but rescue from justice. Can you not see the appeal? Paul certainly could, and the doctrine of redemption through the Cross traded on it – solving, too, the riddle that will have worried his audience just as it still worries some Christians, and appears to have tormented poor Jesus himself as he was dying: why God would ever have allowed the Crucifixion to happen. Jesus would have leapt at the idea of redemption, if he had ever thought of it. Paul did.

Nobody put it better than the 20th-centurytheologian Austin Farrer, to whose writing the inspirational Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, has referred me. Farrer talks about redeeming all debt ‘to a Supernatural Bank of Justice’. Unfortunately, though, he says that this is what Redemption does not mean.

Which returns us to that question of meaning. Farrer rejects the metaphor most of the laity embrace: payment. ‘Redemption’ is, after all, a metaphor drawn from the world of finance. This has two deep psychological roots in the Old Testament, in the human unconscious, and in every culture we know of. First, the idea of propitiation through sacrifice. Since the dawn of man we’ve offered up sacrifices (usually animals) to the gods. Self-abasement; kowtowing; the blushing apology; ritual humiliation; at its highest, hara-kiri; at its lowest the volunteering of cash… these are all variations on the theme of self-punishment in pursuit of forgiveness, sometimes on our own behalf, sometimes (as with reparations for slavery) on behalf of others. Second is ransom. ‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’: paying for our release from captivity. There was even a theory that Christ paid our ransom to the Devil.

But if not to Satan, then to whom? And if propitiation, then who demands to be propitiated? The God we’ve fashioned over the millennia is not like that. And are we all redeemed forever, or only if we don’t run up further debt?

Christians should face up to this: the whole atonement thing is a terrible muddle, a tangle of primitive and modern thinking, a proselytising salesman’s wheeze, a mess. Trying to make sense of it is a waste of time. Blame Paul. But don’t blame Jesus: it was never his idea in the first place.

Not an experience you’d want to repeat: Shen Yun, at the Eventim Apollo, reviewed

If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by puffs from authorities proclaiming the show to be ‘very, very on top’ and ‘an exemplary display of excellence’. This primitive advertising strategy seems to have worked: on the night I went, the Hammersmith Apollo (capacity around 3,500) was filled to the gills, the crowd made up of the same social mix that you might find at the Cirque du Soleil. What did any of us think we’d be getting?

‘Shen Yun’, as the two robotically scripted compères informed us in front of the curtain, is Chinese for something along the lines of ‘the beauty of divine beings dancing’. Based in New York, it trains and operates eight troupes that tour globally, presenting a different programme every year – a model similar to the Holiday on Ice franchise ubiquitous in my youth. Behind it, unapologetically, is the ideology of the Falun Gong movement that mushroomed in China during the early 1990s. Its spread worried the communist regime, which now proscribes and persecutes its members. Falun Gong accuses the state of torture, arbitrary arrest and organ harvesting.

It has since spread to Chinese communities in Taiwan, Europe and the USA. At first glance it can look harmless enough – a spiritual practice focused on ‘truthfulness, compassion and forbearance’, syncretic of Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity, and having no truck with violence. But there may be a dash of Scientology in there too, and in exile its political alignment has veered far right towards QAnon fantasies as well as extremely narrow attitudes to sexuality.

Constituted as a not-for-profit charity, Shen Yun functions as Falun Gong’s squeaky-clean face to the world. Its goal is to reclaim what it describes as the culture of classical Chinese civilisation, drawing on the pantomime format of traditional Chinese opera, a rough-and-tumble demotic spectacle with elements of circus and martial arts, far removed from the courtly refinements of Japanese Noh.

Over its two-hour duration, Shen Yun presents about 20 vignettes, interspersed with musical interludes during which one prim lady sings a melancholy lament and another saws away on the two strings of a spike fiddle. Each scene has a Technicolored backdrop of CGI video depicting idealised landscapes, mostly of misty mountains and cascading waterfalls, out of and into which, via a clever bit of jiggery-pokery, the dancers appear to materialise. 

The bulk of the episodes focus on Chinese folk-tales enacted with pantomimed emotions, but there’s also a striking excursion into modernity showing a park in a Chinese city in which innocent youths are arrested and tortured by apish official thugs for the crime of displaying Falun Gong banners. Redemption comes with the descent from the heavens of an archangel. If only it did.

What disappointed me was the low level of technical virtuosity. The dancing has been rigorously rehearsed: timing is precise, lines are dead straight, the women are supple and graceful, the men are lithe and virile. But aside from a few back flips and somersaults, there’s nothing to draw a gasp of admiration or surprise. I was more impressed by the speed of the costume changes than I was by anything that happened on stage.

By today’s standards, where everything is indiscriminately acclaimed with whistling standing ovations, the audience response was oddly muted, with the most enthusiastic applause being reserved for an orchestra that played doggedly through a succession of anodyne banalities. Slickly produced, colourfully staged and competently performed, Shen Yun is not to be lightly dismissed as the source of an evening’s light entertainment. But it’s not an experience you’d want to repeat. 

Why do theatres hate their audiences?

War has broken out in theatreland. Managements are increasingly at odds with the audiences who fund their livelihoods. A recent stand-off involved James Norton’s new show, A Little Life, which contains a couple of scenes in which the actor removes his clothes. A punter at a preview in Richmond secretly photographed the moments of nudity and posted the images online. This sparked a furore in the newspapers and the majority of commentators took the producers’ side against the theatre-goers. Dr Kirsty Sedgman, a media studies lecturer, spoke piously to the Independent about ‘an absolute violation of the unwritten contract between audiences and performers’. The Mirror reported that ‘drastic measures’ might be needed to ensure that similar ‘privacy breaches’ don’t occur. No one considered that the backers of the show were secretly thrilled by all the free advertising. And it seems bizarre to invoke the ‘privacy’ of an actor who chose to appear naked in public and who spoke to the press about his on-stage striptease. Richmond Theatre itself handed out leaflets reminding punters that photography was forbidden and this almost certainly encouraged the illicit snapper to get to work.

Theatres are now being urged to crack down on playgoers carrying smartphones. A well-known publicist suggested that every device must be covered in duct tape before its owner can enter the venue. Alistair Smith, editor of the Stage, predicts that smartphones will have to be deposited in lock-boxes at the start of each performance. But what if the punters refuse to surrender their devices? We may end up with a stop-and-search policy in every foyer. That may sound unthinkable but the Covid crisis taught the public to act meekly in the face of intrusive regulations.

The fundamental problem here is that theatre administrators don’t much like the audience. The same is true of directors and actors who regularly declare that the rehearsal period is their favourite part of the job. Why? No spectators getting in the way. A playgoer is a wilful and unpredictable creature who forms an independent and sometimes negative impression of a show. Worse still, he shares his critique with other potential customers. For theatre managers the ideal production would involve 20 shows performed to an invited crowd of fans, agents and family members. The presence of the paying customer can only taint this pure and exalted form of dramatic expression.

To many theatre-makers, the audience is simply a conspiracy against art. And this hostility finds its way into the control-freak rules imposed by every playhouse. During Covid, the level of enforcement intensified but the strong-arm tactics haven’t disappeared. Many theatres order their ushers to blast every visitor with ‘a cheerful earful’ of prohibitions. ‘Phones to silent. No re-admission’, they honk at us. ‘No bags in the aisles. No entry for latecomers. No photography. No smoking. No wine glasses in the auditorium.’

A popular playhouse in west London likes to kettle the crowd outside the auditorium until six minutes before the show begins because ‘the set is being dressed’. Well, hardly. The previous performance ended 22 hours earlier and it’s inconceivable that the stage-hands are still tinkering with the furnishings and the decor. In reality, this theatre has found a neat way to inconvenience the customers. This arbitrary and irrational practice can have only one possible cause: a wish to micro-manage and control. This contemptuous attitude towards punters seeps into a theatre’s dramatic output. Artistic directors, especially in the subsidised sector, are happy to ignore the audience and pursue a narrow and inflexible manifesto of fashionable interests approved by the metropolitan elite.

Since the end of Covid, new battlefields are emerging. A spate of physical conflicts has been reported to Bectu, the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union. Brawls are breaking out between audience members. Drunken playgoers have been seen urinating in stairwells. Front-of-house staff complain of being spat at or punched, and a third of theatre employees have witnessed an incident that required police intervention. Theatre managers haven’t yet found a solution to this problem because they’re keen to ply the punters with as much over-priced drink as possible. Many playhouses now offer an ‘at-seat app’ that delivers crisps and champagne to anyone who wants to avoid the scrum at the crush bar. If you treat your audience like a booze-cruise crowd you can’t complain if they descend to that level. An anonymous respondent to the Bectu report said: ‘The price of drinks is so high that people come pre-loaded or they smuggle things in.’

A production of The Bodyguard at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, was marred by rowdy singing which led to complaints from ticket-holders who wanted to enjoy the professional cast. The same production was shut down when it reached the Palace Theatre, Manchester, after two audience members insisted on singing along and the police had to be called to eject them. The theatre management in Glasgow issued a warning to audience members on social media: ‘You can help by ensuring the professionals on stage are the only people entertaining us.’ In other words, shut up and keep your tuneless screeching for the karaoke bar. This created a bizarre precedent: a singalong musical that allowed nobody to sing along.

Today’s audiences behave a lot better than in previous centuries. When David Garrick began his career it was common for playgoers to saunter into the venue via the dressing room. And audience members felt free to lounge on stage throughout the show. The proscenium arch was introduced in part to create a barrier between the playing area and the seats. Not that this stopped the crowd from lobbing gingerbread and cooking apples at the cast and sometimes at each other. If a show failed to please, the auditorium would erupt in a chorus of ‘mooing’ noises. There were fights too – often over rises in ticket prices. During the 18th century, the Drury Lane Theatre was smashed up by audiences on six separate occasions.

And although we haven’t reached that level of chaos, our theatre culture is becoming steadily coarser. The furore over James Norton certainly doesn’t help. Never mind the issue of smartphones or the confected outrage over a naked performer’s ‘privacy’. Look at the bottom line. Even with prices at a whopping £145, nearly every seat for A Little Life has been snapped up. That sends a powerful message to commercial producers. ‘Get an actor to disrobe and you’ll sell out.’ We’re in danger of turning the West End into a strip club.

Boring is as good as this erotic drama gets: Netflix’s Obsession reviewed

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series got. The rest of the time it alternated between the inept, the infuriating and the utterly mystifying – and not just because you could never fathom what on earth the characters thought they were up do.

How, for instance, did so much money and talent get wasted on a show that the people involved with must surely have realised was terrible? And did the makers really think that we’d put up with any amount of humourless tosh just for the sake of some sex and nudity? (Not, admittedly, that my 15-year-old self would have had a problem.)

For what it’s worth, here’s the basic plot – at which point I might have issued a spoiler alert if Obsession hadn’t come pre-spoiled. Richard Armitage played William, whose status as a brilliant surgeon was briskly established by him saying ‘vitals?’ as he separated conjoined twins and was hailed by colleagues as a brilliant surgeon. His home life seemed pretty agreeable too, with house and wine glasses both outsized, and an adoring and attractive wife who, as a high-flying barrister, was much given to sitting up in bed with specs and a laptop.

But then, at a House of Commons party where William was being courted as a potential health tsar, he met the beautiful Anna and fed her an olive that she did her plucky best to render phallic. Not long afterwards, she summoned him to her swanky flat where they somehow managed to stare at each other with hammy intensity for several minutes without giggling, before having solemn if brief intercourse on the wooden floor.

For a lesser couple, the fact that Anna (Charlie Murphy) was the girlfriend of William’s son Jay might have represented something of a moral dilemma. These two, however, remained refreshingly guilt-free as they had urgent sex against a wide variety of walls. The sex was also largely wordless, which, given the dialogue when they did speak, was maybe just as well. (‘It is my choice to surrender to you… I give you your power.’)

Not that Anna was entirely without an ethical code. Sensing that Jay was about to propose, she quickly rang his father to get his approval for accepting – in return for which ‘You’ll have more of me’. And with that, it was back to sex in which cuddles, comfy beds and nice cotton sheets played little part.

But by now, it was already clear that the best way for the over-15s to get through the programme was to take a slug of booze at every cliché (up to and including someone signalling inner turmoil by squeezing a wine glass until it shattered) or thumping piece of dramatic irony (‘I’d like you and Anna to get to know each other,’ the unwitting Jay told his priapic old dad at one stage). Certainly, you’d have been wasting your time looking for any psychological or narrative coherence.

Anna’s own way of deflecting awkward requests for information about her strange behaviour was to tell her paramours that they should ‘love the questions’ rather than seek anything so naive as an explanation. In a hotly contested field, perhaps Obsession’s biggest flaw was to think that it could palm off its viewers with the same guff.

Meanwhile, back in the world of recognisable men and women, there’s the highly promising Australian sitcom romcom Colin from Accounts. Granted, the meet-cute here might have appealed to Anna – if she’d had the remotest trace of high spirits or sense of humour. Walking to her work as a medical student, Ashley (Harriet Dyer) flashed a breast in gratitude when a man let her cross the road in front of his car. (‘Was it your party tit?’ a friend later asked her. ‘Not even, it was the small one,’ Ashley replied.) The sight of it was enough to cause the driver Gordon (Patrick Brammall) to run over and badly injure a stray dog, which the pair then felt duty-bound to jointly adopt.

Sure enough, a hesitant affection is now growing between them, despite the younger Ashley’s failure to recognise Gordon’s cultural references, including the reason why his preferred nickname is ‘Flash’. They have agreed, though, that the harmless-looking little dog should be called Colin from Accounts.

If all that makes the show sound rather sweet, that wouldn’t be inaccurate. But it also pulls off the neat trick of combining its undeniable charm with plenty of irreverence and a fair degree of filth. There are lots of great jokes too.

Rossetti’s muse was a better painter than he was: The Rossettis, at Tate Britain, reviewed

‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed.’ What’s queer in England is quite normal in Italy, where heated arguments are described as ‘discussioni’, but history has tended to forget that Rossetti was Italian. His fellow Pre-Raphaelites, however, were very conscious of his foreignness, though Holman Hunt found the ‘maccaroni’ served at the Rossetti family table – where you were as likely to meet Giuseppe Mazzini as Niccolo Paganini – ‘delicious’.

Gabriel (he adopted the Dante in his teens) was the second of four children born in quick succession to Gabriele Rossetti, the Italian poet and exiled founder of the revolutionary network the Carbonari, and to Frances Polidori, daughter of another émigré writer, whom he married in London in 1826 after fleeing Naples. The Rossetti household was literary, socialist and unconventional. All the children drew and wrote – thanks to grandpa Polidori’s private printing press, Gabriel and his younger sister Christina were both published authors in their teens – but only Gabriel thought of pursuing art as a career. At the Royal Academy, bored by the formal teaching, he continued to dither over whether to become a poet or a painter until he discovered William Blake and decided to be both.

Tate Britain’s new exhibition is unusual in being about a family rather than a movement, and – with Christina Rossetti’s poems papering the walls around her brother’s ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation)’ (1849-50) in the opening room – as much about literary as visual imagery. The Rossetti children’s literary bent was a formative influence on the Pre-Raphaelites – Gabriel, his younger brother William and Christina wrote half the content of the group’s short-lived magazine The Germ – and their revolutionary spirit rubbed off on the Brotherhood, lending it the cachet of a secret society. Without the Rossettis’ radicalism and unconventionality the Pre-Raphaelites might never have had the nerve to go scouting around the capital for working-class models, discovering Elizabeth Siddal in a hat shop, Annie Miller in a pub, Jane Burden at the theatre, Fanny Cornforth in a park and Alexa Wilding on the street.

Rather than professional models trained in classical poses, the Pre-Raphaelites wanted girls who could play damozels in medieval dramas for which the main requirement was a mass of hair, preferably red. Siddal’s was genuinely auburn, as the memorial lock of it in the exhibition proves.

The Rossettis of the exhibition title include Siddal as Gabriel’s artistic protégée and eventual wife, and the show sets out to dispel the myth of the meek, melancholy, laudanum-addled muse, presenting her as an independent woman and serious aspiring artist in her own right. Its argument that she influenced Rossetti is hard to sustain, but her drawings easily hold their own against his. The sense of space in her ‘Lady of Shallot’ (1853) (see below) is a sweet relief after walls and walls of Rossetti’s overcrowded compositions, and her Rouault-like, inky ‘Last Farewell Before Crucifixion’ (c1858) makes his contemporary ‘St John Comforting the Virgin at the Foot of the Cross’ look feeble. ‘He had his defects, and she had the deficiencies of those defects’, was William’s rather bitchy comment on their artistic relationship, although he conceded that her work displayed ‘eminent purity of feeling, dignified simplicity, and grace’.

Siddal stayed faithful to the purity of the Italian Primitives after Rossetti strayed into more sensual territory. Following a failed attempt at Victorian moralising about fallen women à la Holman Hunt in the unfinished ‘Found’, he headed off down the primrose path to artistic perdition. The appearance of his newly discovered, more voluptuous model Fanny Cornforth in ‘Bocca Bacciata’ (1859) marked the start of his conversion from painting pre-Raphael to post-Raphaelite Venetian ‘courtesan portraits’.

The picture’s protagonist, Alatiel – a bedhopping Babylonian princess from Boccaccio’s Decameron – was no shrinking violet. Hunt was aghast at the image’s ‘gross sensuality’ suggesting ‘animal passion to be the aim of art’, but collectors lapped it up. Girls! Girls! Girls! They couldn’t get enough. A photograph shows the Princes Gate drawing room of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland stuffed with Rossetti stunners, five of which hang in the exhibition.

Rossetti’s serial obsessions with different models anticipated Picasso’s; he treated them better, though the bare breast lent by an unnamed ‘cook’ to Alexa Wilding’s ‘Venus Verticordia’ (1868) is an early example of deep fakery. ‘Haircentric compositions’ is how the catalogue describes his late paintings; as the hair colour dictated the palette they almost invariably conform to the same complementary red and green scheme. Seen one, seen ’em all. The Tate is right to confine them to one room, but should have cut down on the indifferent early works too. Rossetti wasn’t a patch on Millais as a painter or on his sister as a poet. He was an influencer who created an Italian vision of woman that came to define an ideal of English beauty.

A puzzling spectacle: The Secret Life of Bees, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

The Secret Life of Bees is a fairy-tale set in the Deep South in 1964. Lily, a bullied white girl, befriends a plucky black maid, Rosaleen, and they escape together from Lily’s tyrannical dad. After various adventures they take sanctuary at a honey farm run by a commune of astonishingly successful African-American businesswomen.

This story clearly wants to expose the cruelty of whites and the oppression of blacks but the details suggest the opposite. This is a tale of black self-confidence and white failure. Spineless Lily could never have fled her abusive dad without the intelligent and combative Rosaleen to spur her on. And the all-female honey corporation is a fantasy of African-American empowerment. The women sell a homemade brand of ‘Black Madonna’ honey using a label that shows a dark-skinned Virgin Mary. And they rake in huge profits despite doing very little work in the beehive meadows.

They pass their ample leisure hours gossiping about love affairs and strutting around in exquisite cotton blouses, matching skirts, fancy hats, silk stockings, high heels and picture-perfect hairdos. JFK’s wife never lavished so much attention on her appearance. And their finery is on view all day, every day, even in the heat of a South Carolina summer.

As for the story, it grinds to a halt once Lily and Rosaleen reach the honey haven. A few random things happen. Lily’s dad tries to kidnap her. A black boy gets savagely beaten by cops. One of the rich black women marries a needy local creep. And the final scene includes an impenetrable revelation about Lily’s mother who died in odd circumstances, but this hardly affects the characters.

The show looks pleasant enough and the action is interspersed with forgettable songs played by an off-stage band. But the strangest thing about this story of African-American liberation is that it attracted an audience that was overwhelmingly white, even though the white characters are portrayed as vicious thugs who use the N-word constantly. A puzzling spectacle.

White Londoners would sooner die than utter that racial slur and yet they’re keen to hire actors to say it for them. This show isn’t an isolated case. We Caucasians have a boundless appetite for plays that revisit the mausoleum of racist bigotry and remind us how badly we used to treat our black neighbours.

The Only White, another show about racial oppression, is set in South Africa in 1964. A terrorist deposits a suitcase full of dynamite at a whites-only train station. Despite several bomb warnings, the device goes off and kills an elderly white lady, Mrs Rhys. The cops focus on the Hain family who oppose apartheid but who also deplore violence. Did one of their chums plant the exploding suitcase? They tap the Hains’ phone line and harass them by thumping aggressively on their front door. ‘That’s Special Branch,’ says Mr Hain stoically. ‘I’d recognise their arrogant knocking anywhere.’

It gets worse for him and his wife. Both are placed on a ‘banned’ list which prevents them from contacting newspapers or their friends, so they turn to their teenage son, Peter, to smuggle messages out of the house. This is young Peter Hain, later a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, whose first experience of politics feels like an episode of Tintin.

He learns how to sneak through the police cordon carrying letters hidden inside eviscerated onions. He watches a family friend decipher secret messages written on a handkerchief in ‘invisible ink’ (fresh lemon juice). And he learns how to conceal a metal cutter in a barbecued sausage and hide it in a food parcel for a jailed freedom fighter. It’s thrilling stuff although the script focuses more on the cops’ quest to find a culprit than on Peter’s discovery of spy-craft.

The chief suspect, John, admits to planting the bomb after being savagely beaten in prison but Peter refuses to believe his confession. Later, John’s wife blurts out her opinion that the station master is the real murderer because he failed to heed John’s bomb warnings. (This rather gives the game away about John’s role in the crime.)

The story-telling isn’t entirely satisfactory. The Hains believe their house is bugged so they withdraw to the garden for confidential discussions. But they also share incriminating gossip indoors. The drama ends with the shattering of young Peter’s illusions. The man he believed to be a lifelong pacifist is found guilty and sentenced to death. Peter’s ostracised parents ask him to represent them at the memorial service where he reads a lesson from the Gospels. Well, well. A leading Labour figure attends the funeral of a terrorist. Some of us thought that was Jeremy Corbyn’s role. Peter Hain got there first.

The last unashamedly happy masterpiece: Haydn’s The Creation, at Ulster Hall, reviewed

Haydn’s The Creation is Paradise Lost without the Lost. True, the words aren’t exactly up there: translated into German by Haydn’s pal Baron van Swieten and subsequently retro-translated into some of the clumsiest, most endearingly rococo English ever set to music. But you get the idea. Near the start some demons get consigned (very efficiently) to the outer darkness, and at the end the angel Uriel gives Adam and Eve the briefest of warnings – despatched in a brisk recitative before the chorus of angels floods the heavens, once more, with sunlight and praise. Basically, though, it’s optimism. It’s freshness. It’s a universe founded on faith, and with it, joy.

An odd choice of repertoire for Belfast on a Good Friday? Even leaving the politics and theology aside, it’s hard to imagine a piece more remote from the usual anguished Pass-iontide fare. The Creation portrays a world that (for a brief dewy morning) stands in no need of redemption and its first public performance, in Vienna in March 1799, might have been the last moment in history when a composer could produce a universally acknowledged masterpiece on those terms. Twelve months later Haydn’s pupil Beethoven premiered his First Symphony. From then on you know the story: conflict, issues, the artist against the world, and two centuries later here we all are, still trying to reverse ourselves out of that particular mess.

What we got at the Ulster Hall was surround-sound happiness. The Ulster Orchestra, under its principal conductor, Daniele Rustioni, accompanied the 100-strong Belfast Philharmonic Choir, and it didn’t feel too many. Intimidated by the slimline aesthetic of period instrument orthodoxy, most symphony orchestras feel compelled to shrink 18th-century music down to chamber scale. In fact (as Christopher Hogwood demonstrated back in 1991), Haydn’s own Vienna performances fielded an orchestra of 120, which isn’t far short of Mahler’s Eighth. But Rustioni’s forces certainly filled the stage, and they sounded buoyant. The Ulster Hall was new to me; it’s one of those high-roofed Victorian assembly rooms that acoustically just seems to work. A mural in the foyer listed the city council’s repeated attempts to have it demolished.

Anyway, on this occasion it resounded. There was enough vibrato to give the strings a supple, glossy tone without impeding Rustioni’s dance-like phrasing. The man’s a livewire: speeds were swift, but the effect was more like puppyish enthusiasm than breathless haste, and the woodwinds, in particular, played with huge sweetness and character, individually and as the heart of the ensemble sound. It’s tricky to judge the condition of an orchestra when it’s accompanying a choir, but it sounded as if the good reports about Rustioni in Ulster are justified. The choir was just as fresh: no hint of weakness in the usual areas (tenors and high sopranos), and no trace of weariness as the evening progressed – in fact they seemed to be holding energy in reserve.

As soloists, we had Robin Tritschler (sounding youthful), Emma Morwood (suitably tingly on her high notes) and the baritone Ben McAteer, who sounded rich and savoury and heroic and who basically stole the show by leaning into the guileless comedy of Haydn’s musical depictions of birds and beasts: bleating like a sheep and hollowing out his voice, poker-faced, for that most collectible of lines, ‘In long dimension / Creeps with sinuous trace the worm’. Performances of The Creation tend, by their nature, to be cheerful occasions, but this is the first time I’ve witnessed an audience laughing out loud, or indeed rising to their feet for what looked like a wholly unpremeditated ovation. Rustioni turned to the audience, placed his hand on his chest and led the entire company – players, chorus, the lot – in a deep bow of appreciation. A class act.

The previous night in London, Nigel Short conducted his chamber choir Tenebrae in a more typical seasonal programme of Bach motets interspersed with the sacred music of Sir James MacMillan.

This was the opposite end of the choral spectrum: barely 20 singers performing with superb refinement over a softly purling organ and cello continuo (and sometimes not even that). They blended, wove and separated, bringing out the shadows beneath the pealing harmonic cascades of MacMillan’s Miserere and subtly outlining the massive architectural underpinnings of Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude.

At twilight in a candlelit St John’s Smith Square it simply floated on the stillness: you barely noticed the technical finesse. Earlier this year Tenebrae took some flak for leading a private vocal workshop priced at the higher end of (but clearly not beyond) what the market will take. Musicians do, after all, need to eat. Perhaps the recent saga of the BBC Singers (and their cretinous senior managers) will prompt us to think more seriously about the value that we place upon professional artistry at this level.

Glorious: Elton John’s farewell tour, at the O2 Arena, reviewed

Elton John has now been retiring for nearly five years. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in September 2018. Why there? Because it’s a hop and a skip from the small town of Lititz in Amish country, where scores of the big arena shows are built – it’s the real rock’n’roll capital of the world. Since then, with breaks for Covid and other health worries, he has played roughly 300 shows, grossing north of $800 million as of January this year – this is the most commercially successful tour ever.

Retirement, or the threat of retirement, has always been a canny career move: Frank Sinatra played more than 1,000 concerts and recorded ‘Theme From New York, New York’ after he quit the business in 1971. For more than 40 years the Rolling Stones have attracted concert-goers keen not to miss their last chance to see them. They’ve now had more chances than a wicketkeeper standing up to Muttiah Muralitharan. It’s certainly one reason why I finally turned out for Elton – another tick on the ‘legendary artists wot I have seen list’.

For Elton, this was the ninth of ten shows at the O2, with its seating maximised to pack ’em in, and it followed two big outdoor London shows last summer, which brought in 100,000 punters between them. Given those numbers, this is not a show that messes about with new songs or runs of deep cuts. You want hits? You’ve got ’em – hit after hit after hit after hit, songs that have insinuated themselves into the consciousness in a way that only very few artists have managed. I’ve never shelled out for an Elton record, but when he played ‘Rocket Man’ there were, inexplicably, tears welling in my eyes – nostalgia for a time I don’t remember, for events I never participated in, for a world that was not mine. These songs are part of your life whether or not you wish them to be.

For a lot of the show I was reflecting on the relationship between Elton and his lyricist Bernie Taupin. Lots has been written about it and it was the centrepiece of the biopic Rocketman, presented as an up-and-down love affair between two men – one gay and one straight – who needed each other to reach apotheosis. I was thinking less about that, though, than how weird it must have been for both of them. On the one hand, you’ve got Taupin knowing his words only matter when sung by his best friend; on the other, you’ve got Elton having to live with the knowledge that scores of people, even knowing Taupin wrote the words, can’t help assuming they reflect Elton’s own thoughts. I don’t think there’s any other significant artist whose career is so entirely dependent on the lyric-writing of just one other person.

The melodies, of course, are all his own, which is the other mind-blowing thing. What must it be like to have that facility with a tune, to be able to summon something that lodges so completely in the heads of others? Is it like being a top-class footballer, where you actually can’t explain how you are able to make the complex calculations necessary to pass a ball to the foot of someone else, 50 yards away, running at full pelt? Is it just something he knows how to do? So many of these songs, even the lesser ones, have a melodic invention that startles. Maybe it’s because I was a kid when it was a hit, but ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’ has an ease and simplicity that, despite it not being a song with the depth of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, astonishes me. When melodies come so easily, how do you even know which are the good ones?

I strongly suspect the reason for the huge and ongoing public affection for him, despite all the years of cocaine-driven twattery, lies in the fact that despite giving himself the middle name Hercules (probably the funniest thing any rock star has ever done), he never stopped being dumpy, insecure Reg from Pinner, and everyone could see it. Unlike Keith Richards, who was probably born smoking and telling the midwives to piss off, Elton John seemed more like the results of a bizarre experiment in which your next-door neighbour was transformed into a globe-straddling superstar.

There were parts I could have lived without: ‘Have Mercy on the Criminal’ was an early-1970s blues-rock waltz, and the early-1970s blues-rock waltz is the single least- appealing musical style ever devised. And ‘Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding’ might be the apotheosis of serious Elton, but the heavier he got, the less appealing he was to me. But come on, it was Elton. It was glorious. And you’ll never get the chance to see him do this again. Unless he changes his mind, like everyone does.

So tastelessly disturbing it forgets to say anything: Sick of Myself reviewed

Sick of Myself is a satire from Norway that skewers the ‘look at me, look at me’ generation addicted to social media and asks: how far will someone go? Too far, is the short answer. Much, much, much too far, is the longer one. Indeed, although this starts out as a dark comedy, it does eventually escalate into full-on body horror, and while it is compelling and original, if you are as squeamish as I am, you will eventually be watching from behind your hands. Still, I did catch around 67 per cent, so consider this a review of 67 per cent of the film. The other 33 per cent is anyone’s guess.

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, this is the story of Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), which is pronounced ‘Seen-ya’, in case you were wondering. She works in a coffee shop and isn’t special in any way, although she keeps telling her friends: ‘I should have my own podcast.’ We get the measure of her early on when a woman mauled by a dog stumbles into the coffee shop. Signe rushes to her rescue and by the time she’s finished she’s the hero of the hour and saved the woman’s life and the story becomes one exaggeration heaped on another. She longs to be the centre of attention but as she’s white, blonde and blue-eyed, it’s not like she’s first in line when it comes to, say, claiming any kind of victimhood.

She later tries provoking a dog in the hopes that she’ll get mauled and everyone will rally round, but the dog (a husky) is too lovely to comply. This film could also be called The Worst Person in the World, like that other Norwegian film. In fact, The Worst Person in the World should now be renamed The Second Worst Person in the World because Signe is definitely the worst.

She lives with her boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Saether), an artist who is equally charmless and steals furniture that he transforms by turning it on its side, essentially. Yet he is starting to make a name for himself in the Oslo art scene and this winds her up horribly. She steals his thunder at the dinner to celebrate his exhibition by faking a nut allergy (I laughed). Then it all spirals out of control when she’s perusing the Mail Online, which never ends well, and reads about a Russian anxiety drug that is causing horrific side effects in the form of skin rashes and lesions and eventual disfigurement. She’s sick of being ordinary. That’s her illness, but what if she’s properly sick? That’ll make everyone sit up. She scores the drug and can we just say, the results aren’t pretty? And leave it there?

This becomes increasingly graphic, with blood and also vomit, although on that front it’s not on the same level as Triangle of Sadness, thankfully. And, also thankfully, this is interspersed with her self-regarding fantasies, like the one about her own funeral, which is so packed that mourners have to be turned away, which also made me laugh. So you do get a breather in that sense. And there are some biting moments, particularly where it sends up the ‘inclusiveness’ of a fashion industry that pretends to care about different body types when it’s really about selling stuff. However, it’s the sort of film that seems to have set itself a challenge as to how tastelessly disturbing it can become, and eventually forgets to have something to say.

Is it about today’s culture, or does Signe just have a personality disorder? It fizzles out in the end. But it is well directed and well performed and it is on to something. Doesn’t this take to the nth degree what we all feel, at some level? For example, shouldn’t I have my own podcast by now?