Isabel Hardman on the Nightmare Awaiting the New Prime Minister

How the West sees Muhammad Tom Holland The glory of garden centres Susan Hill

8 june 2019 ❘ £4.75 www.spectator.co.uk ❘ est. 1828

Taking over Isabel Hardman on the nightmare awaiting the new prime minister

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Playing chicken

hy is it that free trade, which of any trade deal, Gove said that they could mer employee Simon Stevens is now chief almost everyone agrees is good ‘kiss goodbye’ to a trade deal with Britain. executive of the NHS. Kaiser Permanente, Wwhen conducted with other Euro- No trade negotiation is going to result in a not-for-profit healthcare group based in pean countries, suddenly becomes some- the NHS being dismantled. Trump was try- California, has for years been held up by thing to be feared when it is proposed with ing to be friendly: when questioned about reform-minded doctors as a model for the the United States? What is it about Amer- whether the NHS would be on the table, NHS. But the Tories are too nervous of criti- ican chicken which means that Britons he thought the implication was that Brits cism to explore the possibilities. who eat it happily enough when they are wanted it to be there so he said yes. As so As for chlorinated chicken, the supposed on holiday are supposed to fear it when it often, he was not quite sure what he was health risks have long since been exposed is imported? And if Americans can offer as a scare story. UK consumers ingest far world-class, well-priced medical services to UK consumers ingest more chlorine more chlorine drinking water than they ever Britain through the National Health Ser- drinking water than they ever would would by eating American chicken: indeed, vice, how is that a threat to our social fabric? by eating American chicken UK salads are routinely chlorine-washed, On his state visit to Britain this week, yet we do not hear Gove talking about President Donald Trump reiterated his desire saying. Theresa May had to explain to him them. In fact, once we are out of the EU, to do a ‘comprehensive’ trade deal with Brit- what NHS stood for, and once he realised lifting the ban on chlorine-washed chicken ain. Given that we are leaving the EU in the sensitivity he said that America did not is something we should consider doing even order to make our own way in the world, seek to pull apart any British public service. without a trade deal with the US. On this this is a prospect that ought to be welcomed. But NHS care is not provided by the issue, and many others, it will soon be time When Trump was asked about the NHS, he state alone. Today, one in every 14 NHS to think for ourselves again. said simply that ‘everything will be on the treatments is carried out by private-sector Conservative ministers have been far too table’ — to cries of horror from a lot of Tory hospitals and clinics. Sceptics might point quick to appease protectionists whose agen- ministers (and leadership candidates) who to the exorbitant price of medicine in the da is to keep US competition out of their should know better. It seems to have sent US, but nobody is suggesting we import the cosy European markets. With that attitude, ‘global Britain’ Tories into a protectionist whole flawed American healthcare system. we are not going to get very far towards a spasm. Jeremy Hunt, Matt Hancock and On top of the direct treatments carried trade deal with the US — or with any other Sam Gyimah were furiously declaring that out in the private sector, the NHS spends country, for that matter. Trade negotiations under no circumstances would our health £15 billion a year buying drugs, and billions require concessions. This depends on the service be opened up to US firms. more buying other equipment and services. government being prepared to look at the When Tony Blair was prime minister, he It rents clinics and surgeries from the private bigger picture and accept that, overall, free spent a good deal of time thinking of ways sector. Some of that money is spent with US trade is a benefit. The protectionist finds it to lure US health giants to come to Britain firms. There is nothing sinister about the easy to forget that free trade is an exchange, and open treatment centres to help the NHS US healthcare sector — parts of which are a form of mutual co-operation that can only clear its waiting lists for knee operations world-beating and more innovative than the take place when each side profits. and hip replacements. Under a supposedly NHS — wanting to access these markets on In a few weeks’ time, Britain will have a Tory government, these same companies the same footing as European companies. It new prime minister, charged with deliver- are treated not as welcome investors but is the very principle of free trade. ing the benefits that come from decoupling as a threat. This fits a trend. Two years ago, For years, US companies have been our economy from the EU. It’s often said Michael Gove shot down the possibility of helping to strengthen the NHS. United- that it would be bad for the Tories to fail to allowing chicken that has been washed in Health Group, one of the biggest compa- deliver Brexit. It would be worse for them to chlorine (a common practice in the US poul- nies in America, offers services such as achieve Brexit only to discover that, due to a try industry) on to the UK market. Were US medication management and the negotiat- lack of imagination and courage, they do not officials to try to make chicken a condition ing of contracts to the NHS. United’s for- know what to do with it.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

Leader_08 June 2019_The Spectator 5 05/06/2019 13:28 Puerile protests, p16 Don’t you love them, p11

A pug called Trump, p34

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

5 Leading article 14 The in-tray of horrors BOOKS Theresa May’s successor will inherit 32 8 Portrait of the Week Tom Holland a hideous pile of unfinished business Faces of Muhammad, by John Tolan 11 Diary The glory of garden centres Isabel Hardman Susan Hill 34 Wynn Wheldon 15 Could a recession be next? The Animal’s Companion, 12 Politics A crowded contest There are troubling economic signs by Jacky Colliss Harvey James Forsyth Ross Clark Clinton Heylin 13 The Spectator’s Notes 16 Children of the revolution This Searing Light, the Sun and In memory of my father Political protests are so infantile Everything Else, by Jon Savage Charles Moore Tanya Gold 35 Tom Smalley 19 How to save the Tories Rod Liddle 20 ‘People underestimate me’ Surrender, by Joanna Pocock 21 Seduction Will Jeremy Hunt be the next PM? Ancient and modern 36 Mark Bostridge and the Boris bus Katy Balls Passionate Spirit, by Cate Haste 23 The trouble with 21 Lionel Shriver John Greening 37 John Burnside ramping up rhetoric ‘After the Interval’: a poem This Storm, by James Ellroy 24 Juncker’s perks, 22 Barometer Hands free 38 Andrew Taylor atheist beliefs, football vs cricket A new kind of abstinence movement Shadowplay, by Joseph O’Connor 26 How I was Cosmo Landesman Matthew Parris 39 Katrina Gulliver very nearly scammed 24 Protons and cons Wild Sea, by Joy McCann The jury’s still out on proton therapy 28 Letters Vote Gove, get Corbyn Cassandra Coburn 40 Carolyne Larrington 29 Any other business Network Rail Epic Continent, by Nicholas Jubber and the case against nationalisation 41 Amanda Craig Martin Vander Weyer Mother Ship, by Francesca Segal Diana Hendry Lux, by Elizabeth Cook

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Nick Newman, Grizelda, Bernie, Geoff Thompson, RGJ, Royston, Paul Wood, Russell. 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: letters@spectator. co.uk (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/A263A or call 0330 3330 050 and quote A151A; Newsagent queries Spectator Circulation Dept, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: [email protected]; Distributor Marketforce, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP. Tel. 0203 787 9001. www.marketforce.co.uk Vol 340; no 9954 © 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

6 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Contents_08 June 2019_The Spectator 6 05/06/2019 13:27 She kissed Klimt, p36

Corporate pride, p60

Funkier than Turner, p46

BOOKS & ARTS LIFE ARTS LIFE I long to travel back in time, 42 Richard Bratby 53 High life Taki just for one early summer’s day – Wagner in a shed: the miracle Low life Jeremy Clarke a rich, titled lady with a barouche, of Longborough 54 Real life Melissa Kite servants and going into dinner two 44 Television 56 f The tur Robin Oakley by two, on the arm of a prince. Chernobyl Bridge Janet de Botton Susan Hill, p11 James Delingpole 57 Wine club Jonathan Ray 45 Theatre The British like calling Trump The Starry Messenger; a Wotsit. The tragedy is: Trump Rutherford and Son AND FINALLY . . . Lloyd Evans 49 Notes on… Hats doesn’t know what a Wotsit is. Camilla Swift Radio He calls them Cheetos. The 104-year-old dancer; puffins 58 Chess Raymond Keene Tanya Gold, p16 Kate Chisholm Competition Lucy Vickery 46 Exhibitions 59 Crossword CheeseCracker Jan Morris, who lives in Wales, Frank Bowling; Lee Krasner has tremendous contempt for sheep, 60 No sacred cows Martin Gayford Toby Young but writes wonderfully about cats. 47 Cinema Battle for Britain Wynn Wheldon, p34 Late Night Michael Heath Deborah Ross 61 Wiki Man Rory Sutherland 48 Opera Your problems solved The Bartered Bride; Mary Killen Don Giovanni 62 Drink Bruce Anderson Richard Bratby Mind your language The listener Dot Wordsworth Morrissey: California Son Rod Liddle

CONTRIBUTORS Susan Hill, whose novels Cassandra Coburn is a Tom Holland, who discusses John Burnside, who reviews Carolyne Larrington is include The Woman in Black, former deputy editor of the western views of Muhammad the new James Ellroy on p37, is Professor of English Literature The Bird of Night and The Lancet and a post-doctoral on p32, will publish Dominion: a poet, novelist and memoirist at St John’s College, Oxford Albatross, was awarded a researcher in genetics at The Making of the Western whose recent work includes and author of a new translation CBE in 2012 for services to University College London. Mind this autumn. Still Life With Feeding Snake of The Poetic Edda. She literature. Her diary is on p11. She assesses proton therapy as and Ashland & Vine. reviews a history of Europe a cancer treatment on p24. through its epics on p40.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 7

Contents_08 June 2019_The Spectator 7 05/06/2019 13:27 recording was published of him saying to a President Trump imposed a 5 per cent tariff Home journalist: ‘This is off the record. It’s almost on imports, which would rise unless Mexico resident Donald Trump of the United certain who is behind all this anti-Semitism curbed illegal migration to the United PStates made a state visit to the United against Jeremy [Corbyn]. Almost certainly States. Claudia Sheinbaum, the mayor of Kingdom, avoiding protesters by arriving it’s the Israeli embassy.’ Killdren, a band Mexico City, said that in schools from now at Buckingham Palace by helicopter. He booked for Glastonbury this month, was on, ‘Boys can wear skirts if they want and brought quite a few of his family, visited criticised by some for the lyrics of its song girls can wear trousers if they want’. Westminster Abbey and was given halibut ‘Kill Tory Scum’: ‘Even if it’s your dad or and lamb at a state banquet. Proposing a your mum, kill Tory scum.’ n the 30th anniversary of the toast, the Queen said: ‘After the shared OTiananmen Square massacre, Mike sacrifices of the second world war, Britain fter the number of candidates for Pompeo, the American Secretary of State, and the United States worked with other Athe leadership of the Conservative called upon China to ‘make a full, public allies to build an assembly of international party had reached 13, James Cleverly accounting of those killed’. In response, institutions to ensure that the horrors and Kit Malthouse withdrew from the a Chinese spokesman said: ‘These lunatic of conflict would never be repeated.’ contest. Six of Change UK’s 11 MPs left ravings and babbling nonsense will only Trump joined the Queen in ceremonies to sit as independents, and Anna Soubry end up in the trash can of history.’ A to commemorate D-Day. Earlier, Trump became the leader of the rump. Police said South Korean newspaper reported that had swapped insults with Sadiq Khan, that they were pursuing ‘violent dissident Kim Hyok-chol, the envoy for US affairs the mayor of London, and, asked by the republicans’ after a bomb was left under appointed by Kim Jong-un, the ruler of Sun about the prospect of Boris Johnson the car of an off-duty officer at a Belfast North Korea, had been shot by firing squad becoming prime minister, had replied: ‘I golf club. with four other officials after the failure think he would be excellent.’ To Theresa of Kim’s summit with President Trump in May, the Prime Minister, Trump said: ‘I eil Woodford, a fund manager, February. Twelve people were killed in a think we will have a very, very substantial Nsuspended trading in his largest mass shooting at a government building in trade deal.’ Although she was resigning fund before Kent County Council could the state of Virginia; a suspect, DeWayne as party leader on 7 June, he added: ‘Stick withdraw £263 million. Liverpool won the Craddock, shot dead by police, was said to around. Let’s do this deal.’ He arranged Champions League by beating Tottenham be a disgruntled city employee. to meet Nigel Farage, the leader of the 2-0 in Madrid. Cases of gonorrhoea in Brexit party, but declined to meet Jeremy England rose by 26 per cent between 2017 t least 60 protesters were killed when Corbyn, the Labour leader, who had and 2018 to 56,259, the most since 1978. Atroops opened fire in Khartoum. The boycotted the banquet. Larry, the Downing Sudanese military cancelled an agreement Street cat, found a refuge between the Abroad to make a transition to civilian rule within rear wheels of the Beast, the President’s three years and said that elections would bulletproof Cadillac. 39-year-old Iranian imam was be held within nine months. Eight climbers, A sentenced in France to two years’ jail led by the experienced British mountain n one day, 74 migrants were intercepted for helping migrants to cross the English guide Martin Moran, were missing after an Ias they crossed the English Channel on Channel in inflatable boats, on the sale of avalanche on Nanda Devi in the Himalayas. eight boats. Peter Willsman, a member of which he received a commission, according A fissure opened on one side of the crater Labour’s National Executive Committee, to the prosecution. Having signed a free of Mount Etna, sending out lava that was suspended from the party after a trade deal with Mexico on 30 November, glowed red by night. CSH

8 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

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ADVERT - 7IM_18-Apr-2019_The Spectator 8 15/04/2019 17:16 Susan Hill

on’t you just love garden centres? Covent Garden to gawp at one another DYou have to be mad to go on through lorgnettes. I sometimes long a sunny Sunday morning in the full to travel back in time, just for one early bedding-out season but all human life is summer’s day — a rich, titled lady with a there, enjoying the full English breakfast barouche, servants and going into dinner or even kippers. They sell everything two by two, on the arm of a prince. Such — sofas, lamps, barbecues, waterfalls, daydreaming is not only harmless, it is bread, toys, meat, mountaineering gear. positively therapeutic. Instead of today’s Oh, and plants and Growmore and those une is very frothy and royal, flowery fashionable meditation or stretching, little windmill things. I went to buy extra Jfrocks and hats and military parades, fainting and writhing in coils, everyone geraniums and lobelia because it is a garden parties, picnics on country house should daydream delightfully. It’s very truth universally acknowledged that lawns during the opera. The upper classes productive for a writer, too. whenever you buy far more than you know how to put on a show and if it’s can possibly need for your pots, those always the same show, that is part of the hat a horrible term ‘dementia’ is. pots expand when you turn your back. It point — the unvarying summer routine, set WIt implies crazed insanity rather was a gladiatorial clash of trolleys, and I in stone since, oh, 1910 or thereabouts. It’s than memory loss. Can we not find a trampled on several old ladies in fighting fun to gawp at, though I wouldn’t care for better one? Most people reading this for the last ivy-leafed Brilliant Scarlet. I all that dressing up as one being gawped. will have been touched by it, closely or at got it of course. I am an old hand. But the Victorians and Edwardians did far a remove, as we have all been similarly more parading, strolling in the park in lace affected by the cancers. Those are cruel ictorious, I enjoyed a pot of tea and and bustles and morning suits, going to enough, but, unlike dementia sufferers, Va cheese scone, before checking out, cancer ones now often enjoy full as well as the garden stuff, a squeaky recovery or a long remission. My mother badger (for the dog), a massive sack of never spoke the word aloud and when niger seed (goldfinches) a book about hers was diagnosed, nearly 50 years ago, the planets (grand-daughter) a sun she was told she had ‘ulcers’, and had hat (self), some mint imperials and a surgery during which one kidney, a large birthday card. But you just wait until section of bowel and bladder, plus uterus Christmas — that’s when garden centres etc were removed. The surgeon told really come into their own, and not just her she would get well (though he told for the fir trees. If you want outdoor me otherwise) and so she did, enjoying blow-up Santas, 50 varieties of fairy three years of excellent health, until a light, flashing reindeer, candles smelling friend referred to her illness by name. of fruitcake, gnomes or door wreaths Horrified, she absorbed the truth, then made of flamingo pink feathers, look no Call shrivelled and died in eight weeks. Never further. I can NOT wait. 020 3823 8678 underestimate the power of words. e now have swallows, swifts, n 1988 two daughters, Hannah and Wflycatchers, chiffchaffs, great Email IJessica, both 11, went to the first night tits, finches and treecreepers. There of a play adapted by Hannah’s father was even a nightingale in the copse for [email protected] from a ghost story by Jessica’s mother. one wonderful night. Every sparrow in We wanted them to be there as The Norfolk is nesting in our hedges or under Go to Woman in Black was scheduled to run the eaves, one has a wren, and I haven’t for only six weeks at the Stephen Joseph even started on the heron and egret by www.7im.co.uk/ Theatre in Scarborough, my home the pond. But for the first time, we have spectator town. The girls could have waited, no house martins. Friends in other parts actually. A London producer brought it of the country say the same. Why? They to several West End theatres, before it can’t all have been blown off course. landed at the Fortune and we dreamed Maybe they’ll come rushing in at the last of a six-month run. This week, we minute and it will be non-stop*. Friends celebrated 30 years there. Stephen in France have swallows that have Mallatratt died far too young, 15 years returned for 20 years to nest on a beam ago, so I run on as torchbearer. It’s been in their sitting room, so the front door a remarkable 30 years. En avant! stays wide open from May to September, but c’est la vie in rural Quercy. * The house martins have come back.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 11

Susan Hill diary_08 June 2019_The Spectator 11 05/06/2019 12:13 POLITICS | JAMES FORSYTH A fractured and crowded field

he remarkable thing about the Tory Sajid Javid seems to be finally finding his a limited change to the backstop, that would leadership election is how long it has mojo after a lacklustre start to the campaign. be more challenging to the EU than a crude Tbeen coming. When Theresa May Hunt’s problem is securing the parlia- demand to rip up the whole deal. Despite blew the party’s majority in the 2017 gen- mentary backing he needs to make the final Michel Barnier’s insistence that the only eral election, few imagined that it would be two without further damaging his chances deal available is the one negotiated by The- two years before she quit as leader. What in the members’ round, if he even makes it resa May, some members of the EU would kept her in place was not a lack of Tory ruth- that far. This explains his tortured position feel nervous about slamming the door in lessness but a failure to agree on who should on whether no deal is suicidal or something the new prime minister’s face. The EU replace her. that he’s prepared to countenance. Opin- won’t abandon the Irish or humiliate Leo A lack of consensus is the defining fea- ion in the Tory parliamentary party, as in Varadkar, of course. There might, however, ture of this contest. No candidate is pulling the country, is polarising on the issue, which be more chance of constructive dialogue ahead in the endorsements, and no one has makes Hunt’s position particularly difficult. than expected. the backing of most of the cabinet. Instead, I understand that the cabinet ministers The timings will be difficult, though. The the race is as fractured as it is crowded. most opposed to no deal have privately beating that the Tories took at the Europe- There are two sides to this election: full- agreed to back either Hancock or Stewart in an elections for delaying Brexit has given on Brexit vs the cabinet. On the Brexit side, the first round. Some even argue that they 31 October, the new Brexit date, an almost Boris Johnson is consolidating his position. should back Stewart because he is the can- religious status within the party. Boris John- He has the highest number of MPs backing son is warning that another failure to leave him and is fighting this contest in propitious Johnson’s rivals hope that two on time could be an extinction event for circumstances, as he is the Tories’ most obvi- televised hustings will flush him out the party. The problem, however, is that the ous answer to Nigel Farage and the Brexit new prime minister will take over at the end party. He has also shown a discipline that and shift the momentum of July, and the next EU Council won’t be Westminster doesn’t normally associate until 17 October. Even if a new prime min- with him. Rather than indulging in publicity didate making a principled argument against ister succeeded in getting the EU to agree stunts, he has kept working away on the MPs leaving without a deal. changes to the withdrawal agreement at this whose support he needs. Everyone knows there is more than one meeting, which would be impressively quick So far, Johnson has kept a low profile, round of voting. In the first round, many work, they would have only ten days to get eschewing media interviews. This has frus- MPs will vote either to make a statement, the new deal through parliament and into trated his rivals. They hope that two tele- or, in a surprisingly large number of cases, to UK law. This is not a realistic timetable. vised hustings will flush him out and create help their friend. MPs don’t want to see their The second feature is just how many can- enough drama for the momentum to shift. close colleagues publicly humiliated. didates there are. It is easy to mock the num- But if he is 20 votes or more ahead of Domi- Even before the voting begins, two fea- ber of people who are running, and it is a nic Raab in the opening round, he would be tures stand out. First, there has been more sign of how crowded the field is that special as certain as any candidate can be in such Brexit realism than expected. Candidates rules have been introduced to try to thin it a crowded field of making it through to the aren’t proposing ripping up the whole without. But it is actually encouraging for the final round. One of the cabinet candidates is drawal agreement. Instead, nearly every- Tories for two reasons. First, competition even considering endorsing the former for- body is talking about targeted changes to drives up standards. Rory Stewart has, for eign secretary before he reaches the final the backstop. Even Dominic Raab, widely example, made the other candidates better two. Parties always overcorrect when pick- regarded as the most hardline of the lead- on social media. The second is that while ing a successor, and Boris the buccaneer is ing candidates, is only proposing a legally the size of the field illustrates the fact that the opposite of May the vicar’s daughter. As binding exchange of letters to give the UK there is no perfect candidate, it also shows one of the ministers backing him puts it: ‘We an exit from the backstop. that there is talent in the Tory party. Theresa tried going for the safe choice and look what If the new prime minister were to request May has always been wary of ability. Even at good that did us.’ the height of her powers she didn’t appreci- On the cabinet side of the draw, the sit- ate that cabinet ministers’ success was not uation is more complicated. The order in threatening, rather it reflected well on her. which candidates are knocked out is going to Thankfully, the front runners in this Tory lead- be crucial. In the first round, Michael Gove ership race have a more generous attitude. needs to be in touching distance of Jeremy Whoever wins this contest will inherit a Hunt and far enough ahead of Matt Han- party in one of the worst states in its history. cock that if Rory Stewart is knocked out, Nevertheless, the failings of Labour under Stewart’s support will go straight to him Jeremy Corbyn mean that they may still have rather than Hancock. Gove also faces a deli- a chance of extending their stay in No. 10. cate balancing act of appealing to those worried about no deal while also maintaining the SPECTATOR.CO.UK/SHOTS Brexiteer support that he still has. Further ‘Oh no — this isn’t Love Island, Daily political analysis from James Forsyth complicating the picture, Home Secretary it’s Gove Island…’ and others.

12 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

DUMMY Main story web headline goes here. Try not to go past the red stripe or you risk being cut off PolCol_08 June 2019_The Spectator 12 05/06/2019 13:43 Charles Moore

y father Richard, who died last y unworldly father considered M month aged 88, was a profoundly M himself a failure. He devoted impractical man. He could not drive a himself to the political party — the car, swim, whistle, use a mobile phone or Liberals, now the Liberal Democrats computer, or play any ball game apart — for whom failure is, with a few from croquet. One of his most common intermissions, a way of life. He always remarks was (he could not pronounce his stood for parliamentary seats he could ths), ‘Vis wretched fing [a door handle, not win, and I never saw him try to a light switch, a well-wrapped parcel] advance his own interest in anything, doesn’t seem to work.’ When younger, except perhaps in seeking out good he would sometimes go out with an meals. He and my mother lived apart unsafe 1840s shotgun in search of rabbits after about 25 years (though remaining or pigeons, but the only thing he ever explaining the glories of Freedom from married and fond of one another). actually shot was his little toe, falling Torture and the Hebrew University in His lack of the normal acquisitive down a bank. Although he was extremely Jerusalem (he was a lifelong, raging imperatives which keep the show on clean, he did not, until he married, know philo-Semite) that we feared he would the road was maddening for her. In how to wash his hair, and would go to a run out of time to name the other retirement, he was happier than since barber for the purpose. Twenty years ago, beneficiaries of his by now tiny fortune. his Cambridge undergraduate days, he lived briefly in our house in Islington. because, bolstered by a European At breakfast once, he announced he n theory, my father might have seemed parliament pension which even he could would be out all morning because he Ilike a snob. His first recorded remark, not exhaust, he could be benevolent full- had to go to the post office to buy some aged two, on being shown a picture of time, whether it was taking members stamps: he knew only one post office in ‘Baby Jesus and his Mummy’ was ‘Where’s of his wider family (a pool of about London — in Trafalgar Square — and his nanny?’ He hated the words ‘radio’ 35 people) on foreign holidays or was unaware that other shops sell stamps. and ‘TV’, so our listings magazine was campaigning tirelessly for causes he renamed the ‘Wireless Times’. He refused believed were right, such as Remain. his impracticality amounted to a ever to roll up his shirtsleeves because Tcast of mind. In his five years as it looked ‘ravver ouvrier’. I asked him, t his funeral in his village last week, a journalist on the News Chronicle when he was very ill, if he would like a A it was touching to see how many in the late 1950s, he never claimed clergyman to visit him, and he replied, ‘I people understood his truly liberal spirit. his expenses for taking contacts out fink it would be nice to see ve Archbishop As Oliver Letwin said in his perceptive to lunch, because he felt it unseemly. of Canterbury.’ In practice, however, tribute, ‘He was … it has to be admitted, I remember him astounding stallholders Richard treated all human beings the ill-suited to the age in which he lived. in the souk in Marrakesh by saying, at same, always assuming their good nature, But the defect lay in the age, not in the first price they named, ‘Vat sounds their interest and their intelligence. him.’ At the wake afterwards, Felix, one very reasonable.’ Although never rich, One day, at our house in Sussex, he of his grandchildren, spoke so well of he started adult life with enough. He was helping a 15-year-old girl from the the letter his grandfather had written to then got rid of it with persistence and local comprehensive wash up lunch. him when he (Felix) had transitioned skill — partly by not understanding the ‘And that,’ I heard him say to her as I from female to male. It began ‘Darling difference between capital and income, entered the kitchen, ‘is why Lazio, alone Felix’, and then added, ‘I know darlings partly by thinking food must be bought of the papal states…’ She was flattered are normally women but my mother at Fortnum & Mason, wine at Berry by his uncondescending conversation. used it for all close family and I follow Bros and suits at Welsh and Jefferies, and The hazard lay in the opposite direction her example.’ Felix added: ‘Even in my partly by his unquenchable generosity to — his uncritical reverence for learned most insecure moments, I would never family, friends and charity. In his nursing persons. Once, after a weary hour have thought to take the word “darling” home this year, we found him sitting up with some whiskery professor of his as any sort of invalidation of my gender, in bed with his cheque book, making acquaintance, I complained, ‘Goodness, which only makes his obvious concern vague signing movements with his right what a bore that man was.’ ‘What can on this point more endearing.’ At hand. ‘Vere must be someone I can write you mean?’ protested Daddy. ‘He’s a Christmas, my father always recited a cheque to!’ he cried piteously, worried great expert on Danish political history.’ the toast: ‘Here’s to all those that we that he hadn’t been well enough to do Ignorance did trouble him. At breakfast love, and here’s to all them that love us, so for several days. As he waited to go when taking my wife to York races (he and here’s to all them that love them into theatre for the operation from loved the Turf), they watched the passing that love those that love them that love which he never really recovered, he was crowds. ‘It’s extraordinary to fink,’ said he, those that love us.’ I now understand busy making wishes for the charities ‘that perhaps a third of vose people don’t that he took those words literally, in all he wished to help. He took so long know ve date of ve treaty of Westphalia.’ their ramifications.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 13

Notes Charles Moore_08 June 2019_The Spectator 13 05/06/2019 12:46 The in-tray of horrors Theresa May has left a hideous pile of unfinished business for her successor

ISABEL HARDMAN

ear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid power of the state to do good things for the stop-and-search reforms that she introduced there is no money. Kind regards — country beyond London. as home secretary have gone too far, while ‘Dand good luck!’ Liam Byrne will Dominic Raab is more worried about the Javid and Johnson want to spend more forever be haunted by the note he left on his £57 billion HS2 bill, and says he’d review the money on boosting police numbers. Esther desk for his successor in 2010. Both coalition whole project — while cutting income tax by McVey promises £3 billion, to be funded parties made much of what was supposed 1p a year for five years. (she says) by halving the foreign aid budget. to be a joke about the difficulties of keep- As Hunt tells this magazine, he is keen to It’s also why so many of them are using the ing Whitehall spending in check. David Cam- copy some of Donald Trump’s ‘big business row about Huawei to say they could reverse eron waved the note around in his May’s decision to let the Chinese victorious 2015 election campaign. tech giant build parts of the UK’s Byrne later said he was so embar- 5G network. rassed by his mistake that he con- In fact, all those now contending sidered throwing himself off a cliff. for the leadership are far more likely There’s nothing funny about to leave the injustices smouldering what Theresa May leaves on her away than to solve them. Whoever desk for the next prime minister. becomes prime minister could end Rather than just one pithy note, up swerving around all the biggest there’s a teetering, disorganised in- crises facing this country, just as tray of decisions the Tory leader has May did. been putting off. For three years, Take social care. Politicians all Britain has had a government that offer the same pointless platitude has been unable to govern, leaving about ‘taking the politics out’ of what is perhaps the biggest pile-up the issue, which is code in West- of unfinished business ever created minster for trying to get as far away by a peacetime government. from an unpopular decision as pos- Under May, a nuclear winter sible. A worthy-sounding commis- descended on UK policy-making. sion headed by an unelected boffin She seemed to think that the best will spend several years examining way to tackle the ‘burning injus- the detail which everyone already tices’ she named on the steps of knows from the past five failed con- Downing Street in 2016 was to pour sultations. Then the prime minister cold water not on the fire itself, but on any cuts in tax’. Sajid Javid wants to bring the top can take a couple more years to read its ear- ideas her ministers came up with. At first, sec- rate of income tax back down to 40p, while nest report about how to tax grannies or take retaries of state were impressed with the shift borrowing £100 billion for infrastructure pro- away a hard-earned inheritance. And hey from chillaxed David Cameron, who didn’t jects, mainly in the north. presto! There’s a convenient general elec- understand the detail of the NHS reform his ‘In another era, we’d be the party of low tion or change of leader to distract everyone government was carrying out until it became taxes and smaller state,’ says one of the lead- before a decision is taken. an enormous political row. May was serious, ing contenders. ‘But the issue I’m hearing One of the boldest moments of May’s asking for more information on every poli- from colleagues is that the cuts have gone premiership was when she used her 2017 cy. Ministers liked this — until they realised too far.’ Boris Johnson wants to ensure the manifesto to promise proper funding for she wasn’t really ensuring something was per-pupil secondary school budget is at least social care. Unfortunately, she messed up designed correctly. ‘She just wanted to pre- £5,000, which would mean a big boost to most that pledge and caused a majority-crushing varicate for as long as possible,’ says one. grammars. Hunt, the son of a Royal Navy row about a ‘dementia tax’, and then was ‘Anything to avoid making a decision.’ admiral, suggests taking defence spending too scared to try again. A green paper has All the unresolved problems have created to American levels over ten years, which, if been sitting unpublished in the Department opportunities for the leadership candidates. he is remotely serious, would mean almost of Health since last autumn. One leader- They’ve each picked an issue to grandstand trebling the cost today, the most expensive ship contender complains that: ‘The problem about, hoping their suggested solution dem- pledge made by anyone. with social care is that voters think it’s free onstrates what sort of Conservative they are. Such announcements are, above all, at the moment and get really upset when we Take Jeremy Hunt. He’s said HS2 is worth intended to show how different each con- announce plans that involve them having to pressing ahead with. This, he thinks, marks tender is to May. That’s why all of them pay. So you can never ever win.’ Only Rory him out as someone who believes in the seem so interested in crime. Raab thinks the Stewart, who falls into the category of candi-

14 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Isabel Hardman and Ross Clark_08 June 2019_The Spectator 14 05/06/2019 13:11 date who can never ever win, has decided to make social care a key part of his campaign. Or take energy policy. How will the government keep the lights on following the col- Could a recession be next? lapse of the Moorside nuclear power plant deal? What does it have to say about Hitachi The omens for the global economy are not good suspending its construction of another nuclear station in Wylfa Newydd in Anglesey? ROSS CLARK For more than a decade, Tories have talked up the wonders of shale gas but they have not found a way past local opposition to fracking. So what’s it to be? Will a Conservative prime ow can a new incumbent of No. 10 period without one. But a recession now minister opt for higher state involvement in H survive without a majority and would be politically devastating. For energy, or might they invite in foreign inves- with Brexit to solve? It defies the the moment, the word ‘deficit’ has all- tors, with all the associated security worries? imagination. Yet if they do survive but disappeared from political debate. Then there’s housing. Those writing poli- Brexit, against all odds, there could be Last year, the government borrowed cy for the main contenders accept that their an even bigger horror waiting around £23.5 billion — down from £153 billion candidates won’t do anything that might the corner: global recession. in 2009/10. In terms of percentage of upset Conservatives, such as promising to For three years the economy has GDP, the deficit has fallen from an build large numbers of homes. Stewart says defied doom-laden predictions by 9.9 per cent to an innocuous-sounding he’d build two million new homes within five aggrieved remainers. Suddenly, though, 1.2 per cent. Yet after years of economic years but doesn’t say how he’d go about it. the economic news is looking ominous. growth, public spending ought to be in In May, retail sales fell by 2.7 per cent surplus. Gordon Brown showed how Decisions are needed to solve problems compared with a year earlier. The devastating the consequences are if manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ you enter a recession with a deficit: that have festered for years precisely Index (PMI), an indicator which runs within three years the extra demand because there are no simple options a month ahead of Office for National on the public purse through rising Statistics data, plunged from 53.1 in unemployment and reduced tax receipts Raab would tweak planning permission and April to 49.4 in May, where any figure sent the deficit soaring from £38 billion hope for the best. Civil servants have started below 50 denotes shrinking activity. to £153 billion. As Nigel Lawson organising for a planning bill in the autumn It was inevitably blamed by many on discovered, running even a modest in the vain hope that a new administration Brexit, but the gathering downturn is surplus is no guarantee of avoiding fiscal might cement over more of England’s green global. In the eurozone, the PMI for and pleasant land — though this is bound manufacturing has been below 50 for The next chancellor could find to cause a fight with the National Trust and four months — and in Germany it is himself with a ballooning deficit and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. down to 44.3. It isn’t just Germany’s Such fights are necessary. Decisions are industrial sector: the economy as a no political authority to contain it needed to solve problems that have fes- whole avoided recession in the last three tered for years precisely because there are months of 2018 by the skin of its teeth. disaster — the recession of the early no simple or popular options. It would be all Italy was not so lucky, although it did 1990s reversed a surplus equivalent too easy to make the same excuses as May succeed in clambering out of recession to 1.7 per cent of GDP to a deficit of about Brexit taking all the bandwidth. But — just — in the first quarter of 2019. 5.1 per cent of GDP in three years. it’s beginning to look as though Tories are Last month, manufacturing moved We have just been through a decade developing a phobia of governing — and into contraction territory in Japan and of what the Conservatives’ opponents that voters are beginning to notice. The real South Korea, too. Emerging economies have damned as ‘austerity’ — a term question in this leadership contest isn’t who have been stuttering. And now comes which Philip Hammond has unwisely has the balls to deliver Brexit, but who has Trump’s trade war. Trade wars, the adopted himself. How will a future the strength of character to sift through that President claimed on taking office, are Conservative chancellor make the case scary in-tray. good and easy to win. But perhaps not for restraint in public spending when good and easy enough. The imposition his predecessor has sanctioned the idea SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST by the US of punitive tariffs on nearly that balancing the state’s books amounts Alex Morton and Hugh Pym on that all Chinese goods has unnerved markets, to a kind of monkish denial? The next nightmare in-tray. which had so far remained robust. The chancellor (Hammond surely cannot effect on world trade is beginning to keep his job after threatening to bring show. In April, the global trade index the government down in the event of a published by the Netherlands Bureau no-deal Brexit) could find himself with for Economic Policy Analysis showed its a ballooning deficit and no political first year-on-year fall since the 2008/09 authority to act to contain it. crisis — although it did rebound last It has become commonplace over month to annual growth of 0.5 per cent. the past fortnight to claim that Theresa It is a measure on which a British PM May is leaving office with no discernible needs to keep a very close eye. legacy. It is also unfair. The lowest There is still no inevitability about unemployment rate in 45 years is surely a recession, yet they have a habit of an achievement worth shouting about. creeping up on us every few years with Yet for unemployment to carry on little warning. We have now had what is falling requires the economy to carry on beginning to look like a remarkably long growing, and that is far from guaranteed.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 15

Isabel Hardman and Ross Clark_08 June 2019_The Spectator 15 05/06/2019 13:11 Children of the revolution When did protest become so puerile?

TANYA GOLD

s the left sinks into psychosis, what the politics themselves. I thought Nigel Far- remains? The answer is sugar, age looked rather serious with banana and A profanity, snacks and toys. Pro- salted caramel milk dripping down his face. test now resembles Clown Town, a dystop- At last there was a reason for his previously ic toddler play barn near Finchley Central. inexplicable grievances. To mark the American President’s trip ‘If you can’t fight something with humour, to London this week, the Donald-Trump-in- how can you fight it?’ said Matt Bonner of a-nappy balloon rose again. There was also Trump’s Babysitters, who designed giant a Donald Trump robot. It sat on a toilet in Trump in a nappy. With debate of course; Trafalgar Square and farted. ‘The fart we but that is less fun. ‘Humour is my weapon,’ couldn’t get from him,’ said its creator, Dom said the creator of the Trump robot on a toi- Lesson, ‘so we had to use a generic fart’. let. But you can’t campaign with humour, Meanwhile, a man mowed a penis shape because the only people who will laugh are into a lawn to protest against climate change. the people who agree with you. That is the He was hoping that Trump might see it from psychology of comedy. I think, rather, that his aeroplane. the infantilism of the rage directed at Trump The fashion, when faced with a politician and Farage and Robinson empowers them. you despise, is to attack them with milk- They do not instigate this rage. They con- shake. During the elections in May, milk- duct it, and the more rage there is, the better shakes were thrown at Tommy Robinson from the wreckage of the Dennis the Men- for them. But I am a liberal with my talk of in Warrington (strawberry) and Bury (also ace fan club. welcome to london, i pissed rational debate and polling booths. I can die strawberry), and at Nigel Farage in Newcas- on your bed. Surely that is a lie? tiny under a rock. tle (banana and salted caramel). On Tuesday, hands, huge asshole. trump your name Food protest is ancient, it is true. Some- a milkshake was thrown at a Trump support- means fart. donald trump big poo poo. one once tried to hit the Emperor Vespasian er, as a woman screamed ‘Nazi!’ at him. There was, inevitably, a man selling Donald with a turnip. In 1958, in Greece, so many Others have progressed to solid foods. Trump toilet paper from a shopping trolley politicians were attacked with yogurt that a Remain campaigners buy fairy cakes that last year, and the toilet paper returned this law was passed to ban it. The Russian con- say ‘Brexit Justice’. Leavers bake their own. week, with a hefty mark-up, which I esti- sulate in Odessa was hung with noodles in Why? Is it an inversion of a bread riot mate at 600 per cent. Oh, Capital! ‘If you’re 2014 to protest about Russian interference and so a reminder that things could be going for a dump,’ he said, ‘don’t forget your in the Crimea. worse? Snack-themed insults follow Donald Trump. Wouldn’t it be funny if we could wipe Julia Gillard, the former prime minister Trump everywhere. At the anti-Trump proof Australia, was pelted with sandwiches by tests last year, I saw banners that said: go The infantilism of the rage teenage boys in 2013. They sought to per- home wotsitface, wots hitler and wotsit directed at Trump and Farage suade her to return to the kitchen to make hitler. Many have returned this year. nazi and Robinson empowers them sandwiches, and in doing so they lost all their wotsit was actually spelt out in Wotsits. ‘I sandwiches. There is also a group called Al- think people need to be reminded of histo- Donald Trump’s face on our bum?’ Funny, Pieda who seem to exist to throw pies at ry,’ the owner of the wotsit hitler sign told yes, slightly. Meaningful, no. Toilets are not the American pundit Ann Coulter. Yet she me. ‘That is why I use that name.’ She was polling booths. They just feel like them. grows in strength. It is as if she eats them. very grave, but I wanted to laugh and ask: Supporters say: it’s performance art with- I think the act of food-tossing itself if people had only stood outside the Reich- out art, it’s circus without elephants, it’s sat- exposes its own weakness; in that sense it is stag in 1933 holding signs that said shitler ire. Britain has a long tradition of robust art, a metaphor for itself. A milkshake is not made of pretzels, might the outcome have satire. ‘Our balloon is part of a proud his- a ballot paper. It is mere succour for infants. been different? But British leftists like call- tory of political satire in the UK,’ says Anna What makes people look more foolish than ing Trump a Wotsit because he is orange-col- Vickerstaff, who helped raise the Trump reaching for power while covered in milk- oured like a Wotsit, and it is a class-based baby blimp. Even people I sometimes agree shake? Trying to stop them with milkshake. taunt of the kind that they depend on. The with say it’s legitimate to throw milkshakes At the anti-Trump protest in London last tragedy is: Trump doesn’t know what a Wot- at people if they are unpleasant, and it’s true year, one banner said: this is what democ- sit is. He calls them Cheetos. There is also a that it’s hard to look at Tommy Robinson racy looks like. I paused at it, because popular Jaffa Cake-themed insult: bugger decorated as an angry creme egg without this isn’t what democracy looks like. Milk- off you nazi jaffa cake. laughing. But I fret that I begin with laugh- shakes, Wotsits, Jaffa Cakes and farts? Quite Much of the protest is toilet-themed, ing at the politician and end up laughing at the opposite. This is what losing looks like.

16 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

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ADVERT - Disruptor_06-Jun-2019_The Spectator 22 04/06/2019 11:47 ROD LIDDLE How to save the Tory party

ow do you feel about the standard that everybody thinks they are ludicrous. I now is so fractious, childish, fraught and fis- of political debate in this country? I think it was Michael Foot who once said you siparous: the forum for debate is in entirely Hask this question at the very moment can rat, but you can’t re-rat. the wrong place. The goalposts have been two blimps are flying over London. The first Piqued by the behaviour of their own removed and set up somewhere else, leaving attempts to depict President Donald Trump previous parties, Labour and Conservative, our politicians kicking a ball around in a sta- as a giant baby in a nappy and is the proper- they set up a party that shared precisely the dium from which the supporters have long ty of people who do not like Donald Trump; values and policies of the Liberal Democrats since departed. But the politicians and our the other attempts to depict the London (and indeed the vast majority of the House liberal elite cannot quite bring themselves to mayor, Sadiq Khan, as a kind of transves- of Commons) and thus for presumably psy- accept this fact. Hell, look at Europe, and the tite dwarf and is the property of people who chiatric reasons called it Change UK, when US. Look at the alliance in Italy between the do not like Sadiq Khan. Both groups habit- it promised exactly the reverse. What did League and the Five Star Movement, look at ually call each other fascists, doing a pass- they think they were doing? Was it pure pet- the millions of voters who transferred their able impression of Harry Enfield’s Kevin ulance and hubris which made them think allegiance from Bernie Sanders to Donald the Teenager. Both groups, I would venture, they could gull the public by presenting the Trump. It is no longer left versus right. It is are irredeemable narcissists with the collec- same agenda but in a different wrapper? It something else entirely. tive IQ of a block of Cathedral City ched- is a genuine mystery. They are Liberals and So what do the Conservatives do? dar cheese. And yet both groups are also should have had the sense and grace to join Become Conservative is the obvious answer, very much of their time, with their respec- even if it is one which would hurt my party, tive resorts to infantile insult simply because Look at the millions who transferred the Social Democrats. Represent that huge they disagree with the opinions of Trump or their votes from Bernie Sanders to tranche of the population which believes the hapless Khan. Trump. It is no longer left vs right that women do not possess penises and that Actually, the first impulse of the anti- our children should not be taught the con- Trump demonstrators, including Magic the Liberal Democrats — as should, inciden- trary. Represent the overwhelming majority Grandpa himself, was to try to stop the US tally, half our Conservative MPs and a good who do not wholly agree with the ubiqui- President from coming, to ban him from third of Labour MPs. Yes, the Lib Dems are tous canard that immigration has enhanced speaking because they don’t like his views. led by a self-satisfied hobgoblin, but at least our country beyond all measure and that That’s very au courant, of course. Last week they represent a strand of thought shared by Islam is a soothing balm which we should a livid little leftie quack called Alan Woodall, a sizeable proportion of the electorate, espe- all respect and rub into our aching joints who describes himself as a ‘doctor and a sci- cially the affluent bit of it. every evening. Give a nod to those who entist’, succeeded in his attempts to prevent The divide in politics today is no long- do not believe that the UK has been a his- the right-ish journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer er between left and right. It is between the torical source of untrammelled wickedness from speaking at a conference he was to individualistic and the communal, the lib- and that the idea of the nation state is on attend. He did that because he thinks he eral and the social. Our parliament does the ‘wrong side of history’. In other words, should be permanently insulated from views not remotely reflect that new divide, with reclaim the conservative centre ground and with which he disagrees. five-sixths or more of MPs being effectively do not be bullied by the liberals. They have I do not know the man, but my suspicion liberals, whereas the polls suggest that the power but not hegemony. is that he is a moron. Not because he and I majority of the population are more socially Meanwhile, some bloke has already would disagree about stuff, but because the conservative, traditional and communal. pulled out of the race for the leadership determination to clamp your hands over The liberal view is also grossly over-rep- of the Conservative party, actually before your ears when you fear someone might resented in our institutions, such as the BBC. I knew he had even intended standing. be about to disagree with you is surely the Perhaps this is why the political debate right James Cleverly hoped he might win over recourse of an imbecile, a four-year-old child, some votes by being young! And black! It a halfwit. And yet he is scarcely alone in that ain’t enough, mate. Brexit aside, the Tories intellectually stunted mindset. need an ideological route out of their cur- And then there is Change UK, which rent stagnation and increasing distance from seemed, according to news reports, to dis- the voting public. The only contender who solve exactly 54 minutes before I started seems to grasp this, so far, is Esther McVey. writing this article. Set up when the hounds A one-nation Tory who understands the dif- of spring were already on winter’s traces, ference between male and female genitalia. pretty much dead and gone before the But I don’t suppose she’ll win. roses are out. Six of its defectee MPs have now counter-defected, following the party’s SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE hilarious Euro election results and the fact ‘You had to go and tell him we voted Lib Dem.’ The argument continues online.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 19

Rod Liddle_08 June 2019_The Spectator 19 05/06/2019 10:40 Operation Hunt Can the ‘underestimated’ Foreign Secretary become prime minister?

KATY BALLS

hen a head of state market share of artificial intelli- flies in for a state visit, gence. You have to ask whether W it’s traditional for the it is wise for any of us to become Foreign Secretary to lead the wel- technologically dependent on a coming committee. When Don- third country for those kinds of ald Trump landed at Stansted air- technologies, given how impor- port in Air Force One, Jeremy tant they are going to be.’ Hunt was left waiting on the tar- If he sounds hawkish on mac for a while. Hunt assumed China, it’s not because of his that a tired Trump was ‘probably Chinese wife but to do with his just powdering his nose’ after a upbringing as the son of a Royal long flight. It transpired, however, Navy commander. ‘I grew up that the Commander-in-Chief in the 1980s in a naval family was busy tweeting his denuncia- and with a father who spent his tions of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London makes his case: he’s an experienced politi- life doing exercises preparing for possible (‘a stone-cold loser’) — thereby setting the cian for serious times. ‘This is a moment in war with the Soviet Union,’ he says. ‘I just news agenda for the day. our national destiny where we should not think that the best way to defend yourself is ‘I found out almost in real time because turn our nose up at experience,’ he says. through strength — and we have to recog- the President told me about his tweets,’ the ‘We’ve got to get things right. Get things nise when there is a potential threat to our Foreign Secretary says, when we meet the wrong, and within six months we could have values. In the case of China, I think it’s at day after. ‘I do think we have to learn from Corbyn in Downing Street — and no Brexit.’ a crossroads — but we have to prepare for his ability to communicate,’ he adds. ‘This is Or worse. ‘We have a more aggressive these scenarios.’ the first president in history who arrives to Russia. A more autocratic China. In some Hunt’s CV reads like a model Tory appli- work and the whole world knows what he’s ways, we are going back to a situation much cation: head boy at Charterhouse and PPE thinking.’ closer to the 1980s where we can’t take for at Oxford before becoming a successful But is that necessarily a good thing? granted western values.’ His pitch? To make entrepreneur. ‘I could have gone for a com- ‘This is someone who puts enormous effort Britain stand tall again, and increase defence fortable job in a consultancy in the City,’ he into communication. It’s authentic. I don’t spending. But as Trump was at pains to point says. ‘But I started out on my own, building a think he wakes up thinking: how can I grab out on his visit, the US likes allies it can trust, business from scratch that ended up employ- the headlines today? I think he is express- and it’s not sure it can trust countries who do ing 200 people.’ In 2005, he won South-West ing what he genuinely feels. He touched business with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant Surrey from the Liberal Democrats. ‘I’d be down and was genuinely angry about Sadiq bidding for Britain’s 5G network. Would the first prime minister in modern times Khan — and expressed it.’ For Hunt’s part, Hunt be prepared to confront Beijing? who’s won a marginal seat. We are going to he told Trump: ‘We are going to put on a ‘America is our strongest ally, will always need to win a lot of marginal seats if we’re great welcome for you because you’re our remain our strongest ally,’ he says firmly. going to win the next general election.’ Since best friend.’ His concerns about China go far beyond the then, he has served nine years in the cabinet The charm offensive worked. After the question of Huawei and 5G. There is, he says, where he became the longest-serving secre- interview, Trump took time in his press con- a ‘strategic question’ as to whether Britain tary of state for health. ference to declare that the Foreign Secre- should be giving Beijing such business at Hunt wants to take inspiration from the tary would ‘do a very good job’ if he were to all. ‘China has an industrial strategy which time he has spent running start-ups. ‘I will become prime minister. It’s a sentiment with they are quite open about: “Made In China be the first prime minister to have been an which Hunt agrees. Sitting in his official resi- 2025”. They want to have 80 per cent market entrepreneur by background. Building a dence, opposite a portrait of Castlereagh, he share of telecoms equipment, a 90 per cent business is in my blood,’ he says. He thinks

20 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Jeremy Hunt and AM_08 June 2019_The Spectator 20 05/06/2019 11:04 After the Interval ancient and modern Seduction and the Boris bus Such disappointment that the celebrated Belgian violinist was indisposed, unable to perform, would be replaced by no one of note. You knew you were fated never to hear him play, though you had waited since 1945. You could have passed on the second half, but — not to waste Boris Johnson is to be an evening out — you stayed. And now it’s started, tried at the Crown Court on the grounds that, during the 2016 Brexit referendum the river flowing darkly by the Strand, campaign, he crucially affected the that flower-summons, Big Ben’s harp-harmonics, referendum result by arguing that the UK paid the EU £350 million a and cymbal rush hour. ‘A London Symphony’ week, ignoring another interpretation you’d never heard before, whose movements send that the sum was only £250 million a you back to find your blacked-out heart is on its week. Ancient Greeks knew all about advocating one side of an issue, as a law way downstream, towards the unrationed sea. suit exemplifies. Euphiletus was the defendant in —John Greening a homicide case brought against him by the relatives of one Eratosthenes. The relatives claimed that Euphiletus that one measure of whether Brexit has been date has plenty at this stage — say that he is had murdered Eratosthenes after good for the country will be if the UK econ- another safety-first choice who would bore luring, or even forcing, him into his omy grows faster than the eurozone. ‘Then voters and be eaten alive in Brussels. What house as part of a premeditated plan. But Euphiletus’s defence (we do not people will say Brexit has been a success.’ does he think of those colleagues who call possess the prosecution’s case) was that He would also draw inspiration from him ‘Theresa in Trousers’? He does his best Eratosthenes had been seducing his wife. America, and its tax cuts. ‘Instead of fash- to smile. ‘Don’t confuse continuity for loyal- He had been able to do this because ionably deriding Trump, we should actually ty,’ he warns. ‘I have served two prime min- his wife had been sleeping downstairs look at the fact that America’s GDP growth isters completely loyally over the last nine in order to look after their child, is double ours,’ he says. He wants a ‘very years, but I would be quite different to both.’ leaving Euphiletus innocently asleep aggressive programme of business tax cuts’ . Would voters view him as another Tory upstairs. This allowed Eratosthenes easy He’d start by cutting corporation tax to toff? ‘Well, all I would say is I have spent overnight access to her. The truth came Irish levels — down to 12.5 per cent from my life with people underestimating me,’ out when Euphiletus was tipped off today’s 19 per cent. Then he’d increase the he replies. ‘In nine years I’ve done some of about what was happening by another annual investment allowance from £1 mil- the most difficult jobs in government. I’ve of Eratosthenes’ squeezes, details lion to £5 million ‘to promote investment, faced down our most challenging union, the of which were confirmed by his own deal with our productivity gap’. He would doctors’ union, a strike that lasted almost as slave-girl. Gathering local witnesses by night, Euphiletus ‘pushed open the also like to cut business rates. And how to long as the miners’ strike, I was responsible bedroom door to find him lying beside pay for these pledges? ‘Look at the head- for the London Olympics with all the chal- my wife, then leaping up naked’. He tied room that we now have in the economy, the lenges that involved. I don’t think you can him up and accused him of seduction. £26 billion that we know the Treasury has say I haven’t been tested in government.’ Eratosthenes begged for his life, offering now, which is keeping a business war chest Brexit has cost the last two prime min- a financial settlement. Euphiletus, for a no deal,’ he says. ‘Well, my argument is isters their jobs. Hunt served under both of quoting a 200-year-old law of Draco’s, that you don’t wait for no deal. Use it right them. But when I put it to him that the EU killed him. away. The best thing that you can do is to might fancy its chances against a third Brit- And that was the nub: there were fire up the economy! Turbo-charge it so that, ish PM, he replies, ‘They might have a go. other more recent laws relating to whatever challenges we face, our businesses But I like to prove people wrong.’ such cases, of which compensation are really motoring.’ was easily the most common. We can assume that the opposition quoted Would no deal even be a possibility SPECTATOR.CO.UK/HUNT under a Prime Minister Hunt? He garnered Listen to Andrew Neil interview Jeremy Hunt them, to make clear how unprecedented Euphiletus’s action was. But it was up criticism from Tory colleagues last week on the NHS and more. to the opposition to make that point: with an op-ed declaring it would be ‘polit- Euphiletus did not have to. ical suicide’ for the Tories. He’s confident And so to Boris: he claimed we paid that he can negotiate a better deal from the £350 million a week to the EU and stuck EU, but what would happen if we were a to it, feeling no obligation to quote few weeks away from the 31 October dead- any other figure. But the riposte came line and the EU still refused to enter discus- that the real payment to the EU was sions? ‘If there were no prospect of a better £250 million. So both interpretations deal, I would — as I have said — be pre- were out in the open, and the ball was in pared to go for no deal,’ he says. ‘In the end, the voters’ court. Who is to say whether I’ve always thought the democratic risk of the £100 million difference had any no Brexit is more dangerous than the eco- effect on the referendum? nomic risk of no deal.’ — Peter Jones His detractors — every leadership candi-

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 21

Jeremy Hunt and AM_08 June 2019_The Spectator 21 05/06/2019 11:04 Hands free I’ve joined a new kind of abstinence movement

COSMO LANDESMAN

ight years ago, I had an erotic epiph- has now become a sub-theme in the Ameri- men in the same way that Jordan Peterson any. It was around midnight: I had can culture wars and the #MeToo movement. does — it provides rules and restrictions that Esex on the brain and porn on my Critics of NoFap come from the left encourage a self-discipline that is the foun- laptop. Suddenly, everything felt wrong and and the right and from feminists and reli- dation to cultivating what Peterson calls a a wave of sadness washed over me. I felt like gious fundamentalists. For some conserva- more ‘noble’ self. ‘I probably wouldn’t be some sleazy man from a Michel Houellebecq tives, NoFap is a fellow traveller in the war here if it wasn’t for ol’ JP,’ notes a contribu- novel. I no longer wanted to be that kind of on men because it perpetuates the myth of tor on the Reddit notice board. man. So I made a solemn vow to abstain for ‘toxic masculinity’ that regards all men as Less serious are the many NoFap mem- at least 60 days. porn addicts in need of treatment. Feminists, bers who just like a challenge; men for whom Back then, I thought I was the only man however, criticise it because it fails to make no porn for 60 days is a kind of endurance in the world who had taken such a vow. that very critique. test. Hence the deep strand of gung-ho guy (And in case you’re wondering, I lasted 45 But many liberals don’t like NoFap bonding you find in numerous postings. At days that first time and now remain free either. They see the group as depriving men times, fapstronaughts sound like a band of of porn.) Little did I know then that that of not just a human right but a human good Navy Seals getting psyched up for a danger- year — 2011 — was when a forum called as well. To some, only religious bigots, right- ous mission. ‘Let’s go guys, we can do this’ NoFap was set up on social media plat- wing conservatives and sexually repressed (African Agent 47) and declarations of the form Reddit by Alexander Rhodes to neurotics would challenge the consensus. So, laconic ‘Count me in’ sort. support men like me. The name NoFap by this logic, NoFap must be suspect. For thousands of years, men have band- is meant to be an onomatopoeic repre- I don’t think either critique is fair. What ed together to fight for noble causes, to sentation of the sound of masturbation. strikes me after reading numerous postings scale mountains and fly to the moon — Members who abstain are called ‘fapstro- but this? Come on guys, can’t we come up naughts’ and women members — they have NoFap has an online community with something a little grander? There’s an a few — are known as ‘femstronaughts’. of around 400,000 and describes inherent and self-defeating contradiction in Today NoFap has an online community the NoFap idea of abstinence. Why bother of around 400,000 and describes itself as a itself as a ‘porn recovery site’ quitting for 30, 60 or 100 days if you’re just ‘porn recovery site’. What, you may wonder, going to end up going back to your old hab- are they recovering from? Exhaustion? on the Reddit site is the absence of the typi- its? Why not, like other addicts, make the Sprained wrists? NoFap believes that the use cal anti-masculine rant that woke #MeToo pledge to quit? of porn and masturbation together has detri- men usually go in for. That said, mocking the mission of these mental effects on your mental, physical and NoFappers are mostly men in their twen- young men is easy. But abstinence is harder emotional health. The site advocates ‘absti- ties who don’t hate pornography for exploit- than you think for one simple reason: good nence’ for a period of 60 days, which allows ing women and perpetuating sexism; they reasons to stop are hard to find. The scien- the body and mind a natural ‘rebooting’. hate it because, they believe, it can cause tific claims made by NoFap are either irrefu- Over the past decade, an anti- erectile dysfunction, leaves you feeling table or based on suspect science, depending masturbation movement has emerged in drained, undermines your productivity and on your view of porn. The church doesn’t America. Groups such as NoFap, Proud can damage your relationships. The websites want to mention sin or damnation as in days Boys (young right-wing nationalists whose warn of porn addiction ‘rewiring the brain’s of old. No wonder the male default mode is: hashtag is #NoWank), Christian chastity reward mechanism, which results in apathy why not? What’s the big deal? advocates and writers such as the produc- or procrastination’, a ‘loss of attraction for We might say there’s nothing wrong with tivity gurus Tim Ferris and Jordan Peterson real women’ and ‘all the other issues that all this — though I think there are good ethi- are seen as part of it. There are groups such come with any addiction’. For them it’s real- cal reasons not to use porn — but that’s not as the Sacred Sexuality Project which warns ly an issue of health, not morality. what we often feel. If there’s nothing wrong that ‘pornography addiction could quite lit- I suspect NoFap appeals to many young with it, why do so many men feel embar- erally be considered an epidemic in modern rassed by the practice? Young men have the culture today’ and should be seen ‘in a simi- choice to actively engage in the cultivation lar light to the abuse of cocaine in the late of a higher or better self through self-denial. 19th and early 20th centuries’. Perhaps the final word should go to Mark Of course, the British like to think this is Queppet of the Sacred Sexuality Project. some sort of peculiarly American thing, root- The world needs more strong and passion- ed in its puritanical past. But there’s a grow- ate men, he says, but ‘sadly, we’ve never even ing number of British men who are joining met many of our greatest leaders’ because offline support groups such as Sex and Love they are still stuck in their room watching Addicts Anonymous, where they can find filth on their smartphones. NoFap is a sign the kind of support that NoFap offers. This ‘Is all the rubbish in your head recyclable?’ that maybe something will change.

22 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

DUMMY Main story standfirst goes here. Please keep it no longer than this box, and shorter is probably better DUMMY Main cosmo_08 June 2019_The Spectator 22 05/06/2019 10:54 LIONEL SHRIVER Don’t use up all your rhetoric at once

aturday night, a guest commentator and all the punchy pejoratives are exhaust- ries into which we were helplessly born. Pret- on Sky News sputtered that Donald ed already. ‘Fascist’? Sadiq, the Democrats ty much what you’d expect, right? STrump has ‘normalised white suprem- impoverished fascist before the Donald was What I didn’t expect was to be strangely acy’. Once the American President has float- even inaugurated. undermined by my own side. I’m a big fan of ed off to the horizon after his three-day visit Brexit has also been a magnet for the Trevor Phillips, a sharp, observant broadcast- to the UK as an inflatable media punching lexicon of hysteria. At the weekend, Elton er whose documentaries on political correct- bag, we will doubtless have been subjected John announced that Brexit has made him ness and British Muslim values have been to much further denunciation of this diaboli- ashamed of his country. He declared: ‘I am a especially courageous. I felt fortunate to cal, fiendish, authoritarian, hate-filled, lying, European. I am not a stupid, colonial, impe- have him as second affirmative. But when he misogynistic, crass, criminal, moronic, stupid rialist English idiot.’ (Note that English here concluded, I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. He’d … sorry, that’s a bit too close to ‘moronic’… is deployed as one more insult.) It’s news to rounded on the point that identity politics then, you know, totally crummy leader who is me that Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson is indeed tearing society apart, but that’s a also… also… fat! Sadiq Khan made a brave are scheming to send the British army on grand thing, because society needs to be torn superlative play in labelling Trump a ‘fascist’. 31 October to retake Kenya. apart, the better to rebuild it afresh from Now, that one’s hard to top — which won’t Notoriously, too, David Lammy deplored the ground up. Something of a back door to have stopped fellow detractors from trying. members of the pro-Brexit ERG as akin to our side of the argument, to say the least — Welcome to the world of impotent hyper- and at 65 the gentlemanly OBE makes for an bole. That dig about white supremacy is a Language inflation has the same unlikely burn-the-whole-joint-down revolu- good example of contemporary word infla- effect as the monetary kind: your tionary firebrand. tion, in some ways worse than what’s hap- words grow rapidly worthless In opposition, a Guardian journalist dili- pened to grades. (The fetishistic lefty resort gently expounded on the merits of research- to normalise deserves parsing as well: the Nazis and proponents of apartheid. When ing the effects of government policy on verb seems to decode ‘Maybe it’s not strictly Andrew Marr invited the MP to moderate various demographic subsets — fair enough, illegal yet but we don’t like it, so it should be his comparisons, he declared instead that but rather off-point. Then our friend David illegal’.) Now that white supremacist no long- the parallels were ‘not strong enough’. I’m Lammy (for whom I must also be a pro- er refers specifically to Anglo-Saxons who curious just how Lammy plans to heighten apartheid Nazi) delivered a rousing civil proudly believe their race is superior, the the opprobrium. rights sermon, part Mandela, part Martin term means nothing. Granted, Trump may See, rhetorical overkill blows up in your Luther King. Hence in the final wrap-up, I or may not have obstructed justice and he’s face. Hyperbole depletes your linguistic arse- submitted dolefully: ‘If I’d realised that we hardly Mr Protocol, but Khan has now used nal, and oratorical crying wolf destroys your were really going to be debating the propo- up fascist. So what will London’s mayor call credibility. Lammy simply sounded childish. sition “Racism and sexism are bad”, I might the President were Trump actually to send The exaggeration bounced harmlessly off have declined this invitation.’ in troops to shut down CNN? ‘Injudicious’? the ERG, while betraying the Labour MP Somehow the cherry on this melting sun- The self-defeating nature of rhetori- as having no sense of proportion. Language dae — throughout which we had signally cal overkill was on display for decades in inflation has the same effect as the monetary failed to debate anything to do with iden- Northern Ireland, where politicians ritu- kind: your words grow rapidly worthless. tity politics, but had thrown in plenty of ally fell over themselves to condemn the Speaking of Lammy and growing rapidly Brexit — was being approached afterwards culprits behind atrocities as, say, ‘heartless, worthless: last month’s Intelligence Squared by a member of the audience (black, if that inhuman animals who have sunk to new debate in Westminster was one of my weird- matters, and alas, maybe it does) to please depths of depravity and unspeakable wick- er events in recent times. The panel was explain my closing remark. I spelled out that edness…’. While party leaders’ thesauruses ostensibly discussing the proposition ‘Iden- racism and sexism being bad is settled, isn’t grew rifled and grey from paging for fresh tity politics is tearing society apart’. I kicked it? So debating that proposition is a waste synonyms, for the audience this escalating off with ten minutes for the affirmative, of time. She continued to look belligerently invective induced a funny linguistic neuropa- during which I defined what I understood uncomprehending. I blithered on at greater thy. The pols would have been more affecting identity politics to mean: an insistence on length. There’s nothing more disheartening had they characterised yet another bombing interpreting history, the arts and the dynam- than having to tortuously explain a remark as ‘unfortunate’. ics of the present entirely in terms of unequal whose meaning should have been self-evi- As for Trump, the American left has power relationships between groups. I con- dent, when the remark itself was about not already thrown Roget’s at the guy — the tested the very definition of ‘identity’ that wishing to discuss the self-evident. hardback, unabridged — and look at how the movement embraces. For me, knowing much good it’s done. Trump is still Presi- who we are means transcending, rather than SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST dent, we’re approaching another election clinging to, the social and biological catego- Writers worth listening to.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 23

Lionel Shriver_08 June 2019_The Spectator 23 05/06/2019 11:41 BAROMETER Protons and cons

Juncker’s perks The jury’s still out on proton therapy

The European Commission President CASSANDRA COBURN Jean-Claude Juncker complained that he doesn’t have an official residence, unlike the ambassadors who frequently entertain him, and has to live in a hotel room. What are the perks of his job? — He receives a salary of €306,655 (£271,000), untaxed in his home country and subject only to a low EU tax. — He gets a residence allowance of €46,000 p.a., equivalent to 15 per cent of his salary. — He is also eligible for a family allowance t’s Asco week in Chicago: the biggest ful that doctors need to think carefully to equivalent to 2 per cent of his salary. meeting of clinical oncologists in the determine if the radiotherapy will cause Iworld. McCormick Place convention more harm than good. The free world centre, the largest in the US, is filled to its This is why proton therapy appeals. 2.6 million square foot capacity with people Protons behave in a very different way to Was Donald Trump’s state banquet the talking about cancer. And one of the hottest photons: put simply, they’re less energetic. most appropriate to boycott? Countries topics being discussed is something called Therefore, in theory, unlike photons, the pro- whose leaders have been treated to a state visit in the past decade, ranked by their proton therapy, a possible new tool in the tons hit the tumour with almost all of their position on the Human Freedom Index: anti-cancer arsenal. energy and have very little left to cause dam- highest lowest But does it actually work? Given that age to the healthy tissue beyond the tumour. Netherlands 6 Mexico 75 two private proton therapy machines have This makes proton therapy potentially much Ireland 8 Qatar 103 already been built in the UK, and that two safer than normal radiotherapy, but without USA 17 Turkey 107 more NHS machines are on their way at a any diminished loss in cure. Singapore 25 India 110 cool £250 million, you’d think we’d know. Why the caveats in the last paragraph? Spain 25 UAE 117 The sad truth is that, for many cancers, the The research on proton therapy isn’t in South Korea 27 Kuwait 124 medical jury is still out as to how helpful South Africa 63 China 135 these machines actually are. It’s not that the evidence for treating Proton therapy is a new kind of radio- Atheist beliefs therapy. Radiotherapy has been success- prostate cancer with proton therapy fully used to treat cancer for decades. In is ambiguous: it’s that it isn’t there Percentage of people describing themselves as atheists who ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ essence, it’s a way of using targeted energy agree with the existence of: to destroy tumours, with standard radiother- yet. Despite there being around 67 pro- Life after death 19% apy machines using light particles (photons) ton therapy machines already built world- Reincarnation 13% as their mode of attack. wide (not including the two new NHS Astrology 14% The problem with using photons is that ones currently under construction), defini- Objects with mystical powers 11% they’re extremely high energy. Unfortunate- tive answers to the two vital questions of ‘That significant events ly, the same high energy that allows them to whether proton therapy is better and safer are meant to be’ 29% destroy tumours also means that they trav- than normal radiotherapy for most cancers Supernatural beings 20% el deep into the body, harming whatever aren’t known yet. Universal spirits of life force 19% comes into their path. For some very rare cancers — brain Underlying forces of good and evil 30% Fortunately the photons’ energy dimin- tumours, particularly in children, or in very Karma 7% ishes as they penetrate deeper into the body sensitive areas like the eye — proton thera- Source: Understanding Unbelief Project, University of Kent and so, with careful planning, most of the py is the recommended treatment, predom- force is spent on the tumour and less hits inantly because of the potential damage Football vs cricket the surrounding healthy tissue. Nonethe- normal radiotherapy can do. But for the less, radiotherapy can still cause side effects most common types of cancer, doctors are How do audiences for the Cricket World to the healthy tissue. Depending on where still waiting on the results. Cup and the Football World Cup compare? the tumour is — for example, in the brain — Prostate cancer is a typical example. It — According to Fifa, last year’s Football the side effects can potentially be so harm- is the second most common cancer in the World Cup final in Russia attracted an UK, with Prostate Cancer UK estimating estimated 1bn viewers around the world. that one in eight men will be diagnosed at The matches were attended by a total of some point in their lives. The good news is 3m fans. that if the cancer is caught early enough, — The most-watched match in the last many men can be cured through a combi- Cricket World Cup in 2015 was not the nation of hormonal therapy, chemotherapy final but a group game between India and and radiotherapy. In other words, with the Pakistan, which drew 313m TV viewers worldwide. That, however, was dwarfed right treatment plan, there is a good chance by the 558m who watched the 2011 final of survival, meaning that there should be sig- between India and Sri Lanka. nificant new evidence before patients decide As for game attendance, the 2015 Cricket to veer off this treatment course. World Cup attracted 1.02m ticket sales. NHS England recognises this. In its clinical commissioning policy, it states that it has

24 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

cassandra and Barometer_08 June 2019_The Spectator 24 05/06/2019 10:56 ‘carefully reviewed the evidence to treat viders of prostate cancer treatment around prostate cancer with proton beam therapy. the world that are now marketing their ser- We have concluded that there is not enough vices privately. evidence to make the treatment available at But these concerns have not escaped the this time.’ medical press, with leading journals repeat- This cautionary approach is echoed in edly sounding the alarm that we need more the guidelines of America’s official radio- evidence before spending vast sums on these costly potential white elephants. Most treatment providers advertise Professor David Collingridge, editor of the Lancet Oncology, the world’s leading claims online that are inconsistent cancer journal, commented to The Specta- with international guidelines tor that the ‘economic pressures to recoup investment [in proton therapy units] cre- therapy society, Astro, which recommends ‘Good news, Mr Billingham. I no longer ate perverse incentives not based purely on proton therapy for prostate cancer treat- have to refer to you as the “worried well”…’ clinical value’. The data backs this up: this ment only as part of a clinical trial or regis- year’s Asco meeting sees the presentation try investigation: in other words, as part of As always, the answer is money. Proton of work showing that most proton therapy the evidence-collecting process. So it’s not therapy machines are extremely expen- providers’ websites contain information that the evidence for treating prostate can- sive to build but the incentives they provide and advertise claims that are inconsistent cer with proton therapy is ambiguous: it’s can be worth it. Some American proton with international guidelines. that it isn’t there. therapy centres generate profits of $50 mil- Private proton therapy services present So if this is the case, why do patients with lion annually. themselves as offering groundbreaking new prostate cancer in the US form the group of The American model, whereby doctors treatment to patients who might fare better patients who are most frequently referred are recompensed according to the services by sticking with old-fashioned treatments for proton therapy? Why do private British that they prescribe, provides a possible clue such as photon-based radiotherapy. But radiotherapy clinics advertise their proton as to the increasing number of referrals: it’s cancer patients, being under great stress, are therapy services using stories of men with more lucrative for the prescribing doctors. among those most likely to clutch at expen- prostate cancer? Prostate cancer demography also helps. sive straws. In other words, why are private proton The disease most frequently afflicts older For the moment, there is at least one therapy providers still actively promot- men, who tend to be the most capable of resounding message: don’t pay for proton ing their untested services to patients who affording to pay out of pocket for medical therapy yourself, no matter how swish the already have a good chance of survival? services. This fact is not lost on those pro- websites might be.

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cassandra and Barometer_08 June 2019_The Spectator 25 05/06/2019 10:56 MATTHEW PARRIS How I very nearly became the victim of an online scam

lease don’t suppose I’m unaware I’ve the AnyDesk App for Remote Desktops, him — now, after all this time — that I was been an idiot. I recount what hap- which came after the TeamViewer Auto- going to hang up. P pened to me last week without expect- matic Download. By this point things were ‘Scroll down right to the bottom of ing your sympathy or understanding, and happening on my screen without my inter- what’s on the screen,’ he told me, ‘and you’ll this account carries only the very slight- vention — as though someone or something see the result’. It said: ‘Due to client: £386 est plea in mitigation: the suggestion that it had taken over. compensation.’ He was apparently looking could happen to you too, even if you don’t I had now been on the phone for 35 min- at the same screen. ‘That’s compensation for think you’d ever be so stupid. utes. If when I had first picked up I had a poor service,’ he said. ‘BT will be fixing the Because I certainly didn’t think I was. I’m known the time or the complication that defective service as soon as possible. not IT-illiterate, I’m not particularly slow- would be involved, I would have told them ‘But we need to get the compensation witted, I’ve attended ‘take online security to call back later, when Julian could have to you straight away.’ Now I was smelling seriously’ lectures, and I do know about the handled it. But I had been led very slowly a rat. ‘First I want to confirm your address.’ new ways thieves steal from the unsuspect- into all this, and was beginning to feel that, It occurred to me that he already had my ing these days. I’m forewarned. address, but I gave it. ‘Now can I check we So I thought myself proof against such In an IT landscape where I was lost, have the right bank details for you?’ he said. attempts when the landline phone rang on this ‘supervisor’ had become my ‘Can I confirm which bank you bank with?’ Friday morning. My partner had just gone guide, leading me by the hand I was now very suspicious but I told him riding, so when the caller said she was from the bank’s name, as this did not strike me as BT, and believed I was dissatisfied with our having invested so much time already, we very secret information. ‘And I’ll need some fluctuating broadband speeds, I assumed might as well get through to a result. details from your account,’ he said. he had made a complaint because he is Also — and this is hard to describe — Whoa. ‘BT have my bank details already,’ indeed dissatisfied. I think I had become rather passive. In an I said. ‘I pay by direct debit.’ She sounded as though she was in a call IT landscape where I was lost, this ‘supervi- ‘But we need to confirm that the man I’m centre in India (you could hear a noisy back- sor’ had become my guide. He had me by speaking to is the account holder,’ he said — ground of calls) and spoke with a thick accent. the hand and I was simply doing what I was or words to that effect. At last my brain was I could hardly understand her but, then again, told — even feeling I was letting him down kicking in. His explanation made no sense. one often can’t with these call centres. She by being slow to understand his instructions, ‘No,’ I said, and told him so. ‘All you need handed me over to ‘my supervisor’, a man. and taking pleasure from his pleasure when to do is credit my account,’ I said. The scales He wanted to take me through a few tests we got the results he was looking for on to had fallen from my eyes. I hung up. of my broadband quality, and did I have a the screen. Immediately he phoned back. I told him screen I could use? I did, and logged in, hold- ‘We’re going to get a conclusion now,’ he to stop calling, but each time I killed the call ing the cordless phone to my ear. He asked said. My hands were off the keyboard, and the phone rang again, so I left it off the hook. me to confirm my address and the spelling the AnyDesk App for Remote Desktops On my smartphone I called my bank and of my name (‘so BT can be sure we’re speak- thing was flashing all sorts of figures and agreed that they can block internet access to ing to our client’) which I did. symbols and incomprehensible IT language my account until I’ve had my laptop checked He then dictated the URL of a testing on to my screen. It did now occur to me that over for ‘malware’. What may these crooks website to go to, and I got it on to my screen. there might be something suspicious going have been able to extract? I have no idea. First we went (I’ve retrieved all this infor- on, but I felt it would sound irrational to tell For half an hour my hands trembled. I mation from my Chrome history) to the was surprised how shaken it left me feeling. WC3 Markup Validation Service, then to the I don’t think I’d ever have given him pass- Nu Html Checker. words or anything, or accessed my account I was getting a bit confused, and from while he might have been able to watch — but here on my memory begins to tangle. The I’ve rather lost confidence in my own scepti- ‘supervisor’ was directing me from website cal good sense. Could he be watching now? to website, including a login to my MyBT Yet it didn’t and wouldn’t occur to me to website, and I began to lose track of why I tell the police. They’d be as far out of their was doing all these things, simply telling him depth as I am. It’s the Wild West out there, what was on my screen. The one that wor- ‘Alexa just informed me that he wants to be and we’re alone and unprotected. Analogue ries me, though, is the last one we went to: known as Alex from now on.’ law enforcement in a digital world.

26 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Matthew Parris_08 June 2019_The Spectator 26 05/06/2019 11:37 OUR PERSONAL FINANCIAL ADVICE BEGINS WITH ONE QUESTION: WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

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exhibits the disdain of many intellectuals for need a Remain-supporting MP on the Trump and Brexit public opinion, but also for democracy. The ballot so that MPs can see the strength of Sir: Your leading article (‘The Trump British public is highly intelligent and has feeling within the party against remaining card’, 1 June) states that ‘May’s successor more insight than any narrow elite. That is in the EU. There can be no doubt that the should seek to capitalise on Team Trump’s why democracy works. Remain arguments have been rejected enthusiasm for Brexit’. Tim Martin by the membership (and the majority of President Trump — the leader of by Exeter, Devon Conservative voters), and MPs have a duty far our most important political, economic to listen to the membership. Two Leaver and military ally — has always respected candidates would not make that clear. what most British MPs have chosen to Don’t give us Gove David Bell ignore: that the British people voted to Sir: A good many of us hold Michael Gove Northern Ireland leave the European Union. Assuming that personally responsible for the fact that the Conservative party wants to survive, it Brexit has not taken place (‘Can the Tories must choose a proven vote-winning leader save themselves?’, 1 June). Had he not Tinkling felines who is determined to leave the European ‘knifed’ Boris Johnson we would not have Sir: Could the distressing problem of cats Union on WTO terms by 31 October this been landed with May. He appears devious exercising their natural instinct of killing year, unless the EU has agreed by that date — trying to face both ways at once — and birds and small mammals (‘Vegans should to a convincing, substantial improvement to he has nothing like the national appeal of go cat-free’, 1 June) be partially solved by its current offer. If the new prime minister Johnson. If people vote Gove, we would the RSPB sponsoring and promoting collars commits to doing that, it’s likely that more than likely get Corbyn. with small metal bells fixed to them? Nigel Farage would join forces with the A.J. Snow Mark Coley Conservatives in a general election. And South Cerney, Gloucestershire Brinkley, Newmarket if the Tory party is so foolish as to elect a Remainer, don’t be surprised if a Leaver vs Remainer Why teachers hate Tories vote-winner such as Boris Johnson electrifies the British people by joining the Sir: David Soskin, ‘Leavers only, Sir: Toby Young blames teachers’ support Brexit party. Such an alliance of Leavers please’ (Letters, 1 June), calls for two for Labour on left-wing university staff, as would surely win a general election, and Leave-supporting MPs to be put to the if teachers were passive receivers of other handsomely, at a time when millions of membership. I believe this is wrong. We people’s opinions (No sacred cows, 1 June). Labour and Conservative voters are crying When I entered the profession 55 years out for no-nonsense political leaders. ago, teachers were overwhelmingly Tory, to Winston Churchill, so admired by the despair of the Communist party, which millions including Boris Johnson, defected ran my local NUT. Continual meddling to the Liberal party, then rejoined the has caused the change. Two examples of Conservatives. Donald Trump, a Democrat, Conservative stupidity and cowardice: the ran for President as a Republican. In academies’ draining of resources from politics, as in war, a true leader does WE KNOW HOW... classrooms into the pockets of men in suits, whatever has to be done to win. Is it only and an unpopular sex education policy President Trump who understands this? YOU TELL US which has been foisted on schools. If I were Hugo Anson to tell a staffroom that I supported the Tory London W11 WHEN & WHERE party, it would be assumed I jested. Michael McManus As a specialist in charter services Leeds Power to the people with 29, 50 and 72 seat aircraft, we’ll Sir: Jonathan Sumption (Diary, 1 June) meet your requirements and cater for your needs getting you to your states that there was ‘not much’ that ‘British The commentator’s curse chosen UK or European destination. politics could learn from the United States’. Sir: As a cricket fan, I was growing more In fact, the UK could learn a lot. The US EasternAirways.com/charter- confident of England’s chances in the World constitution has successfully preserved flights, 08703 669199 or email Cup, until I read Roger Alton’s article last democracy by ensuring that power remains [email protected] week (Sport, 1 June). While his glowing vested in the people. praise of the 50-over side was largely fair, In contrast, power in the UK and Europe it placed the journalistic equivalent of the has been ceded to unelected EU presidents commentator’s curse on their chances. There and the increasingly undemocratic Brussels is the small matter of the Ashes looming regime. Sumption also says that ‘many later in the summer — and a rejuvenated regard [the referendum result] as an act Australian side with a point to prove in both of economic vandalism by a bare majority formats of the game is always a dangerous of the electorate’, and he defends Theresa threat to an English team, especially if we May in her efforts to limit the damage. are regarded as favourites. This negative perspective emanates from Daniel Cure, the same political faction which incorrectly Kingswinford, West Midlands predicted economic failure if the UK did not join the euro, and recession in the immediate WRITE TO US aftermath of a Leave vote. In referring to The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London Brexit supporters as ‘grim fanatics’, Sumption SW1H 9HP; [email protected]

28 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

FD12395_EA_Spectator ad May 2019_v2.indd 1 16/05/2019 15:40 letters_08 June 2019_The Spectator 28 05/06/2019 10:37 ANY OTHER BUSINESS| MARTIN VANDER WEYER In favour of nationalisation? Take a look at Network Rail

e don’t hear enough about Net- issue is reportedly 80 per cent behind him. the galaxy of innovative ventures that have work Rail these days. By that But voters should take a close look at the already put their names forward. I’m look- W I mean that the entity recently one example we have of a large-scale nation- ing forward to meeting some of the entre- described by the Sunday Times as ‘syn- alised utility, namely the unfit-for-purpose, preneurs behind them during the judging onymous with incompetence and delays’ half-hidden fiasco that is Network Rail. process — and I’m delighted to report doesn’t receive anything like the abuse it that one of our 2018 winners, Warwick deserves for failing to provide the infra- Fallen free-thinker Music Group, maker of the celebrated low- structure essential for a 21st-century rail- cost plastic trombone, has just received a way. I refer you to the Crossrail project, in When the fund manager Neil Woodford was Queen’s Award for Enterprise. which the inability of new trains to connect interviewed for The Spectator by Jonathan On a related theme, I’m also pleased to with old Network Rail signalling systems is Davis in 2015, not long after he left Invesco have discovered the Green Angel Syndi- one reason for the delayed opening that has to set up his own firm, I headlined the article cate, which exemplifies what I regard as the become a major national embarrassment. ‘The world is a very difficult place’. That was right pragmatic answer to the ‘climate emer- I invite you to observe LNER’s expensive Woodford’s summation of global economic gency’ question with which so many of you new fleet of Azuma bullet trains that were tides at the time, but it’s also a fair comment have recently made mischief. The syndicate due to launch in December but delayed by on his own subsequent experience: as his is a group of 120 private investors who have incompatibility with Network Rail signals. funds’ performance failed to live up to their together put £5 million into early-stage ven- And of course if you’re a London commuter , promise, investors gradually fled, causing his tures in various aspects of ‘cleantech’. Their you’ll have your own observation of the fre- flagship equity income fund to shrink from portfolio includes Powervault, ‘an intelligent quency with which track and signal failures £10 billion in 2017 to £3.7 billion this week, battery system for the modern smart home, ruin your day. when withdrawals were frozen. designed to maximise energy efficiency’; and But I’ll bet you don’t know who con- Woodford’s reputation as the invest- Swytch, which converts conventional bicy- trols Network Rail, or whether it sits in the ment scene’s most potent free-thinker, nur- cles into electric bikes, encouraging com- public or private sector or (as Labour min- tured over 30 years, is in tatters. And that’s muters to leave their cars at home. Director isters pretended when they confiscated its a shame, because he’s also one of the few David Sheridan says the syndicate’s aim is assets from Railtrack shareholders in 2002) mainstream London money men who has to have ‘fun and excitement’ while picking somewhere in between. The answer is that been willing to put a slice of his funds into green winners. If we can all do that, I’d say Labour’s sham was unwound several years smaller, early stage and even unlisted busi- the battle’s almost won. ago, so that Network Rail is now wholly nesses. One such was Oxford Sciences Inno- Lastly, in this trot around the disruptor nationalised, its debts sitting on the Treas- vation, a university spin-out in which (under track, a tribute to a start-up I described here ury balance sheet and its sole shareholder pressure to find cash for redemptions) he in 2007 as ‘a lesson to would-be entrepreneurs Secretary of State for Transport Chris Gray- recently sold his £55 million stake. that if you really pay attention to the qual- ling. One consequence of this change is that, ‘It’s the failure of my industry to under- ity of the product, success will follow, how- when £1.5 billion-worth of Network Rail’s stand the needs of the science and inno- ever entrenched the competition.’ This was property was sold to private equity earlier vation community, or even to want to a tiny bakery called Cinnamon Twist: it was this year (to the distress of railway-arch participate in it,’ he told us in 2015, ‘that is so good that folk who muttered that we had businesses whose rents shot up in conse- the single biggest factor behind our failure no need for a fancy patisserie when plenty quence), the Treasury snaffled most of the as a country to translate the great science of pies were already available in our York- proceeds as a contribution to deficit reduc- we have into commercial success.’ The fall shire town of Helmsley were soon found tion, rather than allowing them to be rein- of Woodford is, in that sense, a much bigger ‘daily barging each other like bullocks’ to vested in overdue rail upgrades. loss to UK investment than the implosion of buy beautiful bread and pastries from its Why does this matter, apart from the one overhyped fund. charming Polish sales girl. Now, hardwork- irritation for rail passengers? Because John ing husband-and-wife bakers Mark and Jil- McDonnell has plans if he comes to power, Trumpets and cinnamon buns lie Lazenby have decided to ease back, shut as well he might, to nationalise utilities rang- up shop and do something different. How ing from Thames Water to National Grid, The entry deadline for our 2019 ‘Economic we shall miss them. But it’s a reminder that with sub-market compensation for share- Disruptor of the Year Awards’ is this week- nothing’s permanent in the business world holders, and to take train franchises into end but there’s still time to fill in the form — and that the thrill is always seeing who’ll public hands — and voter opinion on this at www.spectator.co.uk/disruptor and join be next to shake up the marketplace.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 29

AOB_08 June 2019_The Spectator 29 05/06/2019 10:38 A SHARED COMMITMENT TO PROVIDING SPACE TO PERFORM.

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‘Abstract No. 2’, 1947, Mark Bostridge explores Rod Liddle wishes he liked The Starry Messenger by Lee Krasner the juicy, spicy, racy, sexy Morrissey’s music more Richard Bratby discovers Martin Gayford — p46 life of Alma Mahler James Delingpole approves how to do the Ring cycle John Burnside enjoys a of the way they kill the in a chicken shed ride through the moral doggies in Chernobyl Carolyne Larrington mayhem of James Ellroy’s Lloyd Evans marvels at celebrates Europe’s Los Angeles the rich tapestry of epic triumph

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 31

BooksArtsOpener_08 June 2019_The Spectator 31 05/06/2019 10:39 BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS Revelations about the prophet For centuries in the West, Islam was condemned by philosophers and pamphleteers as well as by the Church. But there was often a hidden agenda, says Tom Holl an d

Faces of Muhammad: Western as a siren: a monstrous compound of the with the great counterpoint to their own, Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam human and the bestial, luring the unwary to a doppelgänger no less universalist and from the Middle Ages to Today their doom. potent in its ambitions than Christendom by John Tolan This portrayal of Muhammad as itself. Tolan shows us a Muhammad made of Princeton, £24, pp. 288 a heresiarch, a charlatan who had thrived by gold, worshipped in Jerusalem as the Anti- twisting the truths of Christianity to his own christ; a Muhammad who tricks his gulli- In 2011, when the editor of Charlie Hebdo pestilential ends, was in turn heir to an even ble followers by means of assorted bogus put Muhammad on the cover, he did older tradition. As John Tolan points out ruses; a Muhammad who is variously epi- so as the heir to more than 200 years of in his new book, condemnation of Islam as leptic, lecherous and stained in blood. Here a peculiarly French brand of anti-clerical- a heresy did at least derive from a recogni- is the Muhammad condemned by Peter ism. Just as radicals in the Revolution had tion on the part of Latin Christians that it the Venerable as ‘detestable’. desecrated churches and smashed icons, so was not an entirely alien faith: that it hon- Yet this is not the whole story. Had it did cartoonists at France’s most scabrous oured the biblical prophets; that it laid claim been, then Tolan’s book would not be near- magazine delight in satirising religion. to a divine law; that it was monotheistic. ly as interesting as it is. Scholars in medi- Although Catholicism was their principal It had taken time, however, for scholars eval and early modern Europe rarely wrote target, they were perfectly happy to ridicule in the heartlands of Christendom to attain about Muslim history because it was the Islam too. If Jesus could be caricatured, then even this degree of familiarity with the primary focus of their concerns. ‘Many of why not Muhammad? these authors,’ as Tolan puts it, ‘were inter- Sure enough, one year after the proph- Voltaire’s condemnation of ested less in Islam and its prophet than in et’s first appearance on the cover of Char- Muhammad was aimed principally at reading in Muhammad’s story lessons that lie Hebdo, he was portrayed again, this time his own bugbear, the Catholic Church they could apply to their own preoccupa- crouching on all fours and with his genitals tions and predicaments.’ Peter the Vener- bared. The mockery would not cease, so the able, when he condemned ‘Mahomet’ as magazine’s editor vowed, until ‘Islam has beliefs of Saracens. Initially, the assump- the prince of heretics, was quite as anx- been rendered as banal as Catholicism’. This tion had been that — like the Vikings or ious to reclaim Spain from the Moors as would be, in a secular society, for Muslims to the Magyars or the Wends — they were he was to combat the spread of heresy in be treated as equals. pagans. ‘When northern Europeans of the Christendom itself. In 17th-century Eng- Except that they were not being treated 11th and 12th centuries did hear the name land, pamphlets about Islam were invaria- as equals. The scorning of Islam was a tradi- of the Muslim prophet, they often imagined bly disguised polemics about the monarchy, tion in France that reached back far beyond that this “Mahomet” must be the Saracens’ or Cromwell’s protectorate, or the Church the time of Voltaire and Diderot. The ear- god.’ In French, ‘mahommet’ signified ‘idol’ of England. Voltaire’s condemnation of liest European caricature of Muhammad the whole way through the Middle Ages. Muhammad as the archetype of fanaticism served to illustrate a work by Peter the All of which, of course, reveals a good was aimed, principally, not at Islam, but at Venerable, a 12th-century abbot in Burgun- deal more about medieval Christendom that perennial bugbear of his, the Catholic dy. Peter’s Summa totius haeresis Saraceno- than it does about Muhammad himself. In Church. rum — ‘A Summary of the Entire Heresy Tolan’s expert study, ‘Western perceptions The result, spanning the course of Euro- of the Saracens’ — did what it said on the of the prophet of Islam from the Middle pean history, was a series of engagements tin. Islam was a monstrous perversion of Ages to today’ serve him as an index, not with the Muslim prophet that, despite their Christian teachings. Not merely a heresy, of Islam’s evolution, but of the West’s. general tone of hostility, were marked it was the sump of all heresies. Muham- Inevitably, the overwhelming impres- as well by ambivalence and complexity. mad, its founder, was ‘the chosen disciple sion is of a mingled fear and dislike of the Increasingly, Muhammad came to serve of the Devil’. The caricature of him which civilisation which, from Spain to the Bal- European intellectuals as a vehicle for their accompanied Peter’s text duly showed him kans, provided the Christians of Europe hopes as well as their fears. Even Peter the

32 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Hostility to Islam has disguised a host of other prejudices Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 32 04/06/2019 14:57 Resembling an Old Testament prophet more than the scourge of Christendom, BRIDGEMAN IMAGES a benign-looking Muhammad reveals the first pages of the Koran. From La Ciencia y sus Hombres by Louis Figuier, 1881

12 of the magazine’s staff by two vengeful gunmen — served brutally to demonstrate that ‘Western perceptions of the prophet of Islam’ no longer exist in isolation from the Muslim world. This, of course, had been glaringly apparent for decades — ever since, on Valentine’s Day back in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death for blasphemy. The Satanic Verses, the work of a writer obsessed by the interface between the Western and Islamic worlds, was a novel deeply informed by the long history of Christian misrepresentations of Muhammad. But such literary subtleties had cut no ice with the Ayatollah. Unsur- prisingly, then, medieval polemics against Islam are a topic that novelists have tended to keep clear of ever since. Meanwhile, though, in the darker reaches of internet chatrooms and on the stump at far right rallies, they are being given a new lease of life. Tolan, a scholar whose preference is clearly for writing about scholars, avoids concluding his book by exploring just how topical its theme has lately Venerable, writing to Muslims, sought to delighted by the contemplation of a proph- become. Amazingly, he does not mention win them for Christianity in a spirit of amity et who had scorned both the metaphysi- The Satanic Verses at all. The Charlie Hebdo — ‘not as our men often do, with arms, but cal complexities of Christian theology and killings and the Danish cartoons controver- with words; not with violence but reason; the entire apparatus of a priesthood. Even sy are touched on in only the most gingerly not with hate but love’. Voltaire, towards the end of his life, was of fashions. The anti-Islamic blogosphere — In 17th-century England, in the wake prepared to acknowledge Muhammad as which at its most extreme has inspired mur- of the civil war, hostility to the doctrine the most brilliant founder of a sect who had derous rampages from Utøya in Norway to of the Trinity led some Protestant radicals ever lived. Christchurch, New Zealand — is dealt with to go so far as to compare Islam favour- This, then, is the 1,000-year line of in a mere couple of sentences. ably with the Anglican church. ‘The Ara- descent in which Charlie Hebdo stands. Yet Instead, we get a chapter on the attitude bians,’ wrote Henry Stubbe, author of the if its editor — like Peter the Venerable, like of various 20th-century Christian intellec- first wholly positive biography of Muham- Stubbe, like Voltaire — was chiefly inter- tuals to Muhammad. Interesting though mad ever written by a European Christian, ested in the figure of Muhammad as a mir- this may be, it is hard not to feel that Tolan ‘liken him to the purest streams of some ror held up to his own preoccupations, then has taken his eye somewhat off the ball. river gently gliding along, which arrest and no longer is the mirror quite as distant as Faces of Muhammad is a learned, pano- delight the eyes of every approaching pas- once it was. What Tolan coyly terms ‘the ramic and fascinating book. But it is also far senger.’ A century on, and there were many furor around the caricatures of Muham- more timely than its author seems comfort- enthusiasts for the Enlightenment similarly mad’ —the murder in January 2015 of able acknowledging.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 33

DUMMY Main story web headline goes here. Try not to go past the vertical stripe or you risk being cut off Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 33 04/06/2019 14:57 BOOKS & ARTS

villains who have killed his ravens, all called Grip. Raccoons were dog), half-answering ques- commonplace pets in 16th-century Mexico. tions about why exactly we The word ‘tabby’ derives from the French have pets. tabis, the word for the striped silk woven ALAMY STOCK PHOTO What is their evolution- in Attabiya, a district in Baghdad. Hoga- ary purpose? Do we keep rth’s pug was called Trump — jocular 18th- them because we have egos, century slang for ‘fart’. and like to command? Is Such anecdotes may sound trivial, but it that they bond us to one the subject of our relationship with animals another? Are pets an anti- is a serious one, and has attracted much dote to our exploitation of animals? Or, converse- Byron’s menagerie consisted of ‘eight ly, does keeping an animal enormous dogs, three monkeys, five reinforce our sense of being masters of nature? Is it cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon’ because they make us laugh? Perhaps they are merely a philosophical attention. Harvey shirks kind of accessory? (Cora none of this — even though the reader may Pearl, the notorious Parisian be impatient for the next juicy tidbit. courtesan, dyed her dog blue The assumption that those who love to match a blue dress.) Or, as their pets necessarily love animals in gen- the poet Christopher Smart eral is certainly questionable. Jan Morris, had it, was his cat Jeoffrey, ‘an who lives in Wales, has tremendous con- instrument for the children to tempt for sheep, but writes wonderfully learn benevolence upon’? about cats. As does Harvey. She describes And what is a pet anyone of her own, dying, as: ‘Quills for bones way? The word is difficult to and thistledown for fur, a delicate fetish define. It comes from north- where there had been a cat.’ ern Britain, and originally meant ‘lamb’. The OED gives us ‘an animal kept for pleas- A combustible combo ure or companionship’, which is accurate but vague. What is a Clinton Heylin Portrait by Titian of Federico II Gonzaga, warhorse? A sheepdog? What Duke of Mantua, 1525 about a stick insect? Does a This Searing Light, the Sun and pet have to be responsive? Everything Else: Joy Division, All these questions are the Oral History put by Harvey, and then, as by Jon Savage best she can, answered by means of well- Faber, £20, pp. 336 Shaggy dog stories informed conjecture spiced with anec- Wynn Wheldon dote. Her beautifully illustrated book is Once upon a time there was the arche- organised thematically and is perhaps best typal Manchester band — half of The Animal’s Companion: thought of as a series of essays on the vari- which came from Macclesfield, in leafy People and their Pets ous themes that the relationships between Cheshire, and a quarter of which grew up in A 26,000-Year-Old Love Story kept animals and humans throw up, such Salford, a city in its own right, full of fans of by Jacky Colliss Harvey as choosing, naming, communicating and a famous football club equally confused Allen & Unwin, £14.99, pp. 294 losing. However, for all its research into about its true home. This combusti- deeper matters, the real pleasure of The ble combo was Joy Division — or it was What is it that distinguishes humans Animal’s Companion lies in its stories. And after they dropped Warsaw, because of its from other animals? The default answer they come thick and fast. Nazi connotations, adopting instead a nowadays is tediously misanthropic, but The Barrison Sisters, a Vaudeville act of moniker given to the brothels in Nazi con- a more interesting distinction is that humans the 1890s, used to perform a song entitled centration camps. Not a mass of contra- keep pets. Why this should be is the subject ‘Do You Want to See My Pussy?’, at the dictions, then. of this book. Jacky Colliss Harvey investi- end of which they would lift their skirts to Bathed in such muddy waters, Joy Divi- gates the men and women who have owned, reveal a kitten in a pouch over the crotch. sion remains a band in need of serious re- doted on, and in some cases mistreated their According to Shelley, Byron kept, in his evaluation 40 years after the release of their pets, in literature, painting, the movies and house in Italy, ‘eight enormous dogs, three debut LP, Unknown Pleasures. And Jon Sav- history. This begins 26,000 years ago, when a monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and age seems the perfect choice to do posterity boy and his dog went exploring in bear caves a falcon’. As a boy, Abraham Lincoln had such a service, being one of three national in the south of France. The evidence was dis- a pet pig and carved a cradle for it. These music journalists who lived in Manchester covered in petrified tracks at Chauvet in the three stories come on succeeding pages. in its post-punk heyday. Ardèche in 1994. Turner used one of his own paintings, Back then, that trio would take turns Harvey has a scholar’s aspiration and ‘Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand’, as a cat- to champion this band of miscreant public she is tremendously erudite, ranging far and flap. Emily Brontë nailed the difference schoolboys and dyed-in-red-wool football wide, from Jacques Derrida (‘The animal between cats and dogs: ‘We cannot stand up hooligans when their music, at least, could looks at us and we are naked before it’) to under comparison with the dog. He is infi- barely get arrested. Mick Middles and Paul John Wick (an action movie starring Keanu nitely too good. But the cat… is extremely Morley — the other Mancunian punk pen- Reeves, who visits terrible vengeance on the like us in disposition.’ Dickens had three smiths, whom readers of NME and Sounds

34 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Does a stick insect count as a pet? Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 34 04/06/2019 14:57 devoured in their post-punk heyday — shot connection some Stretford smartass noted their own literary wads in 2006 and 2016 in the first JD monograph, Form & Sub- covering Division in posterity’s dusky after- stance, in 1987. glow and applying (some spurious) shades Herein, though, precedents and ante- of meaning. cedents have they none. No one even men- Now it’s the turn of the esteemed tions the pivotal role of the Ubu/Pop Group author of England’s Dreaming. But it is Rafters show in April 1978. But at least one Savage has consciously abrogated — Peter Hook takes issue with Hannett’s idea which is a crying shame. I wanted to read of production: ‘There must be only me and Savage Does Division, not the rambling Bernard... that don’t like Unknown Pleas- latter-day reminisces of the three survivors ures, because it doesn’t sound like we did Life at the Globe of the band, all of whom have already pub- live. It’s pretty one-dimensional.’ This column concludes my brief series lished their own memoirs (the last of which, Such insights, though, have to be hewn about Shakespeare and the Globe, linked from the drummer Stephen Morris, came out of this slightly indulgent exercise, by to the summer season of history plays out only a few weeks ago). folk who’ve already gleaned that something — from Richard II to Henry V — spon- It is rare for a writer this good to stoop to lifelike resides below the surface sound sored by Merian. It’s been a pleasure to co-opting such a slipshod sub-genre. Gener- effects and tragic idiot act that brought this write. And one of the special pleasures ally, oral histories — certainly in the punk story, and the band, to a premature close. it has offered is the chance to explore domain — prove the truth of the maxim Savage — a writer I greatly admire — what Oxford’s Professor of Shakespeare that those who can, write and those who has preferred to turn the tape-recorder Studies, Emma Smith, identifies in her can’t, compile others’ words and call it a and/or camera on a small cabal of the usual book This Is Shakespeare as the Stratford history. In reality, it’s merely the raw data suspects (most of the interviews being for man’s outstanding quality: what she calls for history. a recently broadcast documentary). It his ‘gappiness’. That is what academics The late Brendan Mullen, the loqua- means the same old, same old: mythology more usually call indeterminacy. (I can see cious Legs McNeil and self-promoter par reinforced by men — and a couple of token why she prefers ‘gappiness’.) excellence John Robb have all published women — who still can’t explain who shot What she means by that is that the eminently readable oral histories of the this post-modern Liberty Valance. plays, rather than arguing a series of punk scenes in LA, New York and Eng- political, moral or personal positions, land respectively. They have done so with instead leave great gaps into which their resources a-plenty, there being substantial Poisoned paradise audiences can project meaning. It’s true numbers of embittered blowhards looking of all literary writing, but especially true to vent their frustrations at the world’s iniq- Tom Smalley of Shakespeare. He’s king of the implied uities. Like I say, eminently readable. question mark. It’s what Keats (in special If almost nothing recorded in Mullen’s Surrender: Mid-life in reference to Shakespeare) called ‘nega- or McNeil’s tomes is actually true, punk was the American West tive capability’. And it’s why in even the always about perception taking a sledge- by Joanna Pocock few weeks I’ve been writing these little hammer to inconvenient truths: most of Fitzcarraldo, £12.99, pp. 309 squibs we’ve seen a Shakespeare who these bands weren’t very good and almost can blow the trumpet for a just war and none of them sold any records. For Joanna Pocock, a midlife crisis is the show its awful costs; who can map out the However, unlike most of their con- moment in which ‘bored of the rhythm honourable path to kingship and bring temporaries, JD really were very, very of our days, whatever those may be… we its dishonourable flipside to compelling good on stage, mustering a tidal wave begin to realise that we have more past human life; who can sound like an ardent of noise at the centre of which was than future’. With the approach of her 50th Brexiteer and a thoroughgoing European. the whirling dervish Ian Curtis, apoplectical- birthday and the onset of the menopause, I’d like to commend to you Emma’s ly — or, as it turned out, epileptically — lost she is struck powerfully by this notion. conversation with me on our books pod- in the music. Yet most people lucky enough Her response is to leave London and to cast (www.spectator.co.uk/emmasmith). to have heard Joy Division live — where One of the things I asked her about was they were masters of their own domain — In Montana’s ‘Eden’, the rivers something that has long bothered me: would have seen them playing support to isn’t it anti- intellectual that in all our cur- are sterile and wildfi res have left ricula, and indeed in our national life, the likes of the Rezillos, Buzzcocks and PiL. a blasted, barren landscape Meanwhile, as a self-immolating gesture we tend to regard Shakespeare not as to punk solidarity, JD did all they could to one writer among many, but as an isolat- ensure they sold precious few records. Noth- relocate, with her husband and their six- ed monument? Even in undergraduate ing released in the band’s lifetime even set year-old daughter, to the American West, courses, there’s Shakespeare and then the alternative charts alight, let alone chart- a place where she hopes ‘the fabric of there’s the rest of literature. It’s weird. But you don’t need to subscribe to Harold ed in the real world. With Tony Wilson run- our lives and rhythm of our days would Bloom’s slightly batty notion that Shake- ning their record label (on a small bequest be different’. speare ‘invented’ modern humanity to see from his mother) and a manager who real- It is an idyllic, optimistic premise that him as a bit special. It is my admittedly ly wanted to be a Northern Soul DJ, they ties into the mythos of the American West anti-intellectual view — and I hope it is never stood a chance. as being a place where people can reinvent yours — that Shakespeare really was just The duo of dunderheads they entrusted themselves. In the opening pages of Sur- quite a lot better than every body else. render — which won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo to make the ‘right’ commercial decisions — Sam Leith duly appointed as their producer Martin Editions Essay Prize — she describes the Hannett, who frankly should have been view from her bedroom window suddenly IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. becoming dominated by ‘mountains and sky PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S The result was a sound largely appropriat- and deer looking in’. ‘Montana strikes the 2019 SUMMER SEASON ed from the likes of Pere Ubu, a band first newcomer as a sort of Eden.’ championed in print by one Jon Savage; a Beneath the surface of this Eden, how-

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 35

Midlife crisis in Montana Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 35 04/06/2019 14:57 GETTY IMAGES

BOOKS & ARTS

ever, the reality is more complex. Run-off was people like Alma, Lehrer from copper mining has left rivers biolog- quipped, who make you real-

ically sterile; global warming has caused GETTY IMAGES ise how little you’ve accom- glaciers to melt; and a million acres of for- plished. She was both ‘the est are being destroyed by wildfires. In loveliest girl in Vienna’ and Pocock’s evocative descriptions of these ‘the smartest’. events, her grief is palpable. The fires Alma has been portrayed leave behind ‘a blasted, barren landscape in a host of books, plays and of blackened trees’. At a polluted creek, films. She has even given her ‘water the colour of split peas buries stand- name to a problem. ‘The Alma ing trees half way up their trunks’. Problem’, coined by musicol- There is the sense that, in these descrip- ogists and Mahler scholars, tions of lifeless landscapes, Pocock is also refers to the ways in which grappling with the menopausal changes she falsified and manipulated within her own body. Perhaps because of the written record of her life this parallel, her rendering of the Ameri- with the composer to her own can West is often framed in a manner both advantage in the decades fol- physical and deeply personal. She feels the lowing his death in 1911. Her seasons ‘swinging off their axis, in [her] destruction of all but one of body’, as she ‘drowns in news of poisoned her letters to Mahler makes rivers and melting glaciers’. it almost impossible to deter- Exploring the history of the land and mine the extent to which she the many existing disputes over how it acted as a nurturer of, and should be used (and by whom), Pocock muse to, his genius. delves into the various subcultures that She is problematic, too, populate the respective extremes of these as a biographical subject debates. They range from wolf-trappers not least because her behav- and anti-government patriot groups (at iour is such a mass of con- a picnic hosted by the latter, she describes tradictions. She never lost how ‘almost everybody had a copy of the the taint of anti-Semitism constitution sticking out of their back prevalent from her youth in pockets, next to their holsters’), to people the last years of the Austro- who have learned to live, often at the very Hungarian empire and spent fringes of modern society, in a state of sym- Alma Mahler: vain, cruel, magnetic, beautiful and sexy a lifetime making startling- biosis with nature. ly offensive remarks about In the woods of Washington State, Poco- Jews, fuelled in old age by ck attends a festival for ‘Ecosexuals’, a group her daily bottle of Bene- whose philosophy revolves around the dictine liqueur. Yet she married two Jews idea that you should treat the environment The loveliest girl — Mahler (a convert to Catholicism) and as you would a lover. On the ‘sacred hoop’ in Vienna Werfel — and bravely stood by Werfel (a Native American ‘lifeway’, whose when his books were burned by the Nazis, adherents migrate, annually, across seven Mark Bostridge following him into exile in America, all the states — subsisting on crops that they plant while making it clear that she supported and harvest along the way), she meets Fin- Passionate Spirit: neither the ‘bacillus’ of Nazism, nor its ideo- isia Medrano, a 61-year-old transsexual The Life of Alma Mahler logical anti-Semitism. rewilder who has lived continuously on by Cate Haste The Alma of Passionate Spirit is a more ‘the hoop’ for 35 years. Pocock is drawn to Bloomsbury, £26, pp. 469 sympathetic creature than the monster people who, like Finisia, have made what of previous biographies. She may still act many would consider extreme choices in It must be rare for a popular song to have abominably, but Cate Haste has wisely for- their efforts to live more harmoniously such a lasting influence on a posthumous rep- saken the harshly judgmental tone so often with nature and who, as she admits, lead utation. However, this is the case with Tom used about Alma, and corrected significant ‘lives I am not brave enough to live’. Lehrer’s deliciously satirical tribute, ‘Alma’. errors that have contributed to the monster Surrender is not just a historical or Reading Alma Mahler’s obituary in 1964 — legend (for example, the despicable Elias ethnographic exploration, however; it is the ‘juiciest, spiciest, raciest’ he’d ever come Canetti described witnessing Alma’s false also an attempt by Pocock to understand across — Lehrer was amazed by her matri- tears, ‘like enormous pearls’, at her daugh- her place in the world, as a woman in monial CV and proceeded to immortalise it ter Manon Gropius’s funeral, even though the latter half of her life, as a mother and in a catchy lyric. Alma turns out not have been present as a human being: ‘I was dipping in and out Not only had Alma been married three at the ceremony). of people’s lives; I was becoming infertile; times, to the composer Gustav Mahler, to Haste makes it clear that Alma’s over- I was watching my child grow up; I had wit- Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, and, whelming desire to ‘fill her garden with nessed a lot of death.’ finally, to Franz Werfel, author of the run- geniuses’ stemmed from her idolisation of This is a bewitching and deeply affect- away bestseller The Song of Bernadette, she’d her father, the court painter Emil Schindler, ing book. Pocock’s elegant interweaving of also managed to bag as lovers some of the who died in 1892 when she was 13. Alma had the intimate and the expansive, the person- top creative men in the Europe of her time. begun to compose on a pianino when she al and the universal, culminates in a work Gustav Klimt had given Alma her first kiss, was nine. By 19 she knew Wagner’s operas that forces us to consider our own place in, while her relationship with the Expressionist by heart and had determined to ‘be a some- and impact upon, a world that could itself painter Oskar Kokoschka was ‘one fierce bat- body’. But at the same time she recognised have more past than future. tle of love’, full of explosive sexual power.It her own vulgarity and superficiality, and

36 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Alma Mahler — maddening, mesmerising or plain malicious? Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 36 04/06/2019 14:57 GETTY IMAGES

her longing to bask in someone else’s as Haste does in part, to a myth of Alma’s reflected glory. own making, that although Mahler ‘meant Evil under the sun When Mahler, 20 years her senior, pro- me no murder’ he had effectively mur- John Burnside posed to Alma in 1901 her doubts centred on dered her genius. the dilemma of whether she loved the man So instead she fed the creativity of oth- This Storm himself or ‘the wonderful conductor’ (she ers. Werfel couldn’t decide whether Alma by James Ellroy was lukewarm about his music). She also was his ‘greatest joy’ or his ‘greatest disas- Heinemann, £20, pp. 577 measured him against her current passion, ter’, but there’s no doubt that she forced him the composer Alexander Zemlinsky, asking into becoming a more successful writer. Her When James Ellroy’s L.A. Confiden- herself in her diary: ‘What if Alex were to power over men lay in their belief that she tial appeared in 1990, it introduced us to become famous?’ This ability to grade hus- would make the best of them. She was vain a world of blatant corruption, casual rac- bands and lovers according to a fame and and at times cruel. She was also magnetic, ism and routine police brutality that, creativity rating established a pattern for beautiful and sexy. a year before anybody ever heard of the future. When her marriage to Gropius Kokoschka thought that he couldn’t live Rodney King, might have seemed fan- failed, Alma wondered how she could ever without her. After their affair ended, he com- ciful to some. Set in the early 1950s, the be expected to be interested in ‘art of a mod- missioned a doll-maker to create a life-size novel was a landmark in neo-noir writ- erate talent’. ing, in which historical detail mingled with Mahler’s devastating letter to Alma, Alma recognised her own vulgarity pacy fiction to conjure up a city that was weeks before their marriage, in which he and superficiality, her longing to bask both highly glamorous and rotten to the told her to give up her own ambitions as core. At the same time, Ellroy’s staccato, a composer and accept her position as a in someone else’s reflected glory near-telegraphic prose drove the action ‘loving partner’ supporting his work, has relentlessly onwards, with an urgency that rightly been attacked as a monstrous ban replica of Alma. The finished doll was as beau- seemed designed to swamp not just the on a woman’s artistic expression. Seven- tiful as Alma, even though its breasts and hips reader but also the protagonists them- teen songs by Alma survive in published were stuffed with sawdust. Dressed in the fin- selves with noise, movement and a lower- form and they have won modern plau- est Paris fashions, it accompanied Kokoschka ing, inescapable sense of doom. dits for their gift of melody. Haste writes on rides in his carriage — though he denied For Ellroy, this brutal, sleazy world of music as being at the core of Alma’s claims he took it to the opera. Eventually, was personal: growing up in Los Ange- being; and yet she never returned to com- doused in red wine, the Alma substitute lost its les, he had not only witnessed its violence posing, even after Mahler’s death. For such head at a party — an image, Kokoschka said, first-hand but, at the age of ten, had lost a forceful, independent personality this is of the spent love ‘that no Pygmalion could his mother, Jean, in a rape-homicide case surprising, and it’s all too easy to subscribe, bring to life’. that was eerily reminiscent of the infa-

MA by Research in DICKENS STUDIES October 2019 - September 2020 A one-year, London-based programme of supervised study and research, with For enquiries about the course, or to attend our informative Open Afternoon a stimulating programme of seminars and research workshops, led by Professor at the Museum on Saturday 15th June, contact our Admissions Team on John Drew and Dr Pete Orford, experts in Dickens and 19th-century studies. 01280 820227 or email: [email protected] Teaching takes place at the Charles Dickens Museum (48 Doughty St, WC1) and at the University of Buckingham’s offices in Bloomsbury. The course The course is offered in partnership with the Charles Dickens Museum, London. includes field trips, access to the Museum’s rare collections, and memberships of the International Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society.

Recent speakers have included: • David Edgar • Professor Jenny Hartley • Professor Michael Slater • Lucinda Hawksley • Professor Joanne Shattock www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ma/dickensstudies

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 37 Uni_Bucks_spectator.indd 1 03/06/2019 11:36

Washed-up in LA: This Storm, by James Ellroy, reviewed Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 37 04/06/2019 14:57 BOOKS & ARTS

mous Black Dahlia murder, on which the of strange, sometimes bizarre alliances L.A. Quartet’s first volume was based. and accommodations, as his assembled Three’s a crowd Now, with This Storm, Ellroy redeploys crew of pimps, enforcers, conmen, dealers Andrew Taylor some of his original cast, while adding a and shameless war profiteers pursue their whole new layer of sinister figures, includ- several conflicting goals. Shadowplay ing historical players who, in various ways, Without a doubt, Ellroy aficionados by Joseph O’Connor helped shape the America we know today. will love This Storm. Others may baulk at Harvill Secker, £14.99, pp. 320 (A helpful dramatis personae is included its length and complexity, or at its head- as an appendix, offering some provocative long momentum. Possibly, in an era when ‘I am very, very pleased,’ murmured Queen home truths about the nature and extent many readers complain if they cannot find Victoria in 1895, when she dubbed Henry of corruption that has always haunted likeable or ‘relatable’ characters in Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight. He American political life.) a novel, there will be those who dislike the and Ellen Terry, who so often played oppo- The book opens, in inimitable Ell- fact that everyone here could be described site him, were international celebrities. roy fashion, with a no-holds-barred alco- as morally wanting (to put it kindly). Yet Bram Stoker was their intimate friend and hol and drug-fuelled party at New Year’s surely it is one of the uses of fiction to associate. He managed Irving’s Lyceum Thea- Eve, 1941: as America prepares for explore, if not to rectify, the moral failures tre for 27 years and spent much of his career war, Los Angeles prepares to reap the of any age. At the end of This Storm, a man in their shadow. More than 100 years after his rewards, of which the most lucrative, for is brutally and systematically beaten by death, however, Stoker’s name is almost cer- now, is the routine business of relieving a pair of Los Angeles police officers; at this tainly more widely known than theirs, solely Japanese-American citizens of their valu- point in the proceedings, their superiors because of his most famous creation, Dracula ables before dumping them in internment (who is believed to have been partly modelled camps. Meanwhile, the city is experienc- Aged ten, Ellroy lost his mother in a on his employer). ing an unusually powerful rainstorm that rape-homicide case eerily reminiscent In Shadowplay, Joseph O’Connor focuses instigates a seemingly routine murder on the three-cornered relationship between investigation, after a body is washed out of of the infamous Black Dahlia murder Stoker and the two actors. In terms of struc- the mud in Griffith Park; it also provokes ture, the novel purports to be a collection of a naval officer, named Joan Conville, to have seemingly logical reasons for allowing diary entries, notes, transcripts and fictional- make some unexpected career changes, them to act in this way and they are able to ised fragments put together by Stoker near after she ploughs into a truckful of Mexican do so in the full confidence that there will be the end of his life. workers while driving under the influence. no consequences. At its heart is the rambling, leaking world From these seemingly random events, Similarly, in the closing weeks of 1942, of the Lyceum, both sordid and glamorous. Ellroy guides the reader through a series a 44-year-old public accountant named Stoker creates a hiding place for himself Stanley Beebe was beaten so severely in the attic, where he writes the stories that while in LAPD custody that he died of his bring him little contemporary success; known injuries — yet not only were his attackers as Mina’s Lair, the attic also houses something acquitted, but the authorities even claimed undead in a box filled with earth. In another that Beebe’s wife had murdered him when of the many nods to Dracula, he recruits an he was released into her care after the enigmatic assistant called Jonathan Harker. INTRODUCTORY OFFER: beating. At the time, the LA police chief, Irving, who despises Stoker’s literary one Clemence B. Horrall (who appears in ambitions, is by turns tyrannical, tempera- This Storm and in Ellroy’s previous novel, mental and overwhelmingly charming. Both Subscribe for Perfidia), was widely recognised as irre- men are more than half in love with Ellen deemably corrupt; but it took seven more Terry. Stoker, charged with nervous energy, only £1 an issue years before he was forced out of office, seems constantly on the brink of disaster. He after perjuring himself before a grand jury prowls the streets of London by night, and he ü Weekly delivery of the magazine investigating the Brenda Allen vice ring. has lustful thoughts about young men. Suffra- (Allen also appears in a number of Ell- gettes, Oscar Wilde and Jack the Ripper all ü App access to the new roy’s novels.) have their parts to play, but the novel returns issue from Thursday So it continues, with one sorry tale again and again to the emotionally confused ü Full website access of power and its abuse dovetailing into ménage à trois at its heart. another, and gradually we begin to see the Shadowplay does not set out to be his- patterns, all the ways in which those in high torically accurate. O’Connor takes liberties places protect themselves and their lack- with everything from the language to the eys, at least for as long as they are useful. biographical facts. At one point, for instance, The characters we meet in This Storm may Queen Victoria picnics in Green Park, sur- not be relatable, but, for those of us still rounded by a ‘squadron of Beefeaters in following the news, they are all too often scarlet and black livery, bayonets drawn’, eerily familiar and their methods need and watched by a crowd of her cheering, flag- to be understood. waving subjects. What Ellroy shows us, time and time This is a novel you have to take on its own again, is not only the ugliness of corrup- terms — and the rewards for doing so are tion but also the shame that infects an considerable. Much of it is beautifully writ- www.spectator.co.uk/A346A entire society when the guilty are permit- ten. O’Connor creates a vivid and vigorous 0330 333 0050 quoting A346A ted to go about their business so brazenly world of his own. He makes us believe in his and with such a clear sense of entitlement own versions of Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Auto-renewing payments only. $1 a week in Australia that we no longer recognise what is Bram Stoker, and he makes us care what hap- call 089 362 4134 or go to www.spectator.com.au/T051A right and what is most surely and inargu- pens to them. Who needs facts when fiction ably wrong. like this is on offer?

38 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Nights at the Lyceum: Shadowplay,by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 38 04/06/2019 14:57 Rogue icebergs start appearing at 60º S,

GETTY IMAGES making even the most experienced sailors wary

ly of Tahiti. That would be the South Seas.) ern Ocean is real, even given today’s satel- The cruellest sea But as an ocean it certainly has its charac- lite mapping and communications. Katrina Gulliver teristics. As the nautical saying suggests, much McCann is an environmental historian of this is rough water. For a vessel heading and her focus is our growing knowledge Wild Sea: A History of the south, rogue icebergs start appearing at 60º S. of the ocean and its incorporation into Southern Ocean The cold gales and ocean currents can make our understanding of the world. The first by Joy McCann even the most experienced sailor wary. But tentative European explorations of the Chicago, £21, pp. 258 the risk carries a payoff in speed. Southern Ocean were made in the hope of This is thanks to the world’s long- finding another great continent (not Ant- ‘Below the Forties there is no law, and below est ocean current: the Antarctic circum- arctica). Circumnavigators dipped into the Fifties there is no God.’ Most sailors polar current, which speeds along from it while working their way round Tierra know some version of this saying, refer- west to east with no land masses in the way del Fuego. It was the furthest ocean from ring to the dangerous waters more than 40º to slow or divert it. In the 19th century it Europe, and the last to be charted. south of the equator. was discovered that for ships travelling The scientific possibilities were recog- In Wild Sea, Joy McCann focuses on from Europe to Australasia the quickest nised early — the area features species these waters with a history of the Southern found nowhere else — and the economic Ocean. The ocean surrounds Antarctica, The Southern Ocean, littered with value was not far behind. By the mid-19th its northern bound still open to dispute. In century, whalers and sealers were heading the 1928 first edition of Limits of Oceans wrecks, contains the point on the south to pursue their quarry, chasing them and Seas, the Southern Ocean was deline- globe farthest from any land into the currents. ated by land-based limits: Antarctica to the The Southern Ocean contains marine south, and South America, Africa, Austral- route was to head south after passing the life still being discovered. Today much of ia and Broughton Island, New Zealand to Cape of Good Hope and be carried along it is protected as being part of the Antarc- the north. by the current and high winds of the South- tic; but it is not immune from the environ- More recently, cartographers have tried ern Ocean. mental problems of the rest of the world. to limit its scope. UK officials take the It’s a strategy still used by round-the- Changing ocean temperatures and pollu- position that the Southern Ocean starts at world yacht racers. But heading so far from tion are affecting it in different ways, and 55º S, while their Australian counterparts still any land or hope of rescue is extremely increased tourist traffic to Antarctica cre- measure the limits of the ocean by its contact risky. The Southern Ocean is littered with ates its own pressures. Its wildness and with land masses, meaning that it reaches up wrecks. It contains the oceanic pole of remoteness unfortunately constitutes part to the southern coasts of Australia and inaccessbility (at 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W), the of its appeal. South America. point on the globe farthest from any land McCann intersperses her own observa- When even defining the ocean is diffi- — more than 1,400 nautical miles. That tions of the ocean with the story of its discov- cult, it proves an elusive subject of study. means days of sailing for any rescue ves- ery and exploitation, beginning each chapter The Southern Ocean is one we don’t often sel, although now that few of us travel by with an entry similar to an explorer’s jour- think about: it has no famous ports and its ship it’s easy to forget the scale involved. nal. But she does not foreground herself, cultural influence is diffuse. Some don’t Readers may remember Tony Bullimore’s dropping out of sight subtly to adopt the even realise it has an identity. (I mentioned miraculous rescue from his capsized yacht, authorial voice, creating an effective and dra- it to one friend and he thought immediate- at 52°S 100°E: the remoteness of the South- matic narrative.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 39

The wildest waters in the world Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 39 04/06/2019 14:57 BOOKS & ARTS ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Charlemagne’s nephew Roland — in gold armour, with his horn — is killed at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in 778. The battle is the subject of the great medieval epic, the Chanson de Roland

the migrants whose paths so often intersect erous infiltration of the enemy camp and sui- Myths ancient and modern with his own. cidal last stands. Carolyne Larrington Interwoven with the usual adventures of After the macho posturing of these two travel — late-night drinking in smoke-filled poems, the Nibelunglied offers relief — of Epic Continent: Adventures in the bars, quirky conversations, semi-comic mis- a kind. Jubber focuses on Queen Kriem- Great Stories of Europe haps and often terrible weather — is a more hilt, whose dramatic clash with Queen by Nicholas Jubber profound meditation — indeed much direct Brünhilt over social precedence culmi- John Murray, £20, pp. 322 reportage — on contemporary and histori- nates in a bloodbath in which she takes cal ideas of European identity, the notion of a shockingly active role. Then it’s on to Brit- Six remarkable stories shape this book. homeland and that shining promise of a bet- ain — a little awkwardly, since Beowulf is Tracing the trajectories of the Odyssey to the ter life that our continent seems to extend to set entirely in Scandinavia. Jubber’s adven- Icelandic Njals Saga, via the Kosovo Cycle its neighbours. tures on home turf try to localise the poem’s of heroic poems, the French Chanson de The six epics spark Jubber’s imagina- place of origin, in midland Mercia or the fen Roland, the German Nibelunglied and our tion in different ways. The Odyssey triggers fastnesses of East Anglia. Next, he takes ship own home-grown epic Beowulf, Nicholas thoughts about the bonds between fathers for Denmark, to the reconstructed royal hall Jubber’s new work is at once a travel jour- that the monster Grendel sought to destroy. nal, a meditation on the idea — and ideal — Njals Saga isn’t really an epic By the time he reaches Iceland, sailing on the of Europe, and an exploration of a pivotal notorious Faroese ferry, the Smyril, autumn moment in the author’s own past. Follow- but a tale of local politics and has definitively arrived. Weather and mood ing the 2016 referendum, Jubber sets off to southern Icelandic sheep farmers have turned. the Greek island of Chios, perhaps Homer’s Iceland’s geothermal landscapes are birthplace, and now at the front line of the and sons and the loss of his own father. The strikingly described, but Jubber himself runs Mediterranean migrant crisis. After a month Kosovo Cycle, least known of the six perhaps, somewhat out of steam here. As he admits, volunteering in a refugee camp he works his is embedded in a series of encounters with Njáls Saga, wonderful though it is, isn’t really way west and northwards until he comes to Kosovans, Serbs and Bosnians, each of whom an epic, but rather a tale of local politics and rest on the turf roof of a farmhouse in south- has their own disquieting story to tell about southern Icelandic sheep farmers. The trans- ern Iceland. the ways in which, 20 years after the last Bal- lation cited is 150 years old, yielding some The prose is colourful and vigorous; kan war, the 14th-century battle of Kosovo unfamiliar character names and archaic dia- landscape is frequently described through Field still resonates with nationalist aspira- logue; contemporary Icelanders’ names too dynamic verbs and unusual similes. So in tions and anxieties. are often mangled. Serbia: ‘Fast-moving streams played glis- Great epics do not simply relate past Nevertheless, these chapters not only sandos on the shallow beds, and precipi- stories, but rather, disturbingly, continue to recount the highlights of two of the most tous meadows dangled above us, like rags give shape to dangerously powerful emo- important sagas — Laxdæla Saga has an pinned to the sky by their sheep.’ Jubber’s tions. Reminding us of Islam’s long history intertextual connection with the Nibe- advance from John Murray can’t have been in Europe, both the Kosovan poems and the lungenlied story, but as a bonus, they also over-generous; he sleeps rough, on trains Chanson de Roland feature invading Muslim consider the Poetic Edda, the great anthol- and in doorways, hoarding his resources like enemies; the Christians respond with treach- ogy of mythological and heroic poetry

40 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

From the Odyssey to Njals Saga: a voyage round the great myths Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 40 04/06/2019 14:57 written down in Iceland around 1270 and babies she initially calls A and B each weigh which has a better claim to engagement with less than a bag of sugar. Too fragile for The lust of kings epic themes. clothes, but with their ‘fine leaf-veining’ vis- Diana Hendry Jubber heads to the remote north-east to ible beneath translucent skin, they are men- visit the island’s newest literary monument, aced by their immaturity, by the flu virus Lux the Arctic Henge, still under construction. season and by endless interventions that can by Elizabeth Cook This huge stone circle records the long list go wrong. What can make the difference to Scribe, £16.99, pp. 403 of dwarf-names that appears in the Edda’s a premature baby is the milk its moth- very first poem, ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’. er must express eight to ten times every The novel is a wonderfully commodious The Edda also offers its own distinctive ver- 24 hours. Still recovering from abdominal creature. One might wish they made trousers sion of the heroic legends about Sigurðr the surgery, Segal becomes one of a number of like it, for it can stretch or shrink to accom- dragon-slayer and his fierce wife Guðrún, the such mothers, attached to a breast pump and modate almost anything, from Ali Smith’s Northern reflex of Kriemhilt. These refigure experiencing the accelerated intimacies of Spring (part story, part polemic) to Max Por- the Nibelungenlied material in a mode that is medical trauma. ter’s prose-poem/fable, Lanny. Then there’s highly critical of the epic ideals of honour and What these new mothers call ‘the milking the current vogue for re-tellings: Margaret vengeance, increasingly placed under pres- shed’ is a novel topos, described as ‘a place, Atwood’s version of The Tempest and Pat sure throughout the book. Iceland’s relative a state, of grace’. Friendship, jokes, fanta- Barker’s feminist look at the Iliad. Penguin isolation from the European mainland may sies of arranged marriages between their even has a ‘Modern Retellings Book List’, have safeguarded the Edda as a unique tes- babies and sympathy transcend class, race, which includes Alexander McCall Smith’s tament to our likely pre-Christian Germanic status and education. I have long thought reworking of Emma. (Why would you?) heritage, but it could not prevent the Nazis Elizabeth Cook was ahead of the game from harnessing these poems for propaganda, Segal’s gentle humour makes every with her Achilles in 2001. Her latest book, claiming them as a repository of ideal Lux, four times as long, having been ‘slow in Aryan heroism. setback and advance more affecting the making’, is a kind of meditative triptych From this bleak point, at the very edge during the 56 days of struggle (‘Ark’, ‘Prophet’, ‘Poet’) rooted in the tale of of Europe, it’s time to turn for home. Jub- David and Bathsheba. The story has every- ber’s journeying has indeed been epic, in that childbirth is the female equivalent thing a novelist could wish for in its themes scale and in ambition. In this thoughtful of the battlefield, and Segal’s account of of power, lust, love, faith and conscience. travelogue he has woven together colour- how people with nothing much in common ‘Ark’ introduces us to the children’s ful ancient and modern threads into a Euro- are bound together by trauma and hope David, the shepherd boy who kills the giant pean tapestry that combines the sombre and underlines this. In this place, fear of men- Goliath with a single stone from his sling. the sparkling. tal or physical impairment shrivel before Then he becomes king, lusts after Bathshe- the fear of death. The privileged north Lon- ba (who in turn becomes pregnant) and very don world she has described so elegantly in nastily arranges for her husband to be killed An agonising vigil The Innocents and The Awkward Age can by sending him back to the war. never look the same again. In ‘Prophet’, David is brought to recog- Amanda Craig Segal’s gentle humour and eye for char- nise the abuse of power that has led him to acter are two of the most admirable aspects sin against Yahweh. The prophet Nathan Mother Ship of her book and make every setback and foretells that Bathsheba’s child will die as a by Francesca Segal advance more affecting during the 56 days result of David’s dishonouring of Yahweh. Chatto, £14.99, pp. 288 of struggle. Some useful practical informa- As penance, David spends seven days fast- tion is woven into her account as Celeste and ing and meditating and emerges wiser, kind- Memoirs about giving birth, a subject once Raffaela — as A and B eventually become er and with psalms to sing. shrouded in mystery, have become so pop- — move in and out of crisis, ‘handled like Primarily a poet, Cook writes with ular that another may seem otiose. We precious relics’, but needing to be left every impressive empathy for David. There is both are all produced in variations of anxiety, day by their agonised mother. a painterly eye and a physicality about her pain and delight: what is the point of labour- The state provision of services that would, prose. Michael Symmons Roberts’s endorse- ing labour? in other continents, cost many thousands of ment of Lux rightly focuses on its ‘striking Two years ago, the novelist Francesca pounds is something that, as an American, portrayal of religious belief under pressure’. Segal gave birth to twins ten weeks prema- Segal is in awe of. From beanbag hands that The third part leaps forward to the spring turely. Her account of their struggle to sur- retail at $99 a pair, donated free as effective of 1528 and to the poet Thomas Wyatt. vive in the neo-natal units of two London comforters, to the overworked but compas- Henry VIII’s desire for Anne Boleyn can be hospitals could be mawkish, banal and of no sionate nurses and doctors, these are some compared to David’s for Bathsheba. Henry interest to anyone save those who have expe- of the miracles which we take for granted. acquires rich Flemish tapestries depicting rienced a similar ordeal. That it is, in fact, as Mother Ship is a love letter to the NHS, as the early lovers, and arranges a dramat- gripping as a thriller and as moving as a love much as to the babies and women of the ic pageant to exhibit them, witnessed by story is testament to her exquisite writing milking shed. Wyatt. The poet is familiar with the story and deep humanity. Of the 60,000 premature babies born and the psalms, and David’s seven songs of Her narrative moves from the joyful and annually, Segal tells us, 85 per cent are (as penitence have ‘long inhabited him’. He has humorous (‘we shared a new and urgent my own son was) ‘moderate to late pre- time while in the Tower to remember and interest in anchovies and cottage cheese,’ term’. Her twins were squarely in the ‘very ‘English’ them — making them, one critic she says of the developing twins inside her) preterm’ box. If you have had any experi- has said, penitential in matter and a pen- to the appalling: finding herself bleeding in ence of a traumatic birth, be warned: you ance for the reader. The connection between the hospital loo, she tries to clean up the will burst into tears at what happens here. David and Wyatt seems to me a bit precari- mess before pulling the emergency cord. But Segal’s book, like the best war stories, ous (Cook did the same with Achilles, link- Her introduction to motherhood feels ‘not has a happy ending — albeit one that does ing him to Keats). Wyatt’s falcon is depicted like a birth but an evisceration’. not forget the tiny ‘fallen soldier’ who was on the cover, symbolising both freedom Unable to be cuddled or touched, the unable to win through. and light.

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My agonising vigil over my twins’ fight for life Books_08 June 2019_The Spectator 41 04/06/2019 14:57 BOOKS & ARTS

ARTS Ring without the bling Richard Bratby on the company that broke the mould for summer opera

t Longborough Festival Opera, there’s no more eloquent an answer than moment — as soon as she mentioned what Richard Wagner is on the roof. attending a performance for yourself. The it was, it was a “yes” from me. Then the ter- ALiterally: his statue stands on top spirit of the place wells up from Graham’s ror of the undertaking catches up with you of the little pink opera house, survey- boyish devotion to Wagner, coupled to his — pretty quickly, but in the best way. I mean, ing the Evenlode valley from beneath a wife Lizzie’s organisational genius. A sense what a gift.’ stone beret. He’s not alone, mind. A fig- of shared, incredulous delight to be doing For some directors that terror would ure of Mozart looks up indignantly. On this at all pours out of everyone you talk to: only be intensified by the bare-bones prac- the other side of the pediment stands tuba players, conductors or the ladies serv- ticalities of Longborough’s 500-seat theatre. Verdi, arms folded, glowering huff- ing the interval tea. When you’re working in a former chicken ily at the floor. But Wagner is on top: Second time round it’s also a question shed — even one with a Bayreuth-sized a permanent reminder that this is the com- of how. Surprisingly, direction of the whole orchestra pit — you can’t simply install pany that took on the greatest musical-dra- massive project has been handed to Amy a three-storey spiral of liquid fire, as Warner matic challenge in the operatic universe, did at Covent Garden. Lane has embraced and in 2013 staged a full production of Der LFO staged a complete Ring cycle Longborough’s animating principle: that Ring des Nibelungen in a converted barn. in a former chicken shed – and is practical obstacles spur creativity. ‘The And next week, they’re going to start about to do it all over again limitations of the stage I found completely all over again. The 2019 Festival opens with appealing,’ she says. Das Rheingold, with a full cycle scheduled Lane, a newcomer to Longborough. But ‘Even the train journey from London for 2023, the year that the company’s irre- Lane worked as associate director on suc- to Moreton-in-Marsh: you leave the city pressible founder Martin Graham turns 80. cessive revivals of Keith Warner’s Royal behind, the air changes and the landscape It’s a brand-new production: LFO isn’t the Opera Ring, and has been formulating her changes and you suddenly have a horizon. kind of outfit that can afford to maintain own plans for nearly a decade. That’s pretty Wagnerian on its own. And warehouses full of mothballed sets. To cre- ‘In 2012, when we’d just finished the then you go into the theatre: there are no ate a new Ring from scratch less than a dec- cycle at Covent Garden, my next job was in wings, you can’t fly anything and I just fell in ade after the previous production — when Paris working on a musical. I had to get Wag- love with it because it removes any form of the challenge of mounting a single Ring has ner out of my system, so I spent my spare trappings. That is why a text-driven, score- been known to break national opera com- time designing what I thought my ideal Ring driven Ring cycle sits perfectly here — there panies — is pretty unprecedented. And cycle would be, if someone ever asked me. isn’t much room for trickery. I’m thrilled since LFO has little left to prove (Michael I never thought in a million years that any- with our designs: we have a very clean, clear Tanner called its 2017 production of Tristan body would ask me. Then I got a phone call statement space. I believe we’ve found und Isolde ‘one of the most exalting expe- from Lizzie Graham saying, “Would you like a way of travelling through all of Wagner’s riences I have had in the opera house’), to discuss some Wagner?” And she dropped worlds that Longborough won’t have seen you might be tempted to ask why. To which the Ring cycle on the table. That was quite a before, and which allows the story to live.’

42 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Arts_08 June 2019_The Spectator 42 05/06/2019 11:16 MATTHEW WILLIAMS-ELLIS

Richard Wagner stands on top of the little pink opera house at Longborough, flanked by Mozart and Verdi

Such innovation doesn’t sit entirely eas- think that’s who we are,’ says Polly. ‘It’s not es and assuming that no door is locked until ily with the stereotype of summer opera in a grand country house, it’s a new-build in a it’s been given a vigorous shove. The Gra- the UK — a world of picnics and novelty field, and next to it is an agricultural barn hams’s determination to trust their artists cummerbunds, where the prospect of artis- that was converted into a theatre. That’s the has led to misfires: a grim sci-fi Fidelio, and tic change is about as welcome as wasps extent of any kind of grand estate. All that’s a 2015 Tristan in which body-stockinged on a Fortnum’s vol-au-vent. Longborough, there is an amazing view and the determi- dancers simulated sex during the Act Two built from the ground up over three stren- nation to create great work.’ Martin, with love duet. uous decades, has never really been like his impromtu pre-show speeches, is cer- Other gambles have paid off tenfold. that. Polly Graham — Martin and Lizzie’s tainly not your average châtelain. (‘Tell Longborough’s long-serving music direc- daughter, who’s worked as a staff director tor Anthony Negus — who worked with at Welsh National Opera and became artis- Such innovation doesn’t sit entirely Rudolf Kempe at Bayreuth, and has welded tic director of the family firm last year — easily with the world of picnics and the LFO orchestra into an instrument of for- has described the ‘tropes of country house novelty cummerbunds midable passion and power — spent much opera’ as ‘damaging’, and you can see her of his career in staff roles until the Grahams point. Longborough’s hillside setting is The Spectator that I was a dodgy builder,’ gave him that first Ring. He’s the element of almost inappropriately pretty. The orches- he insists — his first career was as a proper- continuity in this new cycle. ‘We are obvious- tra’s brass section plays gigs in the village ty developer.) As LFO moves from its early ly entering a new period of development,’ he pub, and you might spot the general man- years as upstart overachiever, Polly aims to says. ‘But it’s important to build upon what ager scooping up a stray chicken five min- broaden repertoire and (the real challenge) we’ve achieved already, and not do what utes before curtain-up. (Full disclosure: I access; a production of Janacek’s Cunning they do so often in Germany, when a whole made a smallish donation to LFO this year Little Vixen next season will involve size- team moves out of a theatre, leaving nothing because, like Klingsor’s garden in Parsifal, able community participation. behind. This is definitely going to be some- it’s all just so damnably seductive.) And perhaps, two Ring cycles in, it’s thing new — the most technically ambitious But the fact remains: if your core busi- tempting to see LFO’s achievement as Wagner we’ve ever done.’ ness is serving bubbly to the green welly set, something established, rather than a contin- you don’t stage a Ring cycle. ‘I really don’t uous process of taking risks, backing hunch- Das Rheingold is in rep until 11 June.

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Arts_08 June 2019_The Spectator 43 05/06/2019 11:16 BOOKS & ARTS

Accidental lined with leaking pipes. Then, just when hero: one of you think it can’t get any worse, the sudden the Chernobyl plunge into total blackness as their crappy liquidators Soviet-issue torches all fail… He’s good on his classic movie tropes, is Mazin. Besides Spartacus, that scene very effectively invokes the gnawing ten- sion and jump-cut fear — and labyrinthine pipework — of Alien. As Mazin said at a pre-launch conference: ‘Chernobyl will be a horror movie, it will be a war movie, it will be a political thriller and a courtroom drama’ — and that’s exactly what it is. To his list I’d add ‘reluctant buddy movie’, as seen in the growing cameraderie between nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) and Soviet apparatchik Boris Shcherbina (Stel- lan Skarsgard) as they find themselves reluc- tantly embroiled in the most important and last (because of the fatal radiation exposure) mission of their lives. Yes, it’s a compendium of clichés: if you want to ruin Chernobyl for yourself, have a look at the website ‘TV tropes’, which takes it brutally apart: ‘Bambification’, ‘Bothering by the Book’, ‘Everybody Smokes’, ‘Kind- hearted Cat Lover’, ‘Naked People Are Funny’… Not without reason, though, Cher- nobyl has now topped the film and TV data- base IMDB’s greatest shows ever charts with a record rating of 9.7. Mazin has shaped the historical narrative to create a miniseries that pushes all the viewer’s emotional buttons. But what Chernobyl doesn’t mention — for why alleviate the relentless depres- sion? — is that those three doomed volun- teers (Boris Baranov, Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov) actually survived for years after the incident and that two of them are tion to go with the scary myth rather than still alive. Similarly, the Soviet general, Pika- Television the more nuanced truth? lov, we see driving towards the burning core Blast from the past But scriptwriter Craig Mazin has found a because it is so dangerous he won’t order his cunning line between the two, at once conjur- soldiers to do it died in 2003 at the age of 78. James Delingpole ing up all the apocalyptic horror of a nuclear- Does it matter that the helicopter didn’t reactor explosion and its aftermath, while yet really crash because the crew had suddenly How many people do you think died at Cher- largely accepting that the facts of the story been zapped by radiation? Or that the expert nobyl? 10,000? 50,000? 300,000? The correct are so strange and horrible and disturbing nuclear technician played by Emily Watson answer, according to the never knowingly that they really need little embellishment. never existed but is a composite character understated World Health Organisation A good example of this is the Spartacus there, presumably, to add female cast inter- — in a thorough report released nearly 20 moment at the end of episode two, where est and to shoehorn in that vital ‘plucky, out- years after the 1986 explosion — was ‘fewer the Soviet bosses demand that three vol- spoken female in a sea of useless, hidebound than 50’. unteers undertake a suicide mission for men’ trope? Ah, but what about all the mutant babies the salvation of the Motherland: they must Mostly, I don’t think it does. This is who ended up with two heads and webbed enter the melting reactor and drain the historical drama, not documentary. And feet? What about the inevitable epidemic water in order to avert a second explosion I think Mazin was right to take liberties in of cancers? Well, yes, it’s true that 4,000 that will surely kill millions. But the radia- order to reach the deeper emotional truth. more cases of thyroid cancer were loosely tion to which they will be exposed will be so To take another example, the heartbreak- attributable to Chernobyl, mainly in chil- great that they will never survive. ing rounding up and killing of all the aban- dren and adolescents. But the survival rate It makes for a powerful scene: a room- doned pets in episode four was handled was 99 per cent. ful of bolshie, more-than-my-job’s-worth by professional exterminators, not raw Because I’ve long been familiar with workers not daring to meet one another’s squaddies. But that would have denied us these facts — mainly as an antidote to all eyes as the request goes out. One man rais- the much more satisfying dramatic arc: the those lefties, like the late historian Tony ing his hand, then another, and another: an innocent volunteer drawn into the compa- Judt, who fell for the green anti-nuclear exchange of glances — ‘So it’s us three?’ ny of hard-drinking yet tender Afghan war propaganda that many people still believe they seem to say. The donning of the pitiful- veterans; the gang of oh-so-sweet doggies — I was initially very wary of Chernobyl ly inadequate protective suits. The Geiger he’s required to kill in the apartment; the (Sky Atlantic/HBO, Tuesdays). How could counter crackling manically as they shuffle wiser, dirtier, more brutalised man-come- any fictionalised version resist the tempta- and slosh deeper into the flooded basement, of-age we see at the end of that first day.

44 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Arts_08 June 2019_The Spectator 44 05/06/2019 11:16 not above using the conventions of farce. Theatre He deploys the ‘amorous clinch witnessed Radio Poetic and profound by shocked innocents’ device no fewer than She hasn’t stopped three times. Matthew Broderick delivers Lloyd Evans a faultless performance as the low-rent aca- dancing yet demic who compensates for his professional Kate Chisholm The Starry Messenger failings by taking up with a younger woman. Wyndham’s Theatre, until 10 August He knows it’s wrong, he does it anyway, and it doesn’t help. Something poetic and pro- It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year- Rutherford and Son found underlies this play. A flawed human old on the radio. You’re even less likely to Lyttelton Theatre, in rep until 3 August tries to explain the mysteries of the cosmos hear one so clear in thought, so spirited and to his uncomprehending tribe and yet he full of enthusiasm for life. Eileen Kramer’s Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote the movie judges himself by the pettiest of all earthly voice crackles with age, with the years she Manchester by the Sea, shapes his work from indicators: success. has lived, but from what she says, and the loss, disillusionment, small-mindedness, Rutherford and Son is a brilliant proto- energetic way she says it, she could be at least hesitation and superficiality, all the forget- feminist drama by Githa Sowerby (1876– 30 years younger. ‘I don’t know how long table detritus of life. The Starry Messenger 1970) which opened at the Royal Court in I will go on living,’ she says, but she’s still is about Mark, a disappointed astronomer 1912 and transferred to the West End and excited by the present: ‘There’s so much aged 52, who gives public lectures at a city New York. Not many of the Royal Court’s going on. I’m living in that period when a lot planetarium. He loves his subject even current crop of playwrights are likely to is being discovered about everything.’ though it let him down and every week he repeat that feat. Kramer is a dancer, artist, performer, tackles the daft questions of his pupils with The setting is a glassworks in the north- famed in Australia for her expressive, idi- superhuman patience. east run by ‘the guvnor’, Rutherford, a bril- omatic style of movement, and she’s still The same two pests always raise their liant businessman whose touch has deserted choreographing new works, although dif- hands. One is a burly misanthrope who dis- him. His son, John, was sent to Harrow to ficulties with balance have meant she has believes all experts, the other is a high-flying become a gent but the upper crust sneered only just given up joining the dancers on oddball who craves attention. Mark starts at him because he said ‘thank you’ to serv- stage. In Art of Now: Breath of Life on a slow-burn affair with Angela, a single mum ants. John is a talented chemist who has dis- Radio 4 (produced by Eleanor McDow- who needs a role model for her nine-year covered a formula that may save the firm all) Kramer recalls how, aged 22, she went old son: an expert on the stars and inter- from bankruptcy but he demands that his to see a performance by the Bodenwieser planetary travel is just the ticket. Back at father pay the full market price. dance group and experienced a moment home Mark is cared for by a kindly wife who Rutherford refuses and tries to obtain of recognition. Next day she went to watch the formula by subterfuge. Other siblings Its rhythm is attuned to the heartbeat vie for attention. Dick is a wet curate who Kramer remembers being of the everyday, like the broken tap wants to become a preacher in Blackpool. taught to do the twist by that beats a tattoo in the sink Janet, unmarried at 36, is covertly entan- Louis Armstrong gled with Martin, the clerk of works, but prattles about sofa beds and dry cleaning. when Rutherford learns of their affair he them in rehearsal and then asked Madame In the basement lurks a teenage boy miser- evicts her from his house. Martin is no bet- Bodenwieser if she could join the compa- ably thrashing at an amplified guitar. ter. He’s happy to tryst with her on the sly ny. ‘Life with her opened up your feelings,’ Lonergan’s amazingly naturalistic dia- but when their dalliance becomes pub- says Kramer. ‘The importance of feeling, logue captures the beating essence of every lic knowledge his position is threatened. the importance of expressing feelings.’ human being he creates. And his walk-on Grubbing two shillings from his pocket, he Bodenwieser had been forced to leave characters are as vivid and quirky as the cen- sends her packing. Vienna on the last train to Paris after the tral figures. Angela nurses an old man whose This fascinating play blazes with a quiet invasion by the Nazis; her husband, a thea- cancer is in remission. ‘I preferred you when fury. Sowerby wanted to castigate Ruther- tre producer, had been arrested and died you were dying,’ says his prickly daughter. ford and Martin for their mistreatment of in a concentration camp. Kramer says of Mark’s son, who is never seen, is revealed Janet but she would have known that the the experience of first meeting her, of the to be more than just an angry little maniac. auditorium at the Royal Court would be full impact she had: ‘You have all this in you, He’s a decent, courteous lad in need of emo- of Rutherfords and Martins. There would and someone comes along and shows you tional nourishment. At the close of Act One, have been Janets in attendance as well but how to express it in dance.’ Mark’s chief tormentor lingers after class to they wouldn’t have paid for their tickets. After Bodenwieser died, Kramer left deliver a critique of the lecture course and Polly Findlay’s fine production includes Australia and went to live in Paris where to award Mark grades — ‘poor’, ‘adequate’ wailing singers (somewhat superfluous) and she worked as an artist’s model, at the same and so on — for various sub-disciplines of a dark, oaky Edwardian sitting room with time as Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends the teaching profession. Mark endures this the lights set to ‘battery-save’ mode. The were having their existential conversations insolent cross-examination in silence and gloom may be accurate but it does little to at the Café de Flore. She remembers going then bids his pupil farewell. He’s left alone in cheer the spirits. to a ballroom where Louis Armstrong was the lecture room. ‘Fuck you,’ he says, then he Roger Allam, concealed behind a mon- playing and being taught how to do the frowns and swipes a palm sideways to erase strous beard like a petrified cataract, brings twist by him. Kramer’s gift for life, her abil- the expletive from the universe. touches of cordiality and even sweetness ity to tap into the essence of what really From such tiny threads, the rich tapes- to Rutherford. Justine Mitchell is a grace- matters, shone through a programme that try of this show is woven. Some have carped ful and deadly earnest Janet, and Sam was skilfully, vividly produced. We could at the lack of pace. But that’s the point. Its Troughton is wonderful as the strutting feel Kramer’s excitement as she explained rhythm is attuned to the heartbeat of the buffoon John, who thinks he’s hit the jack- that feeling of waiting in the wings and tak- everyday, like the broken tap that beats pot. Word of warning: everyone talks like ing in her first breath as the music begins. a tattoo in the sink. And although Loner- Gazza. Non-native Brits may need to do The dance, she says, begins with that intake gan is a meticulous documentary realist he’s some homework in advance. of breath. She was probably rather a char-

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Arts_08 June 2019_The Spectator 45 05/06/2019 11:16 BOOKS & ARTS

acter when in her prime but has weathered into someone quite remarkable. ‘You can Exhibitions fall in love at 80,’ she says, speaking from The possibilities of paint experience. ‘As a listener how should you prepare Martin Gayford yourself for this?’ asked Sean Shibe at the end of the first programme of his new Sun- Frank Bowling day-night series for Radio 3, Sean Shibe’s Tate Britain, until 26 August Guitar Zone (produced by Sarah Devon- ald). He began conventionally enough with Lee Krasner: Living Colour John Williams and Julian Bream, a bit of Barbican Art Gallery, until 1 September Rodrigo’s famous concerto and the notoriously difficult tremolo study by Francisco ‘The possibilities of paint,’ Frank Bowling has Tarrega. But then, a classical guitarist him- observed, ‘are endless.’ The superb career ret- self, he admitted to being sometimes daunt- rospective of his work at Tate Britain demon- ed by the range of effects and extended strates as no words could that he is correct, techniques available to electric guitarists. and that the obituaries of this perennial medi- To prove his point he gave us the last three um — so often declared moribund or defunct minutes of Tristan Murail’s ‘Vampyr!’. I lis- — are completely wrong. This presents more tened to a preview first thing one morning than half a century’s virtuoso exploration of and was jolted awake by the ear-splitting what pigment on canvas can achieve. chords — not in a bad way. Murail is a clas- After his first decade of work, Bowl- sical composer who studied under Olivier ing (born 1934) became what is called an Messiaen in Paris but ‘Vampyr!’ (written in abstract artist. But that is a vague and unsat- 1984) sounds like Jimi Hendrix on speed. isfactory category. His early, figurative pic- In just an hour Shibe took us through tures such as ‘Cover Girl’ (1966) could be seven centuries and the great diversity of labelled ‘pop’. It features an image of a Jap- guitar music. He’s chatty but also knowled- anese supermodel garnered from the front gable, assured but also personable, drawing of the Observer colour supplement — plus us in and making a connection as he shares a very different silkscreened photograph of his enthusiasm. Rodrigo, he says, never really understood the guitar, in spite of the popu- The ten-foot high multi-hued larity of his Concierto de Aranjuez. The most waterfall has something of the difficult passages to play, requiring hours of sublimity of a late Turner practice, are buried beneath the orchestral sound because the guitar has so little carry- a shop in New Amsterdam, Guyana, which ing power. Shibe also gave us the source of was the artist’s childhood home. that universal earworm, the Nokia ringtone, In other respects, however, the picture which comes in the middle of a light, innocu- — like all good ‘figurative’ paintings — is ous tune by Tarrega written in 1902. When- quite abstract, mixing sharply edged stripes ever a guitarist plays ‘Gran Vals’, says Shibe, and soft, cloud-like patches of colour. Later there’s always a laugh or ripple of applause on, after he had ostensibly crossed the fron- from the audience at that moment when tier into abstraction, Bowling’s pictures still those few notes resonate. continued to be powerfully evocative of the Somehow PM on Radio 4 has managed physical world. ‘Towards Crab Island’ (1983) to rise above the political shenanigans and has the feel of a waterland by Monet. The retain a sense of balance and normal living Great Thames series from the late 1980s, while also developing several new strands painted in a Docklands studio, suggests the ‘Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and that run through the daily editions creat- ooze and ripple of the river nearby. From Brighton’, 2017, by Frank Bowling ing a more magazine-y, less political feel. The ten-foot high multi-hued waterfall of Evan Davis, who presents, can incorpo- ‘Aston’s Plunge’ (2011) has something of the rate the lighter side of life without sound- sublimity of a late Turner (though in a much York of Andy Warhol and Barnett Newman. ing embarrassed or off-kilter while the tone funkier vein). Bowling is aware of his great I can’t think of another artist who has inhab- is always intelligent without being off-put- predecessors. He has talked about the chal- ited all three of these environments: Car- ting. Planet Puffin, for instance (designed lenge of working in London, ‘Turner’s town’. ibbean heat, foggy London and modernist as a podcast but none the worse for that), A touch of Constable is visible too, side by Manhattan. Bowling’s majestic ‘map’ paint- takes us every few days to the Isle of May side with Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. ings from around 1970, in which the outlines in the Firth of Forth to report on how the Pairing the Bowling show with Van Gogh of the continents of Africa and South Amer- puffins are doing. It’s a remarkable place to in Britain, downstairs at Tate Britain, is unex- ica emerge faintly from sumptuous oceans of see seabirds and the puffins are not just an pectedly apt. Of course, the Dutch master colour, perhaps hint at his personal Odyssey. extraordinary example of endeavour and made the journey from the cool north to the Another link with Van Gogh is that both determination but also a barometer of how hot colourful south and dreamed of going he and Bowling are enthralled by the possi- our seas are doing. further, to the tropics. Bowling journeyed bilities of paint: the rich glutinous substance Last week Emily Knight and Becky in the opposite direction, sailing from what itself in all its variations of thickness and thin- Ripley were up to their elbows down puf- was then British Guiana to Britain, where he ness, transparency and opacity. At various fin burrows, looking to see whether an egg arrived in 1953. times Bowling has — in addition to apply- had been laid. It took us a long way from What makes his trajectory unique, how- ing the stuff in a conventional manner with Westminster. ever, is that he then moved on to the New a brush — thrown it, flicked it like sea spray,

46 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Arts_08 June 2019_The Spectator 46 05/06/2019 11:16 COURTESY FRANK BOWLING AND HALES GALLERY , ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES AND MARC SELWYN FINE ART ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2019 going out of style. Krasner (1908–84) found The Office, so she knows of what she speaks, herself as a gestural abstract expressionist and she also stars as Molly. Molly works in exactly when that idiom was being replaced. a chemical plant but is desperate to break Krasner was probably both helped into comedy and through convoluted plot and hindered by being married to Jack- shenanigans that would suffer more in the son Pollock, one of the greatest innovators retelling than they even did in the watching, in 20th-century painting. When they met, she ends up working for Katherine Newbury she was the more senior artist. But it was (Thompson — Kaling wrote this part specifi- Pollock who made the inspired leap into cally for her). Newbury has been a titan of abstract expressionism: his flying pigment television for the past decade but her audi- free, rhythmic and pulsing all over the can- ence has fallen off a cliff and the new boss of vas. It took Krasner ten years to assimilate the network (Amy Ryan) wants to replace this revolution. She described how she was her with a young male dude. Newbury has completely blocked, unable to produce any- short-cropped hair and a fabulous wardrobe thing but ‘grey slabs’. When she did break of mannish clothes and veers away from through, it was by first physically cutting up jokes about abortion or menopause. The sug- her own work, then recycling it in the form gestion is that she has lost touch with herself of collage — thus forcing looseness and as a woman, and who she really is. Will Molly freedom on herself. put her back in touch? Seriously, you have to In 1956 Krasner was just getting going, ask? Although we mustn’t hold that against when Pollock was killed in a car crash. Grief- it. You would, if it weren’t funny enough, but stricken, afflicted with chronic insomnia and generally it is. working in Pollock’s old studio, she battled Newbury’s writers’ room is staffed on. A few years later she produced her mas- entirely by white men, and at the first writ- terpieces — ‘Polar Stampede’ (1960), for ers’ meeting, where Molly is asked for the example, and ‘Another Storm’ (1963) — pow- soup, there is no seat for her, so she has to sit erful pictures, suggestive of a wild sea break- on an upturned trash can and then proceeds ing over rocks, throwing up plumes of spray. By that date they looked a little passé to A woman-centred comedy that the art world of the day. But what seemed cut- satirises the white male stronghold ting-edge in 1960 is now irrelevant. Today’s on comedy? Count me in! newspapers, it is often said, are the first draft of history. In the same way, contemporary to do that female apologetic thing: ‘It’s more judgments are only an early draft of art his- comfortable than a chair!’ (I laughed.) And tory — and equally subject to being revised. she is not just a woman; she’s also a brown Each of these exhibitions does just that. woman. ‘I wish I was a woman of colour so I could get any job,’ hisses one of the writ- Frank Bowling’s work is also on show at ers. ‘We’ve talked about this. You can’t say Hales Gallery until 22 June. that,’ hisses one of the others, sadly. Poor fel- las. You really feel for them… not. Look, some of the jokes don’t quite land, Cinema the turnaround of the chat show is rather lame, and there is a subplot to do with New- More, please bury’s marriage that doesn’t quite come off. Deborah Ross Still, her husband is played by a scene-steal- ing John Lithgow, whose character is a professor emeritus somewhere or other but, as Late Night he explains to Molly, ‘Emeritus’ isn’t that big ‘Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and 15, Nationwide a deal. ‘It’s what happens when you’re not From Brighton’, 2017, by Frank Bowling dead yet but they don’t want you to come Late Night is a comedy starring Emma in.’ (I laughed.) There are plenty of cracking and used it to stain his surfaces in translu- Thompson as a chat-show host in America lines, in fact, as when Newbury is told to smile cent veils. The zinging red, blue and yellow whose ratings are in decline and who hires for the press: ‘Katherine, use the same fake of ‘Tony’s Anvil’ (1975), gyrating wildly like her first female writer. This is Molly, who is smile you used when you lost the Emmy to the graph of an earthquake, were produced welcomed by the bank of male writers, not. John Oliver.’ by controlled pouring. They initially mistake her for someone who So the meat is strong, and Thompson is has come to take their food orders and greet to this film what Meryl Streep was to The Bowling inhabited Caribbean her with: ‘I’ll have the soup.’ So it’s that. And Devil Wears Prada. Her character can be heat, foggy London and then it’s quite a lot more of that, one way fabulously cruel, but is never one-dimen- modernist Manhattan or another. And, you know, good. A wom- sional, as Thompson brings real heft. At one an-centred comedy that satirises the white point she says, desperately: ‘They’re taking Master though he clearly is, Bowling has male stronghold on comedy? Count me in! my show away and I don’t know what to been neglected for prolonged periods. The And it does have its terrific moments, plus do. I’m a woman in Hollywood in her fif- work of Lee Krasner, another important, Thompson is absolutely superb, and clearly ties, what am I going to do?’ And you prop- long-overlooked abstract painter, is on show having a ball. erly feel it. So, while this isn’t flawless, it at the Barbican. In both cases, vagaries of art Directed by Nisha Ganatra, the film is is a start, and it has verve and energy and fashion have been partly to blame. Bowling written by Mindy Kaling, who was the only pathos and quite a few white, entitled men turned to abstract painting just as it was female writer on the American version of running scared. More, please.

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Arts_08 June 2019_The Spectator 47 05/06/2019 11:16 BOOKS & ARTS

broker Kecal — a beady-eyed operator in Opera brown and white brogues whose glorious, the listener Sunny delight all-engulfing bass tone was one of the even- Morrissey: California Son ing’s many sonic treats. His final defeat felt Richard Bratby very temporary, while Jenik’s reunion with his estranged father supplied just enough The Bartered Bride real emotion to convince you that it all mat- Garsington Opera, in rep until 30 June tered (The Bartered Bride isn’t an opera that admits very much darkness). Van Steen kept Don Giovanni it skipping along; Lara Marie Müller as the Garsington Opera, in rep until 21 July circus girl Esmeralda was as nimble in her upper register as she was on her pins, and So it’s the start of the summer opera season by the end — with lovers united, acrobats at Wormsley and we’re sitting there in even- stacked four high and the audience yelling ing dress in the middle of the Getty estate, for more — it felt as though we’d just seen looking at a beautifully detailed replica of the ideal summer opera. a rundown English village hall. It’s superbly Michael Boyd’s new production of Don done: the canvas chairs and austerity-drab Giovanni opened the following night, and paintwork in Paul Curran’s new produc- we learned from the souvenir silk scarves in tion of The Bartered Bride could surely the gift shop that it was to be — and you Grade: B have been found in any number of church didn’t see this coming, did you? — a #MeToo Rock stars who utter something halls in this corner of the Chilterns, at least Don Giovanni. In reality, it was nothing of a little gamey, something a tad right- in the 1950s when this production seems to the sort. Boyd’s Giovanni is a Young Brit- wingish, are usually coerced by the be set. And then, having gone to painstak- ish Artist, first seen flinging buckets of paint lefties into a cringing apology before ing lengths to relocate this definitive Slav at a white canvas. Leporello is his studio you can say a-wop-bop-a-lu-bop. This national opera to rural England, Garsington assistant and Elvira appears (at first, any- is not a new thing — it happened to flips our expectations straight back at us and way) to be an artistic collaborator. It’s car- Eric Clapton after his ‘Enoch’s right’ has it sung in Czech. outburst in 1976 (which very quickly Well, it wouldn’t be country-house With lovers united and acrobats spawned the Socialist Workers opera without a few absurdities. The choice stacked four high, it felt as though Party-led Rock Against Racism of language was, I believe, the preference we’d seen the ideal summer opera movement). The message has always of the conductor Jac van Steen, and a less been: get with the programme, right- dogmatic maestro you’ll never find. Smet- ried through with economy and wit (the wing scum, or we’ll hate you and your ana said that The Bartered Bride was ‘only final banquet is a KFC meal deal), but other career will be over. a toy’, and it’d be a joyless soul who didn’t than placing Elvira (Sky Ingram, plangent Credit, then, to Morrissey for come away smiling from Curran’s sunny, and touchingly sincere) front and centre, refusing to resile from his belief vividly peopled world, with its gauche vicar, this was a fairly conventional interpreta- that England is ceasing to be the industrious district nurse and Brylcreemed tion. The final scene was cut altogether, end- England he knew and loved and that rockers. The set for Act One provides both ing the opera on Giovanni’s doom: a jarring there are too many foreigners in the a public space for maypole dancing and reversion to Victorian practice, half-hearted- country. I kind of agree with him, matchmaking and a separate kitchen for ly excused in a surtitle with a disingenuous up to a point. But the liberal bullies more intimate confessions, generally deliv- reference to the opera’s première in ‘1788’ will have their way. Posters for his ered while buttering corned-beef sand- (trust me, you don’t want to go there). new album are already banned by wiches. Act Three’s circus stage, meanwhile, At the outset, Giovanni had killed the Merseyrail (in that vast repository of could have come straight out of the most Commendatore by spraying him with red acquired victimhood, Liverpool) and traditional of Prague productions (the cir- paint. Amusing, but without seeing the Don California Son has been spitefully cus performers themselves sent the post- commit at least one act of believably shock- panned in the Guardian and by the picnic audience wild). ing violence the character loses much of ageing adolescents at the NME. My only major reservation, barring his darkness — not a mortal sinner at the I doubt either review would have some splashy brass playing from the Phil- threshold of damnation, just a bit of a knob. been so vitriolic if Morrissey had harmonia, was that all this activity left you Decide for yourself if that matters along- been Billy bloody Bragg. unsure where to look, at least in the choral side the fact that the singing and characteri- My problem is that I don’t much and dance scenes. It snapped brightly into sation was, for the most part, very enjoyable. like Morrissey’s somewhat histrionic focus whenever the young lovers Jenik (a Mireille Asselin (Zerlina) was bright and music, either with the Smiths or since, bluff, hipster-bearded Brendan Gunnell) pointed, Trystan Llyr Griffiths floated his much though I admire his singular and Marenka (Natalya Romaniw) were tenor sweet and high as Ottavio and Cami- refusal to conform. This is an album together. Romaniw’s lustrous voice, in par- la Titinger was dignified, if underused, as of covers of, in the main, not terribly ticular, was at maximum wattage; this bride Anna. Douglas Boyd’s bouncy period- good songs. He is fine tackling Roy was not going to be bartered without a fight. instrument orchestra rippled with colour, Orbison — his alter ego from a She brandished a breadknife, vamped it up and the central relationship between Gio- previous life — and ‘Wedding Bell with the stammering Vasek (Stuart Jackson, vanni — a cocksure, steel-eyed Jonathan Blues’ captures some of Laura Nyro’s whose character would nowadays get a slot McGovern — and his put-upon wingman sweet lilt. But his inflection is all on The Undateables, and who came across Leporello (sung with comparable style but wrong when handling Joni Mitchell here as wholly lovable) and stormed off to discernibly more warmth by David Ireland) and Dylan. And why cover a Jobriath the kitchen to take out her frustration on a was a bromance for the ages, never more song? Still, keep annoying them, Victoria sponge. believable or entertaining than in their Steven. The nearest she came to meeting her boisterous joint recitatives. That, at least, is — Rod Liddle match was in Joshua Bloom’s marriage- usually a good sign.

48 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Arts_08 June 2019_The Spectator 48 05/06/2019 11:16 NOTES ON … Hats By Camilla Swift

hank goodness for racing,’ says GETTY IMAGES the right of every Englishman to place what Rachel Trevor-Morgan. She is a he wanted on his head. The Times wrote the ‘Tmilliner — a hat maker — so it’s following day: ‘Hetherington’s hat points no surprise she’s grateful. Without weddings to a significant advance in the transfor- and race days, many milliners would be out mation of dress. Sooner or later, everyone of business. will accept this headwear. We believe that If you want to gain entry into the Royal both the court and the police made a mis- Enclosure during Ascot week, a hat is take here.’ non-negotiable. And it’s not just any old hat: The Times was right. Hat manufacturers the rules dictate that your headpiece must in England made a substantial amount of have a base of at least 10cm in diameter. money from this ‘extravagant construction’. The Ascot ruling was brought in in 2012 Some also poisoned themselves: the phrase to put a stop to the trend for tiny fascinators, ‘mad as a hatter’ came about because many essentially just twiddles of feathers and fluff hat-makers were adversely affected by the that perch above the hairline. For the very mercury in hat felt. latest in fascinators, look at Ivanka Trump Our hat manufacturers and sellers are during the Trump family visit to Westmin- still making a mint. An antique silk topper ster Abbey. Sitting above her right eye is a al traditions. A British man might still wear a in good condition will sell for anything up to sort of felt bedpan designed by milliner to top hat to Ascot or a wedding even though it’s £2,000. Men’s heads tend to be bigger nowa- the stars Philip Treacy. Thank heavens a new more than 200 years since toppers first made days, too, and the price goes up accordingly. generation of hat-makers are making proper an appearance. In 1797, a haberdasher called Young milliners such as Jess Collett, Vivi- hats fashionable again. John Hetherington ventured out in a hat in en Sheriff, Cara Meehan and Emily Bax- There is something about the wearing of the shape of a stovepipe. Within a short time, endale now incorporate brightly coloured a hat, especially for formal occasions, that’s the story goes, a large crowd had gathered veiling, sequins, feathers and huge flowers particularly British. But why? As with so around him. Women fainted, children cried into their designs to bring their hats into the many British traditions, the royal family is in and dogs barked. There was such chaos that 21st century. And London is still king as far part behind it. Royal protocol dictates that the ‘officer of the law’ grabbed Hetherington as the hat is concerned. Philip Treacy, Ste- women must wear hats to all official occa- by the collar and summonsed him before the phen Jones and Jane Taylor are all based in sions because up until the 1950s upper-class court. He was accused of disturbing public the city, and the London College of Fashion women rarely showed their hair in public. order and fined £500. and Kensington and Chelsea College are In this country, we hang on to our sartori- The hat-maker relied in his defence on still turning out the world’s best milliners.

Theatre

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 49

Classified_08 June 2019_The Spectator 49 05/06/2019 12:09 CLASSIFIEDS Travel & General

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50 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Classified_08 June 2019_The Spectator 50 05/06/2019 12:09 CLASSIFIEDS Travel

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52 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Classified_08 June 2019_The Spectator 52 05/06/2019 12:09 Sex is aerobic, it lasts ten minutes (if you’re English) and, unlike jogging, ridiculous clothes are optional — Rory Sutherland, p61

the beautiful tiny church within the castle, everybody into the Pilatus and flew back to High life the grandfather was feeling his age. ‘Panis Gstaad, only to come down with the hidden Taki Angelicus’, the hymn by César Franck, woke virus I had drowned for three days, the one me up and inspired me to listen closely to I carried over from the Bagel. what Monsignor Hermann Pachinger and In last week’s column, I mentioned Carlo the perfectly named Dr Markus Himmel- di Robilant, the father of my friend Edmon- bauer had to say. Heaven should be right do, in a not very nice way. I regret this here on earth, said the good priest. Live because I got it wrong. The Robilants have a good Christian life and you don’t have never been fascists at any time, before, dur- to worry about what happens afterwards. ing or after Mussolini. Perhaps because my I looked around me and saw men and father and grandfather were supporters of women, old and young, all listening to the the Greek dictator Metaxas (and I still am) They were putting the finishing touches to message while my little grandson, dressed I didn’t realise my comments would be taken the giant tent as I drove up to Schloss Wolf- up in his great-grandmother’s silk white as an insult. I like Edmondo and Maya di segg after an hour’s flight from Gstaad to a baby dress, looked happy and rather curious Robilant and did not wish to hurt their feel- tiny nearby airport. With me were my son at the goings-on. No one promised virgins in ings, especially as the family was anti-Duce. and two good friends, and the Pilatus felt the afterlife and no one encouraged anyone like a Messerschmitt 109 cutting through to go out and kill people. the clouds and landing on a dime. The Pila- A great lunch followed in the tent — Low life tus is a great airplane. It can cruise for seven a very liquid one, I might add. I sat between hours at 280 knots, and land at less than 500 Fiona, a beautiful young blonde, and my Jeremy Clarke metres. It seats six people very comfortably. friend Ludmilla Habsburg, a grande dame The only man who has complained about whose political opinions and mine are dia- this aircraft is my old friend Charlie Glass, metrically opposed. We talked only politics who like a true lefty whined about the lava- and laughed a hell of a lot and not a single tory’s headroom. (I told him to try EasyJet bitter word was exchanged. It was similar to next time, but lefties like to fly private and arguing with a young Corbinista about cli- not mix with hoi polloi.) mate change. (And if you believe that, you The house party at the castle consisted of probably think Philip Green is an aristo- about 75 people, and the occasion was the crat.) Then came my Waterloo. ‘heilige Taufe’ — holy baptism — of Anto- At the dinner that evening, my son-in- Of course the varifocals I bought online nius Alexandros Edouard Maria, my grand- law’s best friend, Prince Altenburg, gave were a waste of money. When they came in son. Before I go on, a word about how good a very funny speech, although he was quite the post and I first put them on I could see it feels to be far away from the vulgarities gone, if you know what I mean. This encour- the world up to and including my fingernails of today’s politically correct world. Civi- aged me to do the same after some people but anything beyond was a blur. I should lisation matters a hell of a lot, and one is called for me to speak. I could see the moth- have guessed that emailing a photo of my reminded of it in places such as my son-in- er of my children, who recognises the symp- face with a credit card fixed to my forehead, law’s schloss. Here we are, with nearly 1,500 toms, squirming. But speak I did and made as directed, was too rough and ready a guide years of achievement in philosophy, poetry, the most disastrous after-dinner speech ever. to the correct measurements. If the glasses architecture, science, music, art and religion People were kind, but it was embarrassing had been right it would have been more of behind us, yet we allow cultural troglodytes as only drunken speeches can be. The only a surprise. Being poor is always more expen- and other such ‘cool’ types to set the agenda. relief was more oblivion, but I made up sive in the long run. I’d have been better off Western civilisation was basically the for it the next day by announcing during spending the £200 on some class As and creation of the Church. It was believers lunch that Alexandra and I were expecting a hat and going to a party. such as Charles Martel in 732, Duke John a happy event, finally drawing a laugh. These were the second pair of glasses I’d in Lepanto in 1571 and Jan Sobieski in 1683 Because of the surroundings and the bought online whose only possible use was as who defeated the invading Muslim hordes people present I was transported back to a an executioner’s blindfold. Add to that about and safeguarded the Christian continent. more civilised era. But I was brought back three pairs of magnifiers at £30 each, which Western civilisation was built on a Christian to the present when Prince Altenburg’s baby worked with the text examples in the shop foundation, and the chivalric respect for boy, born three days apart from my grand- but nowhere else, and for the total amount of women grew from the Church’s devotion to son, was brought in and placed next to lit- money spent I could have gone to a high street Mary. The art that followed was an expres- tle Antonius. The babies looked like blond, optician. There I would have been fussed over sion of that faith. blue-eyed twins. But my grandson took by young women and been ordered to gaze Mind you, the spiritual emptiness of the exception to the new addition to his crib deeply into their eyes, and with a final guar- modern world was absent for the weekend and screamed like those dreadful women antee that I would eventually walk out of the at Schloss Wolfsegg. Friday night’s dinner do against Boris or Trump, or whatever. Ter- shop able to see. In the long run it would prob- was at a wonderful local inn with tradi- ritorial imperative, I presume; it starts early ably have worked out cheaper. tional Austrian food and lotsa wine. Too on. One day, they’ll be the best of friends So I made an appointment with a local much, in fact: early Saturday morning, in like their fathers is my guess. I then piled optician to be tested and measured up for a

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 53

Life_08 June 2019_The Spectator 53 05/06/2019 12:51 TRAVEL SOLUTIONS TRAVEL SOLUTIONS

LIFE TRAVEL SOLUTIONS Telegraph Travel brings you more tried-and-tested holiday recommendations pair of frames and the best varifocal lenses sucked in: coppers, nurses, ambulance driv- bly, as I stood in the doorway by the fridge than any otherTRA newspaper,VEL SOLU TIONSand now we are delighted to bring you exclusive money could buy. They would cost approxi- ers, medics, hospital administrators, social complaining that he had destroyed a per- offers at your favourite hotels. All the hotels featured here have been reviewed by our travel team – now all you have to do is enjoy them… mately nine times the Parker’s guide price of workers, solicitors, you, me and my eyeballs, fectly good loo. ‘It was leaking,’ he claimed, Exclusive Offers my car. Was 3.40 on Friday afternoon OK? at least one optician, and even my mother, improbably. ‘I think I would know if the loo To raise the money I sold three silk hand- left asleep in the chair at home for longer was leaking,’ I said. kerchiefs. They had escape maps printed than is ideal.’ But never mind that, what was he doing TRAVEL SOLUTIONS on both sides and were given to servicemen Of course this was all hypocritical balo- to the hatch behind the loo, which was now DEAL OF THE WEEK and pilots serving in North Africa during ney. I’ve been a nematode worm all my life. not a hatch at all. He had half bricked it up. TRAVEL SOLUTIONS the second world war. I had inherited them But I had been looking forward so much to He informed me the loo should not be side- Save up to Corinthia Hotel, Budapest from my great uncle, an anti-aircraft gunner, my visit to the opticians. I was feeling pee- ways on. ‘I like the loo sideways on.’ ‘It’s 30% From £329pp for a three-night stay who, in his own words, was ‘up and down that vish and just couldn’t help myself. ludicrous.’ ‘It’s feng shui!’ bloody desert like a yo-yo’. Being largely But he was bricking up the hatch to fit  Return flight from selected UK airports (regional airports housebound, I was looking forward to get- a new loo backwards to the wall. No climb- on request)  Option to add on hold luggage from £45 ting out and having my eyes tested and face Real life ing past it to the coal hole. That would now per bag  Option to add transfers from £20 per person measured as much as Kenneth Noye must be Melissa Kite be accessed via the main cellar entrance.  Three nights’ luxury accommodation at the five-star looking forward to his release date in August. ‘I liked my Narnia loo coal hole,’ I told him. Corinthia Hotel, Budapest  Complimentary upgrade Friday came. I showered and shaved and He told me he didn’t care. A leaking loo fit- to bed-and-breakfast basis  Danube river cruise ironed a shirt. I was about to leave when ted sideways next to a hatch to a coal store my mobile burbled. The mother of my two was ridiculous. Situated in the centre of Budapest, the Corinthia is a beautiful hotel grandsons. ‘All right?’ she said. ‘Yes, thank ‘Whereas not having a downstairs loo with a neoclassical facade that reflects the rich history of the city. you,’ I said. ‘You know you were going to in a house with four floors and the nearest pick up the boys tomorrow?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. available convenience two floors away from Adrian Philips, Telegraph Travel’s Budapest expert, says: ‘Well, can you pick them up this afternoon the kitchen is not ridiculous?’ I asked. “The Corinthia carries itself with an effortless grace.” instead?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the opticians ‘You’ll get a new loo by the end of the at 3.40. Why?’ week,’ he claimed. And a small part of me Offer available for stays until March 31, 2020. Quote TTSPEC0806. ‘I’ve got to go down to the hospital and No sooner had the builder boyfriend fin- — the part that remains girlishly optimistic, calm a relative down,’ she said. ‘She’s lost it ished digging for no good reason in the base- naive, trusting and full of optimism about 0330 162 2392 telegraph.co.uk/tt-corinthia-bud again and beaten up her boyfriend. At least, ment than his attention turned to the old but the world (in other words, a nanoparticle of they think it’s that way round. He proba- perfectly good downstairs loo. me) — believed him. Price based on a January and February departure. See online for full terms and conditions. bly started it — she’s black and blue — but I don’t know why he does this. I didn’t It took him three days to finish bricking she probably finished it, knowing her. She’s want the basement dug and I certainly up the hole. And then it took him three more been on a bender up in Aberdeen. Found did not want anything done to my downstairs loo. It is, or should I say was, a rough The builder boyfriend brought I’d have been better off spending but functional affair just off the kitchen, home various loos, all of which Save up to Save up to the £200 on some class As and accessed via a small step down into the util- made me scream a hat and going to a party ity and larder area — turn right at the fridge, 30% 25% et voilà. Well, we all love an en suite. days to tile the floor, after ripping out the some mates. The police want me to have The idea that you can move seamlessly nice worn lino. her here. No flaming way, I said. Not with from one enterprise to another, perhaps tak- Then it took a further week to bring the kids here. So I’ve got to go round to the ing out the milk to make a cup of tea with home various loos that made me scream, hospital and talk some sense into her. Calm the sound of the flush ringing in your ears, including one with a plastic seat and one her down so the police can leave and go and ought not to be seen as a problem in my with a button flush. Eventually, he brought fight crime instead of babysitting a nutter. view. In fact, I call it flow. home a loo that looked inoffensive and had Between you and me I think she’s bipolar.’ And the flow didn’t end there. The down- a flush handle. ‘Oh yes? What’s that?’ I said. ‘You know! stairs loo led seamlessly into the coal hole. Then it took him another week to work They’re up one minute and down the next. Behind, or more accurately beyond, the loo, out that this loo did not fit the complex san- So can you come over right away and fetch like Narnia, there was a small hatch door itary pipe situation, which he now realised the boys early so I can go down to the hospi- which, if you could squeeze past the bowl, was a decades-old botch that came out of tal and give the police a break?’ led into a part of the cellar where the logs the floor wrong. ‘Look,’ I said peevishly. ‘What’s the mat- and coal are stored. The two of us then spent a week argu- ter with you all? It’s one thing after another. Again, I don’t see this as a bad thing. ing so badly that we ended up not speaking. Charingworth Manor, Cotswolds The Headland, Cornwall You’re all drama queens who imagine you’re I found it appealing that one could be sat I went up and down the two flights of stairs From £175pp for a two-night stay From £185pp for a two-night stay starring in the nation’s favourite soap opera. there on a chilly winter evening and sudden- to the main bathroom swearing increasing- All you are interested in is stimulating the ly be reminded that the fire needed lighting. ly foul-mouthedly, then I crawled ostenta-  Two- or three-night stay  Breakfast  Dinner on two nights  Two-night stay in an Ocean View room  Breakfast pleasure centre of your brains. You’re like a And remembering this, one could sim- tiously, then I staged a childish protest with  ‘Taste of Cotswolds’ gift basket*  Champagne afternoon tea  Two-course dinner on the first evening  Full use of the spa lot of nematode worms.’ ply step from the loo through the hatch into a bucket. (for three-night stays only)  Three-night stays available from £239pp and leisure facilities  Complimentary room upgrade (subject ‘What are they?’ she said, genuinely the coal hole to fill a bucket with coal and it And when he still didn’t fit a loo, I waited to availability)  A bottle of sparkling wine on arrival interested. was then just about possible to crawl back until he had gone out and got the plumber Four miles from the historic town of Chipping Campden, Charingworth ‘They represent 80 per cent of all animal through the hatch and round the loo to get round. The plumber looked at the piles of Manor offers an exciting dining experience with locally sourced produce. Situated on a dramatic vantage point outside Newquay, life on earth,’ I said, ‘and they have a very out carrying the coal bucket, stopping only toilets heaped up in the garden and prom- The Headland Hotel & Spa offers incredible ocean views Harriet O’Brien, Telegraph Travel’s Cotswolds expert, says: simple brain devoted to eating and excret- at the fridge, perhaps, to take out the mince ised to come back. and excellent facilities. ing, also an elementary pleasure centre that to make dinner. The builder b and I are in such bad “Charingworth Manor has a picturesque garden, a first-class can be endlessly stimulated with the sharp- This was open-plan living at its very best. odour with each other I have told him our restaurant and impressive facilities that include an indoor pool Natalie Millar Patridge, Telegraph Travel writer, says: “This grand ened point of a pencil.’ But the builder boyfriend thought other- relationship feels perilously close to going and steam room.” Victorian pile offers good food and a contemporary spa.” ‘Wow,’ she said, impressed. wise and I came home one day to find the down the pan. And if it does, it will be a Book by August 30 for stays until August 31, 2019. Quote TELSPEC0806. Book by July 31 for stays until September 30, 2019. Quote TELSPEC0806. ‘Your nematode worm of a relative goes loo in the front garden and him banging and busted flush for good this time. Whether off on one again,’ I continued, warming to crashing. or not you want to call any of that toilet 0330 162 0364 telegraph.co.uk/tt-charingworth 0330 162 8736 telegraph.co.uk/tt-headland my theme, ‘and look how many people are ‘It had to come out!’ he shouted irrita- humour is all the same to me. See online for full terms and conditions. See online for full terms and conditions. 54 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Life_08 June 2019_The Spectator 54 05/06/2019 12:51 055_spec_08.06.19.indd 1 05/06/2019 11:31 TRAVEL SOLUTIONS TRAVEL SOLUTIONS

TRAVEL SOLUTIONS Telegraph Travel brings you more tried-and-tested holiday recommendations than any otherTRA newspaper,VEL SOLU TIONSand now we are delighted to bring you exclusive offers at your favourite hotels. All the hotels featured here have been Exclusive Offers reviewed by our travel team – now all you have to do is enjoy them…

TRAVEL SOLUTIONS DEAL OF THE WEEK TRAVEL SOLUTIONS Save up to Corinthia Hotel, Budapest 30% From £329pp for a three-night stay

 Return flight from selected UK airports (regional airports on request)  Option to add on hold luggage from £45 per bag  Option to add transfers from £20 per person  Three nights’ luxury accommodation at the five-star Corinthia Hotel, Budapest  Complimentary upgrade to bed-and-breakfast basis  Danube river cruise Situated in the centre of Budapest, the Corinthia is a beautiful hotel with a neoclassical facade that reflects the rich history of the city. Adrian Philips, Telegraph Travel’s Budapest expert, says: “The Corinthia carries itself with an effortless grace.”

Offer available for stays until March 31, 2020. Quote TTSPEC0806.

0330 162 2392 telegraph.co.uk/tt-corinthia-bud

Price based on a January and February departure. See online for full terms and conditions.

Save up to Save up to 30% 25%

Charingworth Manor, Cotswolds The Headland, Cornwall From £175pp for a two-night stay From £185pp for a two-night stay

 Two- or three-night stay  Breakfast  Dinner on two nights  Two-night stay in an Ocean View room  Breakfast  ‘Taste of Cotswolds’ gift basket*  Champagne afternoon tea  Two-course dinner on the first evening  Full use of the spa (for three-night stays only)  Three-night stays available from £239pp and leisure facilities  Complimentary room upgrade (subject to availability)  A bottle of sparkling wine on arrival Four miles from the historic town of Chipping Campden, Charingworth Manor offers an exciting dining experience with locally sourced produce. Situated on a dramatic vantage point outside Newquay, The Headland Hotel & Spa offers incredible ocean views Harriet O’Brien, Telegraph Travel’s Cotswolds expert, says: and excellent facilities. “Charingworth Manor has a picturesque garden, a first-class restaurant and impressive facilities that include an indoor pool Natalie Millar Patridge, Telegraph Travel writer, says: “This grand and steam room.” Victorian pile offers good food and a contemporary spa.”

Book by August 30 for stays until August 31, 2019. Quote TELSPEC0806. Book by July 31 for stays until September 30, 2019. Quote TELSPEC0806.

0330 162 0364 telegraph.co.uk/tt-charingworth 0330 162 8736 telegraph.co.uk/tt-headland

See online for full terms and conditions. See online for full terms and conditions.

055_spec_08.06.19.indd 1 05/06/2019 11:31 LIFE

horse.’ And it is that capacity to keep calm The turf — and keep your mount calm, too — that is Bridge Robin Oakley so crucial, with split-second decisions having Janet de Botton to be taken in the hurly-burly of the Derby. The Coolmore operation have no doubt about what is the most important race in the Stefan Skorchev, young Bulgarian interna- world. As Aidan put it: ‘We have to pinch tional, has given us another top tier annual ourselves every day. We’re working with the pairs tournament to put in our diaries — the best people, the most incredible horses with Acol Invitational Pairs. Superbly organised unbelievable pedigrees and physiques in the and offering big prize money, this year it was best facilities. The Derby is the ultimate test: won by Thor Erik Hoftaniska and Gunnar it tests their speed, their stamina, their agil- Hallberg, a Norwegian/Swedish partnership There is a danger that memories of the 2019 ity and mentality. This race is so tough to win that was invented at the rubber bridge table Epsom Derby will be swamped by statis- every year, that’s why we run so many hors- the night before! Thirty-two pairs competed tics. By training his seventh Derby winner in es.’ But even ‘the lads’, as Aidan describes and around 100 boards were played over the Anthony Van Dyck, the self-effacing Aidan the operation headed by John Magnier, weekend. Let me say right now — I didn’t O’Brien equalled the totals set by Rob- Michael Tabor and Derrick Smith, don’t play it and that’s not because I was NFI. ert Robson, John Porter and Fred Darling know in advance which of their four-legged I was. Honest! between 1793 and 1941. The first of Aidan’s team members is going to deliver best on Let’s watch Gunnar in every bridge play- Derby successes, Galileo in 2001, has sired the day. This year their No. 1 jockey, Ryan er’s favourite hunting ground — 3NT. four of the winners since then. No fewer Moore, was on the favourite Sir Dragonet, than seven of the 13 runners in this year’s who finished fifth. Aidan’s precociously tal- Dealer East N/S vulnerable scurry over Surrey for the Blue Riband of ented but tall son Donnacha, who will only the Turf came from Aidan’s Ballydoyle team have so many Derbies before weight forc- ♠ K 6 and five of them were in the first six past es him out of the saddle, was on the second ♥ Q 9 5 the post. John Magnier, the driving force of favourite Broome, who came fourth. ◆ A K 7 4 the Coolmore team, has now had a share in But Coolmore have strength in depth ♣ J 8 5 3 the ownership of ten Derby winners, nine of in the saddle too and there was no doubt- them trained at Ballydoyle. ing their obvious pleasure that the man in ♠ J 9 7 5 ♠ 8 4 2 But in a sense all that is for the anoraks. the plate on Sir Anthony Van Dyck was ♥ J 4 2 N ♥ 10 8 6 3 What made this year’s Derby such a delight their long-time squad member Seamie W E was the pulsating nature of the contest Heffernan, now 46. Aidan trusts his team ◆ J 9 6 5 S ◆ 2 and the characters involved in the drama. — remember Padraig Beggy, who won the ♣ A Q ♣ K 9 6 4 2 When Anthony Van Dyck flashed past the Derby on the 40–1 shot Wings of Eagles in post first, after being driven through a gap 2017 on only his ninth ride of the year — ♠ A Q 10 3 to deliver his run along the rail, there were and the team trust Aidan. Asked if he had ♥ A K 7 three horses just half a length behind him expected to win on his 12th Derby ride, Sea- ◆ on the outside and it took the camera to mus locked his tongue firmly in his cheek Q 10 8 3 determine that it was Madhmoon who had and noted: ‘It was only a matter of time!’ ♣ 10 7 held on for second, a nose ahead of Japan, Pointing out that no other yard in Ireland who beat Broome into fourth place by could have provided him with a dozen West North East South a short head. A single horse blanket would Derby chances, he added: ‘I’m into the last Pass 1NT have covered the three. You could not have ten years of my career. I was second on the Pass 3NT All pass contrived a more exciting finish or a more favourite one year and second on a 150–1 enthralling advertisement for the joy of shot the next, so you never know where West elected to lead a small Heart. Declar- watching horse racing. they’ll finish when Aidan trains them. I’m er put in dummy’s nine to muddy the waters, The Queen has no doubt about those lucky I don’t have the choice [of which one and won in hand. Next he went to dummy in pleasures. She has never won the Derby her- he rides]. If you did, and got it right 51 per Diamonds and played a Club to his 10 and self but since her Aureole finished second in cent of the time, you’d be doing well.’ West’s Queen. This underused play very often 1953, she has only twice missed seeing the Seamie Heffernan’s association with makes something good happen, as it did this race and before racing began on Saturday Coolmore, as their supersub, has brought him time when West tried a Spade. Happy with she unveiled a life-size statue of the man plenty of big wins and Aidan was happy to his catch, Gunnar started to cash out his pre- who has his own remarkable set of Derby remind the world’s media that his first Derby sumed 11 winners, but on the Diamond to the statistics: Lester Piggott rode in the race 36 success was no one-off: ‘He is an unbeliev- King, East unexpectedly showed out. Declar- times and won it nine times. A more than able feller — and a world-class jockey.’ er cashed his Spades and Hearts and ended in averagely loquacious Piggott called sculptor dummy (with three cards left) to have a think. Willie Newton’s bronze ‘marvellous’. Better Had West started with Jxxx in three suits than the time a biographer asked him for his and scored the singleton Queen of Clubs? thoughts on his greatest Derby winner. After Gunnar went through what had hap- a two-minute pause, the full response was: pened in the Heart suit, coupled with the fact ‘Nice ’orse’. Former jockey Jason Weaver, that East hadn’t flinched on the first round of the shrewdest analyst of an ITV team who Clubs, and came to the conclusion that West’s have brought both zest and humanity to hand was probably as above. He ended this racing’s most vital shop window, hit the but- terrific piece of card reading by endplaying ton as usual when he said of Piggott: ‘When West with the Ace of Clubs to lead into his he came here [to Epsom] he didn’t let the Diamond tenace for 11 tricks and a near top. nervous energy of the place affect him — he Special thanks to Stefan and the Acol just took it all in and didn’t transfer it to the Club — and count me in next year!

56 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Life_08 June 2019_The Spectator 56 05/06/2019 12:51 SPECTATOR WINE JONATHAN RAY

e’ve four wines from Château to say that the bottle ain’t quite so posh. A being aged in French oak for 15 months Belles Eaux this week, one of blend of Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre, to give structure and body and the other Wthe leading lights of the Langue- it’s a beguilingly pale, pale peony pink half being rested in concrete vats to ensure doc and a long-standing favourite of mine. I thanks to swift pressing and no maceration. freshness of fruit. The result is a red wine remember a very jolly visit to the estate in Stainless-steel fermentation and a brief mat- of quite some depth and robust complexi- the days when it was in the hands of AXA uration in steel vats has led to a delicious- ty, full of ripe black cherries, liquorice, spice Millésimes, the vineyard-owning arm of and herbs. It’s one for the barbecue all right. AXA Insurance that’s led by the canniest of I love the whites of the Languedoc £10.00 down from £12.75. canny old foxes — Christian Seely. and this is one I could drink Finally, the 2010 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les CS is celebrated for snapping up and all day long Coteaux’ Rouge (4) a fully mature exam- turning around under-performing estates ple of the above. The extra bottle age has and making them great again. Given that ly fresh and appealing pinkers, full of wild softened the tannins and given an earthy, the AXA portfolio currently includes such strawberries, peaches and herbs. If grown-up meaty, mushroomy, tobacco-laden core to it. top-notch properties as Quinta do Noval, rosé is your thing, you’ll love it. £9.50 down There’s still plenty of fruit and it’s wearing Ch. Pichon Baron, Ch. Suduiraut, Ch. Petit- from £11.75. its age lightly. Slosh into a carafe or decanter Village, Domaine de l’Arlot and Disznókó, The 2017 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les Coteaux’ and enjoy. £11.00 down from £14.50. you will have some idea of the company Rouge (3) is a similar blend to the rosé but These are ideal summer wines and cork- Ch. Belles Eaux has been used to keep- a wildly different wine of course. Fermented ing good value given the generous discounts ing. Seely/AXA bought the estate in 2002, in stainless steel and concrete to preserve we managed to squeeze out of Mr W. Get invested heavily, planted extensively, turned freshness, the wine was then steeped for six stuck in and enjoy! it around and sold it in 2015 to Les Grands weeks or so to give depth and colour before The mixed case has three bottles of each Chais de France, one of the world’s largest the cuvée was split into two, with one half wine and delivery, as ever, is free. drinks companies, which has continued the good work. The 100-hectare estate lies in the hills of ORDER FORM Spectator Wine Offer Caux near Pézenas. It’s wild country here, www.mrwheelerwine.com/belleseaux with dry, rocky, gravelly soil, the heady scent Mr Wheeler, Estate Office, Park Lane BC, Langham, Colchester, Essex CO4 5WR of herb scrub and a constantly blazing sun. mrwheelerwine.com; tel: 01206 713560; Email: [email protected] The estate has an enviable microclimate, too, thanks in part to the many springs — Prices in form are per case of 12 List Club the Belles Eaux themselves — that thread case price price No. the property, giving freshness and nourish- White 1 2018 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les Coteaux’ Blanc, 13.5%vol £144.00 £120.00 ment to the vines. 2 2018 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les Coteaux’ Rosé, 13%vol £132.00 £114.00 I love the whites of the Languedoc and Rosé the 2018 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les Coteaux’ Red 3 2017 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les Coteaux’ Rouge, 14.5%vol £144.00 £120.00 Blanc (1), from the estate’s middle range 4 2010 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les Coteaux’ Rouge, 14.5%vol £159.00 £132.00 of wines, is one of those that I could drink Mixed 5 Sample case, three each of the above £155.25 £121.50 all day long and probably would if Mrs Ray wasn’t keeping such a close eye on my con- Mastercard/Visa no. Total sumption at the moment. A blend of Grenache Blanc, Clairette, Start date Expiry date Sec. code Vermentino and Roussanne (part of which Issue no. Signature Prices include VAT and delivery on the British mainland. Payment should be spends time in oak), it’s full flavoured, rich, Please send wine to made either by cheque with the order, creamy and complex. There’s plenty of Name payable to Mr Wheeler, or by debit or vibrantly fresh white peach here and some- credit card, details of which may be Address thing tasty that I can’t quite put my finger telephoned or faxed. This offer, which on. Baked apple maybe and something is subject to availability, closes on 15 faintly spicy. Either way, it’s darn tasty and Postcode July 2019. — I know such things shouldn’t matter but Telephone they do — comes in a very pukka-looking Email* bottle that belies its modest price tag. £10.00 down from £12.75. The 2018 Ch. Belles Eaux ‘Les Coteaux’ Terms and conditions: This week’s Wine Offer is managed by Mr Wheeler. For full details on its T&Cs, email [email protected] Contact permission: I would like to receive up to date offers and communications from Mr Wheeler ❏ ❏ Rosé (2) is similarly classy although I have I would like to receive up to date offers and communications from other carefully selected organisations ❏ ❏

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 57

wine club_08 June 2019_The Spectator 57 05/06/2019 11:29 LIFE Chess Competition Spirited New ‘New Colossus’ Raymond Keene Lucy Vickery

An unusual tournament has taken place at the Diagram 2 In Competition No. 3101 you were invited Lindores Abbey Whisky Distillery in Scotland, to compose a contemporary take on ‘The namely a double-round competition between rDWDq4kD New Colossus’, the 1883 sonnet by Emma four of the world’s elite, including world DW0Wgp0W Lazarus that is inscribed on a bronze plaque champion Magnus Carlsen. The final scores out on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. of six were as follows: Magnus Carlsen 3½, Ding b0PDpDW0 Written as part of an effort to raise money Liren and Sergey Karjakin 3, Viswanathan for the construction of the 89ft pedestal, the Anand 2½, and this week I focus on the decisive 0WDp)WDW poem has spoken powerfully to successive games from this most imaginative event. PDWDWGnD generations. Today it is often invoked as a counterpoint to Donald Trump’s inflamma- Carlsen-Anand: Lindores Abbey Stars 2019 DWDWDW)P W)QDP)BD tory rhetoric, in particular the famous lines: WDr1rDkD Give me your tired, your poor, DbDnDpgp $NDRDWIW Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free pDnDWDpD Most of you ran with this idea and pro- the greedy 24 g4 which is refuted by 24 ... Rxf3 25 duced accomplished if sometimes predicta- DW0WDWDW gxf3 Qf4+ mating. 24 ... Qxg3 25 Ra3 Raf8 ble entries. The best are printed below and NDW0WDWD 26 Nc3 Kh8 27 Nb5 Bxb5 28 axb5 Qh4 earn their authors £20 each. Commendations 29 Kb1 Rf4 30 Re3 R8f6 31 Bg4 Rc4 32 go to Ann Drysdale, Frank McDonald, R.M. )WDW)PDW Qd3 Rb4 33 Bxe6 Black resigns Goddard and Ray Kelley, who all came at

the challenge from a more oblique angle. B)WDNDP) Karjakin-Anand: Lindores Abbey Stars 2019 DW$QGRDK The goddess Libertas is poised erect, WDWDWDWD Copper beneath her sheath of verdigris, DRDNDpiW An emblem of two nations to respect Anand, as Black, had doubtless prepared a defence The true, republican equality against the dangerous-looking 21 Qb3. In fact, after WDWDWDp0 Inscribed in both their founding documents. 21 Qb3 Black can defend with 21 ... Rb8 22 Qxf7+ The vivid dream that lights her torch is noble — Kh8 23 Nxc5 Nxc5 24 Rxc5 Ne5 with strong DPDWDWDW To banish tyranny and ignorance — counterplay. By inverting the move order of his WDKDWDPD Her cause compassionate, her vision global. attack against f7, the reigning world champion Who now desires to reaffix the chains That lie inert and shattered at her feet? gains a significant advantage. 21 Bxf7+ Kxf7 22 DWDW4WDP Take Liberty away, and what remains Qb3+ Kf8 23 Qxb7 Rxe3 24 Ng3 Nce5 But an oppressor swollen with conceit, 25 Bd2 Rd3 26 Ne4 Black’s king is exposed WDWDWgWD A monstrous ego-wish devouring all, and his queenside pawns are weak. 26 ... Rb8 DWDWDWDW Whose monument’s no statue but a wall? 27 Qd5 Rxd2 28 Nxd2 Nd3 29 Rc2 Qe7 Basil Ransome-Davies 30 Ne4 Nf4 31 Qc4 Black resigns

Here 50 ... Re7 would pin the white knight and The Giantess has turned a ghastly green; : Lindores Abbey Stars Ding Liren-Karjakin hamper his attempt to make anything of his sick-visagèd and unwelcoming of those 2019 (see diagram 2) passed b-pawn. 50 ... Rxh3 51 Ne5 Black’s ill-fated folk who’ve taken to their toes. materialist 50th move enables White to Yet if their bloodline manifests a gene The f2 and f7 squares are notorious weak points in coordinate his position and the b-pawn soon our Lady craves, they’re honoured with a keen the army of every chess player. Black now spots an wins the game. 51 ... Kf6 52 Kd5 Kg5 53 acceptance; thus she strives to ever close opportunity to strike at this sensitive target but Rxf7 Be3 54 Rg7 Kf4 55 Rxg6 Kg3 56 the door on creed and hue which might impose sadly for him this turns out to be an occasion when b6 Rh1 57 b7 Rb1 58 Rg7 Bf4 59 Nc4 a demographic shift from what has been. White can defend. 17 ... Nxf2 18 Kxf2 Bc5+ Rd1+ 60 Kc5 Rc1 61 Rf7 Rb1 62 Kc6 19 Be3 Bxe3+ 20 Kxe3 f6 21 exf6 Rxf6 22 Bb8 63 Rf8 Rb4 64 Rxb8 Rxc4+ 65 Kb5 ‘Take heed!’ she cries. ‘I’m sealing off this land. Bf3 Qe7 23 Kd2 Qd6 24 Kc1 White avoids Rc1 66 Rg8 Black resigns Oh fiery torch, deter the migrant ship! This beacon is a cudgel in my hand, this rigid grin a sneer upon my lip; PUZZLE NO. 557 for pale-faced Evangelics are the brand I choose to brave the trans-Atlantic trip.’ White to play. This position is from Ding Liren- WDWDWDWD Paul Freeman Anand, Lindores Abbey Stars 2019. Here White played 1 Rb8 which lost a piece to 1 ... Rdb3. In DWDWDWDp Brazen (though not a giant, not at all), fact White has only one move to avoid ruinous W$WDW0kD Scoffing and sneering at all men and lands, material loss. What is it? Answers to me at The A self-important orange figure stands. Spectator by Tuesday 11 June or via email to DNDWDW0W His nickname (his real one is rather small) [email protected]. There is a prize of £20 Is very, very easy to recall: for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please W4WDWDPD It’s ‘One Mean Mother’. His miniature hands include a postal address and allow six weeks for DWDrGKDW Uplift a middle digit. He commands prize delivery. The building of an immigrant-proof wall. WDWDW)WD I’ll make our country great again, tweets he, Last week’s solution 1 ... Rxf1 So keep your wretched riff-raff well away, Last week’s winner Harry James, DWDWDWDW Let teeming masses stay beyond the sea Mamhilad, Pontypool, Monmouthshire Or let them huddle by the Mexique Bay.

58 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

comps_08 June 2019_The Spectator 58 04/06/2019 15:43 LIFE

I’m in charge, not old lady Liberty. 12345678 They can’t afford my hotels anyway. Crossword Brian Murdoch 2411: Left out 9101112 Like a loud, brazen slut for wealth and fame, by CheeseCracker 13 14 15 16 Helpless astride what he can’t comprehend, He’s weak and ignorant, but must pretend 17 18

He’s got the strength and smarts to win this game. 19 20 21 Atop a wall gold-lettered with his name He plants vast sculpted feet as if to send 22 23 The message, ‘I will quickly put an end To anyone who contradicts my claim 24 25 That Mexicans do every sort of crime Clues for ten thematically 26 27 28 29 (And other Latin gangster types as well). linked entries (all single words) We’ve built this wall bad hombres cannot climb. have been left out. 30 31 32 Our country’s locked like one vast prison cell. Newcomers once found welcome in a rhyme, 33 34 35 But we don’t want you now, so go to Hell!’ Across 9 Hot-rod awry? — fancy 36 37 38 Chris O’Carroll not being this (10) 14 Jackass regularly rejected 39 40 Usurp this outsize woman with a flame 60s music (3) That lights the poor and needy of this land, 41 18 Behind in award, finally I seize the torch, this portal must be manned going ahead (5) By one of giant stature, not a dame. 42 43 20 Get better poet to enter The huddled masses I intend to tame competition (7, two words) As by the harbour, manspreading, I stand; 22 Venture around the City, 6 Secretive folk revel noisily, A first prize of £30 for the first The wretched refuse, foreigners, are banned not much of an area (7) heading off on Sabbath (7) correct solution opened on 24 And with a wall I’ll curb the beaners’ game. 24 Extremely engaging men 7 Casual clothing has tenor June. There are two runners-up Then once I’ve quelled the threat from Mexico in ladies’ underwear — briefly ill-tempered prizes of £20. (UK solvers can I’ll look to ancient lands across the sea, crikey! (7) (6, hyphened) choose to receive the latest Bring an official end, I’ll lay them low. 25 Worries about ship holding 8 Indeed, no time for result edition of the Chambers I am the new colossus, I decree, water capsizing (5) (4) dictionary instead of cash — I raise my torch; its lustrous gleam will show 26 Fight animals back, 10 Bullet used by bounty ring the word ‘dictionary’.) My godlike form, revealed for all to see. avoiding river (5, hunter, say (6) Entries to: Crossword 2411, Sylvia Fairley hyphened) 12 Bias of private school over The Spectator, 22 Old Queen 28 Enduring a lot of meeting about sons (13) Street, London SW1H 9HP. If you were sailing past this wave-worn plinth, cobblers? (7) 13 Unknown Frenchman Please allow six weeks for Its old words might have seemed mere platitudes 31 Turned towards one’s love cutting cake, one from prize delivery. When speeches bloat around you, news is synth, — British poetry (7) a particular range (8) And the brave new world is in some nasty moods. 33 Emphatically, anybody 21 Women in colleges see Unchiselled for the mean time, here are subs: feels no wrong (7) without judgement (8) If you like malls, come in and have an eyeful; 37 Model with a group 23 Scarf worn by Tom finally Come in, if you like narcissistic clubs; of stars (5) lost in sailing vessel (7) Enter at will, for an over-the-counter rifle. 39 Chap, deft worker with 27 Outdoor broadcasting Name no energy, died (6) now about training Bombastic slogans, short-fuse rhetoricians, 40 Diner picked up letter (7, hyphened) Enough to go around; and redneck preachers. overseas (3) 29 Brief brawl before quiet Address America First! We don’t need your permissions. 41 Semi-pro air unsettled strike by Spenser (6) If you are foreign now, you suck like leeches. show manager (10) 30 Muscle cut badly in If things change, call. Right now there is no unguarded press (6) muddling, Down 32 Nun against admitting wife And as for your masses, please quit all that 1 Offer, ultimately limited, in old English society (6) huddling. outsider can’t change 34 Primarily wrapping up Bill Greenwell (13, two words) porcelain (5) 2 Left in vile European city 35 Spread food around Stop giving us your tired, your poor; (5) bottom of bowl (5) Email We’ll only make them poorer. 3 Runs over girl in African 36 Initially knew all the Your huddled masses looking for republic (6) answers in Japanese Free air just make us sorer. 4 Polish uniform capped with exercises (4) An exiled mother at the door? head of US vulture (5) We’ll snatch her kids, ignore her. Obamacare? There’ll be no more — Just pay a health insurer. SOLUTION TO 2408: END OF THE LINE Let wretched refuse quit our shore, And welcome, rich off-shorer! Unclued lights are TSAR (12) NICHOLAS (5A), his son But if you’re tempest-tost, unfed, ALEXEI (33), and his predecessors PETER (3) and Here’s our advice to you: Drop dead! CATHERINE (20) THE GREAT (23), BORIS (35) Sylvia O. Smith GODUNOV (21) and IVAN THE (6) TERRIBLE (43).

NO. 3104: TAKE THREE First prize Miriam Moran, Pangbourne, Reading Runners-up Jack Shonfield, Child Okeford, Dorset; You are invited to encapsulate the life story Vincent Clark, Frant, East Sussex of a well-known person, living or dead, in three limericks. Please email entries to lucy@ spectator.co.uk by midday on 19 June.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 59

comps_08 June 2019_The Spectator 59 04/06/2019 15:43 LIFE

announcing earlier this year that it large that demographic is. Rather, it’s No sacred cows would be replacing the second world a mandatory exercise in virtue signal- Budweiser flags up its war pin-up girl that has adorned its ling, something every large company planes for 35 years with a more diverse now feels it has to do to demonstrate new-found virtue signalling group of figures, including a gay man its alignment with progressive ortho- Toby Young wearing a one-piece red bathing suit. doxy. But why? To attract woke appli- But the rainbow-coloured biscuit cants from good universities? Because must go to Budweiser UK. The lager someone in the corporate and social manufacturer has decided to pro- responsibility department has suggest- aurice Bowra, the flam- duce a range of plastic beer cups with ed it and no one dares contradict them boyant warden of Wadham Pride’s nine official ‘flags’ on them, for fear of being labelled homophobic, MCollege from 1938 to 1970, each representing a different section transphobic or bi-phobic? Because once argued against the legalisation of the LGBT community. There’s the fiftysomething CEO wants to be of homosexuality on the grounds ‘Genderfluid Pride’, for instance, a able to tell his blue-haired 16-year-old that it would take all the fun out of it. combination of pink, blue, white, pur- daughter that he’s doing his bit to fight Without the risk of being picked up ple and black, and ‘Asexual Pride’, bigotry and oppression? Or is he plan- by the police, cruising up and down where black is for ‘asexuals who don’t ning to give a set of the rainbow cups the Cowley Road at one in the morn- feel sexual attraction to anyone’ and to his wife so she can show them off to ing would become rather tedious. He white represents ‘non-asexual allies’. her friends at the local country club? referred to the secret club of power- As a marketing exercise, Budweis- Probably all of the above, but ful homosexuals in the British estab- er’s ‘Fly the Flag’ campaign cannot be there’s also a strong hint of religious lishment as the ‘homintern’ and prid- aimed at those people who happen to observance in it, with all members of ed himself on being a high-ranking fall into these categories because there the Brahmin class, and those aspir- officer. He liked the fact that there simply aren’t enough of them. In the ing to join, feeling obliged to express was something exotic and clandes- US, the Williams Institute estimates the same progressive pieties. Which tine about his sexuality and dreaded that about 0.66 per cent of the popula- brings me back to Maurice Bowra. the risk of embourgeoisement if the tion is transgender, but that is a volu- Over the past 100 years, the attitude law was changed. minous number compared with some of polite society towards homosexu- Easy for Bowra to say, of course, of the more niche groups represented ality and other expressions of sex- protected as he was by wealth and by the Budweiser cups. For instance, ual and gender non-conformity has privilege. And he may not have really the black stripe on the yellow, white, shifted 180 degrees. Being LGBT is meant it. But you can’t help wonder- purple and black cup symbolising now the height of respectability, while ing what he would have made of Pride, ‘Non-Binary Pride’ is intended to rep- being a white ‘cishet’ male is moral- the month-long celebration of LGBT resent ‘those who feel they are without ly suspect. These days, a man is more identities that now takes place every gender entirely’. Another flag labelled likely to get into trouble for making summer. Talk about gentrification! Being LGBT ‘Intersex Pride’ is aimed at people a pass at a girl than a boy, particular- Every element of the festival is plas- is now the ‘whose biological sex can’t be classi- ly if he works for a woke corporation tered with a corporate logo, so desper- fied as clearly male or female’. About like Budweiser. It’s easy to become a ate are multinationals to convey how height of one person in 2,000 fall into that par- bit Bufton Tufton about this, but per- on board they are with the ‘equal- respectability, ticular medical category. haps men like me should take a leaf ity, diversity and inclusion’ agenda. while being a So is the target audience beer out of Bowra’s book. It’s time to start Procter & Gamble is celebrating its white ‘cishet’ drinkers whom Budweiser thinks will thinking of ourselves as a glamorous, 25th anniversary of ‘LGBT+ inclu- approve of the support it’s showing to underground minority who can only sion’, while Virgin Atlantic got the male is morally these groups? I doubt the company reveal our sexual preferences in pri- jump on its less-woke competitors by suspect has done any research to establish how vate. Welcome to the ‘heterotern’.

MICHAEL HEATH

60 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Toby Young_08 June 2019_The Spectator 60 05/06/2019 11:45 ble annual rite of unperforating and valued year after year, rather than The Wiki Man displaying your tax disc, people feel becoming invisible. It’s easy to sex up the short-changed? To promote honesty By rebating people’s taxes annu- and altruism, it helps to provide some ally and simultaneously you can also business of paying tax small selfish gain in return. borrow from Princess Marianne’s Rory Sutherland For years I have advised public playbook. It is hard to get people health professionals to stop recom- to volunteer to pay more tax. But it mending we engage in ‘ten minutes of would be far easier to get people to aerobic exercise, three times a week’. accept a lower tax rebate. A month o fund the war against Napole- Phrased like that, it sounds deeply bor- before the annual rebate was due, we on in 1813, Princess Marianne ing. ‘Why don’t you encourage people could be invited to donate a propor- Tof Prussia invented an ingen- to have more sex instead?’ I asked. tion to causes of our choice: 50 per ious tax-raising scheme. Wealthy After all, it’s aerobic, it lasts ten min- cent back to the NHS, for instance. Prussians were called on to hand their utes (if you’re English) and, unlike jog- People who gave 50 per cent or 100 jewellery to the state; in exchange ging, ridiculous clothes are optional. per cent could have their names pub- they were given iron replacements In the same way, why not make it lished online. for the gold items they had donated. more interesting to pay tax? Some This would silence those annoy- Stamped on the iron replicas were people say we pay too much tax. Oth- ing people who constantly drone on the words ‘Gold gab ich für Eisen’. ers say we pay too little. But the cur- about how we should pay more tax The phrase has a double meaning, rent tax system is flawed for another while avidly trousering every tax the iron referring to the iron of the reason: it is psychologically tone-deaf. break they can find. If your pinko replica, but also to the ‘iron’ your There is no attempt to create any friends had spent their despised tax donation had bought as armaments. compensatory feel-good factor at all. break on a holiday to Machu Picchu, At Prussian balls thereafter, iron jew- The Treasury’s hatred of hypoth- you could call them out. ellery carried more status than gold. ecated taxes is one problem. As every Better still, social pressure, unlike Gold merely proved your family was charity knows, people are far happier legislation, is sensitive to context. rich; iron proved you were not only giving to a specific cause than to an Nobody would begrudge the young, rich but patriotic. ill-defined one. Economists assume say, or a low-earning family, for keep- Why does no one try such ideas that the pain of writing a cheque ing their rebate. But anyone with today? As Adam Smith observed, depends only on the amount and not money to spare could reasonably be ‘The chief enjoyment of riches con- the destination. That is nonsense. nudged into contributing more. sists in the parade of riches’. At Prussian For another thing, cutting the tax The window tax was in some ways Just as the British Legion would balls, iron rate is emotionally wasteful. We soon the perfect tax. You could avoid it if raise far less money if it stopped jewellery become accustomed to the new rate you needed to, but you couldn’t hide handing out poppies, the DVLA carried more of tax and forget about it. More inter- the fact that you had. seems to have lost millions when it esting would be to hold the tax rate stopped handing out tax discs. Per- status than constant, but to refund tax cuts annu- Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman haps, without the bizarrely enjoya- gold ally in a lump sum. It would then be of Ogilvy UK.

dear mary your problems solved

of its provenance. The buyer can with the bride either genetically rush of people flocking towards fantasise — surely it must have or financially, surely it could me like gannets all saying that cost a fortune originally! It’s so equally be rude to exclude them, they gave up decades ago but chic it might even have belonged especially if they did a lot behind they suddenly really fancy a to Catherine Deneuve? Or Coco the scenes to make the event the cigarette and would I mind if they Chanel herself? Don’t let daylight success it was. Please advise. asked for one. Well the answer in on magic. Just take quiet — E.B., London SW10 is yes I would mind. If everyone comfort from this posthumous has one then I will be left short proof that your mother must A. The etiquette is that you should myself. How can I say no without Q. My mother died a few months have been very much on your thank whoever’s name was on the creating an unfriendly vibe? ago. Her collection of colourful wavelength if her tastes have invitation as the person/people — G.N., London W1 clothes, hats, shoes and an harmonised so clearly with those inviting you. You will probably immense amount of costume of your living friends. find that you were invited only by A. When you go out take a full jewellery was donated to various the two biological parents. Since packet concealed about your charity shops in nearby Devizes. Q. I have just been to a wonderful the parents of this bride no longer person and another with only Consequently, I now see a diverse wedding and want to write a live together you will have to write two cigarettes in it. Even if the range of ladies wearing one of thank you letter, but when the separate letters to thank them. first person is selfish enough to my mother’s ‘little numbers’. If parents of a bride are divorced But there is no need to include the take one of your ‘last two’, no I bump into a friend festooned in and both remarried to new partners in the salutations. one would dream of taking the these purchases, what is the right partners, which parent do I ‘last one’. In this way the demand compliment to make? thank? Also, do I include the new Q. I smoke 20 cigarettes a day will adapt itself to the supply and — N.C., Stanton St Bernard, Wilts partner in the salutation of the and always make sure I carry a the group craving will subside. letter? Although it might seem packet with me. What annoys me Meanwhile, you can secretly top A. Say nothing. Part of the joy of weird to include the partner when is that, whenever I bring one out your packet up when their backs vintage clothing is the mystery they have had nothing to do at a social event, there will be a are turned.

the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 61

The trouble with tax is it’s boring – but there are ways of sexing it up Wiki and Dear Mary_08 June 2019_The Spectator 61 05/06/2019 11:52 LIFE

ilar to D-Day? Let us hope that we lar transformation, in a shorter period, Drink never have to find out. Morals led and under a leader who does not revel Let the wine do the talking us on to Philip Hammond. General in the defects of his defects. agreement broke out among a group I called the meeting to order. We Bruce Anderson who are normally allergic to agree- had been drinking an excellent Rhône ment, that there is no more honoura- red, a Brune et Blonde 2012 from the ble man in the front-rank of public life. house of Guigal, a superb grower. I In an era of illusion and fantasy, he is a had recently experienced disappoint- tough-minded realist. Yet there would ments over Guigal’s ordinary Côtes be no point in his running for the Tory du Rhône, which was merely trading leadership, a contest which Boris John- on the name: not nearly as good as its son might win. This is not to the Tory equivalent from Saint Cosme. But the party’s credit. Brune et Blonde was delicious, and ‘Philip’s not much of a politician,’ could indeed withstand plenty more someone observed. ‘No,’ said I: ‘he years in the bottle. e had all said everything has the defects of his qualities.’ That I felt that we should all give it five there was to say about was immediately hailed as a brilliant minutes of undiluted concentration. WBrexit a hundred times remark. I swiftly rebuffed the com- We have all been guilty — I more than over. So the conversation took differ- I felt we pliments. A few decades ago, I had most — of being so caught up in talk ent routes. We discussed D-Day, Phil- to delve into the minor political lit- that a good wine slipped unobtru- ip Hammond, clichés and President should all give erature of the 1890s. In those days, sively across the palate. That Guigal Trump. D-Day: what an awesome the Brune et ‘defects of his qualities’ would have deserved better, even if not as much as concentration of men and materiel Blonde five ranked as an arrant cliché. At some a ’09 La Turque, from the same stable. — what a magnificent expression of minutes of stage, it disappeared into a linguistic I shared a bottle a few weeks ago. It military, national and moral resolve. culvert, from which it can now emerge, was worthy of a 21-gun salute. A youngster made the sort of point undiluted refreshed and renewed. Let us hope Less worthy, President Trump beloved of smartass youngsters down concentration that the Tory party can undergo a simi- received one. Which is more dispirit- the ages. What about the Eastern ing: his opponents’ childishness or his Front; what about the Kursk salient? determination to come down to their Should all that not put D-Day in a level? In the words of the late George diminished perspective? Brown, he should treat Sadiq Khan, No, he was told, for two reasons. Jeremy Corbyn and Vince Cable with Without D-Day, the Soviet empire a complete ignoral. In their turn, they would have extended a lot further should remember that he won because west, reaching the Rhine if not indeed his opponent came from a family that the Channel. Equally, with some give sleaze a bad name. Few Ameri- exceptions, especially when the Waffen cans have been as different as he and SS were in action, the war in the west T. S. Eliot. Yet Eliot captured the Pres- was as civilised as war can be. In the ident’s character: Apeneck Sweeney. east, the earth and its inhabitants were But if the Democrats choose, as seems ravaged by hell-driven barbarism. likely, a candidate who seems ill at ease Another question arose. Moral in most of America west of Manhattan resolve: these days, could we as a ‘Darling, you must meet the Carters! Neither of them and east of Hollywood, Apeneck will nation ever mount an operation sim- is standing in the Tory leadership contest!’ stay in the White House.

mind your language Artichoke My husband has been growling: As soon as the plant received plant names shift, considering ‘You cross-legged hartichoak.’ a Latin name, etymologising how rooted the vegetables are. He tries it on obstructive variants appeared such as From its enjoyment of the pedestrians hypnotised by their articoctus or articactus, suggesting seeds of thistle, artichoke or mobile phones. He thus hopes, it was something to be cooked, or cardoon, the goldfinch got the optimistically, to utter insults survive. Artichoke displays a resembling a cactus. The French Latin name Carduelis carduelis. while avoiding any -ism that could modest degree of folk etymology. called it artichaut or artichaud, as Remarkably, another Latin word get him into trouble. It came into English in the 16th if it was essential to eat it warm. for thistle, silybum, produced This imprecation hartichoak century from words already Not to be outdone, the English the Spanish word for goldfinch, he took from the mouth of obscure in their derivation. We assimilated the first element, arti, jilguero, after more than one Young Tom Strowd, a Norfolk borrowed it from the northern to hearty, like a lettuce, and the phonetic transformation. Yet I’ve man, in The Blind-Beggar of Italian form articiocco, in which second element to choke, since seen it claimed on the internet Bednal Green, a play from 1600 ciocco was taken to mean that is what you would do if you that jilguero comes from sirgo, by John Day (a Norfolk man) ‘stump’. In reality the word had ate the thistly centre. Don’t. ‘piece of silk’, since the bird’s and Henry Chettle (in and out of come, via Spanish alcachofa, from The edible part used to be plumage is as bright as silks. debtors’ prison). The artichoke the Spanish Arabic al-karsufa. called the card. This derives, like Popular etymology is still at jokes went down so well that two The meaning of the Arabic is chard and cardoon, from the work trying to give transparent sequels were performed, though not apparent, beyond the prefix Latin cardus, ‘thistle, artichoke or meanings to obscure words. their text, sadly or not, does not al-, ‘the’, as in alcohol and algebra. cardoon’. It’s amazing how these — Dot Wordsworth

62 the spectator | 8 june 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

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