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Uniting the kingdom

hen launching the Scottish England and Scotland. There is far greater it will mean voting Conservative. There are National Party’s election cam- variance in opinion between the south-west others, too, such as the late Charles Kenne- Wpaign, Nicola Sturgeon said the and south-east of England than there is dy’s seat of Ross, Skye and Lochaber, where word ‘Tory’ 20 times in 20 minutes. For between England and Scotland. the Liberal Democrats have the best chance. much of her political lifetime, it has been The Conservatives have performed badly Many will feel an innate resistance to tac- used by the SNP as the dirtiest word in in Scotland over the past generation for the tical voting. There is a respectable argument Scottish politics. Nationalists have long liked same reason as the Liberals have performed that people should always vote for their to portray the Conservatives as the succes- poorly all over Britain since 1945: there is favoured candidate on the basis that even if sors to Edward Longshanks: an occupying not a lot of room in a two-party system for they don’t succeed this time around, a strong army with little affinity for the people they a third party. As nationalism grew stronger, performance by a losing candidate can help were trying to govern. voting habits tended to polarise between build a base for victory in a subsequent But things are changing fast in Scotland. the SNP and Labour. This was always a little election. But in Scotland there are special Amid the other political dramas of the past unsustainable because it meant that Scottish circumstances. The SNP is certain to try to few months, the revival of Tory support north politics was dominated by two left-of-centre use this election campaign as a mandate to of the border has gone relatively unnoticed. parties. But since 2014, Labour’s weakness inflict another referendum campaign on a They had only one MP after the last election, has led to the Conservatives emerging as the country still recovering from the last one. but a poll this week puts them on 33 per cent leading unionist party. Equally, it is hard to argue that in this in Scotland — enough to win 12 seats. There Now Scots who want to defend the Unit- election the result will be so close that the is a similar story in Wales, where one poll sug- ed Kingdom have the option of voting tacti- election of a few Labour and Liberal Dem- gests that the Tories might take a majority of cally to increase their chances of sending the ocrat MPs will change the composition of the seats in the principality for the first time Nationalists home to think again. Nicola Stur- the UK government. But ending the SNP’s since the 1850s. The idea that the Conserva- near monopoly on Scottish representation tives would become an England-only party, Ms Sturgeon seeks a new referendum at Westminster will make it much hard- reviled in the Celtic fringe, is now out of date. because she feels the momentum er for them to claim to be speaking for all The truth is that this narrative was always slipping away from her of Scotland every time they rise from their false. It suits the Welsh and Scottish nation- benches in the Commons. alists to pretend that their countrymen’s val- geon knows that a poor general election per- There was much talk that the Brexit vote ues are different, even inimical, to those of formance will damage her call for a second would lead to a surge in demand for Scottish the English. But the people of these islands independence referendum, hence her belat- independence. Instead, polls suggest more are united not only by a common culture, ed attempt to decouple the two questions. people are going off the idea. This is why Ms language, even a second language (Polish) Last week, Gina Miller, the pro-EU cam- Sturgeon seeks a new referendum: she sens- but also by a worldview. paigner, produced a spreadsheet to advise es the momentum slipping away from her. So The British Social Attitudes survey, the diehard Remainers on how they should vote far, the general election campaign has seen a gold standard for measuring public opinion, to kick pro-Brexit MPs out of parliament. country coming together rather than apart shows that what gaps there are in regional Tactical voting certainly has its place in gen- and a Tory party that is — now more than approaches to politics are small, and nar- eral elections, and this week The Spectator any time for a generation — speaking to the rowing. For example, when asked ‘are most publishes the results of a similar exercise whole of the UK. Mrs May could well return people on the dole fiddling?’ the fewest peo- advising those north of the border how they with a stronger majority, but to return with a ple answer ‘yes’ in London and the south- should vote in order to elect MPs opposed stronger union would be a far greater prize. east, and the most in Wales, with Scotland in to the break-up of the UK. In most cases, the middle. It is party-political disputes that such as Aberdeen North, it will mean voting Our guide to tactical voting in Scotland can explain the difference in policies between Labour; in some, such as Aberdeen South, be found at www.spectator.co.uk/unionist the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 3 Ruislip Lido: more attractive than you’d think, p52

Can we trust Bear Grylls? p47

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 12 What’s the matter with Macron? BOOKS 7 Portrait of the Week France’s young pretender is 28 Christopher Howse marching towards disaster The Cross, by Robin M. Jensen 9 Diary After Rossgate Jonathan Fenby 30 Emily Rhodes Kelvin MacKenzie 13 A little too perfect Reservoir 13, by Jon McGregor 10 Politics Talking up Labour Just who is France’s new golden boy? James Walton James Forsyth Jonathan Miller The Nothing, by Hanif Kureishi 11 The Spectator’s Notes 15 A Brit in the White House Fred Johnston The ‘Uberisation of politics’ Meet Sebastian Gorka ‘Riviera Incident’: a poem Charles Moore Freddy Gray 33 Sara Wheeler 14 Rod Liddle Silencing Tim Farron 16 Competition, not caps In the Land of Giants, by 17 Matthew Parris The intellectual May’s throwback energy policy Gabi Martínez passion of trainspotting Matthew Lynn Helen R. Brown 18 Ancient and modern Friends, 18 The lords of poverty The Blood Miracles, by Romans and Russians Corrupt UN aid keeps Africa poor Lisa McInerney 21 Barometer Pippa’s wedding; Aidan Hartley 34 Dominic Green Communists For Corbyn 20 Is boarding school cruel? The Earth is Weeping, by 25 Letters The downsides of aid; It can make — or break — children Peter Cozzens prudish pride; Farron’s allure Alex Renton and Lara Prendergast 35 Mark Mason 26 Any other business 22 Do do God Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, Vote winners Chippy secularism doesn’t win votes by Nicholas Reynolds Martin Vander Weyer Theo Hobson 36 William Cook 23 Notebook The Shortest History of Germany, My irritation at the ‘sexist’ by James Hawes Archers storyline 37 Craig Raine Prue Leith The Bittersweet Science, edited by Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra 38 Tim Martin The Evening Road, by Laird Hunt

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Phil Disley, Royston Robertson, Percival, Adam Singleton, Mike Turner, Grizelda, Geoff Thompson, Bernie, Nick Newman, Mike Stokoe, Cluff, K.J. Lamb., Dredge. 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: [email protected] (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 COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QX Vol 333; no 9844 © 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 | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk Please, sir, can I Catch me if you can, p33 go home? p20

Cover stories, p40 LIFE

ARTS LIFE I accept being a trainspotter 40 James Walton 55 High life Taki does not make me a transport The album art that dazzled a Low life Jeremy Clarke generation expert: it makes me a man 56 Real life Melissa Kite with a mild case of a relatively 42 Interview 57 The turf Robin Oakley harmless mental condition Egypt’s rebel film-maker Bridge Janet de Botton Mohamed Diab Matthew Parris, p17 Tobias Grey Jeremy Corbyn sometimes tries 43 Opera AND FINALLY . . . The Exterminating Angel 52 Notes on… Ruislip Lido to sound religiously mysterious, Michael Tanner William Cook but resembles an elephant 44 Radio Kate Chisholm 58 Chess Raymond Keene hiding under a coat Festivals Competition Theo Hobson, p22 Salzburg Easter Festival 59 Crossword Michael Henderson 60 Status anxiety Toby Young Cafe Football is full of men with 46 Cinema Lady Macbeth Battle for Britain shaved heads wearing children’s Deborah Ross Michael Heath clothing, and couples on first dates. 47 Television James Delingpole 61 Sport Roger Alton There will be no second dates Tanya Gold, p62 49 Music Your problems solved Peter Donohoe: the complete Mary Killen Scriabin piano sonatas 62 Food Tanya Gold Damian Thompson Mind your language The Listener Dot Wordsworth Ray Davies: Americana Rod Liddle 50 Theatre The Philanthropist; Whisper House Lloyd Evans

CONTRIBUTORS Aidan Hartley is the author Theo Hobson is an Anglican Prue Leith — writer, chef Travel writer Sara Wheeler Dominic Green teaches of The Zanzibar Chest and theologian. On p. 22 he and a judge on the new The reviews In the Land of Giants politics at Boston College and writes the Wild Life column explains why it’s important for Great British Bake Off — on — an account of how an epic is the author of Three Empires for this magazine. He has a politicians to be brave about why no one invites her to quest to find the Yeti led on the Nile. He examines farm in Laikipia, Kenya and their faith. dinner (Notebook, p.23). straight to the Taleban (p.33). America’s original sin — its talks about the crisis in Africa treatment of the Indians (p.35). on p.18. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

Home position was on Europe, Peter Mandelson, Petry, failed to persuade the party to move the former cabinet minister, said: ‘Search closer to the mainstream. At least 16 people eremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, me.’ Sir Keir Starmer said that Labour drowned trying to reach Greece across the Jcheered the United Kingdom by wanted to keep the EU single market ‘on strait separating Turkey from Lesbos. promising four new bank holidays for the the table’ for negotiations but opposed free whole country when he becomes prime movement of people, though not of labour. he entire US Senate was asked to minister, for the patronal days of St David, Labour promised to pay NHS staff more. Tattend a briefing on North Korea at the St Patrick, St George and St Andrew. Asked Sir Elton John spent two days in intensive White House as an American submarine about the replacement for the Trident care after contracting a ‘rare and potentially arrived in South Korea, to be joined by a nuclear deterrent, he said: ‘I’ve made clear deadly’ bacterial disease in South America. naval force led by an aircraft carrier, which any use of nuclear weapons would be a North Korea was ready to sink ‘with a disaster for the whole world.’ Three hours Ps not standing at the election single strike’. America installed Thaad anti- later, the Labour party put out a statement Mincluded Gisela Stuart, Andy missile systems in South Korea. Xi Jinping, saying: ‘The decision to renew Trident has Burnham and Michael Dugher for Labour the ruler of China, rang President Donald been taken and Labour supports that.’ and Sir Eric Pickles and Simon Burns for Trump of America, and urged restraint on The Communist Party decided not to field the Conservatives. After an acid attack at all parties. A man in Thailand killed his baby candidates against Labour. an east London nightclub left two people daughter, recording the act on Facebook blind in one eye, police said that there had before killing himself. heresa May, the Prime Minister, been 1,800 attacks with corrosive liquids Tvisited South Wales, following a in London since 2010. A man was charged he UN said that more than 18 million YouGov poll (for what it was worth) after 90 vehicles were vandalised during the Tof Yemen’s 25 million people need suggesting the Conservatives would gain night in one part of Inverness. urgent assistance. In Saudi Arabia, King 40 per cent of the vote in the principality Salman reversed pay cuts for civil servants with Labour at 30 per cent. She said that Abroad and the military. The sister of the fattest voters could choose between ‘lower taxes woman in the world, Eman Abd El Aty, an under the Conservatives or higher taxes mmanuel Macron of the En Marche! Egyptian, challenged doctors’ claims that under Labour’ but refused to say if her Emovement, a former economy minister she had lost more than 39 stone following party would repeat its current manifesto in a Socialist government, won 24 per cent surgery in Bombay. Ecuador’s state undertaking not to raise income tax, of the vote in the first round of the French media watchdog, Supercom, fined four National Insurance and VAT, nor would she presidential elections, going through to the newspapers and three television stations guarantee the triple-lock on state pensions. deciding vote on 7 May with Marine Le for not reporting accusations against an Tony Blair, the former Labour prime Pen of the National Front, who gained 21.3 opposition politician. At least seven people minister, appealed for voters ‘to return as per cent. She relinquished leadership of died when an electric cable fell on fans many Members of Parliament as possible to her party to concentrate on her candidacy. watching a Manchester United match on Parliament that are going to keep an open The two presidential candidates attended a television in Calabar, Nigeria. A 12-year- mind on this Brexit negotiation’, which, ceremony conferring the Legion of Honour old boy attempting to drive 2,500 miles he said could mean voting Labour, Lib on a policeman, Xavier Jugelé, shot dead from Kendall in New South Wales to Perth Dem or even Tory, though he added: ‘I will five days earlier by a man who Islamic State in Western Australia was stopped after vote Labour; I would always vote Labour.’ said was acting on its behalf. The co-leader 800 miles by police at Broken Hill, when Asked on Newsnight what Labour’s of Alternative for Germany (AfD), Frauke the bumper of his car fell off. CSH the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 7 IN A CHANGING WORLD MAYBE IT’S TIME YOU CHANGED TOO.

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hen Trevor Phillips stood down now drawing up the will. I tell this story Was chairman of the Equality because I am forced to, not because I and Human Rights Commission, he want to. Another victory for Liverpool. had served nine years. His period remains the longest of any UK equality t a super lunch by food writer Rose commissioner. So when the confected ALloyd in her home in Tourrettes on outrage started over my Sun column the Côte d’Azur, talk turned to the very about Everton footballer Ross Barkley funny Alan Coren (father of Giles and I was not surprised to see a text pop up Victoria), whose widow has kept on their from Mr Phillips. I feared he would join holiday place in the village. A one-liner the Liverpool bandwagon claiming I from Coren that always raised a smile at was a racist because I had compared the such events was: ‘My hero is the bloke look in the eyes of Barkley with a gorilla. Alleyn’s in Dulwich, south-east London. who founded Sainsbury’s as it kept the Actually I and every football fan I had If I left the school some money could riff-raff out of Waitrose.’ ever met believed Barkley to be white. they guarantee that 100 per cent of the Unluckily for me, but luckily for my scholarships would go to minority children? uring the height of the Rossgate enemies in the north-west, that was not I had in mind African-Caribbean kids Dfurore I texted Tony Gallagher, entirely true. It emerged that although from the catchment area of Camberwell, the bloody good editor of the Sun. He Barkley looked white, his grandfather Peckham and New Cross. They went replied: ‘In church. Will be free in a few was half-Nigerian. away to check with the chairman of the minutes.’ How times have changed. In governors and the head teacher. I was my more louche period as editor of that he reality is that had I known of given the thumbs up and my lawyer is fine organ, I would reply: ‘In brothel. This family tree I would never have Will be free in a few seconds.’ made the comparison, but since I am a columnist and not a researcher on Who s the size of Nelson Mandela’s cell Do You Think You Are? I didn’t know, Aon Robben Island still haunts me, I and have yet to meet anybody who did. had always rejected the idea of visiting Including the Sun sports editor. So, with Auschwitz because I feared my tears hesitation, I read the text from Trevor would make the trip about me and not Phillips expecting it to follow the line PODCASTS the victims. But thanks to persuasion of such luminaries as Stan Collymore from my longtime friend Richard Glynn, — presumably from a dogging site in a former CEO of the bookies Ladbrokes, Staffordshire — and Virtue Signaller of I spent most of Thursday at the camps an the Year, Gary Lineker. But no. This is Subscribe to The Spectator hour from Krakow in Poland. Nothing what he said: ‘WTF? I have to confess I Podcasts on the iTunes prepares you for Auschwitz. The stats are had no idea Barkley was a brother. Sad stark: 1.1 million victims, mainly Jewish, to see a great city wallowing in victim store or listen at perhaps 230,000 of them children. If you status. Unbelievable.’ A number of MPs spectator.co.uk/podcasts didn’t die in the gas chamber, you would shared his view, believing the reaction die in the field, because the SS gave was comedic, with Andrew Mitchell, the prisoners so little food that they would ex-secretary of state for international lose weight and be gone in three months. development, texting: ‘On behalf of all My abiding memory was the shoes. The gorillas I’d like to make a complaint.’ The little shoes. The large shoes. The dust- Sun did not see the joke and suspended covered shoes. Those victims were not my column. The readers didn’t agree and forgotten. I had seen their shoes. Only 8 opinion was running 100-1 in my favour, per cent of SS guards ever faced a court. with some threatening a boycott if I Why? At the end of the day these mass didn’t return. Boycott? That would never murderers would return to their homes work, would it? outside the camps to play with their children and cuddle their wives. Is this a hen plunged into this kind of German thing, or do we all have murder Wstorm, deploying the ‘my best in our hearts? One other question: if it friend is black/gay/transgender’ option had been six million Christians, six million invites derision, but I thought the story Muslims, six million Hindus or six million of my will would be helpful. Predating Sikhs murdered, would Holocaust Rossgate by a few weeks, I contacted the Memorial Day be a bigger event? I fear fundraising department of my old school, so. Anti-Semitism is alive and well. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 9 POLITICS | JAMES FORSYTH Why Tories are talking up Labour

onsidering that their party is Ukip defections to the Tories. Mrs May is customs union. For that reason, the new expected to win by a landslide, the immensely popular, with 61 per cent of vot- MPs won’t really change the debate: the CTory spin doctors sound unusually ers saying she would make the best Prime Prime Minister’s mind is already made up. panicked. They are keen to point out that Minister, while Corbyn is electoral poison. A shift on the economy would be more the polls aren’t always right, and the poll- For all her protestations against compla- consequential. Mrs May’s enthusiasm for sters are still trying to correct what they got cency, Mrs May’s campaign schedule suggest an energy price cap and an industrial policy wrong at the last general election. They insist she too is preparing for a landslide. She has show where her own instincts lie — but until that national voting tells you little about already visited Labour-held seats in Lon- now she has faced opposition from her own what will happen in the key marginal seats. don, the north-west, the West Midlands and cabinet to some of her more interventionist These are normally the pleas of a party that Wales. Indeed, I’m told that the Tories won’t ideas. Armed with her own personal man- is failing, and trying to persuade voters that publish any list of target seats because they date she will be more inclined to put her it is still in the race. But Labour isn’t doing a don’t want Labour to know precisely where stamp on policy. good job of spinning its own prospects — so their aims lie. In another sign of how big the So how might this look? The candidacy of the Tories are doing it for them. Tory majority could be, regional Labour par- Andy Street, the former boss of John Lewis This is not as odd as it first sounds. The ties have already started to abandon seats now running for the mayoralty of the West Tories are worried about complacency, that they currently hold as they concentrate Midlands, offers some clues. Labour current- about their vote not turning out. If voters their efforts on saving other, safer ones. ly has 21 of the 28 parliamentary seats in the cannot envisage Jeremy Corbyn in No 10, region, yet under Street the Tories remain and don’t take the election seriously, why If voters cannot envisage Corbyn in competitive in this race. He is not a classic should they make their way to the poll- No 10, why should they play their laissez-faire Conservative but rather some- ing station and play their part in a Theresa one who talks about the good that comes May coronation? As one minister close to part in a Theresa May coronation? of the government and the private sector the campaign puts it: ‘The risk is exhaustion working together. He cites his time running with politics. That the only people turning A landslide Tory election victory would the Local Enterprise Partnership as crucial up to vote will be hardcore Brexiteers and change both the Tory party and Theresa experience for the job. He says that his pol- hardcore Corbynites.’ May’s premiership. If the Tories have MPs itics are based around May’s desire for an Their other great worry is that the near- for places such as Wrexham, Stoke and ‘economy that works for everyone’. If he certainty of a Tory victory blunts their attack Darlington, it will shift the party’s centre of wins in the local elections next month it will lines. If Corbyn has no chance of becoming gravity. In crude terms, it’ll move the Tories be a sign that this different, Mayite, brand of PM, then there’s no risk in voting for your to the right on Brexit and immigration and Conservatism has electoral potency. local Labour candidate, or backing the to the left on the economy and public servic- In Tory circles, the chatter is about Liberal Democrats. If Corbyn’s finger isn’t es. This is pretty much where May has taken whether May can get a result to match, or going to be on the button, it doesn’t matter the party since becoming leader. even better, Thatcher’s 1980s landslides. that he wouldn’t use the nuclear deterrent It is tempting to view this election as But there is a key difference. Thatcher took in any circumstances. If Labour aren’t going being all about Brexit. It certainly will advantage of Labour’s weakness to push to be in government, it is academic who they change the negotiating timetable and through a policy agenda that would not have would tax more. increase May’s room for manoeuvre on been possible in normal times. May, by con- So, the Tories need voters to think that things such as the so-called EU divorce pay- trast, wants to occupy the centre ground so Corbyn could, somehow, become Prime ment and the transitional arrangements. that Labour can never move back on it. Minister. This means that polls which put But it won’t change her decision that Brit- If May can secure a Thatcher-style land- the Tories on 50 per cent — twice Labour’s ain should leave the single market and the slide, it is not certain that Labour will recov- support — are rather inconvenient for them. er. In the ’80s, Scottish Labour played a key They add to a sense that the only question role in the party’s return to sanity. But that about this election is how big Theresa May’s section of the party is now trying to save majority will be. its only MP. Some of the unions also did The Prime Minister sounds convincing their bit. However, the re-election of Len when she insists that, whatever the polls McCluskey as the leader of Unite, albeit by say, there is nothing preordained about a narrow margin, is a reminder that they no the result on 8 June. She is nothing if not a longer play their former stabilising role. disciplined media performer. All of which means that this election is But other cabinet members struggle to likely to result in a long-lasting change for keep up the pretence. As one remarked to the Conservatives — because a Tory party me this week: ‘I know we’re all meant to be that represents more of the nation will be suspicious of the polls. But it is hard when it more of a one-nation party. matches what you’re hearing on the door- step.’ Indeed, nearly everyone who has been SPECTATOR.CO.UK/COFFEEHOUSE out on the campaign trail reports large-scale ‘Don’t go! I promise I can change!’ Hourly updates from Parliament and beyond.

10 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk Charles Moore

ith Emmanuel Macron and Christian views of homosexuality. WMarine Le Pen through to the Originally, they asked him the wrong final in France, people of a conservative question, doctrinally, by inquiring disposition might feel themselves whether he thought ‘homosexuality’ spoilt for choice. You can have either was a sin. This was an easy one for the believer in free markets and open him to repudiate, since an involuntary societies or the upholder of sovereignty disposition is not a sin. I forbore to point and national identity. In both cases, the this out, since I didn’t want to make left doesn’t get a look-in. But what if it their persecution of poor Mr Farron isn’t like that at all? What if Macron, far any easier, but by the beginning of this from opposing the big state, is just a more week, they had realised their mistake technocratic version of the usual dirigiste and began pressing him to state whether from ENA? What if Le Pen, far from politics. I suppose that makes Le Pen the gay sex was a sin. (The Times covered wanting a nation’s genius expressed in spokesman for the black cab interest. I this with the surprising headline : ‘Farron its vigorous parliamentary democracy, is want to live in a country which manages a shrugs off gay sex row to target veteran’s just a spokesman for joyless resentment, modus vivendi between these two schools seat’.) Mr Farron at first resisted their looking for handouts for angry white of thought. If life is all Uber, it will be freer impertinence in asking a politician people? Maybe both of them mentally and cheaper, but also more ignorant and about matters of faith and pointed out come from the left — he ‘progressiste’ grotty. If life is all black cabs, prices will that he had always supported gay rights. obsessed with equality, she the rabble- be too high and cabbies will revert to the Obviously the right people to turn to rouser exploiting nostalgia for working- surlier service they used to give in the 20th for answers on this sort of thing are class solidarity? From a British point of century. Perhaps such peaceful coexistence the religious authorities, but they are view, the whole thing feels back to front. is an impossible dream. so coy nowadays. My understanding is Macron loves the EU in part because he that the mainstream teaching of all the sees it as a bastion of free trade. Le Pen ach year, this column has the three monotheistic religions remains hates it, in part for the same reason. That Emelancholy duty of reminding the that all forms of genital sexual activity is not how we see the EU, but perhaps if public of the Prince of Wales’s prediction, are sinful unless performed between we were French, we would. made in Brazil in March 2009, that there husband and wife; and some of them were only 100 months left to prevent are not permissible even then. In the old hich result would better serve ‘irretrievable climate collapse’. Those Catholic catechism, ‘the sin of Sodom’ Wthe cause of Brexit? Obviously, a 100 months will have elapsed at the end is said to ‘cry aloud to Heaven for Le Pen victory would precipitate a crisis of next month, so it looks as if we are all vengeance’ — as is the sin of oppressing in the EU, weakening its negotiating doomed. The general election on 8 June widows and orphans — but the sin of hand against us. On top of Brexit and will therefore be pretty pointless. It is Sodom is by no means exclusively a Trump’s victory, it would be a thumping noticeable, however, that the Prince has not, matter of ‘gay sex’. Mr Farron is right rejection of the internationalist in recent years, repeated his exact dating that we should not have to read about complacencies of the last 50 years. It is of the catastrophe, muttering, in 2015, that this in the Liberal Democrat manifesto. unbearable to see the joyful pretence it might be 35 years. Even more striking But he has now capitulated to the media in Brussels, the FT etc that Macron is was his co-authorship, at the beginning of and declared that he has decided that ‘anti-establishment’ — their collective this year, of the Ladybird Book of Climate gay sex is not a sin. This is the secular exhalation of relief at the prospect that Change. Presumably there would have equivalent of Henry of Navarre’s view the same people will still be on top. On been no point in publishing such a work, that ‘Paris is worth a Mass.’ the other hand, is there a single Le Pen intended to set the younger generation on policy, apart from Frexit (which she may the right path, if climate collapse were really lections and the public interest not truly support), that any reasonable irretrievable from the end of May: it would Ecannot always go together. It must conservative would admire? A Le Pen have been a cruel deception of the young to be secretly obvious to most people who victory could make what the French call sell them a book telling them to provide for think about the matter that the best ‘le système’ look desirable and discredit a future that could not exist. In his Ladybird practical measure to improve road safety the cause of Euroscepticism. ‘On est Book, the Prince is rightly concerned about in this country would be to compel chez nous’, they reassure one another the future of the yellow-footed rock wallaby everyone aged 70 onwards to retake the at Front National rallies. I find it hard and the golden shouldered parrot, but is driving test at regular intervals. It will to work out whether that is what we in notably more reticent about exactly when never happen, however, because of the Britain should want France to be. the end is nigh. We can breathe again. rage of the elderly voters themselves and of all their children and grandchildren French friend tells me that Macron ournalists have hunted down Tim Farron, upon whom, without a car, they would A represents the ‘Uber-isation’ of Jthe Liberal Democrat leader, about suddenly become dependent. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 11 What’s the matter with Macron? France’s young pretender is marching towards disaster

JONATHAN FENBY

oming out of a celebratory dinner ing as president of the republic. Macron, ability to broaden her appeal. Macron had at a Montparnasse brasserie after immaculately groomed, exudes confidence only to ensure that the swelling ranks of En C topping the poll in the first round of and seems to have an answer for everything, Marche! supporters remained pumped up. the French presidential election on Sunday, including the need not to make concessions Laurent Joffrin, editor of the left-wing Libé- Emmanuel Macron had a brief brush with to the UK over Brexit. He has determination ration, conjured up a new political substance, the press. A reporter asked: ‘Is this your Fou- and ambition, but he’d be wise to remember Macronite, as a 21st-century version of Tef- quet moment? This referred to a notoriously how lucky he’s been too. Given the Socialist lon — or the Gallic equivalent of Blairite. showy celebration by Nicolas Sarkozy at Hollande’s abject unpopularity, this looked Macron deftly deflected accusations that Fouquet’s restaurant after his own victory like the year when the centre-right Repub- his policies were like a box of chocolates: in 2007. The 39-year-old centrist was visibly licans were bound to regain the presidency. neatly arranged but with soft centres. He cross. He simply wanted to thank his secre- But their candidate, François Fillon, ran into promised to cut the budget deficit while taries, security officers, politicians and writ- fatal allegations that he arranged big pay- reducing taxation, but avoided Fillon’s ers, he said. Then came the dig. ‘If you don’t ments from state funds to his wife and fam- Thatcherite rigour. When claims surfaced of understand that,’ he said, ‘you understand ily for work they did not do. a gay relationship, he smiled and, referring nothing about life. I have no lessons to to Mélenchon’s doppelgänger, said: learn from the petit milieu Parisien.’ ‘If you’re told I lead a double life, it’s This dismissive reference to the because my hologram has escaped.’ chattering classes is par for the course Macron has the backing of Angela for a man who shows no hesitation in Merkel and can be expected to unite demonstrating his superiority; a man with Germany in making sure that soft who claims he’ll create a new sort of terms for Brexit do not encourage the politics to replace the discredited and Le Pen-Mélechon Eurosceptics. The cliquey system which reached its nadir main threat on 7 May is likely to be under Hollande. But behind Macron from left-wingers unable to bring them- on the red velvet banquettes of the selves to vote for a banker in a country brasserie was as fine a collection of a with a deep distrust of the financial sec- particular kind of Parisian in-crowd as tor, and from those who find him too one could wish for. representative of the elite they want to Alongside secretaries and security overturn. His real challenges will start guards sat the perennial presidential then, and he will no longer be able adviser Jacques Attali, who was whis- to count on Macronite good fortune. pering in François Mitterrand’s ear as The immediate problem is the June he steered France into a downward legislative elections. En Marche! has course in the early 1980s. There was no members of parliament — it plans Daniel Cohn-Bendit, survivor of the to run candidates in all 577 constitu- 1968 student riots turned Green politi- encies, but when voters choose their cian and all-purpose pundit. There was National Assembly representatives a radio host, a well-known actor, a veteran The Socialists split, choosing the left- they often stick to candidates they know. senator and big city boss and the 88-year- winger Benoît Hamon and prompting a And Macron’s movement lacks a national old singer Line Renaud. Very much business walk-out by social democrats like former organisation. Last Sunday he scored well in as usual. premier Manuel Valls, who backed Macron big cities and western France but his oppo- The man who set up his own party to despite bad blood between them when they nents did better in swaths of the north and challenge the system, En Marche! (his own were in government together. Two of the south. Even Charles de Gaulle could not initials), is in fact a perfect insider-outsider. party’s important provincial figures, Lyons muster a parliamentary majority of his own A graduate of the top administrative col- mayor Gérard Collombe and Jean-Yves Le when he founded the Fifth Republic in 1958. lege, l’ENA, he made a fortune organising Drian, president of the Regional Council of So President Macron will need back- mergers and acquisitions for the Rothschild Brittany, swung behind the pretender. The ing from others in the National Assembly. bank, earning €2.9 million in one takeover rise of the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon in That will mean a lot of old-fashioned horse- and getting the nickname of ‘the Mozart of the first round campaign, addressing huge trading. The outlines of such an alliance finance’. In the seamless way of the French crowds and using a hologram to appear at are: social democrats and centrists plus the elite, he gravitated to the Elysée Palace as two rallies at time, provided an alternative liberal wing of the Republicans under for- a Hollande adviser and became economics pole to Marine Le Pen for angry voters. mer prime minister Alain Juppé. But apart minister in 2014, lasting two years before As her polls ratings declined, she focused from requiring a lot of minding, coalitions resigning and setting his sights on return- on her core electorate and thus limited her tend not to be resolute in offering the kind

12 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk of radical changes in economic and social policy Macron has offered, and which he needs to keep En Marche! mobilised. A little too perfect The Republican leadership will want to avoid being sucked into the new president’s Just who is this shiny golden boy? orbit. The Socialists, who had a disastrous first round with only 6 per cent of the vote, will struggle for survival and will resist a JONATHAN MILLER Macron takeover. In short, building a new reformist, liberal, pro-Europe Jerusalem looks like being more a matter of forging alliances with skittish, self-protective part- ners. It is a great mistake to imagine that the anti-Le Pen line-up on 7 May will endure. The single aim of stopping the Front will mmanuel Macron is going to be the rumours are rampant. It would not be replaced by a myriad of party, regional next president of France. I know normally morally bother most French and personal interests. The idealists of En E people are saying Marine Le Pen people that Macron has been rumoured Marche! may find that hard to stomach. A isn’t out of the race, but I see no scenario to be in a close relationship with a movement that came from nowhere could all in which she is voted into the Elysée. The senior male broadcaster. What does too easily dissolve like snowflakes in the sun. French may claim to be revolutionaries, provoke bemusement is the apparent Macron’s task is made all the more tricky but they are terrified of change and contradiction between this story and his by the legacy of another element in the vot- Marine scares them. Avec raison. claim to have a perfect marriage. Or is ing last Sunday. Almost half the voters sup- So the serious question is, who is he asexual, and seeking something else? ported anti-establishment parties. Their Emmanuel Macron, future president of I pose the question not to be intrusive parliamentary representation will be well the republic? Even in the full flush of but because perhaps we should know short of their popular backing. That is likely enthusiasm for this fresh young political more about this man before he is handed to fuel street action encouraged by Mélen- face, still just 39, there are problems and the keys to the presidential Airbus. chon and Le Pen, whose Front is the prin- doubts. Macron is a classic product of the Another of Macron’s very curious cipal political vehicle for industrial workers hyper-selective system used by the elite relationships is with François Hollande. to perpetuate itself, producing fellows At the Elysée, he worked directly with The man who set up his own (mostly) who are good at passing exams the president, always at the forefront party to challenge the system is but hopeless at running France. Now he of his entourage, privy to the darkest in fact a perfect insider-outsider is about to pass the hardest test of all, secrets of this most conspiratorial of with the prize of a gilded palace and the characters. Some said Hollande treated and has made inroads into depressed rural world’s best wine cellar. him as a son and groomed him as his areas. The big CGT union federation will But there is something maybe a successor, despite recent rebukes of try to make up for declining membership by little too perfect about this golden Macron that appear to have been increased militancy. Vested interests, from boy. Always top of his class in school, cinematic, as the French would say: farmers to pharmacists, will be up in arms. A he appears to have had few friends, designed to conceal a relationship that rentrée chaude is on the cards for the autumn. preferring piano lessons and drama to could not have been closer. The first-round vote showed a sharply sport, and always attaching himself to Despite his reputation as a reformer, divided nation. Le Pen took nine depart- authority figures. albeit one who put the toughest ments among those with the highest job- At the very centre of his life, since problems in a file marked trop difficile, less rates. They are not likely to fall for the his earliest childhood, there has been an Macron as a presidential candidate Macron charm or his liberal ‘open to the infatuation with older women. His book, has stopped talking of big-bang world’ policies. So France will come out of Revolution, reveals his earliest influence reforms of the French economy. He is one election and approach another split to have been his grandmother, a teacher staking his hopes for growth instead between the haves and have-nots with two who, according to Macron, inspired all on interventions that are essentially articulate rabble-rousers confronting the who encountered her. He says in the statist. Green energy is one idea, but political start-up of the decade. book that even now, not a day passes you better bet the unions and parastatal when he does not think of her. enterprises will take their share. None of SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST Then there is his wife, Brigitte this is costed. Jonathan Fenby and Anne-Elisabeth Moutet Trogneux, 24 years his senior. In public, His posture towards Germany can on the French presidential election. he seems to be constantly turning be expected to be subservient. Angela towards her, like the boy in class who Merkel, 23 years his senior (and almost always has his hand up. She was his as old as Macron’s wife), is precisely married French professor and drama the mutterfigur to which he is most teacher. He decided to marry her susceptible. He will not dare cross her. when he was 17, when she already had Elsewhere other powers, unidentified, three children. also lurk. It is quite unclear how he Is one allowed to say that love for financed his campaign, or to whom he an older woman does raise questions might owe favours. The clientelist media beyond a passing reference to Oedipus? will do their best to protect him. But What has he sought in this relationship? by the end of five years, it is hard to Approval? Counsel? Sex? Probably not see Macron being loved any more than children. He has stepchildren older than Hollande, his political midwife. France, I he is. Even in a nation that prizes privacy, fear, will be more foutu than ever. ‘He’s old school.’ the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 13 ROD LIDDLE Tim’s a Christian, so he’s not allowed an opinion

aybe I’m wrong about this, but I present himself as anti-establishment. If you view is shared by at least 50 per cent of the don’t remember the BBC run- count the dupes who voted for him, more population and possibly more, although they Mning a documentary 100 days into than two-thirds of the French voted for a might prefer the words ‘yucky’ or ‘vile’ or ‘a Barack Obama’s first presidency and kicking candidate opposed to the liberal establish- bit rum’ rather than ‘sin’. him from pillar to post. Interviewing almost ment, even if only nominally so in one case. Of course Farron was immediately casti- exclusively people who hated him, pouring I mentioned before that with Brexit and gated and, being a weak little weasel, he kind scorn on his every utterance. They did it this the election of Trump and the rise of such of recanted a bit (Thank you, Lord Jesus!). week to Donald Trump, though, and even European parties as the Front National (and What was interesting to me was the point- wheeled out Jeremy Paxman to present this Syriza and Five Star) that the old liberal (in blank refusal even to consider that his view travesty of a documentary. Because Jeremy the US sense) paradigm was in the process might be allowable — a view shared, to a was interviewing exclusively people with of being jettisoned. So it is, beyond all doubt. greater or lesser degree, by a great many whom he wholeheartedly agreed, he didn’t But the liberal establishment still has great people. A chap called David Shariatmadari, get the chance to put on that famous super- power, if not anything remotely approaching writing in the Guardian, tried to be kind. cilious expression we all used to love, back hegemony. And so those who challenge its He said we liberals should all give Timbo a when he was good. Shame. imprecations, its bovine shibboleths, whether break: ‘I don’t care what he considers sinful, With Obama, as I remember, it was a very from left or right, will find themselves vili- so long as it doesn’t translate into policy. For different approach. The studio floors were fied. A weight will come down, propelled by that reason, however, he should be watched still awash with liberal ejaculate well after like a hawk for any hint of discriminatory 100 days of his singularly inept presidency Farron was castigated and, being law-making.’ had elapsed. The establishment circle-jerk- a weak little weasel, he recanted He can think what he likes, then (for ing persisted right until the very end — and a bit (Thank you, Lord Jesus!) which many thanks, Mr Shariatmadari), but not just from the BBC, of course. The Nobel he should not be allowed to let this deep- committee bunged Obama the Peace Prize an outrage at the presumption that such a rooted belief inform his politics. Instead, it in December 2009 for ‘reaching out to the challenge could be mounted at all. Even as is Mr Shariatmadari’s views, rather than the Muslim world’ — a policy which has brought the establishment politicians modify their views of the Holy Bible, which should inform such wonderful dividends for us all. Frankly, language on such stuff as immigration and Tim Farron’s politics. This is because Mr Sha- the further you reach, the more likely you Islam, so that they sound a little closer to riatmadari, like the rest of the liberal estab- are to get your hand chopped off. the views of the ordinary citizen, there is lishment, believes that his views count for a I have many reservations about The Don- still plenty of stuff which they simply cannot lot more than the Holy Bible — indeed his ald, which I outlined here a couple of weeks countenance in any form. views are inviolable. They are all that count. ago — but when I see the establishment, the One of these, in this country particularly, And if anybody dares to disagree, they will newish establishment, so apoplectic about his is the dissing of homosexuality — as the Lib- be watched ‘like a hawk’. I don’t know what very existence, I kinda know what side I’m eral Democrat leader Tim Farron discovered kind of hawk. Maybe a goshawk. on. I can only hope French voters feel simi- recently. Farron’s enormous crime in the eyes And yet the reason people go into poli- larly repulsed by the multiple orgasms expe- of the establishment was to refuse to deny tics is to articulate their points of view and rienced in Brussels, Strasbourg, the BBC, by (for a while, at least) that he thought homo- convince the public of the rectitude of them. Obama and beyond, over the weirdo Manny sexual sex was a sin. Farron is a born-again In a normal society, that would even include Macron’s triumph in the presidential semi- evangelical Christian, so of course he thinks people who have views which differ from finals. The establishment has once again homosexual sex is a sin. My guess is that this those of Mr Shariatmadari — they would be banded together to tell French people how allowed to speak too. And enact legislation to vote in the final, and it would be truly based upon those views, assuming the major- French of the French to react by telling them ity of people agreed with them. Such as on to get stuffed and voting for Marine Le Pen. gay adoptions, for example. My guess is that If I had a vote I would have been torn if you asked in an opinion poll what the best between Le Pen and Mélenchon, much environment would be in which to bring up a as I’d have been torn between Trump and child, a huge majority would choose ‘a moth- Bernie Sanders. Instead, in France, the pre- er and father’. I suspect Tim Farron thinks tend anti-establishment candidate won. You this too. But for the liberal establishment, it can tell he’s pretend by the smirk of jubila- is not even a question. It contravenes a shib- tion on the face of that arrogant and flatu- boleth which simply cannot be challenged. lent perpetually half-cut halfwit Jean-Claude Juncker. But I suppose at least Macron was ‘I’m afraid you’ve got a Theo Hobson on why politicians need savvy enough to understand that he had to progressive disease…’ to start doing God (p.22).

14 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk open newspapers and read about an issue in which I was involved in the room the day Trump’s Brit before, and the reportage is diametrically opposed to what happened in the building. Meet Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the 45th President I wouldn’t even say it is lazy journalism, it’s fabrication.’ FREDDY GRAY What then does he make of the story, widely accepted as true, that his faction in the White House has lost influence? Ever since Bannon was removed from the Nation- al Security Council’s ‘principals committee’ and the Trump administration threw some Tomahawk missiles at President Assad’s ebastian Gorka is a big man. He has father defended his Jewish schoolmates who forces in Syria, it’s been said that the Amer- a powerful handshake, a deep voice, went to school every day after the Germans ica First radicals within Team Trump have Sand a serious goatee. He’s also depu- occupied, so it’s disgusting.’ been sidelined — drowned in the Wash- ty assistant to President Donald Trump, and Gorka became involved with the Make ington swamp they promised to drain. The known as the most influential Brit in the America Great Again project in the sum- world has assumed Jared Kushner, Trump’s White House. He was born in London, the mer of 2015, when Corey Lewandowski, then son-in-law, who looks too dashing to be a son of Hungarian immigrants, and grew up Trump’s campaign manager, asked him to zealot, must have persuaded the President to in Ealing. Yet he seems to identify more with go to New York to help Trump prepare for embrace a more liberal worldview and shun America and Hungary than with Brit- the Breitbart brigade and their talk of ain. When I ask him if he feels British, globalist conspiracies. The ‘grown-ups’ he says, ‘As a good friend said to me, have taken over. ‘You know where that and I think this is a quote from some- comes from?’ Gorka scoffs. ‘That was one else, possibly Hayek, “You were six weeks ago on Twitter. Colin Kahl, always American, you were just born former deputy assistant to the Presi- in the wrong country.”’ dent, the rank I now hold, said we must Nevertheless, the British govern- “purge” — Maoist language — the axis ment, desperate to form bonds with a of ideologues from the White House, Brexit- friendly Trump administration, meaning Gorka, Bannon, [Stephen] has been eager to claim him as one of Miller, so that we can work with the us. ‘They almost instantly glommed on adults that remain.’ to me,’ he says, ‘I’m seen by 10 Downing Gorka rejects ‘the effort to paint us Street and the FCO as somebody to talk as ideological camps’ within the White to about things.’ House as little more than fake news: He has been ‘pleasantly surprised’ ‘You’ll always have palace intrigue.’ by the warmth of the British embassy He insists there is a ‘fabulous com- in Washington. ‘I expected there to be plementarity’ between the key White a little bit of chip on the shoulder — House figures. In Reince Priebus, the “you’re not who we thought was going Chief of Staff, ‘you have someone who to win” — but that was not the case, it understands how the party works… was literally long-lost cousins — “how Then you have Steve Bannon, who’s can we help you?” — so hats off to the never had a non-strategic thought in British team.’ his life. Then you have Jared, who sees Gorka has not enjoyed such convivial a TV debate on foreign policy. Trump spot- what the President wishes to achieve and acceptance elsewhere. The foreign policy ted a fellow alpha dog: he asked Gorka some then becomes the executor of that vision. It’s grandees of America dismiss him as a profes- questions about the Middle East, then turned a very powerful combination.’ sional anti-Muslim and Fox News blowhard to Lewandowski and said: ‘I like this guy.’ A There can be no denying, however, that who, thanks to the craziness that is Trump- contract soon followed. ‘I was never part of Trump’s voters are alarmed at the Presi- world, has become a player in the most pow- the campaign but I was an external expert, dent’s apparent lurch towards intervention- erful government in the world. One snob at if you will. I wrote him a selection of policy ism. Trump has attacked Assad to enforce a the Foreign Policy Research Institute called papers on topics you can probably guess.’ (He ‘red line’ over the use of chemical weapons. him ‘the Simon Cowell of counter-terrorism’. means Islamic terrorism, in case you can’t.) He has sabre-rattled at North Korea, and Gorka puts such attitudes down to ‘profes- After Trump won the election, Gorka dropped the Mother of All Bombs on sional jealousy’. worked for the (now ousted) General Mike Afghanistan to show America’s enemies what The media say he’s a Nazi. That’s because, Flynn on the National Security Transition he’s capable of. Has America First populism on the night of Trump’s inauguration, he Team. But his real ally in the new administra- been junked for neocon internationalism on appeared on TV wearing the medal of the tion has been Steve Bannon, the right-wing steroids? ‘Absolutely not,’ says Gorka. ‘The Order of Vitez, a Hungarian honour which media guru turned Trump consigliere. Ban- President has said again and again and again: he inherited from his father. Various report- non employed Gorka as national security edi- we are not going to occupy foreign lands and ers joined the dots between the Order and tor for his Breitbart website, and the two men we are not going to invade them, that is un- the Slavic far-right and concluded that Gorka are of similarly robust mind on questions of American, we are not interested in nation- must be an anti-Semite. immigration, Islam and terrorism. building. One of the problems I have with a Gorka says that the real prejudice is Like Trump and Bannon, Gorka deplores lot of conservative commentary in our coun- against him. ‘I was born in 1970. I was hardly most journalism: ‘I didn’t realise how lack- try is that they think 59 unmanned missiles goose-stepping down Nuremberg. My father ing in cynicism I was until I got a job in this hitting an air base used for a chemical weap- was nine when World War Two started. My administration. Every morning, I come in and ons attack against unarmed women and chil- the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 15 dren is equivalent to 160,000 people invading Iraq. One MOAB bomb doth not an inva- sion of Mesopotamia make.’ The madness of price caps He admits that ‘the attack on the air- field was about more than just Syria and the Anything would be better than May’s throwback energy policy 2,100-pound bomb was about more than just about a cave complex in Afghanistan.’ What MATTHEW LYNN he means is that, in the case of Syria, Trump was signalling to Russia that he was will- ing to attack its ally. And by making a large bang in Afghanistan, Trump was telling the Chinese that he meant what he said when he told them to ‘solve’ the North Korea prob- etter access to education. Tax cuts for in the final wave of liberalising reforms. Costs lem — killing a few Muslim terrorists in the anyone in the struggling middle. More have been kept under control, new energy process was just a bonus. Gorka insists there Baffordable homes, and more money for sources have been developed and consumer is nothing wrong with bombing one country the National Heath Service. There is noth- choice has been introduced. We may not use to teach another a lesson: ‘If states maintain ing wrong with Theresa May seeking to stake it as much as we should, but one in six gas client relationships with very problematic out the centre ground of British politics and and electricity customers switched supplier and at times heinous nations, then why not?’ stop Brexit turning into a right-wing cam- last year. You couldn’t do that when it was all Flexing America’s muscles has already had paign to turn back the clock. But one might state-controlled. The government should be the desired effect, he says, pointing to Chi- have imagined she’d use conservative means trying to build on that deregulating legacy — na’s recent rejection of a North Korean coal to achieve this, rather than raiding Ed Mili- by having a completely open market in agri- shipment and Putin’s sudden volte-face in band’s last manifesto for ideas. The proposed culture after we leave the EU, for example, favour of meeting the US Secretary of State price cap on energy companies is an alarm- or allowing driverless cars on the roads so we Rex Tillerson. ‘These are not accidents and ing example of Mrs May’s left turn. can innovate with new ways of working. they are very positive signs.’ There are so many ways in which the price Finally, it might be an old point, but it Gorka is not preoccupied with the great cap is a genuinely terrible idea that it is hard can never be repeated enough: price con- game against Russia or China, though. It is to find space to list them all. But here are four trols never work. If they did, then why stop the war against Islamic terrorism that drives big flaws to be getting on with. at energy? Why not caps for food, or school him. He is in London to talk to the govern- First, there is no evidence anyone is mak- uniforms, or furniture — or rent? (This was ment about joint security efforts in the Middle ing ‘excess’ profits. The energy sector is one another Labour proposal that may soon be East: ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you on Brexit.’ of the most extensively monitored industries His views on Islam would not go down anywhere in the world. Last year, the Compe- High prices are more to do with the well at a dinner party in N1, to put it mildly. tition and Markets Authority finished a major ‘Look at the President’s address to the Joint review of the industry and concluded there EU’s demand for renewable energy Session of Congress, watch the video — the was no need for price caps or further controls, sources and the fracking backlash most trenchantly pronounced words in that and only recommended minor changes to the speech are “radical … Islamic … terrorism”. market. A similar investigation in 2008 had arriving at a Tory manifesto near you.) While We’ve jettisoned this idea that political cor- drawn the same conclusion. you are at it, why not place caps on the price rectness will keep us safe, that if you don’t say Far from ripping off consumers, the ener- of Sky Sports subscriptions (that would go “jihad” then people won’t be mowed down gy business is now so competitive that it can down pretty well with the former Ukip voters by vehicles or knifed or blown up.’ I put to be quite a difficult business to make money the Tories are courting), or, come to think of him that, while the neocons may still be out of in — and certainly a difficult one to break it, Waitrose salads (which might tempt a few US government, the Islamophobes are in. He into. Only last year GB Energy Supply, which Remoaner defectors to the Lib Dems back laughs. ‘I would say that those who talk truth- claimed to be the cheapest supplier in the into the fold)? The reason we don’t is because fully about the threat are in.’ market, collapsed. If it was price gouging, it we know state control doesn’t work. If it did, Gorka doesn’t mind being called a fringe wasn’t doing it very well. The high price of the Soviet Union would not have failed. The figure: ‘When you’re on the inside of the White power might have far more to do with the Tories used to have a perfectly good method House, I would say that obviates or negates European Union’s demand for renewable of controlling prices — it was called ‘compe- the definition of fringe!’ He does marvel at his energy sources and the backlash against tition’. And they used to be able to explain ascent, however. ‘I only became a US citizen fracking, which has made energy almost twice how it worked. five years ago, and now I’m working inside as expensive on this side of the Atlantic than There is nothing wrong with Theresa the White House. Every day you pinch your- it is in America. But in case anyone hadn’t May wanting to help families struggling to self and say “Only in America.”’ noticed, we will soon be able to do something get by on stagnant real wages. But there are about those EU regulations. far better ways of doing it. She could try cut- The second drawback of price controls is ting the standard rate of income tax, which that any new regime will be captured very has been stuck at 20 per cent since Gordon quickly by lobbyists who will figure out how Brown last reduced it in 2007. Or abolishing to game the system. Big companies are usual- the green belt and scrapping planning regula- ly perfectly relaxed about regulated markets tions to reduce the prohibitive cost of hous- — it is the consumer who suffers. Competi- ing. Or forcing the Bank of England to finally tion worries the energy firms far more than normalise interest rates, so that people get a the notion of price controls. return on their savings again. Thirdly, a more liberal, privatised energy Or indeed almost anything — because market has been working reasonably well, anything would be better than a throwback especially when you take into account the to the economics of 1970s South America, ‘Not so much a “Don’t Know”, sheer scale of investment required. The Con- which is all that seems to be on offer in this more a “Couldn’t Care Less”.’ servative party privatised the industry in 1990 general election.

16 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk MATTHEW PARRIS What would Darwin make of trainspotters?

hy are men so much more like- no trains when we first came down from girls and women pursue these hobbies. How ly to be interested in trains than the trees. So one has to conclude that the about the instinct for order, control and a Wwomen? I believe this to be a impulse for mastery in railway matters is pre-determined track? I would by no means question of profound importance. It has one of those traits that (in a phrase coined suggest that women through history led dis- implications for the debate about whether by the science writer Steven Pinker) ‘have proportionately disordered, uncontrolled or behavioural gender differences are inborn come along for the ride’ on the coat-tails of random lives: on the contrary, the life that or learned. And implications for our under- another adaptation that does enhance sur- most cultures traditionally prescribed for standing of male thinking. vival chances. women did need organisation and control, When at a dinner party did you ever The evolutionary biologists Richard but they were not usually in control, and hear an intense conversation between two Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould used the were often at the mercy of men and events. women about railway timetables? How term ‘spandrel’ for this bi-product of evo- The little boy overseeing the operation of many teenage girls have you ever noticed lution: in architecture, spandrels are the his extensive model railway: a set of points among groups of trainspotters? Do small triangular gaps created in the top left- and installed here and a level-crossing there, girls ask for a train set as a birthday present? right-hand corners of an arch when it sup- shunting goods wagons up a siding, operat- Doesn’t this stark disparity between genders ports a horizontal. Often richly decorated, ing the signals, changing the points and send- on a matter which touches equally the lives they exist only because cross-members are ing his locomotive and carriages off down of both, and in which both are equally com- flat and arches curved. Ping-pong is a span- the tracks with a touch on the lever on his petent to take an interest, deserve attention? control box — that is what I mean by giving Women use trains just as men do, because The impulse to be a train buff is shape and system to events. they are a convenient means of transport. useless – worse than useless – as it Now take those two instincts — the A woman will be as well-informed on rail- damages a chap’s romantic prospects instinct to collect and the instinct for a sys- way matters as she needs to be for practi- tematic predetermination of events — and cal purposes. She can drive a train or run drel in evolutionary terms. It doesn’t help us ask what would be the perfect conjunction a train operating company as well as any with procreation, but the instinct for contest of those two in a single impulse? Surely the man if her career takes her that way — but does have a useful part to play in the strug- impulse to be a train buff: useless from an when she was a little girl she did not dream gle for survival. Trainspotters, then, may not evolutionary point of view. Indeed worse of the prospect. But so many male faces will be superior lovers, but what drives them than useless because the hobby damag- light up when train information is offered must have some Darwinian value. es a chap’s romantic prospects. So I offer or sought. For us it is what, say, football, I identify two core instincts, one or both Professor Pinker this example of an evolu- cricket or politics is to many: more an intel- of which may make a man a train buff. The tionary adaptation that has come along for lectual passion than a necessary life skill. first is the instinct to collect. The second, a the ride and now actually inhibits its car- This glaring gender difference, though subliminal craving for order, certainty, con- rier’s life chances. Interestingly, the love of on a minor matter, is particularly worthy trol, and a predetermined course: ‘Keeping collecting things, and an obsessive interest of study because an interest in trains is not things on track’ sums up the impulse. Enthu- in trains, are both often cited as examples something likely to be bullied out of a little siastic collectors of things do tend to be male. of autistic behaviour. Autism is a dispropor- girl or drummed into a little boy. One can Stamp collections, butterfly collections, tionately (Hans Asperger believed exclu- argue that boys are conditioned into not plant collections — more boys and men than sively) male condition. showing emotions, liking a fight, or want- I love trains. I love the clickety-click on ing to be in charge; and girls encouraged to the last bit of the Matlock line where the want pink frilly dresses, empathy and dolls, rails have not yet been continuously welded. etc. But nobody would tell a boy he was less I love studying timetables even when I’m than a man because he was not interested in not going anywhere. I love adding to my trains, and if anyone raised an eyebrow at a collection of railway stations I’ve alighted daughter who studied railway timetables, it at. I want to board a London train at Belper, would not be because this was thought inap- just because you now can. There seems to propriate, but because it was so very unusual. me something deeply right about people In the argument about nature versus nur- being carried along tracks, predestined; and ture, therefore, a tendency to be interested something inexplicably wrong about them in railways strikes me as a small but rather weaving all over the motorway, free to divert perfect argument for ‘nature’. Yet no obvi- at whim. But I accept that does not make me ous Darwinian explanation suggests itself. a transport expert: it makes me a man — a Natural selection may make warriors of man with a mild case of a relatively harmless men and carers of women, but there were ‘It’s the Conservative election battle bus.’ mental condition. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 17

ANCIENT AND MODERN Friends, Romans and Russians The lords of poverty How corrupt UN aid barons keep Africans poor, sick and hungry

AIDAN HARTLEY

President Vladimir Putin, who still supports Bashar al-Assad in Syria, needs help if he wishes to be seen as a member of the civilised world. Rome might provide it. Kenya enough, Africa will have more people of From 509 bc Rome had been a met Dr Tom Catena in Sudan’s Nuba working age than anywhere else, but with republic, controlled by a senate, consuls Mountains — the site of an African war few jobs to go around. Africa had a larger and people’s assemblies, all (it was and famine few have even heard about industrial base in the 1980s than it does now. argued) balancing each other out. I — in a hospital overflowing with children. The prices of Africa’s oil and metals fluctu- During that period Rome mastered all Italy, defeated the powerful state of I saw bombs had ripped away their arms, ate, which leaves agriculture. In the last half Carthage, and brought much of North flying shrapnel had taken out a baby’s eye, century African harvests have stagnated — Africa, France (Gaul), Spain, Greece anti-personnel mines had shredded legs and in countries like Zimbabwe, they col- and the Levant under its control. It to jagged bone and ribbons of gangrenous lapsed. Vast African forests and virgin lands did so not primarily because it was an flesh, infants suffering kwashiorkor and have been cleared, while soils have erod- aggressive, warlike state: so was every the other horrors of malnutrition. Inspired ed, lakes, rivers and aquifers have dried up. other state it faced in that dog-eats-dog by St Francis of Assisi, ‘Doctor Tom’ has Some predictions say that in the next three ancient Mediterranean world. worked almost every day, all day, since he decades harvests will drop by a fifth. For all its triumphs, Rome suffered arrived as the only surgeon for the Catholic When South Sudan was briefly at peace 90 military defeats in that time; the hospital in Nuba nine years ago. I asked him: four years ago (it has been at war for most Celts (390 bc) and Hannibal (218-202 ‘Why do you stay?’ He replied: ‘There’s no of the past six decades), friends of mine bc) nearly brought it to its knees. other option. You leave and abandon every- offered to invest tens of millions of pounds The reason for its success, it has one here or you stay and keep going.’ there to grow rice. Even in peacetime, the been argued, was twofold. First, it was a securely integrated state, actively Heroes like Catena convince me that country had to import 400,000 tons of food involving the whole population, rich giving to charitable causes in Africa is the aid every year. On the eve of my friends and poor alike. More important still, right thing to do, because at least some of committing their money, the government in this bellicose world Rome alone what you donate will help rescue children understood the advantages of bringing like those in Nuba. But we know nothing The only contracts we could win enemies onside. much is going to change. Six years ago we During the 200 years it took to bring were told Africa faced the ‘worst drought in were the ones that didn’t involve Italy under its control, it developed 60 years’. In 2015 Ethiopia faced ‘the worst bribes – we didn’t stand a chance high political and diplomatic skill at drought in decades’. This year the aid man- ‘alliance management’, converting darins once dubbed the ‘Lords of Poverty’ in Juba told them all pesticides and ferti- enemies into loyal Roman citizens. by Graham Hancock have upped their lisers were banned, because only organic Consequently, the military and hyperbole yet again to claim that wars and farming was permitted. My friends packed human resources Rome had at its droughts across the Horn of Africa, Nige- up and left. Today, five million South Suda- disposal vastly outnumbered those of any other state it took on, and its ria and Yemen have generated ‘the largest nese are starving to death, mainly because success in conquest (and the booty it humanitarian crisis since the creation of the President Salva Kiir and his Dinka mafia are accumulated) made more allies and United Nations’ 72 years ago. massacring rival tribes they regard as rebels. cemented existing loyalty. Hannibal’s Certainly nothing will change if we do The UK’s development secretary calls ally King Philip V of Macedon urged not object to the fact that Yemen was heavily what is unfolding in South Sudan tribal gen- Greek states to adopt the tactic. dependent on United Nations food aid even ocide — but President Salva Kiir does not The tsars of imperial Russia had before the current civil war — and that this care. Last month he raised the permit fee ‘co-optation’ skills, too. But now this was because two thirds of its cultivable land for aid workers from $100 to $10,000. Drop- deeply corrupt, insecure nation seems was devoted to growing khat, a vegetable ping a few cruise missiles on his head might incapable of co-opting anyone except narcotic on which Yemenis spend most improve South Sudan’s situation. We know those equally corrupt. of their daily household income. Nothing that giving food aid might not — rival armies Consequently, it has no option but will improve unless we acknowledge how will loot it; warlords will steal relief aid, sell to express its pride in being a leader of across Africa people are fighting over scarce it in the market and buy more cattle so they loners, surrounded by enemies, single- handedly and heroically facing up to a resources, while environmental destruc- can acquire more wives and feed their sol- hostile world. tion and corruption are crises that fuel the diers. Yet still we should contribute to char- But if you are unable to see that it is jihadist insurgencies of Boko Haram and ity, because some of it might reach people in your interests to turn enemies into Al-Shabaab — and drive the exodus of like Tom Catena who do the right thing. allies, what can you expect? migrants to Europe. What we should expect when giving to — Peter Jones Between now and 2050, Africa’s popula- charity is a better performance from the tion will double to 2.5 billion — and soon Lords of Poverty themselves. Today the UN

18 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk blames droughts on climate change, but they for aid agencies. The only contracts we could have always occurred in Africa with cyclical win were the ones that did not involve us regularity. In Genesis, Joshua predicted the offering bribes — and among all the inter- onset of famine years in Egypt and gathered national aid groups, the very worst were the corn when it was as abundant as ‘the sand United Nations agencies deployed to assist of the sea’ for the lean years to come. An people in dire need of humanitarian aid. It ancient Israelite in bondage knew how to was entirely usual for UN officials in Juba to think ahead about combatting an African expect bribes of tens of thousands of dollars drought better, it seems, than any of today’s in return for a contract. In an environment UN officials. The UN agency World Food where contractors were happy to pay such Programme flies food to seaports, or air- inducements, we did not stand a chance. drops bags of grain instead of buying locally Among all the aid organisations work- or trucking supplies by road. ing on this year’s emergency appeals across Africa, departments of the United Nations n northern Uganda, the world’s largest will control the lion’s share of funds. In Irefugee camps have been forming for ‘“Brought to you using recent years there has been a flurry of sto- nearly a year as the South Sudanese flee non-fossil fuels” — the bastards ries about impropriety among UN workers, President Salva Kiir’s murderous army. Sud- are virtue-signalling us.’ including rampant theft and sexual abuse. At denly UN officials sound alarm bells that a a time when Donald Trump’s administration cholera epidemic is about to erupt. Send the refugees in 50 trucks every day, dump- plans to cut US funding for the UN, the new money now! What we know is that the ref- ing the supplies into small plastic tanks that secretary general António Guterres is prom- ugees did not have cholera back home in cannot easily be disinfected with chlorine. ising to speed up overhauling a system that their villages — but they find it when they The reason, witnesses say, is that local UN has been more resistant to reform in recent congregate in camps specially established officials are making money from the water decades than anywhere outside Pyongyang. by the UN to house and feed them. If the trucks, since they are in control of the lucra- UN workers who commit crimes such as UN knew the refugees were on their way, tive contracts supplying the camps. fraud and paedophilia enjoy complete impu- they had no excuse to allow the risk of chol- This is a familiar story to anybody in nity thanks to a little-known international era to arise. Water from boreholes is plenti- the aid business. In South Sudan a couple law called the 1946 Convention on the Priv- ful in camps like Bidi Bidi, with its 272,000 of years ago, I myself attempted to start a ileges and Immunities of the UN. While we refugees, and supplies could be kept clean logistics business serving the aid industry give generously to assist Africa’s poor, we with large pumps feeding into giant bladder — flying and trucking food, supplying kit to should expect an end to the corruption that tanks. Instead, the UN transports water for provide clean water, constructing buildings still exists within the United Nations.

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DANIEL HANNAN MEP RADEK SIKORSKI VICKY FORD MEP THOMAS KIELINGER British politician, author and Senior fellow, Harvard Chairman of the Internal German journalist, political leading Brexit campaigner University and former Market and Consumer commentator and author Polish foreign minister Affairs Committee in the European Parliament

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the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 19 DEBATE Is boarding school cruel? Being sent away from home can make – or break – a child

den. To admit life at school isn’t glorious is to ‘Wisdom comes through suffering,’ my old fail, to be unworthy. I never told my parents headmaster Billy Williamson liked to say, how miserable I was at my prep school, at quoting Aeschylus (though Billy was talk- eight or at 13. I was ashamed; I thought they ing about the school food). From Sir Thomas might be hurt — and besides, the cane-happy Browne to Friedrich Nietzsche, the thought headmaster had told us not to sneak. Caning has echoed. was banned 20 years ago, but the pressures The Book of Proverbs backs it up: ‘He on children to say the required thing are still that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he strong, at home and at school. that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.’ I’ve interviewed dozens of parents If, as has been said, the British have been and boarding school teachers to find out uniquely brutal to their children, it was how this eminently Victorian practice per- with reason. By the end of the 19th cen- sists — thrives — today. There are broadly tury, much of the world believed that the three strands of defence, which cross over. ritual brutalities and humiliations dealt out First are the must-dos. Jobs, geography or at the great British boarding schools were Yes family breakdown make boarding the best necessary to produce a very special Briton. Alex Renton solution. You have to have sympathy with How else would a handful of young men run the last; clearly for some children a stable, Baluchistan or Zululand? Last week some 20,000 children under the secure home with reliable adults to trust, if Ah, today’s parents say, that was then and age of 14 packed their bags to return to this is now. It isn’t about producing empire boarding school for the summer term: a ‘You wouldn’t believe how rubbish builders but responsible citizens. There are migration unique in anthropology. The habit some parents are,’ one housemaster mobile phones and flexi-boarding. Duvets, was born of necessity for the rural gentry in revealed. ‘Schools get used as a dump.’ teddy bears and child-protection policies. the 18th century, and it became customary for But I’ve been told of several schools where the wealthy and aspirational in the 19th cen- not love, may be better than what’s at home. they advise no contact from the parents tury. But what possible need for boarding is The flip side is that the schools get used for the first weeks after the parting. That is there in the 21st? as a ‘dump’, as a housemaster at an eminent not so very different from the 1930s head- Some parents say they have no choice. public school puts it. ‘You wouldn’t believe master who, when asked by a mother why ‘She literally made me do it,’ one mother told how rubbish some parents are. Most exeat she couldn’t visit her boy every weekend, me of her eight-year-old, residing at a very weekends, come Friday evening, I’ll have a responded: ‘Madam, if you had a puppy smart prep in the Midlands. ‘I was in bits. Still couple of kids waiting miserably in the hall would you cut off its tail an inch at a time, or am. But she’d read Harry Potter and Malory with their bags. Then the phone call — we’re all at once?’ Towers and her mind was made up.’ I pointed desperately busy, could you just hold on to I don’t think that pre-teen boarding out that neither J.K. Rowling nor Enid Bly- him till Sunday? Some people should not schools set out to break a child like a young ton had gone to boarding school, and won- have kids at all.’ horse any more, nor that they tolerate preda- dered gently what might happen when her The next argument is less voiced. But it’s tory adults as mine and many others did in daughter discovered that her wizard’s wand clearly as significant as it was during the great the 1970s and 1980s. But you won’t find a sin- didn’t function and that boarding wasn’t a private schools boom in the late 19th century. gle child psychologist or development expert ten-week sleepover party at Alton Towers. Some wealthy parents buy boarding as they who thinks the practice is anything but a Her mother laughed: ‘Not an issue. She just might a Bentley — it is a status-marking com- grave risk. The schools and what they do are adores it. Friends galore. We just about had modity. A proven good investment, too: the an anachronism: it’s time to say goodbye to to drag her home at half-term.’ class that uses these schools still dominates the notion, along with other things we used I am glad for both of them, but not con- Britain’s elite, as it did in the 1860s and the to think were a good idea — sending small vinced. Children tend to tell parents what 1960s. Prep boarding is the easiest route into boys up chimneys, marrying off girls at 12. they want to hear — they like to protect us public schools and so into the Establishment. Children are better off at home. from the nasty realities. A child informed that If you have £350,000 to spare, why not spend he or she should adore boarding school, or it buying your child a slot on the top shelf? Alex Renton is the author of Stiff Upper that Mummy and Daddy scrimped and saved The most honest and interesting argu- Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of for their great adventure, is a child with a bur- ment for boarding is even more ancient. a Ruling Class.

20 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk We dreamt up imaginative ways to smuggle BAROMETER in contraband — and parents were involved. One girl had a clever wheeze which resulted in a local takeaway joint delivering boxes of cold, greasy pizza to the school squash courts. Pippa goes public Did we feel unloved because we weren’t constantly at our parents’ side? Of course Church of England lawyers ruled that not. Most of us had begged them to let us go the public must be allowed to attend the No wedding of Pippa Middleton at St Mark’s Lara Prendergast and when we went home we would regale them with stories of our adventures. They Church, Englefield, Berkshire on 20 May. Other rulings that could put the dampers Like Alex Renton, I went to a prep school seemed grateful that we were testing the on your celebrity wedding: in Sussex where I boarded for a few years. school’s authority, rather than theirs. — Marriages are public services. All Unlike him, I have happy memories of my What about the perverts and the sadists? parishioners, and possibly all members of time there. I doubt my experience would No boarding school anecdote is complete the public, must be let in ‘unless a genuine make for a gripping book. For me — and for without a few grisly characters, so we loved question of safety or security arises’. most of the friends I have stayed in touch dreaming up stories about angry history — It is not legally clear whether marriage with — boarding wasn’t horrific but great teachers and drunken matrons. One boy services can be ticketed, but if they are then fun. But who wants to read about the good set up an underground magazine filled with they must be publicised. times? Brutality makes for better copy. such stories — mostly imaginary — that was — No video can be produced without the There is no denying boarding school passed around surreptitiously. Others learnt consent of the organist. used to be tough. Older generations were the Childline phone number by heart, and sent away at a very young age, and would whispered it in corridors when those in loco Time off barely see their parents all term. Corporal parentis walked past, just to wind them up. Jeremy Corbyn wants another four public punishment was the norm. Sadists and per- Did we feel unloved because we holidays. Which countries have the most? verts flocked to these schools, knowing full Argentina ...... 18 well that nobody would ask many questions. weren’t at our parents’ side? Of course Hong Kong, India ...... 17 Literature does a good job of reinforcing not – we’d begged them to let us go Russia, Japan, South Korea, the sense that boarding schools are ruthless Saudi Arabia, Brazil ...... 15 places that churn out dysfunctional char- But if there had genuinely been a problem, Singapore ...... 14 acters. Alex’s book is no exception. He has we would have called our parents. Most, if not Netherlands, China, Germany, extrapolated from his own experiences, and all, of the teachers seemed kind and wanted France, Spain, Italy ...... 11 found contemporary sources who confirm us to do well. They cared about what hap- USA, Canada, Mexico ...... 10 them. Boarding school is terrible for children, pened to us and hoped we were happy, as did Germany, Austria ...... 9 they say, supported by quotes from authors our parents. I think for the most part, we were. UK ...... 8 such as Dickens, Kipling and Evelyn Waugh. When I eventually arrived at university, Alex paints a hellish picture. It’s just not one I found it strange to discover that some of Red’s not dead that I recognise. my fellow undergraduates felt homesick. The Communist Party of Great Britain is For society has changed, and so have They had never lived away before. I could not fielding any general election candidates boarding schools. The cane has been packed remember that feeling, but I was glad to and is throwing its weight behind Jeremy away for years now. Children are both seen have got that part of the process out of Corbyn. How much weight is that? and heard. Educational expectations have the way. Everyone has to grow up at some The Communist vote in recent elections: risen. Communication has changed beyond stage — and doing it in the safe confines of election seats fought overall vote recognition. My grandfather’s generation a boarding school didn’t seem all that bad. 1979 ...... 38 ...... 16,858 would receive a handful of letters a term, if There are worse things than a stiff upper lip. 1983 ...... 35 ...... 11,606 that. By the time I was boarding in the early I don’t want to sound callous or dis- 1987 ...... 19 ...... 6,078 noughties, I could speak to my parents every miss those who say they hated it. Boarding 1992 ...... 4 ...... 603 day if I wanted — but why would I? There school can be an unhappy place for some — 1997 ...... 5 ...... 639 were hundreds of things to be getting on with. although find me a school that isn’t at times. 2001 ...... 6 ...... 1,003 Because that is what boarding school But is it cruel and are children always bet- 2005 ...... 6 ...... 1,124 2010 ...... 6 ...... 947 meant to us: friends — and freedom. Week- ter off at home? I don’t think so. I suspect 2015 ...... 9 ...... 1,229 ends and holidays were for the family, but dur- that for everyone who says they had a terri- ing term time we formed close-knit groups, ble time, there are many more who adored it. Grow more and those bonds have endured. Returning home was something we cherished. I looked Lara Prendergast is online editor of Emmanuel Macron wants to make France forward to seeing my parents at the week- The Spectator. more business-friendly. Which countries ends, whereas friends of mine who went to host the highest numbers of Europe’s 1,000 day school found it frustrating to be stuck fastest-growing companies? with their family night after night. Germany ...... 236 Netherlands ...... 29 Our school taught discipline, but what UK ...... 235 Sweden ...... 13 kind doesn’t? Most of the time we played by Italy ...... 186 Poland ...... 6 the rules, but everyone misbehaved at times, France ...... 139 Switzerland ...... 5 just to see where the limits lay. If you were Spain ...... 102 Czech, Romania ...4 Ireland, Finland, Iceland, caught in another person’s dormitory after Belgium ...... 3 lights out, you could face a week of changing Austria, Norway ...... 2 the bed sheets in the boarding house. Pupils Bulgaria, Portugal, Hungary, learned to be inventive when it came to Denmark, Croatia, Malta ...... 1 breaking the rules. It was almost as impor- Source: FTSE 1000 fastest-growing companies tant a life lesson as learning to follow them. ‘I packed the kids off to boot camp.’ the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 21 early Blair) gives the impression of having a comprehensive, seamless world view, as if Do do God his politics and his religion effortlessly con- firm each other, in a virtuous circle. A little faith goes a long way for leaders Behind the scenes it might not be so straightforward, but that’s another matter. THEO HOBSON Farron has proved that a liberal politician can’t afford to be seen as doctrinally con- servative — he or she must exude sunny optimism that liberals and believers are fun- damentally at one. Whichever party emerges as the principal opposition this summer, it should seriously consider formulating an official line on reli- gion. Otherwise its approach is too much defined by that of its leader, whose views on his election was won two days before right. And that largely means that it must the matter might be muddled or superficial. it was announced, on Easter Sunday. formulate its approach to religion with great Incidentally, the Tory party doesn’t have Theresa May put out an Easter mes- care. This is not a secondary matter that can the same need, for there is a strong assump- sage in which she suggested that British be shrugged off, left to chance. tion that its leader approves of the status values had a Christian basis. It was her In my reading of the data, about a third quo, of the nation’s traditional official Chris- version of David Cameron’s message two of Britons are pro-religion, about 15 per cent tianity. Even an agnostic Tory can mumble years before, in which he said that Britain are anti-religion and about half are pretty something about being a flying buttress, is a Christian country. She was rather more indifferent. A political party needs to appeal supporting the Church from the outside. convincing. I don’t know whether Cameron to that third, partly because it is the most civ- With a progressive party leader, one natu- is sincerely religious, but he didn’t seem ically engaged section. rally wonders whether his or her reformism it. He didn’t even seem to try very hard to Hitherto, progressive politics has only extends to wanting to reform religion away. seem it, as if fearing that his metropolitan half-grasped this. It has not quite noticed that So it would greatly help if he or she had a support might weaken, and perhaps that pro-religion leaders are capable of doing a lot party line to refer to. George Osborne would make a snarky jibe better than their sceptical peers, even in sec- This party line should be: we affirm the about it at cabinet. But it still did him good ular Europe. I would even say that a leader role of faith in public life, and we see Brit- to make those pro-religious noises. who identifies as atheist is a liability. In fact, ain’s shared moral values as largely deriving St Theresa should keep her piety out of so is a leader who is careful not to identify as from its Christian tradition. This might seem politics, said a few pundits. Alastair Campbell an unnecessary foray into the history of adapted ‘We don’t do God’ into ‘she shouldn’t Alastair Campbell and the ideas, but it is crucial for a progressive party do God’: ‘I think even vicars’ daughters Guardian don’t get that chippy to make this point about the roots of our should be a little wary of allying their poli- shared values. Otherwise, its affirmation of tics to their faith,’ he said, and accused the secularism is a minority taste ‘faith’ sounds like an empty bit of political Prime Minister of suggesting that ‘if God had correctness, dated multiculturalism. Other- a vote he would have voted Leave’. A Guard- atheist but basically is one. Which describes wise, it is likely to perpetuate the old met- ian editorial warned that Mrs May’s message Jeremy Corbyn. He sometimes tries to sound ropolitan progressive idea that religion is was part of a global move towards religious religiously mysterious, but resembles an ele- an oppressive neurosis: Marx and Freud left identity politics and ‘religious national- phant hiding under a coat. In one interview sufficient traces of themselves in north Lon- ism’. Do they say this every year about the he objected to being labelled an atheist, and don to ensure the survival of this prejudice. Queen’s Christmas message? said his actual position was ‘a private thing’. Progressive politics must make a deci- Dangerous religious nationalism might He went on: ‘I respect all faiths, I probably sive break with that Hampstead orthodoxy be on the rise in other parts of the world, spend more time going to religious services if it is to win over the crucial third of the but that doesn’t discredit a British politician than most people, of all types. I go to syna- electorate that is pro-religious. That means mildly affirming our main religious tradi- gogues, I go to mosques, I go to temples, I a new will to speak about the roots of politi- tion. It’s Campbell and the Guardian who go to churches, and I have many humanis- cal idealism — even if it embarrasses our don’t get it. They don’t get that chippy secu- tic friends and I have many atheist friends. I English habits of evasion. larism is a minority taste. Campbell ought respect them all.’ Of course I don’t mean that a progressive to have noticed that Blair won three elec- Can you hear the peeved tone? ‘Don’t I party must be overtly Christian. The secular tions by doing a bit of God amid his poli- sit through enough faith events for people to nature of our politics must not be directly tics, by making liberal Christian enthusiasm leave me alone about my atheism?’ Corbyn’s disrupted. Rather, a progressive party must basic to his style. They don’t get that a huge (probable) atheism can’t really be separated make it clear that the humanist ideals it sector of the electorate is vaguely reassured from the rest of his winning personality. But affirms are not at odds with religion, but are by soft Christian noises, and dislikes atheists it’s safe to say that it contributes to his lack of informed by Britain’s main religious tradi- implying that they are dodgy illiberals for mainstream appeal, his failure to engage the tion. It must say that progressive idealism feeling reassured. This blinkered approach Home Counties voter with a conscience who has Christian roots — yes, it has other to religion, seeing it as a veneer for nasty was wowed by Blair. The same was true of roots too, but the Christian roots must be nativism, is hugely costly to its proponents: Ed Miliband. He once or twice tried to sof- foregrounded, so that the old Hampstead it is a major cause of the liberal left’s loss of ten his atheism by pointing to its Jewish char- assumptions are rejected. mainstream appeal. acter. It didn’t work. A politician who sneers at this idea, or This election might pave the way for This should put Tim Farron in a strong fears that it heralds ‘religious nationalism’ a realignment of progressive politics in position. But he has allowed himself to be is unlikely to appeal beyond certain pockets Britain. But if a genuinely fresh force is to boxed in as narrowly religious. A success- of north London, or to deprive Mrs May emerge, its ideological foundations must be ful progressive politician (think Obama and of any sleep.

22 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk NOTEBOOK Prue Leith

’m an unashamed Archers fan. eing a professional cook has its IBut for the first time in 50 years I’m Bdisadvantages. People often say ‘I’d exasperated by the storyline. A fortnight never ask you to dinner’ or ‘I’ve spent ago Usha, who has no ball sense, is all day in the kitchen, slaving my socks justifiably rejected as a potential player off.’ But they forget that no one comes by Ambridge’s cricket captain. Even to dinner to award you Michelin stars she admits she’s useless. Nevertheless, or AA rosettes, and the last thing they bleating ‘sexist’ and ‘age-ist’, she leads need is you in a culinary flap, red-faced a Lysistrata-style boycott, not of the and furious. They’ve come to see you. marital bed, but of the practice nets. The The food is secondary, if not tertiary. women down bats and walk. Really! It’s enough to make you ashamed to be a odern children are, I think, indulged nd as for me, I’ve only belatedly feminist. And then last week the captain Mand both over- and under-protected. Arealised that I’m expected to show offers her the job of ‘inspirational team They are consulted about what they’d off, with drizzles and foams, powders coach’. Laughable. Except for some like to eat, what colour mug they’ll have and spherifications (that’s little jellied reason I don’t laugh. I fume. their apple juice in. They are patiently balls to you and me), cracknels and negotiated with on the subject of bedtime glazes. It must be a bit of a letdown to ast weekend’s perfect foretaste, or TV. Mostly they get their way. They are get meatballs or roast chicken. Too late Lfingers crossed, of summer, had given so many toys one can barely navigate to mend my ways though. husband John dusting off his 1600cc what my nephew, who also has three under Harley trike (rudely called his mobility eight, calls a ‘sea of plastic crapola’. But he aforementioned nephew is scooter by his children). It’s perfect for those same parents will let their offspring TSam Leith (literary editor of this an old lady like me — the leather pillion ride a mini motorbike, whizz down a esteemed publication). I’m glad to say seat wraps cosily round my back and zipwire without a helmet, or row a boat he occasionally stoops to slightly less hips, and it feels stable and safe. Also, without a lifejacket. I run around fussing highbrow journalism and recently Saga since it’s classed like a Reliant Robin, like an old hen, clucking that a toddler can magazine hired him to interview me for you don’t have to wear a helmet, which drown in an ankle-deep pond and that five- a piece in next month’s issue. I haven’t means you can smell the blossom in the year-old skulls are fragile things. enjoyed an interview so much ever. hedgerows or the catkins overhead. At First of all we didn’t have to go over sundown we growl gently through the ne risky activity — which I’m told is a much-travelled ground, such as where smiling Cotswolds, marvelling at the Ogame first played by Mexican Indians I learned to cook and what my worst lambs in the fields, sun slanting through that’s made it to the UK — is ‘fire hockey’ culinary disaster was. We just yattered the trees, hot-air balloons above. Oh, to or ‘flaming hockey’. Basically it’s hockey away about his generation and mine, me be in England. played at night with the puck on fire. The accusing him of lax parenting skills (see fortysomething dads tried it on our gravel above), and him reminding me that my remember when my children were drive and I must admit it was exciting, generation’s morals were laxer than his Itoddlers they’d have tantrums in the though not good for my tulips, with the and very much laxer than those of the supermarket, but let them loose in the goalposts set in front of the flower beds. current crop. Did you know sex, drugs, countryside and there’d not be a tear drink and crime have all fallen among all day. Now my son and daughter- teenagers and young adults? Too busy in-law, with three under eight, come on their phones, I guess. down from London, sometimes with two or three other families. Last week ut what made the gig with Sam we had 14 children belting round the B such fun was that as we talked we garden, making dens, riding bikes and cooked, me bossing him about as we climbing anything that could be climbed. made pasta with pesto. Only this was Two little boys played chess for hours. a very English pesto, made with parsley, Small girls did handstands on the lawn. walnuts, cheddar, rapeseed oil, and None of them cried, sulked or raged. I garlic (the garlic came from Italy as wild remarked to one young mum that open British garlic is currently so fashionable spaces stopped all whining. ‘That and there wasn’t a leaf to be had), eaten with being out of sight of their parents,’ she ‘It’s easier to manage and stops me spaghetti from a supermarket packet. replied. Dead right. being dragged about everywhere.’ Delicious, though I sez it m’self. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 23 LETTERS

Aid is not the answer election, and then last year in a referendum theories but I do not recall a single occasion is more than enough to be getting on with. in over 40 years when I have been asked by Bill Gates says he is a huge fan of It may amuse and employ the media. a pollster about my voting preferences (or capitalism and trade (Save Aid!, 22 April) It may seem a good ploy in the game of anything else, for that matter). Evidence but then spoils it by repeating the received Westminster politics. But we the people from family and friends suggests that these wisdom about aid: ‘If you care at all about elect our MPs to get on with the serious pollsters are rather discreet. I’m curious conditions in Africa – the population business of government — legislation, to know if any of your readers can prove explosion, measles, polio — then don’t managing the economy, diplomacy, otherwise. suggest there is a private-sector solution to implementing policies and so on — Charlie Ainsworth these problems. It’s outrageous.’ hopefully unfazed by opinion polls, social Haywards Heath, West Sussex No. It is not outrageous. A vigorous media, and the feverish daily contradictions private sector is the only answer to from the pundits. No comparison African development. I have spent my life We do not want to be bothered every in Africa, working in 18 of its countries, five minutes — you were elected, get on Sir: Rod Liddle, whose writing I always usually deep in the bush. I have watched with it. One supposes one will have to go enjoy, describes Tim Farron as possessing numerous aid programmes fail once the and vote in June, but I am not sure I can be the ‘sparkling allure of a Methodist Church external funding is removed, and have bothered to contribute in any way to the Hall in Bishop Auckland in late November’. spent much time thinking about and election. What a bore. He may be quite right about Mr Farron, discussing why this should be so. Anne Booth but this is surely very unfair to Bishop After 50 years and something like a Shaftesbury, Dorset Auckland, a lovely town with a splendid trillion dollars, Africa’s growth rate is episcopal palace. barely keeping up with its population. Slippery polls Eliot Wilson Mr Gates has put aside $40 billion to Sunderland help, and yes, the clean water, sanitation Sir: Rod Liddle is right to mock the and vaccinations it funds will save many credibility of the pollsters (‘What I expect Side-saddle suffering thousands. But it will not drag Africa out of from this pointless election’, 22 April). poverty. This requires cultural changes. Their record since the 2015 general Sir: Simon Barnes makes an interesting The problem here is the nomadic roots election has been nothing short of an point about riding side-saddle (‘Side-saddle of African culture. Nomadism eschews embarrassment. I’m not one for conspiracy is sexy’, 15 April), but as a teacher, writer private property, and communal land and rider with 50 years of horsemanship ownership is still the norm in Africa. If behind me, I beg to differ. Most importantly Africa is to develop, then aid money should because it causes inevitable suffering to be directed at changing this. Until this both rider and horse. First, by not remaining cultural change occurs, the money spent by square to axis, the rider is placed in an Mr Gates will not develop Africa. It will unnatural posture. Secondly, this inevitably simply keep it running on the spot. leads to a harmful twisting of the rider’s John Hollaway spine. Thirdly, this leads to the overloading Harare, Zimbabwe of one side of the horse’s body, leading to a similar imbalance. Finally, it is unsafe. If Rich history the horse falls to the ‘wrong’ side, both the rider’s legs will be pinned underneath. Sir: When future historians attempt to Much as I understand the ‘step back explain the recent rise of populism with into history’ attitude of riders such as policy-related examples, they can be Simon Barnes, I have to disagree that side- assisted by Bill Gates’s recent intervention saddle riding is harmless. It may indeed be in the political debate around the UK’s a way of ‘having fun with a horse’, but for contribution to overseas aid. Although he the horse it’s not much fun at all. is the richest man in the world, Gates has Sylvia Loch no electoral mandate. However, it seems Dressage trainer and founder of the that his advocated aid budget of 0.7 per Classical Riding Club, Suffolk cent of GDP has the support of all the main UK political parties. In contrast, among Tall stories the UK electorate, opinion is mixed. Some opinion polls showing a majority against Sir: Thank you for Mark Mason’s article the current levels of aid. Disparities such as about being tall (‘My towering problem’, this, between the elected and the electors, 8 April). I am 5ft 10, which back in the help feed the populist narrative that we are 1970s when I was beginning to grow and controlled by a wealthy global elite. grow and grow was terrifyingly tall for a Charles Jenkins girl. In the minds of the fashion industry, Penn, Buckinghamshire I did not exist so I had to buy either men’s clothes, or women’s in a size far too large. Bored by the ballot I spent my youth draped in clothing rather than wearing it, and when my classmates Sir: We British are not political animals. To looked forward to ‘home clothes’ day at be asked, two years ago, to vote in a general school my great dread of it was in exact

24 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk LETTERS proportion. I will gloss over having to be ‘a Life is tweet man’ in dancing lessons and school plays, and leap forward to my pregnancy at the Sir: I have started a new policy of age of 22, when I could find nothing at all ‘unfriending’ people on social media if acceptable to wear. In the end, I dragged they start talking about politics. I now have out my mother’s old Singer sewing machine fewer friends, but my life is more peaceful. and started to make my own clothes. It seems a reasonable compromise. I now run a part-time B&B with beds a Rose Douglas full 7ft long. I had the side rails extended by ‘You’re wrong. These are not the Bosham, West Sussex a local blacksmith and commissioned the same old lies, these are new lies.’ mattresses to fit. I’m always very pleased Trust Trump? when a tall person arrives to stay. flattered, but it offended me. I scrumpled it Caroline Lawrence up in front of him and threw it in the bin. Sir: I can see that James Delingpole Builth Wells, Powys Angela Hilturn might have gotten a little intoxicated by Bampton, Oxfordshire his Breitbart connection to the White Melancholy moderns House. But it’s hard to feel sorry for Logging off him now he’s ‘nervous’ about the Trump Sir: Norman Lebrecht (‘The decade the revolution because his former boss Steve music died’, 15 April) may be right to Sir: Henry Jeffreys is right about avoiding Bannon is not running the White House. suggest the decline of London’s orchestras social media and politics (‘Anti-social Did anyone really think that President is attributable to the ‘inertia of state media’, 22 April). I’m an expat German and Trump was a leader they could trust? Did funding’, but he assumes that half-empty I’ve lost count of the friendships I’ve soured he really think Trump would stick to his halls and grey-headed audiences are the by getting into furious online discussions nationalist populist guns when everything province of the capital alone — they are on subjects we would not have discussed was falling apart? Trump is a Democrat not — and fails to ask why politicians face to face. We have an election coming up turned Republican. You don’t have to be a (and educationalists) have judged it safe in Germany and, like Mr Jeffreys, I will be metropolitan liberal elitist to think he is a to wield the knife. Classical music has logging off until it’s all over. fraud and a charlatan. Get real, James. failed to engage new listeners and establish Wilhelm Nimitz Poppy Robinson new repertoire. Post-war modernism is a Manchester Nottingham god that failed. We are living through its ‘melancholy long withdrawing roar’. Visor advice Nick Simpson Cheadle, Cheshire Sir: In Dear Mary’s column (22 April), she suggests using a broad-brimmed hat Against the bias with a hole cut in the top in order to keep skin fair but to give hair the chance to Sir: The debate between Nick Robinson develop highlights. Could I suggest another and Charles Moore on alleged bias of the option? While it may not be terribly BBC coverage of Brexit was entertaining fashionable, a sun visor also works very — but inconclusive (‘Bias and the BBC’, well. The trick is to avoid anything made 15 April). Both made good points. of nylon or plastic, which looks a little too However, it seems that very many people Palm Beach in style. Instead, opt for one of a conservative and self-sufficient mind made of straw — preferably in black — do feel that the BBC shows a distinct bias which wouldn’t look out of place on the towards a liberal and left-of-centre view. Côte d’Azur. Interesting to know if those of a liberal Annabelle Pumfret or left-of-centre view also think the BBC London N7 coverage is biased. And if so, which way? Tim Elworthy Leave me out Swyncombe, Oxfordshire Sir: A message for Toby Young (‘This Prudery and nudery snap election’s real victims? Bankers’ wives’, 22 April). I am a banker’s wife, Sir: I applaud Laura Freeman’s plea for I live in Notting Hill, I voted for Leave, prudery (Proud to be a prude, 22 April), but I will vote for Theresa May, and I don’t found her too willing to bend to the spirit mind telling people all that at dinner, of the expose-yourself generation. She was thank you. Don’t pigeonhole me in your glad to have been ‘at school in the age of ‘elite remainer’ bracket! Nokia, when the best a boy could hope for... Susannah Smith was a tiny pixelated photo…’. Even if we’d London W11 had camera phones in my day, we certainly would not have let boys tell us what to do WRITE TO US with them. In the sixth form a boy dared The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, to give me a drawing of what he thought London SW1H 9HP I looked like naked. I was meant to be [email protected] the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 25 ANY OTHER BUSINESS| MARTIN VANDER WEYER Capping prices to win votes is no substitute for a serious energy strategy

s capping domestic energy prices an rent owners are wise to exit? Either way, a Northern powerbase equitable way to help the ‘just about market value of £700 million looks rich for Imanaging’, or an electoral gimmick with the listed Jimmy Choo plc, its shares having The other election that catches my business a whiff of anti-free-market ideology? When risen 80 per cent since last June, so it’s no eye is the one for mayor of Greater Man- it was Ed Miliband’s idea, it was certainly surprise German investment group JAB is chester. The winner will have a powerbase the latter. Now it’s likely to be included in aiming to offload its 68 per cent holding. with huge potential: a city-region of 2.7 mil- Theresa May’s manifesto, offering a poten- The rest of JAB’s portfolio consists of lion people, an enterprise culture that has tial £100 saving for millions of homes on popular coffee and donut brands, Belstaff evolved over two centuries, an outstanding ‘standard variable tariffs’, it is defended outerwear for motorcyclists and a stake in university science base, strong flows of by the ever-plausible Sir Michael Fallon as Reckitt Benkiser, which makes useful prod- inward investment, Europe’s largest indus- a matter of ‘intervening to make markets ucts such as Durex, Gaviscon and Harpic. trial estate at Trafford Park, a global sports work better’. And that, after all, is what the Those are the kind of solid, long-term bets brand at Old Trafford, and a world-class air- Prime Minister said she would do, wherever that Warren Buffett might favour, whereas port. Yes, it also has problems of ‘entrenched necessary, in the interests of fairness. a purveyor of wear-them-once £1,000 stilet- worklessness’, NHS overstretch and under- In a regulated market, within which tos might be (like the wearer, as it were) a performing schools — and nine of its ten the consumer’s ability to choose the most private-equity plaything for a while, but is local authorities are Labour-controlled. But favourable tariff or supplier is notori- bound to fade. So I won’t be launching a bid. that’s no reason to award the mayor’s job to ously obscured by complex competing yet another socialist opportunist. offers, an intervention to help inflation-hit The real Macron I refer of course to Liverpool-born two- householders is hardly a serious assault on time leadership loser Andy Burnham, who is capitalism, even if it hurts the shareholders Stock markets staged a ‘relief rally’ in standing down as an MP in the expectation and even dents the executive bonuses of response to the rise of Emmanuel Macron of mayoral victory on 4 May. Who am I to suppliers such as Centrica and SSE. Well as clear favourite for the French presidency; argue with the New Statesman when it says maybe, but it is still a dangerous precedent the MSCI World Index, a measure of global Burnham is ‘widely seen as an unprincipled created by an easy promise, and Centrica share prices, hit an all-time high, while the flip-flopper’; but what’s more important is chief executive Iain Conn was justified in euro traded stronger. But celebrations must that he can claim no working relationship reacting like a scalded cat. have been muted in my Dordogne holiday with Theresa May, has only lately paid lip- The underlying risk is that prices will village of St Pompon, which I claimed last service to city-region devolution and the go on rising above inflation year after year, week as the perfect election indicator. My Northern Powerhouse, and has never in his because successive governments go on fail- neighbours may swing behind Macron in the life had anything to do with enterprise. ing to secure future power supplies, instead second round, but in the first they gave him Now that George Osborne has gone, the relying on imports at fluctuating exchange just 45 votes, behind Marine Le Pen (61), Manchester-centred Powerhouse needs a rates. In consequence, ever bigger price Jean-Luc Mélenchon (59) and François Fil- new champion who is trusted by local busi- interventions will be called for, making the lon (47), while the Dordogne as a whole put ness leaders and has access to Downing industry less profitable and less willing to the Trotskyite Mélenchon on top. Street. Burnham is more likely to be left invest in new capacity. To avoid that vicious That’s a disturbing indicator of true sen- sulking in his fastness, particularly if the circle, the Tories — given their apparent timent in la France profonde, but perhaps Tories win the West Midlands mayoralty winning hand — should drop the price-cap more pertinent for this column is to know (where their candidate is former John Lewis vote-grabber and promise instead a serious how French expatriates voted in London boss Andy Street) and shower it with invest- long-term energy strategy. and New York. Mostly young, well edu- ment as a reward. cated and in good jobs or entrepreneurial Manchester’s Conservative candidate Killer heels ventures, almost 100,000 registered on each Sean Anstee (council leader in the conurba- side of the pond — and reportedly went big tion’s sole Tory borough, Trafford) is already I don’t know the difference between killer for Macron. Why? My Gallic stringer texts a respected and well-networked player in heels and kitten heels, but I’ll bet Theresa from Manhattan: because he’s ‘the perfect the devolution project. The odds are against May owns several pairs of Jimmy Choos. bullshitter’, claiming he’s the entrepreneurs’ him but they ought to be narrowing: voters Does that make this an auspicious moment friend and ‘riding the Justin Trudeau wave’ would be wise to pick mayors who favour for a new buyer of the designer brand — or of youthful glamour. But ‘at heart he’s a prosperity and connect to power, not carpet- do tougher times ahead mean Choo’s cur- socialist opportunist’, so prenez garde. bagging has-beens.

26 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk © 2017 HIPGNOSIS LTD

Album cover of 10cc’s Sara Wheeler warns that if Dominic Green argues that Michael Tanner spots the How Dare You!, 1976 you look for the Yeti you the ‘solution’ to the Native Adèsives out in force at the Cover design by Hipgnosis/G. Hardie, may come to a sticky end Americans in the 19th première of Exterminating photography by Aubrey William Cook wonders why century amounted to genocide Angel Powell we’re still obsessed with the Tobias Grey finds the Kate Chisholm discovers James Walton — p40 Third Reich, compared to Egyptian revolutionaries that Luther’s music had the rest of German history pining for Mubarak more impact than his words the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 27 BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS The wondrous cross Among Christians, the cross is seen as an instrument of execution and an emblem of victory. Christopher Howse explores the paradox

The Cross: History, Art The cue for the idea of Christ on the displayed in the Vatican. The king of the and Controversy cross being, not a tortured criminal, but Visigoths and the queen of the Lombards by Robin M. Jensen a royal priestly figure, long predated the soon got a slice too; it helped the barbar- Harvard, £25, pp. 280 adoption by Constantine of the cross as ians feel less barbarian.) ‘The banners an emblem that guaranteed victory in his of the king go forth: / The mystery of the How did the cross, from being such a loath- march on Rome in 312. The two sources for cross shine out, / By which the maker of our some taboo that it could scarcely be men- Constantine’s vision were Lactantius, one flesh / In flesh upon a gibbet hung,’ goes this tioned, change into an image thought of his advisers, who describes the sign seen song, which is still sung all round the world suitable viewing for all ages in public art in a dream as a Chi-Rho (XP, from the first in the days before Easter. galleries? There is no doubt about its early Greek letters of the name of Christ), and By Venantius’ time, the link was estab- despicable reputation. A hundred years Eusebius, his biographer, who says he saw a lished, more by way of poetic exegesis than before the birth of Jesus, Cicero declared cross of light in the sky. What Constantine as a matter of history, between the tree of that ‘the very word cross should be far the cross and the tree of Eden by which, removed not only from the person of a Receiving a relic of the true cross from through disobedience, Adam and Eve fell, Roman citizen but from his thoughts’. the Emperor Justin II made the King precipitating, in the fullness of time, the It was the cross that gave rise to the word of the Visigoths feel less barbarian incarnation of God as man to save their off- excruciating. It makes me feel rather queasy spring. Jesus was seen as the second Adam, to envisage the slow death by suffocation of so it was reckoned that Golgotha, meaning the crucified man, left without the strength ordered to be made as his standard was a the ‘Place of the Skull’, where Jesus died, to draw breath, so I was glad that Robin M. long, gilded spear bisected by a horizontal had been the site of Adam’s grave, and the Jensen trotted fairly briskly through the bar and topped with a golden wreath sur- skull (often depicted in scenes of the cru- forensic evidence, which includes a first- rounding the overlapping X and P. cifixion) was Adam’s own. Moreover, the century heel bone with a nail through it. This might seem something very differ- story went, the tree from which the cross One might think that early depictions ent from the crucifix, but Christians had was hewn had grown from a cutting of the of the crucifixion of Jesus would be realis- always been aware that the author of the Edenic tree. tic, since the reality was still familiar. Only Gospel according to St John deliberately This tale was picked up by the medieval later would visual metaphors be devel- refers to the death of Christ on the cross bestseller the Golden Legend (later printed oped. The opposite is the case. In the first as his ‘glorification’, a fulfilment of the Old by Caxton), ensuring its universal propaga- centuries, it is true, his followers did not Testament type in the book of Numbers of tion in the West. In all this, Robin M. Jensen, depict Christ on the cross, even though the the brazen serpent lifted up on a standard a professor at Notre Dame, is an authorita- crucifixion was put at the heart of their (to save the Israelites in the desert from tive, clear and enjoyable guide, especially to earliest writings. deadly snake-bites). ‘As Moses lifted up the the unfamiliar world of late antiquity. Her The first surviving manuscript pictures serpent in the wilderness,’ Jesus tells Nic- use of pictures is particularly informative. of the crucifixion date from the sixth cen- odemus in St John’s Gospel, ‘even so must She must be fairly tired of being confused tury and commonly, as in the Rabbula the Son of man be lifted up.’ with Robin E. Jensen, a professor at Utah Gospels (named after their scribe, who This paradoxical notion of the cross as and the author of Dirty Words: The Rheto- wrote in Syriac), Jesus is shown dressed an instrument of execution and an emblem ric of Public Sex Education. Perhaps they from shoulder to toe in a sleeveless pur- of victory was exploited by the Latin poet both are. ple robe with two vertical gold stripes. This Venantius Fortunatus in his hymn ‘Vexilla Professor Jensen, since she is factual was called in Latin the colobium. The Brit- Regis’. He wrote it for his friend and patron and focused, does not mention it, but an ish monarch is invested in a robe of that Queen Radegund of the Franks, who found- analogue of the connection between the name after the coronation anointing. The ed a monastery at Poitiers to house the gift, cross and the tree of knowledge is to be coronation colobium is of plain linen; the in about the year 569, of a relic of the cross found in The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. purple, gold-striped colobium of pictorial from the Emperor Justin II. (He gave a sim- Lewis. In his first book in the series, the crucifixes from the sixth to the tenth cen- ilar relic to Pope John III, the reliquary for author had (thanks to a sort of dream) turies is imperial and hieratic. which, in the shape of a gemmed cross, is put an anachronistic lamp-post in Narnia.

28 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk GETTY IMAGES

poured out from this man’s side when he had given up the ghost.’ In a coincidence even more striking than the survival of The Dream of the Rood, some of its lines are carved in runes on the eighth-century sandstone cross, 18ft high, preserved at Ruthwell in Dum- friesshire. The Ruthwell Cross had been ‘taken down, demolished, and destroyed’ following an order of the General Assem- bly of the Church of Scotland in 1662, and put together again by the antiquarian- minded Rev. Henry Duncan in 1818. It interests me that scenes on its north side have a surprising Egyptian subject-matter, with captions in Latin, such as ‘Saints Paul and Antony breaking bread in the desert’, a reference to the successful search for the hermit Paul by St Antony, who memora- bly meets a centaur and a satyr on the way. The lives of these hermits were written by St Athanasius and St Jerome, top Chris- tian intellectuals in the fourth century. It all seems a long way from rainy Ruthwell. The demolition of the Ruthwell Cross had its parallels in Cheapside, where a stone cross was finally toppled by the Roundheads, or Geneva, where Calvin (in distinction from Luther, who was rath- er fond of contemplating the crucifix) denounced crosses and, even worse, relics of the cross. It was he who said ‘If we were Saint Helena and the Emperor Heraclius restore the Holy Cross to Jerusalem after its to collect all these pieces of the True Cross, recapture from the Persians. Altarpiece by Miguel Jimenez and Martin Bernat, c.1485 they would form a whole ship’s cargo’. I’m not sure that this quotable claim is strict- ly true. Cubic measure can easily produce a huge multiplicity of matchstick-sized pieces. By way of a posterior onomastic explana- About 1,300 years before Lewis, an Certainly, when I came across a 15-inch tion, he attributes its presence in Lantern unknown author narrated the history of relic of the cross (the largest now claimed) Waste to the wicked Empress Jadis having the cross in its own words. The Dream of at the monastery of Santo Toribio de Lié- wrenched the crossbar off a lamp-post in the Rood, as it is known, mostly to unwill- bana in the Cantabrian mountains, I had no Edwardian London and thrown it angrily ing undergraduates, was preserved by hesitation, when it was proferred, in kissing at Aslan in Narnia, only for it to grow, in chance in a manuscript that ended up in it. The feel of the grain on the lips did sug- the fertile ground of the new world, into Italy. ‘They mocked us both together,’ the gest the thought of who had touched that its parent post. cross recalls, ‘I was all wet with blood that wood before.

the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 29 BOOKS & ARTS Dark secrets of village life for warmth’) and conjures an impressive bankrupt and ends up working on the range of 50-odd characters, slipping easily supermarket’s meat counter, where he Emily Rhodes among their voices and thoughts, each one sees the dairy farmer abandon his shop- alive with complexity. ping when he discovers the price of the Reservoir 13 As McGregor takes us, sentence by milk; the introverted school caretaker, who by Jon McGregor sentence, from, say, foxes to primroses, to lives with his housebound sister, is arrest- 4th Estate, £14.99, pp. 327 a lone runner, to a parish council meeting, ed when child porn is found on his com- to the lambing, to a flirtatious conversation puter; a cleaner, the widow of an abusive Jon McGregor’s first novel, If Nobody between a farmer and a school teacher, the husband, struggles to cope with her autis- Speaks of Remarkable Things, a surprise village soon feels greater than the sum of tic son. Intriguingly, McGregor’s father is inclusion on the 2002 Booker longlist that its parts, becoming a whole living organ- a vicar and it’s the female vicar who is the went on to win the Somerset Maugham ism, which we watch develop over the community’s greatest source of solace: and Betty Task Awards, captured 24 hours years. Certain annual markers are empha- in the life of a suburban street. Fifteen sised as points of comparison, such as She collected these confidences from people, and carried them around. It was like piling years later, his fourth novel, Reservoir 13, whether ‘Mischief Night’ entails moving a rocks into the boot of a car, she told her dean has a similarly concentrated focus, but this bus shelter or letting off stink bombs; who once, and sooner or later there are too many time on a village in the north of England gets which part in the panto; and the col- rocks and the suspension bottoms out each and the lens remains open for 13 years. lective verdict on the harvest festival deco- time you hit a bump in the road. McGregor’s portrait of a village is an rations: ‘Her decision to include a stack of astonishing feat. He gives us the nature unwashed fleeces alongside the more usual These problems ripple out from a dark- surrounding and intrinsic to the place flowers and marrows and corn attracted ness at the novel’s core: the unexplained in prose both precise and poetic (‘In the remarks, but nothing was said directly.’ disappearance of a teenage girl, holidaying beech wood the foxes gave birth, earthed Bucolic moments are more than bal- in the village with her family. This terrible down in the dark and wet with pain, the anced by the many difficulties which rural event opens the novel and remains haunt- blind cubs pressing against their mothers life evidently can entail: the butcher goes ingly unexplained as the village struggles with its ongoing repercussions. McGregor skilfully hints at what his Riviera Incident characters don’t reveal, implying that the girl’s fate could be explained if everyone were to tell the whole truth. For all the When the old Monégasque fisherman light the author shines on village life, he was hauled in, dead, on his small boat deliberately keeps some things in the dark, I learned of it from the doorman drawing our attention to what is unsaid, perhaps unsayable. who’d known him, and who for the evening was tasked with opening ornamented doors for our gilded mob A cuckold’s revenge and who’d sniffled quietly to himself James Walton as the chapel filled and the orchestra tuned up. The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi The music ravished and delighted Faber, £14.99, pp. 167 the applause – some women wore white gloves – was appropriate and damp with dignity Perhaps the least necessary piece of advice ever given to a Hanif Kureishi protagonist while he stood at the back under a fresco, comes in 2014’s The Last Word. ‘Harry,’ a it was not his place to applaud; wise old writer tells the main character, soon, again, he turned his duty to the doors ‘always put your penis first.’ It’s a suggestion, needless to say, that and I said something to him, I cannot recall Harry has no trouble accepting — not least what, and went out with the rest into the heat. because, like so many Kureishi protago- nists, he shares the belief that ‘the body of the young woman is the world’s most signif- The bay was full of yachts, some icant object’. (Or as the narrator of 1998’s tolerated helicopters fat and black as tickbirds Intimacy puts it, ‘women’s bodies… are at our evening was unending the centre of everything worth living for’.) Admittedly, Kureishi’s men do occasion- the sun would not descend ally agonise between betraying their part- drinks came iced in glasses ners and betraying themselves — i.e. by thin-stemmed, fragile as tears – failing to sleep with someone they fancy. But not, on the whole, for long. (After all, as the head of the doorman who mourned the narrator of Intimacy also puts it, ‘There the old fisherman bobbed and sank are some fucks for which a person would like a black olive down the daiquiri-yellow hill. have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea.’) By now, in fact, there’s a strong case to — Fred Johnston be made for Kureishi as the last of the great

30 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk EVERY OBJECT TELLS A STORY

an exhibition by oliver hoare

4 May – 5 July 2017 5 Cromwell Place, London sw7

Abu’l Hasan Ghaffari, Sani’ Al-mulk 1814–1866 Shunga–Persica, Iran, second half 19th century Gouache on paper, 22.3 × 34 cm

When Christie’s illustrated this miniature in a catalogue (8th in France, Henri Vever and Louis Cartier, were also avid October 2015), they imposed a grey square on the core of the collectors of Ukiyo prints. Such prints were in circulation action, like a Victorian fig-leaf or wisp of drapery. On receiving earlier, and their influence can be seen in the paintings of the full image I was surprised at their prudery; far from the Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Vuillard and others. From what is full-on Al Goldstein-type image from Screw magazine that I known of Abu’l Hasan’s personality, he must have loved Shunga expected, it was no more revealing than a demur spread in a prints, as much for the indelicacy of their subject-matter as for 1950s-era Playboy. They explained that it was done to enable the the delicacy of their execution. catalogue to circulate without censorship in the Middle East. He painted several versions, two of which at least are larger- Abu’l Hasan was appointed court painter by Muhammad Shah format oil paintings. It is striking that these other versions are Qajar in 1842, and sent to Italy and Paris to study European more typically Qajar in their formality, and it is tempting to painting. This undoubtedly gave a new European flavour to surmise that he re-worked the theme again once he had Qajar painting, which is evident in this example, but doesn’t encountered Shunga prints. This composition is probably based quite explain why it is so different from mainstream Qajar on a print either by Katsukawa Shuncho, Tsukika Settei or erotica. The man’s unusual hairstyle caught my attention: it Kitagawa Utamaro. Another version of the same scene, with the seemed more Japanese than Persian. It then became obvious five people involved differently arranged, was paintedc. 1860 by that the model for Abu’l Hasan’s composition must have been a Mirza Baba Naqqashbashi, but in pure Qajar style with no trace Shunga print. The most eminent collectors of Persian paintings of the Ukiyo. (See Sotheby’s London, 8th October 2014, lot 79.)

www.everyobjecttellsastory.com Instagram: @everyobjecttellsastory BOOKS & ARTS penis-prioritisers. Although a generation under the pretext of helping her with her characters, particularly Anita, a beautiful younger than the likes of Roth, Updike and nursing duties, spends most nights at their actress of whom Waldo gallantly remarks Kundera, he’s no less committed to their flat. that she’s ‘not a woman a man can look at ideal of endless sexual fulfilment as the key And yet, while Waldo’s raging impotence for long without wanting to put his penis to a male life well lived. does have its moments, the Eddie–Zee in her mouth’. An old friend and colleague, All of which makes the premise of his sections prove disappointingly incoherent. Anita often appears to be on Waldo’s side new book rather intriguing. The narrator Kureishi never seems to decide whether — except when she doesn’t. The result, Waldo is a distinguished film director, who Eddie’s primary role in the novel is as a again, is that we have no real notion of once lived in ‘a commune in California with cuckolder or as the kind of conman who what she’s up to and what her motives are. the motorbike and live-in lesbians, sharing famously relieved the author himself of This feeling of The Nothing as a half- the love. Those magical fucks…’ Then after his savings a few years ago. Instead, The formed thing isn’t helped either by the ‘numerous wives, lovers, matches and mis- Nothing lurches uneasily between the two, patchy nature of the dialogue. Some of it matches’ he met Zee, a Pakistani woman very different plots, leaving both underde- is as sharp as you’d expect from an author 22 years his junior. ‘With her,’ he tells us veloped — and the reader with the distinct who began as a playwright and first made proudly, ‘it was the first time I wanted to be impression that Kureishi’s revenge fanta- his mark as a screenwriter. Some, however, married to the person I was married to… is weirdly stagey (‘You’d starve me, would She liked me to sit on her face, even until Kureishi is committed to the ideal you, pig?… How you torment me’). Taken she couldn’t breathe.’ Sadly, though, these as a whole, it therefore adds to the sense days Waldo is ‘right out of semen’. In his of endless sexual fulfilment as that what we’re reading is not so much a eighties and confined to a wheelchair, he’s the key to a male life well lived finished book as an early draft in which had to adjust to life without sex — which Kureishi has bundled together some old for a Kureishi man must be like a world- sy about his real-life thief has been crow- obsessions with some promising new ideas class footballer having to adjust to life barred into a book that wasn’t properly — but without making the final much- without football. prepared for it. needed decisions about how to combine On the face of it, this should be the Not surprisingly in the circumstances, them, or even about what sort of novel he’s chance for some good tragicomic fun with Zee’s behaviour is pretty baffling too. At aiming for. the idea both of a celibate Kureishi pro- times, her love for Waldo seems as strong Fortunately, the man can still turn a tagonist and of one who suddenly finds the as ever; at others, she tries to murder him. neat sentence, and The Nothing does have boot on the other foot — because Zee has Of course, it’s possible for such conflicting its share of nifty one-liners and good jokes. now struck out for some sexual fulfilment feelings to co-exist — but here Kureishi Nonetheless, in the end, possibly its most of her own with a man called Eddie: a film makes little attempt to explain how. noteworthy achievement is to be so short, critic and champion of Waldo’s work, who The same also applies to the minor and yet still such a sprawling mess.

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32 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk picture, and more on regional politics would have been welcome too.

REX FEATURES Echoes sound through these pages of the hopeless idealism of Chris McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and of Tim Treadwell, eaten by the grizzly bears he championed in Alaska and the subject of a documentary by Werner Herzog. We are told that Magraner ‘yearned to spread a kind of purity, a truth so clean and faultless that it would distinguish him somehow’. The authorities in Chitral had advised him to leave the valleys months before his death in 2002, ‘because his life was in peril’. Some saw the search for the mythical barmanu as a front for espionage. It is still unclear whether his murder (he was stabbed) was political or a crime of passion. Martínez ably conjures the scent of juniper, the taste of black, salty tea and the sight of a 40-donkey convoy heading to Panjshir. As well as slabs of invented conservation, there are discussions about the characteristics of a monster, whether animal or human. Throughout, the author is preoccupied with Magraner’s inner life, constantly trying to prove the man’s bril- liance. But it doesn’t work. Magraner emerges as an unpleasant freak. ‘His life is a metaphor for many people’s lives,’ Mar- A Kalash girl in traditional dress tínez pronounces. Is it? The author enters the story himself in his quest for the truth, visiting the Hindu Kush and interviewing everyone there, as well as The curse of the Yeti Spain of both fiction and non-fiction. First Magraner’s family in France, whose confi- published in Spanish in 2011, and fluently dence he gains. He is a diligent researcher. Sara Wheeler translated here by Daniel Hahn, In the Land His own journey takes over towards the end, of Giants benefits from the author’s access to as he searches for clues: ‘Just like Jordi was In the Land of Giants: Hunting Magraner’s diaries and letters, and to photo- seeking the Yeti, so I am seeking Jordi. We Monsters in the Hindu Kush graphs, which appear in the book. are a dream of chains and hopes. Where will by Gabi Martínez, translated from Magraner first went to the valleys of it end?’ Where indeed? the Spanish by Daniel Hahn north Pakistan in 1987. He semi-adopted Scribe, £20, pp. 394 two boys, one of whom, a Nuristani, shared his bedroom. When this latter child showed a The gangster life of Ryan This book, according to its author Gabi Mar- reluctance to go to school, Magraner hit him. tínez, is ‘a non-fiction novel’. It tells the story At this point in the story one loses all sym- Helen R. Brown of Jordi Magraner, a Morocco-born Spaniard pathy for its subject, and to a certain extent, who grew up in France. A largely self-taught all interest in him. He went on to have other The Blood Miracles zoologist and naturalist, Magraner worked fist fights; at one point, putting words into by Lisa McInerney on humanitarian convoys in Afghanistan his protagonist’s mouth, Martínez describes John Murray, £14.99, pp. 297 before devoting his life to searching for the an Afghan whom Magraner beat up as ‘that Yeti among the Kalash people in the Hindu loathsome sack of shit’. Very nice. Lisa McInerney found a brilliant way Kush. He was, according to Martínez, ‘Proud. Magraner lost his job at the Alliance to turn heads and hone her craft as the Enigmatic. Multifarious. Pagan. Passionate. Française in Peshawar, the nearest city to his ‘Sweary Lady’ behind the ‘Arse End of Ire- A beast.’ The book opens with his murder base at Chitral in the valleys, over allegations land’ blog. Taking a gonzo approach to the (which remains unsolved). of paedophilia. Martínez is not judgmental. life she knew — first a council estate in The Yeti, possibly a version of Neander- ‘He had found in Pakistan,’ he writes of the Co. Galway, then a selection of much nicer thal man, are the monsters of the title. In Yeti-hunter, ‘a place where he could live as houses in Cork — she let rip as an ‘amplified, north Pakistan they are known as barmanu. he wanted, free to enjoy nature, his profes- wittier, crankier version of myself’. She took These bipeds never make an appearance. sion, his sexuality. ‘ that mood of wild pace and confidence into But Magraner kept the faith. He put togeth- I would have liked a bit more on the pagan her first novel, The Glorious Heresies, and it er a dossier on ‘relict hominids’, and made Kalash, an ancient people who have whit- paid off. Her boisterous tale of Munster drug a study of the cranial bone, and was at one er skins than the Muslims who live around dealers, nailed as ‘Trainspotting with a heart’ point invited to lecture on the topic in Cam- Chitral. Martínez claims that Magraner by online magazine The Pool, won both the bridge. The book includes boring details of wanted to ‘rescue’ the Kalash. At any rate, Baileys Prize for women’s fiction and the the politics of ‘the Neo-Darwinists who run he founded a group for the study and safe- Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novels. French scientific institutions’. guarding of the cultures of the Hindu Kush. When critics repeatedly commented on Martínez is a prolific author in his native The nascent Taliban float in and out of the the ‘maleness’ of both her prose and her the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 33 BOOKS & ARTS subject matter, she bit back on her website, concerned that these poor misguided souls

might think ‘women are best suited to gen- GETTY IMAGES tle pursuits, like embroidery’. And in knock- ing out this second novel in the trilogy and a screenplay for her first (the rights have been snapped up by the production company Fifty Fathoms, which has a deal to develop further series for Sky Atlantic), she tells them to get stitched. The Blood Miracles finds us back in the company of the sensitive drug dealer Ryan Cusack. We knew him as a motherless teen, battered by his alcoholic dad, shifting a few pills and hauled into a gangland killing. He lost his virginity to kind, clever Karine in a room still Blu-tacked with footy post- ers. Six years on, Karine is still his ‘ould doll’, but Ryan picks up random ‘wans’ when mashed on his own product. Now a nurse, Karine’s a force for social good and is frus- trated by Ryan’s failure to walk away from a life that’s about moving about all day, scared shitless, The beginning of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876 , by the Oglala-Lakota artist Amos Bad Heart Bull talking shite and throwing shapes at those in the same boat, but knowing it’s all chestnuts and mottos and platitudes, like you’re work- ing off a script... a boil on the arse of your own country. But Ryan can’t get clean. Cork’s not America’s other civil war In 1830, Andrew Jackson’s administration big or forgiving enough to hide him. He’s passed the Removal Act, pushing the Indi- now ‘owned’ by Dan, a rising dealer — Dominic Green ans of the old north west and the ‘civilised’ ‘a wunderkind, hand-reared to take a bullet tribes of Alabama and Georgia across the for his keeper’. He’s got a staff and a GTI. The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story Mississippi and into a swathe of the Great And Dan is one of two ‘professional savag- of the Indian Wars for the American Plains, reserved as Indian territory. es’ who slip into the role of fucked-up father West Jackson believed the army explor- figures while Ryan’s real dad is lost to Aldi by Peter Cozzens ers who had reported that the Plains were whisky. He knows he should be playing the Atlantic, £25, pp. 545 unsuited to white settlement. In the 1840s, piano like his long dead Mama taught him. American maps showed a permanent Indi- He has a gift that’s wasting until a strange old ‘What makes the Red Man red?’ the Lost an frontier, running south from Minnesota crone lures him back to the ivories. But he Boys asked in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). to Louisiana. Meanwhile, Cozzens writes, makes a staggering number of bad decisions According to Sammy Cahn’s lyric, it was ‘a cataclysmic chain of events’ dissolved for a smart lad. embarrassment: ‘The very first Injun the frontier: the rush for land in Oregon The plot’s a slippery snake of dodgy deals prince/ He kissed a maid and start to blush.’ and gold in California, and the annexation and deadly double crosses, with a series of of Texas, California and the south west. By handbrake turns at the end. It’s standard The massacre of Indians in the 1860, there were more whites in California gangster stuff, spiked into originality by the snow at Wounded Knee marked than Indians in the entire west. chemical kick of McInerney’s prose. She cuts There were also more Indians in the the pure grade of her literary language with the death of an ancient civilisation Great Plains than ever before. While the feral street slang, ending with a product that whites stripped the land on their way generates enough adrenalin to ensure the Redness is everywhere in The Earth westwards, displaced tribes like the Sioux, ropier metaphors skid past like hallucina- is Weeping — in the anger of the Indians, Cheyenne and Arapohoe fought for the tions. On ecstasy, Ryan feels his ‘lashes lift harried and starved into fatal resistance; territory of established Plains tribes like from his skin’ and ‘chews notes’ of trance in the shame of the whites, with their fork- the Pawnee and Crow. Inter-tribal feuding music, as euphoria surges through his groin tongued treaties and heavy weapons; and was ‘the very foundation’ of the Indians’ then leaves him ‘propped up against the in the blood, Indian and white, that flows warrior culture, and a necessary strug- parapet of the morning, peaceful, papery- on almost every page of Peter Cozzens’s gle for the resources it required, espe- thin’. The sex is both honest and thrilling, a sweeping, expert and appalling account of cially the buffalo. But it undermined a slipping of hips beneath patterned, pastel the murder of America’s Indians. sense of common ‘Indianness’. Instead of duvets. Nothing is dumbed down. ‘Do you Every nation has its founding sin. Amer- uniting against the whites, the Indians split hear Philip Glass when you come?’ smirks a ica, the land of plenty, has two. Cozzens’s into ‘accommodationists’ and ‘traditional- posh girl Ryan picks up. story begins in the 1860s, with the expiation ists’. McInerney has promised the trilogy of slavery and the refounding of the United The Indian wars were overlapping civil will follow a thematic arc of sex, drugs and States, but the commission of murder was wars: whites against Indians, and Indi- rock’n’roll. I hope her surviving cast makes already well advanced. In the early decades ans against Indians. Often, the expul- a go of their EDM dreams. But I bet it’ll be of European settlement, disease and war sion of Indians by newly arrived whites murder on the dance floor. had reduced the Indians of the north east. was the ‘displacement of one immigrant

34 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk group by another’. The savages Fighting talk, tion of bartenders, wharf rats, down-at-heel were on both sides. The Indians pelota players, former bull fighters, Basque scalped and mutilated their dead but little action priests… and assorted exiled counts and enemies, to handicap them in the dukes’. But they didn’t spot anything of note, afterlife. US soldiers respond- Mark Mason and Hemingway soon got bored. ed with rape, murder and dis- Instead, he trawled the Caribbean in embowelment. The Apache were Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest his fishing boat, looking for German sub- especially feared for their ingenu- Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, marines. ‘I can really have myself a party,’ he ity as torturers. Cavalrymen often 1935–1961 told the US ambassador to Cuba, tied their bootlaces to their trig- by Nicholas Reynolds provided you will get me a bazooka to punch gers, and saved their final bullet William Morrow, £20, pp. 384 holes in the side of the submarine, machine for themselves. guns to mow down the people on the deck, and Yet the Plains were never a On 11 May 1937, at the Gare St-Lazare in hand grenades to lob down the conning tower. level playing field. The Indians Paris, Ernest Hemingway said goodbye were superb horsemen and arch- to a friend who was leaving Europe. Like He never attacked a single U-boat. ers, and the US army had ‘barely Hemingway, John Dos Passos had been in Hemingway’s only real contribution enough men to defend its small Spain to support the Republic in its civil war came in France, where his 1944 reports forts’; but the army adapted its tac- against the fascist Franco. But he became on German troop placements helped the tics. By 1876, when the vain and disillusioned when the Soviets (also fight- Allies in their march on Paris. Report- untrustworthy George Custer led ing against Franco) murdered someone ing to an American officer who described more than 200 cavalrymen to their he knew. As the train was about to leave, him as ‘God, as painted by Michelangelo’, deaths at Little Bighorn, the army Hemingway asked Dos Passos not to Hemingway commandeered a hotel in had learnt not to be drawn out of report the event. Dos Passos refused: what which he housed German prisoners of war, its encampments, and to surprise was the point of fighting a war for civil forcing them to remove their pants — as ‘a the Indians in their winter camps. liberties if you destroyed those liberties in man without pants was less likely to escape’. Meanwhile, Indian warriors raced the process? ‘Civil liberties, shit,’ replied (We have to assume the American mean- into the army lines in order to Hemingway. ‘Are you with us or are you ing, though removing the British kind would ‘count coup’ — to win prestige by against us?’ surely have been even more effective.) He touching an enemy with a ‘coup The writer’s ‘at all costs’ opposition to also forced the Germans to wear frilly jack- stick’. fascism forms the theme of this book, an ets as they served their captors dinner. Every Indian victory was pyrrhic, in account of his fighting and spying adven- Arriving in Paris after its liberation, Hem- provoking terrible retribution. Every tures from the Spanish episode through the ingway parked himself at the Ritz, where his defiant leader — Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, second world war to Castro’s revolution in bathtub was soon filled with hand grenades Crazy Horse — surrendered in the end. Cuba. There was ‘only one form of govern- and his basin with bottles of brandy. The federal government failed to help ment that cannot produce good writers’, Details like this help drive Nicholas the Indians starving on reservations, but said Hemingway in a speech, ‘and that sys- Reynolds’s book along, compensating for always found the means to punish every tem is fascism… a writer who will not lie the lack of actual drama. There are appear- Indian revolt. In December 1890, the mas- cannot live and work under fascism.’ At this ances by characters like Willi Munzenberg sacre of Bigfoot and the Lakota Sioux in point you’re tempted to lump him in with — a German member of the Comintern so the snow at Wounded Knee marked the today’s vacuous luvvies pontificating on versatile and energetic he was known as closure of the frontier, and the death of an politics as they collect the latest Oscar. But ‘the five most interesting men in Europe’ — ancient civilisation. Hemingway was better than that, and knew and a US ambassador so formal that in his This murder by ‘grand encirclement exactly how liberated writers had become memoirs he refers to his own wife as ‘Mrs and slow strangulation’ was not, Cozzens under Stalin. Years after that speech, he Philip W. Bonsal’. As ever in these stories, argues, genocide. The federal governments admitted that in Spain he’d become ‘so the biggest enmities are between those on that reneged on treaties and defraud- stinking righteous’ it gave him ‘the horrors the same side. Hemingway hates the FBI, ed the Indians of their land and rights to look back on’. partly because he assumes their mostly also launched five sets of ‘peace’ talks in And he was always careful to insist Catholic agents would have supported the the 1860s and 1870s. In 1866, when Gen- that he was an anti-fascist, not a commu- Spanish fascists. He calls them ‘Franco’s eral Sherman, the head of the US army, nist. This helps explain why he survived Bastard Irish’. advised ‘vindictive earnestness against McCarthyism, and was never called before But of course we know how it’s going to the Sioux, even to their extermination, the House Un-American Activities Com- end. Throughout his life Hemingway was men, women, and children’ the Grant mittee. A pity, really, because he told a friend drawn to war. ‘It is wicked to say,’ he once administration instead pursued peace that had the summons arrived he’d have said wrote about war, ‘but that is the thing I love talks. ‘slowly and carefully for the microphone’ … best.’ Was it a death wish, a subconscious Yet when Sherman advanced his solu- that the committee members ‘appear to me attempt to escape ‘the Black Ass’ (his term tion for the ‘Indian problem’, he was the to be cocksuckers’. for depression)? His own name for the anti- legal subordinate of the secretary of war. His actual achievements never amounted U-Boat operation was ‘Friendless’ (bor- Cozzens writes that ‘the federal govern- to very much. He agreed to spy in China for rowed from one of his cats) — not literally ment never contemplated genocide’, but the Soviet Union’s NKVD (they gave him true, because he had a crew with him, but he this is to acquit on a technicality. the codename ‘Argo’, after Jason’s and the wrote that they would have been ‘happy as The systematic treachery of the federal Argonauts’ ship, because he loved the sea goats’ if it had led to their deaths. government, and the ‘vindictive earnest- so much); but in the end he never met any In his final weeks Hemingway made sev- ness’ of the settlers and soldiers, accom- of their operatives over there. During the eral suicide attempts, one of which involved plished the murder of the Indians without second world war he assembled a surveil- trying to walk into an airplane’s whirring a policy statement. ‘No matter what’s been lance team to help the US government spot propeller. Eventually, you could say, he written or said / Now you know why the potential fascists in Cuba. Called the Spook proved that happiness is indeed a warm gun, Red Man’s red!’ Factory, it comprised ‘a bizarre combina- whichever way you point it. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 35 BOOKS & ARTS

Rostock, in north Germany, joined the Hanseatic League in 1251. It has one of the oldest universities THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY THE BRIDGEMAN ART in Europe and was a major ship-building city for the Baltic

Europe’s best hope He knows what he’s on about and his con- group of people defined by a common lan- clusions are measured, but he favours clear, guage and often not much else. Throw in the William Cook concise prose over dense academese. He has trauma of the Thirty Years War (in which a a sense of humour, and a sharp eye for simi- third of the population perished) and defeat The Shortest History of Germany larities between then and now. I was tickled in two world wars, and you can understand by James Hawes to learn that Romans used to moan about why most Germans regard the EU as the Old Street Publishing, £12.99, pp. 226 German migrants, much as Little Englanders solution to their problems —and why most complain about Eastern Europeans today. Britons don’t. Go into any high street bookshop and find Sure, we all know what happened when The way Hawes sees it, Prussia is the the European history section. There’s usually the Roman Empire reached breaking point, source of all of Deutschland’s woes. It a shelf or two on France and about the same but Hawes argues that Germany was Rome’s hijacked Germany under Bismarck, drove on Germany, but the difference between successor, rather than its destroyer. The Holy the Germans into war under Kaiser Bill and these two categories is apparent straight Roman Empire (a.k.a. the First Reich) may voted Hitler into power. Eradicated by the away. The French stuff spans several centu- not have been holy, Roman or an empire, but Allies, its ghost lived on in the GDR and ries, whereas German history is confined to remains an endless drain on West German just 12 years. If it hadn’t been for Prussia, Germany resources. Without those warlike Prussians, Yes, a lifetime since the death of would have been as peaceful and Germany would have remained a peaceful You-Know-Who, Britons are still obsessed prosperous (and dull) as Switzerland and prosperous place, ‘a land where state with the Third Reich, and who can blame us? worship, puritanical zeal and scar-faced It remains the most bizarre and awful epoch militarism have always been alien’. In short, in European history and we’re still reeling it was still a bastion of Christian civilisation it would have been a lot like Switzerland — from its consequences. What’s less forgiv- throughout the Dark Ages, and the distant rich, enchanting, and of no interest to histo- able is our wilful ignorance about anything ancestor of today’s EU. Look at the map of rians whatsoever. that came before (my son learnt all about Charlemagne’s empire in 800 AD: its borders You might think Hawes would have the Nazis for his history GCSE, but it wasn’t are virtually identical to the borders of the his work cut out trying to cram 2,000 years until he did A level that he got onto Bis- six founder members of the EEC. into 226 pages, but he still finds room for marck). This is the purpose of James Hawes’s An absence of natural borders has always some interesting asides about the perils fac- compact primer. You can read it in an after- been Germany’s biggest headache, especially ing Germany (and Europe) today. ‘Europe noon, but it’ll give you a good overview of in the east. German knights and merchants is far too weak and divided to stand in German history — and even some idea of founded Riga, Tallinn and Danzig, and so for the US strategically; and, without US what makes modern Germans so different these Hanseatic ports became Germanic, leadership the West cannot survive,’ declared from modern Brits. while the lands around them remained Slavic Joschka Fischer, Germany’s former foreign Hawes read German at Oxford and has (even stripped of their German populations, minister. ‘Thus, the western world as virtu- lectured in German at Sheffield and Swansea these cities still feel intensely Teutonic). For ally everyone alive today has known it will universities, but he’s also a novelist and his 1,000 years, since Charlemagne, Germa- almost certainly perish before our eyes.’ pithy style combines the best of both trades. ny was a concept rather than a country, a So what does this current crisis have to

36 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk do with German history? Well, as Hawes and freezes the frame. It lets you take a prop- They carry their own authenticity. They don’t outlines in this excellent little book, the solu- er look at Bugner’s looks; lets you see what need writing up. ‘Kid Dynamite Blows Up’ tions nations seek are shaped by past expe- you can’t quite see. (The New Yorker, 14 July 1997), his account rience, and in this respect Germany and There aren’t many good boxing writers. of the Mike Tyson–Evander Holyfield bout, Britain could scarcely be less alike. Ger- Even proven authors can fall short. Mari- is exemplary: clear-eyed, dispassionate and mans have been familiar with federal insti- anne Moore, a poet capable of describ- alert to detail. I learned that Tyson ate bits of tutions ever since Charlemagne. Germany ing a lion’s ‘ferocious chrysanthemum’ or both Holyfield’s ears, first ‘a half-inch chunk’ has only been a nation since 1871 and its a jerboa’s ‘Chippendale claw’, has very from the right one. I also learned that Holy- experience of nationalism was a disaster. little to say about the Floyd Patterson– field had his own ear-eating previous. As for History has taught the British that we’re George Chuvalo heavyweight match in the missing lobes: best off one step removed from Europe, Madison Square Gardens on 5 February a hotel employee named Mitch Libonati whereas it has taught the Germans that 1965, a bout she was taken to by George found the chunk of ear that belonged to Evan- they’re far better off as part of a supra- Plimpton, with Bob Silvers, the editor of the der Holyfield. He found it on the ring mat, national superstate. Really, it’s a wonder we New York Review of Books, wrapped it in a rubber glove, and delivered it agree about anything at all. The pre-fight preliminaries produce her to the champion’s locker room. Where Hawes differs from many of most vivid touches. These are punters look- his fellow Brits is that he sees Germany as ing for ticket touts: This latest anthology has its moments, Europe’s best hope for the future, and I must Battered felt hats [Moore is wearing her but they are few. Some vivid touches are say I agree with him. Only Germany has the best tricorne] and heavy faces, arms waving supplied by boxing vernacular: the ‘nose- economic muscle and the moral will to make $100 bills and men shouting, pay you double, bleeds’ are seats close to the ring; there are Europe work. The question for Britain is pay you double in sight of the brass buttons of the ‘suits’, and then there are those ‘with skin whether we want to be inside this project or policemen. I had to be led by the hand, through in the game’. Sam Sheridan shows us ‘bags outside it. Well, we’ve answered that ques- the squeeze of humanity; ticket-taker vigilant wound tight with duct tape’ and ‘terraced looking at your face and ticket, strong thumb tion now, and we should wish the Germans on the ticket. holes’ in plywood flooring where genera- all the best (while it might be some fleet- ing comfort for us if the EU went tits up, it’s The Fight, Norman Mailer’s account of Tyson ate bits of both Holyfield’s hard to see how it would help us). If Theresa the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 Zaïre ears, starting with a half-inch May is looking for a good model for Anglo- match between George Foreman and chunk from the right one German co-operation after Brexit, perhaps Muhammad Ali, has its moments, but they, she should mug up on Hawes’s chapter on too, are mainly before the fight. Ali in his the German Confederation. After the Bat- dressing room, ‘wearing no more than a jock- tions of fighters have been skipping. Dono- tle of Waterloo, for half a century, Britons strap, was soon prancing around the room, van Craig remembers fighting Roy Jones Jr regarded the Germans as our cousins. Maybe shadowboxing with the air’. Foreman’s stare in 2006: one day we will learn to do so again. when the referee is instructing the fighters is I was surprised by how hard he hit. His punch- ‘a big look, heavy as death, oppressive as the es were so crisp and sharp they felt like elec- closing of the door of one’s tomb’. Even here, tric jolts, zzt, zzt, zzt, even when they landed Boxing clever you can see the temptation to overwrite, to on my arms. Craig Raine which Mailer quickly succumbs: Then the barrage began. With Ali braced on Elsewhere, a badly hurt boxer walks the ropes, as far back on the ropes as a deep- unsteadily, like a baby with a full diaper. The Bittersweet Science: sea fisherman is braced back in his chair when There is a decent profile of the trainer Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the setting the hook on a big strike, so Ali got Darius Ford. Corner and at the Ringside ready and Foreman came on to blast him out. But this is a university press publication. edited by Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra A shelling reminiscent of artillery battles in Several contributors are professors — hence World War I began… heavy maniacal slam- University of Chicago Press, £14.50, pp. 266 ming punches, heavy as the boom of oaken the dispiriting range of reference, ponder- doors, bombs to the body, bolts to the head, ous clinches there to advertise scholarship, Thirty years ago, Russell Davies wrote a punching until he could not breathe… like commercials between rounds: Mailer, weekly sporting column in the New States- Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Citizen Kane, man. It proved unsustainable and was soon David Remnick is a much better box- Francis Bacon, Ian McGilchrist, Aristo- discontinued, but not before Davies had ing writer because he trusts the facts to tell. tle’s ‘formal cause’, Ian McEwan’s Black described a boxer ‘genuflecting through the ropes’ — an image I have coveted ever since. Boxing is ‘a standing challenge to [a writer’s] powers of description’, according to Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra in their preface to The Bittersweet Science. They are right. All physical action is a challenge to writers: YouTube can repair deficiencies, and is invoked several times in this anthology; but it is no substitute for writing, because writing adds focus to reality. I once saw the handsome, British-Hungar- ian, bottle-blond heavyweight Joe Bugn- er working out in a gym above a pub in the Pentonville Road. His looks were legend- ary, celebrated in many photo-shoots. But in reality they were also faintly out of focus, blurred by boxing. Writing searches, selects ‘It’s not you or me. It’s them!’ the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 37 BOOKS & ARTS

Dogs, Schrödinger’s cat and ‘the insouci- THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY ance of a Socratic paradox’. And there is some tortuous theory: ‘Jones-Hopkins is the uncommon post-prime-versus-post- prime rematch that more accurately reflects the reality over a prime-versus-prime first bout.’ Here, the perverse idea is that box- ing ability is best assessed not by boxers at their best, but when they are over the hill. So, comparably, T.S. Eliot’s ‘A Note on War Poetry’ would be a better benchmark than The Waste Land. There are many academ- ic perversities here: ‘Duran quit once, but he was no quitter’; ‘Mayweather, whose undefeated record has hoodwinked peo- ple into vastly overestimating his value’; ‘he took a dive just to demonstrate the slimi- ness of the proceedings’. It isn’t all bad. There is a brilliant piece by Charles Farrell, ‘Why I Fixed Fights’, an account of furnishing fighters with ersatz provenance which is wryly witty: ‘Bruce Johnson always arrived from out of town prepared to lose. His livelihood depend- ed on his career going nowhere.’ Brin- Jonathan Butler contributes an absorb- ing profile of Roy Jones Jr, still fighting at 47. And Carlo Rotella, one of the editors, has this tonic observation about the light ‘Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze...’ The infamous lynchings in heavyweight champion, Bernard Hopkins: Marion, Indiana, inspired the song ‘Strange Fruit’ and Laird Hunt’s weird novel A skilled fouler, Hopkins will also hold-and- hit, punch low, step on an opponent’s instep, and follow through with his own smooth- shaved skull after a punch to initiate a clash Bud and her redneck husband Dale. They is more eventful than Ottie Lee’s, but her of heads. stop to feed Dale’s pig; they stop at a church voice is more prosaic, less strange and com- supper and a Quaker prayer meeting; they pelling: is Hunt more wary of inhabiting David Remnick understands the funda- stop at a backwoods still; they stop to for- the head of a black protagonist, or does the mental brutality of the sport: cibly relieve a black family of their buggy. second section simply have too much nar- Boxers go into the ring alone, nearly naked, They meet a Klansman, an elderly acrobat rative heavy lifting to do? At some stage, and they succeed or fail on the basis of the and a man on a bicycle. They never make it anyway, the paths of the two protagonists most elementary criteria: their ability to give to Marvel, because this is a book about jour- will cross. and receive pain, their will to endure their own neys, not destinations. Instead, as she travels Most noticeable throughout is Hunt’s fear. through the hot night, Ottie Lee sinks back unusual decision to replace the charged into her own troubled dreams and memo- vocabulary of segregationist insult and Boxing is primitive and atavistic, and it ries. She has been told there is something moves us, when it moves us, by its display special coming, and she has a special map in ‘Wrong wasn’t the word for what of human courage. Like bull-fighting, it is her hand that will get her to ‘Marvel and its was happening. It was 1,000 miles surrounded by bullshit, by bogus claims for marvels’. ‘Who knew what fearsome won- artistry, but it is the blood being spilled that ders would populate the night,’ she won- from what needed saying’ holds us. ders, ‘who knew how long it would all go on?’ aggression with a set of coinages all his The second part of the book follows a own. White people are ‘cornsilks’, black On the way to a lynching black woman, Calla Destry, who is travel- people are ‘cornflowers’, Chinese people ling in the opposite direction, from Marvel are ‘corntassels’ and Native Americans are Tim Martin — a place that is meant to remind the read- ‘cornroots’; but the reader is left to parse er of Marion, Indiana, where two black men their various identities in sentences such as The Evening Road were taken from a prison and murdered by ‘He had stories he didn’t like to tell about by Laird Hunt a white crowd in 1930. Recorded in a noto- cornflowers and corntassels and cornroots Chatto, £14.99, pp. 278 rious photograph, that lynching is also the running low on gas when they were out in event to which the song ‘Strange Fruit’ cornsilk country’. Southern trees bear a strange fruit in Laird refers, and Hunt has drawn on an account How this goes down will depend on the Hunt’s seventh novel, a dark historical fic- by James Cameron, who survived it, in writ- reader’s sense of what a writer owes to the tion filled with dreams and visions that ing his novel. historical record, though I felt it added has one very disconcerting trick of style to Calla Destry is a furious avenger — to the mesmeric, underwater feeling of play on the reader. The setting is Indiana ‘Wrong wasn’t the word for what was hap- Hunt’s prose. Drift and mood are every- in 1930, where a white woman called Ottie pening. It was 1,000 miles from what needed thing in this weird book; it goes nowhere Lee Henshaw is on the way to a lynching in saying’ — and she carries an instrument of with particular vigour, but its eddies are the town of Marvel with her lecherous boss vengeance hidden in her basket. Her story often worth lingering in.

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ARTS Cover stories James Walton talks to Aubrey Powell, the man behind the album art for virtually every 1970s rock band you can think of

hese days, Aubrey Powell is a geni- ‘I did have a sense of that,’ he says with rious word ‘Hipgnosis’ in Biro on a white al 70-year-old who can be found what proves to be characteristically under- door. Adopting it as their name, Storm and Tmost mornings having breakfast at stated pride. But there was also the sad- Po moved into an office in Soho to establish his local Knightsbridge café. But in the late ness that comes with being reminded of a a proper company. ‘Musicians were always 1970s, he did something that surely no other world, and of some much-loved colleagues, stopping by for a chat,’ recalls Po, who was human being has done before or since. He now gone. soon cast in the role of the company grown- photographed a sheep lying on a psychia- One colleague there from the start was up, with Storm as the eccentric ideas man. ‘It trist’s couch on a beach in Hawaii. Its coat Storm Thorgerson, who he met in an arche- was great, but I sometimes did think, “For had been treated with Vidal Sassoon prod- typal 1960s way. In 1966, Po was a 19-year-old God’s sake fuck off, we’ve got work to do.”’ ucts, and it was sedated with Valium because former public schoolboy living in Cambridge Hipgnosis’s breakthrough year was 1973, it was scared of waves. when he decided to call on some local bohe- with Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, So what on earth was he up to? The Wings’s Band on the Run and, most world- answer — as anybody who recognises Pow- Powell was punched by Paul Rodgers conqueringly of all, that white light going ell’s name will guess — was creating one of Bad Company for ‘drumming on through a prism for Pink Floyd’s The Dark of the 373 album covers that his company Side of the Moon. ‘After that, the phone Hipgnosis designed back when LPs ruled a table out of tune’ didn’t stop ringing,’ says Po. ‘Suddenly we’d the world. (In this case, for 10cc’s Look mians he liked the look of. Barely was he gone from amateur art-school studio to a Hear?) through the door than Storm welcomed him pretty slick professional outfit.’ Now Powell — known as Po — has gath- with a cheery ‘Hello, man, want a spliff?’ Their timing couldn’t have been bet- ered all 373 together for the first time, in a Po did — and from there, his ascent into ter. By the mid-1970s, the music industry book that for some of us thrillingly recalls 1960s bohemia was almost eerily smooth. was awash with money — and willing to those many happy hours spent flipping Among those Cambridge hippies were Pink spend it. Not only could Po spend a week in through album racks in record shops. Po’s Floyd and at an early gig of theirs at Lon- Hawaii while someone made a psychiatrist’s accompanying commentary does acknowl- don’s UFO club Po shared a joint with Paul couch for a sheep. (‘I could probably have edge the occasional misstep. (‘An embarrass- McCartney and Pete Townshend. The band done that photograph on Camber Sands,’ ment to the Hipgnosis catalogue,’ he writes also commissioned Storm and Po’s first he admits with a chuckle.) He also got three of one particularly dodgy schoolgirl-based album cover — for A Saucerful of Secrets — months in a suite at the New York Plaza out sleeve.) Nonetheless, what’s most striking which naturally drew on Tarot cards and the of doing the cover for Led Zeppelin’s The is how endlessly inventive yet consistently I Ching. Song Remains the Same. dazzling Hipgnosis covers were: not just the Less happily, Po witnessed the sudden Before long, he was living rather like a famous ones for the likes of Pink Floyd and LSD-fuelled decline of Pink Floyd’s former rock star himself, joining bands on their Led Zeppelin, but also those for, well, virtu- leader Syd Barrett, with whom he shared a private jets and at those notorious 1970s ally every 1970s rock band you can think of London flat. ‘It happened over a weekend. post-gig parties (about which he’ll only say — and plenty that you probably can’t. On Friday he was Syd: a beautiful, charm- that ‘all the stories are true’). After being Having joined Po in that Knightsbridge ing, very bright man. By Monday, he was punched by Paul Rodgers of Bad Compa- café at the decidedly non-rock’n’roll hour gone, burnt out. We’d been best buddies, but ny for ‘drumming on a table out of tune’, he of 9 a.m., I ask him what it was like seeing his personality flipped to being extremely even drunkenly smashed up a hotel room, Hipgnosis’s work collected together. Did it aggressive, smashing things up, burning his which, as far he remembers, was surprisingly create in him the feeling Paul McCartney girlfriend with cigarettes. He was very scary good fun. (another former client) often seems to have: to be around.’ For Po, it duly seemed as if the golden age that of a man who can’t quite believe what But one inadvertently useful thing that of albums, and album covers, would never he achieved in his younger days? Syd did do in the flat was write the myste- end. In the event, if you date its birth — as

40 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk © PINK FLOYD MUSIC LTD

Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, 1969, photography by Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson

he does — from Sgt Pepper in 1967, it lasted rumours were emerging of a new format Floyd exhibition that opens at the V&A on just 15 years, until the arrival of CDs in 1982. that wouldn’t have room for proper cover 13 May. Before that, though, Po had his first art anyway… Of all the rock stars Po’s known, the inkling of a less certain future when ‘some And so, in 1982, Hipgnosis moved on ones he appears to admire most are those scruffy herberts’ called the Sex Pistols to pop videos. Then, after falling out with who, like Roger Waters and Paul McCart- moved into a neighbouring studio. ‘I remem- Storm (a rift happily healed by the time of ney, have remained utterly driven. And the ber one of them wearing a T-shirt saying “I same, it seems, firmly applies to him. ‘I’m Hate Pink Floyd” and I thought times are The sheep was sedated with Valium absolutely hammering it,’ he says content- changing. We were still playing Crosby, because it was scared of waves edly, ‘14 hours a day, seven days a week and Stills and Nash and wearing velvet trousers.’ loving every minute. I never want to stop. Even worse, ‘the brilliant cover’ of the Sex his death in 2013 by which time ‘we were Why would I?’ Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks ‘must have like brothers again’), Po became the creative cost about 2p. Storm and I looked at each director for Paul McCartney’s world tours. Vinyl. Album. Cover. Art: the Complete other and said, “You know what? The writ- He’s now in the extremely time-consum- Hipgnosis Catalogue by Aubrey Powell is ing’s on the wall for our style.”’ Meanwhile, ing process of curating the enormous Pink published by Thames & Hudson at £24.95. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 41 BOOKS & ARTS Revolutionary road Tobias Grey talks to film-maker Mohamed Diab about his film Clash, which grapples with the kaleidoscopic conflict that engulfed Egypt post-Tahrir Square

Tanked up: prisoners in an Egyptian police van in Mohamed Diab’s ‘Clash’

airo is deceptively calm, says Egyp- TV every day,’ he says. He became so asso- The first two people to be thrown in the Ctian film-maker Mohamed Diab. ‘Peo- ciated with promoting the revolution that back of the truck are a reporter and a pho- ple were so scared from the fighting in the people began to recognise him more as a tographer. ‘They represent us: the filmmak- streets that now all they want is stability at political activist than as a film-maker. ers,’ says 39-year-old Diab, who co-wrote any price,’ he explains. ‘But if you look close- They were heady, hopeful days for the script for Clash with his younger broth- ly at the situation, it’s worse than it was with young people like Diab. Soon after, he er Khaled. ‘The fact that they are neutral Mubarak in charge when it comes to free- started work on a film about the revolu- makes them a target for both supporters dom of speech, freedom of the press and tion but was compelled to change tack dra- of the army and the Muslim Brotherhood, human rights.’ matically as the democratic moment turned which is exactly what happened to us when It’s not turned out quite how Diab had sour and autocracy returned. the film was released in Egypt.’ hoped. In 2010 he directed Cairo 678, a On a sweltering August day in 2013 an Instead of taking sides in this kaleido- riveting film that in hindsight seemed Egyptian policeman fired CS gas through scopic conflict, Diab and his brother were like a premonition of what was to come. the window of a prison truck that had determined to make a film that ‘expresses A New Yorker article in 2011 described it been driving aimlessly around the capital different points of view than ours without as ‘unmistakably a harbinger of [the] rev- because all the prisons were full. Thirty- judging’. The finely balanced screenplay was olution’, and commended Diab for ‘viv- seven people suffocated to death. The inci- written so that each of the 25 prisoners gets idly portraying how the old system failed dent became the key inspiration and spur to six or seven lines of dialogue. repeatedly to address daily indignities and his latest movie, Clash. Shot entirely from This even-handed approach was greeted frustrations suffered by ordinary Egyptians, inside a van (emulating films such as Sam- with cries of indignation when Clash came women in particular’. When Tahrir Square uel Maoz’s 2009 film Lebanon,which is set out in Egypt last July. ‘Each side supposed erupted in early 2011, Diab became a lead- inside a tank, and Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 I was working with the enemy,’ Diab says. ‘I ing participant (he rejects the term ‘leader’) U-Boat drama Das Boot), Diab squeezed was called “a traitor” and “a spy” on state- in the revolts that unseated Mubarak. his own batch of prisoners into the tin con- run TV, and on the other side the Muslim ‘I was lucky that Cairo 678 had just been fines of a cramped vehicle and watched Brotherhood accused the film of being gov- released so I had the opportunity to talk on them squirm. ernment propaganda.’ Diab had experi-

42 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk enced similar opprobrium when Cairo 678 that not everyone feels the same way. ‘It’s and remained until the end of Act Two. It was released in Egypt. definitely going to be harder to make a film was replaced by interest and fascination ‘In the beginning people accused us of because there was an attempt to stop Clash in Act Three, which strikes me as by far exaggerating and fabricating stuff, but not from being released [in Egypt] and that the finest both musically and dramatically. long after our film’s release some laws were might scare people from backing my pro- Adès conducts with fervour and, of course, finally passed against sexual harassment,’ jects,’ he says. ‘But I’ll make a film even if it authority, and has relaxed the tempi, so that he says. means directing it in my bedroom.’ this performance lasted a quarter of an hour Shot over an intense 26 days, Clash longer than the Salzburg première, mainly wasn’t easy to film. ‘Any Egyptian will tell Clash is in cinemas now. to its advantage. you that shooting action scenes in the streets Working with what is now a highly experi- of Cairo is suicidal,’ he told an audience last enced team, Adès left no doubt that what we year. ‘Because, especially in a film like this, Opera saw and heard was exactly what he wanted where the camera is inside a car, people us to. Charles Workman, Amanda Echalaz, might mistake what they see with real pro- Fallen angel Thomas Allen, Christine Rice, Anne Sofie test and they might get involved.’ Michael Tanner von Otter, Sally Matthews, Iestyn Davies, Diab, who lives in Cairo with his film Sophie Bevan, John Tomlinson, to mention producer wife and daughter, is disarming- only some of the cast, more or less guaran- ly frank about the failure of the revolution The Exterminating Angel tee that the early performances of this opera to bring about lasting democratic change. Royal Opera House, in rep until 8 May are as fine as any will ever be. Yet I felt their ‘What were our demands? Nobody, includ- talents weren’t being put to good use in the ing us, knew,’ he says. He likens trying to The Adèsives were out in force at Covent first two acts, because they were largely yell- evaluate the Egyptian uprising six years on Garden last Monday for the UK première ing banalities at one another over a busy to what it must have felt like for the French of their hero’s third opera, The Exterminat- and often fascinating orchestral accompani- ing Angel, unable to contain their rapture ment — that’s the wrong word really, since it ‘This is my film’s secret message: until the piece was over, yelling their excite- seems to go its own way. In this respect, if no reminding Egyptians that we once all ment even at the interval. Thomas Adès’s other, Angel reminded me of Janacek’s The had the same dreams’ opera is closely based on Buñuel’s film of Makropulos Case. What did the dialogue 1962, with the text adapted by the composer among the innumerable characters gain by during the Terror that followed the 1789 rev- and Tom Cairns, who also directs the pro- being sung? The kind of pitched declama- olution. ‘They would have said then that the duction, which was first seen last July in revolution was the biggest disaster in histo- Salzburg, with a cast mainly identical to the Surrealist art is pretentious, vapid, ry,’ he says. ‘There’s also a backlash in Egypt Royal Opera’s. trivial and boring at the moment, but eventually things will I hadn’t seen it before Monday, but have even out and we’ll be on the right track — listened several times to my pirate record- tion Adès gives them makes them seem to though I have to say for now we’re not even ing and hoped that seeing it (with indispen- be perpetually on the verge of hysteria — on the track.’ sable surtitles) would clarify the opera for quite often they are, but that doesn’t make One of the most touching scenes in me and help me to sort out my responses. them much fun to listen to. Clash, which is full of black humour, is when It didn’t — excellent, indeed exemplary as It would be wrong to say that things a fat member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the production is — and has left me feeling calm down in Act Three, but hysteria with dreams of becoming an actor, sings a confused and uneasy about the piece. The has mainly given way to despair, and the mocking revolutionary song. During the sheer fact that it is an adaptation of a noto- music becomes much more beautiful than revolution, the same man was known as rious surrealist film forced me to reconsid- for most of the preceding acts. There is ‘the tear-gas singer’ and would often be left er my attitude to that movement, but I have genuine pathos in the guests’ gratitude to alone warbling amid the smoke as every- reached the same view that I have long a water pipe that they manage to fracture, one else ran for cover. The prisoners’ faces held: surrealist art is pretentious, vapid, so finally getting some liquid. The relent- light up with smiles and laughter as they are trivial and boring. I know that its point is to less parodying of the music is succeeded, momentarily united by their enjoyment of unsettle us, but it does so in only a superfi- for long stretches, by solemnity and a kind this absurd memory. cial way, the clearest example of that being of hieratic quality which is the more mov- ‘This is why I made this film: 2011 was the Dalí, with whom of course Buñuel had ear- ing because we have been deprived of opposite of 2013,’ Diab says. Two thousand lier collaborated. it for so long. Adès even employs some and eleven was about unity; 2013 about divi- The Exterminating Angel, as everyone words from the Latin requiem to power- sion. ‘We have forgotten how much every- must now know, is about a dinner party ful effect. one was in love with each other at that great attended by a mainly loathsome collection The ending is sudden and almost shock- moment. This is my film’s secret message: of people: posturers, fakes, who are frivo- ing. But it leaves us — it left me — with a reminding Egyptians that we once all had lous and, worst of all, bourgeois. It begins bewildering sense that I didn’t know how the same dreams.’ with the servants scenting that something to take the opera: is it, in the end, a com- But just how ephemeral these dreams is wrong and quitting the scene, so that the passionate portrayal of ‘the human condi- were can be measured by reaction to guests have to fend for themselves. What tion’? Is this mainly unsavoury collection Mubarak’s release from prison last month. is worse, they find that they are unable to of characters meant to be of universal sig- ‘It’s hard to believe but he’s the most pop- leave, though what kind of force it is that nificance? Is it possible to combine, as the ular guy in Egypt right now,’ Diab says. ‘A constrains them is never even hinted at. work seems to be doing, satire, pastiche lot of Egyptians who are tired of ideas of Creating and sustaining bewilderment, and real solemnity? These are questions democracy are thinking only of Mubarak and leaving us unsure about how serious one might equally ask of Stravinsky’s The because they just want to go back to a situa- it all is, is a key element in surrealism, but Rake’s Progress, an opera Adès adores and tion when it was bad, not shitty.’ it is one of those things that really can’t be has conducted, but though it now has clas- Concerning Diab’s own place in the done more than a few times before tedium sic status it seems to me broken-backed. It scheme of things, he wants only to keep on sets in. will be interesting to see if The Exterminat- writing and directing movies. But it seems For me, it set in fairly quickly, in Act One, ing Angel achieves the same status. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 43 BOOKS & ARTS Radio gau (close to Wittenberg) in 1544, where ‘Radio’s like being a passenger in the she discovers that the altar was positioned car where you’re sitting alongside some- A square dance in Heaven at the east end, as is traditional, but above one and talking to them, but you’re not it was placed not the crucifix you might looking at each other. It’s much easier to Kate Chisholm expect but a massive organ, in full view of say things, but no answers are required. the whole congregation. Every member of That suits a religious sensibility, which It’s 500 years since Martin Luther pinned his the congregation participated in the service is often unfinished. People will bring to 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church by singing the hymns and metrical psalms. church situations that are unmendable. It’s in Wittenberg, sparking what would come to This meant that for the first time women’s very important that there are places where be known as the Protestant Reformation. voices were being heard in church. those unmendable things can be said — His superficial complaint was against the As a boy chorister, Bach would have and listened to.’ corrupt practice of indulgences, the Catho- begun each day at 6 a.m. by singing some- We are living in ‘a credulous age’, says lic Church teasing money out of the gulli- thing written by Luther. But, explains Win- Winkett, and people are ready to believe ble and persuading them that they could buy kett, his musical genius then turned the almost anything. In such a time religious their way into Heaven. But what Luther, a melodies he grew up with, such as Luther’s broadcasting becomes ever more impor- professor of theology, really wanted was for hymn on a text from Romans ‘The spir- tant by shining a light on what is happening God to be made accessible to everyone and it gives aid to our weakness’, into choral in church, making it accessible, as Luther for worship to be more intimate, more direct, motets whose harmonic complexity reflects believed, but also challenging and asking and in the vernacular, not Latin. We think of the deeper meaning of the text. Luther’s the difficult questions posed by Bach in his him now as a man of the text, who believed melodies are often very lively, syncopated, music. that faith was so important its meaning like the rhythm of life; you can imagine run- should not be withheld by the priesthood ning along to them in the gym. Bach, in con- or clouded by that ‘dead’ language. Radio 3, trast, forces you to stand still, to be in awe Festivals though, has chosen to mark the anniversary of the music and of its ambition, inviting us with a series of programmes highlighting the individually through the music to contem- A familiar Ring importance of music, not words, to the Ref- plate the mystery of God. It’s like ‘a sermon Michael Henderson ormation. delivered through music’. Why focus on Luther as a musician? I Her programme, too, was like a lively asked the Revd Lucy Winkett, rector of St Lutheran sermon delivered through a radio Easter Festival James’s, Piccadilly, who presents tomorrow feature; an opportunity to reflect not just Salzburg on Luther or Bach but on the meaning of Would Bach have created belief. Through her work as a priest, and as Herbert von Karajan established the East- his St Matthew Passion without a regular broadcaster, she talks every day er Festival in Salzburg 50 years ago with a Martin Luther? to those who need a listening ear as they production of Die Walküre that is now con- disclose their grief, or fear of death, or the sidered legendary. In the sense that legends night’s Sunday Feature: A Square Dance fact that they have absolutely no money, are rooted in memory, and mythological in in Heaven (produced by Rosie Dawson). or that they’re fed up with their work and substance, that much is true. Which is not to Winkett, a former professional singer and are desperate to find something to do that damn it with faint praise. This revival, staged choral scholar who has been singing Bach means something. ‘At its best, that’s what by Vera Nemirova, was an old-fashioned since she was a child, says she was ‘really religion is for,’ says Winkett, ‘…for the life representation of Wagner and many Wag- interested in Luther as a musician’ because that people are actually living, not some nerians, having endured too many modern ‘everyone associates him with words’ but fantasy gleaned from TV or social media.’ presentations of the Master, who has suf- much more significant was the way he trans- She believes fervently that there’s ‘a quality fered more than any other composer from formed church music, using it ‘to help peo- of listening that the Church can offer… and the curse of Regietheater, would say that ple understand that God was with them and which radio can also do because it’s a really that is No Bad Thing. for them’. He recognised, says Winkett, ‘that intimate medium.’ A giant ash tree, in whose hollowed-out music is the language of the human spirit’ trunk reside Hunding and Sieglinde, was the and because of that he got everyone singing in Saxony. Four hours of music each week No bad acting. No capering. But was introduced into the school curriculum some very good singing and choirs sprang up in every town. Music, she argues, was at the heart of the Luther- single, simple prop for the first act. The vast an reformation. He famously said, ‘When second act, the most significant dramatic people engage in music, singing in four or stretch of the Ring cycle, its natural pivot, five parts, it’s like a square dance in heav- was played out on a ring-shaped walkway en.’ This leads her to wonder whether Bach which, in the final act, became the rocky would have created his St Matthew Passion crop on which Wotan sends Brünnhilde into without Luther? a sleep that will only be disturbed by Sieg- In the programme she travels to fried one whole opera later. There was little Eisenach in Germany, to the church where tonal variety, grey being the favoured colour, Luther was once a choirboy, followed coin- which works for a world of myth — it is not cidentally 200 years later by J.S. Bach. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. As a chorister, the young J.S. would have If you had ever yearned to see, one more sung hymns and metrical psalms written time, valkyries wearing breastplates and by Luther, both the words and the music. winged helmets this was a show to warm Lutheran melodies are threaded through the cockles. The beginning of the third act, Bach’s work. She goes to see the first ‘All our priests are busy at the moment but your which is often an excuse to indulge in bad Lutheran chapel, which was built at Tor- confession is important to us…’ acting and gormless capering, worked very

44 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk Wilfrid de Glehn 1870–1951

5 The Rainbow, 1938 oil on canvas 50 x 61 cms 19 ⁄8 x 24 ins signed lower right PROVENANCE: The Artist’s Studio Estate, Atelier no. 84.

26 April – 26 May While he owed much of his style and technique to Sargent, Wilfrid de Glehn excelled at classical subjects, in which Sargent showed little or no interest. By splicing his early training with Gustave Moreau with the command of plein-air technique he developed with Sargent, Wilfrid developed an approach to decorative painting that set allegory and myth – particularly the sexier ones from Ovid and Apuleius – against glossy views of Cornwall and the South of France. Fully illustrated catalogue – £15 inc p&p

MESSUM’S 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Tel: +44 (0)20 7437 5545 www.messums.com BOOKS & ARTS well here. Nemirova lined up the nine warri- names and familiar works. So this year we or-maidens first diagonally along the battle- had symphonies by Bruckner and Mahl- ments and then across the front of the stage, er, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, as guardians. No bad acting. No capering. played by the brilliant young Russian But some very good singing. Daniil Trifonov, not one of life’s most nat- Musically it was superb. Christian Thiele- ural Mozartians. mann, who grew up, quite literally, at Kara- This was the third time in a decade that jan’s knee in Berlin, has long been considered, festival-goers had heard that concerto, fol- not least by himself, as his musical son and lowing performances by Alfred Brendel heir. At times, in Beethoven, for instance, (magnificent) and Maurizio Pollini (appall- the homage he pays to his hero shines a lit- ing). Yet Mozart composed 27 concertos for tle too brightly. Where does Karajan end, and the piano, as they know full well in Salzburg, Thielemann begin? But in Wagner, to borrow and at least 12 of them are well worth hear- a phrase from Philip Larkin, all his compul- ing! It is not compulsory to go back to No. 21 sions ‘meet, are recognised, and robed as des- time and again. tinies’. There is no conductor alive, with the We also had Fauré’s Requiem for the exception of Daniel Barenboim, so thorough- second time in six years, and next Easter ly immersed in the musical and philosophical they will roll out Brahms 2 and the Sym- world of Wagner. phonie Fantastique, both of which Simon The Dresden Staatskapelle, the festi- Rattle conducted on his watch as festival val’s resident orchestra, played with char- director. No Sibelius, alas, nor Nielsen. acteristic grace for their music director. Those second-rate northern Europeans! As When one thinks of these musicians the for Elgar and Vaughan Williams.… Actual- adjective usually employed is ‘burnished’, ly, Elgar’s Second Symphony is the sort of for perfectly good reasons. It is a noble, work that should be presented in Salzburg, as it grew out of the old German tradition. Patrons at the Easter Festival are Would it really upset all those expensively moneyed, and for that money they upholstered men and women to hear, just expect big names and familiar works once, an English masterpiece that owes its being to Wagner? rounded sound but it is not opulent for Still, they did Wagner proud this East- the sake of opulence, a criticism that was er. Carlos Kleiber, a conductor who could often levelled at Karajan in his later years. hardly be more different from Karajan, Supple, alert, responsive to Thielemann, used to visit Anif, five miles from Salzburg, never more so than in the emotional surges to place a red rose on his grave. Half a cen- before Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde, this tury after he created this festival, and 28 is an orchestra worthy of its reputation. years since he died, Karajan came to life Vocally it was good, sometimes very again through the power of music. Thiele- good. Anja Harteros was a gleaming Sieg- mann and his musicians placed a meta- linde, and Vitalij Kowaljow, with his high phorical rose of their own in the Grosses bass voice, made a sweeter, lighter Wotan Festspielhaus, on behalf of everybody who than we are used to. High marks also for ever heard that remarkable conductor, and Georg Zeppenfeld, a virile Hunding capa- we were all the richer. ble of real violence, not just malevolence, and for Anja Kampe, delightful of voice and engaging in manner. Here was a proper Cinema maiden, not some silly girl. Christa Mayer, ished for veering off message, my best guess clad in ermine, was an imperious Fricka. Girl power is they’d be fist-pumping the air while cry- You couldn’t fault Wotan for wanting Deborah Ross ing: ‘You go, girl, you go!’ (Or similar.) This to spend as much time away from her as circumvents all our expectations, plays like possible. a thriller, ditches bonnets for more murder- The only disappointment was Peter Lady Macbeth ous pursuits, and is plain terrific. Bit of a long Seiffert, who did not sing badly but who is 15, Nationwide intro, I can now see. Just remember: ‘Plain too old for Siegmund. ‘Winterstürme’, that terrific.’ beautiful hymn to spring and young love, Lady Macbeth, which has nothing to do Directed by William Oldroyd (formerly made little impression. In his poacher’s with boring old Shakespeare beyond indi- director in residence at the Young Vic The- coat he looked as if he were about to set cating a certain archetype (huge sighs of atre) with a script by Alice Birch (a play- off for a long walk across the fells in search relief all round), is a British period drama wright with work performed at the Royal of a rabbit or two for supper. But Seiffert about a young woman who, trapped in a Court and RSC), the film is based on Lady has long been a member of the repertory cold, loveless marriage, finds sexual passion Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the 1865 company that services major European elsewhere, and runs with it. And runs with novella by Nikolai Leskov first published in houses and festivals, so he was a shoe-in for it. And runs with it. And if you think you’ve Dostoevsky’s magazine, Epoch. (I know this the part. seen this all before — Madame Bovary, stuff: I didn’t just look it up on Wikipedia.) Tradition, in terms of programmes and Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley, etc. — Here, the action stays in Victorian times but performers, governs this festival. The sum- think again, my friend. In fact, if Madame has been transposed from the Mtsensk dis- mer festival, being longer, is also broader. Bovary were here with us right now, along trict, wherever in Russia that is, to Northum- Patrons at the Easter Festival are mon- with Anna and Lady Chatterley and all the berland, I think — the exact region is never eyed, and for that money they expect big other women in literature who’ve been pun- specified, but I noted some Geordie in the

46 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk This is a micro-budget film. You know, shot in 24 days for 42p. (Actually, £350,000, but in film terms that is around 42p.) And everything is spare. The music is spare. The script is spare. The locations are spare. Katherine’s frocks are lush but spare, in the sense there are so few of them. Some- times, all this spareness is a drag. Why are there no horses in the stables? Can you blame Sebastian for shagging the mistress of the house, given that he has nothing to groom? But ultimately it just adds to the sense of what Katherine’s life would have been if she’d not taken matters into her own hands: a spare life devoid of all nour- ishment or comfort. The pace is brisk — we’re all done in 89 minutes — and the direction is sure-footed and never heavy-handed. There is violence, but most of the abuse is slyly psychologi- cal, and allowed to just sit with us. The end- ing has, it’s true, been substantially changed from that of the novella (I know this stuff: I didn’t just skim read the novella on my Kin- dle just now) but as I prefer this ending, I won’t complain. This is a film that says women who try to break free don’t have to fade away or top themselves. (‘Yay!’ says Thérèse Raquin). Yet the only thing you need to truly remem- ber? Plain terrific.

Television The real deal James Delingpole Plain terrific: Florence Pugh as Katherine in ‘Lady Macbeth’ The other day I had a very dispiriting con- versation with a TV industry insider. It turns out that everything you see on real- ity TV is fake. It’s the ‘everything’ part that really both- ered me. Obviously, we all sort of know that most TV is faked: that close-ups on wild- air — and Katerina has become Katherine. marriage is as sexless as it is loveless. Her life documentaries are sometimes filmed She is played by relative newcomer, Flor- husband demands she stands naked, then in zoos and that the meerkat they pretend ence Pugh, who is truly remarkable; who leaves her in the dark to shiver, or demands is the same meerkat is actually three dif- must convince us that sweet innocence can she faces the wall while he masturbates. ferent meerkats; that the chance meetings warp into a mad, destructive, unrepentant Either way, he’s not exactly winning any- with colourful characters and experts are all lust, and does it, in spades. body over here. prearranged and that when they answer the The film opens on Katherine’s wedding But then she falls for Sebastian (Cosmo door and act surprised it’s often the third or day, when she’s being married off to an Jarvis), the groom. He’s her Mellors, if fourth take; that the glamorous parties and you like. But once her sexual desire is realistic, totally unstilted dialogue on Made Madame Bovary and Lady unleashed you will be constantly surprised in Chelsea wouldn’t happen if the cameras Chatterley would be fist-pumping the as to where it takes her. You won’t always weren’t there; and so on. But some things I air crying, ‘You go, girl, you go!’ approve, but you will be surprised. I don’t thought were sacred. wish to land myself in any spoiler trou- Storage Hunters, for example. It had sim- older man (Paul Hilton) who lives with his ble, so will only say that Katherine’s maid, ply never occurred to me that, when the man father (Christopher Fairbank). She is chat- Anna (Naomi Ackie), is struck mute by cuts the chain with the bolt cutter, the tar- tel, having been bought by the father ‘along what she sees. Anna is black, by the way, as paulin is pulled off, and the storage locker with a piece of land not fit enough to graze are a couple of characters introduced later. for which the successful bidders have paid a cow on’. Their house is grand but remote They just happen to be black, as they might just $300 contains a Riva speedboat, an and chilly. Katherine must stay in this well have been, given many well-to-do hous- original copy of the US constitution, Neil house at all times. Katherine is bored to the es did have black servants at that time, and Armstrong’s space helmet and a jar of 1933 point of stupefaction. Katherine is obliged it’s just a Ukip-style fantasy to imagine double eagle gold coins, there’s a possibility to wear constricting corsets. Katherine’s otherwise. that at least one of these items might have the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 47 BOOKS & ARTS been put there beforehand by the produc- as salties. Also, in that swept-away-by-the- tion crew. tide scene, the bloke would have been con- Also dog training. For the past couple of sumed by tigers or bulls long before the years, I have been trying — without much policewoman swam to his rescue. As for the success, it must be said — to teach our dog taipans… that I am its pack leader by always making This year’s theme is youngsters v. oldies. sure to precede it through gates and door- Initially, it looked as though age and guile ways. Turns out, though, that this is just some would win. By the end of the first day, the complete rubbish that Cesar the alleged canny oldsters had prepared their shelters dog-training expert came up with on his now and made their fire. The under-30s, mean- defunct series Dog Whisperer. Apparently — while, were so busy flirting and bickering as subsequent research has shown — your and practising their yoga, and all the other dog doesn’t respect you in the slightest if you stupid stuff that stupid young people do, go through doorways before it does. This, cer- that it was suddenly day three and they still tainly, tallies with my own experience. hadn’t produced a flame to boil the water to Now we’re starting a new season of one render it drinkable, so were at risk of dying of my favourite reality series, The Island of thirst. With Bear Grylls (Sunday, Channel 4). In of the contestants fell on to some rocks and Then, inevitably, fortune’s wheel turned. the past, this has got itself into trouble by could easily have broken his back. We also What these series are, above all, is a triumph helping out the struggling contestants with had several scorpion stings. This week, we’ve of editing, and however much you may little cheats. One year, for example, the pro- already had one ageing castaway nearly loathe the fakery you cannot but admire the duction crew brought on some pigs — tame swept away and drowned by a perilous cur- skill with which all that footage is shaped into domesticated ones: ergo, comfortable in a rent while stubbornly trying to negotiate a satisfying drama: the annoying dork whom human’s presence — for the starving girls stretch of treacherous tidal water. I’d love to everyone hates — up until the point where tearfully to slaughter. On another occasion, know how their risk assessment and insur- he makes the fire and catches all the fish; just when the group were on the verge of ance works. the wise, capable one who loses it complete- dying of thirst, they handily chanced upon It helps, I suppose, that they’re filming off ly in the mud. You desperately want to stop a supply of fresh water from a rubber-lined Panama — and not, say, somewhere equiva- watching because you’ve been here before pool such as is often found on remote, unin- lently tropical in Australia, where the wild- and it’s all such a huge waste of life. But you habited islands. life is so much more dangerous. Bear Grylls can’t because this is televisual soma made by But the danger is real enough. Last year, loves to reassure us how deadly caimans are, terrible, cynical, brilliant people who know there was the most horrific scene where one but they’re nowhere near in the same league exactly where your weaknesses lie.

VICTORIA CROWE

4 May – 2 June 2017

Printed and e-catalogues available upon request.

Monday - Friday 10.00-5.30 Saturday 11.00-2.00 , oil on linen, 24 x 22 inches, cat. no. 22. , oil on linen, 24 x 22 inches, cat. no.

A Night of Frost A Night

48 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk Music ing across as a John Ogdon tribute act. More fool me. Perhaps if I’d listened THE LISTENER Mission impossible? to Donohoe’s much-praised recordings of Ray Davies: Americana British composers on Naxos and Dutton, I’d Damian Thompson have been prepared for the stunning pian- ism we heard on Sunday. Peter Donohoe: the complete Back to those manuscripts for a moment. Scriabin piano sonatas Scriabin’s penmanship is at its most decora- Milton Court Concert Hall tive when he uses three staves. It’s not just that he can’t fit the notes on the convention- Just before Peter Donohoe played the last al two: he’s asking for simultaneous textures of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at that suggest multiple personalities. Very few the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday, the pianists are up to this challenge, even the autograph score of the piece was beamed on young show-offs who toss off Ravel’s Gas- to the wall behind him. It was just a glimpse pard as if it were a Clementi sonatina. — but enough to show us that Scriabin had Step forward the 63-year-old Dono- the most beautiful musical calligraphy of hoe, who took us into the thickets of the any composer since Bach. Sixth Sonata — so dense that even Scriabin On the face of it, that’s surprising. You wouldn’t play it in public — and illuminat- would expect the Cantor of St Thomas’s to ed it with a flickering delicacy. He coloured There is some surprise that after all inscribe neatly — and indeed baroque musi- every voice, revealing a spectral polyphony these years Ray Davies has turned cians often play Bach straight from his own that other pianists often smudge with the his attention to America. He is the manuscripts, preening as they do so. But sustaining pedal. I’m sorry if this sounds most quintessentially English of pop Scriabin is often regarded as a messy com- rude, but he reminded me that heavy people musicians, a witty and acute observer poser, in thrall to the mystical fads of pre- are supposed to be strangely light on their of the British way of life whose best revolutionary Russia. So you might envisage feet when they dance. tunes were drawn from music hall a scrawl covered in ink blots and frenzied My litmus test for a Scriabin pianist is and calypso — even while, with his crossings-out. the second half of the Fourth Sonata, whose brother Dave, he was inventing that It’s true that Scriabin’s mysticism hasn’t skipping theme incorporates sadistic cross- most doggedly, turgidly, horribly aged well; nor have his laborious attempts rhythms. Scriabin wanted it played ‘as fast English of genres, heavy metal. And to link every tone in the chromatic scale to a as possible, on the verge of the possible… a yet The Kinks most famous hit, ‘Lola’, flight at the speed of light’. had a real American swagger about Donohoe took us into the thickets of The number of pianists who achieve it, in the wonderful rolling rhythm, the Sixth Sonata – so dense that even this effect in the recording studio is vanish- as Davies expressed his profound Scriabin wouldn’t play it in public ingly small. Peter Donohoe attacked it joy- confusion at meeting a transgendered fully: his opening speed was no faster than lady in a Soho bar. It was the first specific colour and emotion. But this doesn’t anyone else’s, but his transparent touch record I ever bought, at the age of make his piano music messy. If the chords revealed the tiniest wisps of accompani- ten, much to my parents’ disgust and sound clotted and the musical argument ment — and then he gunned us down with consternation. Come to think of it, incoherent, blame the pianist. the thunderous virtuosity that won him the even ‘Waterloo Sunset’ had a whiff of The sonatas, written between 1892 and Tchaikovsky prize. San Francisco in the melody. 1913, move rapidly from conventional late There were short breaks between the Inspired by a late tour across romanticism to dissonant experiments pieces in which the composer Gerard the pond, he has now reservedly touched with hysteria. Yet even the spooki- McBurney read well-chosen reminiscenc- embraced the USA and its own est effects are the product of rigorous meth- es of Scriabin, and once or twice the lights genre, Americana (which, truth be od rather than madness. turned red in a nod to his synaesthesia. But told, is already a little jejune). But To quote the Scriabin scholar Simon this was just subtle framing, not one of those this is a fine album, packed with Nicholls, the composer’s ‘voice-leading and suffocating day-long ‘experiences’ beloved sweet, chiming guitars, the occasional harmony were impeccably logical at all stag- of arts administrators. crunching power chords and, most es in his development’. Hence the grace- This recital was a monumental achieve- importantly, a batch of the best tunes ful pen strokes of his finished manuscripts, ment. I’d have said that playing all Scria- he’s come up with since about 1972. works of arts in their own right. This ‘slender bin’s piano sonatas in one afternoon with The targets are a little predictable — exactitude’, says Nicholls, ‘makes it clear to such accuracy, structural insight and joie de ‘Rock ’N’ Roll Cowboys’, ‘The Great the interpreter that a similar clarity, preci- vivre was beyond ‘the verge of the possible’. Highway’ and a song (probably sion and grace is demanded in his or her own Donohoe proved me wrong. the best tune on the album) called performance — something extremely diffi- ‘Poetry’, which Ray thinks America cult to achieve.’ utterly lacks. His words are sharper I wasn’t expecting Donohoe to pull it and funnier on ‘The Deal’, a vignette off. He became a bit of a celebrity in 1982, of Los Angeles, a place which is when he won the silver medal at the Tchai- ‘fraudulent, bogus and unreal’. It is a kovsky Competition — a triumph miss- pleasure to hear the man in such fine ing from the detailed CV provided for the form so late in the day. Scriabin. Perhaps he feels that it overshad- Now all we need is for that old ows his career. There were a couple of big- Kinks hit ‘Apeman’ to get some boned romantic concertos on EMI before radio airplay. They never put it on he moved to smaller labels; with his bear- these days. I’m not dumb but I can’t like frame, goatee beard and Manchester ‘Just wait till your biological parent’s live-in understand etc.... — Rod Liddle accent I thought he was in danger of com- surrogate’s transgender ex-partner gets home.’ the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 49 BOOKS & ARTS

MANUEL HARLAN twerpish as Philip, and Tom Rosenthal gives a persuasive account of Donald, the smug Oxbridge lifer. Matt Berry, as the cynical novelist, wears a velvet suit of brightest purple, which makes him look like a Quality Street. And he’s too tidy and sleek. The character needs more rock-star bedevilment and sexual magnetism. Those points aside, I can hardly praise this show highly enough. The pedantry of the quibbling dons is enter- taining to the point of being contagious. When Philip was asked for a word mean- ing ‘bloodless’, he replied ‘etiolated’. A student of philology beside me muttered the correction, ‘anaemic’. Whisper House is superbly designed to throw its audience into a pit of despair. The setting is a haunted light- house on America’s eastern seaboard during the second world war. An orphan boy lives with an embittered club-footed spinster and a meek but wise Japanese servant who is loathed by the local sheriff. The dismal shoreline is menaced by the ghosts of two drowned musicians and by prowling Nazi sub- marines that threaten to open fire at Adorably twerpish: Simon Bird as Philip in ‘The Philanthropist’ any moment and blast everyone to bits. The first song ‘Better To Be Dead’ informs us that the human race would have been far happier had the charac- Theatre contemporary borrowings from that decade. ters on stage never lived. Anyone tempted The only unequivocal hint comes from Ara- to dispute this thesis (and I assented to it Pleasing pedantry minta’s fake upper-class accent (a passing immediately) is destined to hear its mes- Bohemian fad), which locates us in the age sage repeated, in ever more miserable ver- Lloyd Evans of the hippies. sions, five times during the show. Were it more clearly a period piece, the The set is equally committed to the neg- The Philanthropist grotesque comedy would be easier to digest. ative vibe. Centre-stage is a wooden crater Trafalgar Studio, until 22 July Much of it jars nowadays. The characters the size of a Jacuzzi which appears to be joke about a recent attack on the House Human Melancholy realised in the form of Whisper House of Commons that left 11 MPs dead. A ter- varnished timber. The storyline moves at the Other Palace, until 27 May ror group that murders novelists is given the speed of an opiated turtle crossing an ocean same light-hearted treatment. A rich novel- of molasses. After an hour, the Japanese guy Christopher Hampton’s 1968 play The Phi- has decided to hide from the nasty sheriff. lanthropist examines the romantic travails The show may be popular with After the second hour, he’s been biffed on of Philip, a cerebral university philologist, Trump-haters searching for the the nose and has revealed his love for the forced to choose between his unexciting antidote to the Antichrist embittered club-footed spinster. The show fiancée and a predatory seductress. The is, of course, an allegory for Trumpism. The play’s opening scene contains one of the ist who abandoned left-wing politics ‘for tax orphan boy, representing America, ponders most brilliant comic shocks in all drama. reasons’ has a contempt for the poor that the moral gulf between the spinster who And the paradoxes and flashes of Hamp- sounds horribly callous to the modern ear. loves the servile foreigner and the sheriff tonian wit are an everlasting treat. ‘I’m a Araminta (Lily Cole) casually mentions who punches him. man of no convictions,’ says Philip. ‘At least being molested, aged 12, by her uncle, ‘which The show may be popular with Trump- I think I am.’ rather takes the romance out of things’. haters searching for the antidote to the Anti- The production, brilliantly directed by Charlotte Ritchie’s Celia turns her encoun- christ. The roles of the ghosts are played by Simon Callow, is exquisite to look at. Libby ters with rapacious tutors into a party piece Simon Bailey (of the group Teatro) and Watson creates a stark white sitting room, that amuses her varsity pals enormously. As Niamh Perry. Perhaps to compensate for the with great pools of crimson carpet, enlivened it would have done at the time. meagreness of their parts they were allowed by colourful rows of books that are harmo- But today’s viewer wonders why a sex- to perform a rock duet at the curtain call nised carefully, but not obtrusively, with the ual abuse inquiry hasn’t begun. The atmos- and because it had no legible connection to overall palette. The surgical blankness of the phere of prejudice is never questioned. the foregoing action it came as a delicious space symbolises Philip’s monastic detach- The women accept their roles as gorgeous surprise. Niamh Perry has the looks of a ment from life. There is one difficulty. The insects who dote on the menfolk, laughing goddess and a sweet needling voice, with a classic furniture and the men’s clothes offer dutifully at their jokes, and never challeng- narrow range, which gets inside your head no information about dates and times. The ing a system of values that deprives them and refuses to budge. She deserves a band women’s dresses might be 1960s originals or of status or money. Simon Bird is adorably and a record deal.

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15% Discount code SpectatorReaders NOTES ON … Ruislip Lido By William Cook

ost mornings, if I’m not too hung- PICTURE: GETTY IMAGES was prohibited. The pedalos were packed over, I go for a run around Ruis- away. When I moved to Ruislip five years M lip Lido — a mile there, through ago the lido seemed rather run down, a sad Ruislip Woods, about two miles round the relic of a bygone era, and the surrounding lido and a mile back again. It generally takes woods felt seedy. I have no evidence to sup- me about half an hour. On my way, I see port this theory — it’s probably the prod- woodpeckers, egrets, sparrowhawks, and the uct of a dirty mind — but some secluded occasional Muntjac deer. It’s hard to believe areas had that distinctive ‘dogging’ vibe. you’re in London, at the arse end of the Met- The foliage was festooned with beer cans ropolitan line, surrounded by bland suburbia and vodka bottles. I didn’t want to look too — John Betjeman’s Metroland. closely at what else might be lying around. Ruislip Woods is the largest slice of natu- Yet lately something’s changed. The ral woodland in Greater London: 726 acres Glory days: Charlotte Rampling at the lido in 1965 council has built a smart new ‘Woodland of oak, beech and hornbeam, and the lido is Centre’ and spruced up the public areas. its pearl. People have gathered timber from for bathing and boating. Trains and chara- There’s a children’s playground, an outdoor this scruffy forest since god knows when. bancs brought day trippers from the Big gym, and the miniature railway is still there. The medieval barn at Ruislip Manor is built Smoke — a cheap day out for Londoners at The lido has been recolonised by joggers, from oaks that were saplings here 1,000 an ersatz seaside resort. dog walkers, and all sorts of nesting birds. years ago, when these wild woods stretched Its glory days were after the war, before When my daughter went there on a school right across Middlesex, Bucks and Herts. cheap package holidays. They built a min- trip, I tagged along. She spent an idyllic Naturally, Ruislip Lido isn’t quite so iature railway and held beauty contests, afternoon fishing for tiddlers. We walked ancient. It was built 200 years ago as a res- and happy families and courting couples home through the woods together and it was ervoir for the Grand Union Canal, but the flooded in. Jon Pertwee went waterskiing, one of the best days out I’ve had in years. idea was a failure. The canal was too far Cliff Richard filmed The Young Ones, and You’re still not allowed to swim in it away and the reservoir flooded local farms. 19-year-old Charlotte Rampling reclined (something to do with pollution, apparently) For more than a century it lay forgotten, on a speedboat in her swimsuit to drum up and sailing remains verboten (the water level a gigantic puddle on the edge of London, publicity for a movie called The Knack. is too low), but I rather like the absurdist until the canal company had the bright idea But in the 1970s and 1980s the punters concept of a lido you can’t take a dip in. It’s of turning it into a lido. They built a splen- started disappearing to Spain and the Ruis- a perfect fit for Ruislip, this surreal suburb did Art Deco pavilion, dumped some sand lip Riviera lost its lustre. The pavilion burned where medieval England and Betjeman’s along the shore, and opened up the reservoir down. The turnstiles rusted over. Bathing Metroland collide.

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54 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk ‘Until the 20th century Jennifer was a rare and curious name from Cornwall’ — Dot Wordsworth, p62

High life saloons or dives, where jazz musicians and but took a liking to me instead and invited me singers could take popular songs and deliv- to the Yankees dugout leaving Linda alone. Taki er them to you as though they were confid- There was a romantic, sexual electricity ing in your ear. They were dark, they were in those small cabarets back then, or perhaps smoky and they were small, and the best of it was the fact that I was in my twenties that them, near Third Avenue and 55th Street, made it so. It was a magnetism that made was called the Blue Angel. It opened its one feel on top, especially when escorting doors late, as Elmo’s and the Stork club a beauty. The big-band era was coming to a closed theirs, and its lavishly upholstered close, but there were still more than 20 ball- room was straight out of a 1920s Berlin rooms in the city where one could go and whorehouse. Eartha Kitt and Johnny Mathis dance one’s legs off. Many hotels had their and Woody Allen got their start there, and own supper clubs — the Persian Room at Twenty-five years ago this week, Los Ange- the Plaza, the Cotillion at the Pierre, and the les was burning because of Rodney King’s I once entered and came third in Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf Astoria. I beating at the hands of the fuzz, and I had a cha-cha-cha contest once even entered and came third in a cha- my shoulder sliced open by a doctor in cha-cha contest, but I’ve been too embar- order to repair torn ligaments. My shoulder the place was packed with celebrities who rassed to write about it 60 years on. hurt more than Rodney’s ribs. I know that lived at night, people such as Tallulah Bank- Anyway, that’s how things were back because I saw him, on TV, get up and ges- head and Marlene Dietrich and that awful then, and when it gets dark I sometimes miss ticulate freely after having been whacked Truman Capote. For some strange reason I them. Lesson to be learned: don’t get old. rather hard by four cops. I didn’t lift my arm used to be in the gossip columns back then, for months. Lesson to be learned: it’s better especially around 1956, because of the film to be beaten by four police officers than to stars I used to escort around. The maitre d’ Low life run into an ice wall at high speed while ski- of the Angel treated me like a celebrity (that ing with snow blindness. was a first and last, I might add). Jeremy Clarke Forty years ago last week, there was bet- Manhattan back then had more piano ter news: Studio 54 opened its doors, chang- bars than immigrants. Cocktail pianists in ing the Big Bagel’s night-time culture for smoking jackets played their hearts out over ever. The club was founded by two friends the noise of drunks in long seamless med- of mine — they became friends after a rocky leys. That was the best part of the day, or start — and to get in you had to do physi- rather evening. You’d pick up your date after cal battle under the giant marquee with a hard day on the tennis court and head for the ‘deplorables’ that lay siege to those of a piano bar while her stomach was empty. us who were given the signal to enter upon Once you were well oiled, you’d move on to arrival. The sidewalk outside Studio was a a restaurant, followed by El Morocco. After I went to a barbecue. Everyone was patient scary zoo: the non grata ones linked arms that, holding on to each other for balance, and well disposed towards the silent, against those welcomed by the legendary you’d head for the Blue Angel, where you’d depressed, two-toed sloth in their midst. Mark Benecke, and some even spat at peo- stay until dawn. Then, owing to youthful The eye contact told me that I was included ple like Warhol and his entourage as the horniness, it was on to even better things. It in the conversation but it was also under- club’s heavies escorted them in. I never had might sound like a dull life, but I wouldn’t stood that I need not contribute. They com- any problem with the BBQs — the Brook- trade it for a Nobel Prize for Literature. prehended and they sympathised. If I didn’t lyn, Bronx and Queens crowds —as I always People stayed up much later than they want to, there was no need to go into it or dressed square and never expected the do now. Even after a 6 a.m. drink, there was explain. Or indeed to say anything. I sat a heaving humanity to open up à la Red Sea always Lexington and 51st Street for break- little apart from the nest of outdoor furni- to welcome me. Lesson to be learned: act fast. Bickford’s served good but cheap all- ture and the circle of conviviality revolving like an old-fashioned gent, not like a haugh- night food, and as there were no drugs back around it, puffing on my new vaping con- ty celebrity, and the crowd will neither spit then, people actually ordered food when traption, emitting long plumes and billows on you nor try to keep you out. they were hungry. From the end of the war of white, ‘fresh mint’-flavoured steam. Studio was redolent of secret chambers. in 1945, until well into the 1960s, Manhat- Present were five adults and a child. There were nooks and crannies, and plac- tan had more cabarets than anywhere else The child was a seven-year-old boy called es where people openly screwed and took in the world. The Little Club was owned by George Eagle. George Eagle was brimming drugs. What amazed me was that it was Billy Reed, a gay man who took a shine to me with eager intelligence and vivid imagina- always referred to as exclusive, but at full and gave me his best table despite my rather tion. One by one he’d tried them all, but capacity it held 2,000, a fact that always led definite announcement the night we met that found the adults far too pedestrian, statu- me to question its exclusivity. Which brings there would be no hanky panky, table or no esque and grown-up for his needs. As a last me to the point of my story. table. It was at the Little Club that the base- resort, he endeavoured to coax some life What I miss most when in New York is ball great — greatest ever, as far as I’m con- and interest from the peripheral paralytic not Studio, or Nell’s, nor even El Morocco, cerned — Mickey Mantle tried to pick up my with his head lowered, pondering his smoke but the small cabarets, known back then as date Linda Christian, wife of Tyrone Power, machine. Emerging from the house bearing the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 55 LIFE a three-storey Lego police station, George up the stairs and into George Eagle’s bed- broadband I wanted, even the rubbish kind, Eagle placed it beside me on the loung- room. ‘Get in the closet,’ he snapped, clos- and made me an offer for the same TV and er and showed me around the place. There ing the door behind him and pointing with broadband I have now. It was so much cheap- was a lavatory, a bullet-proof glass-fronted his weapon. I slid back the closet door and er than my current package that I told them armoury, and an interrogation room with a stepped meekly inside. My interrogator to stick it on the basis that they had now not working trapdoor in the floor. Although the slammed the door shut and I stood patient- only been lying to me for three hours; they blue lettering above the entrance said that ly in the darkness with my head among the had been lying to me for three years. it was a police station, George confided that coathangers until their clanging died away I think I may possibly have cancelled Sky the building was in fact the headquarters of and there was silence. with immediate effect, but I can’t be sure. It an international crime-fighting force known After a minute or so, I wondered whether still seems to be working, despite various as the Good Guys. That the Good Guys George Eagle had left the room and rejoined emails telling me I’ve done this and that to invariably beat up their sworn enemies the the adults in the garden. I hoped so. Because my TV and cancelled this and that on my Bad Guys was due not only to moral force, on balance I decided that I liked and pre- phone line. apparently, but also because they were better ferred standing in the pitch darkness of a Whatever had happened, I then set about armed, having at their disposal the most tech- child’s closet. I suited it. So I made no move notifying the DVLA because the removals nologically advanced weaponry, including a to escape and stood motionless with my eyes man told me that’s the one that always gets helicopter armed with a nuclear bomb. The closed, hoping that he had. home movers into trouble. If the police pull Good Guys had no qualms about using this. you over and the address on your licence is He then fetched the Good Guys’ helicopter wrong, it’s curtains. (also Lego) from the house. He showed me Real life People often read this column and say, a bomb as proportionately big as a Fat Man ‘Yes, but none of that really happens to you, or a Mother of All Bombs hanging from the Melissa Kite does it? No one can be that disaster prone.’ undercarriage. He showed me how it could Well, I can assure you I make nothing be released at the press of a button. up. I am that disaster prone. If the police are He demonstrated the mechanism by fly- pulling anyone over to find the address on ing the helicopter six inches above my head their licence is incorrect, believe me, they’re and dropping the nuclear bomb on it sev- pulling me over. eral times. Then he landed the chopper on So I changed the address on my driving the surface of my nut to check the damage, licence. And then I had a quick exchange of if any. Finally, I retaliated to these attacks fire with Lambeth council to see if I could by enveloping the Good Guy headquarters notify them of my move, but their website with a vast plume of minty white smoke, With so many last-straw moments to was having none of it. which I identified as deadly sarin gas. This choose from in my house-moving experi- Everything else was in place, however, caused momentary panic and alarm among ence, it is a close call to pick the very, very and my solicitor was sufficiently confident to the Good Guys, who took refuge in the inter- last. But I think the absolute last straw hap- go off and finish the exchange of contracts. rogation room until an electromagnetic force pened like this. And then my phone rang again, and the field, George claimed, was erected around I was sitting in my house surrounded by cheery voice of the estate agent acting for the building, deflecting and neutralising the boxes, pretty much waiting for the removals the vendor of my dream house in the coun- poisonous gas. The Good Guys then armed lorry to turn up. With exchange only hours try came on the line and said: ‘Hey! So, how their attack helicopter with the nuclear away, and completion two working days are you doing? Hmm? How are things?’ bomb. Before it was quite ready to fly, how- after that, my lawyer had phoned me a few ‘Why, in the name of jumping Jehosha- ever, I was offered, and accepted, a plate of hours earlier to make sure I had taken out phat, are you sounding so self-consciously crisp barbecued prawns, and hostilities were buildings insurance on the new property. casual?’ I thought. I said: ‘Packing, remem- suspended while the enemy nibbled his tea. Yes, I told him. I had just put it on a credit ber?’ George Eagle had thought my sarin gas card, a year’s worth paid up front, effective ‘Oh right, yeah,’ he said. ‘About that…’ attack hilarious and rather brilliant, giggling from that day. And there it was, in his voice, the slight in astonishment in spite of his humourless, I was now busy making my phone calls to waver. The nervous half-laugh. The little fire-eating US five-star general persona. In British Gas, Thames Water, Sky and so on, to throat clear… this unusually immobile, down-in-the-mouth cut off my accounts and restart services in ‘Yes?’ I said, thinking, ‘I’m going to kill house guest he now saw potential. He went the new property. someone today, I can feel it coming. Finally inside the house and returned dressed in Incidentally, this was just the seventh cir- they will have to lock me up.’ camouflaged army fatigues and a black beret cle of hell I had imagined it to be. While Brit- ‘It’s all looking good,’ he said. and armed with a huge death-ray gun. If he ish Gas was remarkably efficient, allowing ‘Well, I should hope so,’ I said. shot me with it, he warned me, I would feel a a simple online procedure to be completed ‘Yes, it’s all loo-king goooood,’ he went ‘tingling sensation’ then I would die. ‘Just the in minutes, the Sky call centre ate up three on, in full estate-agent Mr Smooth mode. ticket,’ I said. ‘Shoot me.’ ‘Okay,’ he said. But precious hours of my life that I can never ‘Well, it better had be.’ before he executed me, I must accompany get back. ‘Yes, all looking goooood for exchange him to his bedroom to be interrogated. Here First, they argued rather mysteriously next week and completion two weeks after I saw the adults momentarily suspend their that my TV and broadband package for the that.’ animated conversation and look up, curious new house would be much more expensive The sound I then made cannot be repro- to see how the mental invalid would field the on the basis that I could only have fibre-optic duced here, for grammatical and legal rea- hegemonic invitation to leave the grown- at that address, and not the ‘rubbish broad- sons. up’s world entirely and join the child’s. band’ (technical term) I had now. So I told Turns out that I and the five other peo- Having said barely a word for several days, them I would cancel and not have Sky any ple in the chain, and all our lawyers, have I figured that interrogation — even military more. Whereupon they passed me to anoth- spontaneously and simultaneously suffered interrogation — would be a piece of cake. So er department, who mysteriously denied some collective freak outbreak of convey- I uncrossed my legs, rose, and was ushered at everything the last department had told me. ancing mass hysteria to manifest, very much the point of the death-ray gun into the house, They informed me I could have any type of like a stigmata on our hands, a firm set of

56 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk exchange and completion dates where there 3 Dubai Duty Free Finest Surprise Stakes Bridge wasn’t one, and even a false trail of paper- (formerly the John Porter Stakes) in the work confirming this. hands of his latest retained rider Jim Crow- Janet de Botton When I stopped screaming, I realised ley for Gosden, who also took the maiden that if I worked my way back down the with Face The Facts. But it is the fillies with list, reversing each ‘to do’ item to mean the whom John Gosden is dominating. Having Last week we played round four of the Gold opposite, I might just pull it off. won the Nell Gwyn Stakes at Newmarket Cup. I had eagerly looked at the email to see So, starting at ‘Cancel British Gas’…. three days before with Daban, he won New- who we were up against and for the first time bury’s Dubai Duty Free Stakes (once the ever we had drawn… Susanna’s team! Her Fred Darling Stakes and another of the key partner was rubber-bridge maven Graham The turf fillies Classic trials) with the Frankie Dettori- Orsmond, with Brian Ransley and Brian ridden Dabyah. The filly, who like Daban is McGuire at the other table. Robin Oakley owned by Abdullah Saeed Al Naboodah, The match was 48 boards and after 32 dominated and won with her ears pricked. we were slightly ahead. The most dangerous She was immediately installed as second opponents in a knockout match are those favourite for the 1,000 Guineas. From the who are prepared to push the boat out to comments of Gosden and Dettori, it seems make up some ground. The two Brians are more likely, though, that Dabyah will run in not afraid to put up a fight, and so it was, with the French 1,000 Guineas and the more laid- 16 boards to go, that they came out all guns back Daban will be Gosden’s representative blazing on this hand: at Newmarket. Frankie’s reasoning is that Dabyah, who has already run in France, will Dealer South Love all Any of us can forget little things on leaving be better suited to the easier ground expect- home in a hurry. To the chagrin of Mrs Oak- ed there while Daban is already proven at ley, who might need a pint of milk or a few Newmarket. John Gosden noted, ‘I always z K 10 9 8 3 more tonics on my way home, my mobile feel the jockey’s comments when he first gets y 6 phone and I don’t always arrive at the races off the horse are the most valuable.’ together. In that regard I have long sympa- Dream Castle, a son of Frankel trained X A K 7 5 thised with the former Chancellor Kenneth by Saeed bin Suroor and ridden by Oisin w Q 8 4 Clarke. He regularly left his government- Murphy, was made favourite for the colts’ issue model at home (especially when head- trial, the JLT Greenham Stakes, in which he z A Q 7 6 2 z J 5 ing for a day’s cricket) complaining, ‘The was opposed by another Godolphin-owned y 8 3 N y K J 10 9 4 trouble with mobile phones is that some- horse Barney Roy, bought after his only pre- W E X Q 8 X 9 6 2 times people call you on them.’ I even for- vious run at Haydock last autumn but left S w 10 7 3 2 9 6 5 got my wallet one day en route to Ascot and in the hands of Richard Hannon. Without a w had to borrow my day’s staking money from lead horse or enough company, Dream Cas- z 4 the esteemed financial editor Jeff Randall. tle raced too freely and Barney Roy swooped A Q 7 5 2 Such minor episodes of forgetfulness, in the final stages to win by two lengths. It y though, pale beside the effort of the Amer- must have added salt to the contest that Bar- X J 10 4 3 ican Airlines pilot on whom I was rely- ney Roy was ridden by James Doyle, down- w A K J ing to get me home overnight from the US graded last season by bin Suroor but who has last Friday in time to make it to Newbury been riding winners for the boys in blue in for the Spring Trials day so stylishly spon- Australia. Told that Barney Roy had been West North East South sored every year by Dubai Duty Free. Hav- cut in the betting for the 2,000 Guineas, the 1y ing taxied us out to the runway, the captain ever-approachable Hannon declared that Pass 1z pass 2X announced that he would have to take us all the price didn’t matter. ‘After all, I have won pass 3w pass 3NT back to the Miami terminal because they it with a 33–1 shot.’ (Night of Thunder, who pass 4X pass 4y had set off without some essential item of took the race in 2014, was actually 40–1.) pass 4NT pass 5y safety paperwork. My schedule was cutting After watching the race in the bar with John pass 6X all pass it fine and so the lengthy delay the missing Gosden, who told him two out, ‘You’ve got documentation entailed left me grinding my this’, the beaming Hannon said of Barney teeth even more than usual at that absurd Roy, ‘He’s always been a little bit differ- West led w7. This contract needs a few message from the cockpit: ‘Thanking you all ent. He used to be a bit keen but now he’s good things to happen, including Declar- for your patience.’ relaxed he might get further.’ Even, he sug- er not misplaying. Needing to ruff a cou- Eventually I made it, halfway through gested, the Derby distance. ple of hearts in dummy, he scrapped any the sponsors’ excellent lunch, and was able Coming off a plane after three weeks thoughts of drawing three rounds of trump to begin to get to grips with the new Flat sea- out of British racing, I should have kept — Qx had to drop. It would also be a mis- son. Initially, little seems to have changed. my hands in my pockets. Instead I lost on take to let the defence draw a third round of Already one can foresee another bonus year five consecutive races. Funds will be recov- trumps too soon. Realising all this, McGuire for John Gosden, Richard Hannon and Wil- ered, though, by supporting Luca Cumani’s won in hand and led a Spade up. West won liam Haggas, who now has so many horses Spring Cup winner Banksea on his next few and shifted to a trump. The top two trumps in his Newmarket yard they will probably outings. Always a talented horse, but one brought more good news, and after a suc- have to put any new arrivals in the spare who tended to get in a tizz, Banksea has cessful Heart finesse, declarer ruffed two bedroom. He scored a popular double with undergone the snip, which will deny him the Hearts in dummy, discarded one on the zK, the Queen’s Call To Mind and Signe. pleasures of ever becoming a stallion. Now and claimed a fantastic +920. The match was Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum was posi- he is a relaxed athlete. ‘It’s amazing what a close again! Luckily, a few boards later things tively purring in the winner’s enclosure after little op can do,’ mused trainer’s wife Sara went our way, and with a sigh of relief we St Leger fourth Muntahaa won the Group Cumani. ‘He’ll be a fun horse.’ made it into the next round. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 57 LIFE Chess Competition Bugged Ribaldry Raymond Keene Lucy Vickery

Polish grandmaster Akiba Rubinstein was one Diagram 1 In Competition No. 2995 you were invited to of the strongest players never to win the world submit ribald limericks as they might have title. Up to 1914 he seemed unstoppable, but kDW4WDrD been written by a well-known poet. then the Cuban genius Capablanca burst on to William Baring-Gould, who wrote a his- the scene and after the first world war 0pgW1p0W tory of the genre, noted that when a limerick Rubinstein was a changed man. In Chess and Chessmasters (Hardinge Simpole), Gideon WDpDWDW0 appears, sex is not far behind And the writ- Stahlberg wrote: ‘A latent disease of the mind )WDn0WDW er Norman Douglas considered limericks to was slowly weakening the titan’s creative be ‘jovial things … a yea-saying to life in a powers and sapping his ability … but one could WDBDPDWD world that has grown grey’. still recognise that he was a great master; his DW)PGR!P The cheering winners of what was a play was almost more subtle than before and his hugely popular comp are rewarded with £8 art more remarkable’. W)KDWDPD each. It was seen as a sign of his mental distraction that he seemed constantly disturbed by $WDWDWDW Though most of my loves are Platonicer, imaginary flies, though it has been postulated It was always quite different with Monica. that this could have been caused by a condition If I’ve got a hard ’un called posterior vitreous detachment, which puts Diagram 2 Down there in the garden, black floaters in the field of vision. So his We do it behind the Japonica. artistry in the 1920s may have been held back kgW4WDrD John Whitworth/Philip Larkin by a minor optical ailment, rather than early 0pDWDR0W symptoms of his eventual problems. Although candy is dandy, what’s finer Rubinstein did withdraw from chess in the W!p1WDW0 And much quicker is liquor, so wine her. 1930s due to his declining powers, and in three Is a peck on the cheek more decades of life he played no serious games. )WDW0WDW All the boon that you seek? These game notes are also based on WDBDPDWD Tut! The odds say your goal’s her vaginer. Stahlberg’s comments, modified by modern Max Gutmann/Ogden Nash computer checks. DW)PDW)n Daddy, won’t you get out of my head? Rubinstein-Hromadka: Maehrisch Ostrau 1923; W)KDWDWD (Oh I bet you were beastly in bed!) King’s Gambit $WDWDWGW You were fascist and vile And I think of you while 1 e4 e5 2 f4 Bc5 3 Nf3 d6 4 Nc3 Nf6 5 Bc4 Being thoroughly rogered by Ted. Nc6 6 d3 Bg4 7 h3 Bxf3 8 Qxf3 Nd4 9 Qg3 George Simmers/Sylvia Plath Qe7 This was a popular line and it was well- time that he essentially has no counterplay at known that 9 ... Nxc2+ 10 Kd1 Nxa1 11 Qxg7 was all and White rolls forward on the queenside When I met her, my married half-sister very dangerous for Black. 10 fxe5 dxe5 11 unimpeded. 16 ... Bb6 17 a5 Bc7 18 Be3 Looked like me in a gown, so I kissed her. Kd1 White gives up the right to castle but has Kb8 19 Kc2 Easily sidestepping the threat of If I see my reflection, compensation with the bishop pair and open ... Nxe4. 19 ... Ka8 20 Rf3 Nd5 (see diagram I get an erection, f-file. 11 ... c6 12 a4 Rg8 This is rather passive. 1) A slightly desperate try. 21 Bg1 Sensible And that’s why I couldn’t resist her. 12 ... Nh5 was more to the point. 13 Rf1 h6 enough but 21 exd5 was also fine, e.g. 21 ... cxd5 Susan McLean/Byron Black is wasting far too much time and this gives 22 a6 (not 22 Ba2 e4) 22 ... dxc4 23 axb7+ Kb8 White the opportunity to get organised for a 24 Bxa7+ Kxb7 25 Qg4 with a winning attack. He would tickle the Feathers — of Hope — queenside assault. Much better was 13 ... 0-0-0 21 ... Nf4 22 Qf2 Bb8 23 g3 Preparing a Should he slather my Breasts with rich Soap — And the shape of my Sole — and if 14 Ne2 Kb8 15 Nxd4 Rxd4 with complex brilliant combination. 23 ... Nxh3 24 Rxf7 O, such loud Barcarole — play. 14 Ne2 0-0-0 15 Nxd4 Bxd4 Black is Qd6 25 Qb6 (see diagram 2) A pretty move Singing Bind Me, Securely — with Rope. again too compliant. He should prefer 15 ... Rxd4 and also the most incisive. If 25 ... axb6 26 D.A. Prince/Emily Dickinson and if 16 c3 then 16 ... Rxc4 17 dxc4 Qe6. White is axb6+ Ba7 27 Rxa7+ Kb8 28 Rfxb7+ Kc8 29 certainly better but Black has definite practical Bc5 wins. 25 ... Rd7 26 Bc5 Rxf7 27 Bxd6 A wildly priapic young fellow counterchances. 16 c3 Black has wasted so much Rf2+ 28 Qxf2 Nxf2 29 Bc5 Black resigns Sported trousers of daffodil-yellow Which at parties he’d doff To insanely jerk off, PUZZLE NO. 454 After which he’d feel placid and mellow. Basil Ransome-Davies/William Wordsworth Black to play. This position is from Belsitzman- rDWDkDW4 Rubinstein, Warsaw 1917. How did Rubinstein 0b0WDp0W I will tell you the truth about love. finish off? Answers to me at The Spectator by Before tentative push comes to shove Tuesday 2 May or via email to victoria@ spectator. WDWgWhWD I’ll be happy to find co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct DpDWDWDW That it’s you I’m behind answer out of a hat. Please include a postal Or below or beside or above. address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. WDW)WDW0 Martin Parker/W.H. Auden

DBDWHW)q Ophelia said ‘Let’s have some grub, Last week’s solution 1 Rxg4 Last week’s winner David MacDonald, Perth P)W)Q)W) ’Cos I’m starving.’ ‘Of course, tiger-cub,’ Replied Hamlet, ‘But first, $WGWHRIW Thou must deal with my wurst. Move thy hand like this … Ay, there’s the rub!’ Derek Robinson/William Shakespeare

58 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk LIFE

On the naturist beach, he loves staring At flesh that the ladies are baring. Crossword He even makes passes 2307: At girls who wear glasses, Provided that’s all that they’re wearing. Obit IV Sylvia Smith/Dorothy Parker by Pabulum Love’s an art that can turn to disaster. From no date should you run away faster Than a Star Wars fanboy Who calls his favourite toy His ‘light sabre’ or ‘Jedi Master’. Clockwise round the grid from Francis Harry/Elizabeth Bishop 16 run the titles of four works (4,4,9,6,1,5,3,5,3,4,6) by a late A nightingale’s warbling is canny; great 3 (two apostrophes) An urn’ll outlive your old Granny: followed by the 3’s initials. The I’m crazy for Psyche, remaining unclued lights com- But really me likey bine to give a further such title A handful of beautiful Fanny. (three words in total). Else- Bill Greenwell/John Keats where, ignore an apostrophe.

The vicar was tempted to flee When the Bishop’s wife said after tea, ‘Oh Reverend Morgan Across Do show me your organ! 9 Middle-Easterner very It’s something I’m dying to see.’ soon returns (5) Alan Millard/John Betjeman 10 Shrew lacks a house (5) Down A first prize of £30 for the first 11 Old physician sheltered 1 Stringed instrument fair correct solution opened on Fae the crypt in the hert o’ St Giles children (5) Virginia holds (5) 15 May. There are two runners- Cam’ a scream heard by folks roon fur miles 12 Bear’s appetite (7) 2 Mournful career girl up prizes of £20. (UK solvers Says a wiley auld Hen 13 Short purple satin dresses struggling without the can choose to receive the latest ‘Dis the Deacon no’ ken edition of the Chambers with nothing in bad style three Rs (7) That oor Minister suffers fae piles?’ dictionary instead of cash — (10, two words) 4 Floor containing Arab’s John Samson/Robert Burns ring the word ‘dictionary’.) 16 Smart bastard prime fodder (6) Entries to: Crossword 2307, There was an old poet named Lear, shuns wet (5) 5 Boredom united The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Whose sex life was, verbally, queer. 18 Primula withered beside nine bats (5) Street, London SW1H 9HP. He pobbled his dong brook (8, hyphened) 6 Paramours cooked the two Please allow six weeks for prize In a luminous thong, 19 Grimy early English fish Romeo caught (8) delivery. Turning green in Gromboolian beer! church edged by River 7 Poet carries on like P.C. Parrish/Edward Lear Wye (6) Humpty Dumpty (5) 8 Important date for I am large, I contain multitudes. 21 Some practise section I engirth them in all attitudes. of opera (3) goddess (5) Their flesh is divine, 24 Male with box for 15 Plant round most of hut (5) And a blessing to mine. women’s clothing (5) 17 Love is very much about (4) Name We’re all mystical, hankering nudes. 25 See me boring woman (5) 20 Soaring round Thailand A.G. Atkinson/Walt Whitman 28 Girl B: why not a beauty? is familiar insect Address (6) (5, hyphened) Bloody men are like buses? Well, test 29 Assault with ladders in 22 Trojan fixed sidecars (8) That big claim and you won’t be impressed. bizarre case-load (8) 27 Satire by rascal about Contradicting that boast, 34 Dance in prison (5) American politician (7) You’ll discover that most 36 Cheap lodgings that could 30 Modest hotel social group Are like little French compacts at best. Noam D. Plum/Wendy Cope make marshal sad (10) overruns (6) 37 Lass with a great worry (7) 31 We hear fishes breed (5) My darling, please turn out the light. 38 Give satisfaction when 32 Athletic chap grabs one Don’t worry, I swear I won’t bite… lunch is served? (5) violently (5) Email …unless you say, ‘Do, sir! 39 Handwriting of Canadian 33 Cruel criminal is a constant …It’s that which I choose, sir! Eskimo (5) source of evil (5) I pray, don’t go gentle tonight!’ 40 Radical sea monster almost 35 African people curse on Robert Schechter/Dylan Thomas stripped kyle (5) Tuesday (5) Are you — Nobody — sir? So am I! I can see how you — reach for the Sky SOLUTION TO 2304: HEXAGON With your Grail seeking Lance. If you’re — up for Romance, No Body than mine is more — spry. The HEADWORD (26) ‘bail’ appears six times in Chris O’Carroll/Emily Dickinson CHAMBERS (1D). Its different meanings include CROSSPIECE (1A), BAR (25), FRAME (36), HOOP (40), LADLE (16) and SECURITY (24). BAIL (diagonally NO. 2998: LOST IN TRANSLATION from 32) was to be shaded.

You are invited to submit a set of instruc- First prize Jacqui Sohn, Gorleston, Great Yarmouth tions for an everyday device that have been Runners-up Alexander Caldin, Houston, Texas; badly translated into English. Please email B. Taylor, Little Lever, Bolton up to 150 words to [email protected] by midday on 10 May. the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 59 LIFE Status Anxiety would attract. And that is exactly she’s a bug-eyed eurosceptic. Should why the leaders of the Labour Party the promoters of the tactical voting A progressive alliance? It’s and the Lib Dems have categorically alliance urge its sympathisers to vote ruled out any sort of alliance in this for her or the europhile Lib Dem? more a coalition of chaos campaign. Jeremy Corbyn knows It’s far from obvious, and not helped Toby Young that his hard left supporters would be by the fact that when Paul Mason scandalised by a link up with the Lib appeared on Newsnight last week he Dems, while Tim Farron knows he said he would be voting ‘tactically’ won’t have a hope of winning back against Kate Hoey even though he y heart soared when I first swing voters in the south-west if he wants Corbyn to be Prime Minister. heard the phrase ‘progres- gets into bed with Labour. To sort out issues like this, you Msive alliance’ in this election Not that I gave up at this point. I need a single, tactical voting author- campaign. Not the reaction you’d decided Unite the Right should be a ity that puts out a clear line, and there expect, perhaps, but any attempt to bottom-up campaign — a grass-roots is no such body representing the pro- persuade people to vote tactically tactical voting alliance. But then I gressive alliance. On the contrary, on the eve of a general election is encountered a major problem. It you’ve got Gina Miller in one corner, doomed to failure. A complete waste wasn’t always obvious which candi- Tony Blair in another, Ben Golda- of time. I should know because I tried date was best placed to beat Labour cre in another and Open Europe in to get a similar venture off the ground in each constituency. Should we go on another, and they can’t agree on which three years ago. the 2014 European election result or constituencies to target or who people Mine was a conservative version, the 2010 result? What weight should should vote for. The promoters of the obviously. In 2014 I was worried that we give to the locals? Should we ‘coalition of chaos’, to use CCHQ’s the split on the right would enable Ed take into account whether the Tory brilliant attack line, are themselves a Miliband to become our next prime candidate was a eurosceptic or not? chaotic coalition. And their chances of minister. So I launched a Unite the Hard to get Kippers to vote for a sorting all this out within seven weeks Right campaign and set about trying europhile, after all. are vanishing to zero. to persuade supporters of Ukip and The difficulty wasn’t so much I don’t want to sound too super- the Tories to vote for whichever resolving these issues, although that cilious because I was guilty of a simi- candidate in their constituency was was challenging enough, but creating lar folly. But it is symptomatic of how best placed to defeat the Labour a single body that could issue instruc- un-serious the opponents of leaving candidate. Our slogan was ‘Country tions about how to vote in each seat the EU have been since they were Before Party’. that would be followed by the sup- wrong-footed on 23 June. As with It quickly became apparent that porters of both parties. It dawned their other efforts to obstruct Brexit, the leaders of both parties wanted on me that working all this out, cre- there’s something infantile about it nothing to do with it. Not only would ating an Académie française of the — they seem more intent on throw- it have meant persuading some Unite the Right campaign and then ing their toys out of the pram than already selected candidates to stand marshalling my ground forces would actually stopping it. Theresa May will down, but the negative effect of enter- Theresa May take far longer than the year I had win on 8 June because she’s the only ing into an electoral pact would have before the next election. grown-up in the room. And the dis- outweighed the gains. In other words, will win on 8 And this, of course, is exactly the organised rabble promoting the pro- each party calculated that an alliance June because problem the anti-Brexit alliance has. gressive alliance just reminds voters with the other would be regarded she’s the only Take the constituency of Vauxhall, for of that fact. as so toxic by many of its support- instance. The person best placed to ers — particularly its activists — that grown-up in beat the Tory candidate is Kate Hoey, Toby Young is associate editor of it would put off more voters than it the room the sitting Labour MP. Trouble is, The Spectator.

MICHAEL HEATH

60 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk Spectator Sport a-dope’ courage. It is the best sport- mother Yeta, always overjoyed to see ing documentary ever made and justly him at her home in north London as The age of Joshua won an Oscar in 1996: both Ali and the line of awards on her mantelpiece Foreman went to the awards. They had grows ever longer. Joshua might just Roger Alton long buried their differences and Fore- be the man to revive the romance and man helped Ali on to the stage. It is a glamour, and the glory of biff and bash. brutal sport, but a noble one. I think he will win on Saturday and Joshua and Klitschko, these two win quickly. He will then be on course gentleman giants, literally, can bring to be one of the world’s richest sports- very so often comes a moment it all back before 90,000 spectators men, rated alongside the great British that can set the history of sport and millions of viewers. Klitschko is heavyweights — Frank Bruno, Henry Eon a different trajectory. I believe a colossus, immensely dignified and a Cooper, Lennox Lewis — and com- we will witness such a moment on Sat- great ambassador for boxing. He has parable to many of the world’s great- urday when Anthony Joshua, of Gold- won 53 fights by knockout and spent est. He impresses as a person and, as a ers Green no less, fights the veteran an average of 15 minutes in the ring fighter, he is getting classier and dead- Wladimir Klitschko for the Heavy- over all his fights. But he is 41: superbly lier. Global greatness beckons. weight Championship of the World. At fit of course, but that is one hell of an Wembley Stadium, not a Las Vegas car age. Joshua — AJ — is just 27, the 2012 ore than 20 years ago Martin park. This is a battle of the ages and for Olympic champion, hugely courteous MAmis wrote a brilliant New Yor- the ages, and it is right here in London. and respectful of Klitschko, as his ker article bemoaning calls for more For those of us who were glued to opponent is to him. Joshua has fought tennis ‘personalities’. For personali- barely audible radios at 3am to hear 18 times as a pro and won 18, all by ties, he said, read ‘assholes’. The per- epic US fights or flogged around seedy knockout, the majority in the first two fect example then was Ilie Nastase, London cinemas for a live transmis- rounds. His average time in the ring is and here he is again at the Fed Cup sion, the romance, the magic and the just six minutes. Klitschko is the expe- shambles, vilely abusing Britain’s brutal beauty seems to have gone out rienced one and, if he can drag the fight women players. Arthur Ashe recalled of the heavyweight game. The story of out, there might be doubts about the Nastase called him ‘negroni’ to his Muhammad Ali, and the brilliant film younger man’s stamina and fight-sav- face and ‘nigger’ behind his back. of his Rumble in the Jungle, When We vy. But I cannot see it getting that far. The much-married Romanian is a Were Kings, now feels like a romantic He might just Joshua is impossibly handsome, ghastly man, who liked to pitch up in confection. But it wasn’t. charismatic and charming. And polite the royal box at Wimbledon in some Who can forget seeing the writers be the man with it, always learning about the fight insane Ruritanian general’s uniform, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer to revive the game, reading about fighters, reading plus medals. Ho-ho, what a character. rising open-mouthed in awe, as we all romance and business books. He had a troubled Though he did have one good did when we watched the film, when glamour and youth: run-ins with the police, drugs, joke: when asked by police why he Ali dropped George Foreman in the a bit of ABH, though anyone try- did not report the theft of his wife’s eighth, having exhausted him in the the glory of ing to mix with him needs certifying. credit card, he said: ‘Because the thief heat of the Zaire night with his ‘rope- biff and bash Through it all has been his Nigerian is spending much less than she does.’

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

A. Ask them back. And when they A. It is now smart to be as low-key the meter just kept rolling on. next invite you to lunch accept as possible at the Fourth of June. Once you have ordered an Uber, gratefully, upon the stipulation Neither Range Rovers, awnings by contrast, the price quoted that they collect you from the nor marquees are acceptable stays the same no matter what. top of their drive, where you will (especially when the latter are Much as I applaud the drivers’ leave your car parked. Only at this erected by bodyguards and staffed ‘knowledge’, with London traffic point, when they ask ‘why’ can by professional chefs and butlers as it is, I just can’t take the risk of you mention the blackthorn heads wielding champagne). As parents, using a black cab. having caused you a puncture. you should aspire to arrive in — J.F., London SW12. Q. New colleagues invited us to something like a Volvo estate. lunch but didn’t warn us that the Q. Our son is in his first year at Eat a simple picnic (cucumber A. There has been a fightback clippings had not been cleared Eton. His best friend tells me that sandwiches with beer and crisps from the world of black cabs. up from a blackthorn hedge that for the Fourth of June his parents for example, perhaps with a There is now a smartphone app lines their private drive. The next have purchased a large awning thermos of soup). Eat this out of called Gett which will quote you day we had two flat tyres. With which his father will attach to the back of the raised boot with a fixed fare. For heritage reasons established friends we would ring the back of their Range Rover. I pop-up chairs for other parents you should try it first. If it starts up and give them an earful, but asked the father of another boy and picnic rugs for the Etonians. to rain, then some black cabs we don’t know how this couple what his plans were and his reply will turn off their Gett receptors (who seem a bit humourless) was something like ‘one thing’s Q. I take issue with your decree and respond to pavement hailers. would take it. However, we don’t for sure... we won’t be parking that we should support black So prioritise the black cab, but think they should get away scot anywhere near those awful oiks cabs. Some of us can’t afford in periods of peak demand or free — not least because their with their marquees’. I’m unsure them. Last time I took a cab urgency you may revert to Uber. other guests might well suffer. now as to what is and what isn’t from St James’s Street to the What do you suggest? acceptable. Can you help? Albert Hall I paid £35, because Write via the editor or email — Name withheld, Aberystwyth — Name and address withheld the traffic was at a standstill but [email protected] the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 61 LIFE Food eaten by a Burberry Concession, or a ing — or perhaps clothing that does spaceship with its own fraying political not fit — and couples on first dates. Fowl play system, and spa. It needs trees. There will be no second dates. A man For the Olympic Games we built a who needs to think about football on Tanya Gold theme park to, of all things, convince a date does not deserve a woman of us that we could live close on the any kind, even one prepared to enter ground, and play with sticks, and run Cafe Football. It is decorated like the about; that we could, still, do it. That man playroom of an executive Essex lie is dead, for we are fatter and more show home. divided than ever. The menu is divided into sections I can only look back on the news- called Defence (soup, satay, chicken in paper columnists so bewitched by the a basket), Midfield (Burgers vs Pizza) Olympics that they claimed would and Attack (‘the legends’ — fish, save us, and laugh now as I did then, meat, noodles — and kebabs, pasta for nothing important can be settled and pies). I feel disorientated reading afe Football is in the Westfield by how fast a man runs from one it. I have chicken in a basket, which is shopping centre in Stratford, point to another, or how far someone bright orange chicken wings over-fried Ceast London, a shopping cen- throws a stick — and what remains is to the texture of crumbling limestone, tre with a faulty name. It isn’t in the A man who a shopping centre and an overpriced but crumbling limestone with bones, west, and it isn’t in a field. (The origi- café dedicated to sport and obesity, and they are disgusting, and my com- nal Westfield is in Shepherd’s Bush. needs to think but mostly obesity. Sport watched on panion has a gammon steak which That is in the west, but not in a field. about football television is not sport. It is anti-sport. does not deserve to get into print. It is by the A40 and it is like Amer- on a date does Eating is not a sport either. I count 16 television screens. This ica without the joy.) Westfield Strat- not deserve Cafe Football feels like an outpost seems quite restrained, although there ford City sits in a puddle of chain of Ikea — metal, orange, capital letters may be more, in the men’s lavatories cafés and restaurants and shops. It a woman of — and it is full of groups of men with or the kitchens, or on the roof. Maybe has been on my review list for three any kind shaved heads wearing children’s cloth- the chef is a TV; maybe the sous chef is years, 2.9999999 of which I have spent a remote control. (No, that is too much cowering in north London. whimsy. There cannot be a sous chef Stratford was — shall we call it ren- here; if there was, he died.) I would ovated? — for the London Olympic have walled the whole place with Games in 2012, and it is now a windy them, as J.G. Ballard might have done building site full of air pollution and in his unwritten football apocalypse hipsters and thwarted hopes. I would novel Balls. Themed restaurants like to see a friendly tornado rumble designed by modern novelists? off the Thames to tear the buildings As I look around the wreckage of apart and save us all from having to east London, now branded into west look at them. The land feels — and London, which has no fields — an I felt this at the Millennium Dome insanity that will become a trend, and nearly 20 years ago — poisoned. It I name it fake geography — that is all does not need homes that look like I want to see. fragile ships wobbling above a waste- land, or a shopping centre so com- ‘Nothing else for me, thanks — Cafe Football, Westfield Stratford City, plete it could be an airport terminal my phone memory’s completely full.’ London E20 1EN, tel: 020 8702 2590

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE Jane ‘What are you laughing at?’ asked in the mirror as: ‘Portrait of a Jenny now is also regarded my husband in an accusing tone governess disconnected, poor, as a hypocoristic or nursery on Monday morning last week as and plain.’ Mr Rochester is of version of Jennifer. But until he unloaded supermarket bottles the same mind: ‘You — poor and the 20th century Jennifer was from a carrier bag into the drinks obscure, and small and plain as a rare and curious name from cabinet near his armchair. Mackenzie’s novel Carnival you are — I entreat to accept Cornwall, a regional version of The answer was, to my surprise, (1912), in which the mother of me as a husband.’ But then, the the name of Arthur’s queen, most Woman’s Hour, on which Jane little Jenny Raeburn defends her author makes plainness and plain familiar in its Frenchified form Garvey had entertainingly been newborn daughter from pious speaking things to be proud of. of Guinevere. Another version of discussing names – ‘first names’, great aunts, saying: ‘She sha’n’t ‘Jenny kissed me when we met Guinevere from the Middle Ages mostly, which we used to call be a Plain Jane and No Nonsense, / Jumping from the chair she sat is Gaynor, which now sounds far Christian names, just as we used with her hair screwed back like in,’ wrote Leigh Hunt, making the less upper- class. to talk of Red Indians. No longer. a broom, but she shall be Jenny, best of Jane Welsh Carlyle, when I was surprised that Jane Jane Garvey doesn’t, it sweet and handsome, with lips she was about 37. At bottom Jane Garvey thought Jane no very transpired, much care for Jane, made for kissing and eyes that will and Jenny are the same name, the classy name either. It sounds which is popularly associated sparkle and shine like six o’clock same too as Jean and Joan and perfectly respectable to me. But with plain. The Oxford English of a summer morning.’ Janet. All are feminine versions then I share a name with Dot Dictionary’s first citation for There were precedents for of John. They bear very different Cotton of EastEnders. Plain Jane is from Compton plain Janes. Jane Eyre saw herself characters, though. — Dot Wordsworth

62 the spectator | 29 april 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk This election, have better arguments.

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