Gary Lineker lashes out at ‘dangerously provocative’ Tory MP

Gary Lineker is back in his job as presenter of Match of the Day. He’s also back on Twitter commenting on the activities of Tory MPs. The BBC host has hit out at Tory MP Jonathan Gullis, who accused Lineker of being a member of the ‘Twitterati’. Gullis also said of Lineker:

‘Those are the (type of) people I don’t care about upsetting. Those are the people who want to call people up here racist, bigots, Nazis, like Gary Lineker has done…’

Lineker denied the accusation – and said Gullis’s words are ‘outrageous and dangerously provocative’.

“Boris has a star quality that no other politician… could even get close to.”

Tory MP Jonathan Gullis discusses the state of ‘red wall’ Conservative constituencies with Paul McNamara, as our exclusive poll finds that they would lose all 45 seats. pic.twitter.com/Urgj6bDgg5

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) March 14, 2023

Lineker’s tweet is one of the first he has written since his suspension was lifted by BBC boss Tim Davie. Lineker was briefly given the boot from hosting Match of the Day after he lashed out against the Tories’ Channel migration policy. Lineker wrote of Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s plan:

‘There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?’

His suspension sparked a walkout among Lineker’s fellow BBC football presenters. Let’s hope this latest Twitter spat doesn’t lead to another walkout…

Paris is stinking

They say Spring is a magical time to visit Paris but perhaps not this year. It’s not so much love that is in the air of the French capital but the stench from 7,000 tons of uncollected rubbish. 

The city’s refuse collectors have been on strike as part of the nationwide protests against the government’s pension reform. Workers at the three incinerators that dispose of Paris’s garbage have also downed tools and the walkout will last until at least Monday 20 March.  

It’s not a strike that affects all the capital. In some of the arrondissements, private firms empty the bins and it is business as usual for them. But in other districts – including the swanky 6th and 16th arrondissements – the rubbish collection is the responsibility of city hall employees who have not been seen for ten days. 

The refuse collectors are supported by the city’s mayor, the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, who has expressed her ‘solidarity with the protest movement’. Opposition to the government’s bill that will increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 began in January, and the unions say they are prepared for a long and bitter fight. But might the resolve of the people be weakening? Last Saturday was the seventh day of organised nationwide demonstrations against the reform bill, and the turnout was significantly down on previous protests. Only 380,000 demonstrators were on the streets, compared to the 1.28 million who marched the previous week. 

There is another day of action today, with strikes and rallies planned across France, but another low turnout would suggest that president Emmanuel Macron is on course to score a famous victory against the unions. The pension reforms bill was approved by the Senate at the weekend, by 195 votes to 112, and a committee is currently agreeing on a final draft, which could be submitted to the Senate and National Assembly for a final vote by the end of this week.  

As well as increasing the retirement age by two years, the bill makes other changes to the country’s complicated system of pensions and this is what has brought refuse collectors out on strike. Currently, they can draw a basic minimum pension from the age of 57, but the reform bill would push that back two years.  

Winter is on its way out of Paris and temperatures are forecast to climb to 17 degrees by the end of the week. The Great Stink is going to get worse, and there is growing concern about potential health risks, particularly given that Paris is notorious for its vast population of rats. In 2018, the city council launched a rat ‘hotline’ in order to tackle the menace of an estimated 3.8 million rodents. Although their presence has decreased in recent years there are fears the thousands of black bags littering the pavements will lead to a surge in numbers. 

Hidalgo’s political opponents are weaponising her support for the strikes. Rachida Dati, who is mayor of the 7^th arrondissement and the leader of the centre-right Républicains in Paris, had demanded the ‘implementation of a minimum service for garbage collection…to avoid any health and safety risks’. 

Dati will run for the mayor’s office in 2026, as probably will Clément Beaune, currently the minister of transport. He expressed his outrage at the situation in a tweet:

‘Stench and rot. No emergency measures, even partial by the City of Paris. Yet another example of inaction and contempt for Parisians.’

The mayor’s office excused him of ‘disgusting, demagogic one-upmanship’. On Tuesday evening the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin instructed the Paris police prefect to ask city hall to ‘requisition’ resources to clear the streets of the 7,000 tons of rubbish. If Hidalgo doesn’t comply with the request, reported Le Figaro on Wednesday morning, then the government ‘will take over’.  

The government will certainly be desperate to have the refuse workers back to work by 26 March, the day King Charles III arrives in the capital on his first state visit as monarch. The occasion is of great importance for Emmanuel Macron and the last thing the president wants is for royalty to meet rubbish on the streets of Paris. 

Six key announcements in Jeremy Hunt’s Budget

Jeremy Hunt got the job as Chancellor because he is very different from his predecessor. If Kwasi Kwarteng was rash and unpredictable, Hunt is calm and dependable, if a little dull. Those characteristics will be reflected in Hunt’s Budget, which he will unveil in the Commons this afternoon at 12.30pm. There are unlikely to be any rabbits coming out of his hat.

Hunt’s headline measure is an increase in the pensions lifetime allowance from £1.07 million to £1.8 million. The Chancellor hopes that this benefit, which will affect up to two million people, will encourage older workers to delay retirement if it allows them to build up a bigger pension pot before they finish work.

There will be good news for parents in Hunt’s announcement: free childcare of 30 hours a week for working mums and dads in England is due to be expanded to cover one and two-year-old children (currently it applies only when a child turns three). The Chancellor says this is part of a package to ‘break down the barriers’ to work for mums and dads. He is also expected to up funding for the existing programme of free childcare for parents of those aged three and four – and could allow for a relaxation on staff-to-child ratios to reduce costs.

Drivers are also expected to be handed a welcome year-long extension of the 5p cut in fuel duty – which will cost the Treasury up to £6 billion. The energy price guarantee, which aims to protect people from the soaring cost of energy by capping average prices to £2,500, will also be extended, for three months.

Rishi Sunak has tried to emulate his predecessor, Boris Johnson, by supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia. This is reflected in Hunt’s announcement that defence funding will be increased by £5 billion over the next two years (even if this falls short by £5 billion of what the Ministry of Defence asked for).

One of the big question marks is whether Hunt goes ahead with his controversial hike in corporation tax. This currently sits at 19 per cent but is due to rise to 25 per cent in April. Big businesses, including Dyson, have warned agains the measure. But it seems likely their pleas will fall on deaf ears: Hunt is expected to press ahead with the plan which was first announced by Rishi Sunak in 2021 when he was chancellor. Hunt is, however, expected to offer an olive branch to businesses: by offering tax breaks to firms who invest in the UK.

Hunt says his Budget aims to incentivise growth:

‘In the autumn we took difficult decisions. Today, we deliver the next part of our plan: a budget for growth. Not just growth from emerging out of a downturn but long-term, sustainable, healthy growth that pays for our NHS and schools, finds good jobs for young people, provides a safety net for older people.’

Let’s hope he’s right – and his announcement goes down better than that made by Kwarteng.

The true cost of the teachers’ strike

Here we go again. It’s term time but millions of kids across the country are being denied school as the National Education Union (NEU) has called its members out on strike once more.

Forget the fact that children have already had three years of their education disrupted by Covid. Ignore the minor issue of school attendance being through the floor and that the average secondary school student on course to miss the equivalent of an entire month of lessons this year.

Following a national strike on 1 February and regional ones a fortnight ago, this week sees two more full days of school closures, complete with the marches, rallies and carnivalesque paraphernalia that unions seem to love so much. Yet one can’t help but wonder why the NEU is still pursuing this action when so many other unions have paused theirs to start negotiations about settlements.

Teacher strikes are the wrong move for the wrong reason at the wrong time, and this is even more the case now than ever. They are the wrong move because they’re so divisive. The NEU was the only one out of the three unions balloting for action who actually voted in favour of striking – even then, fewer than half of its members actually backed strikes.

Since then, we’ve seen staffrooms split and those left in school run ragged trying to keep the show on the road. At a time when we should all be pulling together, it’s a tragedy.

Teachers are striking for the wrong reason too. While pay for many has indeed fallen in real terms since 2010, overall teachers remain extremely well rewarded relative to most people, especially when you add on an extra 24 per cent of their salary towards the generous pension scheme they have. Those in the private sector earning far less, with just a basic pension, and who weren’t paid in full while at home during the lockdowns could be forgiven for looking on and thinking strikers are out-of-touch with reality.

Above all, now is the worst time to strike. Attendance in schools has plummeted, with nearly a quarter of all students ‘persistently absent’ and missing more than 10 per cent of school hours. The most important thing teachers can do right now to improve pupils’ prospects is to have them in school and learning – strikes do the exact opposite of this.

This is not to mention that striking destroys any credibility a teacher might have in challenging absences too: you can’t insist with a straight face that a kid comes to school if you’ve just taken action to close that very same school. What a mess.

That said, it does feel as though we might be inching towards an end to the dispute.

The mood music from the government has changed; other striking public sectors have started talks to address their issues. The Department for Education has also made it clear that pay and other matters are now on the table for discussion. You’ve got to wonder why the NEU has persisted with strikes, refusing to call them off even if they do come to the negotiating table. Other teaching unions have said that they feel able to get stuck into substantive talks and hinted at frustration with the NEU’s refusal to engage.

We must hope that things are resolved sooner rather than later. This has not been the most edifying conflict to observe and while it might end up being good for teachers’ pay, it won’t have done much for the profession’s reputation.

There is also a good chance it will make the recruitment challenges that schools face even worse: telling the world for months and months how awful your job is will hardly encourage others to choose it for themselves.

However this ends for the strikers, this has, without a doubt, been most damaging for the people who should matter most: the pupils. Teachers can get their pay rises backdated; kids can never get back the time they’ve missed from school.

So when you see people jubilantly marching today or cheering a big pay rise in the near future, remember that the cost isn’t just the financial one borne by the tax payer. It is also the one imposed on kids who can least afford it. I’m not sure that is worth celebrating.

Stop demonising cyclists

If you were to ask me how many bicycles I’ve had in my life, my response would be about as precise as Boris Johnson’s to the question of how many children he’s fathered. In my case, so many bikes have been stolen over the years – including one attached to a signpost (which vanished along with the bike) and another that I left unlocked for 45 seconds outside Nicolas on Holland Park Avenue. That turned out to be the most expensive bottle of wine I’ve ever taken to a dinner party. (In fact, that was the same bike that had previously been harvested of 90 per cent of its components after being tied up in the street one night, leaving only the bare frame.)

So many bikes, but I persist. And the reason I persist is that in a world of extreme technological and bureaucratic intrusion, of micro-surveillance by Big Brother, of speed cameras, of traffic cameras, of constant nannying, the bicycle is a balm. It is a two-wheeled symbol of freedom.

Aside from walking it is the cheapest and most libertarian mode of transport available. It’s not taxed (except VAT on purchases), and joyously both bikes and cyclists remain unregistered – long may that continue, since number plates on bikes would be a death knell. Say it quietly, but cycling remains a miraculously, if surprisingly, under-policed activity. It relies instead on a code of behaviour and a good old-fashioned sense of survival.

Amazingly, in our health and safety obsessed times, you don’t even have to wear a helmet – a fact so delicious that if you shut your eyes you could just about convince yourself you’re living in Italy. A certain 1970s-style laxity to drink-cycling also persists ­– so you can still go out and have a pint or two, and then you cycle home very, very carefully. If you fall off it’s your own stupid fault. This isn’t just a boon for struggling pubs the length and breadth of Britain, but it can also help out other trades, such as dentists, because inevitably – sober or otherwise – accidents do happen.

And what about one-way streets? Well, like most of us who have ever driven at slightly more than 70mph on the motorway, I may occasionally opt to cycle along a one-way street the wrong way. But if there’s no traffic – and no pedestrians to upset – where’s the harm? Likewise, police camera or not, you can very sensibly saunter through a red light in the middle of the night or when there’s no one else around. Why not? Yes, it’s against the law, but at 3 a.m. the law in this specific instance is a bit beside the point.

Of course, if you take these behaviours too far – weaving through traffic because you’re completely blasted after a four-hour lunch, for instance, or carving up cars at red lights – then people have a legitimate cause to be aggrieved. Should you cycle on pavements? No, not as a rule, but if means you can bypass a massive one-way system intended for car management? Well, go on then, but do it slowly and dismount if there’s a pedestrian. 

Cycling is a bit Z-Cars – it still exists in a time when a clip round the ear was recognised as potentially a more useful response to an infraction than an Asbo. It is perhaps the last bastion of a certain kind of robust Britishness libertarianism. Certainly if John Bull were still with us today – though he’s only ever been a fictional representation of Britain – then I know he would commute in to London on the train and then cycle, red faced, to his office, probably on a Brompton, before stomping about, stripping off layers of tweed and ill-fitting Lycra while complaining about a white van that almost killed him at Hyde Park Corner.

The lack of bureaucratic intrusion into cycling also has a bearing on the lack of taxation that bears down upon it. This helps cycling to remain cheap, which in a non-urban landscape where you’re as likely to see a comet go by as a bus is vital for people on lower incomes. Given soaring petrol prices, road taxes and insurance costs, it’s a sad reality that for those who are fit and able, Lord Tebbit’s great exhortation to ‘get on your bike’ remains a lifeline. Bikes aren’t just about getting from A to Z – they’re a vehicle for social mobility too.

And they’re green. They’re the most efficient means of human transport we have – five times more efficient than walking when measured by the calories you burn in return for distanced covered. In environmental terms, your ageing Dawes Galaxy or Raleigh run-around makes a spanking new Tesla look about as eco-friendly as a slag heap.

There are few better feelings than leaving the city on your bike, passing the suburbs and cycling out into the countryside. It’s incredibly freeing, and reinforces a sense of the connection between your starting point and destination in a way that driving a car never does. If venturing further afield, you can pack your panniers, cycle to your railway station or ferry terminal, and take your bike with you, before pedalling onwards. That’s proper, black-belt Victorian travel, and it beats a Welcome Break handlebars-down.

In part it’s simply because from the saddle of the bike you see the world in greater, sharper focus than from a car – even in London where the two travel at similar speeds. And, of course, it’s good for your heart and soul. Like purple-sprouting broccoli and having a dog, cycling is another thing that doctors should be able to prescribe to patients.

Therefore, I have a request. Please could we stop our rather pervasive collective whingeing about cycling? Please can we stop demonising cyclists? Let’s stop lambasting colleagues for arriving in the office showing a bit of Lycra. Let’s celebrate the Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra), not castigate them.

Cyclists are reducing the car congestion on the roads for motorists. They’re not polluting the air, and they are leaving more parking spaces available for cars. And by pedalling their way around there’s even a chance that they’re reducing the future burden on the NHS – certainly at the cardiology department – so they’re helping to cut everyone’s future tax bill, too.

Yes, we should punish those cyclists guilty of egregiously antisocial or downright hooliganish behaviour. But we must also drop this culture-war-style animosity against cyclists. More than that, we should as a society in general become more bike positive. Let’s call it the spoke agenda.

This is the country that invented the modern bike, and it remains a wonderful achievement of our civilisation. And if you don’t believe me, get back on the bike and find out for yourself how much fun it can be.

The secrets of London by postcode: N (North)

How Rod Stewart kept his hair in place, why the BBC gave its presenters electric shocks and what Paul Gascoigne shot with an air rifle: this month’s London postcode area is N – buckle up for another trivia-packed tour…

• The first run that cabbies have to learn for the Knowledge is Manor House Tube station to Gibson Square. Their task, as with any journey, is to take the most direct route possible – this is called being ‘on the cotton’, because the route will follow the straight line mapped by an imaginary piece of thread stretched between the two points on the map.

• The Great Northern Hotel at King’s Cross gets its unusual shape from the River Fleet. The road there was curved because it followed the river (which is now underground), so when the Great Northern was constructed (1854 – London’s first station hotel) the building followed the road. Soundproofing between floors was achieved by filling the gaps with clinker (a waste product that results from burning coal). The hotel’s restaurant is called Rails, for obvious reasons, having previously been Plum and Spilt Milk (the colours of the Flying Scotsman). Originally each floor had only one bathroom, at the end of the corridor. Now that rooms are en suite, those corridor spaces have been converted to kitchens where guests can get extra milk, teabags and – most excitingly – complimentary Tunnock’s teacakes.

• The young Rod Stewart, who lived in Highgate, would style his hair using water mixed with sugar, and then blow-dry it. He has said: ‘Picture me if you will, carefully dressed and styled for the night, accompanied by my mates, standing down in Archway station as the train thunders in – and all of us cowering into the wall, with our arms up over our heads, trying to protect our bouffs from getting toppled by the wind.’

• King’s Cross takes its name from a monument to George IV, which stood at the ‘king’s crossroads’ where the Euston Road (then the New Road) meets Gray’s Inn Road and Pentonville Road. The 60ft column, topped by an 11ft statue of the king, was ridiculed by the public, and demolished in 1845, having stood for just 15 years.

• The US talk show host Jerry Springer was born in Highgate Tube station, where his mother was sheltering from a German bombing raid in 1944. (For years Springer thought it was East Finchley, until someone pointed out that that station is above ground.)

• When the BBC started its TV service from Alexandra Palace in 1936, the director of television, Gerald Cock, insisted on breaks between programmes to avoid viewers getting eye-strain. One of his early presenters, Joan Miller, was cued in by the studio director delivering mild electric shocks through wires attached to her ankles.

• The Holloway Road got its name from the cattle that would hollow it out as they made their way to Smithfield Market. (Similarly Shepherd’s Bush was the last place that sheep being driven to the market from the west would rest overnight.)

• The character Hotblack Desiato in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the sequel novel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) was named after an Islington estate agency. Douglas Adams, who lived in the area, was struggling for a name when he saw one of the agency’s boards. He phoned to ask if they’d mind him using it – Geoff Hotblack himself answered and said he didn’t mind at all. For years afterwards people would ask him how he had the nerve to steal his firm’s name from a Douglas Adams novel.

• Finchley resident Harry Beck, father of the modern London Underground map, got the idea for the design classic because he had trained as an electrical engineer. Circuit diagrams don’t need to show the components’ actual locations, just where they are in relation to each other. Beck realised that the Tube map could work on the same principle.

• Arsenal hold the record for the shortest distance travelled to win the FA Cup (in the era after the final moved to Wembley). All of their 1949-50 matches, up to and including the quarter-final, were at home. Their semi-final was played at White Hart Lane, the final at Wembley.

• Talking of White Hart Lane – the stadium’s new incarnation features a scaled-up replica (at 4.5 metres it’s nearly twice the height) of the metal cockerel that sat atop the old Spurs ground. Even the dents have been replicated – including several inflicted by Paul Gascoigne with an air rifle during his time at the club.

• When all-conquering Manchester United were 3-0 down by half-time at White Hart Lane in 2001, a Spurs fan decided to add some financial gain to his sporting joy. Tottenham’s odds to complete the victory were by then an unsurprisingly stingy 16-1 on, so the fan bet £10,000 to win just £625. Manchester United won the match 5-3.

• Bob Hoskins, who is buried in Highgate Cemetery, used to describe himself as ‘five-foot-six cubic’.

Save our sweet shops

There are only so many times I can watch Lord Sugar swivelling in his chair and reusing put-downs from three seasons ago before enough’s enough, so I’ve dropped in and out of the latest series of The Apprentice. But one contestant that has caught my eye is Victoria Goulbourne, the flight attendant turned online sweet shop owner (note: not sweat shop, despite what one unfortunate online review might say) from Merseyside. And while I pass no judgment on her business acumen, it did get me thinking: what a miserable thing an online sweet shop must be.

Victoria’s company markets itself as the ‘UK’s most Instagrammable pick ’n’ mix’. Quite apart from why sweets that belong in your gob needs to be camera-friendly, it was the selection that left me wondering. Plenty of chicken feet and vegan meerkats, but not a rhubarb and custard in sight. It also probably goes without saying that gone are the days of £1 a quarter. I went into a newsagent the other day to find penny sweets at 5p each, and 10p for the ever-so-slightly larger ones. I almost choked on my fizzy cherry cola bottle. Though I shouldn’t complain, for charging by weight can be an even nastier surprise. Every few months there’s a cautionary tale of an unfortunate parent who ended up spending a week’s salary after letting the kids fill up their own pick ’n’ mix bags.

Today, old-school sugar troves are few and far between. Covid no doubt had something to do with it given old-fashioned human contact fell out of favour. Too handsy for the new age too I guess; after all, you can’t easily disinfect a gobstopper. The sweet shop has also become something of a dirty word after the ridiculous influx of shady American-style candy stores across London. But there’s no doubting there is still demand for proper old-school confectionery: a decade ago another former flight attendant saw an opportunity to get into the sweet business. Melanie Richings bought a 1976 Bedford ice cream van and began touring the schools and streets of Solihull, a saviour bedecked in pink and white selling retro favourites from the jar. Bravo. Though who would have thought the aeroplane would be supplanted in the glamour stakes by the flying saucer?

There are a few bright spots, including in the Yorkshire Dales which is lucky to have the oldest sweet shop in the world. Meanwhile, Mr Simms Sweet Shop has grown to some 80 stores which operate as franchises (including a handful in Hong Kong, lover as it is of all things British). A post-Covid makeover has seen them lose some of their charm, and with the brand having started up in 2004 they were admittedly only ever faux-Victorian. But a chocolate lime in a bricks and mortar store is not something to be sneered at in 2023.

Every generation has its own sweeties. Mine was an upbringing of Curly Wurlys, sherbet straws, candy cigarettes and Chupa Chups melody pops, though – always an old soul – I often hankered after the even more retro stuff. Most sweets seem designed to appeal to the child in us: fizzy worms, for example, given kids’ fascination with the squirming creatures. Incidentally, the number of sweets shaped as animals is striking: from sugar mice and sour spiders to the modern vogue for fizzy fish and Candy Kittens (not to mention Jelly Babies). I suppose it captures that same childhood fascination with the natural world.

In my school holidays I used to be shipped off by my parents to work in my aunt and uncle’s corner shop in Southend-on-Sea. Free labour for them and unlimited penny sweets for me, which suited both parties just fine. Aside from excitedly piling into the clapped-out Volvo to dash to the cash-and-carry when stocks of something or other ran out, my favourite duty was always taking payment for the sweets during the after-school rush – including seeing past the 11 gummy bears in the bag being routinely passed off for ten.

I long for a world of mint humbugs and aniseed balls. Pear drops and lemon sherbets. For magical emporiums of Willy Wonka-esque excess. Don’t we all? And while the general tide of retail shopping moving from the high street to online may be unstoppable, the sweet shop would be near the top of my list of bits to save. Checking out of Amazon with 500g of sweets in your online basket can’t quite compete with walking out of a real shop, paper bag in hand and a mouthful of barley sugars.

A 14-1 tip for a handicap on day two of the Cheltenham Festival

The big race on day two of the Cheltenham Festival tomorrow is the Grade 1 Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase (3.30pm). This will decide which horse in Britain and Ireland is the best chaser over a distance of two miles. 

The first three home in the Albert Bartlett Clarence House Chase, run at Cheltenham in January,reoppose each other tomorrow. Editeur du Gite caused something of an upset that day, winning from Edwardstone and Energumene.

Yet, I can’t believe the Willie Mullins horse, Energumene, was at his best on that occasion and I’d fancy him to win tomorrow if he shows his best form. However, especially as there are four other runners with chances, odds of around 7/4 are easy to resist. Instead, I am happy just to watch an enjoy an intriguing contest.

The biggest disappointment for me about tomorrow’s racing is that Saint Segal has not made the “cut” for the Johnny Henderson Grand Annual Challenge Cup Handicap Chase (4.50pm). He was one of my biggest fancies for the week but the wager was struck Non Runner No bet (NRNB) and so all stakes are returned.

Furthermore, after all the rain of the last week, connections have decided to run ELIXIR DE NUTZ in tomorrow’s Grand Annual (4.50pm) rather than the Magners Plate Handicap Chase on day three over a longer distance. I had put him up as a bet for the latter race, but also NRNB, so once again there is no financial pain.

I had initially worried that the two mile trip of the Grand Annual would be an insufficient stamina test for Joe Tizzard’s horse, Elixir de Nutz. However, on testing ground I am happy to back the improving chaser each way at 14-1 for the Grand Annual with Bet Victor paying five places.

In the Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle (1.30pm), it would not surprise me if the Willie Mullins second string, Gaelic Warrior, beat both his more fancied stablemate Impaire Et Passe and Paul Nicholls’ Hermes Allen. However, I am not confident enough to put down my hard earned on this race.

In the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase (2.10pm), the British horse Thyme Hill could outclass his rivals at a nice price but his past jumping frailties mean that, once again, I won’t be backing him to land the spoils.

I have already put up Camprond each way at 20-1 NRNB for the Coral Cup Handicap Hurdle (2.50pm) and he is now less than half that price. The downside is that he is a much better horse on good ground and so the rain of the past week has tempered my enthusiasm for his chances. The less rain, the better his chances between now and the off.

I think Delta Work is the right market leader for the Glenfarclas-sponsored Cross Country Chase (4.10pm) but odds of little better than evens make no appeal in a 16-horse race run over 3 miles 6 furlongs. 

It’s a similar story in the Weatherbys Champion Bumper (5.30pm) in which the favourite, A Dream to Share, has solid form but the odds of 4-1 or shorter in a 24-runner race are too short to warrant a bet.

The results on day one were generally disappointing for a four point loss on the day. However, all is not lost and there is still plenty of racing to come. I will be back on Spectator Life late tomorrow to offer my thoughts on day three.

Pending bets:

1 point each way Camprond at 20-1 NRNB for the Coral Cup, paying 1/5th odds, five places.

1 point each way Elixir de Nutz at 14-1 for the Grand Annual Chase, paying 1/5 odds, five places.

1 point each way French Dynamite at 14-1 NRNB for the Ryanair Chase, paying 1/5th odds, three places.

1 point each way Gin Coco at 14-1 NRNB for the County Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, five places.

1 point each way Hewick at 20-1 NRNB for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

1 point each way Royal Pagaille at 50-1 NRNB for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, paying 1/5th odds, three places.

1 point each way Might I at 10-1 NRNB for the Martin Pipe Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, five places.

1 point each way The Galloping Bear at 14-1 for the Midlands Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Notachance at 33-1 for the Midlands Grand National, paying 1/5^th odds, fiveplaces.

1 point each way Corach Rambler at 20-1 in the Aintree Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Lifetime Ambition at 33-1 in the Aintree Grand National, paying 1/5 odds, five places.

1 point each way Any Second Now at 20-1 in the Aintree Grand National, paying 1/5 odds, five places.

Settled:

1 point each way Hill Sixteen in the Becher Chase at 11-1, paying 1/5 odds, six places. Unplaced (7^th). – 2 points.

2 points win Annsam at 8-1 for the Howden Silver Cup. Cancelled meeting. Stake returned.

1 point each way Eldorado Allen at 20-1 in the King George VI Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places.Unplaced (4^th).  – 2 points.

1 point each way The Big Breakaway in 20-1 for the Welsh Grand National at 20-1, paying 1/5 odds, five places. 2^nd. + 3 points.

1 point each way The Big Dog at 12-1 in the Welsh Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places. 3^rd. + 2 points.

1 point each way Grumpy Charley at 12-1 in the Newbury 2.25pm paying 1/5 odds, five places. 1st + 16.4 points.

2 points win Midnight River at 5-1 for the Cheltenham 1.55pm, with Skybet. 1^st. + 10 points.

1 point each way Coconut Splash at 12-1 in the Cheltenham 1.55 on Sunday, with William Hill, paying 1/5 odds, six places. Unplaced (P). – 2 points.

1 point each way Sir Ivan at 20-1 in the Sandown 3pm tomorrow, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Lord du Mesnil at 8-1 in the Warwick 3pm race, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Dubrovnik Harry at 8-1 in the Kempton 2.40pm race, paying 1/5^th odds, 7 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Mister Coffey at 15/2 for the Doncaster 3.15pm, 1/5 odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake returned.

1 point each way Back On The Lash at 7/1 for the Cheltenham 12.40pm, 1/5 odds, five places. 1^st. + 8.4 points

1 point each way Empire Steel at 12-1 in the Sandown 3.30pm, paying 1/5 odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points. 

1 point each Small Present at 25-1 for the Grand National Trial (Haydock 2.40pm) paying 1/4 odds, four places. Unplaced – 2 points.

1 point each way Homme Public at 9-1 for Ascot 3pm, paying 1/5 odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Party Business at 20-1 NRNB for the Pertemps Network Hurdle Final, paying 1/5 odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake returned.

1 point each way Benson at 16-1 in the MorebattleHurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, five places. 1^st. + 19.2 points.

1 point each way Monviel at 17/2 for the Imperial Cup, paying 1/5^th odds, six places. 5^th. + 0.5 points.

1 point each way Saint Segal at 20-1 NRNB for the Grand Annual, paying 1/5^th odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake Returned.

1 point each way Elixir de Nutz at 20-1 NRNB for the Plate Handicap Chase, paying 1/5 odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake Returned.

1 point each way Doctor Bravo at 22-1 for the Sky Bet Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Nassalam at 20-1 NRNB for the Ultima Handicap Chases, paying 1/5th odds, five places. Unplaced. – 2 points. 

1 point each way I Like To Move It at 20-1 for the Unibet Champion Hurdle, 1/5 odds, three places.Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Metamorpheus at 16-1 NRNB for the Boodles Juveniles Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Mister Coffey at 25-1 for the National Hunt Chase, paying 1/5^th  odds, three places. 3^rd. + 4 points.

2022-3 jumps season, running total + 37.5 points.

My gambling record for the seven years: I have made a profit in 13 of the past 14 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the profit of has been just over 469 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a “point” is your chosen regular stake).

Rishi Sunak has a scrutiny problem

Rishi Sunak is in a hurry to fulfil his ‘five priorities’, especially on small boats. He’s in a hurry because there isn’t much time before the public use the general election to judge how well the Tories are doing. So legislation that promises to ‘stop the boats’ is moving through parliament swiftly. Most people agree that something must be done to prevent the deadly crossings in the Channel. But ministers are trying to get their own version of ‘something’ through parliament so quickly that MPs might not notice whether it will actually make the situation better – or indeed make it worse.

The Illegal Migration Bill has passed its first stage in the Commons, with no Tory MPs voting against it at second reading. Because of the rush with the legislation, it isn’t passing into the normal lengthy committee stage where a small cross-party, politically-weighted group of MPs examine the legislation line-by-line and try to improve it, but to something called a ‘Committee of the Whole House’. This ostensibly allows all MPs to have a say in the most detailed bit of legislative scrutiny, but as the Institute for Government’s Hannah White complains here, what often ends up happening is a rehash of the second reading, where MPs merely make ‘grandstanding’ speeches about principles – the ‘something must be done’ argument – rather than about the details of the legislation. Principles are important, but if they are then embodied in badly-drafted legislation, you end up with unintended consequences that are only visible once the law is implemented and MPs see the results in their constituency surgeries or in tragic cases in the national news. 

Why might this be a particular problem with this Bill? Firstly, immigration legislation is particularly complex and always needs proper thought. Secondly, what’s before MPs is currently a bit ropey. There are two ‘placeholder clauses’ which allow the government to add more details about what they intend to do at a later date. These are not small matters: they largely concern how the UK law works – or doesn’t – with the European Court of Human Rights. Last night in the Commons, Labour’s Yvette Cooper said of one of these clauses that:

‘It adds to the chaos within this piece of legislation that the Government have not worked out what they want to do: as a consequence, they are undermining our reputation as the kind of country that stands up for the rule of law and leads the way in expecting other countries to follow the law.’

One of the reasons there is a gap left in the legislation is that there is a dispute within the Conservative party about how far it should go. Tory backbenchers want clause 49, which covers the powers the government has to make regulations about interim measures from the ECHR, to allow the Home Secretary to be under a statutory duty to remove unlawful migrants. There will be other big amendments at Committee stage: as Katy wrote last night, the big rebellion will be over a proposal to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. These will be principle arguments, though, not about detail.

The MPs who raised concerns about proper detailed scrutiny were not the ones who were opposed to doing something to stop these deadly Channel crossings, or the gung ho types who want the Bill to be tougher. In fact, they took care to say it was important to do something – but not anything. Diana Johnson, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee and a Labour MP, told the Commons that ‘I believe there is consensus that we all want to stop people crossing the Channel in unsafe, small boats, and risking their lives in some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.’ She added that because the Bill was part of one of Rishi Sunak’s five priorities and was ‘so important’, she had asked for her Committee to ‘carry out pre-legislative scrutiny to test the robustness and evidence supporting the Bill’ – something which had been refused.

Theresa May raised another problem with the speed of this Bill, which was that it was too soon after the previous legislation for ministers to be able to tell what was working and what wasn’t: ‘I am concerned that the government have acted on Albania and the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, when neither has been in place long enough to be able to assess their impact. I do not expect government to introduce legislation to supersede legislation recently made, the impact of which is not yet known.’ 

But May, Diana Johnson and Yvette Cooper are still on the Remain-y side of this argument, which means many ministers, including Home Secretary Suella Braverman and indeed Sunak himself, might well ignore them. That’s not to say that Brexiteers are all that happy about this government’s approach to scrutiny, either. Another select committee, this time chaired by a Conservative Brexiteer – in fact, some might say he is the Conservative Brexiteer ­– Bill Cash, has been complaining today about the way the Prime Minister is proposing to give MPs a say on the Windsor Framework. In this report, the Committee warns against the government rushing parliamentary approval of this agreement.

Cash says:

‘Parliament should not be railroaded into a deal that it has not had sufficient time to come to an educated choice over whether to proceed or renegotiate, which will be unlikely to happen if the Government were to rush ahead particularly if the EU wishes to do so. MPs in the House must have a meaningful chance at input before this happens.’

The report also says the Committee is ‘disappointed’ Sunak has declined to give evidence to it on his solution to the Northern Ireland Protocol stand-off. ‘Appearing before us would have provided the Prime Minister with an opportunity to discharge what we consider to be his obligation to the House to subject the Windsor Framework to close and detailed parliamentary scrutiny.’

Sunak might think he has better things to do than spend an hour giving evidence to Cash, but then that’s what all prime ministers in a hurry think when threatened with scrutiny that might slow them down. And for all Keir Starmer complains about ‘sticking plaster politics’, he has yet to propose anything that suggests he won’t end up being just as scrutiny averse if he enters government in the next few years and wants to get his way on something he wants done, too. The problem is that just because a government has decided something must be done, doesn’t mean that it ends up doing that thing in law, or indeed that the thing is the right solution to the problem. MPs who really care about policies working – as both Sunak and Starmer claim to – rather than mere symbolism, should be a little more forceful in slowing down leaders in a hurry, if nothing else to stop them tripping over their own feet.

How hardboiled detective fiction saved James Ellroy

Public readings by James Ellroy would tend to begin like this:

Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, demon dog of American literature, the foul owl with the death growl, the white night of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. My books are written in blood, seminal fluid and napalm.

Etcetera. This is his ‘demon dog’ persona, adopted many years before as a way of overcoming his native insecurities.

He is quoted in this biography as saying that this persona is ‘about 3 per cent’ of who he is. I would say, and I choose the adjective carefully, this is a conservative estimate. A few years ago I was at a party in Los Angeles and got talking to one of his ex-lovers. It was like listening to the Ancient Mariner: a long narrative of gruelling outlandishness which had made her seemingly unable or unwilling to talk about anything else. I didn’t mind: I didn’t have anything nearly as compelling to offer.

And similarly, Steven Powell’s biography is notably short on longueurs. The grimness starts even before the murder of Ellroy’s mother when he was ten years old, with she and his father, a man for whom the word ‘deadbeat’ could have been coined, engaged in a bitter battle over him. He loved his father, although when he went to live with him after the murder he found daily existence with him a struggle.

I am putting it mildly. Ellroy’s behaviour began to revolve around speed and alcohol, to the point of psychosis, with multiple arrests (‘65 to 70’, in his words, although records suggest a far lower number) for various minor misdemeanours, the kind that come with severe substance abuse and homelessness. He was no stranger to the drunk tank, the police cell and the drying-out clinic. At school he adopted a persona whose main schtick (a favourite word of his, especially as applied to his own public, performative character) was expressing a fondness for far-right politics.

He was saved by his love of books, especially hardboiled detective fiction, which he read almost obsessively. Knowing he had it in him to become a writer, he managed to swap his addictions to that of composition. He had no desk, and would write standing up, in capitals, leaning his manuscript against a dresser. He also had another addiction: to women. This is well documented in his own memoirs – and here.

Yet he could inspire affection, unless he was trying to be difficult. Sometimes you stand with him, as when he dines with Oliver Stone, interested in directing one of his screenplays. Stone arrived late and was boorish. Ellroy said, before they had even been served their appetisers: ‘Mr Stone, you’re drunk. I’m not working with you.’ There aren’t many times one sympathises with him, though – except when one bears in mind what he went through until he became successful. Before he cleaned up his act, he was lucky to be alive, and his sobriety was little short of heroic (though he relapsed in the early 2000s).

But turning your addiction into a style couldn’t go on forever. His is like an amphetamine high in prose, even down to the near-paranoid insistence on finding deep links between absolutely everything. But as he went on, the books got (even) longer, the mannerisms repetitive, the paragraphs shorter. Just as he would need the wadding from a dozen benzedrine inhalers to achieve the same effect that one used to have, so he would almost reach the point of self-parody, both in his writing and in his life. He was a regular guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien for four years until he riffed thus on the Ku Klux Klan: ‘An equal opportunity Ku Klux Klan… let in Jews, Catholics, Irish, gays – everybody!’ The audience loved it, but O’Brien was less amused, and he didn’t appear on the programme for another five years.

To say Ellroy is a problematic writer as well as a person is to state the obvious. You may have noticed that his list of people the KKK should welcome leaves out one obvious category, and indeed his characters spend an awful lot of time making anti-black slurs. Well, if you’re going to write about the LAPD in the 1940s and 1950s, reported speech is going to have to contain some foul language and sentiment; it’s when it seeps into the narrative that there might be more of a problem. And this is before we get to the matter of the gruesome fate that so many of his female victims suffer, and the sadism visited upon them.

But there’s no denying he’s an important author. Like Homer in the Iliad, he tells a fundamental, ugly and unwelcome truth about humanity. And all honest stories about LA, from The Big Sleep (which Ellroy loved) to Chinatown (which he disdained) to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, are about innocence betrayed, as Ellroy’s was. Powell has clearly worked hard to do justice to his subject. He gives him a fair hearing, but perhaps shies from fully addressing his faults. You can tell that, like so many people who have dealt with Ellroy, he has rather fallen under his spell.

Strange encounter: The Gospel of Orla, by Eoghan Walls, reviewed

It’s been two months since 14-year-old Orla’s mother died of cancer, and the girl isn’t coping. Neither is her father. While he self-medicates with booze, she plots her escape, to her aunt’s in Northern Ireland, where her mum is buried:

I am sad to go but it is time now and there is no point in hanging around any longer. I leave my phone under the pillow. I don’t leave a note because that is just for suicides. I don’t want to make them sadder than they will be anyway but I also don’t want them coming for me straight away.

We are plunged from the outset into Orla’s head and her anguish. 

Walls is a poet, who has translated Heidegger’s poetical works. In this debut novel, his punctuation-light approach to prose creates a raw stream of consciousness that neatly captures the angst of teenage grief and isolation. ‘Mostly they know I’m a mad dog and leave me alone. Suits me just fine,’ writes Orla about her supposed school friends, whose mothers make them invite her to their birthday parties but who post photos after a trip to the circus that leave her out – ‘As if I wasn’t there at all’.

She attempts her escape at night by bike, along the canals to Liverpool to catch the Belfast ferry. But a ‘mad hairy’ man in the bushes steps out, and both she and her bike end up in the canal. She is scared, but mostly cross, and after whipping out her Swiss Army knife, she asks his name: ‘Jesus. Jesus? Jesus bloody Jesus like the Jesus Jesus? He nods.’

And with that, the tale gets metaphysical. Jesus, who returns Orla’s bike, can bring animals back to life by blowing into their mouths. The catch is they burst into flames if they leave his orbit. Oh, and so will he if the sun’s rays hit his skin. This doesn’t stop Orla from upgrading her getaway plans to include Jesus, so he can raise her mum from her grave.

It sounds far-fetched, but Walls makes it work by keeping his foot on the narrative pedal as the two navigate the canal paths by night. While she waits for dusk, Orla finds that

the boredom is nearly as bad as the thirst. I have not spent so long without a phone since I was a kid. It is really hard to keep your thoughts under control without it. No telly nothing to shut out my own mind.

Although Orla longs to see her mother again, it is the girl herself who needs bringing back to life – something Walls manages in this poignant, hopeful, compelling little book that offers a window into a troubled teenage soul.

Rishi’s Richmond flourish in No. 10

During Boris Johnson’s tenure, No 10. Downing Street seemed to anthropomorphise into being political actors itself. From partygate to wallpapergate, Britain’s most famous address frequently featured in the headlines amid a myriad of Brexit and Covid dramas. So perhaps it is no surprise then that Rishi Sunak has already begun putting his stamp on the building and making the house feel like home.

Mr S can reveal that the Prime Minister has raided the Government Art Collection to hang an eighteenth century print of ‘The South West Prospect of Richmond’ on his walls, in a nod to his Yorkshire constituency. Other artwork now proudly displayed in No. 10 include Graham Sutherland’s painting ‘Origins of the Land No.1′ – created for the Festival of Britain in 1951 – and Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s ‘Bengal Tiger Van’ in a nod to a British Indian ice cream salesman of the 1960s.

More modern millenial touches are provided by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’ painting ‘Poetic Feet’ and Louise Giovanelli’s print ‘Ambia I’. Lubaina Himid offers a perfect political metaphor in ‘Old Boat, New Weather’ while Sunak also boasts a seventeenth century portrait of the Tower of London by Johann Spilberg II. Perhaps that’s where he’d like to some of his predecessors…

Sunak is not the only minister with a visual reminder that ‘all politics is local.’ His next-door neighbour Jeremy Hunt sits for South West Surrey and has duly chosen William Johnstone’s ‘Surrey Landscape’ while Michael Tomlinson, the Solicitor General, prefers a Lyme Regis print for his Dorset constituency. John Glen, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, likes looking at John Constable and David Lucas’s vision of Salisbury Cathedral.

Yorkshireman Kevin Hollinrake has plumped for Cornelius Copner Wambey’s painting of ‘Richmond Castle’ to hang in his room in the Department for Business and Trade. Penny Mordaunt, the Portsmouth MP, has chosen several nautical depictions alongside a trio of parliamentary pictures to suit her role as Leader of the House.

And this being a Tory government, some choose to decorate their offices with grander flourishes. Edward Argar selected Winston Churchill’s ‘Seascape’ with George Freeman going for a portrait of Nelson and Therese Coffey selecting Cecil Beaton’s snap of composer Benjamin Britten. Julia Lopez has used her culture brief to bag Grayson Perry’s ‘Print of a Politician’ while Steve Baker has gone for Mark Titchner’s series of digital prints on aluminium titled ‘Some questions about us.’ Oliver Dowden has meanwhile enlivened his Cabinet Office base with a trio of battle depictions by Joshua Ross junior. Expecting trouble perhaps?

There’s also a knowing nod from Jesse Norman, author of an excellent biography on Edmund Burke, who chose a painting of the aforementioned philosopher as his only piece of artwork at the Department for Transport. Chris Heaton Harris, the Northern Irish Secretary, went for David Shrigley’s ink drawing titled ‘We Are All Walking Tightropes. Every Single One of Us’ – appropriate for a man tasked with restoring power-sharing at Stormont.

Talk about mastering the art of politics…

The long journey from Lindisfarne: Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, reviewed

Benjamin Myers had a lucky break with his 2017 novel, The Gallows Pole. First published by a small indie press, it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, garnered a two-book deal from Bloomsbury and this year is to be adapted by Shane Meadows as a BBC television series.

He is something of a maverick – his work a mix of Hughesian lyricism and noir violence – and his success has been hard won.  He has been working the literary coal face for almost 20 years, trying every kind of genre while knocking on publishers’ doors and finding them shut. He responded with a new literary movement, the Brutalists – its manifesto: ‘Young, hungry and rejected by the mainstream.’

Bloomsbury has changed all that; and now here he is with Cuddy, a whacking 400-page experimental novel. Based on the life of St Cuthbert, it follows the saint’s progress from his death on the Isle of Farne in 687 to his much visited shrine in Durham cathedral. The quest to find a safe resting place for the saint’s bones, and the building of the cathedral, form the novel’s narrative spine.

Cuddy opens with Myers’s address to ‘Dear friends and readers’ (when did that last happen?) and his notion that ‘novels are surely spell books’. Am I spellbound? A little. The book is a dazzling compendium of styles: poetry, prose, dramatic dialogue and even an epistle or two. I liked the furthering of the story by the interleaving of bibliographical references, from Bede to Simon Schama, which one might usually expect to find either in footnotes or as an appendix, but I suspect that’s because I’m of the ilk who might turn to acknowledgements before the first chapter.

The poetry of Book I is nicely Anglo-Saxonly alliterative. The saint, not long dead and ‘fizzy with joy’, converses with Ediva, an orphan girl who cooks for the Lindisfarne community. The monks, ‘swift with their swaddling’, have rescued the saint’s body from the ‘devilish Danes’ and are about to carry it for hundreds of years, and pages, to its eventual resting place in the cathedral.

This is also a novel about visions, and how the life of the past haunts the present. Needless to say, it’s the humble Ediva and not one of the monks who is given a vision of the cathedral. As the story moves through the centuries, the cook is reincarnated as Eda, a stonemason’s wife (1346), as Edith, a cathedral housekeeper/angel (1827) and as Evie, a student waitress in the cathedral’s café (2019) in the rather soppy final pages. Her original companion, Owl Eyes, appears in later sections as a husband and ultimately as ‘the Daft Lad’, either a monk-to-be or a historian.

There’s much to enjoy in the novel’s linguistic beauty – the cathedral itself becomes a voiceover in a play about the Scottish soldiers, ‘honey-fed farm boys and moor-top dreamers’ gaoled there in 1650 – and thorough research. Thankfully there’s none of the gruesome violence of The Gallows Pole. Instead, Cuddy explores the endurance of goodness and grace. English Heritage are about to reveal a memorial to St Cuthbert on the spot of his original tomb at Lindisfarne Priory, which just goes to show.

The wiliest politician in the Middle East is back – but not in charge

Bibi is back. Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to the prime ministership of Israel two years after a motley coalition of his many enemies banded together to topple him. With him removed from power and facing trial on corruption charges, many assumed that the Netanyahu era was over. They under-estimated the wiliest politician in the Middle East. In last November’s elections, Netanyahu ousted his ousters and won for himself a sixth term in which to wreak vengeance on the leftist establishment he believes is ranged against him.

Victory did not come without a price. He had to team up with the disreputable right. Itamar Ben-Gvir, once convicted for inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation, is the national security minister, responsible for the Israeli police; and Bezalel Smotrich, who describes himself as ‘a fascist homophobe’, but has promised he ‘won’t stone gays’, is finance minister. Netanyahu now spends much of his time distancing himself from the allies to whom he has shackled his political fortunes. Bibi is back in office but not in charge.

Bibi: My Story is his account of how he got there. He is an accomplished storyteller, a timely leader for an era of narratives. The central narrative of Bibi’s story, his personal and political bereshit, is the death of his older brother Yoni, a national hero killed in the 1976 hostage rescue mission at Entebbe. Bibi idolised Yoni, his teacher, protector, corrector in childhood and role model coming into adulthood. Without his death, Bibi reflects, ‘my life would have taken a different course’.

The course it took ranged from elite solder, to Israeli ambassador to the UN, to Knesset member, to Likud leader, to prime minister once, twice, and now a third time. He took the Likud from the national liberalism of Menachem Begin to a proto-Trumpism, roiling with sectarian grievance and populist bombast. He has steered Israel to the right – aided vigorously by the country’s inept, self-destructive left – in both economic and security terms.

Security is another crucial Netanyahu narrative. He pays his dues to his parents’ generation for re-establishing Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, but warns that ‘the enduring permanence of this triumph has never been guaranteed. My parents’ generation was tasked with founding the state; my generation was tasked with securing its future.’ Israel faces severe threats on multiple fronts, no doubt about it; but Bibi is the architect of permanent siege Israelism, a mindset in which the Jewish state, now on its sixth peace or normalisation agreement with an Arab or Muslim country, is forever on the brink of being pushed into the sea.

A lack of introspection can ruin good memoirs, but self-pity makes them dull. And, boy, does Bibi whine. His wife Sara receives ‘virtually no attention or accolades in the press for her philanthropic work’. His son Yair has ‘earned… quite a few enemies’ for the ‘combative directness’ of his ‘impassioned political columns and commentary’. (He has compared police officers investigating his father to the Gestapo, and promoted the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.) Bibi himself is the victim of ‘a systemic campaign of lies’, and a media that has ‘echoed the attacks of my political opponents’. A perennial Netanyahu narrative: Bibi, the most powerful man in Israel, is the helpless victim of ‘leftist’ journalists.

His account is not without value, especially on US-Israel relations. He claims that Bill Clinton admitted to having tried to throw the 1996 Israeli election for Bibi’s left-leaning rival Shimon Peres. He alleges that Obama tried to intimidate him in the Oval Office. Although not quoting the supposed threat, he calls it ‘something out of character that shocked me deeply’, an ‘offensive message’ that was ‘highly disturbing’. After years of the Obama administration keeping a tight leash on Israel’s response to the Iranian nuclear threat, Netanyahu’s first White House meeting with the 45th president underlined the change from the 44th. ‘Why didn’t you bomb them?’ Donald Trump demanded.

Leadership is a recurring theme, not least Netanyahu’s duty to the past and future of Zionism: ‘Having restored our independence, we cannot, we will not, let anyone bring an end to this miracle.’ His opponents say it is Bibi who is now threatening the miracle. Far-reaching judicial reforms, which critics allege will enervate Israeli democracy, have brought tens of thousands to the streets of Tel Aviv and, more ominously, Jerusalem for weekly demonstrations. Some IDF reservists have stopped showing up for duty in protest. Amid a spate of Palestinian terror attacks, Ben-Gvir has proved a more capable TikToker than security minister. Settlers recently rampaged through a Palestinian village, prompting Smotrich to call for the village to be ‘wiped out’. Israel is inching closer to a very dark future.

This is Bibi’s story. The book is just another narrative.

Will Rishi invite Biden to his California pad?

When Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister last October, Joe Biden phoned him to reaffirm the ‘special relationship’. But when the two leaders appeared at a press conference last night to launch the Aukus pact with Australia, Sunak probably wished Biden hadn’t been so chummy.

‘First of all, I want to welcome him back to California,’ Biden said of Sunak. ‘He’s a Stanford man, and he still has a home here in California. That’s why I’m being very nice to him, maybe he’ll invite me to his home,’ he continued, just in case anyone had missed where this home might be, ‘here in California.’ 

According to reports, the home in question is a £5.5 million penthouse in Santa Monica, complete with ocean views, a concierge service, fitness centre and even a ‘pet spa’.

In a classic case of a compliment backfiring, Biden seems to have given the Red Wall, and Sunak’s political opponents, plenty to chew over. Since becoming PM, Sunak has been at pains to play down his West Coast, wealthy ‘tech bro’ image, with more than a few hiccups along the way. 

Just last year, the then-chancellor got into trouble firstly after his billionaire wife’s non-dom status emerged (the two famously met at Stanford University). The second awkward moment for Sunak came shortly after, when he admitted keeping hold of an American Green Card until 2021, only giving it up after several months in the Treasury.

With ongoing efforts by Downing Street to reassure the British public that Rishi is, in fact, relatable, Mr S can safely bet that Sunak won’t be thanking Biden for these friendly reminders. That presidential invite to Sunak’s Californian pad might just get lost in the post.

Carry on curate: scenes of modern clerical life

In A Field Guide to the English Clergy (2018), the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie offered an amusing and informative survey of some of the more eccentric priests and prelates to have served the Church of England over the years. In Touching Cloth, he focuses on a contemporary eccentric: himself.

The book is an account of a year in his life as a young curate at the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Liverpool. It is loosely structured around the major church festivals, while at the same time making a case for some of the lesser known ones, such as Epiphany. Above all, it is a rich store of anecdotes, both sacred and profane.

Butler-Gallie is careful not to reveal too much personal information. He writes that he is the eldest of five children; his mother is a doctor, his father was an army officer whose forebears fought at Waterloo, and his grandmother was a messy eater. He has been a repeated victim of mistaken identity: on New Year’s Eve, he was taken for a drug dealer and, on Holy Saturday, for a blind man. Such confusions appear to be an occupational hazard. He describes how one of his friends, a ‘strapping rower turned cleric’, was mercilessly groped in a pub by a hen party, who refused to believe he wasn’t a stripper.

The book is replete with such stories, frequently with erotic undertones, as when he presides at a carol service which features the semi-nude performance of the Fire Brigade Dance Troupe, flaunting their ‘bulging pectorals’ to the backing track of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’. Even more surprising is the response of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie to an ordinand who proposed to give up masturbation for Lent: ‘Well, what a wonderful way to spend Easter morning.’

Weddings and funerals feature prominently. Like many clergy, he expresses a preference for the latter. As for baptisms, it comes as a surprise to learn that people find a sexual connotation to the ‘purple-headed mountain’ in the popular Victorian hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. He remains tight-lipped about the identity of the Oscar-winning actor who sniggered at the penile imagery.

Butler-Gallie finds the humour in such moments and ably conveys it. His jocular prose is at its best when not striving for effect – as, for example, when he describes a mayor destined ‘to spend a year opening new bus shelters while dressed, inexplicably, as a Tudor’. At other times, his extended metaphors, such as ‘I’ve been offered and accepted cups of teas so anaemic that I’ve been tempted to call the NHS 111 helpline’ come dangerously close to the over-eagerness to please of the much-mocked guitar-playing vicar. 

His more serious passages include fascinating nuggets of information on the saints.  Who knew that St Sebastian is the patron saint of rugby players or that the word aspirin is derived from the Neapolitan St Aspren, who was frequently consulted for the relief of headaches? And it is salutary to note that the Church of England, which so often finds itself in a pickle on sexual matters, has a subsection in the document Issues on Human Sexuality on ‘the comparative virtues of same-sex nipple play’.

Butler-Gallie casts his net wide rather than deep. On current evidence, he is not one to indulge in soul-searching, nor – a fascinating account of the association of Advent and the Apocalypse apart – in theological speculation. Except for a few vague references to the mystery of death, he fails to come up with a convincing answer to the question with which he opens the book: ‘What made you become a priest?’ Rather, his concern appears to be to show that, on the one hand priests are as wayward and fallible as the rest of us (gleefully reporting his own transgressions, such as jumping the barrier rather than paying 20p to enter the Euston station lavatory, and pocketing the £10 excess change given to him by a charmless railway clerk) and, on the other, that they are set apart by the sacrament of ordination.

After all the drollery, he allows a note of bitterness to creep into the epilogue, in which he relates how, after his departure from Liverpool, he failed to obtain a salaried parish post and has temporarily abandoned the ministry. He can, however, rest assured that, whatever his failure to progress up the hierarchy of the Church, he has an established place as one of its most acute and amusing chroniclers.

Postmodernism meets pulp fiction: Dr. No, by Percival Everett, reviewed

Perhaps Percival Everett’s The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, made readers realise what an astonishing writer he is. But there is certainly a great backlist. I am particularly fond of Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and American Desert in his satirical vein; and Suder, Walk Me to the Distance and Wounded in his more elegiac and contemplative tone. Dr. No seems to be in his Menippean form, until you realise just how seriously he is joking. I have often thought that a joke is not funny until it stops being funny, when it becomes hilarious, and this novel exemplifies that.

The central character is not actually called Wala Kitu, two words from Tagalog and Swahili that both mean nothing. He is a professor of mathematics, whose speciality is the idea of nothing, though, as he would be quick to point out, even an idea of nothing is not nothing. He is dreamy, and speaks to his one-legged dog in his dreams (yes, you read that correctly), discussing whether the nothing he has in his hand is bigger than the nothing in the dog’s single paw. The gag runs from the start: what do you work on? Nothing. What interests you? Nothing. What do you care about? Nothing. It might seem like Thomas Bernhard or Edward Albee until it goes madcap.

Wala Kitu is approached by John Sill, who offers him ludicrous sums of money because he very much wants nothing. Specifically, he wants to be a Bond villain and to weaponise nothing. Kitu goes along with this, since nothing really matters. The caper is beautifully choreographed, and has a number of little winks to the Fleming oeuvre – a character called Auric, for example; tanks that might or might not be full of sharks; and a plot to invade Fort Knox. Everett is astute on character names, and I often found myself looking up the significance of the nomenclature. Sometimes it can resemble a crossword clue, as when I realised that Vice-President Shilling is a hidden snark on Pence.

Everett has always managed to combine the best of postmodernism with a genuine love of pulp fiction. It is done elegantly here, and the divagations on the philosophical and mathematical notion of nothingness do not detract from the harum-scarum, hi-jinks plot. All of which would mean less than nothing except for the way in which Wala is depicted as a lonely individual and Sill as a righteously aggrieved one.  

The point of the gag is a slow reveal. Towards the end of the book it is made explicit: ‘Our country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.’ Or, as Kitu reflects prior to this, after the beta-testing:

Because though nothing had happened there, nothing had happened there and what was left was nothing. More than 90,000 people were up to nothing, had gone to nothing, had been affected by nothing and were left with nothing and there was nothing to do or say.

To annihilate, to obliviate, to erase is a political wound. 

It is a delicate balance to put together the zany and the profound. It is rare to read a book which is so smartly satirical and yet finds the space to quote Derrida – the final section being called ‘Il n’y pas de hors-texte’. You have to be vastly intelligent and desperately modest to know that you know nothing.

How to be top: two new books promise the self-improvement Holy Grail

People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. I would love to wake up fizzing with ideas, overflowing with insights and determined beyond all reasonable determination to share my extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, my art, with the world. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. Or a schlub, a has-been or a never-was. It’s just a shame, then, that most of the books which promise to tell us how to be top are absolute garbage.

Two new books, by two very different people on a similar theme, promise the usual self-improvement Holy Grail: drink the Kool-Aid from this cup and you too can be creative and imaginative in abundance. In fairness, both books contain a few drops of invigorating liquor for those of us desperate for succour and insight – which is probably as good as it gets, because there is no Holy Grail. There are only drops and dribbles – so let us be grateful for the faintest trickles from on high.

Adam Gopnik is the Ted Lasso of glossy magazine writing. A staff writer for the New Yorker, he is supremely confident, ever-so-slightly irritating, hard to love but impossible not to like. You have to admire the sheer audacity – the low cheek, really – of a book with the title The Real Work, which is in fact a rework, a cut-and-paste of previous magazine articles, dressed up to look like a big ideas book. And the big idea? Nothing less than the very ‘nature of accomplishment’, revealed through Gopnik’s attempts to acquire and practise various and miscellaneous skills, including drawing, driving, boxing and baking.

In true Lasso style, there are lots of hokey assertions about the nature of life, work and art, as Gopnik haphazardly undertakes his tasks. These are doubtless entirely well-meaning but also rather dubious. ‘Doing something well for a lifetime actually teaches us less about what the real work is than doing something badly can teach us when we start doing it anew.’ Really? You could learn less about – I don’t know – boxing from, say, Muhammad Ali than from some middle-aged New Yorker writer who’s just turned up at the gym and strapped on gloves for the very first time?

Absolutely the best things in the book are the quirky details, the stuff that makes Gopnik a great magazine writer: his driving instructor Arturo, a part-time DJ, reminding him to relax, to ‘Become the noodle!’; his weird interview with David Blaine in his Tribeca studio, ‘accessorised with beautiful women, Nadias and Anyas’; and the very sweet chapter about making bread with his mother.

In contrast, most of the big summings-up are either confusing or obvious. He claims to have ‘wound’ the book around ‘Seven Mysteries of Mastery’, but these remain rather mysterious, presented either as ‘fables’, ‘sidebars’, ‘prefaces’ or ‘expanded footnotes’: ‘I’ve tried not to sum up too neatly the point or moral of each adventure as it happened.’ If, like me, you are foolishly seeking shortcuts to mastery and can’t be bothered with the mysteries, the big three takeaways seem to be: first, remember that ‘the flow is always a function of fragments’; second, that ‘everything we do involves everything we do’; and third, that ‘when we look to understand mastery what we find are masters’. Patience, young grasshopper.

If Gopnik spends a lot of time not getting very far but in a highly entertaining fashion, Albert Read goes absolutely all over the place in the twinkling of an eye. Gopnik is a journalist; Read is the managing director of Condé Nast UK, the kind of guy who hires and fires journalists. And if Gopnik reminds you of Ted Lasso, Read is like a cross between Kendall and Logan Roy in Succession: a super-sharp, yipped-up big beast, brimming with big ideas and new ideas and old ideas, and clearly accustomed to having all of these ideas taken entirely seriously by everyone all at once.

According to Read, borrowing a metaphor from the French scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, the imagination is a muscle, a ‘figurative muscle that resides mysteriously somewhere in the mind or the soul’. All I can say is that Read’s muscle is highly developed: there’s a lot of heavy lifting going on in The Imagination Muscle, which amounts to a sort of hypertrophied commonplace book. You name it, it’s here: musings on the ‘plastic state’ of the mind and imagination in youth; the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci; the importance of coffee houses and gathering places in ‘imaginative cities’, and what Read calls ‘cloudburst cultures’, where ‘at rare moments in time, congregations of imaginative minds descend in unison on a single place’; reflections on traditions of storytelling among the griots of West Africa and the hakawatis of the medieval Islamic world; Prometheus; Gutenberg; Shakespeare; Darwin; music; art; film.

It is an extraordinary book, a genuine oddity – an elaborate cabinet of curiosities rather than a set of principles and practices, the sort of book one might almost imagine writing oneself, if one were to attempt to sum up everything one had ever thought about creativity and the imagination. But, of course, that’s probably much more difficult to do than it appears, which is why we need books by people like Gopnik and Read to remind ourselves of the true horror not only of creative work, but also of commentary on creative work, which is, in Gopnik’s words, that we ‘will always discover that there is someone else who does it better’.

The age-old debate continues: are science and religion compatible?

According to the census, there are more Christians in the UK than there are atheists and agnostics – yet the churches are empty. These Christians, it seems, don’t take their faith too seriously. Nor, I fear, does Nicholas Spencer, who has written a big book arguing that science and religion are fundamentally compatible. He’s wrong; but, surprisingly, he is more wrong about religion than he is about science.

Let me start by laying my cards on the table. I’m the son of a missionary. My father’s parents were atheists and scientists. He, in adolescent rebellion, became a Christian; I, ditto, became an atheist. Because I was raised abroad I barely knew my paternal grandparents, but I inherited from them one thing: a copy of Fred Hoyle’s The Nature of the Universe (1950), in which Hoyle attacked the ‘big bang’ theory that the universe had originated in a moment of creation and argued that it had always been exactly what it is now. Hoyle was convinced there was a fundamental conflict between science and religion, and I was thrilled to find a door which opened into a world without faith. Unfortunately, Hoyle’s science was wrong: the universe really did originate in a big bang. Indeed, Hoyle had a remarkable propensity for being wrong. He believed life on Earth was, and continues to be, seeded from outer space. But he was perfectly right that religion and science are at odds.

Spencer doesn’t agree. We ought to accept, he argues, that Hoyle’s steady state theory was perfectly compatible with monotheism, and that the big bang is no proof of the existence of a creator God. When religion and science seem to be at odds it is because one side or the other is claiming too much and conceding too little. Both William Paley, whose Natural Theology (1802) argued that nature demonstrated the existence of a designer, and Hoyle, were equally at fault.

Spencer is remarkably good on the history of science. He writes intelligently about Galileo, Newton and Darwin. Admittedly, he doubts that anyone was really disturbed by Galileo’s discoveries, and there he is surely wrong. Galileo himself was no Christian, although he was obliged to pretend to believe. Descartes, grasping the significance of Galileo’s discoveries, correctly saw that the sun was just one of an indefinite number of stars, and concluded that the universe had not been made to provide a home for man. Pascal wrote: ‘The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.’ After Galileo, human beings for the first time seemed insignificant; in Voltaire’s Candide we are likened to rats who have stowed away on a ship. But Spencer is basically right: Descartes and Pascal saw no need to abandon religious faith just because the Earth was no longer at the centre of the universe; and if life on Earth was only an insignificant part of some larger plan, that did not mean there was no plan. Even Voltaire claimed to believe in a God.

Spencer is thus – up to a point – an advocate of what Steven J. Gould called NOMA: there is No Overlap between the MAgisteria, the authority fields, of science and religion. This is, of course, a profoundly ahistorical argument – for the three monotheistical religions have always claimed that the creation of the universe out of nothing was a real event, not a fiction. NOMA is a modern invention. We can’t read it backward into the past.

Spencer, however, is not really a NOMAtist. For he holds that when it comes to human nature, religion does find itself at odds with certain possible scientific claims. From La Mettrie’s Man a Machine in the 18th century to E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology or Daniel Dennett’s contemporary physicalism, hardline materialism is, Spencer argues, incompatible with religion. Humans are, he claims, ‘spiritual’ as well as ‘material’, concerned with ‘things like meaning, significance, transcendence, purpose, destiny, eternity and love which have always been the building blocks of a religious understanding of reality’, and thus humans can’t be mere machines, and machines will never become human. Chatbots may tell jokes, but they will never have a sense of humour; they may express sympathy, but they will never feel your pain.

Leaving aside the fact that Spenser’s spiritual concerns are what Dennett calls ‘deepities’, words that mean less than they seem, there’s no acknowledgment here of the Christian belief in sin, redemption, incarnation and salvation, of heaven and hell. Of course if you reduce religion to some sort of Spinozist pantheism or Voltairian deism you can smuggle in the spiritual alongside the material while generating only minor, localised conflicts between religion and science. But Judaism, Christianity and Islam have always been at odds with pantheism, and indeed with deism, for the simple reason that they are not merely monotheisms, but also religions of revealed truth, and religions which declare that God has been active in history – revealing his truth being only one of his activities. My father committed himself to what we must now call the missionary practicum not because he cared about meaning or significance in some sort of abstract way but because he really did believe that Christ had risen from the dead and that doubting Thomas had touched His wounds. He had his doubts about eternal damnation, but none about life after death.

This raises a further problem: the disappearance of Enlightenment irreligion from Spencer’s story. Arguing that science and religion are not necessarily in conflict, Spenser sidesteps an obvious follow-up question: what did undermine faith, if it wasn’t science? Where the pagan philosophers believed matter had existed from eternity, even if design had not, monotheism introduced not only a creator God, but a unique claim to historical truth. The great assault on Christian faith came not from science, not from a denial of creation, but from history. Spinoza, Richard Simon and Voltaire maintained that Moses could not have been the author of the Pentateuch, which could be discarded as an unreliable historical source. Bolder still, Diderot and Hume argued that the odds against a miracle taking place were so high that no human testimony could make it rational to believe in such events. It was much more plausible to presume the supposed witnesses were mistaken, corrupt, or imaginary than to take seriously the claim that Lazarus (or indeed Christ) had risen. Christian faith depended on ignoring such arguments. My father’s religion was grounded in Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone (1930, and still in print), a work which assumed that the sort of evidence which might be adduced in an Agatha Christie whodunit was more than adequate to prove that Christ was risen.

But this doesn’t quite explain why miracles ceased, for so many 18th-century intellectuals, to be credible. Belief in magic, in witchcraft and in miracles fell away because it simply came to seem obvious that there was no space for supernatural events within the natural world. Nature, said Galileo, is ‘inexorable and immutable’. This conviction isn’t really a scientific one but rather a meta-scientific one, and it is this meta-scientific belief, rather than any particular scientific theory, which is destructive of religious faith as it is understood by the monotheistic religions. If there is (as the NOMAtist would claim) no conflict between science and religion, there is an inescapable conflict between belief in a God who is active in the world and the belief everything that happens is explicable according to the workings of an inexorable nature.

So this is a profoundly puzzling book. Spencer knows his history of science. He recounts the set pieces of any such story – the trial of Galileo, Huxley vs Wilberforce, the Scopes monkey trial – with bravura. He has a good grasp of how science has changed over time, and he also understands that the word ‘religion’ meant very different things to Cicero, Augustine and the author of The Golden Bough. But he doesn’t seem to grasp that the pared down, purely ‘spiritual’ religion he defends has virtually nothing in common with that of Augustine, Calvin, Loyola and Newman.

What this book marks, in fact, is the quiet triumph of meta-science over faith, for faith in the Bible as history, in the great eschatological drama of redemption, has been replaced here by faith, not in a creator and redeemer God, but in the peculiar specialness of human beings. Perhaps we are special; but there’s more to religion than an insistence that, because we make our lives meaningful, the universe must have a meaning. Though Spencer finds the idea repugnant, maybe we are just peculiar machines whose functioning depends on producing, in endless succession, deepity after deepity. If there is one thing that is clear about human beings, after all, it is that we have a remark-able talent for self-deception – and what is religion but a trick we play on ourselves?

The biography Noël Coward deserves

‘In the prison of his days,’ W.H. Auden wrote, ‘teach the free man how to praise.’ Noël Coward’s last performance, possessing, like so much of his work, a scene-stealing quality, was in the 1969 film The Italian Job. He plays the gangster Mr Bridger, masterminding a gold robbery in Turin from his prison cell. In his final appearance he walks like a Ziegfeld heroine down the central stairs of the jail to the fervent acclamation of the other inmates, acknowledging the ovation to left and right. Coward had abundant worldly acclaim; and he knew very well where the walls lay, and the doors that would not be breached.

That knowledge has served him extremely well. Many of his contemporaries thought that his dedication to the ephemeral, responding to the fads of the moment, would prove fatal to his claims on posterity. The opposite has proved to be the case. Though most of his 50-odd plays are forgotten, the best of them are indestructible: Blithe Spirit, Private Lives and Hay Fever are universally acknowledged masterpieces, and others turn up regularly, including Design for Living, Present Laughter and The Vortex. In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter are classics of the cinema; and dozens of the enchanting songs have held their own. His impact was immediate, and enduring. The repartee in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, or in many of Harold Pinter’s plays, owes much to the absurd exchanges in Private Lives. And what is the hit TV series Schitt’s Creek but six seasons of Hay Fever?

He was extraordinarily original. Hay Fever may be squarely within the sublime English tradition of stage comedies about precisely nothing, but its cadences are astonishing. Has there ever been a curtain fall like the one at the end of the first act, with the characters’ small talk failing, and them staring at each other aghast? Coward went on being innovative, even when fashion turned against him. His 1947 play Peace in Our Time was, Oliver Soden thinks, the first of a long line of counterfactual literature based on the premise that the Germans won the war and occupied England. Other plays revolved around different groups of people in the same space at different times, or explored actors living together in a care home, still performing and dwelling on past glories.

This is a fine biography. It’s the fourth full-length one of Coward to appear, Philip Hoare’s, published nearly 30 years ago, being still one of the best. But Masquerade is justified because changing attitudes mean that more can be discussed – Coward’s first biographer was forbidden to talk about his sexuality – and because material keeps emerging. Soden’s previous work was a terrific life of Michael Tippett, and it must have struck him what very different characters the two men were – though both were composers, both innovative and devoted to finding new ways of existing, and both lived through the same period when homosexuality was proscribed.

The challenge for Coward’s biographer is to get through to what the man was really like – and I’m not sure it can be done. From the very start he was ‘on’, performing for other people’s amusement. His first letter, written at the age of eight, is a childishly adorable performance in itself, as he reports for his mother’s benefit that, visiting a prosperous aunt: ‘I dressed up in a short dress and danced to them and sung to them.’ There are just glimpses of an inner self later when, exhausted, he occasionally burst into tears on stage. For the rest, everything is put on.

Much of the task is to sort out the authentic stories from those that have accumulated around his famous wit. Soden doubts whether Coward had an affair with George, Duke of Kent, or even made the joke about the Queen of Tonga’s lunch; and other celebrated lines are passed over in silence. (I regret the absence of his explanation to an inquiring child that ‘the doggie in front has gone blind, and his friend is pushing him all the way to St Dunstan’s Hospital’.)

The quality of performance, however, is everywhere. A message of love is an opportunity to entertain – such as his telegram to Gertrude Lawrence on her wedding day: ‘Dear Mrs A., Hooray, hooray, At last you are deflowered. On this as every other day I love you – Noël Coward.’ The carapace may be impossible to pierce, now as it was then. Even touring Burma during the war in monsoon season, under fire from the Japanese and falling flat on his face in the mud, the worst that could be got out of him was: ‘I’m most frightfully sorry, but it’s the fucking awful weather.’

That impregnable performing quality was a source of strength, which got a seeming butterfly through situations in which more obvious heroes would crumple. As Auden very truly observed, it’s the ‘pink and white/fastidious, almost girlish’ types who cover the retreat when ‘the proud-arsed broad shouldered break and run’. Soden emphasises what Coward achieved through sheer cheek, taking 1920s London by storm by writing about totally unacceptable subjects in ways both shocking and extremely funny. There was also a lot of turning up without being invited, for which someone as amusing as Coward was usually forgiven. And there was a lack of respect for status; despite his friendships with royalty, he was not a snob especially. He liked clever people, but poked fun at pretension. His career was given an early boost by his brilliant stage parody of the Sitwells (in the guise of Gob, Sage and Hernia Whittlebot), and Edith’s poetry performances:

Round – oblong – like jam –
Terse as virulent hermaphrodites;
Calling across the sodden twisted ends of Time…

Cheek, and a determination not to take no for an answer, bore fruit in what can only be described as a good war for Coward. Through his connections, he found himself admitted to the intimate circles of the Churchills and the Roosevelts – after a visit to the latter, he was summoned to the presidential bedroom to say goodbye. But it was certainly a challenge to do all that he wanted. The prejudices of the time extended from Joyce Grenfell (‘It is definitely a pity that the man who represents this country should be famous as a queer’) to that notorious stinker and closet queen Hugh Dalton (‘of course he is a roaring pansy’). Those kind of obstacles made it impossible for him to continue some initially successful informal approaches, drumming up support in America and across the Empire.

Instead, he devoted himself to gruelling tours, entertaining the troops and keeping up spirits in what were often his most admired productions. In Which We Serve was a dazzlingly innovative film (the studio conditions under which it was made were worse than the actual navy, according to Mountbatten). There were also daring ventures in what might have been question-able taste: Churchill adored the song ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’, and we are reminded how extraordinary the closing tableau of Blithe Spirit must have been to its first audience in 1941, the set being destroyed around Charles Condomine as London outside the theatre was being threatened with total destruction.

This is a sympathetic and very touching biography. Soden makes the daring decision to write occasional sections in imitation of Coward’s style. Not every biographer would be up to this, but Soden pulls it off. The ending is particularly good – first skating around Coward’s last days, letting him evaporate like Elvira, then giving us a chorus of biographers, boyfriends and household servants to narrate it in detail. But the whole book is beautifully done, and will last – at least until more material surfaces. Are some official files relating to Coward’s wartime activity still to be opened? He was engaged in quite secret work, as well as having intimate connections with royalty, among other dignitaries, and information of that sort can remain closed for a long time.

Coward got away with an extraordinary amount. His only brush with the law had nothing to do with his private life and his chain of boyfriends but with a financial matter (which one of the boyfriends had hopelessly mismanaged). And, naturally, he would be forgiven. In 1924, George V was involved in a decision of the Lord Chamberlain about The Vortex, and said the play sounded ‘disgusting’; but seven years later, the king and queen with their entire family made a rare outing to the theatre, to set the seal of approval on Cavalcade.

Coward’s life demonstrates unequivocally that you might as well give anything a go, and the worst that can happen is you will be told no. There was a fair amount of that during his long career. But in the end there was, also, the second greatest balcony scene in English literature; the line in Blithe Spirit when Madame Arcati proposes one more séance – ‘really putting our backs into it this time’; and the moment when the barometer falls off the wall in Hay Fever. Those things survive when serious disquisitions about politics and philosophy and significance prove as ephemeral as an ice cube in a glass of flat lemonade. There’s every reason to think Coward will last forever – and this excellent biography is just what he deserves.