13 january 2018 [ £4.50 www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

May’s misfire Did the Phoenicians exist? Girl power James Forsyth Justin Marozzi The digital inquisition Lara Prendergast, Rod Liddle and Toby Young on trial by Twitter

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What’s going right

t is only a few months since gloomy eco- It is a wonder that the endless talking- of the recovery are so far being distributed nomic commentators were confidently down of Britain’s prospects has not done where they are needed most. I predicting that the world was about to more harm. As the chief economist of the This point would be a powerful antidote plunge into a dark era of protectionism. Yet Bank of England pointed out, the econom- to Corbynism if the Conservatives could the global economy begins this year in its ics profession has had its ‘Michael Fish work out how to get the message across. healthiest state ever, growing faster than any moment’, referring to the weatherman’s dis- Global capitalism has created a golden era time since 2011. There has been a change in missal of the 1987 storm and the damage of poverty reduction: never have so many political rhetoric, but not in the willingness that did to the credibility of meteorology. been lifted so fast out of illness, ignorance, of people around the world to trade with Like the weather, the economy is the result squalor, poverty or misery. Fast growth in the each other. According to the OECD’s most- of millions of forces, often unpredictable. developing world means that global trade is recent projection, made in November, world The global economy does suffer severe increasing at a healthy rate, which ought to trade grew at 4.8 per cent last year. Some- reversals at times, but its general direction provide a pointer for the post- UK thing seems to be going badly right. is upwards because human societies have a economy. It is with countries such as China Negative sentiments about the world natural affinity for economic growth. Almost and India (whose economies both grew at economy echo those which have hung over 7 per cent last year) that the best opportuni- Britain’s economy ever since the Brexit It is with countries such as ties to do business exist. Once freed from the referendum. A month before that event, it China and India that the best parochial, protectionist instincts of the EU, should never be forgotten, a Treasury paper opportunities to do business exist Britain should be in an excellent position to signed by George Osborne forecast that ‘a take advantage. vote to leave would cause an immediate and everyone wants to better themselves, and The UK economy recovered from profound economic shock’, causing a reces- the vast majority are prepared to work to the 2008 crash far faster than others in sion with half a million more on the dole. achieve that outcome. Government works Europe, and it’s encouraging to see that Instead, employment has risen by almost best when it provides low taxes, regulatory these are now catching up. The member 400,000 — and a lack of workers has become restraint and sound money. That is a recipe states of the EU will be Britain’s biggest one of the UK economy’s biggest problems. for a sustained upwards trend in wealth over single trading partner for some time, and Britain’s biggest jobs website says vacancies the medium to long term, whatever hiccups they are now starting to address chron- are up 20 per cent year-on-year, while unem- might occur in the short term through bank- ic unemployment and sclerotic growth ployment sits at a 40-year low. These are the ing crisis, inflationary shock and so on. It has rates that have held them back for so long. conditions for pay rises to accelerate. worked everywhere that it has been tried. The significant tax cuts just passed People tend to think the worst. As a As the Office for Budget Responsibility in the United States, our largest sin- species, we have evolved to focus on what is fond of reminding us, Britain is statisti- gle trading partner, will accelerate this is wrong. We are forever telling ourselves cally overdue a recession — and tradition- new chapter of global growth: a poten- that something dreadful is about to hap- ally, economists are usually blindsided by tial reflected in recent stockmarket highs. pen, whether it be economic Armageddon downturns when they actually strike. We Brexit, on its own, will not change a thing. or climate catastrophe. As the foreign sec- have plenty of problems, chief among them It won’t by itself make anything better or retary points out on page 20, mankind has low wages, the result of low productivity. But worse. But it will hand new powers to min- never been richer, healthier or less inclined wage inequality, we learned this week, is at isters — who can use them well or badly or to fight wars. If you could choose any time a low not seen for about 30 years: since the not at all. If Britain does not prosper over to be born, not knowing your social position 2010 general election, the incomes of the the next few years, it will not be because of a or even nationality, you would choose now. poorest have been rising fastest. The fruits lack of opportunity. | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 3 Oldman’s fi nest hour, p44 The green-eyed monster, p38

Is that really necessary? p24

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 12 Twitter inquisition BOOKS 7 Portrait of the Week An online past will always 32 Nicholas Shakespeare catch up with you Paradise in Chains, by Diana Preston 9 Diary Enabling The Donald and Lara Prendergast the true meaning of Trumpocracy 34 Jonathan Coe David Frum 13 On being a public enemy The Unmapped Country, by Ann Quin The more you defend yourself, the 10 Politics ’s weaknesses more crazed the mob becomes 36 A.S.H. Smyth James Forsyth Toby Young The Skull of Alum Bheg, by Kim A. Wagner 11 The Spectator’s Notes 18 A bird-brained scheme Remembering Gavin Stamp; Battling to keep people 37 Boyd Tonkin Christmas card trumps and nests apart Writer’s Luck, by David Lodge Charles Moore Melissa Kite Ruth Padel ‘Postern’: a poem 15 Rod Liddle The Twitchfork mob 20 Girl power 38 Emily Hill on jealousy and revenge 18 Ancient and modern Educating girls is the answer 39 Tim Stanley A madman at the helm to the world’s ills Franklin D. Roosevelt, 23 Matthew Parris Victims and justice Boris Johnson by Robert Dallek 24 Barometer It’s getting better 21 Samantha Roden 40 Kate Womersley ‘Shove Your Tissues’: a poem The Butchering Art, 27 Mary Wakefield Therapy’s perils 24 Smooth operators by Lindsey Fitzharris 29 Letters The pensions crisis; Wilfred Is expensive surgery necessary? 41 Keith Miller on first novels Owen; Toby Young’s resignation James Grogono Candy Neubert ‘beetle’: a poem 30 Any other business 28 Political football 42 Patrick Flanery Trump, Wolff and Wall Street To Putin, the World Cup A Long Way from Home, Martin Vander Weyer means respect by Peter Carey Owen Matthews Justin Marozzi In Search of the Phoenicians, by Josephine Quinn 43 Dominic Green William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, ed. by Stephen F. Eisenman

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Roger Latham, K.J. Lamb, Grizelda, Adam Singleton, Percival, Nick Newman, Kipper Williams. www.spectator.co.uk Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: editor@spectator. co.uk (editorial); [email protected] (for publication); [email protected] (advertising); Advertising enquiries: 020 7961 0222 Subscription and delivery queries Spectator Subscriptions Dept., 17 Perrymount Rd, Haywards Heath RH16 3DH; Tel: 0330 3330 050; Email: [email protected]; Rates for a basic annual subscription in the UK: £111; Europe: £185; Australia: A$279; New Zealand: A$349; and £195 in all other countries. To order, go to www.spectator. co.uk/A151A or call 0330 3330 050 and quote A151A; Newsagent queries Spectator Circulation Dept, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: [email protected]; Distributor Marketforce, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP. Tel. 0203 787 9001. www.marketforce.co.uk Vol 336; no 9881 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952 The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP Editor: Fraser Nelson

4 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk How she persuaded Boris, p20 Sculpting sunshine, p46

Roosevelt the radical, p39

LIFE

ARTS LIFE 44 Andrew Roberts 55 High life Taki Girls who use the most social Churchill on film Low life Jeremy Clarke media are the most likely to experience depression. But 46 Exhibitions 56 Real life Melissa Kite Bernini which came first: the blues or Martin Gayford 57 Wild life Aidan Hartley the ill-advised retreat online? Bridge Susanna Gross 47 Radio Mary Wakefield, p27 Rwanda; Penelope Fitzgerald Kate Chisholm AND FINALLY . . . When the rights of ground-nesting 48 Opera 52 Notes on… A Gyptian weekend birds come up against the rights Duke Bluebeard’s Castle; Juliet Rix of ground-nesting doggers, the Rigoletto 58 Chess Raymond Keene left-leaning environmental lobby Richard Bratby Competition Lucy Vickery truly is in a fix, isn’t it? 49 Cinema Melissa Kite, p18 Three Billboards Outside 59 Crossword Doc Ebbing, Missouri 60 No sacred cows Toby Young Easily the worst Churchill Deborah Ross Battle for Britain Michael Heath movie ever made was Churchill 50 Television 61 Sport Roger Alton (2017). I counted 120 historical James Walton Your problems solved inaccuracies in those two hours of

Theatre Mary Killen my life I’ll never get back The Twilight Zone; Pinocchio; The Grinning Man 62 Food Tanya Gold Andrew Roberts, p44 Lloyd Evans Mind your language Dot Wordsworth

CONTRIBUTORS Boris Johnson is a former James Grogono is a retired Emily Hill is a journalist and Nicholas Shakespeare, Kate Womersley, who editor of this magazine, now general surgeon. He delves into the author of Bad Romance, who writes about the founding read English then history the Foreign Secretary. On p20, private surgery and doctors’ a collection of her short of Australia on p32, is a at Cambridge and Harvard, he argues that we have never dilemmas on p24. stories. On p38 she writes novelist, biographer and is now back at Cambridge had it so good. about jealousy, revenge and broadcaster. He won the training to be doctor. On p40, heartbreak. Somerset Maugham Award for she explores the grisly world The Vision of Elena Silves. of Victorian medicine. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

Home in succession to Sir Patrick McLoughlin. staff as being like a ‘child’, because he James Cleverly became his deputy and nine needed ‘immediate gratification’, said a heresa May, the Prime Minister, tried vice-chairman were appointed, including book called Fire and Fury by the journalist Tto shuffle her cabinet, but Jeremy , given responsibility for Michael Wolff. The book said that Mr Hunt, the Health Secretary, refused to appointing candidates, and Maria Caulfield, Trump liked to be in bed by 6.30 p.m., become Business Secretary and stayed who opposes legalising abortion for non- watching his three televisions, eating a put with the words ‘Social Care’ added medical reasons beyond 24 weeks, given cheeseburger and making telephone calls. to his title. , the Communities responsibility for women. It quoted his ex-strategist Steve Bannon Secretary, had ‘Housing’ tacked on to his. as describing a meeting between a Russian Justine Greening spent three hours with arrie Gracie resigned as BBC China lawyer and Trump election campaign Mrs May and emerged without her job Ceditor, reverting to newsroom duties officials, including Mr Trump’s son Donald as Education Secretary, having turned and rejecting an offer of a £45,000 rise to Jr, as ‘treasonous’. Mr Trump responded down Work and Pensions, which went to her £135,000 salary, in the face of what she by saying Mr Bannon had ‘lost his mind’. Esther McVey. David Lidington was made called ‘unlawful pay discrimination’. Peter Mr Bannon felt obliged to step down from Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Preston, editor of from 1975 Breitbart News. The book also questioned taking over tasks that had been performed to 1995, died aged 79. Toby Young resigned the ‘mental fitness’ of Mr Trump, who by Damian Green, and was replaced as the from his new appointment at the Board replied on Twitter: ‘Throughout my life, sixth Justice Secretary in six years by David of the Office for Students after a Twitter my two greatest assets have been mental Gauke, the first solicitor to be made Lord storm resurrected old bad-taste jokes that stability and being, like, really smart.’ Chancellor. Education went to Damian he had made. Meghan Markle, the fiancée Hinds, who was replaced as Employment of Prince Harry, closed her Instagram, resident Emmanuel Macron of France Minister by , who was Facebook and Twitter accounts. An updated Pmade a speech in China that included replaced as Housing Minister by Dominic Ministerial Code published by the Cabinet the sentence ‘Make our planet great again’ Raab, who was replaced as Justice Minister Office said: ‘Harassing, bullying or other in Mandarin. North Korea, having agreed by Rory Stewart, who was replaced as inappropriate or discriminating behaviour to hold talks with the South over border Africa Minister by Harriett Baldwin. James wherever it takes place is not consistent tensions, is to send a delegation to the 2018 Brokenshire resigned as Northern Ireland with the Ministerial Code and will not be Winter Olympic Games place in South Secretary on genuine health grounds, to tolerated.’ Virgin Trains stopped selling the Korea in February. In the Swiss resort of be replaced by Karen Bradley, whose Daily Mail on its West Coast route due to Zermatt, more than 13,000 tourists were secretaryship at Digital, Culture, Media and ‘concern raised by colleagues’ about the trapped by snow, but skiing was impossible Sport went to . The shuffle Mail’s view on ‘issues such as immigration, because of the risk of avalanches. brought above 50 per cent the proportion LGBT rights and unemployment’, an of Oxbridge-educated Cabinet ministers. executive said. A series of recruitment he Supreme Court of India reversed its Mrs May said the Government now looked advertisements asked questions such as Torder that the national anthem had to ‘more like the country it serves’. ‘Can I be gay in the Army?’ be played in every cinema before a film was screened. Hundreds of flying foxes died he Conservative party’s official Twitter Abroad in Sydney as temperatures reached 47C Taccount congratulated Chris Grayling (117F), the highest since 1939. A prisoner in on his appointment as party chairman, resident Donald Trump of the United Asturias prison in Spain was certified dead only for to be appointed, PStates was regarded by White House but woke up in a mortuary in Oviedo. CSH the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 7 ANNOUNCING A NEW £20,000 PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION THE This year, John Murray, the publisher of Jane Austen, Charles Darwin and JOHN Lord Byron, turns 250. To celebrate, they are launching a new international non-fiction prize in association with The Spectator – open to unpublished MURRAY authors everywhere.

PRIZE John Murray is looking for an original, insightful and lively piece of non- fiction writing of no more than 4,000 words on the theme of ORIGIN. The prize will be judged by a panel of contemporary John Murray authors including Andrea Wulf, Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Amanda Vickery and Stig Abell, as well as The Spectator’s literary editor, Sam Leith.

The deadline for submissions is 1st May 2018.

For full details, please visit: www.spectator.co.uk/jmprize

FOR THE WINNER: FOR THE RUNNERS-UP:

• A £20,000 book contract with John Murray and mentoring • Their essays published in sessions with the publisher an elegant anthology • Their winning essay will be published both in The Spectator • A selection of books from and in a special anniversary anthology John Murray • An invitation to the anniversary party

@johnmurrays | @spectator IN ASSOCIATION WITH David Frum

ike every journalist in Washington, mind before relying on any of Trump’s LI’m enthralled by the new Michael commitments to them. Wolff book, Fire and Fury, which depicts Donald Trump as a president in steep he Trump presidency has been a mental decline, derided and despised by Tdisorienting moment in American his entire entourage, family included. political life. Imagine a time traveller I read with perhaps special attention starting in the year 1990. He steps because I have a book of my own about forward 25 years to 2015. Who are the Trump phenomenon being released The President-elect asked her to show the the leading candidates for president? on 16 January, just over a week after photo to his then ten-year-old son, Barron. Bush and Clinton — again! What are Wolff’s. The experience is a little like ‘Barron will fall in love with him,’ Trump the top issues? Iraq and healthcare — being the next presenter at the Golden said. ‘Barron will want him.’ That’s just again! Now step backwards 25 years Globes immediately after Oprah what happened. As the supporter told the from 1965. The most powerful men in Winfrey’s speech. Wolff is interested Washington Post: ‘This big smile came over Washington are the head of the AFL- in personalities, not politics. But while [Barron’s face], it just brought tears to his CIO, a federation of 55 unions across Trump may be stupid or crazy, the people eyes.’ Trump never did permit his son to the US, and J. Edgar Hoover. There’s enabling him are neither of those things. accept the promised dog. That’s something, a draft and a telephone monopoly and The lucky-bounce election of Trump say, US allies might want to keep in urban riots and liberal Republicans. It’s by a freak of the Electoral College a different world. I sometimes feel that offered US Republicans an unexpected what Trump has done is restore motion opportunity to enact a deeply unpopular to a political system that froze in place agenda. In return, Trump has demanded when the baby-boomers reached middle that they protect him — and attack his age. What’s coming next? Something enemies. On the very day before the radically different. The baby-boomers will ‘very stable genius’ tweets, Republicans keep ageing, and their dependence on on the Senate Judiciary Committee government will grow. Trump discovered ordered the Department of Justice and confirmed that ethnocultural to open a criminal investigation of resentment mobilises conservative voters Christopher Steele, compiler of the better than economic issues ever did. famous dossier of Trump’s activities The Republicans seem to be heading in Russia. They didn’t consult or even for heavy losses in this year’s elections inform committee Democrats, a sharp — making Trump even more important breach of Senate practice. Trump wanted as a single remaining focal point for it, so they did it. What the world needs party identity and party loyalty. Voters to understand is not Trump’s complex who cannot stomach Trump, especially hairdo, but his self-serving system of college-educated women, are quitting power. That’s my story anyway. the GOP. What will be left is a party that no longer commands a national voting ut while we’re talking about majority. Only one Republican has done Bpersonalities, here’s an aspect of that since 1988 — George W. Bush in Donald Trump’s that I’ve never got past: 2004 — and then only barely. But what his hatred of dogs. When Trump tweeted Republicans are also discovering is on 5 January that his former aide Steve that with sufficiently ruthless methods, Bannon had been ‘dumped like a dog’, a national voting majority may not be he recycled an insult he has hurled more needed to wield national power. That’s than a dozen times since declaring for part of the meaning of Trumpocracy, and president, according to the indispensable it’s more disturbing than Trump’s fast- TrumpTwitterArchive.com. After the food diet. 2016 election, a wealthy Trump supporter offered the new First Family a gift of an David Frum is a senior editor at The especially adorable Goldendoodle. On Atlantic and author of Trumpocracy: The a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the supporter Corruption of the American Republic showed a photo of the dog to Trump. (Harper Collins). the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 9 POLITICS | JAMES FORSYTH May’s three great weaknesses

hey are not as strong as they times — Brexit, the need to defeat the most the fee level that the Tories can never win. thought they were,’ one White- left-wing Labour leader in generations and Several of the moves in this reshuffle are ‘Thall source remarked to me on persistently sluggish earnings growth — at least sensible. Putting health and social Monday night as he contemplated the fall- May might find people more receptive to care in the same department, something out from Theresa May’s attempt to reshuffle the call to serve than she’d expect. No. 10 insists would have happened who- the cabinet. No. 10 had come to believe that To be fair, the reshuffle did attempt some ever was Health Secretary, will help to inte- a successful Budget and ‘sufficient progress’ progress on this front. , who grate the two. David Lidington, one of the in the Brexit talks meant that much of May’s served as deputy chief of staff under David politest men in politics, will be a natural fit political authority had been restored. This Cameron, went to the Cabinet Office, where at the Cabinet Office. He knows more about emboldened them to think that she could he’ll be able to help coordinate government European politics than almost anyone else now pull off a proper reshuffle, something policy. But there is a pressing need for more in government and will bring that know- had regularly cautioned political appointees inside No. 10. ledge — which is all too often missing — to against when he was chief whip. The third and biggest problem exposed the inner cabinet’s Brexit discussions. David But a reshuffle that was meant to con- by the reshuffle is the lack of clarity on what Gauke’s appointment means that a lawyer is firm the Prime Minister’s return to political the government is trying to achieve. One of once more Lord Chancellor. He also under- health has ended up highlighting her three those who kept their job on Monday com- stands the link between the benefits system biggest weaknesses. The first thing it showed plains that ‘the problem is not the people in and prison, having been Welfare Secretary. was that she has not regained her political But the level of turnover in the Minister of authority. Moving ministers around is always One minister compares her to the Justice and the Department for Work and tricky unless it is done as a prime minister’s Wizard of Oz – there’s little there Pensions is alarming. There have been four first act or after a landslide election victory. Justice Secretaries since the 2015 election But May faced remarkable levels of resist- when you pull back the curtain and five Welfare Secretaries. ance, despite choosing to leave all the hold- One other thing May deserves praise for ers of great offices of state in place. In the the cabinet or the ministerial positions’ but is beginning the process of promoting the end, the Health Secretary stayed put, even rather May herself. This minister compares talented 2015 crop of Tory MPs. This is a though May’s initial plan had been to move her to the Wizard of Oz — there’s little there more diverse intake and by bringing them him, and the Education Secretary resigned when you pull back the curtain. into government now, she can ensure that rather than become Welfare Secretary. I understand that Theresa May was so they are ready to be promoted to Secretary The result is that every Secretary of State keen to move Justine Greening because of State before the Tories go to the country who would like to defy May on some issue she was frustrated by her approach to again. As one leading minister tells me: ‘The will now feel more confident. The Prime social mobility. But parliamentary arithme- team that goes into the next election will Minister is, clearly, not an irresistible force. tic means that grammar schools are off the look very different from the team that went The reshuffle has also raised questions agenda, so it is hard to work out what May into the last.’ about the competence of May’s operation. wants to do in this area. Mrs May might not be restored to politi- For the party’s official Twitter account to There are indications that Greening and cal health but that doesn’t mean she is on start the reshuffle by inaccurately tweet- , the Universities Minister, were her way out. There remains no agreement at ing that Chris Grayling was party chairman shifted because No. 10 wants to do some- the top of the Tory party about who should was a spectacular fail. But almost as bad was thing on tuition fees. It would be sensible, for succeed her. There is, however, a sense that No. 10 failing to establish whether Jeremy instance, to cut the interest rate on them. But a leadership contest before Brexit happens Hunt was prepared to move before he came the Tories will never be able to beat Corbyn’s would simply be too bloody. Indeed, opin- in to see Mrs May. One ally of the Health pledge to scrap them. It would be foolish to ion in the cabinet is shifting towards the idea Secretary tells me he had no contact from highlight this issue with a Dutch auction on that the moment when it is safe to have a Downing Street all last weekend. This is vote is the end of the transition period in particularly odd, as Hunt was being offered 2021, not the actual moment of departure a promotion. next March. May’s team need to accept that this is the If May were to continue until then, the second set-piece event that has gone wrong new party leader would have only a year and for them in recent months, the first being a bit before they had to go to the polls. They the party conference where the announce- would have to make use of every minute of ments were underwhelming even before that time to show the country where they the disaster of the Prime Minister’s speech. wanted to take Britain after Brexit. What Even those who defend the competence May must do in the meantime is ensure of May’s team admit that the operation is that the next election is not lost before her understaffed. What is needed is an injection successor even makes it into No. 10. of those with previous government — and preferably Downing Street —experience. ‘Even the Transport Secretary SPECTATOR.CO.UK/COFFEEHOUSE Given the momentous challenges of the isn’t going anywhere.’ Hourly updates from Parliament and beyond.

10 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk Charles Moore

avin Stamp, who died just before the should require public service salaries. Gyear’s end, will be mourned by many Carrie Gracie made that point when she Spectator readers. For years, particularly said — though she didn’t quite put it like in the 1980s, he was the paper’s main this — that she didn’t want her pay to go voice on architectural questions, notably up, but for that of her male equivalents as they affected the public space. His to go down. voice, both angry and compassionate, would be raised whenever he thought ast Saturday’s Court Circular, someone in authority — in church, state, L published in Monday’s papers, local government, big business — was reports: ‘Today being the Feast of the damaging what belonged to the people. Epiphany, a Sung Eucharist was held He was very important at changing in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, official attitudes imbued with fag-end from right to left and yet, to a large extent, when the customary offerings of Gold, modernism. No one expounded better the his views remained the same. Perhaps he was Frankincense and Myrrh were made on conception of a building’s public purpose, seeking a home for his historically minded, behalf of The Queen by Air Vice-Marshal so to hear him talk about, say, Lutyens’s religious, organic idea of urban civilisation David Hobart and Brigadier Jonathan Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in which what was built dignified the people Bourne-May (Gentlemen Ushers to at Thiepval, was revelatory. Gavin made who inhabited it and what he called the Her Majesty).’ This is a charming custom, his greatest splash in the paper early in ‘respectable working class’ could thrive. but why are there only two Gentlemen 1985 with his cover piece ‘Telephone He had an instinctive dislike of anything Ushers to represent the Three Wise boxes: reverse the changes’. This led our to do with money, and was therefore poor. Men? Defence cuts? vigorous campaign to force the newly Gavin was a romantic and so was often privatised British Telecom to stop ripping disappointed by the world as it is. But this ur family’s Epiphany custom is out all its 76,500 K2 and K6 red telephone made his kindness and humour all the O the Christmas card game. The boxes, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, more enchanting. My best memories of Christmas cards received are dealt out perhaps the best pieces of street furniture Gavin are of striding round the East End in equal hands. Each player, in turn, ever made. At that time, The Spectator of London, with him showing me hidden calls his own trumps. So it could be had just been bought by the Australian architectural marvels. If we passed through ‘fattest robin’, ‘most unChristmassy’, Fairfax group, and I had to placate the a market, he would find some amazing ‘woolliest’, or whatever. All must follow dismay of one of the Fairfax executives piece of architectural salvage, buy it on the suit if they can. The cards played are at the ‘irrelevance’ of it all. In fact, few spot and lug it home on his great shoulders. then submitted (only the front of the campaigns have gained such enthusiastic ‘Salvage’ was the right word for what Gavin card counts) for general arbitrament, support of readers, or made such a did, rescuing beauty with the same love and which can become heated. This year, I difference, as Gavin’s. BT retreated, and effort that some people rescue refugees. called out ‘happiest family’ and played a started to save the boxes it should never lovely picture of Nicholas and Georgia — in the interest of ‘rebranding’ — have arrie Gracie is more or less in the right, Coleridge and their four children taken abandoned. In the end, the red box was C but I did laugh out loud when I heard at Nick’s 60th birthday party at the V&A destroyed by something neither side had her, on the BBC programme she was herself last year. My wife, however, who has a foreseen at the time — the all-conquering presenting, say that her resignation from ruthless streak in such games, played an mobile phone. her post as China editor over the equal pay Italian Renaissance painting, ‘Madonna issue had brought wonderful sympathy from worshipping the Child’. I countered avin was a man of great loves ‘across the country and internationally’, that the circumstances of the birth of Gand hates. The former included as though speaking of the plight of the Jesus might have made the family quite nationalised railways, Germany, Frank Rohingya. People who earn six-figure unhappy (in the short term), whereas Pick of the London Passenger Transport salaries and are allowed, by the organisation the Coleridges, united and content at the Board and John Betjeman. The latter which employs them, to complain on air to end of Nick’s long and successful reign included anything rural, fizzy water, food millions about an aspect of their pay are not at Condé Nast, had no worries. Besides, that was complicated to open (e.g. crab) easy for most of us to regard as persecuted I went on, since neither Joseph nor the and France. Both in terms of people and victims. Even Ms Gracie’s ‘resignation’ from Holy Spirit was depicted on my wife’s things he had a particular tenderness for her Beijing post seems to permit her to stay card, this was not a full family. Caroline, the odd, neglected and unfashionable. He on the staff. Hers are what young people call however, insisted that the Holy Family was an unusual mixture of the dogmatic ‘first-world problems’. The serious problem must, for theological reasons, be the and the open-minded — denouncing with BBC presenters’ and executive pay is happiest family ever, and indeed the some architect, politician or philosophy, that it is much too high for a service funded Nativity is one of the Seven Joys of Mary. yet ready to welcome the new as well. He by a compulsory tax on everyone with I lost. She won the entire game, with hated being in a gang. His politics shifted a television. Public service broadcasting twice as many tricks as anyone else. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 11 Twitter inquisition No one should ever assume that their online past won’t catch up with them

LARA PRENDERGAST

friend of mine at university had a deployed what Boris Johnson called his material online to blow up his political rule: he didn’t want anything to ‘caustic wit’ on occasions where silence ambitions. When he tried to delete his A appear online that might ruin a would have been wiser. Some will consider tweets, his detractors were ready. They had future political career. On nights out, when him beyond the pale; others will be unable already saved everything they considered photos were being taken, he’d quietly move to see what the fuss is about. For now, how- incriminating. out of the picture. While we were all witter- ever, the court of social media has passed Tweets never grow old or die: words ing away to each other on social media, he judgment, and there is no place harsher or published years ago can be reposted, fresh kept schtum. Strange, I remember thinking. more frenetically outraged. as the day they were typed. Remarks from Why so paranoid? Sites such as Facebook and Twitter hold one context can be republished in anoth- I thought of my friend when Toby Young vast reserves of information about us, which er. Online comments can now define and started making headlines. After Toby we have willingly handed over. We have destroy you. During the Blair era, Alastair was appointed one of the 14 non-execu- been encouraged to be honest, to share, Campbell used to say that if you were the tive members of the Office for Students, to joke, often in the name of liberty. Twit- story for more than seven days, you had to he discovered to his cost that quit. But in those days newspa- his past — preserved as it is pers decided how long a scan- online — could be dredged up dal lasted: they had readers by those who wanted to sabo- who would tire easily. In the tage his advancement. The cam- age of social media, there is all paign against him worked. The the time in the world. People Twitter storm gathered such who feel angry enough about strength that it sucked in news- something will spend weeks or papers and politicians. His old months keeping a story alive, tweets ended up being debated if that’s what it takes to scalp in parliament. The Prime Minis- the enemy. ter was asked about sentences Social media companies from articles Toby had written have tricked us all. They have 17 years ago. After eight days of lured us into thinking we can outrage, he resigned. lower our guard online and talk Just two weeks ago, the fate candidly as if to friends. They of Toby Young would have been have coaxed us into blurring of interest to Spectator read- personal and private worlds ers, possibly a few free school in the name of free speech. enthusiasts, but not a great We have been led to think our many others. Yet his resigna- comments are ephemeral when tion from an advisory post to nothing could be further from an obscure quango led the BBC the truth. Tweets are dashed morning news — ahead of the off, then forgotten about — cabinet reshuffle. It’s baffling: only to be discovered years why is everyone, seemingly, talk- later by anyone with a bone ing about a journalist having to to pick. We live in a confes- leave a minor government body sional age and are encour- that nobody had heard of? ter users are scored on how many tweets aged to reveal all our inner thoughts. What’s The answer is that Toby has become they have shared with a grateful world. For not encouraged, so much, is to reflect over just the latest — and perhaps the highest- Labour’s Stella Creasy, it’s 75,700; for Piers whether we would be prepared to stand by profile — target of a new phenomenon: the Morgan it’s 110,000. For some, using social everything we have said in the future. digital inquisition. It is something that any- media is a form of work; for others, an addic- When Anthony Scaramucci was appoint- one wanting to enter public life can — and tion. The rough-and-tumble can be part of ed Donald Trump’s communications direc- should — expect. As my university friend the fun: you say something, see how it goes tor, he set about deleting any tweets that knew, if you happen to be ambitious in the down, or who’ll respond at 1 a.m. Careers didn’t align with his new boss’s views. ‘Full internet age, you must be very careful about have been made on Twitter as well as broken. transparency: I’m deleting old tweets. Past everything you say or do online. In Toby’s case, a selection of tweets and views evolved & shouldn’t be a distrac- I need not repeat the litany of Toby’s articles, some dating back over a decade, tion. I serve @POTUS agenda & that’s all offending tweets. He said some bad things. were cobbled together to present him as a that matters,’ he wrote. But those who man- He has been deliberately provocative. He sexist bigot. He had left enough explosive aged to save his deleted tweets were able to

12 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk show that his comments were anti-gun, pro- Twitter’s relatively small band of loud, regu- gay marriage and concerned about climate lar users the most powerful focus group in On being a public enemy change. By way of defence, Scaramucci said the world. Anyone who has spent any time that ‘gotcha’ politics is dead. He soon learnt on Twitter will know how frightening that is. TOBY YOUNG otherwise. ‘Is there anything you ought to tell me?’ ‘Gotcha’ politics has not died. It has Francis Urquhart asks ambitious MPs in evolved. Unedited thoughts have never the original House of Cards. ‘Anything that, been easier to publish — or find. For my age should it come to light, might make me group, most of our lives have been captured think: “I wish I had known that”?’ That’s a The hardest thing about being the online. By the time anyone born in the new polite way of asking a rude question: is there target of a witch hunt is being turned millennium starts to enter public life, there any dirt? It’s now impossible to answer this into a pantomime villain. The lies, the will be masses of images of them and words question, since no one quite knows which of distortions, the brutal literalism of by them on the internet. the hundreds, perhaps thousands of digital the mob, using everything ironic or It’s no surprise that younger people ghosts from their past may be summoned. self-deprecating you’ve ever said and have started to use technology that offers The advent of social media therefore sets pretending to take it at face value so they more privacy as the default. Apps such as a new bar for anyone wanting to enter pub- can use it as evidence for the prosecution. Snapchat and Telegram use messaging that lic life: the trail you leave online will now be It’s a kind of show trial. self-destructs — or at least pretends to. Insta- used to judge your character. Is your profile Not that I wasn’t guilty of saying some gram’s ‘story’ feature allows you to publish clean enough? If not, forget it. Indiscretions, appalling things. Whenever some ghastly, videos that disappear after 24 hours. If Toby youthful or otherwise, are now immortal tasteless tweet was dragged up from had chosen to use Snapchat to voice his sins. This will delight the bureaucratic class, years ago, I was filled with a burning sense of shame. I wanted to scream: ‘But opinions instead of Twitter, he might have who find it far easier to beat away outsiders that’s not who I am!’ I wanted to point avoided losing his job. Then again, far fewer or rebels who aspire to a career in politics. to the good I’ve done, to plead with people would have heard his opinions. This new state of play will also deter anyone people to judge me by my actions, not Yet even the most tech-savvy young- who doesn’t fancy having their life pored by some puerile nonsense I dashed off ster will soon discover that it’s hard, some- over, their reputation trashed. in the middle of the night in 2009 after times impossible, to leave no trace, to clean The internet dream was that the web half a bottle of wine. But it’s pointless. up the photos that others took and pub- would create a more open society. It wouldn’t The more you try to defend yourself, really matter what you said because every- the more crazed with blood lust the Even the most tech-savvy one would feel more liberated. The oppo- Twitchfork mob becomes. youngster will soon discover that site has happened: increasingly, people The power of social media is are nervous about what they say online symptomatic of what Roger Scruton calls it’s impossible to leave no trace for fear of future rebuke. Far from mak- the volatile and foundation-less politics ing everyone feel free to speak their minds, of our times. In an age of uncertainty, in which the values that underpinned lished online. The word ‘delete’ is often a the internet has made many of us terrified our society are melting away, people misnomer. This week Kensington Palace of self-expression. Toby Young’s tale is an seem to be more attracted to puritanical announced that Meghan Markle had closed extreme example of something that could censure. I despair of the impact this will all her social media accounts. It’s highly happen to anybody. have on public life. Who will want to unlikely though that there won’t be a record So my university friend’s paranoia was serve on a quango from now on, knowing of everything she’s said, somewhere. Mass warranted. Now, if I search for him online, there’s a risk that every skeleton in digitisation means that student newspaper nothing of interest comes up: a few chari- their closet will be dragged out with a articles from the 1960s are now online and table causes he has supported, a glow- view to embarrassing the politician who searchable. A BBC editor once arrested ing LinkedIn profile, a polished Instagram appointed them? I’ve been contacted by because he was part of a hard-left protest account with not a single photo that could several friends, hugely distinguished in group; foul language once used by a Treas- cause trouble — or so he must assume. It is their professions and with an enormous ury minister — it’s all there if you know deliberately anodyne: the perfect starting amount to contribute, to say that after what to search for. Or if someone suddenly point for a modern political career. seeing what happened to me they’ve put all thoughts of public service out of their decides to look. heads. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously This digital trail makes it harder for peo- SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST said, when he ran to be governor of ple to grow up or change path. Toby Young Brendan O’Neill and Dawn Foster on California, ‘I haven’t lived my life in has moved from professional provocateur to Twitchfork retribution. order to become a politician.’ Back then, education reformer, but the internet remem- that didn’t disqualify him from public bered his past, and made his political rein- office. Today it would. vention near impossible. One might have Can I take this opportunity to dared hope that, in an era when the capacity thank all those people, including many to snoop is almost limitless, we would learn Spectator readers, who’ve contacted me to be more forgiving of the failings of others. to offer sympathy and support? It makes Instead, the mood is ever more nosey and a huge difference when you’re trying censorious. to retain your sanity and sense of self One might also hope that the adults in — knowing that there are some people who don’t think you’re a terrible person. SW1 would not confuse the Twittersphere The most moving message I got was a with the vox populi. But politicians, ever note from a pupil at the West London anxious about public opinion, are irresist- Free School. She had passed it to one ibly drawn to any indications of what peo- of the teachers and asked him to give it ple think. They can’t help trying to find the to me. When I read it, I was completely national mood on social media. Sometimes overwhelmed. I’ve never been so they take their lead from it, seeking Twit- ‘Whatever you do kids, don’t become touched by a small gesture of kindness. ter praise or fearing its censure. This makes a figure of hate for the left.’ the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 13

ROD LIDDLE The power of the 0.1 per cent

once asked , when he had Change.org or 38 Degrees: they are magnif- The political right, in general, does not just been appointed Education Secre- icently arrogant in their presumption that behave like this. It does not become beside I tary, if he would mind awfully appointing because 0.3 per cent of the population have itself with fury when someone who has me as chairman of Ofsted: I had one or two summoned up the ability to click a button, views counter to their own is appointed to vigorous ideas, such as reversing the grades they must have their way. a post, which is all that happened in the case awarded to schools for ‘cultural diversity’ so The first thing, then, is for the government of Young. For the left, it is all that matters: that they more closely represented what the to reappraise the numbers issue. Maybe start if he disagrees with me, he must be vile and overwhelming majority of parents actually taking a mild interest in petitions when they thus unsuitable. think. Michael smiled politely and walked reach about the four million mark — about 6 Toby Young was appointed to a minor role away, which I took as a definite indication per cent of the population, instead of prom- on an obscure education quango because of of assent. Frankly, I will never forgive the ising House of Commons debates as soon his exceptional work with free schools. In treachery. Gove handed out the job to some- as they reach the pitiful figure of 100,000, as the education sector there are almost no one who went native almost immediately, is the case now. So, four million, minimum, right-wingers appointed to anything. No became subsumed by the Blob. Serves him otherwise ignore them totally. The gov- visiting professors, or honorary professors. right. I assume Gove, in a cowardly manner, ernment is out of date on the numbers, on By contrast, the genuinely idiotic journalist was worried by the possible howl-round what constitutes a genuine public feeling. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has been a visiting of appointing a chap who had once asked With Toby Young there was no popu- professor at three universities, despite hav- readers if they had ever, after a few pints, lar feeling at all — it was just them again. ing said that she wishes white men to be considered giving one to Harriet Harman. I expunged from the face of the earth and that had been trying to be nice, but there we are. This is how it works – a few judicious the white working class is ‘scum’, and having Michael was clearly terrified of the Googles and almost everyone in the referred to people who voted Leave by the Twit ter storm, the maniacs on social media country can be found bang to rights brilliant term ‘Brex shitters’. But the right sites, the relentless fury of a couple of hun- do not get inflamed in quite the same way. dred thousand people, almost all of whom The usual suspects. Take no notice of them, Your history will always come back to we pay for out of our taxes to carry out they count for nothing. Because otherwise haunt you, but only if you are on the right. If their fatuous jobs, if they have any, and nobody who is right of centre will ever be you are on the left, it won’t matter at all. Just who care for freedom of speech and free- able to be appointed to anything. Every hypothetically speaking, I think it is entire- dom of conscience with the same fervour time they do, the puffins will begin their ly possible that one could be appointed to with which a Tower Hamlets imam cares work. The fundamentalist wankpuffins will a senior position within a left-wing party about the rights of his local LGBTQI folk. tap ‘Toby Young Twitter tits’ or ‘Rod Lid- despite having demanded honours for IRA Toby Young got a little further than I dle Facebook give Harriet one’ into Google murderers, supported genocidal terrorist did, as part of The Spectator’s drive to cap- and rip everything out of context, stripped organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, ture all the offices of government of nuance and regardless of whether it was and proclaimed an affection for a totalitarian — Taki in charge of immigration, Charles uttered 25 years ago — and then the foot- communist dictatorship in, say, Cuba which Moore personally strangling foxes at the soldier wankpuffins will swallow it whole imprisons trade union leaders and perse- Min of Ag and Jeremy Clarke running the and tap their little buttons on their laptops cutes homosexuals That’s just hypotheti- MoD — but tendered his resignation when for Change.org. That’s how it works — a few cally speaking, mind; I can’t know for sure. it became evident that it would be shortly judicious Googles and almost everyone in The problem is not the mob, no matter tendered for him. The mob works. The mob the country can be found bang to rights, can how fascistic and undemocratic its mindset thinks it is an expression of democracy — be shrieked at and told to resign. might be. The puffins have every right to and in a sense it is, so long as nobody of tap their little buttons, to scream and stamp importance pays any heed to its eternal, their feet, to howl with anguish. The problem moronic fugue and its bedwetting tantrums. is solely the respect given to it. A Guardian The problem is that people who should editorial column is read by about 100,000 know better, i.e., the government, do take people, 0.1 per cent of the population. It it seriously. Perhaps it is because they are does not matter. And nor does double that right-wingers: they see that 200,000 people number signing a petition. It is time the right have signed a petition against something wised up to this and acquired from some- and assume that they are just normal people, where the semblance of a spine. a bit like them. But they are not. They are the same 200,000 liberal-left wankpuffins SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE who sign every fatuous petition got up by ‘An apology should get us off the hook.’ The argument continues online. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 15 So much to do, so much time.

ANCIENT AND MODERN A bird-brained scheme Madman at the helm There are billions being wasted to keep people and nests apart

MELISSA KITE

Whatever one makes of the accuracy of the journalist Michael Wolff’s depiction of hile walking or riding on the tected bird nests in all three counties. Natu- President Trump, it cannot all be the beautiful heathland near my ral England believes that ‘recreational use’ product of an overheated imagination. Whome, I have noticed a grow- of the heaths, having risen thanks to housing What makes it so interesting is that ing number of signs telling me to respect developments and population increase, is his picture of total dysfunctionality is ground-nesting birds. why the birds are struggling, although there typical of Roman historians’ accounts I keep the dogs close. I don’t let the is good evidence that their numbers are not of many emperors. horses trample through the undergrowth. struggling at all. Suetonius (d. c. ad 125), for But that is not proving good enough for As a result, all housing development example, was a high-ranking the wildlife authorities who have begun to within five kilometres of each SPA is now imperial secretary to the emperor Hadrian. In his Lives of the Caesars, spend millions of pounds on a bizarre pro- subject to stringent tests and impact assess- he covered the period from Julius gramme to divert human beings from large ments. In effect, all house-building near Caesar, Augustus and all the other areas of heathland — not only where I walk some SPAs has pretty much stopped. early emperors — most notoriously but in dozens of other places across the But don’t worry. You, recreational user, Caligula and Nero — through to south-east of England, so that these popular are going to be given a Suitable Alternative Domitian (d. ad 96). beauty spots can be left for the birds. Natural Green Space to walk in. Whoopee! Take his portrait of the viciously Natural England (the government agen- Now, I have never seen a sign near where self-indulgent Caligula. His desire to cy for conservation) and local authorities in I walk telling me to go anywhere else, but humiliate senators and officials and Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire are cam- Natural England insists: ‘Since 2008, 51 to put on shows, dress up, act, sing and paigning to safeguard what they called SPAs, Suitable Alternative Natural Greenspaces dance, made him very popular with Special Protection Areas, by creating some- [sic] have been created, relieving pressure the people. Consuls who forgot his thing they call SANGS, which is so loony on habitats and species.’ Natural England birthday were stripped of office for that no one can agree whether it stands for boasts that SANGS are only going to work three days. He ordered the death or exile of senators, friends and relatives Suitable Accessible Natural Green Space or if they are ‘more attractive than the SPA to with complete insouciance. His dark Suitable Alternative Natural Green Space. users of the kind that currently visit the SPA’. humour reflected his actions: ‘I can Either way, welcome to the wacky world of do anything I please, to anybody’ was rare-bird protection. Eleven local authorities in three his mantra. In this world, you, the human being living counties could be planning to He demanded that the finest in an area known to conservationists as the spend well over a billion pounds Greek statues of the gods be Thames Basin SPAs, will be dissuaded from brought to Rome, and have their visiting your local heathland and instructed It would appear hubristic to think it possible heads replaced with his. He set up a to go instead to a disused farm down the to create beauty spots more attractive than temple to himself and would invite road, for example, where your local author- the purple-carpeted heathlands established the full moon to share his bed. He ity and wildlife chiefs have created for you over hundreds of years by generations acquired and got rid of wives almost an approximation of the favourite place you of livestock grazing and scrub clearance. at random, made a habit of seducing thought you were enjoying and appreciating In practice, over the next 125 years, Guild- women of distinguished families, detailing their performance in bed, but in fact were ruining. Allegedly. ford Borough Council is spending £12.2 mil- and indulged in incest with his sisters. The policy covers 8,274 hectares of Berk- lion on one SANGS alone, raised through a Unsurprisingly, he wanted to abolish shire, Hampshire and Surrey, including Ock- tally on developers. This is a piece of land all lawyers. Suetonius commented ham and Wisley Common, where I walk and called Tyting Farm. Their method reads like that the previous emperor Tiberius, ride, and Whitmoor Common near Guild- a handbook for crushing the soul: ‘It should his adoptive grandfather, got it right: ford, where I used to walk until I got fed be possible to complete a circular walk of in Caligula, he said, he was rearing a up of being accosted by environmentalists 2.3-2.5km around the SANGS,’ the guidance viper for the Roman people. brandishing leaflets telling me how many from Natural England sets out. The SANGS Much of this material does read birds I was slaughtering just by being there. will have ‘a gently undulating topography… like invention, fed into the record There are three rare species in these and a view…with a monument or something by sources hostile to Caligula. But in heaths: woodlark, nightjar and Dartford to visit…’ It will ‘provide a variety of habi- the light of Wolff’s revelations about warbler. They nest in small numbers on or tats for users to experience…’ Trump, maybe Suetonius was right. near the ground and are susceptible to pre- ‘Hills do not put people off visiting a site, The saving grace is that a country’s institutions and public servants keep dation and disturbance. particularly when these are associated with a it on the road, however pathological On Ockham and Wisley, for example, good view, but steep hills are not appreciat- its leadership. If the Roman Empire recent surveys show up to seven Dartford ed. An undulating landscape is preferred…’ could survive for half a millennium, warbler nests, four woodlark and five night- It is utter madness trying to quantify and the USA can probably survive Trump. jar. On Whitmoor, there are two Dartford then replicate a beauty spot. And what hap- — Peter Jones warbler nests, no woodlark and four nightjar. pens when a Dartford warbler pitches up at In total, there are around 1,000 of these pro- the alternative? Do they then have to create

18 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk another alternative to protect the original the environment minister Thérèse Coffey it outdoors and so, like the ground-nesting alternative? Nevertheless, a housing levy on recently advised that numbers have been birds, their rights must be respected. But all new housing in the centre of Guildford ‘normalised’. So why the rush to spend a bil- when the rights of ground-nesting birds for the next 125 years of some £6,500 per lion pounds diverting walkers, with near hys- come up against the rights of ground-nest- house has been put in place, to be paid for teria in official circles over visitor numbers? ing doggers, the left-leaning environmental by developers. Official surveys suggest that more than lobby truly is in a fix, isn’t it? In its draft plan, the council has estimat- 83 per cent of visitors to SPAs arrive by car. Is the precious heathland nearest to Lon- ed it will raise anything between £64 mil- A large proportion are dog walkers, many don a habitat for rare birds, or is it a habitat lion and £90 million to develop SANGS to of whom visit on a more or less daily basis, it for middle-managers stopping off for illicit safeguard the small number of nests in its says. So we know who is trampling through open-air sex on the way home? It seems that area. If you extrapolate that, 11 local author- the nests, then. Or do we? it cannot be both. ities in three counties could be planning to As someone who has walked and ridden I tried to get an official to respond to spend well over a billion pounds. According on Ockham for 15 years, I have noticed a big this, to no avail. A Surrey Wildlife source to critics, that’s a punitive tax on develop- increase in visitors straying off the marked said: ‘You won’t get anyone to comment ment in an area where housing (for humans) on that. No one wants to talk about it. But is desperately needed and which is likely to Those visitors straying off broadly speaking, the birds don’t nest in the increase house prices in the south-east. the marked paths are not people wooded areas.’ Fine, but the point remains And that’s before you consider the insan- walking dogs – they are dogging that the big rise in visitor numbers might ity that you, recreational user, are going to not be from dog walkers but from doggers. be told to drive three miles further to walk paths, but these people are not walking dogs. And I don’t see anyone working out how to around a new beauty spot so that six or They are dogging. divert them. What, therefore, is the point of seven bird nests are not disturbed. Even if Every day, dozens of cars pull up, driven the SANGS initiative? you have been drinking the environmental- by mostly men, but some women too, who ‘We have a duty to preserve our natural ist Kool-Aid and want to help these birds, disappear into the wooded areas of the habitat so that future generations can enjoy there is scant evidence that your absence heath to have sex with each other, leaving the countryside,’ says a spokesman for will help them. The latest stats show that the behind rubbish including condoms. Guildford Borough Council. No doubt. But rare bird population is at virtually the same When I last wrote about this, I was told defending our vulnerable heathlands from numbers as in 1998. by council chiefs and police that this behav- truly invasive human behaviours would Wildlife Trust insiders tell me that bad iour is not aggressively tackled because require the authorities to confront a minority weather was to blame for numbers declining Ockham Common has been officially des- group more powerful than the Dartford war- in the past and that global warming had ignated a ‘Public Sex Environment’ (PSE). bler. And the idea that anyone would do that boosted them. What’s more, in a letter, These people’s sexual preference is to do really is for the birds.

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Go to www.spectator.co.uk/!" or call 0330 333 0050 and quote code !" Direct debit offer only the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 19 Girl power Educating girls may fix the world’s remaining problems

BORIS JOHNSON

he world is blessed with a brilliant Guterres says, the world has problems — the next 12 years the average South Kore- and industrious UN secretary-gener- largely caused by the inordinate triumphs an woman will live to be 90 — the average. Tal, and it was certainly worth tuning in of the human race over some of the things And our quality of life is improving: pover- last week to watch António Guterres deliver that made our ancestors most miserable and ty, malnutrition, child mortality — they are his New Year message to the planet. As sea- afraid. There is also a respectable case for all falling. son’s greetings go, it was not exactly festive. saying that this is the best moment — ever It can never be repeated too often that Intercut with shots of attack choppers — to be alive. 28 years ago, in 1990, there were 1.8 billion and bombed-out cities, the UN secretary- Wherever you look, the armies of dis- living in absolute poverty. Today that figure general discharged a one-and-a-half minute ease are being driven in headlong rout. has been reduced by a billion to fewer than jeremiad in which we learned that inequality Never mind the victories over smallpox, or 800,000 in poverty, and is falling — in spite of was deepening; global warming was out of leprosy. We have virtually wiped out polio, the extra billions the world has acquired in control; xenophobia and nationalism were we are zapping tuberculosis, and as for the interim. I venture to say that we are liv- on the march, not to mention ing through the most spectac- war, famine, pestilence and ular reduction in inequality other afflictions, as though — and the greatest improve- 2018 were beginning with ment in the overall condition a positive cavalry charge of of mankind — since Olduvai. apocalyptic horsemen. Our lives are spiced, our He was putting out an taste buds piqued with pleas- alert, he said, a ‘red alert’ on ures undreamt of by our the state of humanity. One grandparents; and not only diplomatic friend told me it is our food much better, but was the UN’s most bloodcur- we have the continuous ocu- dling New Year message in lar stimulation of machines 30 years. enabled by an internet whose António is of course right, pace and convenience accel- in that the world faces a series erates everywhere, even in of interconnected challenges rural England. that require us to unite, and As a species we seem also to get behind the UN, to less engaged in fighting each back António Guterres and other than ever before. It is an his teams in every unfold- astonishing reflection on our ing crisis: Yemen, Libya, international relations that in Burma, South Sudan, north- 2016 and 2017 there was not east Nigeria, Somalia and in a single British soldier killed many other places. The UN on active service anywhere in secretary-general is bringing the world — for the first time a much-needed drive and focus to the job. HIV patients, they now live almost as long in 50 years. And for the first time in 60 years He deserves our collective support, and will as someone without the virus. We are mak- there was not a single worldwide fatality get it from the UK. ing enormous progress — notably in this involving a commercial passenger jet — a It would be a shame, however, if anyone country — in using the body’s own immune fact for which President Trump was swift to were to be so downcast by his words as to system to fight cancer; and thousands of take credit. believe that the world is indeed teetering on patients are staging recoveries that would Even the world’s potholes are disappear- the lip of some new dark ages. I am conscious have been thought miraculous when I was ing. Compared with only ten years ago, the that some people are now so hungry for bad a child. proportion of tarmac roads across the plan- news they might misconstrue the secretary- Across the world, life expectancy is et has risen from 53 per cent to 64 per cent general’s message. They might conclude that increasing so fast that we are all gaining, — a fact that surely deserves a presidential things are genuinely going backwards. Are on average, an extra five hours every 24 tweet. The overall result is that our ride is you inclined to that kind of pessimism? If (I know it sounds a bit like Zeno’s paradox, literally as well as metaphorically smoother. so (and even if you aren’t), allow me to put as though we are fated never to make the We (i.e. the human race) are living long- a contrary point of view. Yes, as António grave, but it’s true). It is estimated that in er, in better health, and with higher levels

20 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk of comfort, education and all-round enter- Shove Your Tissues tainment; and that is why all the data sug- gests that, in so far as the concept makes any sense, people are also happier. And it is that The man wears chinos and a flannel shirt, very triumph — especially of mankind over a zip-up fleece and odd socks: disease — that has created and exacerbated one is more beige. the problems we must address. Think about the UN secretary-general’s list. We have an arc of instability from South His face, as creased and faded as his shirt, Asia to the Middle East to North Africa, a reminds me of Guernica, but without the light bulb, horrible poxy belt of civil wars and proxy wars. We have governments and societies or the nostrils. that are struggling to provide leadership, struggling to provide unity. But, above all, If I did tell him about my penchant they are struggling to provide a credible economic programme in the face of unprec- for being led astray edented large numbers of young people. by the man who holds a dog lead in one hand, That is the root problem. himself in the other, It is precisely because we beat infant typhoid and diphtheria that we now have a he’d hurl himself at the space population explosion, again, in Africa, the where a window used to be, Middle East and South Asia; and everywhere then I’d have to counsel him. that you find insecurity and instability you will also find huge numbers of young people with not enough by way of gainful employ- He asks why I have my arms folded; ment. Look at Yemen, whose gun-wielding I ask why he doesn’t. The human race is living longer, ‘What would your present self say to your former self?’ in better health, and with higher ‘She’d say you’re a prick.’ levels of comfort and education (Other self nods.)

Houthi rulers are mainly under 30. Look at He writes down ‘transference’ and looks Egypt, or Pakistan, both of which are set to at the clock I’m not supposed to notice see their populations top 200 million in the next 30 years. These countries will have to behind my head. create tens of millions of new jobs every year if they are to meet the needs of their young. — Samantha Roden Of all the apocalyptic horsemen, over- population — by which I mean the growth of restless and surplus labour — is once again the hardest-charging of the lot. As a glob- life of their country. Female education is education. She is a person of extraordinary al phenomenon, it is by no means univer- the universal spanner, the Swiss army knife intensity and persuasiveness. I have come sal. Things are going the other way in Japan that helps tackle so many of the problems to believe that she is basically right: that the (where they have the highest living stand- that António Guterres describes. Societies single best and biggest thing we can do for ards in the world) and in much of the West. where women can read, write and do maths the world is to make sure that every girl gets And that gives us the clue about the solution. as efficiently as their male counterparts 12 years of full-time education. Look at those countries where popu- will be healthier, happier, more prosperous, That ambition is at the heart of UK over- lation is growing the fastest, where unem- with stabler populations and therefore with seas policy — shared by Penny Mordaunt’s ployment is highest, and where the tensions fewer alienated and maladjusted young men DfID and the FCO — and will be at the are greatest, and without exception you will whose egos require them to think of women heart of the Commonwealth summit in find a common factor: female illiteracy. as childbearing chattels. April. It is not just a campaign for fairness The correlation is astonishing. Look at A few years ago I met Malala, shot by the and freedom, but in its essential contracep- the high birth rate countries of sub-Saha- Taleban for daring to equip herself with an tive impact it will help to fix so many other ran Africa and you will find female illitera- problems: not just overpopulation and pov- cy running at 50, 60, sometimes 70 per cent erty, but the threat of war, disorder, terror- plus. In Pakistan it is 66 per cent among ism, climate change and the loss of habitat adult women; 34 per cent even in India. and species. Small wonder that India’s population is set The lesson of the past few decades is that to overtake that of China, where female illit- homo sapiens have seen off the doomsters eracy has been all but eliminated. with consummate style. Man keeps conquer- Yes, it really is that simple. It is not only ing the challenges, from famine to disease. a moral outrage. It is directly contrary to the But if we are to solve the problems of today, interests of world peace, prosperity, health Man the wise needs to stop being such a and happiness that such a huge propor- damn fool about the education of girls. tion of our population — so many women Twelve years of full-time education is not and girls — should be unable to participate, the only answer to the world’s problems. It is alongside their brothers, in the economic not a panacea. But it is not far short. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 21 By the author of In Praise of Older Women and An Innocent Millionaire

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Also available in Hatchards, Waterstones, Daunt Books, selected bookshops as well as on Amazon. Paperback £14.99. MATTHEW PARRIS Victims of crime should not decide justice

ard cases make bad law. The release such cases would sooner or later arise. The The sort of thinking that is pushing us down on parole of the ‘black cab rapist’, press would develop a case for discovering roads like this arises from two modern ten- H John Worboys, is a hard case. But a sense of outrage every time a palpably dencies of which we should be wary. The first ministers should not be panicked into throw- unsavoury character was given parole. is the growing presumption that everything ing open parole board decision- making to It would then not be long before the can be challenged, appealed or ordered for public inspection. demand arose for a procedure for appealing review. The second is the growing centrality The police have blundered, the sentence against a release on parole, either by victims, of the victim when things go wrong. was surely too lenient, and the failure to or the CPS, or a wider public, or a new body I’ve been struck over my own lifetime by inform his victims was disgraceful. But it was set up to allow or disallow appeals. These the retreat of the idea that important deci- not upon some careless whim that Parlia- demands would often be made against the sions may be final. The advance of the judi- ment barred parole boards from giving rea- backdrop of a wave of media-driven or cial review has meant that ministers, civil sons, and the new Justice Secretary, David social media-driven indignation, with the servants, businesses and civil organisations Gauke, should think hard before reversing original crime reheated for a new reader- have found that matters which had once the interdiction. ship, and the victims paraded through the seemed entirely their own affair are now Much of the furore provoked by the newspapers with their stories, their recollec- subject (or, more distractingly, might prove release of this serial attacker of women after tions and (often enough) their own voices subject) to judicial review. Before expel- ten years in prison really arises not from the raised against the granting of parole. ling a rogue member of a political party parole board’s decision but the original sen- or awarding a franchise to a rail operator, tence and the flawed prosecution process A victim’s view of what the law should you have to consider your vulnerability to which helped produce it. Given Worboys’s decree or how a miscreant should be challenge in the courts. When I first entered conviction for only one rape, though there punished should have no special status Parliament, it seemed unexceptionable that may have been scores more that the Met- a Speaker’s ruling on whether to grant an ropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution There would also have to be provision emergency debate should be accompanied Service did not pursue, the indeterminate made for the redacting, where necessary, of by the Speaker’s reminder that his decision sentence with a minimum of eight years information about parole boards’ reasons was final and no reasons could be supplied. failed to reflect a terrible story, but judge for rulings. There will obviously be a range Today it sounds almost archaic. and jury were not to know that; and once the of sensitivities and privacies — about vic- To some degree these new vulnerabili- sentence had been handed down it was inev- tims, about psychiatric and medical opinion ties to challenge and appeal represent an itable that the parole board would be asked and advice, about the special and private cir- advance for equity. But they can cause great to consider release before Worboys was an cumstances of some prisoners, perhaps even uncertainty and interminable delay. There old man and while memories of his atrocities about new suggestive evidence that has aris- have to be limits. I think we’re nearing them. were still relatively fresh. en — which might make it inappropriate to The growing centrality of the victim may And when the board did that it presum- put some reasoning into the public domain. represent, likewise, an advance for compas- ably based its decision partly on what had The board could not just omit to men- sion and fairness. But this can easily court been proved in court, not on what argu- tion such matters, which would often be ger- a sort of retributive primitivism in our ably should have been proved in court. So mane to the decision taken; so it would have approach to law. We should care deeply for we need to understand the circumstances to disclose that there were matters it was victims of crime. Perhaps (though I’m doubt- in which the board found itself before we not disclosing. This would then lead to new ful) the state should compensate them. We declare it obvious that its members should suspicions and challenges from those ques- should be sensitive to their continuing hurt. have taken a different decision. Not to have tioning the ruling. Calls would follow for an But the law is there to protect society at told Worboys’s victims of his impending appointee or committee to see the redacted large, and a victim’s view of what law should release was an inexcusable administrative material and adjudicate on its suppression. decree or how a miscreant should be pun- oversight; but this must be distinguished ished should have no special status. The from the issue of whether parole boards’ modern media, however, and many modern decisions should be open to challenge. politicians, are beginning to speak as though For that would be the result of what is the victim should be part of the judicial pro- being called for. There can be no point — cess itself. This may be prejudicial to justice. and there would fast be seen to be no point I have no shred of sympathy for John — in disclosing reasons for a ruling if the Worboys. I am appalled that he should be ruling were nevertheless final. Indeed the let out. But I seek no way of challenging or reasoning behind the demand for disclosure reversing this decision. Perhaps I should in the Worboys case must surely be that the reconsider my enthusiasm for a second EU ruling ought to have been challenged. Other ‘Oh gosh, they’re going to let us go.’ referendum. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 23 BAROMETER Smooth operators

Many people are gloomy about 2018. Is expensive private surgery always necessary? But some things are improving every year… JAMES GROGONO Natural disasters

These killed 9,066 people in the world in 2017, fewer than any year since 1979. From 2008 to 2017 an average 72,020 died in such disasters. Fifty years earlier (the period 1958-67) the average was 373,453.

Life expectancy n George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doc- py, colonoscopy, laparoscopy and many more. tor’s Dilemma, written early last century, The reason given by your private doctor is The current lowest in the world is the Ithe knife-happy surgeon invents a nut- always that serious pathology such as can- Central African Republic with 51.4 years. shaped abdominal organ, the ‘nuciform cer is best diagnosed early, and these mod- To put that into perspective, in 1800 sac’. It is situated near the appendix, ‘full ern ‘look-see’ operations are relatively small Belgium had the highest at just 40 years. of decaying matter’, and requires removal, and safe compared with the old days, when Average life expectancy changes in Africa assuming the patient can afford the fee. The a ‘look inside’ was itself a major procedure. since 1955: surgeon, Cutler WWalpole , has the line: ‘The Of course the reason is often valid, and year age year age operation ought to be compulsory.’ indeed therapeutic, such as knee arthrosco- 1955 ...... 38.7 1995 ...... 51.9 Bernard Shaw labours the point that py for a torn cartilage, where the diagnosis 1965 ...... 43.4 2005 ...... 55.1 1975 ...... 47.6 2015 ...... 61.4 removal of the nuciform sac equals 500 guin- is confirmed, and curative treatment carried 1985 ...... 51.2 eas, and not removing it equals nought guin- out at the same time through a minute inci- eas. He then suggests, wickedly, that we want sion. However the arthroscopy epidemic Hunger our surgeons to be mortal, ‘quite as honest has spread to many smaller joints, where as most of us’, not God-like. Which of us, he the view is tiny, and the chance of finding The number of people in the world classed asks, would not be influenced by the financial serious or treatable disease equally tiny. In as undernourished fell from 1.01 billion in equation, if it is impossible to prove that this other situations, the search for early cancer 1991 to 815 million in 2016. This is despite organ might be better left in situ? Add in the is often genuine, such as any patient who the world’s population growing from 5.4 need to pay for a Harley Street consulting has seen blood in urine or faeces or vomit or billion to 7.4 billion in the meantime. room, school fees, and a wife with expensive phlegm. But patients with nebulous symp- toms should beware. Child labour Patients like being told How could a caring surgeon, with a clear conscience, put a patient through the risks of From 2000-2012 the percentage of children they need an operation. an anaesthetic and a procedure that it would involved in regular economic activity in the It’s a simple solution world fell from 23 per cent to 17 per cent. be difficult to describe as necessary? What you have to remember is the complication Democracy tastes and the choice is self-evident. Every rates of unnecessary surgery are very low. nuciform sac must come out. No one dares Wounds heal better if unhindered by the The proportion of countries which are challenge the wisdom of the great man, presence of disease. The full benefits of the democracies rose from 24 per cent in 1976 though the operation is of course pointless. placebo effect add on to the likelihood of to 58 per cent in 2016. It might surprise a reader to know that success. Patients like being told they need an there are real ‘nuciform sac’ operations operation. It’s a simple solution. The patient Every day around the world being performed every day in private medi- has already had the satisfaction of knowing cine by surgeons just as eminent as Walpole. ‘it was bad enough to require an operation’. — The number of people living in extreme The organs being cut out really do exist — Even the passing of money increases the poverty falls by 217,000. but the operations are often as unneces- desire for success. No one — patient or sur- — An extra 300,000 people gain access to a supply of fresh water. sary, and always expensive. A few decades geon — wishes to think the fee was wasted. — 325,000 more people gain access to an ago tonsils and adenoids were the nuciform Do I sound cynical? Yes, but a healthy electricity supply. sacs of their day. It was deemed important cynicism is no bad thing in all aspects of life, Source for all the above: ourworldindata.org to excise them for any child with recurrent including medicine. Having an awareness throat trouble. An accomplished private sur- of the pitfalls is all I am advocating. Time Wronged men geon always had an explanation for why the and again, in recent years, living in wealthy lucrative operation was needed, although non-medical communities, I have listened to Chris Grayling was initially wrongly named there was very little actual evidence that tales of remunerative procedures on friends as the new Conservative party chairman. removing them made much difference. and acquaintances that just don’t ‘stack The mistake is far from unique: It was the same for the removal of vari- up’ in terms of vital need. My own operat- — In 1997 Tony Blair made Bernard cose veins. No more justification was needed ing days are long past, but I remember my Donoughue agriculture minister after than the patient’s request. Both these opera- father, an Essex GP, pushing The Doctor’s offering it to Brian Donohoe in error. tions are now performed less frequently but Dilemma across the breakfast table to me — In 2010 appointed Lib Dem Ed Davey as a business minister. each era has its own nuciform sac, and the when I was a pre-medical student. I was suit- Tory Ed Vaizey says the post was first fashion has moved on to endless ’oscopies ably appalled, but put the matter on one side offered to him by mistake only to be taken and keyhole procedures. Any symptoms in for a decade. I then found myself drawn to a away 30 minutes later. the relevant area may lead to one of these, career in surgery, with no time for anything such as arthroscopy, cystoscopy, GI endosco- except the long, tough vocational training.

24 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk Fast-forward another few years and I was income was adequate. I consulted in my own in itself made for safety. A busier surgeon in my first year as a consultant general sur- home with my wife as my secretary, and thus is a better surgeon for reasons I’ll explain. geon in High Wycombe. I felt I had arrived had no overheads. The NHS test meant that The only way to try to establish that your in paradise. The work was entirely NHS, I would sometimes veer away from inter- operation, whatever its nature, is truly nec- and there was soon more than I could easily vention, perhaps wrongly, but always in the essary is to apply an NHS test too — to go handle. No patient needed to worry about best interest of patients. My NHS thinking through the diagnosing and referring pro- the cost of their operation, however great. I cost me further referrals from at least one cess. Once the decision is made then you had to focus on the cases that required my GP: ‘I asked you to operate on her varicose may wish to declare your private insurance, so-called skills, and exercise some degree of veins, not tell her she could wear a support and ask for the great man’s private phone appropriate delegation. stocking and keep them.’ number. You’ll then have the choice of time, I have the lists of operations I performed Over time, the level of private medi- place and creature comforts in hospital. Your in four busy weeks spread over those early cal insurance increased. South Bucks was surgeon is contracted to do the operation years. The average was ten major, six inter- an affluent area, and the amount of pri- himself, a promise that must not be made in mediate and five minor procedures each an NHS setting, although it may be implied week. The word ‘major’ indicates any abdom- Surgeons should apply what I call — ‘none of my juniors know how to do this inal operation, mainly bowel surgery or the NHS test: would you still operate operation’, for example. You will be reduc- gallstones, or, outside the abdomen, remov- ing the pressure on the NHS, where you may al of the breast, prostate or thyroid gland. if there were no financial gain? or may not get speedy and excellent service. ‘Intermediate’ indicates operations such as The bigger your operation, the more hernia, varicose veins or piles, and ‘minor’ vate work also went up. For a short spell I quickly you are likely to be dealt with on indicates removal of cysts or skin lesions or rented a room in Harley Street one half- the NHS. Long waits are probable for pro- vasectomy. The ’oscopies were rare in those day a month, at minimal cost. This enabled cedures for hernia, piles and varicose veins, days, but were classified as ‘intermediate’. local GPs to tell their patients that they did but your turn will come, and your operation After the first few months something not need to travel to London to see a ‘Har- will be competently done. unexpected happened. GPs started asking ley Street surgeon’ if that was their wish. There is one more word of caution. Make me to see occasional private cases. How was The challenge then became one of time sure that your surgeon is very busy in his I to overcome the doctor’s dilemma? How allocation, never short-changing NHS com- NHS practice, and not looking for cases to would I know my motives for suggesting mitments for private practice. I also had a fill his operating lists. It is safer for patients if some expensive op were not self-interested? personal fetish about never having an NHS the surgeon has too much work. He will then My answer was to apply what I think waiting list. No patient had to ‘go private’ to choose to operate only on the patients who of as the NHS test: would you still operate get the operation done. At times the work- will benefit most, and those on the border- if there were no financial gain? My NHS load was almost overwhelming, but that land of necessity will not have an operation. JANUARY SALE

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the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 25 See the film at polroger.co.uk MARY WAKEFIELD When therapy does more harm than good

n the churchyard by the church near my increasing frequency as the years go by. Why titioners believe all individuals exposed to grandmother’s house, there’s a tomb- so traumatised, so young? violent or life-threatening events should be Istone with an inscription that’s haunted The usual suspect is the internet. Teen offered and would benefit from some sort me since I was a child. It marks the grave girls seem trapped in a near-inescapable of intervention.’ But, he says, ‘growing evi- of a woman called Elizabeth who died, as I bubble of constant carping and comparing. dence shows global applications of psycho- remember, in the 1920s. Elizabeth married It’s also a fact that girls who use the most logical debriefing are ineffective and can young, had five babies in five years, then social media are the most likely to experi- impede natural recovery processes’. died well before she reached 30. The epitaph ence depression. But which came first: the In the 14 years since Bonanno’s paper, on her stone: ‘She did her duty.’ blues or the ill-advised retreat online? the mania for psychological debriefing I often find myself thinking about Eliza- I hope for all our sakes that there are and counselling has expanded across the beth and how different her cold and stoic age serious scientists doing serious studies West, propelled both by risk aversion and was to ours. I thought of her late last year on this. I hope they are also investigating by genuine compassion. In the 1980s, state- as a slew of research revealed that an aston- another maybe more controversial theory sponsored counselling was just for medics ishing number of women, more than one in that’s been raised in recent years. who’d witnessed unimaginable horrors. By ten, screen positive for PTSD (post-traumat- In 2004, George A. Bonanno, a profes- 9/11, Bonanno points out, it was considered ic stress disorder). We associate PTSD with sor of clinical psychology at Columbia Uni- an appropriate ‘blanket intervention for all soldiers back from some grisly frontline but versity, wrote an interesting and optimistic exposed individuals’. Come 2018, a wolf- as it turns out, twice as many women as men paper on how we all cope with life’s hor- whistle can be grounds for therapy. That display symptoms: flashbacks, disassociation, rors. Bonanno is perhaps the world’s fore- stern age which decided Elizabeth had done unmanageable anxiety. This isn’t self-indul- most expert on the science of trauma and her duty is long gone. gent self-diagnosis; it’s real suffering. bereavement, but seems a jolly soul even Twice last year I reported a bike stolen Women can be shell-shocked by life. It’s so. His paper was called ‘Loss, Trauma to the Met and though no thief was pursued, surprising — and it’s not. Consider Eliza- both times I was offered trauma counselling. beth. All sorts of recent studies show that What if we’ve created a ‘grief work’ Our western universities are ever keener on giving birth, even to a healthy baby, can be trap, encouraging girls and boys therapy for all. As this magazine has so often traumatising. Most new mothers wobble like to see ordinary blues as a problem? described, campus madness both in America light aircraft in turbulence, then stabilise and and here has meant several works of great carry on. A number nosedive. More than and Human Resilience’, subtitled: ‘Have literature have been considered psychologi- 8 per cent of mothers in America and in Can- we underestimated the human capacity cally damaging. ada develop PTSD after childbirth. Then on to thrive after extremely adverse events?’ I’ve thought all this is silly and paid it top of the ordinary grind there’s life’s sucker Bonanno’s answer was yes, probably. little mind. But what if our caring culture, punches: losing a child; losing a spouse; mis- He looks at some of those same stats the one that finally (and rightly) takes real carriage; abortion (much though we cel- about the prevalence of PTSD, but his view PTSD seriously, is simultaneously under- ebrate it); serious accidents; sexual abuse. is from a different angle. Bonanno agrees mining the natural resilience of kids? What These things happen to men too — but that a decent percentage of us, and especial- if we’ve created a ‘grief work’ trap, encour- they happen more often to women and ly women, require treatment for PTSD. But aging girls and boys to see ordinary blues as it’s a fact that, for the most part, men and what’s really incredible, he says, is how many a problem, urging them to seek help which women react differently to traumatic events. of us just roll with the punches. He divides then keeps them from recovery? A prison chaplain once told me that when people into three main groups: the suffer- We hear more about the placebo effect male convicts are stressed they become ers (the 10 per cent of women, let’s say, and every day. Just the thought that you’ve been aggressive. They lash out and feel better. 6 per cent of men who really go under); the given a cure is often enough to effect one. Women hurt themselves. Teflon-coated Tiggers of the world and then Perhaps there’s a reverse placebo effect too. If it’s not altogether surprising that some the middle group of people, who stagger If we tell our young their ordinary, difficult women are weighed down by life, there is when life whacks them, display some of the emotions are disordered, they’ll become so. another statistic that does seem strange. symptoms of PTSD, then recover. Bonanno’s pendulum swings, but rarely The PTSD chart in this country has a spike. What is particularly interesting is Bonan- settles. How can we ensure that the 10 per Our younger women suffer disproportion- no’s suggestion that therapy, counselling or cent who need help are treated, while pre- ately and increasingly. The number of Eng- ‘grief work’ can interfere with the progress serving enough old-fashioned grit to chivvy lish girls between 16 and 24 who screened of those who would, if left alone, make a nat- the others on? It’s a terrible dilemma. positive for PTSD trebled in the seven ural recovery. He writes: ‘Whereas genuinely years from 2007 to 2014, and it’s rising traumatised individuals were once doubted SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST every year. It’s sad but it’s also curious. Life as malingerers, the pendulum has swung so Mary Wakefield and Isabel Hardman on delivers shocks but surely these come with far in the opposite direction that many prac- dealing with PTSD. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 27 Fifa, of course, is in many ways a kindred spirit to the Kremlin. Fifa was shown to be Political football corrupt by a high-profile investigation by the US FBI in 2015 that resulted in the indict- For Putin, the 2018 World Cup means global respect ment of seven Fifa officials on suspicion of receiving $150 million in bribes. When news OWEN MATTHEWS of the misdeeds was made public, Fifa, like the Kremlin, blamed the press rather than the alleged culprits. In the wake of a 2010 Sun- day Times and Panorama investigation into alleged payments to Fifa board members just before the selection of Russia as host of the 2018 World Cup, Blatter warned of the ‘evils uthoritarian regimes love grand era was over. Between 2000 and 2008 Putin of the media’ in a speech to the Fifa executive international sporting events. exiled and jailed over-mighty oligarchs and committee. As Blatter made clear, Fifa doesn’t A There’s something about the mass took over their TV stations; his troops made do boycotts for the sake of moral principles. regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the the separatist Georgian republics of South Putin has also been lucky that football is old-fashioned idea of nation states compet- Ossetia and Abkhazia Russian protector- one of the very few remaining sports where ing for glory that appeals to leaders who wish ates, laws were passed banning ‘gay propa- Russian athletes haven’t been seriously to show off the greatness of their country to ganda’. Russia was borderline wicked — but tainted by evidence of systematic doping, the world. Berlin ’36, Moscow ’80, Sochi ’14 in the eyes of the world and of Fifa, not wick- and are therefore still allowed to compete — nothing says ‘we’re here, get used to it’ ed enough to disqualify it from hosting such a internationally. Two independent investiga- better than a giant sporting jamboree. prestigious event. By today’s standards, 2010 tions by the International Olympics Com- The 2018 football World Cup doesn’t was an innocent time — and even Russian mittee uncovered overwhelming evidence offer quite the same degree of validation as liberals admitted that compared to Stalinist that the Russian secret services organised a an Olympic Games. But for Vladimir Putin, days, they were living under a ‘vegetarian’ sophisticated system to cover up mass dop- it’s still a major opportunity to demonstrate regime rather than a carnivorous one. ing of Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter not only Russia’s new-found greatness but What a difference seven years makes. Olympics in Sochi. Among other shenani- also its continued membership of the civi- Since his return to power in 2012, Putin gans uncovered by the IOC, urine samples lised world. For what Putin yearns for, above annexed Crimea, backed an ongoing sepa- from Russian athletes were passed through a all, is respect, a place at the table of great ratist rebellion in Eastern Ukraine that has small hatchway in the testing lab into a secret nations, and recognition from the world that killed more than 10,000 people, hatched room and untainted samples passed back in Russia is no longer a poor, dysfunctional col- a plot to conceal mass doping by Russian their place. The IOC established that more lapsed empire but once again a superpower. Olympic athletes, ratcheted up a propagan- than 1,000 Russian athletes had used illegal You might think that if gaining respect da and disinformation campaign intended to performance-enhancing drugs, and stripped is Putin’s aim, he has been looking for it in weaken and break apart western democra- 51 of them of their Olympic medals. Russia all the wrong places. Invading neighbouring cies, supported separatist movements across itself was also denied the right to participate countries, cheating at sports and undermin- Europe from Catalonia to Scotland and in next month’s PyeongChang Winter Olym- ing western democracies are hardly classic backed right-wing parties from Hungary to pics — though individual Russian athletes reputation-enhancers. But respect and Germany — before intervening to turn the can participate under a neutral flag. And Vit- respectability are different things. In the con- tide of the Syrian civil war in favour of Pres- aly Mutko — now deputy prime minister and voluted moral logic of Putin-world, breaking ident Bashar al-Assad. If the selection for president of the Russian Football Union — the rules is what every great nation does — the World Cup were held today, there’s lit- has been banned for life from future Olympic from the US invasion of Iraq to Washington’s tle doubt Russia would be out of the running. Games for his role in the doping conspiracy. supposed encouragement of democratic rev- In the wake of the annexation of Crimea Fifa seems to play by different rules. olutions all over the former Soviet Union. and the downing of a Malaysian Airlines In November 2016, it fired Professor Jiri And if the US can bend international law and plane by a Russian Buk missile launcher in Dvorak, a distinguished doctor and neurolo- remain respectable, Russia should be able to 2014, there were calls to reassign the Cup. gist who had worked on Fifa’s medical, anti- as well. The question is how to get away with it. Fifa rejected them. The then Fifa president doping and injury prevention programmes for The World Cup, politically, is the Krem- Sepp Blatter said that ‘boycotting sport 22 years after he began investigating doping lin’s big chance for attempting to re-set the events or a policy of isolation or confron- in Russian football. According to the Guard- world’s bad opinion of Russia. The Kremlin’s tation’ doesn’t work — and he was backed, ian, Dvorak had contacted Professor Richard sincere hope is that the world will, some day naturally, by Russian sports minister and Fifa McLaren, author of the World Anti-Doping soon, forget about all its recent crimes and executive committee member Vitaly Mutko, Agency’s report into drugs at Sochi, to follow get on with business as usual. Sergei Lavrov, who called the World Cup ‘a force for good’. up on evidence that 11 Russian footballers during his meeting last month with Boris were among the athletes who benefited from Johnson in Moscow, kept relentlessly press- state-sponsored doping during the 2012 Lon- ing the point that it was time to ‘move on’, don Olympics. Fifa insisted that the paper’s ‘concentrate on the positives’, ‘rebuild our ‘speculations around the departure of Prof relationship’ and various other diplomatic Dvorak are completely baseless’. euphemisms for ‘please let us off the hook’. To the Russians, the doping scandal, the Putin has been very lucky with the World Ukraine invasion and the US election hack- Cup. The fact that Russia is hosting the tour- ing scandal should be seen as so much water nament at all is an accident of long-term under the bridge. To quote Sergei Lavrov, it’s scheduling. Russia was awarded the hosting time to ‘put the past behind us’ and get on rights in December 2010, back when the rel- with enjoying the World Cup. Putin will sure- atively liberal Dmitry Medvedev was presi- ly make certain that it’s a spectacle worthy dent and there was every hope that the Putin ‘He’s one of the populist kids.’ of a great nation.

28 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk LETTERS

Long lives and pension pots If he did indeed have ‘sexual forays’ in the will prove to be yet another example of East End, it is to be pitied that he could not where ‘financial innovation’ results in a tax Sir: Jon Moynihan is too optimistic about behave in any other way in 1915. It is easy on the ignorant. Like so many inventions the prospects for further increasing life to make judgments in 2018; we live in a before them, they offer no superior benefits expectancy, and too gloomy about those different world. His short life gave us some to those offered by incumbent solutions. of the pensions industry (‘Falling Short’, of the best war poetry ever written and his Freddie Lait 6 January). The wondrous advancements of sexuality is irrelevant. We should remember London SW1 medical science have offered little to solve the poem ‘Spring Offensive’ and think of the most pervasive problem we now face: the thousands of boys and men who ‘there In praise of Parry declining mental health. It seems unlikely stood still/ To face the stark blank sky that society will chose to invest endlessly in beyond the ridge,/ Knowing their feet had Sir: It was disappointing that Richard repairing bodies to extend lifespans, when come to the end of the world.’ Bratby’s article (‘Hitting the high notes’, the minds relating to those bodies have No one else could have written those 6 January) about classical music in 2018 already been lost. beautiful, heartbreaking words. made no mention of the centenary of Sir So the viability of pension providers Jo Noble Hubert Parry, a great man of British music is not as parlous as suggested. Indeed, Oxford and a fine musician. There is a weekend many current fund deficits derive from in May, at Gloucester, devoted to Parry the low investment yield environment Better buy gold and his pupils, and (praise be) his work that central bankers have engineered is featured at the Three Choirs festival at but which is not sustainable in the long Sir: Lionel Shriver misses the obvious in Hereford. Who knows, perhaps even the term — the timeframe in which pension her search for an asset whose ‘value was BBC will realise that Parry was a lot more funds measure their liabilities. When more not subjected to deliberate, systematic than ‘Jerusalem’. normal investment conditions return, the decay, whose supply was strictly limited, Stephen Lamley actuarial assumptions used in funding whose production was beyond the control Nottingham those liabilities (and they are always just of the state’ (‘Why cryptocurrencies are assumptions) will greatly enhance the the answer’, 6 January). Gold already ticks A shame about Toby viability of pension provision. every box she requires for investing ‘every The suggestion that the young can look last farthing’ and has further benefits Sir: I read with real disappointment about forward to perhaps 50 years of drawing beyond her requirements. Cryptocurrencies Toby Young’s resignation from the new a pension looks more fanciful than the OfS board. One shouldn’t be surprised possibility that in a few years many pension given the concerted public campaign to funds will be reporting healthy surpluses. have him removed. These days I advise all Clive Thursby colleagues to ‘assume everyone will read Hindhead, Surrey everything you write and that everyone will repeat everything you say’. Sad, really Robot nurses — but only this can mitigate the risk of nasty future surprises. But who of us are Sir: Jon Moynihan is right to warn about faultless of thought? Toby Young is one the looming funding crisis of public- of an increasingly rare breed who at least sector pensions. But one wonders why has the minerals to commit said thoughts his optimism about future advances in to the written word. Long may he and his longevity doesn’t also lead him to expect ilk continue. The OfS will be poorer for his widespread productivity gains from absence and his challenging approach and automation. Much of state employment will likely end up as yet another forum of today involves routine administrative nodding heads. Or OfNOD, perhaps. tasks that could be taken over by robots John Prior in the foreseeable future. Even medical Surrey diagnostics and some police and nursing functions could be more efficiently The rise of subtitles performed by artificial intelligence. Not only will robots make us richer and Sir: Mark Mason complains that subtitles healthier, but they won’t require support are taking over the world (‘Read ’em and in their old age. weep’, 6 January). Does it not occur to him Diego Zuluaga that for people with hearing loss (which Head of Financial Services and Tech Policy, must include many readers of his article), Institute of Economic Affairs, London SW1 subtitles are essential if they are to stay in touch with the world, be it watching TV and Owen’s powerful poetry films, or indeed the online clips which are the main source of his complaints? Sir: How depressing to read Nigel Jones’s Mike Peacock article about Wilfred Owen (‘Anthem Andover, Hants for groomed youth’, 6 January). The title suggests sinister undertones that are WRITE TO US unfounded, as Jones comments: ‘All of The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, this may have been entirely innocent.’ London SW1H 9HP; [email protected] the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 29 ANY OTHER BUSINESS| MARTIN VANDER WEYER Wolff told us the US awaited a president who could cast a spell on markets: now it has one

once commissioned Michael Wolff — ing a Green Brexit’ that pleased the urban Man of parts currently the world’s most talked-about middle classes but might previously have I journalist as the author of the White had farmers reaching for their pitchforks — I asked Peter Sutherland — who I greatly House exposé Fire and Fury — to write for while in fact reassuring most of them that, admired and who died last weekend — The Spectator. It was just before the 2004 contrary to previous indications, he has their which of his achievements made him most presidential election in which Republican interests at heart and understands the need proud. Ireland’s most passionate pro-Euro- incumbent George W. Bush looked set to to cut red tape, promote high standards and pean was chairman at the time of BP and see off the Democrat challenger John Kerry, reward conservation in a balanced way. Goldman Sachs International but said and I invited Wolff to tell us the implica- Welcome news was that UK farm sub- little about either and (more understanda- tions for the stock market. His thesis was sidies of £3 billion from Brussels will be bly) nothing about his directorship of RBS. that the Democrats had become ‘the party matched until 2022, but in future will no Instead he listed his leading roles in the of wealth and Wall Street’ while the Repub- longer be paid in proportion to size — a creation of the World Trade Organisation licans had become ‘non-players’, Bush hav- system that absurdly favours wealthy land- and Europe’s Erasmus student exchange ing turned his back on business to be ‘a God- owners such as the Duke of Westminster, scheme, his record as a youthful attorney squad cheerleader’. America was waiting in Sir James Dyson and the racehorse breeder general of Ireland, and his continuing work vain for a president who could ‘cast a spell Prince Khalid bin Abdullah al Saud, with- as UN special representative on migra- of optimism over consumers and markets’. out encouraging better practice. In a sec- tion. He told me he had never aspired to a Not even a mind as allegedly inventive as tor where the average farm is just 160 acres, business career and did not think he would Wolff’s might have imagined that the presi- few will object to that shift. More worrying have prospered if he had chosen that path dent who would one day claim credit for a was Gove’s talk of rewarding ‘public goods’, as a young man, rather than the Dublin bar. one-third rise in the Dow Jones index dur- which many farmers fear means wider public Nevertheless he had relished the challenges ing his first year in office would be Donald access to their land as well as more accepta- of BP, which included fierce arm-wrestling Trump. ‘Six trillion dollars in value created!’ ble objectives to do with bird and wildflower with the Russian oligarchs who were the oil boasted the tweet — which also claimed diversity. But Gove also talked about ‘sup- giant’s joint venture partners. incorrectly that recent weeks has seen the porting innovation, improving productivity He was a humanitarian and an inter- ‘record fastest 1,000-point move in history’. [and] training a new generation of entre- national negotiator first, a slightly reluc- In fact a comparable spike occurred at preneurial young farmers’ — which is what tant corporate titan second. I suspect the the height of the 1999 dotcom boom and smart farmers themselves care about most. least congenial milieu in his portfolio was I’m reminded of a conversation with a grand These days, farming is a highly scientific the amoral money machine that is Goldman old Republican lawyer during Bill Clin- business that is gradually shifting from Sachs; so it’s ironic that his belated induc- ton’s impeachment hearings, a year before chemistry to biology in its quest for better tion into the investment bank’s partnership that boom turned to bust. ‘Do you think results and is replete with acronyms such as brought him a nine-digit personal fortune. the President’s behaviour has shamed your ‘YEN’ — a pioneering crop yield enhance- country?’ I asked. The answer came with a ment network run by Adas, the Agricultural Better than a tattoo shrug: ‘The stock market’s doing just fine.’ Development & Advisory Service. But pro- gressive farmers are frustrated by public and Here’s the best entry so far in last week’s Down on the farm political ignorance, and health scares such as competition for the most articulate justifica- the row over glyphosate, the key ingredient tion, 100 words max, for following the exam- The farming community was hoping, until a in the weedkiller Roundup, which the World ple of the banker’s daughter who is a buyer of few days ago, that Michael Gove might be Health Organisation declared ‘probably Bitcoin over the advice of her father, JPMor- moved to pastures new in the reshuffle that carcinogenic’ though several other reputa- gan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon, that all hardly happened on Monday. One York- ble agencies disagreed. Gove, to his credit, Bitcoin investors are ‘stupid’. It comes from shire neighbour of mine with a big muck- was quick to take the right side of that argu- Bernard Kerrison: ‘Dimon’s daughter is spreader used to refer to the secretary of ment: my neighbour also calls him ‘our right because annoying your father is what state for environment, food and rural affairs new glyphosate champion’. Out of place as daughters do, while buying Bitcoin doesn’t as ‘the Grim Reaper’. But in Gove’s speech he may look in his green wellies in farm- leave lasting damage like a tattoo and is to the Oxford Farming Conference last visit photo ops, the minister can at least be much cheaper than taking up with an unsuit- week, he seems to have pulled off the politi- confident he won’t get sprayed with FYM able young man.’ More entries, please, to cal trick of winning headlines about ‘deliver- (that’s farmyard manure). [email protected].

30 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk GALLERIA BORGHESE Emily Hill is sending her ex-lover’s T-shirt to join the other tragic tat in The Museum of Broken Relationships Tim Stanley reckons that America’s best hope is to find another FDR Kate Womersley celebrates the gentle Quaker Joseph Lister, who transformed surgery from butchery to a healing art Andrew Roberts takes a look at Churchills on film and TV – from Nazi caricatures to Gary Oldman Kate Chisholm has a solution to the BBC pay scandal: downgrade the celebrity presenters James Walton suggests that a genuinely controversial TV drama would be an all- white, all-male one

‘Self-Portrait as a Young Man’, 1623, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini Martin Gayford — p46 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 31 BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS The greatest journeys ever made William Bligh’s was not the only astonishing open-boat voyage in the Pacific in the late 18th century. There were others just as desperate, says Nicholas Shakespeare

Paradise in Chains: The Bounty discovered by the Dutch explorer Abel Tas- Mutiny and the Founding man in 1642, and to claim the island (now of Australia Tasmania) before the English — and then by Diana Preston to claim the western half of the nearby Bloomsbury, £25, pp. 333 continent where England had raised her flag; so far, only over New South Wales. Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years Why else would large areas on charts before its discovery. There had to be a com- mapped by Freycinet and Péron, two of Bau- mensurate weight — somewhere Down din’s officers, be marked ‘Terre Napoléon’? Under — to counter the northern land mass; Had Baudin, in March 1802, not lost con- an ‘unknown Southland’ which was crucial tact with his short-sighted hydrographer to maintaining the balance of the world. Charles-Pierre Boulanger off the Freycinet To confuse matters, this theoretical conti- Peninsula (where I write this) and spent the nent was dubbed for a while Austrialia del next two months searching for him, then Espiritu Santo — in honour of the House the French might have beaten Flinders to it of Austria. and charted the mainland all the way to A socially awkward Lincolnshireman, Spencer Gulf. vivors of the Bounty, after travelling 47 days Matthew Flinders, in 1804, was the origina- As it was, France’s achievement in becom- and 3,600 miles in an open 23-foot boat; on tor of Australia as the name for what had ing the first nation to map Australia’s coast- 5 June 1791, William and Mary Bryant, their for centuries been called New Holland, but line was ignored: when Péron’s Atlas at last two children, plus seven other escaped con- two French sailors, an aristocratic cartogra- appeared in 1811, three years before Flin- victs from Sydney Cove, after sailing 69 pher, Louis Freycinet, and a manipulative, days and 3,254 miles in Governor Phillip’s one-eyed anthropologist, François Péron, In 1791, life in Botany Bay was so stolen cutter; on 15 September 1791, Cap- showed for the first time the continent’s harsh for convicts that escape into the tain Edward Edwards with survivors of the actual shape. shipwrecked Pandora, plus ten captured From the late 1700s, galvanised by the unknown was the lesser of two evils mutineers of the Bounty, after sailing 1,200 loss of their American colonies, the French miles from the Great Barrier Reef. Excited dispatched seven expeditions in 30 years to ders’s Voyage to Terra Australis, it aroused to retell these open-boat journeys, which seek a huge landmass known as Gonneville scant interest. By then, the baptismal ‘certainly rank among the greatest such Land, named after a French sailor blown off melodramas which Diana Preston journeys ever made’, Preston has a chal- course in 1503. None of these expeditions explores in Paradise in Chains had played lenge to keep her feet on several diverging had marvellous outcomes for their com- themselves out. rafts, and lash them together into a single, manders. Marion was eaten by Maoris, Ker- The story about the founding of Aus- focused narrative. guelen convicted of fraud, D’Entrecasteaux tralia has been well told before, not least She is right to restore Tahiti to its posi- died of scurvy, while the most famous, La by Thomas Keneally in Commonwealth tion as the fertile launch pad for Australia. Pérouse, vanished without trace. of Thieves and by Robert Hughes in The She gives special prominence to the can- Napoleon — who had volunteered for Fatal Shore. What Preston brings to it in the tankerous Bligh and his suave mentor, the La Pérouse’s expedition, but was rejected absence of a French connection is an 18th- wealthy botanist Sir Joseph Banks, as char- — kept alive French hopes of a replacement century willingness to follow in the wake acters who left their lasting thumbprints on L’Amérique. In 1801, he authorised a scien- of her leading English characters — a jour- these colonies, as did Cortes and Pizarro in tific expedition captained by Nicolas Bau- ney that takes her to Tahiti and Pitcairn Latin America. The Tahitian islands ‘discov- din, an aloof, dry-witted botanist, to ‘study Island, if not to Kupang in Timor, which has ered’ by the English in 1767, and visited two the inhabitants, animals and natural prod- grounds to be considered the capital of her years later by James Cook, were described ucts of the countries in which he will land’. narrative as much as Sydney Cove. by Banks, who shared Cook’s cabin on the A popular belief is that Baudin’s instruc- In the space of two years, Kupang’s local Endeavour, as ‘the truest picture of an arca- tions included a ‘secret order’ to establish population watched sail into their harbour: dia… If we quarrelled with those Indians a French settlement in Van Diemen’s Land, on 14 June 1789, William Bligh and 17 sur- we should not agree with angels!’ A French

32 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk Bligh and crew are set adrift from the Bounty, in a painting by Robert Dodd

That the fragile young colony did not revolt was due to its fair-minded first gov- ernor, Arthur Phillip. In Tahiti, by contrast, Bligh’s narcissistic and volatile character, more than the allure of young women, sparked Fletcher Christian’s ‘unpremedi- tated’ mutiny. Preston enjoys reminding us that this was not the last mutiny provoked by Bligh. In 1806 — again at Banks’s behest — Bligh arrived in Sydney Cove as the colony’s new governor. The catalyst this time was an appalling ancestor of mine, a profiteer- GETTY IMAGES ing officer in the New South Wales (‘Rum’) Corps called Anthony Fenn Kemp, who steadfastly resisted Bligh’s attempts to botanist, Philibert Commerson, judged the In another significant decision, Banks clean up the corruption in which Bligh Tahitians ‘free of any vice and prejudice’; was responsible for promoting Botany himself participated. ‘What do you think further, their stunningly alluring women Bay in New South Wales as a destination he told me?’ Kemp railed. ‘Yes! Told the were ‘the sisters of the utterly naked Grac- for English convicts, now that American oldest merchant in the colony — that he es’, for whom ‘the action of creating a fellow ports were denied them. The irony here: came here to protect the poor. That is not human being is a religious one’. The Tahi- Banks’s twin project in Botany Bay would the Governor WE want!!!’ At 6.30 p.m. on tians reciprocated with a corresponding need Tahitian breadfruit a lot more than 26 January 1808, the 20th anniversary of passion for anything made of iron. The price England’s Caribbean cane fields. Australia’s foundation, Kemp marched up of a virgin being ‘three nails and a knife’, If Tahiti was a Utopia, then Sydney the drive at the head of the Rum Corps, many a pock-marked, toothless sailor was Cove was its opposite. ‘In the whole world sword drawn, into Government House. soon extracting nails from his ship’s hull to there is not a worse country,’ lamented After a couple of hours, Bligh was discov- reward sexual favours. Nor did the natives Major Robert Ross, commander of the ered in a room upstairs. One of Kemp’s simply covet metal objects. An embarrassed marines sent to guard the first batch of soldiers noticed a bedcover twitching, Banks had to return aboard scampily clad in 759 convicts, most of them petty thieves. prodded it with his musket and struck a Tahitian cloth after his clothes were stolen Instead of a landscape with a climate like boot. There was Bligh, covered in spider- while he was in flagrante delicto at the bot- Toulouse, as Banks had promised, with webs and with his shirt hanging out. tom of a canoe with a Tahitian girl. plenty of fish and fresh water, and timor- If the connections that Preston makes On his return home, the much-affected ous natives, the First Fleet had landed in between her different narratives seem at Banks immediately ‘ended his engagement unforgiving, arid, stunted scrub with no pli- times as arbitrary as the dispensation of to the wealthy heiress Harriet Blosset’. More ant women, no food, and hostile locals who, English justice during this supposed Age significantly, he convinced the Admiralty to accorded to Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, of Enlightment, then it does not detract send back to Tahiti the five-foot, blue-eyed, ‘desired us to be gone’. from the skill with which she reweaves only son of a Cornish customs official, Wil- Within two years the situation had grown a familiar story. Having doggedly fol- liam Bligh, ‘to bring the breadfruit plant’ so critical that Mary Bryant, a convicted lowed their trails on the page as well as with which, Banks argued, England could highwaywoman, decided to escape with her on foot, she is well placed to judge the feed her starving slaves in the West Indies family: ‘an open boat into the unknown was destruction wrought by her characters, — following the loss of her own American the lesser of two evils’. Arrested in Kupang best summarised by the Pandora’s surgeon colonies. Tahitian breadfuit was, in Preston’s and taken back to London, she and her George Hamilton after drawing anchor words, ‘a kind of manna from heaven as free- four surviving companions declared they in Tahiti. ‘Happy would it have been ly available as the island’s beautiful women, ‘would sooner suffer death than return to if these people had never been visited only waiting to be plucked from the tree’. Botany Bay’. by Europeans.’ the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 33 BOOKS & ARTS

they considered their books too traditional. To be experimental, after all, required you to be in revolt against aesthetic hierarchies as well. Most of the writers in Quin’s circle and beyond were interested, above all, in narrative fragmentation: adapting William Burroughs’s cut-up techniques and the radical dislocations of the nouveau roman in order to avoid the bourgeois compromises of plot, tidy narrative resolution and charac- PHOTOGRAPH BY OSWALD JONES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES PHOTOGRAPH BY OSWALD ter development. Therefore, while Jennifer Hodgson’s new collection of Quin’s prose describes itself as ‘Stories and Fragments’, even the longest stories here are themselves fragmentary. A characteristic Quin paragraph will con- sist of short sentences, often verbless, using the full stop the way a conventional writer might use a comma; perceptions will be ren- dered in discrete, brief phrases, cutting rap- idly from one image to another: Along the Front. Deserted. Long sloping pavements. Carefully avoiding the puddles. She took her shoes off and ran. Laughing. On to the beach. Down to the water’s edge. She heard him panting. Crunching over the pebbles. Her hair over her eyes. She did not sweep away. Lights of the town distant. The sky uplifted from the heaving mass of dark- ness. That was the sea. Sound of sea. Sounds of other seas. Other days. Spent in other places. Under foreign skies.

This is from ‘A Double Room’, the story Has Ann Quin’s time come at last? of an adulterous seaside affair, banal enough in its substance but rendered distinctive by the manner of its telling. It’s one of the more Short and sharp realism). These writers included Alan Burns, straightforward pieces in a very diverse col- Eva Figes and Ann Quin. lection, which ranges from autobiographical Jonathan Coe Quin was born in Brighton in 1936, and essays (one about Quin’s schooldays, anoth- died in 1973, walking out to sea off Bright- er — short, pithy and mordant— called ‘One The Unmapped Country: on beach in an act which shockingly pre- Day in the Life of a Writer’) to a 50-page Stories and Fragments figured Johnson’s own suicide a few weeks extract from her final, unfinished novel, born by Ann Quin, edited by Jennifer Hodgson later. In her short writing life she produced of Quin’s ‘frequent and devastating bouts of And Other Stories, £10, pp. 192 four unconventional novels — Three, Pas- mental illness’: a work, in Hodgson’s words, sages, Tripticks and, perhaps most famous- about ‘the horrors of “going sane”’. Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the ly, her debut Berg, published in 1964 and Quin’s friend and supporter Alan Burns experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, con- filmed in the late 1980s as Killing Dad. once reminisced about the time she took tains one particularly careless sentence: the She has never been widely read, but Stew- part in an ICA event in the 1960s and one where I described Johnson as ‘Britain’s art Home has written that ‘despite ongoing she did her Quin thing, that is to say she came one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s’. rumours of a B.S. Johnson revival, I feel our onto the stage and she just sat and looked at It was a silly thing to write, partly because it attention could be more usefully directed people, she wouldn’t say a goddamn word! wasn’t true, but also because it was easily the towards Ann Quin’; and the appearance of She just stared, she either implied or she actu- most quotable line in the book and so every this collection of short prose — some of it ally stated that … we can communicate more journalist and reviewer was bound to pick it previously unpublished — might mark the in silence than with someone actually putting the words across. up and repeat it. And so it proved. beginning of her rise to a new eminence. But Johnson was not Britain’s one-man Most of the 1960s British experimental- literary avant-garde. The 1960s saw a sig- ists were united, very loosely, by political That militant refusal to compromise also nificant flowering of what we might (for as well as aesthetic dissatisfactions. Politi- flavours her writing: you either take her on shorthand) call experimental writing in cally, they were in revolt against the hierar- her own terms, or not at all. Quin is challeng- this country. They saw the emergence of chies of the British literary and publishing ing, for sure, but the recent popular embrace writers such as Nicholas Mosley, Christine establishments, which were even posher of Deborah Levy and Eimear McBride Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy and Robert and more Oxbridge-dominated than they (both writers who, to my mind, show an Nye, while around Johnson himself clus- are today, if such a thing is possible. Of affinity with Ann Quin, if not her direct tered a small group of like-minded novel- course this was also, ironically, the decade in influence) suggests that there is a growing ists, bound together by prickly friendship which working-class writers such as David readership out there with a taste for some- and, if not a shared aesthetic exactly, then at Storey, Margaret Forster and Alan Sillitoe thing richer and stranger than the satisfac- least a shared opposition to what they saw became famous, but the experimentalists tions of mainstream fiction. It could be that as the prevailing aesthetic (neo-Victorian could not cheer on these pioneers because Ann Quin’s time has come at last.

34 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk PostgraduateAsian Diploma Art in

Object-based study of the arts of China, Japan & Korea, India, Southeast Asia and the Islamic world including access to the reserve collections in the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum

Short courses also available

Further details from: Dr Heather Elgood Phone: +44 (0) 20 7898 4445 Email: [email protected]

SOAS, University of London Thornhaugh Street Russell Square London WC1H OXG

www.soas.ac.uk/art

SOAS University of London BOOKS & ARTS BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

The execution of mutineers by the Bengal Horse Artillery, in a painting by Orlando Norie

Cannon law surely means he was not a ‘principal leader cut and the mail prohibited, the Sialkot in the mutiny’, as the note appended to his forces were the last to mutiny — victims, A.S.H. Smyth skull suggests. By and large it would appear essentially, of a vicious spiral of distrust, that he died as proxy for a more notorious fear and professional outrage. The British The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life mutineer, the cartoonish former flogger of thought they saw conspiracy everywhere; and Death of a Rebel of 1857 the district court. the sepoys were terrified of their artillery by Kim A. Wagner But how the havildar (or sergeant) being turned against them. Hurst, £25, pp. 320 went from loyal servant of John Company In all, at Sialkot, events were rath- to mutineer gives scope for looking at the er minor — seven British deaths, includ- Many and various are the things one finds wider mutiny. Indian conceptions of armed ing one woman and one baby. But they in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could service proved incompatible with the East epitomised the general pattern of the top the sepoy’s skull discovered at The India Company’s. The sepoys — largely ‘Uprising’ (Wagner’s preferred term), Lord Clyde, Walmer, complete with brief Hindustanis, in the Punjab which they’d not least because hysterical reports of biography: recently helped to add to British territory ‘violation’, baby-murdering and mutilation Skull of havildar ‘Alum Bheg’, 46th Regt. — saw themselves as kingmakers, a caste- poured fuel on the retributive colonial fire, Bengal N. Infantry... blown away from a gun. ‘sealing the fate of all the Indian troops’, Hysterical reports of rape, baby- however culpable. From this grisly starting point, Kim murdering and mutilation sealed In his telling of the life, death and after- Wagner, lecturer in British imperial histo- life of Alum Bheg, Wagner is at home with ry at Queen Mary University of London, the fate of all the Indian troops terms like ‘orientalising’, ‘fetishised’ and narrates how, in the swelter of mid-1857, ‘subaltern prosopography’. But the vio- following outbreaks throughout British like group unto themselves, with privi- lence of 1857 was mutiny, not (his quotes) India, native Bengal Army units at Sialkot leges to uphold and a strict, contractual ‘Mutiny’; an NCO is not ‘an officer’, par- mutinied, killing officers and civilians and attitude towards the ‘military labour mar- ticularly here; and Bheg, however small looting the cantonment, and then set out ket’. The Company, though, was now the a role he played at Sialkot, wasn’t ‘inno- for Delhi to join Bahadur Shah, the briefly- last employer standing, and had a different cent’. Nor do I accept Wagner’s blithe minted ‘Emperor of India’. idea of their obligations. dismissal of the idea that rebel violence They didn’t make it. All but wiped out Religion, obviously, played its part. A might have played a part in brutalising the by ‘Nikal Seyn’ Nicholson’s moving col- fatal air hung over the centenary of British British soldiery. umn, the survivors fled into the Himala- dominance in the subcontinent. The reports Nonetheless, Nicholson’s ‘exempla- yas. A year later they were dragged back to of fat-smeared cartridges were, infamously, ry’ gory punishments were denounced Sialkot and executed, havildar Bheg among everywhere. And though the EIC officially by British contemporaries, and in aim- them. His head was picked up, ‘defleshed’ frowned on evangelism, Sialkot was ‘over- ing the judicial cannonade at native and brought home to Dublin by a run by zealous Christians’. For their part, audiences, the hell-mouth of the captain of the 7th Dragoon Guards — the sepoys — Hindu, Muslim or other — cannon reignited the same cultural- ‘the ultimate proof’, as Wagner deems it, were quick to turn their scruples into larger religious fears that had sparked the whole ‘of colonial power’. problems. damn business in the first place. Alive, it must be said, Alum Bheg does Geography did not help, either. At a As one lieutenant noted sadly in his not feature too prominently. An ‘archival ‘border post at the end of a road leading diary: ‘Such cruelties must tell against us in absence’ about him before his execution nowhere’ (now in Pakistan), with the cables the long run.’

36 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk Sunlit days big-budget TV serials. We glimpse him, en tion, whether in the incremental loss of faith route by helicopter to Monte Carlo, ‘skim- that estranged him from the church (‘I was and starry nights ming the waves in a rather thrilling way’. not innately spiritual’) or his hawk-eyed That final phrase stamps the narrator of scrutiny of the sexual revolution — always, Boyd Tonkin Writer’s Luck as a deftly crafted character he assures us, as ‘a war correspondent, not to match any in Changing Places or Small a participant’. He does admit to a taste Writer’s Luck: World. So does his response to footage of for naked mixed saunas and nude swim- A Memoir, 1976–1991 his appearance, clad in ‘a fawn corduroy suit ming with ‘the water coursing unimped- by David Lodge from Austin Reed, and a Beatles hairstyle’, ed round your loins’. Typically, though, he Harvill Secker, £25, pp. 387 on a book-chat programme hosted by Rob- acquired his saucy sauna habit at the Cent- ert Robinson. In the discussion, ‘I spoke rath- er Parcs camps where the search for ‘safe, In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David er well, I think’. friendly and predictable’ holidays with his Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won False modesty or not, Lodge’s low-key Down’s Syndrome son Chris led him. an award at a glitzy soirée in London. At the narration has another role. It shifts the focus The quest to make Chris happy and same time, his debut stage play The Writ- from his serene-sounding progress through secure casts the odd shadow over these sun- ing Game opened at the Birmingham Rep. a gilded age of conference globe-trotting lit uplands. His mother’s illness and death Malcolm Bradbury, his old friend and part- and literary hype onto the conditions that engender passing gloom, although when he ner on the twin tracks of literary academ- underlay these ‘buoyant times’. Without kisses Mum’s forehead, ‘cold and unyielding ia and serio-comic fiction, had come to ever dropping his academic hat, he swapped as marble’, we learn that ‘I did not weep. I Birmingham to stay and see the show. After gown for town during a brief window of rich never do’. Lodge glances at his own episodes a starry night in the West End, and ‘a brief opportunity. Changes in education, pub- of stress-related ‘anxiety and depression’, whirl around the dance floor’, Lodge sped lishing and bookselling nurtured a hunger briskly quelled by yoga and counselling. His back home. He arrived at 3.30 a.m., but for the intelligent entertainment that his closest brush with despair or revelation aris- found that his wife Mary ‘had accidentally novels so smartly met. His own journey es from a rash surfeit of long-haul flights that locked me out, and I had to throw gravel spotlights the social history of his genera- culminates in an ‘epiphany’ on the tarmac of up at our bedroom window from the back garden to wake her without disturbing the Bradburys’. Mr Pooter may have joined the Postern A-list, but mishaps and pratfalls still dog his every step. Lodge’s 15 novels reveal a sly and droll Anything can snag unexpectedly ventriloquist who knows exactly how to fix like this picture of an empty doorway a mood or modify a key through the timbre framed by splitting lattice climbing ivy of a storyteller’s voice. In this second volume of memoirs, the contrast between his mid- and a half-panel of tongue-and groove career procession of triumphs, adventures unvarnished weather-hammered oak and accolades and the deadpan, humdrum held open to let us out or in. delivery is wholly conscious and controlled. Who knew, for instance, that this proud adop- tive Brummie had a long-standing link with Dead leaves like the years behind Hawaii — the location of his Paradise News blow over the floor where we stand — after his Auntie Eileen settled there? Although research for that novel involved a looking through to a grey-gold dash from the museum in Waikiki straight to mist over rolling hills a bar ‘with topless go-go girls on a catwalk’, the kind of world Lodge tends to make his Pacific excursions to care for Eileen sound like trips to Sut- where she felt at home. ton Coldfield. Even a tour of Pearl Harbor turns out to be merely ‘extremely interesting, Inside you can almost smell though not very relevant to my novel’. Self-effacing, borderline pedestrian, the rotting deck-chairs creosote this Diary of a Somebody tone does a dou- crumbling leather frayed rope dust. ble job. First, it takes the edge of envy off a You can find anything in here. Look chronicle of middle-aged success that saw Lucky David slip with frictionless aplomb once-vital objects turning like us all away from his cosy berth at the Universi- to junk and rust. ty of Birmingham into a freelance career. During this vanished era, both cash and kudos might await an ideas-rich satirist What am I thinking of? Oh yes — and social comedian of Lodge’s calibre: the abandoned summerhouse ‘I happened to hit my stride as a novelist below and out of sight of the back lawn when the going was good for literary fic- tion.’ Here, the earnest, upwardly mobile in the garden where she grew up. South London Catholic we met in the first This is my mind telling me volume, Quite a Good Time to be Born, seg- that’s where she’s gone. ues from learned studies of modernism and structuralism to the Booker shortlist (twice), healthy advances, round-the-world tours and — Ruth Padel the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 37 BOOKS & ARTS a Canadian airport. Artfully, enjoyably, he as a lukewarm canapé. ‘Our compulsion to who break wind in the direction of obnox- sidelines the inner life in favour of a shrewd avenge a wrongdoing is among the most pri- ious passengers, redirect all their luggage and drily comic testimony from a lost epoch mal of human urges,’ he explains. ‘Getting to, say, Tokyo, and when asked by a man to of plenty. Younger writers in these less bless- even shows there is a price to pay.’ smile, say they’ll smile if he will too. When he ed times may pore over it with the stupefied I raced through this book, cackling — and does, they shoot back: ‘Now freeze and hold wonder of Dark Age peasants uncovering relishing in particular the pages pointing out that for 15 hours.’ The customer is not always a floor mosaic of feasts and revels amid the how, throughout history, and still in some right. When he’s vile he should get his ruins of a Roman villa. areas of the world, mine is the sex that has comeuppance. been persistently maltreated and oppressed But not all revenge is quite so right- and that it’s jolly nice finally to be getting eous. Sometimes it’s just vicariously amus- A girl with green eyes our own back. Fineman points out that war- ing. ‘Never wrong a writer,’ Fineman time rapes have barely been prosecuted and advises. ‘They get their revenge in print.’ Emily Hill refers to honour killings today. I suspect he (A statement that may send a shiver down is itching to write a fresh chapter on how my true love’s spine.) Take Norman Mailer, Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion Harvey Weinstein finally got his just deserts who so despised his third wife, Jeanne Camp- by Giulia Sissa thanks to the #metoo brigade. bell, he had her double strangled and thrown Polity, £17.99, pp. 303 Fineman seems quite a fan of vigilante off a tenth-floor balcony in An American justice — as long as the target is indisput- Dream. Campbell dubbed this light fiction- Revenge: A Short Enquiry ably guilty. He doesn’t understand why we alisation of their unhappiness together ‘the into Retribution should get screwed over again and again hate book of all time’. by Stephen Fineman without doing anything about it. ‘Turn- ‘Mailer’s venom is palpable,’ Fineman Reaktion, £14.99, pp. 152 ing the other cheek,’ he observes, ‘is sim- concludes. ‘But it is trounced by Ernest ply an invitation to be slapped again.’ He Hemingway.’ When Papa’s third wife, The Museum of Broken gives voice to all the waiters who avow Martha Gellhorn, walked out (wonder- Relationships: Modern Love they are not ‘robots to respond to fin- ing why she should ‘be a footnote to some- in 203 Everyday Objects ger clicks’ and lament of their customers: body else’s life’) he retaliated by writing a by Olinka Vistica ‘I wouldn’t treat a dog, the way they poem to her vagina, likening ‘said organ to Weidenfeld, £16.99, pp. 222 treat us.’ the crumpled neck of an old hot-water He adds: ‘Minor acts of sabotage can bring bottle’. Then, in a short story called ‘It was I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brut- relief from intrinsically alienating or monot- Very Cold in England’, ‘a Hemingway- ish and short. Copious weeping was my un- onous work.’ I have known that pleasure. So like character compares the sexual per- tart retort. All that’s left of him is a stained I adored, above all, Fineman’s air hostesses, formance of a Gellhorn-like character to a T-shirt. I must rid my mind of him now. That’s washed-up mine that had failed to detonate’. long overdue. But how? These three books Tempting as it would be to assassi- seem to present three answers. I’ve been nate my man in print, I don’t want to come wonkily underlining whole paragraphs and off looking as petty as all that. So I turned brooding over what to do. to The Museum of Broken Relationships Nowadays, if you admit to being which claims to sum up ‘modern love in 203 heartbroken after the fact you’re treated INTRODUCTORY OFFER: everyday objects’. The museum was found- as a malingerer. So I very much appreci- ed in Croatia by two ex-lovers who wanted ated Giulia Sissa’s Jealousy: A Forbidden to memorialise their former passion for one Passion — a scholarly defence of indulg- Subscribe for another, and I found the accompanying book ing your violent fury. In the age of Tinder, very affecting. I don’t want to fall in love your next paramour is but a thumb-swipe only £1 an issue again if this is how it always has to end. away, so the attitude is: ‘They don’t love you. Each page consists of a photograph of Why would you care? It’s all in your head. 9 Weekly delivery of the magazine an item sent to the museum together with It’s all in your past. It’s always your prob- a note explaining what it symbolises to the lem. Enough!’ I agree with Sissa. We women 9 App access to the new one who posted it. Each tale is different. And ‘do not like being treated like an inter- issue from Thursday yet all are curiously the same — bleak and changeable, meaningless, replaceable pres- 9 Full website access stark and heart-mashing. It’s like a cheerful- ence’, and it’s OK to feel green about it. ly coloured catalogue of suicide, divorce and But I am confused by how much empha- venereal disease. sis she places on Medea, who, according to At times, there’s nothing to do but myth, helped Jason slay the Minotaur, only laugh: at the ‘can of love incense’ (explana- Iran is our natural ally The National Trust in trouble Boris in Libya Can you forgive her? to be abandoned by the ungrateful wretch Isabel Hardman and Matthew Parris on Theresa May’s fate tion: ‘didn’t work’); at the ‘sweatshirt with a

MY DATES WITH DIANA when he took a fancy to another woman. In TAKI smiley face on the front and the reverse on response, Medea slaughtered all their chil- the back’: dren. This might signify much for what Sissa The angry face tells me that he went to a The Houstonlesson of calls our ‘erotic dignity’; but when seeking to South American transgender prostitute on prove that jealousy is not ‘the most obscene Vesterbro and paid 800 Danish Kroner for emotion of all’, Medea is an odd choice a blow job on Christmas Eve. ‘Now we have of heroine. www.spectator.co.uk/A152A gonorrhoea,’ the face says. So I dispensed with the idea of becom- But best by far was the note accompany- ing homicidally jealous and turned instead 0330 333 0050 quoting A152A ing the twin silicone jellies salvaged from to Stephen Fineman’s Revenge: A Short UK Direct Debit only. Special overseas rates also a reversed boob job. (‘My ex had convinced Enquiry into Retribution, in which he argues, available. $2 a week in Australia call 089 362 4134 me to get breast implants... at the time very persuasively, that revenge is a dish we or go to www.spectator.com.au/T021A I hadn’t had enough therapy to tell him really should serve — whether cold, hot or to go f*** himself.’)

38 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk I was persuaded. My love may sleep ‘The Illegal Act’: peacefully in his bed. I’ll just ship what’s left Roosevelt, in of him to Zagreb. There his T-shirt can join a boat named all the other tragic tat. A monument to our National Recovery, nothingness. A promise to forget. struggles to save Uncle Sam from the Depression. Father of the nation The cartoon appeared in 1935, Tim Stanley when the United States Supreme Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Life Court declared the by Robert Dallek National Recovery Allen Lane, £30, pp. 704 Administration unconstitutional Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it be known that he was reading a book about FDR, and tumble- weed blew through the newsrooms. Which is odd because for many decades FDR was every bit the model liberal as Ronald Rea- gan was the model conservative. Roosevelt was credited with ending the Great Depres- sion, laying the foundations of a welfare state and leading America through the sec- ond world war — achievements for which he was rewarded with not one, not two but four election victories. And he did all of this despite being an elitist East Coaster with a wife who was very probably a lesbian. So cool was the marriage of Franklin and Elea- nor, so European, that when Eleanor was GETTY IMAGES asked what she thought of one of her hus- band’s election victories, she replied: ‘What civil rights. From the present perspective — home. His liberalism was distinguished from difference does it make to me?’ when liberalism has become so much about socialism in that it sought not to replace Robert Dallek’s superb book explores identity politics, particularly race — that capitalism but save it. how they got away with it. Roosevelt was looks not only naive but a serious blemish It’s customary at this point in any con- helped somewhat by the era he lived in. on any record. servative discussion of Roosevelt to say that Journalists were more willing to pretend Well, perhaps the present asks too much. his economic experiments may have pro- he hadn’t been left crippled by a paralyt- The scale of conservative opposition to longed the Great Depression by meddling ic illness — and the public had no need Roosevelt reflected how radical and thus with the market — but I’m not going to do to know that Eleanor didn’t always spend remarkable his New Deal was for its time. that. What right-wingers forget is that the Christmas with her husband. But the idea Depression didn’t just test American capi- that the 1930s was a more genteel age in When Democrats look for a talism but the American way of life itself, which it was far easier to govern is bull. and the real secret to Roosevelt’s success Congress was divided not only by party candidate to take on Trump in was his ability to revive his citizens’ faith but by region and ideology — and both 2020, they’d do well to study FDR in it. Nowadays, liberals seem to dislike sides liked to throw around labels like America’s small-town, popular capital- ‘communist’ or ‘fascist’. General Douglas He overturned a small government ortho- ism — and the middle-class heartlands for MacArthur applauded a Republican doxy to electrify the countryside, adjust whom it means so much. Roosevelt both congressman who said that Roosevelt was prices, regulate Wall Street, establish social consciously and naturally embodied the a proto-monarch, determined to ‘destroy security and support the union movement. cultural values of those people, reflected in the rights of the common people’. In 1938, How did he do it? a ‘personal routine [which] gave assuranc- a citizen from Atlanta wrote to FDR: For a start, he was happy to experiment, es that he was grounded in familiar Ameri- ‘Try dipping your head in a pail of water to try anything that might work, so long as can customs’ — hard work, martinis, poker, three times and just bring it out twice. the message was that an activist govern- stamp collecting and an ability to talk to Then the country will really recover.’ ment was taking the side of the little man. folks, particularly over the radio, in a way Roosevelt made mistakes. To over- Second, his liberalism was always tempered that conveyed authority, humility and com- come constitutional resistance, he tried and by conservative instinct. So much energy plete confidence in the future. failed to pack the Supreme Court. He was was spent on helping agriculture, Dallek After Roosevelt, only Reagan achieved too slow to help Germany’s Jews. His neu- argues, because Roosevelt had an old- the same level of public admiration, and he trality in the Spanish Civil War probably fashioned, bucolic sense of what America exhibited exactly the same qualities, albeit helped Franco’s fascists win. He was obvi- was all about. He fretted over balancing the deployed for a very different political pur- ously too distracted by ill-health to negoti- budget — as did the average voter, accord- pose. When Democrats cast around for a ate with Stalin. And he shared the common ing to polls — and when it came to welfare, candidate to take on Trump in 2020, they mistaken belief that the American South he preferred programmes that put peo- should start by dropping the snobbish atti- could be left alone to evolve towards black ple to work rather than paid them to sit at tude and picking up a book on FDR. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 39 BOOKS & ARTS

rubbed shoulders with Thomas Hodgkin (whose father had iden- tified the lymphoma that bears his name). Professor William Sharpey encouraged Lister’s enthusiasm for the new experimental science of physiology. Lister spent his eve- nings peering into the achromatic microscope invented by his father,

PAINTING BY TTHOMAS EAKINS (1889)/GETTY IMAGES PAINTING Joseph Jackson, to inspect animal specimens and swatches of human iris. He even tried in vitro fertili- sation with cockerel sperm and a chicken egg. By the time of Lister’s gradu- ation, ether and chloroform had ended surgery’s ‘age of agony’. No longer constrained by a patient’s reaction to pain, sur- geons ventured deeper into the body with ever more radical procedures. As a result, surgery actually became riskier and infec- tion rates increased. A patient in recovery was interpreted very The surgeon and anatomist David Hayes Agnew, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s. differently to today: inflamma- The cautious Americans were initially resistant to Lister, who toured the US hoping to convert the sceptics tion around the surgical site and ‘laudable pus’ were seen as reas- suring signs. Why certain patients developed systemic sepsis was unclear. Perhaps disease travelled The germ of a ly cleaned between cases, surgical aprons from one person to another via a pathogenic stiffened with blood, and surgeons had agent. Or, as the anti-contagionists believed, revolutionary idea been known to suck patients’ wounds in maybe illness arose spontaneously from the middle of an operation. Professional dirty conditions, moving through the air in Kate Womersley assets included a firm fist that could double miasmatic clouds. as a tourniquet, and the dexterity to flay Lister was unconvinced by both theo- The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s flesh to the bone in seconds (even if a tes- ries. He observed that a patient’s environ- Quest to Transform the Grisly World ticle or finger was collateral damage). A ment mattered (death rates were higher of Victorian Medicine surgeon’s currency was speed and strength in hospital than in domestic settings), but by Lindsey Fitzharris rather than sanitary practice. doubted that infective life could arise de Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 286 Joseph Lister (1827–1912) — with his novo. Prompted by scepticism rather than ‘indescribable air of gentleness, verging Archimedean revelation, Lister went back Every operation starts the same way. on shyness’, a stutter and almost ‘woman- to Joseph Jackson’s microscope. Louis Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, ly’ concern for others — was not the obvi- Pasteur’s recent work in France inspired lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, Lister to make a connection with the fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms. Surgical aprons stiffened with blood, microbes he observed in a sample of A soothing routine accompanied by the and surgeons would suck patients’ gangrene. Could infective processes be sound of water hitting a steel trough sink. halted in a similar way to fermentation Washing is an act of safety but also humil- wounds in the middle of an operation and putrefaction? ity. It acknowledges a doctor’s capacity to Lister developed a regimen for wash- cause disease as well as cure it. More than ous candidate to overhaul this filthy mess. ing hands and tools in carbolic acid, tend- once I have thought of Joseph Lister — the Medicine didn’t run in the family. Devout ing wounds with saturated dressings and father of antisepsis (killing germs) and fore- Quakers, the Listers believed that home- spraying a chemical mist over the uncon- father of asepsis (excluding germs complete- opathy and divine intention were the scious patient. As his conviction grew, he ly) — as I perform this hygienic set-piece. best healers. Nevertheless, aged 17, Lister agreed to remove a cancerous lump from Not that he would have liked the idea of me, found himself in the overcrowded stench his own sister’s breast, which had already his sister’s great-great-great granddaughter, of central London embarking on a surgical been declared inoperable by two surgi- studying medicine. Lister ‘could not bear education. cal colleagues. Etherised upon her broth- the indecency of discussing with women Lindsey Fitzharris has written a brilliant er’s dining room table, Isabella Lister’s the secrets of the “fleshly tabernacle”’, and biography that embeds Lister in his medi- procedure was a success. Avoiding infec- sought to block their membership of the cal moment. The smells and sights of rotting tion, she survived three years before her profession. flesh seeped through the capital’s streets, cancer recurred. In the 1860s, much of the surgical estab- into the teaching hospitals and around Fitzharris subtly demonstrates how Lis- lishment dismissed antisepsis as ‘hocus- the graveyards (raided by body-snatch- ter eventually secured his medical repu- pocus’. They were unwilling to believe ers). It was the time of cholera, smallpox tation not in spite of, but perhaps because that current techniques might actually be and typhoid. Amid the gore, the intellectu- of, his religious upbringing. Quakerism harming patients. Instruments were rare- al scene of the city was flourishing. Lister has tended to be portrayed as a distrac-

40 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk tion from his scientific interests, particu- collar mook, who has found himself in what In short paragraphs the book darts larly as Lister considered leaving medical would, in other hands, have been a clas- between Mark, Heather, Bobby and Karen, school to enter the ministry. But once sat- sic horror-story location: New Glades, a Heather’s mother (or rather Mother — isfied that surgery was an altruistic path, 1960s development, ‘built on ancient wood- the archetypal roles get a capital let- Lister recognised that evidence alone land owned by a monstrously wealthy pri- ter, as in a play or a psychiatrist’s case would not change the status quo. The art of vate trust’. He is the sort of homme moyen history), setting out an ever-hastening persuasion would be critical to converting sensuel who is given rather more plot, showing how the players misun- non-believers. sympathetic life in Jon Canter’s much derstand not just one another but the The ‘scientific Germans’ eagerly underrated Worth. potentially fatal circumstances they find adopted antisepsis, but the ‘plodding and Suddenly and inexplicably deformed by themselves in. Heather, despite her alleg- practical English surgeon’ and cautious disease, James is treated badly by all except edly prodigious capacity for empathy, Americans were more resistant. Touring his children. In due course, after a period of mistakes what lies behind Bobby’s dead the US, Lister made the most of his plat- anomie and uprootedness, he finds himself eyes about as seriously as it’s possible to form to evangelise to roomfuls of stu- acting badly in return to everyone he meets, mistake anything. dents and sceptics. By interweaving case including his children — though rather less The novel probably intends some sort histories, demonstrations and rhetoric, badly than many would in his shoes. of comment about money and ennui; the he won over a generation of disciples. It Heather, The Totality by Matthew Weiner perils of living vicariously through others; wasn’t long before he became president (Canongate, £14.99) is a lean, sharp meta- masculinity in crisis — though it’s a recru- of the Royal Society and personal surgeon thriller. The writing is laconic and assured, descence of masculinity that saves the day to Queen Victoria. He was now part of though Weiner can be cloth-eared at times, — and the Monster Inside Us All. But it the establishment. using the same preposition slightly differ- doesn’t give itself room to say anything Despite The Butchering Art’s admira- ently twice in a sentence, and so on. But as interesting about any of these things. Its ble detail and vivid storytelling, Fitzharris storytelling goes — or, given Weiner’s cele- gestures towards sophistication, such as the is slightly heavy-handed with her conclu- brated work on Mad Men, storyboarding — notion (not borne out, as far as I can tell) that sion that Lister raised the dark curtain of it is superb. psychopaths automatically have the senso- surgical barbarism to let in the light. With- Heather is the impossibly fragrant daugh- ry hyperacuity of a Guerlain ‘nose’, tend to out question, ward conditions and opera- ter of an unhappy Manhattan couple (her let it down. But you do tear through it — tive hygiene have been transformed. But father, Mark, is not a million miles away from and you’re not quite sure what you think the scourges of gangrene, erysipelas, pyem- James Orr, except that he works in finance, when you’ve finished. ia and septicaemia — collectively known and is ‘rich but not rich-rich’). A dark star In State of Emergency (Epigram, £10) as ‘hospitalism’ to Lister’s contemporar- enters their lives in the form of Bobby, a there’s a strong case for seeing common ies — did not disappear. Even with today’s construction worker and matricide, whose ground between its author, Jeremy Tiang, antibiotics, surgical patients are not invul- life up until now has been a long murk of and its subject. (Like his protagonist nerable. Nosocomial infections are a new poverty interrupted by incandescent out- Henry, Tiang is a youngish Oxford-educat- strain of hospitalism: MRSA and resist- bursts of violence. ed Singaporean.) But it doesn’t really read ant superbugs threaten to undermine like a personal project — and why should it? Listerian modernity, and send us back to It’s well researched, informative and even- a time when a scalpel’s trace could be the handed in its view of a chapter of death of you. beetle Singapore’s history about which many of us know little; but the human factor is underpowered. First novels to me There are three key events: the alleged you cover massacre of 24 male villagers by British Dangerous living little ground troops at Batang Kali in 1948; the decision some years later by an impassioned young despite Keith Miller Chinese-speaking freedom fighter, Siew Li, how fast to dodge the authorities, leave her husband Here come three novels marketed as debuts you run Jason and their twins, Janet and Henry, in but written by authors with some sort of Singapore, and go ‘inside’ — to train with previous, be it in short stories, journal- communist militias in the jungle; and the to you ism, theatre, television or a combination of final illness and death of Jason, which the above. I’m nothing brings Henry winging his way home, hav- The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by but a passing ing set aside his research on the Habsburgs Tom Lee (Granta, £12.99) takes a fable cloud to abseil down his own familial crevasse. and transplants it into real life — in this across You’re left with a sense of of intense case bourgeois southern British subur- personal loss, and of the complexities ban life — where the neat conclusions we the sun of the region. But on the political front, might draw from it if we encountered it in other than underlying racial tensions — a more distilled form are muffled and made to us it’s clear that, as elsewhere in the area, strange. The exemplar of Kafka is obvi- our errands communism was a rallying point for ous (both Metamorphosis and The Trial); Chinese minorities, oppressed or other- but I found myself thinking also of John so important wise, before it was any sort of belief system Cheever, Richard Yates and other Ameri- and — there’s not much debate about the rights can writers who needle away at the pain and so quickly and wrongs of it all. On the emotional front, self-delusion behind the sleek lives of the done I’d have liked more about Siew Li and Jason executive class. after their parting: why she found it so easy James Orr isn’t much of an unreliable to ‘move on’, and he so difficult. But then it’s narrator, just an ordinary, appalling white- — Candy Neubert not my story. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 41 BOOKS & ARTS A brutal race government’s pernicious racial policies, give them much of a look in. Last summer which have removed ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal I joined John Julius Norwich lecturing on Patrick Flanery children from their families and land. a ship. His talk on the history of the Medi- Like Willie Bachhuber, who tries to terranean, from ancient times to the cruise- A Long Way from Home create maps that depict not only place ship desecration of today, was a tour de by Peter Carey and location, but also the sedimented lay- force. Confessing to a lack of interest in the Faber, £17.99, pp. 360 ers of time and history, the ‘lethal patch- Phoenicians, he gave them just the briefest work’ of settler colonialism ‘on top of the of cameos. Blink and you’d miss them. The More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey true tribal lands’, Carey turns the novel into glories of Ancient Greece and Rome still co-wrote one of the most audacious road a staging ground for his own merciless exca- carry all before them. movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until the vation of Australian history. And yet there they are at the heart of End of the World, which circles the globe ancient Mediterranean history, some kind before concluding with a long interlude in of confederation of irrepressible maritime the Australian outback. While the film was in Reconsider Phlebas traders and explorers based in the eastern the mode of speculative science fiction and Mediterranean with major cities in Byblos, Carey’s captivating A Long Way from Home Justin Marozzi Berytus (Beirut), Tyre, Sidon and Arwad. is a fiercely realist story set in the 1950s, They make their entrance onto the literary- this new book nonetheless shares both In Search of the Phoenicians historical stage with a first-page mention in that earlier work’s fascination with outsid- by Josephine Quinn the Histories of Herodotus, the 5th centu- ers whose lives spin off in unpredictable Princeton, £27.95, pp. 360 ry BC father of history. He writes that they directions, and as a profound reverence for came originally from the Red Sea, entered Australia’s interior and its people. So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodo- and settled in the Mediterranean and imme- Outside Melbourne, in the small town tus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all diately began ‘to adventure on long voyag- of Bacchus Marsh, Willie Bachhuber — a up in the Histories. Is this really what Jose- es, freighting their vessels with the wares of disgraced former schoolteacher and radio phine Quinn is saying, or is it just a cunning Egypt and Assyria’. quiz-show regular who develops a passion ruse to stir up a fuss and infuriate the dwin- Their influence was intellectually and for mapmaking — and his neighbour Irene dling band of Herodoteans out there? geographically pervasive, apparently teach- Bobs — diminutive mother of two and wife Because Quinn, a professor of ancient ing the Greeks the alphabet and establish- of Titch Bobs, one of the best car salesmen history at Oxford University, declares that ing the famous Phoenician settlement of in the country — find their lives entangled her mission is not so much to rescue the Carthage. ‘They have been credited with when Titch decides to enter the Redex Reli- Phoenicians from their ‘undeserved obscu- discovering everything from the pole star to ability Trial. Although Irene is a better driv- rity’ so much as to argue that there were no Cornish cream,’ Quinn writes, noting their er than any man, Titch knows they need a such people. ‘It is modern nationalism that acumen as traders in cedar from Mount navigator to guide them through the pun- Lebanon, together with beautifully worked ishing 18-day rally that circumnavigates The Phoenicians have been credited metal, ivory and glass. Both the Old Testa- Australia; and Willie, at a loose end after with discovering everything, from the ment and the Iliad pay tribute to Phoenician being fired for dangling a racist boy out of pole star to Cornish ice cream artistry: in the construction and decora- his classroom window, is their man. tion of Jerusalem’s temple of Solomon and This is a novel of two dominant moods, has created the Phoenicians,’ she writes, the world’s most beautiful silver mixing split almost evenly down the middle. In citing 19th-century French, English and bowl, a prize for the funeral games of the beginning we barrel along anarchical- German historians who spoke of the Patroklos, respectively. ly, marvelling at the elegance of Carey’s Phoenician ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in the age In Search of the Phoenicians explores plotting and the explosive joy of the sto- of the nation state. the links that connected these people, lan- rytelling, from Irene’s and Willie’s per- The Phoenicians are those murkiest and guage and religion foremost among them, spectives alternately. They are both misfits most elusive of prehistorical characters, while emphasising the absence of ties based in society — Irene too masculine for her which is perhaps excusable in a community on nationhood and ethnicity. To the extent gelignite-throwing prankster father-in- that existed from around 1,500–300 BC and that we can gauge how Phoenicians looked law Dangerous Dan Bobs, and Willie too left little in the way of literary or archaeo- at themselves, ties and communities were bookish to be anything other than an out- logical evidence. Classicists don’t tend to more based on cities, families and religious sider in the provinces. Carey’s description practices than on anything else. The cult of of the Redex Trial is never less than grip- the Tyrian god Melqart, for instance, known ping, evoking something akin to a mid-cen- to Greeks as Herakles, tied together Phoe- tury Mad Max aesthetic in which Titch’s nician settlements throughout the Mediter- suburban Holden FJ is transformed into ‘a ranean, in addition to the Greek diaspora. brutal beast, four-eyed, with mesh protected The child-sacrifice cult of Baal Hammon headlights’ and ‘massive bull bar’. (Kronos in Greek, generally Saturn in It is in the midst of the rally itself that Latin) seems not to have caught on to the a sense of melancholy takes over, shifting same degree. into a moving meditation on multiple forms No one called themselves ‘Phoenician’ in of paternal failure and the culture of rac- Phoenician, not least because phoenix is a ism that have shaped modern Australia. Greek word — for palm tree. From all the To give away more would risk spoiling the available evidence, the first person to identi- genuine pleasures and pathos Carey has fy himself as Phoenician was the writer Hel- orchestrated, with intricately mapped nar- iodorus from Emesa (in what is today the rative twists that are subtly foreshadowed Syrian city of Homs) in the 4th century. yet still surprising. As the characters drive Quinn’s story is most compelling when deeper into the interior, we become increas- she plays to her strengths as a historian and ingly aware of the corrosive effects of the archaeologist (she is co-director of excava-

42 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk tions at the Tunisian site of Utica), discuss- He even named the age ing who the Phoenicians might have been, when, as in the era of the

trawling through the assorted archaeo- GETTY IMAGES French Revolution, ‘Fury! logical, artistic, linguistic, literary, religious, rage! madness! In a wind epigraphic and numismatic evidence — or swept through America.’ lack of it — to develop a clearer view of ‘Rouze up O Young Men of this shadowy people. She leaves no stone the New Age! Set your fore- unturned, from archaeological ruins and heads against the ignorant funerary inscriptions to poetry and drama, hirelings!’ Blake wrote in in her quest to understand how Phoenicians the preface to his epic poem have, perhaps only after their time, become ‘Milton’ (1810). ‘Suffer not a people. the fashionable Fools to She concludes that there has been depress your powers by the a lot of ‘exciting’ work about identity in prizes they pretend to give recent decades, but too little on ‘the con- for contemptible works or the cept of identity’. Some might counter that expensive advertising boasts the whole field of academic-led navel they make of such works.’ gazing has never been in ruder health. Accompanying an exhibi- The danger of plunging into a long-wind- tion at Northwestern Univer- ed debate about ‘multiple, fragmented and sity in Illinois, William Blake fluid’ identities is that it takes us away from and the Age of Aquarius is the historical narrative prose favoured by the most intriguing book on the general reader into the sociological jar- Blake since Marsha Keith gon preferred by the specialist. And lan- Schuchard’s exposé of him guage matters. ‘Herodotus’ prose’, remarked as a swinger, Why Mrs Blake Aubrey de Sélincourt, one of the most trans- Cried (2006). America’s lators of the Histories, ‘has the flexibility, postwar Blakeans rebelled ease and grace of a man superbly talking’. against expensive advertising Few historians have ever matched it. ‘Glad Day’ by William Blake and contemptible comfort. Ultimately, Quinn is surely right to However misplaced the fury, resist an anachronistic nationhood foisted and despite a preponderance onto this ancient geographically and cul- your Self’) to the vision of the unmediat- of ‘fashionable Fools’, the results were turally diverse community. But one might ed, natural Self: ‘Each flower Buddha-eye.’ not all contemptible. The political inspira- argue that she is as insistent on a malle- After six minutes, the roots of Christianity tions are well known; Blake, in Ginsberg’s able, fluid identity today as the 19th-cen- mesh with oriental religion in a vision of words, warned Thomas Paine to ‘get out tury European nationalists were with their physical liberation and spiritual democracy: of London before the fuzz came to arrest definition of the Phoenicians as a people. ‘Sounds of Aleph and Aum / through forest him’. But many other Blakean echoes are Which is no more than to observe that of gristle… All Albion one.’ surprising. we are all a product of our times — from ‘I kinda like that,’ Buckley admits. Even I knew that Blake supplied the chorus the high-spirited Herodotus to today’s secondhand and soiled, the visionary voice lyric to the Doors’s ‘End of the Night’. But careful academics. cannot be denied. Buckley believed that I didn’t know that Jimi Hendrix, while liv- ‘the ideologues, having won over the intel- ing around the corner from the blue plaque lectual class’, had now ‘simply walked in marking Blake’s residence in South Mol- The eternal visionary and started to run things’. Blake had stood ton Street, drew on Blake’s ‘Mary’ for ‘The athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’ to the ration- Wind Cries Mary’, and on ‘Jerusalem’ for Dominic Green alising, systematising civilisation that coa- the ‘arrows made of desire’ in ‘Voodoo lesced in Georgian London, then conquered Chile’. Nor did I know that Kris Kristof- William Blake and the world after 1945. The further the mar- ferson discovered Blake at Merton College, the Age of Aquarius ket spread, the higher Blake’s stock rose. Oxford, where he played rugby and won a edited by Stephen F. Eisenman In 1863, Blake’s first biographer Alexan- boxing Blue. Princeton, £37.95, pp. 224 der Gilchrist called his subject pictor igno- Another highlight is Jacob Henry tus, the unknown painter. A century later, Leveton’s essay on Blake’s Abstract Expres- On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg Blake was a universal poet, the prophet of sionist connections. Blake’s innovations appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing spiritual revolt in what Buckley called ‘an in colour printing influenced Sam Fran- Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s poli- age of conformity’. cis’s adoption of ‘vibrant color kineticism’. tics as fatuous — the blarney, stoned — Blake’s belatedness encourages us to Clyfford Still quoted Blake’s individualist but Ginsberg stole the aesthetic victory by judge him not by his works, but his admir- Christianity against the impersonality and reading ‘Wales Visitation’, a homage to Wil- ers. A century before Firing Line, Swin- fear of the Cold War. In Fearful Symmetry liam Blake. ‘White fog lifting and falling on burne, anticipating Allen Ginsberg in Blake: (1947), Northrop Frye described the vortex mountain brow,’ Ginsberg intones, ‘…teem- A Critical Essay (1868), spotted ‘the points as Blake’s ‘image of infinity’; in the same ing ferns/ exquisitely swayed/ along a green of contact and sides of likeness between year, Jackson Pollock painted ‘Vortex’. crag/ glimpsed through mullioned glass in William Blake and Walt Whitman’. But ‘One law for the Ox & Lion is oppres- valley rain.’ Blake, working with ‘Ages & Generations’ sion,’ Blake wrote in his age of conformity. ‘Nice,’ Buckley nods. He lets Ginsberg in mind, had hoped for the Blake revival. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before read the whole poem. Ginsberg opposes Before Joni Mitchell called her spoilt and Blake’s defence of religious conscience and the artificial imagery of power and money selfish peers ‘stardust’, Blake wrote that free speech leads modern conservatives to (‘London’s symmetrical thorned tower / & ‘Energy is the only life’, and got back to the concur with Kris Kristofferson: ‘William network of TV pictures flashing bearded garden, naked in Lambeth, not Woodstock. Blake is my man… Hell, yeah!’ the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 43 BOOKS & ARTS

ARTS A tough act to follow Andrew Roberts on the challenges of playing Churchill

ary Oldman has joined a long list George V’s silver jubilee. The next was in era remarks about despising Churchill for of actors who have portrayed Win- Goebbels’s propaganda film Ohm Krüger what he had supposedly done to the Welsh Gston Churchill — no fewer than 35 (1941), about the British invention of con- miners were not. Burton had a weird love- of them in movies and 28 on television. He centration camps in the Boer War, where hate relationship with Churchill — other is one of the best three. ‘I knew I didn’t look he of course is evil personified. Scarcely statements he made were admiring — but like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that less believable were the four Soviet prop- fortunately he stuck to the well-crafted with some work I could approximate the aganda movies of the late 1940s — that is, script. The advantage that the TV biop- voice. The challenge in part was the phys- after Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech that ics of the 1970s had over today’s knock- icality, because you’re playing someone denounced Stalinism — in which Viktor ing, sneering revisionist movies — which whose silhouette is so iconic.’ Stanitsyn played Churchill as a scheming, Darkest Hour emphatically is not — was We all have our own mind’s-eye view grasping imperialist. There was an Ameri- that there were many people still alive in of what Churchill should look and sound can movie, Mission to Moscow (1943), made 1974 who knew and worked with Churchill. like, and his personality was so strong and at President Roosevelt’s request, which was They could pour scorn on inaccuracies, as sui generis that it is almost impossible for could audiences. an actor to impose himself on the role. He We all have our own mind’s-eye view Still the best depiction of Churchill on a is therefore almost always left with either of what Churchill should look and screen is in the eight-part TV series The Wil- mere impersonation or caricature. Old- sound like derness Years (1981), in which Robert Hardy man avoided this in Darkest Hour through inhabited the part of Churchill to such a research. ‘I went to the newsreel,’ he says, naturally far kinder, but not really any more degree that it affected everything else he did ‘and what I discovered was a man who useful as an insight into Churchill. to a greater or lesser extent. (Can one see had this very athletic tread. He would skip After two movies in which Churchill something of Churchill in Hardy’s depiction around at 65 like a 30-year-old, he had a appeared in cameo roles, played by Patrick of the Minister of Magic in Harry Potter?) sparkle, the eyes were alive, he had a very Wymark and Jimmy Sangster, Simon Ward Hardy’s profound reading about Church- sort of cherubic grin.’ played the eponymous Young Winston in the ill, and friendship with Sir Martin Gilbert, This is an insight that a number of actors 1972 film based on Churchill’s autobiogra- Churchill’s biographer, helped make the who play Churchill — who came to power phy My Early Life. Written and produced series the success it was, and set the stand- in 1940 aged 65 — have missed, and who by the genius Carl Foreman (High Noon, ard for everything that followed. It also thus play him as a man in late middle age. Guns of Navarone) and directed by Rich- allowed Hardy to reprise Churchill in War Sir Jock Colville, Churchill’s wartime pri- ard Attenborough, it was sublime. (I saw it and Remembrance (1988), Bomber Harris vate secretary, who was 41 years younger recently yet again on the big screen, and it (1989) and The Sittaford Mystery (2006). than him, wrote of how exhausting it was still is.) Ward captured Churchill’s courage Other very good Churchills have been to keep up with the Prime Minister as he and adventurousness, but also his occasional Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm bounded up staircases, climbed bombsites youthful bumptiousness. (2002), which rightly picked up a Golden and marched quickly down corridors. Old- Although Warren Clarke played a cred- Globe and Emmy, and Brendan Gleeson in man catches this. Others have played what itable Churchill in the seven-part TV series Into the Storm (2009). Just as things looked Oldman calls ‘this sort of rather depressed Jennie (1974) — in which Ronald Pickup, good for Churchill on screen, however, a slew grumpy man with a cigar’, but he wanted to who is a convincing of frankly ridiculous revisionist films and TV ‘give him a bit of a twinkle in the eye’. in Darkest Hour, played Lord Randolph shows were released, which, with the war- Churchill was depicted on the silver Churchill, — the next series overshad- time generation then dead or dying, showed screen half a decade before he even became owed it. Richard Burton was perhaps too a shocking disregard for historical fact, while prime minister. The first time was in Royal handsome to play Churchill in the The still posing as that self-contradictory, want-it- Cavalcade (1935), when he was played neu- Gathering Storm (1974), but the script was both-ways beast, the ‘docudrama’. trally in the movie made to celebrate King historically accurate, whereas his off-cam- In The Crown (2016), the six-foot-four

44 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk FOCUS FEATURES

Premier performance: Gary Oldman as

John Lithgow stoops to play a semi-senile Cox played a prime minister desperate to Gary Oldman, by total contrast, has, Churchill (who was five-foot-six and cer- see D-Day fail. (Yes, you read that correct- through prosthetics, thoughtfulness and tainly not senile), who deliberately murders ly.) I counted 120 historical inaccuracies in superb acting, caught Churchill brilliantly. 12,000 Londoners by not adopting green those two hours of my life I’ll never get back. He acknowledges our preconceptions about anti-global warming measures to defeat the Churchill, and mildly co-opts them with London fog in 1952. He is also portrayed I counted 120 historical inaccuracies charm and acuity. The supporting cast — lying to the Queen about his stroke in 1953, in those two hours of my life I’ll especially Kristin Scott Thomas as Clemen- whereas she was one of the first to be told never get back tine and Sam West as — are about it. Similarly, Michael Gambon’s por- excellent too. Although there have been very trayal in Churchill’s Secret (2016) was ruined Off-camera Cox spouted a series of ludi- many other creditable Churchills — David by unhistorical twaddle. I walked out of crous views about Churchill — such as that Ryall, Mel Smith, Timothy Spall, David Cal- Quentin Tarantino’s lamentable Inglouri- he wanted to invade Germany over the Alps der and Bob Hoskins among them — Gary ous Basterds (2009) so I can’t report on Rod — which showed that he had swallowed the Oldman now joins Robert Hardy and Simon Tayor’s role as Churchill. views of the scriptwriter, Alex von Tunzel- Ward in the triumvirate of the greats. Easily the worst Churchill movie ever man, rather than doing his own research into made was Churchill (2017), in which Brian the truth about Churchill. Darkest Hour is in cinemas now. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 45 BOOKS & ARTS Exhibitions MINISTERO DEI BENI E DELLE ATTIVITÀ CULTURALI E DEL TURISMO - GALLERIA BORGHESE Living sculptures Martin Gayford

Bernini Galleria Borghese, Rome, until 4 February

Seventeenth-century Roman art at its full- blown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no art- ist was ever more Baroque than Gian Lor- enzo Bernini, the supreme maestro of the idiom. But I love his work, which is why, on a spare afternoon in Rome before Christ- mas, I strolled over to the Borghese Gallery where the largest array of Bernini sculpture ever assembled is currently on view. Admittedly, the Borghese collection already contains the world’s finest collec- tion of Bernini (1598–1680) and has done so ever since the artist’s lifetime. But on this occasion some 60 loans — including many full-scale marbles as well as paint- ings and terracotta models — have been added. Given that much of Bernini’s work is immovably attached to the fabric of Roman churches and fountains, this is probably the fullest retrospective that will ever be seen. It is a feast of creative perversity. The nature of sculpture is to be solid and static, Who else would have sculpted sunshine? Or the flames crackling under St Lawrence’s gridiron? yet Bernini was constantly trying to carve the insubstantial, fast-moving and softly yielding. That is, to make marble and metal do unsculptural things. The hand of the god Pluto, jovially abducting Proserpina, digs into her thigh in a disturbingly tac- tile manner, turning the stone into flesh. In the same way — abracadabra! — he could transform a lump of mineral into uphol- stery. His contribution to the restoration of a classical ‘Sleeping Hermaphrodite’ was a marble mattress so cushiony-looking that you feel your hand would sink into it. The thin and fibrous sling with which his David takes aim is another startling sculp- tural still life. Bernini’s ‘Cathedra Petri’ — not in the exhibition, but the focal point of the huge basilica of St Peter’s — is the apoth- eosis of a piece of furniture. The throne of the saint ascends to heaven amid cherubim ‘Apollo and Daphne’, early 1620s, by Bernini and fathers of the church in nodding bish- ops’ mitres and an explosion of clouds and rays of light. Who else would have sculpted sunshine? ing the split-second in which the god catches gers. This is a magical metamorphosis in Or had a go at carving the flames crack- the nymph — and she turns into a tree. more than one sense. ling under St Lawrence’s gridiron? ‘Apol- It’s full of things it shouldn’t be possi- Similarly, the best of Bernini’s portrait lo and Daphne’ — the masterpiece of the ble to sculpt. Daphne’s face is caught at the busts — of which the exhibition contains a Borghese’s own collection — is the most moment when her eyes dull and her fea- magnificent array — are snapshots in mar- paradoxical of all Bernini’s triumphs. Here tures freeze. Roots sprout from her toes, ble. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the great is a chunk of metamorphic rock represent- wafer-thin leaves and fronds from her fin- patron of the artist in his youth, seems to

46 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk be pausing in conversation on the point of Radio a fair and transparent pay structure’. Gra- a remark. This is what Bernini’s contempo- cie couldn’t be interviewed by her co-pre- raries meant when they praised his ‘speak- Lessons from Rwanda senter John Humphrys (who you could tell ing likenesses’. You feel you’re meeting was itching to take on the task) because this this amiable, self-indulgent fellow, almost Kate Chisholm would have broken the BBC’s strict rules on humorously far from religious austerity. impartiality, although she was later heard The same is true of the wonderful head What an incredible statement we heard on on Woman’s Hour explaining her position. of Costanza Bonarelli of around 1635, on My Perfect Country. ‘I can walk into a board- Does this muddle matter? loan from Florence. But whereas the Car- room and forget I am a woman,’ pronounced Yes. Because as a taxpayer-funded organ- dinal seems to be holding forth convivially Isabelle Masozera, a PR executive, on the isation the BBC is incredibly privileged as over the dinner table, the bust of Costan- World Service programme, which this week a broadcaster, free from commercial pres- za — a married woman with whom Bernini visited Rwanda to find out what is happen- sures. To respect that privilege it should had a long affair — is a love letter in 3D. ing there to make it qualify for ‘my perfect ensure that it not only manages its finances You feel her whole presence: the passionate country’ status. Her words hit home because with scrupulous integrity and transparen- glance, the flying hair, and just how strongly of the BBC’s current difficulties over equal cy but also behaves as a model organisa- the artist felt about her — dangerously so, pay and opportunities. tion, leading the way on equality of pay and as it turned out. It appears that the corporation has been opportunity between all employees. There A few years after he made this incom- less than speedy or judicious in its response are too many overpaid people at the Beeb parably intimate portrait, he caught her in to the revelations last year about the sub- (they must know who they are) and at the an assignation with his brother, Luigi. See- stantial differences in earnings between same time too many who would earn a lot ing them together, Bernini utterly lost it. He some of its male and female employees. more if they chose to move into the com- attempted to murder Luigi with an iron bar Badly handled, it led to the bizarre situation mercial world. A radical solution to the on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme on equal-pay dilemma would be to downgrade Bernini attempted to murder his Monday morning when one of its present- a lot of managers and celebrity presenters brother with an iron bar and had ers, Carrie Gracie, was also one of the top in favour of those who burn the midnight oil Costanza slashed with a razor stories of the day. to deliver first-class programmes to deadline She had just resigned from her job as the and on budget. Now that would truly lead and had Costanza slashed with a razor by BBC’s bureau chief in China, claiming in a the way in employer–employee relations. his servant. Pope Urban VIII forgave him letter addressed to licence-payers, which was But let’s get back to Rwanda and Ms for these crimes — the artist was far too gleefully blazoned across several newspa- Masozera. She went on to say, ‘I just pray useful to punish. But the servant was exiled pers, that her erstwhile employer ‘is break- that the world catches up with Rwanda.’ and Luigi prudently moved to Bologna for ing equality law and resisting pressure for She’s in for a long wait. As Fi Glover, Martha a while. Clearly, Bernini was capable of appalling behaviour. Another example was his treat- ment of the assistant Giuliano Finelli whose ashbournecollege.co.uk DATES: virtuoso skills produced the laurel leaves in ‘Apollo and Daphne’, not much thicker than Monday a real leaf. Bernini preferred not to acknowl- 26 March edge his contribution so Finelli, feeling slighted, left. to Friday On the other hand, Finelli’s own works Prepare 13 April are weaker versions of his master’s, while Bernini produced endless fresh ideas. For much of the 17th century Bernini was artistic dictator of papal Rome, so one could spend delightful days tracking his works through for success the city — almost all of which are still there. With set-pieces such as the ‘Fountain of the Four Rivers’, he dramatised the city like an Easter Revision 2018 inspired theatrical designer. The exhibition at the Galleria Borghese is full of pleasures, but it also hints at Bernini’s limitations. The paintings are not exciting, except for the portraits of himself. The busts of Christ intended for the artist’s tomb are downright vapid. And it is useful to see the statue of St Bibiana, which is usually locked away in an obscure church, as it shows how soppy he could be. The truth is that, although Bernini spent much of his life working for a succession of popes, serious religion feel- ing was out of his range. He could do flutter- ASHBOURNE ing angels, sensual ecstasies like that of St Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, drama Independent Sixth Form College and astounding illusions. But for deep feel- ing and sublime thinking you need to go to Tel: 020 7937 3858 [email protected] his great predecessor, Michelangelo. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 47 BOOKS & ARTS Lane Fox, Professor Henrietta Moore and Opera dle as she turns the screws on her spouse, Dr Keetie Roelen sought to explain on My but occasionally underpowered against the Perfect Country (produced by Eve Streeter), Sonic youth sheer splendour of the orchestral sound. Rwanda is a special case. After the massa- That sound, of course, was the point of cre of up to 800,000 people in 100 days dur- Richard Bratby the evening. You just knew that when the ing the civil war of 1994, men were in short fifth door opened, Sir Mark Elder and the supply. Women, who had suddenly become Duke Bluebeard’s Castle NYO would make the floor shake, and 70 per cent of the population, had to step in Barbican Hall Elder’s pacing of the opera’s single-act arc and do the work of men while bringing up was both spacious and urgent. Still, it was the their children single-handed. This genera- Rigoletto quieter details — world-weary clarinet and tion grew up only knowing a world in which Royal Opera, in rep until 16 January horn solos, quivering surges from the cellos, women are dominant, by force of circum- and the stunned fragility of those massed stance. But the government response was Everyone knows — don’t they? — that the violins in the closing bars — that gave this also far-seeing, giving women formal rights National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain performance its fever-dream immediacy, in the constitution to land, to education as is the UK’s youngest world-class symphony and showed you how profoundly Bartok’s well as the right to equal pay. The key to orchestra — an ensemble of musicians aged score had got under the skin of these teen- women’s progress in Rwanda has been this 18 and under that’s the equal of any profes- age artists. As well it might. sional band (and better than some). But it’s Meanwhile at Covent Garden, the The gender gap is closing in Rwanda also the largest, and we don’t hear enough Royal Opera played out the festive season and especially in regard to political about the sheer sonic impact of hearing 157 with David McVicar’s 2001 production of and economic participation musicians moving with absolute precision. Verdi’s Rigoletto. Superficially, at least, you Even the smallest gesture by an 87-player can see the logic of Rigoletto as a Christ- awareness that it’s not just about money: at string section has a sort of heft, a physical mas show: a juicy, handsomely dressed least 30 per cent of all decision-making jobs weight and depth that you can sense in the helping of Victorian melodrama, stuffed in the public sphere must be held by women. air around you. Overwhelming when the with hummable tunes. But any staging It’s not all positive. The Rwandan corre- whole orchestra is playing at full power, it’s that takes Verdi’s tragedy at anything like spondent Maggie Mutesi spoke to a young even more tangible in quiet passages, as if face value is going to leave an extremely female student who complained that girls you’re in the vicinity of some vast, invisible nasty aftertaste, and to his credit McVicar are still expected to marry as soon as they living creature. does nothing to sugar that. Apparently the have finished school. For a woman to get a It was a neat idea, then, for director revival director Justin Way has toned down loan from the bank, it’s much easier if a man Daisy Evans to make the orchestra into a the opening orgy at the Duke of Mantua’s goes with her. Ask a man why he beat his character in the NYO’s concert staging of court, but the sight of courtiers in gorgeous wife and he will reply, ‘Because she went out Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, namely Renaissance costumes grimly dry-humping without my permission.’ But the gender gap the massive, semi-sentient presence of the is closing in Rwanda and especially in regard Castle itself. The stage directions ask for it The smallest gesture by an 87-player to political and economic participation. We to give ‘a cavernous sigh, like night winds’, string section has a weight and depth could learn something, agreed Glover, Lane so Evans had the orchestra’s members you can sense in the air around you Fox, Moore and Roelen. produce the sound themselves, with hands Saturday afternoon’s drama on Radio 4, over mouths. Neon cables snaked between each other in the background as the Duke Offshore (directed by David Hunter), was the players’ chairs, glowing blue for tears, (Michael Fabiano) reels out his ‘Questa o an adaptation by Michael Butt of Penel- yellow for gold or red for blood. Robert quella’ certainly soured the mood pretty ope Fitzgerald’s shifting, haunting novel Hayward as Bluebeard repeatedly turned effectively. from 1979. Nenna is living on a barge on the and surveyed the immense forces behind The darkness of this production is its Thames with her two children Martha and him, shoulders slumping, and when the most striking feature. Michael Vale’s grungy Tilda after leaving her husband (or did he Third Door revealed his treasure-cham- sets concentrate the drama powerfully and leave her? It’s not entirely clear). The chil- ber, players lifted their instruments up to conductor Alexander Joel has a sharp ear dren befriend the other ‘waifs and strays’ of glint and sparkle in the coloured light. The for Verdi’s gamier orchestral colours. In that ‘the offshore brigade’ who have ended up on surtitles were accompanied by drawings setting, the soft-edged glow of Lucy Crowe’s the riverside for reasons that are never clear- of doors by Chris Riddell, and unnamed singing as Gilda stood out with intense ly stated but which become apparent, usually members of the National Youth Theatre sweetness. Andrea Mastroni’s Sparafucile through Martha and Tilda’s clear, unforgiving enthusiastically declaimed the opera’s spo- had a tone like bitumen; a brooding, Fate- perceptions. Instead of going to school, they ken prologue. like figure whose monumental presence spend their time mudlarking, seeking out It looked striking, as far as it went. With could perhaps have given the drama the res- fragments of pottery, signs of life before their Rinat Shaham standing in as Judith at short onance of Greek tragedy had the produc- existence, the river’s constant motion another notice, and (perfectly understandably) tion overall been a bit more tightly focused. symbol of constant flux and change. singing from a music stand while Hayward As Rigoletto, Dimitri Platanias was more In just under an hour of airtime this could performed entirely in character, you had alluring and charismatic — vocally at least only be a slice of Fitzgerald’s book, but Butt’s to wonder if the original intention hadn’t — than the Duke: Fabiano had power, but adaptation captured her delicious sense of been to go quite a bit further. What we got, sounded as though his voice needed a good irony (Nenna’s address is Cheyne Walk, the though, was potent. Hayward is tremen- rest. On this first weekend in January they most expensive in London, yet she’s living dous in this role: a noble ruin of a human all went at it with vigour, without really dis- in poverty on a broken-down boat), her win- soul, whose ringing, deeply expressive dec- pelling the feeling (Crowe and Mastroni some style and nebulous plotting, her evoca- lamation is undercut by the different gra- apart) that they were performing their parts tion of childhood and precise pinning-down dations of pain that move across his face. rather than connecting dramatically. Woolly of what makes us unhappy. Hattie Morahan, He can make himself look as if he’s aged ensemble from the chorus and interminable Molly Pipe and Rosie Boore excel as the two decades within a single bar of music. scene changes reinforced a distinct end-of- three female leads and there’s a deliciously Shaham’s Judith was subtler and less fierce the-holidays feeling. It seemed to be doing a watery, slippery feel to the soundscape. than some — not afraid to let her voice cur- roaring trade, anyway.

48 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk Fighting talk: Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Cinema film, best screenplay, best leading actress felt off. And it’s also just so unexpected. for McDormand, best supporting actor for The film isn’t a straightforward revenge All the rage Sam Rockwell. And this is satisfying, as it’s drama, redemption drama, or fighting-for- about a strong woman who won’t take shit justice drama. Instead, the narrative never Deborah Ross from anybody (basically) rather than, say, goes where you think it will go. Instead, some Brad blubbing about his status. (Boo it takes your narrative expectations and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, hoo, Brad; boo hoo.) Plus, in its furious way, shreds them before your eyes. Oh, that Missouri it’s also a hoot and a blast, which I never Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), 15, Nationwide thought I’d be saying about a rape movie, if head of the local police, he’s bound to be a toxic, misogynistic monster, you’re thinking Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Mis- In its furious way it’s also a hoot and to yourself. But he isn’t. (He is, as it hap- souri does, indeed, feature three billboards a blast, which I never thought I’d be pens, beloved by the town and is awarded outside Ebbing, Missouri. They have been saying about a rape movie his own poignant storyline.) That said, one placed at the roadside on the outskirts of of his officers, Dixon (Rockwell), is a vio- town by Mildred Hayes (Frances McDor- it is that. Hard to know what it is. Beyond lent, racist idiot known to beat up black mand), a middle-aged woman whose teen- ‘different’ and ‘wonderfully so’. people in custody. But he has his principles. age daughter had been raped and murdered To the plot: Mildred works in the town’s ‘So how’s it all going in the nigger-tortur- seven months earlier. The billboards read: giftshop and no one is keen on her bill- ing business, Dixon?’ Mildred asks him. ‘Raped While Dying’; ‘And Still No Arrests’; boards. Her husband, who has run off with ‘You can’t say that!’ he exclaims, genuine- ‘How Come, Chief Willoughby?’ Mildred is a younger woman, isn’t keen on them. ly offended. ‘You gotta say persons of col- grieving, in pain and a ball of fury. But not The local priest who pays a visit, stupidly our-torturing business!’ But Dixon doesn’t your regular, everyday ball of fury. She is a — she rounds on him, in her magnificent, go where you expect him to go. Instead, ball of fury of the most magnificent, unstop- unstoppable fury — isn’t keen on them. McDonagh prods him in a surprising and pable kind. If only she could go after every Her son wants her to move on but she interesting direction. rapist from now on. I’d certainly sleep bet- won’t — can’t. ‘Oh, great, we’re going the All the performances are excellent, but ter in my bed. rape-dying route,’ he says, as they’re about this was expressly written for McDormand, Written, directed and produced by the to drive past them. It is often blisteringly who owns it, and who is a wonder to behold, Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (In Bru- funny, which is why it’s also a hoot, but it’s as she tears fearlessly into the script. Mil- ges, Seven Psychopaths), the film recently never funny at the expense of what might dred’s dialogue is supremely curse-laden — won four awards at the Golden Globes: best be hurting anyone. The comic lines never ‘hey, fuckhead,’ is how she might address a the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 49 BOOKS & ARTS police officer — yet the profanity becomes ered all the more wrenching. entirely. Again, the idea that most Muslims a kind of poetry. She wears a focused scowl, Faced with the crisis, her bosses soon are very nice, and that it’s a shame about and only smiles the once (I think; it was snapped into action, denouncing her deci- the few who aren’t, can’t be called terrify- weird), but as harsh as she can be, you know sion to set up the visit as ‘bold’ and hanging ingly controversial. Yet, Next of Kin shows Mildred has a broken heart under there. her out to dry. Meanwhile, the newspapers every sign not merely of shaping it into a It does fall apart slightly in the third act, went on the attack with their usual mix of proper thriller, but also of allowing it to when it becomes a bit cartoonish, and peo- head-shaking sorrow and badly disguised emerge from a thoroughly imagined family ple can throw other people out of windows glee, as they accused Miriam of ‘ticking all story, rather than imposing it on one. without consequences. And I would also add the leftie boxes’ by putting Kiri’s supposed that we are never asked to consider the pain cultural needs above her safety. Mildred inflicts, which is considerable, just as Fortunately, the programme itself is Theatre we’re never asked to question her own taste much more nuanced than that, with the for violence. (Tip: if you’re a dentist and you ‘issues’ side of things never overshadow- Lost in space ever find Mildred in your chair, don’t piss ing the human story, and the main charac- Lloyd Evans her off.) But as a film that puts a middle- ters permitted to be a complicated lot. By aged woman centre stage, and allows her to the end of Wednesday’s episode, in fact, Mir- kick ass, it has to be terrific. There should be iam had turned into something resembling a The Twilight Zone more Mildreds. Then we’d all sleep better in classic whisky priest: drinking heavily, mor- Almeida, until 27 January our beds. ally compromised but somehow still appear- ing to be on the side of the angels. Pinocchio Jack Thorne’s script also has an obvious Lyttelton Theatre, until 10 April Television sympathy with social workers, whose mis- takes may not outnumber other people’s The Grinning Man Thinking outside the box but generally matter far more. Even her Trafalgar Studios, until 14 April James Walton boss acknowledged that Miriam’s decisions, however bold, were right 99 per cent of the The Twilight Zone, an American TV show time — a strike rate most of us would settle from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost These days a genuinely controversial TV for. Luckily, I’m pretty confident I’ll increase story for the age of space exploration. drama series would surely be one with an mine by suggesting that Kiri will be among Director Richard Jones has collaborat- all-white, male-led cast that examined the the TV highlights of the winter. (Luckily, too, ed with Anne Washburn to turn several problems of a bunch of middle-class peo- if I’m wrong, my error probably won’t be on TV episodes into a single play. Eight epi- ple. (Just imagine the Twitter outrage!) But the evening news.) sodes in all. Way too many. The structure while we await that — possibly for a while And the same could well apply to ITV’s is designed to bamboozle us from the start. yet — we’ve now got two highly promising Next of Kin. This began on Monday with Some of the storylines have been broken new shows of the more approved ‘contro- Mona Harcourt, a saintly doctor, looking up and are placed episodically throughout versial’ kind: where racial issues are tackled forward to the return of her brother, a saintly the piece, while others are preserved as in a thoughtful and scrupulously responsi- doctor, who’d been running a medical char- units and delivered whole. Even the most ble way. ity in Pakistan. To welcome him back, Mona keen-eyed viewer gets flummoxed by this Kiri (Channel 4, Wednesday) has the laid on a surprise party with her extended distinct advantage of starring Sarah Lanca- family, who took a bit of untangling but duly Played at midnight to an audience of shire, whose character Miriam proves that turned out to be a careful cross-section of drunks, the show would succeed. TV mavericks needn’t always be doctors, British Muslims, from a traditional matri- For about five minutes lawyers or cops. They can, it seems, also be arch to a mini-skirted lesbian sister. social workers. So it was that Miriam was But when Mona’s somewhat underwrit- mystery. Among the storylines that baf- first seen adding something a little stronger ten husband (Jack Davenport as the male fled me were: a cop quizzes some strand- to her breakfast coffee. She then headed out version of all those sweetly supportive TV ed bus passengers to find out which is an into Bristol to show what an all-round good wives we used to get) opened the front door alien; a little girl vanishes through a worm- egg she is: delivering a present of sausages and the family leapt up to shout ‘Surprise!’, hole in space-time; a man is haunted by a to a local crack addict, and telling a teenage the person they greeted wasn’t Kareem. lack of sleep; a group of airmen returning boy who’d just broken a girl’s arm that he Instead, it was a policemen bringing news from a mission discover that two or three was really a great kid. of what we already knew from the first of (or perhaps just one) of them have been Her next task, though, didn’t go as the episode’s memorably powerful scenes: airbrushed out of newspaper reports. A smoothly. Nine-year-old Kiri was about to Kareem had been kidnapped by jihadi fight- group of angry neighbours fight over the be adopted by a middle-class white cou- ers on the way to Lahore airport. Not only last berth in a bomb shelter during a nucle- ple — but before that happened, Miriam that, but the policeman also seemed interest- ar attack. thought the girl should be reminded of her ed in talking to Kareem’s absent son Danny The show looks cheap and flimsy and it roots by paying an unsupervised visit to in connection with a recent bomb in Lon- aims for an atmosphere of goofy pastiche. her black paternal grandparents. (And if don — a bomb that had increased the sense There are lots of gags involving silly props you haven’t seen the programme yet, you of Islamophobia felt by that lovely grand- and mysteriously vanishing cigarettes. One may want to look away now.) Kiri was then mother in particular. And from there, Archie of the actors specialises in an ‘amusing’ apparently abducted from their house, Panjabi’s terrific central performance per- laugh. Played at midnight to an audience with her granddad’s connivance, by her fectly captured both Mona’s confidence in of drunks, the show would succeed. For birth father, who has convictions for GBH her family’s status as fully accepted Brits about five minutes. Then it would stale. The and drug-dealing. Even when the girl’s dis- and the effort that she sometimes had to running time is two-and-a-half hours. I’ve appearance made the Six O’Clock News, make to retain it. seen a few muddles posing as dramas at the Miriam still thought everything would But if I’m making it sound as if the pro- Almeida but this is one of the hardest to end well — which only made Lancashire’s gramme is simply doing some box-ticking disentangle. stricken face when the body was discov- of its own, then that wouldn’t fair. Or not Pinocchio is the story of a genial car-

50 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk MARC BRENNER

Missing in action: Cosmo Jarvis and Oliver Alvin-Wilson in The Twilight Zone at the Almeida

penter who carves a toy out of a plank of the show’s pace to slow motion. Few in the There’s plenty of material here for a wood. The toy, Pinocchio, is possessed by a audience cared much for these conceptual romantic fairy tale but the story has anoth- single ambition: to dispense with his wood- own goals. My son, aged 11, hailed the show er layer of narrative complexity. The setting en nature and become a human being like as ‘brilliant’ and ‘nearly as good as Aladdin’. is a pastiche version of Regency London his creator. Arranging the puppetry for this I should add that he spent a fair amount of where a decrepit king, Clarence XII, lies on script must be the easiest task in showbusi- time nudging me and asking me in whispers his deathbed. His children are a set of bick- ness: Pinocchio should be represented by a if I wasn’t bored. ering egomaniacs who indulge in incestu- puppet and the human characters should be Victor Hugo’s novel The Grinning Man ous orgies at the palace while tussling over represented by human beings. John Tiffa- has been turned into a hit musical by Bristol the right to succeed their father. One of the ny’s production at the National reverses this royal princes visits the circus and becomes set-up. The humans are played by puppets. A flimsy piece of apparatus manages enraptured by Grinpayne’s frozen smile. And Pinocchio, the puppet, is played by a to replicate a wolf’s furtive and The two stories cross-fertilise and we jump human being who wears nothing but skimpy sinuous menace between the power games at the palace and breeches, as if to remind the audience that Grinpayne’s quest to identify his childhood he’s made of flesh and blood rather than Old Vic. Now it arrives in the West End. The assailant. The changes of gear are a little timber. All rather puzzling. central character, Grinpayne, is an orphan bumpy and Grinpayne’s desire to win the To make things even more topsy-turvy, who was attacked in infancy by an unknown heart of Dea is never seriously threatened. the puppets on stage (who represent human thug who left him with a hideous grin plas- But the show works very well as a musical. characters) dominate the action. Physically, tered across his face. Grinpayne is discovered The tunes are strong, the singing is excel- these mannequins are huge, like weather- by a sweet-natured impresario who exhib- lent. And the puppetry, modest in scale, is balloons, with vast immobile faces and gan- its him to paying audiences. With them is a superb. gly limbs operated by levers manipulated beautiful blind child, Dea, whom Grinpayne Mojo the wolf is the latest achievement by shuffling assistants. They seem to drift falls in love with. They’re joined by a slaver- from Gyre and Gimble (who created War in midair like beach balls caught in a wind- ing wolf, Mojo, who at first threatens but later Horse). Two actors using a flimsy piece of spiral. Their faces, incapable of movement, befriends them. Grinpayne’s mission is to dis- apparatus manage to replicate a wolf’s fur- are unable to convey changes of mood or cover the identity of the criminal who disfig- tive and sinuous menace. Mojo may not be sentiment and their lack of vitality reduces ured him and to win the heart of Dea. very cuddly but the effect is astonishing. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 51 NOTES ON … A Gyptian weekend By Juliet Rix

hilip Pullman’s latest missal, La Belle ISTOCK bump) in beside it at lock after lock (ensur- Sauvage, once again features the boat- ing water is never wasted by unnecessary Pdwelling Gyptians. Rough and hon- openings). We in turn teach the newbies ourable, they emerge from the waterways behind us. And everyone takes their turn of Brytain to help the heroine Lyra, before at the windlass. The ways of the water are disappearing back to their watery world, quickly entrenched so a single failure to one that runs through Lyra’s, but is separate co-operate by another boat jars terribly. and different from it. After a long weekend We wave, get steering tips (you have on the canals in the heart of Britain, I feel no control when reversing), play boat- I have been drifting in Pullman’s wake. to-boat catch (and canal-to-boathook ‘Just steer her in here,’ says the boatman. retrieval), share tree-fresh apples from a We are new to the canals, so he is taking us lock-side ‘help yourself’ box, race (at a daring through the first lock. ‘Straight in’. He must 5 mph), and chat as we rise or fall between be joking: only one lock gate is open. The Canals and calm: Enjoying life in the slow lane close stone walls. There are constant sto- gap is about six inches wider than the boat. ries: the ferret-owning barefoot boatie; the But his weathered face is completely straight age is not: physical, controllable, perfectly ancient canal-side drovers road; the giant — and completely calm. Deep breath. designed technology… and unchanging. reptiles that once roamed the region — now We make it into the lock without dam- It is easy to imagine the 19th-century fossilised in the blue lias limestone through age. Our boatman disappears up the tow- families whose lives were lived on the canals. which the Stockton Locks are cut. path, and we are alone on the canal. First And the canal equivalent of Land Girls — We are quickly absorbed into canal life we have to slow down. Having boarded our the so-called Idle Women, unfairly named — more so than we realise until we are jolt- smart green-painted narrowboat at Kate for their IW (Inland Waterways) badges — ed back into the terrestrial world. Leav- Boats on the outskirts of Birmingham, our who 75 years ago hauled open these same ing the boat, we cut through the hedgerow route hugs that of HS2. The train will soon lock gates. Usefully unnoticed, they dragged and up a mud path to find ourselves on a whizz passengers to London in 49 minutes. 50-tonne loads along this wartime lifeline six-lane road bridge. I stand shocked, like By boat, it would take us a fortnight. between Birmingham and London. a newly landed alien, as cars blast past, Fortunately, there is something medita- Though it’s half a century since the last horns hoot, traffic lights flash. tive about steering gently along a narrow working boat passed this way, the Inland How did we not know? All this, just channel flanked with hedgerows. Locks, Waterways still have their own camarade- feet from our parallel world wending its of course, are not meditative. But they are rie. We are taught the unwritten rules by peaceful way through an oblivious Britain satisfying. They are everything the digital the boat ahead which waits for us to slip (or — or Brytain.

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52 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk

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54 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk ‘When a woman brings a tiny urn, my husband mutters “The Ashes!” and poses for a photograph holding them’ — Tanya Gold, p62

High life Alistair always got that way before starting ing — as articulate as ever while under the one of his books, but skiing and wine and the influence, looking always the English gent in Taki talk about women helped him unwind. his tweeds — in a simple wooden hut high The mysterious Dmitri Nabokov was up in the Alps. Straight out of Conan Doyle, among the best-looking men ever. He was actually. Natacha would fret about iotas, the only son of the great Vladimir, and a and Dmitri would head back down to places close friend of the Buckleys, as were his unknown to us. Alistair Horne was the last parents who lived 45 minutes away in Mon- to die last year. Bill went eight years ago, and treux. Dmitri was an opera singer, a racing Dmitry about six. Natacha died 15 years ago driver and a novelist, but one who wrote after losing a son. Niven left us in 1984. under a pseudonym that none of us ever Gstaad has changed and there are no discovered. One of the games I played with bookstores or writers around. Those charm- Gstaad him was to announce that I had found out ing huts that served simple food and chilled What I miss most up here in the Alps are the his pen name, and blurt out ‘Romain Gary’ white wine have gone upmarket; you need literary lunches conducted on the fly with or, if drunk, ‘Grace Metalious’, the bestsell- to show a bank balance to get in. I now lunch writers like Bill Buckley, Alistair Horne, ing female author of Peyton Place. I almost at home and occasionally up at the club. Natacha Stewart, occasionally Dmitri Nabok- got hit for that one. Things ain’t what they used to be. ov and, yes, movie star and memoirist par David Niven would tell us stories about excellence David Niven. This was back in the Hollywood, and so when his great bestsell- late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, during ing The Moon’s a Balloon was published, Low life the winter months and in between ski runs. the joke among us was that we should not Bill would ring early in the morning and sug- waste any time even opening it as we had Jeremy Clarke gest a run somewhere, then he’d pick an inn in the vicinity where we’d meet David and Bill Buckley suggested I go back to Natacha, two non-skiers, and that was that. school and learn proper English usage Buckley always referred to me as Führer — once on the slopes, of course — as I would heard every single story — sometimes more go down first, followed by him and Alistair than once. When my first book, The Greek Horne, the two not always steady on their Upheaval, was published in the UK by Tom skis, and at times more out of than in control. Stacey and in the US by a publisher who Once we were safely down, the fun began. went broke almost immediately, the book- Natacha wrote for the New Yorker, in the store on Gstaad’s main street — yes, there By New Year’s Day I’d had enough of festiv- days when it was a well-written weekly and was a bookstore, long before it became a ities. Instead of getting out of bed, I turned not the race- and transgender-obsessed left- luxury-goods store attended by high-class over, put my face to the wall and refused ie vehicle of today. Her main gripe was the hookers — showcased it and my moment of all offers of food, drink and conversation. editing. She would not permit ‘an iota to be triumph had arrived. In fact, the book with I kept this up throughout the day and into changed’, which made me envy her as if she my name on its cover was in the middle, the evening, when I had to get up to go to were Ava Gardner (an obsession of mine shadowed by one by Bill Buckley and by a the toilet. Asked for an explanation of such back then). I was writing for National Review, bestseller predicting the crash of capitalism childish behaviour, I blamed the wind — a Bill’s baby, and I had been told that my stuff by 1979. (Close but no cigar, as communism cold, violent Mistral that had been blowing was heavily edited — the second most edited collapsed in 1989, but what’s ten years where since Christmas Eve. copy in the magazine behind that of a Ger- oracles are concerned.) The cypresses were still twirling and bow- man intellectual with a double-barrelled The lunches were literary, but no one ing the next day. Though not yet restored name. Bill suggested I go to school again and touched upon what I wanted to hear and enough to dance the Gay Gordons, I felt learn proper English usage, or try to learn learn from: things like rhythm and idioms, a bit more sociable, and in the evening we by listening to the sound of good English. I and pauses and innuendos. Bill wrote a went out. A neighbour, Professor Brian Cox, immediately chose the second option. novel each winter based on a CIA operative had invited us over to his house to play the Alistair Horne preferred to talk about who had a one-night stand with the Queen board game Escape From Colditz. He and history, as he was a historian, and always of England, Queen Caroline. His novels his family have developed a passion for the went back to the Greek civil war of 1944– were based on plot and action, and there game and they thought I might be a poten- 51. ‘Taahki, you should try that. You already wasn’t much dialogue or suspension of real tial convert. When we arrived, the board, know so much about it,’ he’d sweetly suggest speech to learn from. Never mind, they were depicting a bird’s-eye view of Colditz cas- to me as the first bottle of white wine was the best lunches ever because Buckley was tle and environs, was unfolded on the din- opened. Then he’d clam up and look nervous always in a hurry, so we’d down a couple of ing-room table. Drinks were issued. Then as hell if the word Chile came up. He was bottles of wine and then hit a Pflümli or two, we gathered around it and Professor Cox due to start his history of the fall of Allen- the Swiss grappa that supposedly makes hair explained the rules of the game. de after the skiing, and it made him terri- grow on one’s chest. He once explained Einstein’s theory of bly depressed. The book was a success and Back then we skied better and faster after relativity to me in 20 minutes over a risot- I loved the title, Small Earthquake in Chile. drinking. Niven would stay behind reminisc- to and I almost — I say almost— grasped the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 55 LIFE it. I might not have been on the same page The Coxes fell silent. Mrs Cox lifted a cold air into the rest of the house, a cruel as him come the end, but I was on the right satirical Teutonic eyebrow. The timing and internal wind of failure. bus to the library. The rules of Escape From speed of my chap’s escape was unprece- I tried drilling a screw into the board with Colditz, however, are much more complex dented in the history of the board game of the hand drill but it just jiggled and popped than Einstein’s theory of relativity and prob- Escape From Colditz, apparently, wheth- out, and I was on the verge of giving up and ably disprove it. Even physicist, astronomer er those games were played here on plan- either calling the keeper, Stefano the Alba- and cosmologist Professor Brian Cox con- et Earth or in a parallel universe, of which nian, or possibly even asking the builder boy- fessed that he hadn’t quite yet got his head there could be an infinite number. If the friend to take me back, when I suddenly had around them. But he patiently outlined rules hadn’t stipulated TWO escapers to the idea to try a screwdriver. them to me as far as the limits of his current claim victory, the game would have been This worked a treat. I should have known, research and understanding allowed. Basi- over right there and then. low tech is my thing. With my loft corridor cally, there are three escape teams of ten newly closed up, the house was draft-free and prisoners (coloured wooden counters) and toasty warm, and I settled down to think what someone has to be the Nazis (black coun- Real life else I could do myself. ters). This is always Mrs Cox because she After nailing up a few paintings to hide likes to be the Nazis. Whether she likes to Melissa Kite holes in walls I can’t afford to plaster, I tried be the Nazis in spite of her staunchly pro- to unblock the main drain under a huge man- gressive outlook in real life or because of it I hole cover on the patio and, pounded by wind didn’t ask. Either way, she threw herself into and rain, promptly fell into it. the role of a cold-hearted camp Komman- Well, I can build up to engineering. The dant, even as she passed the nibbles around. main thing was that I had my resolve: the new The movements of both prisoners and year would mean fewer disasters and more guards are determined by the roll of two competence all round. dice. If you throw a double you throw again. I set off in good spirits for a weekend at a Before making a dash for it, prisoners must friend’s house on a country estate in Hamp- assemble a collection of items, such as rope, ‘Not being rude, but I don’t think you should shire, and after a relaxing couple of days got keys, wire cutters and false papers, hidden do any DIY,’ said the gamekeeper. into the Volvo to come home and promptly at various locations within the castle walls, He had just witnessed me make chicken drove straight over a stone marking out the and concoct a plan. In the outwitting of the soup by liquidising a boiled chicken carcass driveway. The front driver-side tyre, one of guards, prisoner escape committees can co- then pressing all the wrong buttons on the operate. Also, players are encouraged to liquidiser, so detaching the bottom of the No more Cinderella complex. No practise duplicity of every conceivable sort jug from the jug rather than releasing the more male rescuers needed when dealing publicly or privately with the jug from the machine, sending a deluge of player who has chosen to be the Nazis. This soup downwards on to the kitchen counter four new Continentals fitted three weeks ago, last overriding rule of the game struck me and floor. duly burst open, and as I got out of the car a as amazingly anarchic and perhaps the final Cydney was standing below, ever hopeful, loud hissing confirmed that I had shredded it. nail in the coffin of Christian civilisation. As so as the cascade of soup splashed on to the The car sat on the rim, the tyre utter- I mentally grappled with it, the needle on spaniel’s head she simply tilted herself to gar- ly deflated. I felt the same. The wait for the the dial showing my post-Christmas brain gle down the rain of good fortune. RAC was three hours and my new policy of storage capacity leant hard over into the red, The keeper, who had popped in for a doing everything for myself only got me as and perhaps there was a faint smell of burn- coffee, had been listening to me excitedly far as opening the boot and peering at the ing, because the Cox family kindly said that, reciting my plan to finish the house myself huge metal hoojamaflip that winds the spare well, perhaps it would be best if we started by doing all the outstanding work bit by bit tyre down from the undercarriage. playing the game. All being well, I would with my own fair hands, no matter how many I pulled the thing out of its casing and pick things up as we went along. years it took me. flung it about to no avail. What was worse, So away we went. During the first round I would drill, hammer and paint my way the keeper couldn’t help me now. I was miles of dice throws, the disciplined Nazi guards to glory, I told the keeper, finally sorting out from his jurisdiction. Luckily, my friend knew fanned out to cover the escape routes; Pro- my life for myself, with no help from anyone. the keeper there and was on the phone to fessor Cox’s senior British officer headed No more Cinderella complex. No more male him immediately. for the shower block; and mine followed him rescuers needed. When a Kubota hoved into view and two in. Pressed by Professor Cox for an expla- ‘Right you are,’ said the keeper, then men in camouflage got out, I knew I was nation of my apparently futile and slavish added: ‘So do you want me to drill that piece saved. move, I said that my man was celebrity-mad of plaster board in front of the loft entrance ‘How come gamekeepers are the only and wanted to serve him as his vassal. or not?’ people who can fix anything?’ I asked the The next time the dice were passed to ‘Yes, obviously…’ I checked myself. ‘No. keeper by text as the other keeper changed me, I threw a whopping 27 with three con- It’s fine. I can do that myself. Soup?’ I had my tyre. secutive doubles. His advances spurned, my swilled as much as possible into a pan. Waste ‘What have you done now?’ he asked. I Senior British Officer ran pell-mell through not, want not. The keeper grimaced as I told him. ‘You’re unbelievable,’ came the the fortress and flung himself at an outside sloshed liquid chicken with my bare hands reply. ‘Put me on the phone to him and I’ll wall, which he scaled with the aid of two across the counter and into the pan: ‘No, thank him.’ Evidently, there is some unspo- ropes. In the full glare of a searchlight he thank you.’ ken code between keepers. When one then dashed across the moat, snipped his Later, after I had cleared up the rest of keeper’s friend gets into trouble in another way through the perimeter fence with a pair the soup, which had leaked into every crevice keeper’s jurisdiction, a form of diplomatic of stolen wire cutters and made a success- of the worktops — at least my new kitchen immunity kicks in. ful dash for the undergrowth. He was home smells homey — I hauled the piece of board In any case, the Hampshire keeper was all and dry and languidly filing off a hang- into place in front of the corridor leading to smiles, and sent me on my way to drive back nail before anyone else, either prisoner or the loft I cannot now afford to convert, and to Surrey on the space-saver at 40mph, begin- guard, had moved a muscle. whose non-insulated roof consequently leaks ning 2018 as I will no doubt go on.

56 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk Wild life cobweb across our path in which a bee was Bridge trapped alive. As I waited, the man spoke Aidan Hartley softly to the creature and used the point of Susanna Gross his spear to gently cut it out of its silk prison — and only when it had been liberated were we allowed to proceed. My friend Neil Mendoza and I had a great fin- Our hives will shortly begin to produce ish to 2017 when we won the Portland Club’s hundreds of kilos of honey and my plan is to annual Auction Pairs (which is always a high- supply raw honey, propolis (a natural rem- light of my year). I can’t pretend we had any edy that supposedly boosts your immunity real expectation of winning, but a combination and a substance used to varnish Stradivarius of good luck, good play and flawless bidding violins) and bee venom to the organic honey by Neil meant we scooped the £8,000 jackpot Kenya business run by Charlie’s father, my friend (actually we only got half, as Stuart Wheeler First comes a distant hum, rising in volume Andrew Wright. To discuss business, this had bought 50 per cent of us). until I hear it coming straight at me like week I visited Andrew’s honey and kombu- Since then, alas, things have been slip- Niki Lauda behind the wheel of his Ferrari. cha shop in the old coastal town of Malindi, ping downhill: I had a poor result with David The blue sky darkens. I duck as swarming tucked away behind the fish market, near Gold at the Year End mixed pairs, and last bees zoom overhead, trailing their queen. the old pillar erected by Vasco da Gama. It Sunday, a solid beating at the Young Chel- They are gone again in a second, coiling off sea’s ‘pivot’ teams. Time to buck up for 2018! in a shadowy murmuration across the veldt. I had developed hives all over my On Sunday, amid a host of poor decisions, After the rains, several swarms hurtle over body, my ears had swelled shut and I this hand sticks most in mind. My partner us daily looking for homes, criss-crossing in was fire-engine red and I had an early misunderstanding in the air. defence, and the declarer, Tim Gould, made When bees nest in our farmstead walls we was time for my January detox, so no booze a brilliant play to ensure we carried on down leave them be. Anybody who has had bees — and to clean out my system I drank one of the wrong track: live under the eaves will know how cosy it is Andrew’s papaya-leaf kombuchas and pur- to lie in bed at night, listening to the sopo- chased a pot of prickly-pear honey. Andrew Dealer South N/S vulnerable rific thrum of countless beating wings. When provides bee-venom therapy for the afflict- z 4 bees swarm in the kitchen or chimney, burn- ed and declaring that this was just the thing y 9 8 6 ing two or three large turds of desiccated ele- for my detox, I asked him to sting me. ‘Raise X A J 8 3 phant dung produces a cloud of smoke with your shirt,’ Andrew said and with tweezers w Q J 10 5 3 the aroma of incense, Montecristo and pachy- he applied beestings in two spots on my derm bowel — and the insects swiftly vacate. back. This, I sensed as the pain spread, was z 8 7 Laikipia is honey country. Honey from making me feel better already. An hour later z 10 9 5 3 grass blossom is clear as water, honey from at home I had developed hives all over my y A K 10 7 5 N y J 2 X 7 4 W E forest flowers reaches almost black, but the body, my ears had swelled shut and I was S X 10 9 5 2 finest is honey from jasmine-scented wait-a- fire-engine red. I felt there was no point w K 9 7 4 w A 8 6 bit thorn, which blossoms in the driest weeks driving back to see a doctor because I would before the rains, making the landscape be too late. ‘Andrew,’ I said on the phone, z A K Q J 6 2 resemble a peach orchard in spring, or a for- ‘I think I have anaphylaxis.’ ‘Drink two big y Q 4 3 est after snowfall. For years I have bought tots of vodka,’ he said. ‘Whisky?’ ‘That will X K Q 6 honey from our neighbour Gilfrid Powys. He do.’ It was half-a-litre of Jameson’s and a w 3 tended hundreds of beehives on his ranch bottle of blush before the hives passed. and on Christmas Eve he kindly gave me a My New Year’s detox was over, but I West North East South present of two large pots of his best honey. toasted Gilfrid embarking on his great 1z Three days later an elephant killed Gilfrid camel trek across the constellations — and 2y Dble pass 4z and this signals the passing of an era. He was all the bees of Laikipia. All pass a giant figure in Kenya, a great Boran cattle rancher, aviator, conservationist, aficionado Sitting West, I led the yK. Normally, the of camels and rare aloes. Among his many king asks partner to give ‘count’ in the suit attributes that his neighbours will miss, he — but some people prefer to give ‘attitude’ was a beekeeper. signals, and my partner thought that’s what It was Gilfrid who inspired me to keep we’d agreed. So on my yK he played the y2 bees and more than a year ago we start- (‘reverse’ attitude: encouraging). I continued ed several dozen brood hives on the farm. with the yA. My partner followed with the yJ, A young beekeeper, Charlie, came to help and South (Tim), with no hesitation whatso- me set these up and through him I began to ever, played his yQ! Clearly, he was the only learn the basics. Sweating in my heavy bee one who knew what was going on. Now, con- suit, I was fascinated to watch Charlie and vinced that my partner had started with yJ42, Leshomo, one of our Samburu stockmen, I assumed the yJ was a suit-pretence signal, work without gloves or any protection as showing the XK. It was vital, then, to switch to they opened the hives to check on brood a diamond. If I played my winning y10, declar- combs. Their skin crawled with bees yet they er might ruff, draw trumps and play wA and were hardly stung. In the past year I have another club for a diamond discard. Of course been stung multiple times, until I felt I was that was exactly what Tim wanted: he won the building a resistance like my friends who diamond in hand, drew trumps, and discarded are entirely comfortable with bees. Walking his club on the fourth diamond. with a Samburu elder one day, we found a Things can only get better… the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 57 LIFE Chess Competition On speed First thoughts Raymond Keene Lucy Vickery

Although it does not have the prestige of the Diagram 2 In Competition No. 3030 you were invited to Classical World Championship (to be staged in provide a poem entitled ‘January’. London in November), the Rapid and Blitz WDk4WDW4 I mentioned William Carlos Williams, championships recently concluded in Saudi R.S. Thomas and Dante Gabriel Rossetti Arabia carried not just worthy titles, but an 0pDWDp0p in the brief for this challenge, all of whom impressive overall prize fund of $2 million. W1WDpDWD wrote poems with ‘January’ as their title. Viswanathan Anand emerged victorious in the But that most maligned of months also Rapid, while Magnus Carlsen dominated the DWDW)WDN lands a starring role in the opening stanza Blitz. The only fly in the ointment was the refusal to grant visas to Israeli players, an omission WDPhW)WD of George Barker’s charming poem ‘Janu- excoriated by Carlsen. This week, key extracts ary Jumps About’: ‘January jumps about/ in from play in both championships. gWhPDWDP the frying pan/ trying to heat/ his frozen feet/ P)W$W!PD like a Canadian…’ McShane-Anand, Riyadh Rapid 2017 Freezing temperatures were very much IWGWDBDR on your minds, too, and for hot-flush-rid- WDWDWDWD den Jayne Osborn they are a cause for cel- DWDWDW0k ebration. The winners printed below are is easily winning for Black. 28 g3 b5 29 rewarded with £25. Chris O’Carroll is over- WDWDq0WD cxb5 Rd4 White resigns all champ and earns £30.

DWDWDWDp Carlsen-Karjakin, Riyadh Blitz 2017 One face surveys the long, cold month behind, pGWDWDW) One contemplates the deep, short freeze ahead. rDbDW4kD Too much of nature on your watch, you find, )WDWDQ)W Is more than metaphorically dead. 0W0W1p0W WDWDWDNI W0nDWDW0 Yours is the standstill at the end and start: DrDWDWDW The pied, bright spring will flourish from this ice; DW0WDWDQ Refreshed from every flower’s fragrant heart, WDWDP$WD The air will soften as it wells with spice; The veteran new champion strikes with a bolt From silver frost a golden sun will climb, from the blue against a leading British DWDPGNDP Gilding green pastures, warming every beach; grandmaster and winner of the recent UK P)PDWDPD The crops and herds will fatten in their time, Knockout Championship. 51 ... Qh3+! 52 Full of those lessons plenty has to teach; Kxh3 Rh1 mate DWDWDRIW But once brief bounty has been stored away, Karjakin-Esipenko, Riyadh Rapid 2017 The harsher lessons learned from scarcity (see diagram 2) 19 ... Be6 19 ... g5 would trap the white rook Will loom; the cold truth of the shortest day but the weakening of the black kingside allows Will dim the world your backward gaze can see. The defending champion is poleaxed by a blow White to break through with an amazing Chris O’Carroll which would have gladdened the heart of Frank sacrificial sequence: 20 Rh4!! gxh4 21 Bxh6 Marshall, who crushed Levitsky with an Bd7 and now the incredible 22 Bg7!! wins, the Of January wary be! unexpected Queen sacrifice at Breslau 1912. main point being 22 ... Kxg7 23 Ng5 Rh8 24 The fairy on the Christmas tree According to Marshall, his coup was greeted with Rxf7+. 20 Rh4 f6 21 Qg6 Qf7 21 ... Bf7 was Can wave no more her magic wand, a shower of gold coins by the onlookers. the best defensive try. 22 Qg3 Nb4 23 Bxh6 She’s in the loft, she won’t respond. 22 ... Qb3 23 bxc3 23 axb3 Nxb3 is a beautiful Nxc2 24 Ne5 fxe5 Giving up the queen is A cold east wind from Europe blows mate. 23 ... Qxc3+ 24 Bb2 Bxb2+ 25 Rxb2 hopeless but so is 24 ... Qe7 25 Ng6. 25 Rxf7 But what it augurs no one knows, Qc1+ 26 Rb1 Nc2+ 27 Qxc2 Qxc2 With a Rxf7 26 Qg6 Bxa2 27 Bg5 Rff8 28 Rh7 It bites the ears and seems to moan ‘We’ll freeze you out. You’re on your own.’ queen against just two minor pieces, the position Rf7 29 Bf6 Black resigns Then, turning to the west, we hear The Mighty Trump sound loud and clear: A wild, discordant blast that hails PUZZLE NO. 488 More vehement storms and violent gales; WDWDWDkD This month bodes ill but all’s not lost, The spring might yet unfreeze the frost, Black to play. This is from Carlsen-Anand, Riyadh 0bDW1W0p And kinder months are on their way, Rapid 2017. The needle clash from the Rapid was There’s always hope, there’s always May! Anand’s destruction of Carlsen. What was Black’s WDWhWDWD Alan Millard key move? Answers to me at The Spectator by DWHrDpDW Tuesday 16 January or via email to victoria@ Cooler month, you find us huddled spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first W!pDWDWD In the ashes, ex-Noelled; Overhung, contrite and muddled correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal )WDW)W)W Needing Christmas fog dispelled. address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. WGWDW)W) Mark our faces, whitened, ashen, Last week’s solution 1 … Qxc6 DW$WDWIW Pull us up and set us straight. Last week’s winner Malcolm Burn, Tuffley, January, with compassion Gloucester Save us from this chastened state.

58 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk LIFE

Back to work now firmly send us; 123456789 Pay no heed to our complaints. Crossword With new discipline amend us, 2341: 10 Set our boundaries, cast constraints. Durum, Durum 11 12 Slowly then, reveal your glory: 13 14 15 Longer days to which we cling; by Doc Month of firsts, renew our story, 16 17 18 19 Send us hopeful into spring. The unclued lights (one of two Paul Carpenter 20 21 22 words) are of a kind. 23 24 January now. It should be cold, Freezing breath and slippery underfoot Across 1 Confines at convenience 25 26 27 28 With frost and hoary leaves in every fold stores (5) Of earth, its hard and wizened face like soot 29 30 4 Prison visitor, not in Where spiders’ webs and scattered dirt streak out Rolls Royce, sadly places From corners where the hose has splashed in 31 32 33 eggs for fertilization (9) pots. 11 Over half the train to 34 35 But still the soil is soft and through it sprout Dover isn’t broad-gauge The sturdy spears of daffodils and knots (6) 36 37 Of tiny seedlings. Still the cannas stand 14 Range of school note (5) Erect and green, like loyal sentries fixed 38 15 I left seafood dish for old On duty as the seasons’ change is spanned, highwayman (5) And autumn’s death and spring’s new life are 39 40 16 German philosopher and mixed. literary critic who tends But who knows what the morning light will the flock (6) show — 22 Decide against having 7 Deflecting stroke made A first prize of £30 for the first Cold sexton winter still could bring us snow. completed the crossword, by Small and Compton (5) correct solution opened on Katie Mallett we hear (8) 8 Jewish scholar stimulated 29 January. There are two 23 Italian number silly fellows without English being runners-up prizes of £20. (UK There are three months that start with J: adopted (7) translated (9) solvers can choose to receive the January, June, July. 24 Engagements of heartless 9 Fielder’s thin dress is an latest edition of the Chambers June leads July but follows May. Man Utd player (4) error (4) dictionary instead of cash — Does anyone know why? 25 Dull Eisteddfod champion 13 Family member at piano, ring the word ‘dictionary’.) returns (4) with introductions to Entries to: Crossword 2341, In June the weather’s fairly warm; 27 Dire Straits for Bolshevik Mozart’s Adagio (7) The Spectator, 22 Old Queen In July much the same. opponent (7) 15 It’s a party, so lay back (6) Street, London SW1H 9HP. But rain and sleet and icy storm? 29 One male with handy 19 Kept open by the alert, Please allow six weeks for That’s January’s game. phone won’t move (8) brave investigator prize delivery. 32 Forcibly remove (10, two words) June as we know can name a girl. unconventional values (6) 20 Red sign by tailless rats, July is Caesar’s tag. 34 Epic about parliament say (9) Cold January’s a cruel churl, (Italian) (5) 21 Favourite mariner A murderous old lag. 35 English author left in pit admitted to Davey Jones’s Name (5) locker (6)

As sensual souls beneath the moon 36 Provide illumination and 26 Chemical element upset We can enjoy a flux have a fag (7, two words) stomach in senior Address Of pleasure in July and June, 38 Gent and Monroe cavorting clergyman pre-op (7) But January sucks. in the Balkans (10) 28 Tool for bridge, it seems (7) Basil Ransome-Davies 30 Warning call around the Down old city causes such an We welcome you and yet you turn your back 2 Ornamental orange tree uproar (6) becoming very large with On thoughts of spring, presenting snow and ice. 31 US lake regularly Our streets are traps, our pavements icy black time (5) encountered in And bleakness wrapped in bleakness is your vice. 3 Row of shops is away from Strath More (5) December loved our generosity old private apartment (6) 33 Wise king hasn’t got a Email And rang her bells with optimistic joy 4 Sign of progress where moment for law-giver (5) But you arrived with animosity nursing is concerned (7) 34 In France, there is the To inconvenience, anger and annoy. 6 Setting out food on thin heart of the sail-yard There was a time in childhood when your snow metal cover (7) (4, three words) Had playful kindness and you even smiled; Now that our steps are warier and slow We are your playthings, rattled and reviled. SOLUTION TO 2339: INTERESTING And so, dark month, we do not call you friend But shiver till your tribulations end. Deployment of a GRABBING CRANE (1D) is required to Frank McDonald complete entries at 11, 13, 21 and 23. 1A, 19 and the puzzle’s TITLE (35) are synonyms of GRABBING; 5, 18 and 41 are NO. 3033: PRESIDENTIAL PATTER types of CRANE, which is also the surname of Washington Irving’s character whose first name is ICHABOD (28). Thanks go to @huntthesnark on Twitter for this one: you are invited to take as your First prize John Bartlett, Shirley, Solihull first line ‘I am the very model of a Very Sta- Runners-up Mark Rowntree, London SE10; ble Genius’ and continue for up to a further M. Day, London N6 15. Email entries to [email protected] by midday on 24 January, please. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 59 LIFE No sacred cows Does spending too much time on could simply deactivate Snapchat, smartphones hinder children’s cogni- YouTube, Netflix… everything apart Screen-addicted kids? tive development? I’m usually pret- from the Kindle app. They’d get to ty sceptical when people make those keep their phones, but all they’d be There’s an app for that claims, but I heard it from a source able to do on them for certain periods Toby Young I respect last year: James Flynn, the of the day would be to read books. eminent political scientist who gave The hard part, of course, is install- his name to the ‘Flynn effect’. This is ing the app on your children’s phones. the well-documented phenomenon As you can imagine, they’re pretty ver Christmas, Caroline and whereby average cognitive ability, as reluctant to part with them, knowing I finally snapped about the measured by intelligence tests, has what you’ve got in mind. You then O amount of time our chil- been steadily increasing in the United have to persuade them to cough up dren were spending on their screens. States and other countries since 1930. their passcodes and, if we’re talk- If they weren’t watching Logan Paul Until now, that is. ing about iPhones, their Apple vlogs on YouTube, they were on I attended a conference in Mon- IDs as well. I cannot tell you how Snapchat or playing video games. I treal in July where Flynn present- much cajoling and threatening that couldn’t get them to read anything — ed his latest findings, namely, that took. Agreeing which apps they’d not even one of the wonderful How IQ is still increasing in the develop- be allowed to use at what times of to Train Your Dragon books — and ing world, but has started to decline day was like negotiating the Oslo attempts to persuade them to go on across the West. If you ask 14-year- Accords. It took days. walks were met with fierce resist- olds in Britain to take the same tests There were also teething prob- ance. Towards the end of the holidays that 14-year-olds took in 1980, they lems. For instance, we didn’t bother they began to look and act like drug score significantly worse. Flynn spec- to deactivate the ‘News’ feature on addicts — pallid complexions, easily ulated that one possible explanation their phones — we want them to keep distracted, short-tempered. Perhaps is the prevalence of smartphones and up with current affairs — and my they really were addicts. the amount of time British teenagers 12-year-old son quickly discovered Any parent who has tried to spend on social media. that it provided a gateway to You- limit their child’s screen time will This is known as the ‘anti-Flynn Tube. Luckily, he couldn’t help boast- be familiar with the standard objec- effect’ and, after seeing how brain- ing about this — ‘I’ve hacked your tion: ‘But Dad, you’re always on your dead our children became during stupid app’ — so we were able to close screen.’ That’s true, but the differ- the holidays, Caroline and I decided that loophole. ence is that I’m on a Kindle reading we had to take the situation in hand. We’ve now got the system up and a book. In the past, I scoffed at bib- But how? In the past, our attempts running and it’s pretty good. Not that liophiles who claimed that something to restrict screen time have always they’ve started reading books on their was lost when we switched to read- ended in failure because neither of phones, mind you. Instead, during the ing on screens, but I now realise they us has had the energy to enforce the restricted hours they just toss them were right. We’ve lost the ability to Towards the rules for more than about two weeks. aside and start watching reruns of set a good example to our children. end of the But Caroline had heard about an app Friends on television. But that feels Kids brought up in houses surround- called OurPact that would let her like a step in the right direction. Com- ed by books are supposed to have an holidays, choose what apps the children could pared to Snapchat, it seems positively advantage over those who aren’t, but my children launch via a control panel on her own wholesome. Now, if we can just find it’s hard to see how children benefit if began to look phone. Instead of the two of us try- an app that immobilises the telly… those books are never opened. As far ing to take our children’s devices off as mine are concerned, Mummy and and act like them during certain parts of the day Toby Young is associate editor of Daddy are just on screens too. drug addicts — never a pleasant experience — she The Spectator.

MICHAEL HEATH

60 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk Spectator Sport England and Australia will still play with Test matches of four days maxi- Test cricket against each other as long mum, all day-night to ensure crowds Can the long there is demand. (Though how much, I and prime-time viewers, and ticketed wonder, was the great A.B. de Villiers cheaply to ensure big crowds. Each game survive? paid to come out of ‘Test retirement’ innings would be 120 overs with Roger Alton for the modestly supported current incentives for results, and the format home series against India?) supported by a World Cup to attract No, the truth is that not enough outlier nations (New Zealand and so happens for modern tastes. On a flat on). Administrators must grasp the o will the sight of poor Joe Root pitch at the WACA, 43 for two in a ses- nettle of the new long form, otherwise at Sydney, pale as a ghost and sion is just not good enough. Neither Test cricket as played by Gavaskar, Sbarely able to stand, heroically are innings lasting 180 overs with a the Chappells, May and Kallis is dead. facing 90mph bowling in a totally scoring rate of mostly less than three doomed cause, all the while racked an over. The home crowds were rest- hree things we learnt over the with a tummy bug, mark the begin- less at Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, Tholiday: Anthony Joshua always ning of a rethink for traditional long- with most of the atmosphere coming makes his bed before leaving home. form cricket? Make no mistake, like from the Barmy Army. It makes you feel better when you millions I love the Ashes, but this was So will five-day Tests with tea at get in at night, he says. What a well- a dull series with a lot of very repeti- 20 to four become an anachronism brought-up young man he is. Second, tive cricket, whether you were there for all but old codgers like me, sitting the presenter Kelly Cates, besides — as I was for a few Tests — or one of in a deckchair with nurse not too far being Kenny Dalglish’s daughter, is a an ever-dwindling band of late-night away? Lurking not so far away in the massive breath of fresh air in the dull viewers in front of the BT coverage. wings is the power behind the game, old world of football punditry. She And just because I can remember the Indian broadcasters. India con- showed the boys a thing or two with a huddling round a small black-and- trols international cricket, but Test blistering attack on the pampered nar- white telly as a kid to watch Kenny cricket (apart from the Ashes and cissism and lavender tuxes of the Bal- Barrington inch his way to 85 not out games involving India) no longer fills lon d’Or player of the year awards on at the end of a full day’s play doesn’t grounds or attracts TV advertising. Fighting Talk. Give that girl her own mean such memories matter a fig to T20 cricket does, as does the 50-over show soonest. Finally, he might be a anyone in the future. game if it’s day-night. The five-day big lad but the reaction of Rob Cross Many more tours like this, and Test format is simply too slow, too biased at the moment of his World Champi- cricket will be in trouble. It is already toward home teams, and there is just onship victory over Phil Taylor was a less visible, with matches involving Many more not enough tension per session. moment when darts led the way for former great nations such as Pakistan, tours like I am told broadcasters say private- graciousness and fully human inter- New Zealand and West Indies largely this, and Test ly that they only want to screen games action in sport. (Taylor’s subsequent dying or dead. The traditionalists will with full grounds, with a result, and at dad-dancing to Coldplay was less so, say that Ashes cricket will always be a cricket will be prime time. They argue that the long but hey, after 30 years and 16 titles he major event, and India, South Africa, in trouble form must be rethought completely, had probably earned the right.)

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

banquette for practical reasons. to sit side by side. In this way you Night supper. The broad kirk is Not only does it allow access to experience a ‘taster’ of what closer what the Burnsian aspires to and her handbag and protect her more intimacy might feel like. as for being English, “A man’s a delicate clothing from spillages, man for a’that.”’ but the lady usually has more Q. I have been invited by some data in her gossip repertoire than friends to a Burns Night supper Q. I often receive emails from does the man. She tends to be in London. There will be fine people who are friends of more beady-eyed when it comes company with smoked salmon, friends but who I have not met, to social observation and more haggis, cranachan, poetry, and of asking me to attend various Q. Should the lady or the able to recognise prominent course whisky. However other Sloane Ranger-style fundraising gentleman have the banquette in fellow diners. The man will miss friends may accuse me of cultural functions set many weeks ahead. a restaurant? I’ve been brought out by denying her the better appropriation. I am English born Sometimes I want to decide up to believe that the lady has the viewpoint since it allows her to and bred. How should I respond? nearer the time yet there is banquette for her more delicate entertain him. If, in the name of — L.K., by email often pressure to give my reply bottom — and for her handbag. modernity, your fiancé is prepared as soon as possible because of She has the view of the room; the to face the Bateman cartoon-style A. I turn to Burnsian Ross Leckie the caterers. So what I do is just gentleman has only eyes for her. disapproval of waiters and other for the answer. Leckie, who is send an immediate reply saying My fiancé says that a modern diners who will assume he just booked seven years in advance that I’m away for two weeks couple should take it in turns doesn’t know the form, then by all to speak at Burns suppers (his and will be checking emails only to have the hard chair. Whose means let him take it in turns with turn includes reciting Burns’s sporadically. I hope some of your bottom takes precedence? you to have the banquette. ‘Tam o’Shanter’, which takes 25 readers might find this tip useful. — L.F., Bayswater, London On the subject of banquettes, minutes) says ‘Burns would be — Name and address withheld never overlook their facility to fast- appalled to think any Englishman A. As with so many cultural forward latent romance should would imagine a Scot would be A. Thank you indeed for traditions, the lady takes the space permit a potential couple offended by his going to a Burns supplying it. the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 61 LIFE Food centre, which looks like a squashed ber, when there would be no cricket golf ball in the sky) atop its mystery. on, and so there would be space for us. Tea in the hallowed grounds It seemed to be everything this out- And so we stood, my husband and sider loved about England: England I, outside the W.G. Grace gates with Tanya Gold the stage set, and self-gilding fantasy; other married couples, all dressed up it sure beats a pogrom on Twitter, or for the occasion in suits and tea dress- back in the old country. I passed Lord’s es and hats like country cousins on a every day when I lived in London, and road trip to the House of Fraser sale. marvelled that something so English The women wore tolerant expressions; could exist in St John’s Wood without the men looked like infants do when an army to defend it, but then I realised they are happy. it does have an army. My husband’s And what is inside? A cricket uncle comes from Devon to London pitch, of course, as fine as an Oxford to serve, after queuing for 200 years. college lawn; and a museum featuring I have never been inside before; I knee-pads and photographs of hand- s dreams of winning the am a hack, and hacks don’t queue for some West Indians throwing balls Ashes became, well, the only 200 years for anything. We did hold the at other people; and a tea-room — A word is ash, for 4-0 is not party for our son’s naming ceremony the Long Room. It is pale blue, with a number even I would minimise, inside the Lord’s Tavern next door shining chandeliers and gaping ceil- there is a place — a restaurant actu- though. It seemed to express his her- ings and some very good art (for ally — where you can hold the Ashes I didn’t know itage (Devizes/Lodz) better than any- England), all of dead men and boys in your hands. Calm down. What, as I you could thing Stefan Zweig, or I, could write. playing cricket in a long, speechless imagine myself telling Chris Grayling eat at Lord’s I didn’t know you could eat at conversation. It is not my dream, but all the time, would your cardiologist Lord’s without queuing for 200 years, I admire it anyway. say? They may not be the real Ashes without and I have nothing like that kind of We have a view of the empty — the person looking after them was queuing for time to spare. But then my husband’s ground. I prefer ghostly places; plac- vague, like a parent telling a child that 200 years sister sent us tickets for tea in Novem- es that bear witness; places that just Father Christmas would probably are. The food, served by waiters who come down the chimney on Christmas act like nannies — they are soothing, Eve, they couldn’t really say, but it’s as if we are babies in a ball pit — is quite likely. This restaurant is the Long a perfect English tea: scones, jam, Room at Lord’s Cricket Ground, the cream, delicate, fleeting sandwiches. home of Maryle bone Cricket Club. My husband looks as happy as I have I don’t have a sport — just arguing — ever seen him, and when a woman but if I make mistakes, please write in brings a tiny urn — accompanied by like angry birds. It will cheer you up. a photographer! — he mutters ‘The Throw a ball at me, made of words. Ashes!’ and poses for a photograph I always saw Lord’s, which was holding them, with glazed eyes. Not a opposite my synagogue — the Liberal restaurant then, but something better, Jewish Synagogue, which has two lady something more — a drug. rabbis and is, to the orthodox, about as Jewish as a pet shop — as a friendly Lord’s, St John’s Wood Road, London alien space, with an alien ship (the press NW8 8QN, tel: 020 7616 8500. ‘I’m already feeling miles smugger.’

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE Bad academic style Why do so many academics write and exclusion) that bodes ill, like provinces were not enclaves so badly? Those who make the mouse droppings in a hotel untouched by the period’s study of language their life’s bedroom. Even the patient transformations; they were not, as work are as bad as any. I saw two reviewer finds him ‘occasionally anachronizing narratives would books about English in the 18th falling prey to too much jargon’. have it, the products of the century reviewed in the TLS and of global linguistic multiplicity’. It is possible by ‘within the “waiting-room of history”.’ Perish thought I might buy them, until I would guess that he means by space of global linguistic the thought. But what’s with the I read quotations from them that this something like: ‘In discussing multiplicity’ he is referring to scattering of innovations? And the reviewer had chosen, not by how to choose the right words to different forms of English spoken how can you innovate on genres? way of mockery, but to explain make English translation more round the world. Who can say? For all I know, these are their arguments. beautiful in a world of many But I am not prepared to translate brilliant and painstaking scholars, In Multilingual Subjects, tongues, critics tended to use one his whole book into English first but the university presses of Daniel DeWispelare argues that set of metaphors.’ so that I can read it. Pennsylvania and Princeton, ‘anglophone translation theorists He doesn’t mean ‘in order to Janet Sorensen in Strange which published the two books, gravitated towards one specific advocate for’ but ‘in advocating’. Vernaculars, says representations would find their reputation shine set of metaphors in order to I happen to hate the neologism of provincial speech ‘with their more brightly if they improved advocate for protocols of advocate for. That may be just me, humorous innovations on genres their own ‘anglophone literary linguistic inclusion and exclusion but it is a choice of words (or, if of antiquarian writing, their mixed aesthetics within the space of that would improve anglophone you prefer an outcome of lexicons, and linguistic innovations, global linguistic multiplicity’. literary aesthetics within the space protocols of linguistic inclusion remind us … that Britain’s — Dot Wordsworth

62 the spectator | 13 january 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk