T t 2014 12 02

OF LONDON

tuesday december 2 2014 | thetimes.co.uk | no 71369

The British teens who want to be jihadi brides Pages 48-49

Ukip ‘fixing’ selection of candidates, emails claim

Do you have gym face? Page 51 DOUG PETERS / PA

Jill Sherman Whitehall Editor

Party activists quit in attack on Farage cabal

Alexi Mostrous Special Correspondent Billy Kenber Investigations Reporter

Ukip has manipulated the selection of prospective parliamentary candidates and is run by Nigel Farage as an “undemocratic” cabal, according to claims in a leaked cache of documents seen by The Times.

More than a dozen activists previously loyal to the Eurosceptic party have resigned over perceived efforts by Mr Farage and his allies to remove longserving Ukip members from standing as MPs and MEPs in winnable seats.

As Mr Farage attempts to broaden Ukip’s appeal and to capitalise on its recent successes, some of his most longstanding foot-soldiers have accused the party of ignoring its own rules on selection procedures to the benefit of favoured candidates.

Neil Hamilton, now Ukip’s deputy chairman, warned in a private email that its list of MEP candidates for May’s European elections contained “manifest absurdities”.

“As you can imagine, I’m not pleased with the MEP selection process,” Mr Hamilton wrote. “Yet again, things have not been thought through properly and badly executed.”

In another leaked email, Will Gilpin, Ukip’s former chief executive, wrote: “When I saw the [MEP selection] list I concluded that the party doesn’t really want to change, that the same sycophancy will be the driving force.”

Mr Farage has gained support by pitching Ukip as an “anti-establishment” party seeking to shake up the old boys’ club in Westminster. Internal documents reveal, though, that senior figures questioned whether party leaders had tailored interview questions to discriminate against certain

MEP candidates or had altered some candidates’ ratings to suit their own preferences.

Instead of allowing local branches to choose candidates for the European elections in May this year, Ukip required potential MEPs to undergo psychometric testing and a series of formal interviews and assessments. They were given a rating out of 100 based on their performance and placed on a shortlist that was voted on by every party member.

“There is the question of whether the final scores were ‘massaged’ by an internal clique to suit pre-determined outcomes,” Andrew Moncrieff, who remains on Ukip’s governing committee, wrote last year. “What started out as an attempt to produce a transparent, equitable system has turned into another classic Ukip ‘behind closed doors’ selection.”

Last night, a party spokesman said: “What we see are a series of claims by disappointed candidates. The system was fair and rigorous, and the quality of candidates continues to improve. As Ukip grows there are those who have been around a long time who feel that by dint of long service they are entitled to jobs and roles. The opposite is true, as today there is far greater competition.

This can only be a good thing for the party and the country as a whole.”

Steve Crowther, the party chairman, had to reassure the party’s national executive committee last year that Mr Farage had “never at any stage given me even the slightest indication of who should and should not be on the list.

Not once.”

Mr Moncrieff, who like Mr Hamilton did not make the European shortlist, questioned the involvement of “Nigel’s Continued on page 4, col 1

New £200m science institute for the north

Setting a trend Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, with her daughter, Bee Shaffer, at the British Fashion Awards. Wintour was given the Outstanding Achievement Award on the fashion industry’s biggest night of the year. Page 3

A multimillion-pound science institute in Manchester will be announced by George Osborne tomorrow as the next step in his plans for a “northern powerhouse” to rival London’s thriving economy.

It can be revealed that the research and innovation centre will mirror the Crick Institute, due to open in London next year. It will cost more than £200 million, but the chancellor has been negotiating for months with private investors to secure extra funding.

The centre, which will focus on materials research, will have satellite hubs in cities including Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool, in an attempt to attract world-class scientists and technicians to the north. It may also have links to Cambridge and Imperial College London to enable their researchers to contribute to work in Manchester.

Sources in Whitehall said that Vince Cable, the business secretary, had worked on the proposals for months.

“Vince has long pushed for improvements in science capital spending in the north for long-term growth and it is good news that Mr Osborne has recognised and rewarded this with extra cash,” one said.

The chancellor’s autumn statement, which will confirm big spending cuts for the next Parliament, will set out the details of 1,400 flood defence projects to provide better protection for 300,000 homes, although funding for the sixyear scheme was announced last year.

Nick Clegg was forced to deny that the projects included in the statement were being chosen to help the coalition in the general election. Mr Osborne will confirm big road and rail programmes for the north and is likely to reveal that more powers may be devolved to cities such as Sheffield and Leeds. A new Transport for the North authority, to oversee buses, rail and metros, is expected to be confirmed.

Last month the chancellor gave approval for a high-speed rail link — HS3 — across the Pennines, ultimately linking Hull to Liverpool, via Leeds and Manchester. He later announced new powers, money and a directly elected mayor for Manchester as part of the government’s response to the Scottish referendum. After new tax-raising Continued on page 7, col 4

IN THE NEWS Turner Prize winner

Abuse doctor jailed

Iraq’s ‘ghost’ soldiers

Rouble plummets

Leeds chief fights on

A video featuring African masks, an IRA volunteer and comedic bottles of tomato ketchup has been named as the Turner Prize winner at Tate Britain. Page 9

Myles Bradbury, a hospital consultant, was jailed for 22 years after he admitted sexually abusing young cancer patients in his care. He could face further charges. Page 23

Iraq has been paying salaries to 50,000 “ghost” soldiers, the country’s prime minister has admitted, highlighting the challenge it faces in halting Islamic State militants. Page 24

The Russian rouble suffered its sharpest one-day fall against the dollar for 16 years as petro-currencies continued to plummet because of the volatile oil price. Page 31

Massimo Cellino, the owner of Leeds United, resolved to fight attempts to force him out of English football and accused the Football League of waging a vendetta. Page 64

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News INSIDE TODAY

Robert Peston

Politicians won’t save us, so the Bank of England must Opinion, page 19

Louise Cooper

Food shopping is a funny old game . . . until you reach the checkout Business, page 38

News

Restraining order for aristocrat who used ex-lover’s sperm to get pregnant

Page 5

Making the cut

The young theatre director taking on Treasure Island Arts, pages 52, 53

Opinion 17 Weather 17 Cartoon 19 Leading articles 20 Letters 21 World 24 Business 31 Markets 40, 41 Times2 46 Register 42 Sport 54 Crosswords 45, 64 Please note, some sections of The Times are available only in the United Kingdom and Ireland

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Brown bids emotional farewell to work as UN education envoy Mike Wade

Gordon Brown has pledged to continue a life of public service as a UN envoy for education, as he confirmed last night his intention to end his 31-year career as an MP. Echoing his departure from Downing Street for the final time in 2010, the former Labour prime minister appeared with his wife, Sarah, 51, and their sons John, 11, and Fraser, eight, to bid a kind of farewell to friends, constituents and local Labour politicians in the town where he grew up.

On a night of taut emotions in Kirkcaldy, he also thanked his audience for the help they had given his family when his daughter, Jennifer, died in 2002.

Mr Brown said: “I’ll never forget and Sarah will never forget the kindness you showed us and the strength you gave us 13 years ago this year when our first child Jennifer, who was born at Forth Park [hospital] died ten days later. The donations you made to set up the Jennifer Brown Research Fund made possible life-saving research so that in future little girls like Jennifer will live.”

Mr Brown, 63, has almost entirely abandoned Westminster since the previous election, immersing himself in the

charity foundation he established with his wife and in his role with the UN. His decision to stand down before next year’s election was widely expected.

Mr Brown, who employs two full-time staff and two part-time staff in his Kirkcaldy office, said he had no intention of slowing his work rate. He made clear that he had no future in Westminster, either in the Commons or the Lords.

He said. “I am in no doubt it is the

right thing to do. We are not leaving Fife, it is London we are leaving.”

Mr Brown was speaking at Kirkcaldy’s Old Kirk, within a stone’s throw of St Brycedale, where his father, John, was the Presbyterian minister. It was his father’s belief in public service that inspired his career as a politician, he said.

“I learnt an early lesson in the church just across the road that politics, my father believed, was about public service, a vocation, born out of high ideals,

Most voters want gas and railways renationalised Alice Ross

The majority of voters support the renationalisation of gas, electricity and railway industries, according to a poll.

The YouGov survey for The Times found that 56 per cent of respondents are in favour of the state taking back ownership of utilities, while 59 per cent support renationalising the railways.

The poll, published on The Times’s Red Box website, also found that almost half of respondents want the private sector to be less involved in the NHS. Both utility bills and rail fares have consistently outstripped wage increases in recent years. In the past year, more than 70,000 people have asked Citizens Advice for help in dealing with problems with energy companies.

Trust in the sector was described as being at “rock bottom” by Gillian Guy, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, earlier this year. Research by Passenger Focus, a watchdog for the rail industry, has found that 45 per cent feel that it offers value for money.

Anthony Wells, an associate director

at YouGov, said that surveys often found support for nationalistion. “Because no mainstream party promotes nationalisation any more, we forget it’s broadly popular,” he said. “[The] public is quite hostile to big business, but trusts nice, cosy nationalised industries.”

Gas and electricity services were privatised by the government of Margaret Thatcher in 1986 and 1990 respectively, while the railways were privatised under John Major in 1993.

YouGov’s survey of 2,067 people found strong support for nationalisation among supporters of all the main parties. Support was particularly pronounced among Labour voters.

Among Ukip voters, 64 per cent backed nationalising utilities and 67 per cent wanted the railways back under state control. Mr Wells said that this reflected the profile of the party’s newer supporters: “They’re picking up much wider support, often among more working-class [people] . . . There’s a hankering after an earlier age that includes hankering after a nationalised age.”

Leading article, page 20

driven forward by almost a missionary zeal for progress and change.

“I still hold to a belief in the moral purpose of public service. Standing down from public office, I want to renew my commitment to public service.”

Mr Brown had returned to politics with vigour in the last few weeks before Scotland’s independence referendum, delivering a succession of fiery speeches that overshadowed Ed Miliband, his successor as Labour leader.

His pledge to fast-track further powers for the Scottish parliament is widely credited as influencing the outcome and setting the agenda for the Smith Commission on further devolution.

It is rumoured that Mr Miliband had hoped Mr Brown would lead the Scottish Labour party in its attempt to win back the political initiative from the SNP, but Mr Brown refused.

6 Labour is in danger of losing one of its biggest donors after the Co-op Group announced it would hold a vote on whether to continue its ties with the party. Members of the group will vote on whether to cut its £1 million annual donation to the Co-operative party, which is a close ally of Labour, in a ballot expected to take place after next year’s general election.

Unite under fire over ballot for Scottish Labour Sam Coates Deputy Political Editor

Unite has been accused of going too far in its attempt to secure its candidate to beat Jim Murphy to lead Scottish Labour.

The union has devised a mock ballot showing how to vote for Neil Findlay, its candidate. The package contains the edict: “Fill out the enclosed ballot paper like the example below.”

Unite is responsible for distributing ballot papers to its members who are affiliated to Labour. The party in Scotland has not changed the leadership rules despite an overhaul of the way the national contest is run.

The tactic echoes the methods that ensured the election of Ed Miliband in 2010, when the unions supported the winning candidate while MPs and Labour members voted for David Miliband. A Labour source said: “We want union members to know there is a genuine contest here, but this does not look like they are being given a proper choice.”

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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News

Galliano returns to the fashion fold His antisemitic rants signalled the end of his career, but now he is the star of the show, David Sanderson writes There may have been prizes for the creator of the cereal box clutch bags but the real surprise dish last night was the son of a plumber.

John Galliano, last seen declaiming the missed opportunities of Nazism, chose London to mark his return to the fashion world he dominated for most of this century.

The designer, whose ideas took shape in south London and whose flamboyant catwalks continue to influence global tastes, ended his exile at the British Fashion Awards.

Predictably, for a man accustomed to ending his own showcases with a strut along the runway in white feather headdresses and electric-pink and powder-blue matador costumes, there was an element of surprise.

There had been no warning, but a hint came from Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, wearing one of his numbers.

There was little consternation when he did take to the stage; after all, exile is “so last century, darling”.

It is almost exactly four years ago that Galliano’s fall from grace began.

The narrative has him sitting alone nursing a drink at La Perle in Le Marais, the historic Jewish quarter in Paris. For some still foggy reason — the haze of drugs and alcohol has been cited in a predictable, if pitiful, defence — Galliano raised the Holocaust with fellow diners. Jewish diners.

In a soliloquy little longer than a catwalk chasse, Galliano ensured that obituarists have an alternative to “daring fashion designer” when he dies.

“People like you ought to be dead,” he slurred. “Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f***ing gassed.”

And then the coup de grace. “I love Hitler.” After a video of the scene was posted on YouTube two months later, the drop was swift and steep.

From the fashion designer at Dior, feted by models, Hollywood and his peers, Galliano became an unemployable criminal.

At his trial in July 2011 Galliano admitted two charges of making antisemitic comments — he had also abused a museum curator for being Jewish.

Dior, which happened to have Natalie Portman, the Israeli actress, as one of its “brand faces”, sacked him.

The actresses Michelle Dockery, left, and right, Emma Watson. Erin O’Connor, the model, far right, and the designers Victoria Beckham and Christopher Bailey, below, at the British Fashion Awards last night

Drink, drugs and anger counselling followed. He still came out feeling some injustice however and tried, unsuccesfully, to sue Dior for unfair dismissal.

And so the circle turns.

Last night he presented an outstanding achievement award to Wintour, the colossus of Vogue. The glacially formidable titan of fashion is credited by Galliano with giving him his break in the early 1990s.

Galliano paid tribute to Wintour, describing her as “ a world-class philanthropist”.

“She has nurtured young designers like me, like when I was eating baked beans over a bunsen burner to survive. She has been supportive through all my highs and lows. She reached out to me when I was an outcast. I wouldn’t have been here if it hadn’t been for her.”

And to witness the re-emergence of Galliano? David Beckham, fresh from a car crash, Lewis Hamilton, the F1 world champion, Lily Allen, Cara Delevingne and other women who — in another era — would have adored to have Dior’s Galliano whisking his measuring tape around them.

Men rule at British fashion Oscars Carolyn Asome Deputy fashion editor

A

designer whose creations have been worn by the Duchess of Cambridge and Michelle Obama last night won the Womenswear Designer award at the British Style awards.

Montreal-born Erdem Moralioglu was among several male designers to be honoured at the London Coliseum, which played host to the annual gala dinner that has

been dubbed the Oscars of the British fashion industry. The event was attended by Samantha Cameron, the British Fashion Council ambassador, Anna Wintour, Kate Moss and Courtney Love.

Erdem’s intensely romantic, unashamedly feminine creations have won him a high-profile fan base. His clothes sell in over 170 stores around the world.

Other winners last night included Nicolas Ghesquière, the French designer at the helm of Louis Vuitton, who won the International Designer award as well as one

for his advertising campaign, a series of photos shot by Bruce Weber and Annie Leibovitz.

Jonathan Anderson won the Menswear award.

Victoria Beckham took the Brand award and Simone Rocha the New Establishment award. Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen won best Red Carpet Designer and Anya Hindmarch won the Accessories award.

British style was thought to be embodied best by the actress Emma Watson, while Cara Delevingne was voted Model of the Year for the second time running.

Over-50s decide it’s time to look after number one Gabriella Swerling

People in their fifties are ditching the botox, hair dye and cynical world-view according to a new survey that reveals they feel better than ever and do not care what other people think.

The study, conducted by Silversurfers.com, the lifestyle website for people aged 50 and over, found that one in four people in their fifties say they feel ten to 14 years younger than their real age.

The website asked what the priorities of today’s over 50s were and found that financial security was ranked first, followed by health and the desire to see

their grandchildren grow up. The poll surveyed 1,000 people over the age 50, and reveals that they are enjoying a wave of confidence and health as they focus on their own happiness and their spouse over their children’s security.

Just 13 per cent said their priority was to see their children happily married. In contrast, 51 per cent said the best thing about getting older is only doing the things they like, while 45 per cent no longer care what people think about them.

Martin Lock, the chief executive of Silversurfers.com, said: “These results show that confidence grows with age and that by the time you’re 50 you no

Top priorities 1 Security 2 Health 3 Grandchildren growing up 4 Avoiding stress 5 Happiness 6 Family time 7 Fulfilment 8 Travelling 9 Children happily married 10 Help children buy own homes

longer worry about the things that mattered so much before.

“This could be why the over 50s feel up to 14 years younger. They no longer worry about things they can’t change and place health as a top priority.”

More than a third of those surveyed said that their spouse was the most important thing in their lives, while 45 per cent said they feel younger than their parents felt at the same age.

As people in the UK live longer, the research reveals they are enjoying life more. Those surveyed ranked happiness, avoiding stress, travelling, spending time with their families and fulfilment in life as important to them.

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Grand Mufti of Egypt to be Ukip guest for religion debate Laura Pitel, Bel Trew

One of Islam’s most senior clerics is due to travel to Britain this week to take part in a debate organised by Ukip on religious extremism.

The Grand Mufti of Egypt is expected to meet Nigel Farage and will join a panel discussion on youth radicalisation, according to the party’s communities spokesman, Amjad Bashir.

Mr Bashir, an MEP and one of the party’s most prominent Muslims, has billed the event as an opportunity to remind young people of “the teachings of their religion and developing strategies for combating religious intolerance”.

Shawqi Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allam

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is Egypt’s leading religious authority.

He has become one of the most prominent Muslim critics of Islamic State, denouncing it as “an extremist and bloody group that poses a danger to Islam and Muslims”.

The first Grand Mufti of Egypt to be elected by scholars rather than being appointed by the president, he has taken a more careful approach to politics than his predecessor.

Muslim organisations in Britain were perplexed by his decision to take part in the event alongside Ukip.

Mustafa Field, of the Faiths Forum Egypt’s Grand Mufti is a fierce critic of Islamic State

for London, said: “The Grand Mufti of Egypt is well qualified to drive a counter-narrative to defuse the radicalisation of young people, but I wonder if his team have done their homework — I am not sure if they have chosen the right platform to present on an issue of such importance.”

A source at another leading Muslim group described the event as “bizarre,” but was reluctant to publicly criticise such a senior religious leader.

Mr Bashir, one of Ukip’s most prominent Muslim members, invited the Grand Mufti after seeing him deliver an address to the European parliament.

The debate, on Friday, will see him speak alongside the son of a prominent Pakistani cleric and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton. The discussion should be lively.

Lord Carey, head of the Church of England from 1991 to 2002, is renowned for his forthright views on Islam.

Ukip has repeatedly been forced to distance itself from candidates who described Muslims as “nutters who want to kill us”.

Last year, Mr Farage praised John Howard, the former Australian prime minister, for saying: ‘You’re welcome to come here and to have your children here . . . but if you’re coming here to take us over, you’re not welcome.”

Mr Bashir predicted a “very healthy debate”. He said: “I want to have a debate as to why people who are born and raised in our country are getting radicalised. This is a dilemma of our time and we have to think beyond party politics.

Richard Ottaway, the Conservative MP who is chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said that the pairing was “an odd connection”.

“What the Grand Mufti and Nigel Farage have got in common remains to be seen,” he said. “But I wish them well.”

JOSHUA PERRETT / SWNS.COM

henchmen” in the process and asked why “paid party lackeys have done surprisingly well”. He suggested that a likely reason was “that it suits the party hierarchy to get people paid by the party elected as MEPs so they can be paid for by the EU”.

Two Ukip insiders have suggested that at least one candidate’s scores may have been downgraded.

“The candidate got his results [from the firm which carried out tests o/n behalf of Ukip],” one source said. “They told him he was one of the highest. His scores were higher than his position on the list, that was for sure.”

The insider said that members of the party’s governing committee were not shown the candidates’ scores and were simply presented with a ranked list of 60 candidates at the same time as it was published to members.

David Gale, Ukip’s former candidate for the police and crime commissioner role in Derbyshire, resigned last year after suggesting that one party official had justified the omission of an MEP candidate on the basis that “all the members would vote for him and we can’t have that”. Ukip strongly denied the claims at the time.

Rifts in the party over selection look set to continue into next year. Douglas Denny, a former Farage loyalist who joined Ukip in 1999, accused the party of being “immoral, undemocratic and deeply corrupt” after he was deselected as the party’s parliamentary candidate for Portsmouth South.

Mr Denny was selected 18 months ago after winning an open hustings but was dropped by Ukip’s leadership after it asserted the right to change candidates in so-called “key seats”. In a resignation note he said that Ukip had

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Miliband poll apology Lord Ashcroft has apologised to Ed Miliband after admitting to major flaws in a poll suggesting that the Labour leader’s seat was under threat from Ukip. The Tory peer said that the poll in Doncaster North actually indicated Mr Miliband had increased his 26-point lead over Ukip to 29 rather than dropping down to 12, and that he led David Cameron by 14 points, not one.

Newborn found in bin The body of a newborn girl has found found in a wheelie bin in North Yorkshire. The baby was found in the communal waste area of Whitcliffe Grange in Richmond. Paramedics were called but the infant could not be revived and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police have issued an appeal to locate the mother who, they said, was likely to be in a distressed state.

EU student loan ‘fraud’ Foreign students received taxpayer-funded loans and grants worth £5.4 million to which they were not entitled, the National Audit Office has found. An inquiry was prompted by a surge in applications for help with living costs from EU nationals, many from Romania. More than 11,000 applicants could or would not provide proof, such as bank statements, payslips or utility bills.

A time to turn Autumn leaves still provide a colourful canopy for early-morning walkers in Clifton Down, Bristol, but winter’s chill is not far off. Weather, page 17

‘Lackeys’ pushed to the top, insiders claim Continued from page 1

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

“demonstrated conclusively that they are willing to manipulate the MP candidates’ selection process . . . and have changed the rules recently to allow this to be done. Those choosing will be under the shadow of Nigel Farage.”

Andrew MacDowell, Portsmouth’s chairman, also resigned from the party in protest. Roger Bird, a Ukip member, told a local newspaper that Mr Denny’s deselection was a “routine event”.

More recently, the entire local party branch in South Hereford voted to dissolve itself in support of the prospective parliamentary candidate, Kip Waistell, who resigned after a Ukip MEP allegedly threatened to have him “deselected”.

Mr Waistell claimed in his resignation letter that “there are those within Ukip who have sought from day one to manipulate people against each other in this constituency”. Ukip’s response

was that a “lacklustre” Mr Waistell “jumped before he was pushed”.

Last year, about 200 Ukip members paid £500 each to enter the process to become an MEP candidate in the European elections. Some 77 shortlisted names paid a further £360 for screening tests, bringing the party more than £125,000 in income.

Mr Crowther told NEC members in an email that the selection process was “calculated to be self-liquidating”.

However, Ukip’s 2013 accounts listed the costs of MEP selection as £32,671, suggesting it made a profit of more than £95,000.

Caroline Gent, a Ukip councillor, wrote to the party’s NEC last year to express her “total dismay” after candidates she considered to be superior were passed over. “The whole thing stinks,” she said. “I thought UKIP were supposed to be honest.”

Reindeer breaks free A reindeer named Tinsel, bought by a Christmas tree seller to attract customers, jumped over the 6ft fence of its enclosure and escaped only 20 minutes after its arrival at Friezeland Farm in Nuneaton. Paul McRobert had paid £3,000 for two reindeer.

While the second, Holly, remained in the pen, Tinsel was eventually found in an old coal mine three miles from the farm.

Most read at thetimes.co.uk 1. Woman volunteer with Kurd fighters ‘kidnapped by Isis’ 2. Brooke Shields: I chose my first lover over my mother 3. Putin revives nuclear trains 4. Private pupils ‘too confident’ 5. How we really learn as adults 6. £1 coin fails to cover all angles 7. Hackers steal Pitt’s movie 8. Israel to vote on ‘Jewish state’ 9. Pilot’s second air crash 10. Parents avoid royal name

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Aristocrat used ex-lover’s sperm after break-up David Brown

An aristocratic perfumer who used the sperm of a big-game hunter to become pregnant after the end of their relationship was ordered yesterday not to contact him.

Phoebe Manners, the granddaughter of the 9th Duke of Rutland, was cleared yesterday of harassing Stuart Anderson Wheeler after she sent him a series of text messages urging him to be involved in their son’s life.

Miss Manners, 46, later accepted a restraining order meaning that she could be jailed for up to five years if she contacts her former lover in any way other than through her lawyers.

Their son was born more than a year after the end of a four-month relationship in 2010, Hammersmith magistrates’ court was told yesterday.

During their relationship the couple agreed to have a child with the help of IVF, a previous hearing had been told.

When the relationship ended after she suffered a miscarriage, she used Mr Anderson Wheeler’s sperm without his permission to become pregnant again.

He had subsequently married an American banker and had a child with her.

Mr Anderson Wheeler, who had travelled from Tanzania to give evidence, told the court yesterday that he had no involvement with their son’s life apart from paying child maintenance. He contacted police after receiving six text messages from Miss Manners during the five months to April.

Mr Anderson Wheeler, 34, said: “I found it very harassing and unnerving.” He leads African safaris and is a director of his family-owned gunsmiths based in MayStuart Anderson Wheeler and Phoebe Manners

fair. One of the firm’s £17,000 doublebarrelled shotguns was sported by Daniel Craig in the James Bond film Skyfall.

Miss Manners, who charges £800 for creating a bespoke fragrance, told police: “These messages were not threatening or insulting. They were intended to inform [Mr Anderson Wheeler] about my feelings as a parent and provide information about the boy.

“I’m sorry for any distress caused. As a single parent it is very difficult to watch one’s son growing older without his father playing any role in his upbringing. I didn’t intend to harass [Mr Anderson Wheeler] and in the context of our relationship and my role as a mother I believe my behaviour was reasonable.”

District Judge Paul Goldspring did not disclose the contents of the texts but said that Miss Manners had described their son as “a gift”. He repeatedly asked for further details of the background to the messages, which were not forthcoming. “Without a context I do not know what I can make of it,” the judge said.

He added: “What I have are random texts saying, ‘Please be more of a father to this child’. That cannot amount to harassment, there is no case. It seems to me that it was an attempt to get a father to be involved in a child’s life and that does not, on the face of it, seem to be unreasonable.”

After the hearing, the prosecution applied for a restraining order, revealing that Miss Manners had received a warning and caution after admitting having previously sent Mr Anderson Wheeler up to five texts a day.

Miss Manners has worked with the actresses Emilia Fox and Daryl Hannah.

Jihad suspects hid in lorry with migrants fleeing UK Sean O’Neill

Two suspected jihadists trying to get to Syria were arrested in a raid on a lorry carrying illegal migrants who were trying to leave Britain. The raid was targeted at followers of Anjem Choudary, the extremist preacher, and one of those arrested is understood to be a man who is on bail after being arrested with the extremist preacher earlier this year.

The lorry was stopped at Dover on Sunday night and 15 people were arrested: two men, aged 33 and 43, on suspicion of terrorist activity; one man for people-trafficking offences and 12 people for immigration offences. Yesterday morning, a man, aged 28, was arrested at Dover, and two men, aged 40 and 24, were arrested in east London.

Five properties in London were searched but Scotland Yard said that the operation was not in response to any immediate terror threat.

It is understood that the men, who were arrested by Counter Terrorism Command, are suspected of trying to leave the country to get to Syria and hid among a group of migrants in an effort to evade border security.

6 Cressida Dick, Britain’s most senior policewoman, is leaving her role as assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police to take up a secret intelligence role with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Ms Dick, who is the former head of counterterrorism policing, faced calls for her resignation over the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005.

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News MERCURY PRESS & MEDIA

Riding high A motorbike similar to the one TE Lawrence was riding when he was killed in a crash in 1935 has sold in London for £315,100. In 1929, Brough Superior SS100s came with a written guarantee that they had been timed at 100mph

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

News Politics

Brussels slams brake on fuel subsidies for marginal seats

Sam Coates Deputy Political Editor Francis Elliott Political Editor

A coalition scheme to offer a fuel subsidy for remote constituencies, most of which have small parliamentary majorities, has run into trouble in Europe.

The plan, by Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Trea-

sury, would have helped 120,000 people in three English and seven Scottish towns before the election.

Among the beneficiaries would have been five petrol stations in the constituency of the former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy, two in Mr Alexander’s seat and one in the North Devon seat of Nick Harvey, a Lib Dem MP.

John Woodcock, the Labour MP for Barrow and Furness and the safe seat of William Hague would have also benefited.

However, the European Commission could block the plan. The government had hoped to get an answer by the end of the year, but it looks unlikely. A government source said that Mr Alexander

“always acknowledged it would be a challenge” to get approval for the fuel subsidy, which has never been granted for mainland sites in Europe.

George Osborne is expected to announce £15 billion worth of new road schemes tomorrow across Britain, two thirds of which are in coalition constituencies. In the southwest, a large number of Liberal Democrat constituencies will benefit from the £2 billion commitment to make the A303 and A358 dual carriageway, including a tunnel at Stonehenge.

Specific schemes have works beginning in the North Cornwall seat of Dan Rogerson, and David Laws, the schools minister, also benefits in Yeovil.

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, denied that the location of the new roads was driven by politics. He told the BBC: “You don’t make decisions like this based on a political map. You make these decisions based on the economic map and the geographic layout of our county to make sure that all parts of our country are properly linked.”

However the roads have been the subject of significant lobbying by a number of local MPs. Today, details of more than 1,400 flood defence projects that are to receive funding will be set out, many of these near marginal seats. The Treasury is detailing schemes that will receive a share of the £2.3 billion earmarked for capital spending on flood defences over the next six years to improve protection for 300,000 homes.

The spending includes investment in areas such as the Humber Estuary, where £80 million will be allocated.

The Conservatives are defending a 4,298 majority in Cleethorpes and need a 1.1 per cent swing to win Great Grimsby, on the banks of the Humber. There is also £196 million for a programme in the Thames Estuary, with the Tories defending a majority of 92 in Thurrock.

Ministers are also committing to spend £15.5 million on flood defences over the next six years in Somerset, where there are three Lib Dem marginals. They hope it will benefit 7,000 properties, with £4.2 million spent on the Somerset Levels and Moors, which were badly hit by flooding last winter.

The government has been criticised for its flood defence funding, with critics warning that not enough was being spent to protect homes and businesses from the increased risk of flooding in the face of climate change.

Officials said the six-year programme would help to prevent more than £30 billion of economic damage.

Ministers say they have spent a record £3.2 billion in this parliament, though the figure includes extra money announced after flooding as well as spending for 2010-11 in the first year of the coalition, which was set out by the previous government.

The National Audit Office recently highlighted real-term cuts in spending on maintaining defences, while the government’s climate advisers warned of a £500 million shortfall between what has been spent and what is needed to cope with the risk of flooding.

Plans for a garden city in Bicester, near Oxford, containing 13,000 homes, are also expected to be announced in the autumn statement. It will cost £100 million and will be funded through a mixture of government grants and loans. “I am delighted Bicester can now be confirmed as a pioneer in what I hope will be another wave of garden cities in this country,” Mr Clegg said.

Simon Thurley, right, the director of

Osborne’s Sam Coates Deputy Political Editor

George Osborne’s decision to lower the 50p top rate of tax is still playing havoc with the public finances, Treasury officials have said.

Officials from the chancellor’s department told other Whitehall economists in a private meeting last week that the decision, taken in 2012, to reduce the top rate of tax to 45p was to blame for the current uncertainty over tax receipts.

Individuals due big bonuses have been deferring them to take advantage of the lower rate of income tax. Although the change was implemented in April last year, it is understood still to be having an impact on public finances.

One government source said: “The department’s economist had a chat with the Treasury. They were saying one of the big problems was being caused by bonuses. It turned out a lot of people who should have declared their bonuses had deferred them. That’s causing a huge headache.”

The Treasury declined to comment.

This drop in bank bonus tax receipts has already been noticed by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It said earlier this month: “Year-to-date growth in receipts of 2.2 per cent is well below the full-year forecast of a little under 5 per cent. Some of this reflects the timing of receipts through the

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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STEPHEN SIMPSON / LNP

Behold, the leader of the Lib Dem sect Ann Treneman Political Sketch

P

English Heritage, tells Nick Clegg and Dame Helen Ghosh of the National Trust how a tunnel will transform Stonehenge

tax cut gives Treasury a headache Box of tricks: how the chancellor makes it all add up Double counting Using sleight of hand to make a thin list of spending announcements sound more impressive is a constant temptation for the incumbent of No 11.

One trick that Gordon Brown was constantly accused of deploying was that of “double counting”, where a pledge is later found to include money already allocated to the cause.

Pile up spending over several years Another way of beefing up puny-looking funding promises is to add up future spending over a whole parliament or beyond. The ploy can also be used to ease in painful cuts. Expect a lot of the funding announced today to include spending up to 2020 — which may not be immediately clear

from the chancellor’s speech.

Reannouncements If money is tight, chancellors tend to look kindly on spending the money already shelled out all over again.

Reannouncements are an ever-present feature of budgets and autumn statements, whichever party is in power and whoever is chancellor.

Reannounced policies can still collapse, like the attempted sale of the student-loan book.

Comparing apples with pears It is always easier to make the nation’s deficit look a bit rosier by using heroic baselines and projections to come up with a figure of cuts to come. David Cameron has been heavily criticised for suggesting that the

government had made savings of £100 billion and had another £25 billion to go. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said he used an “inconsistent” definition of “savings” with the two figures.

Blind with detail A tried and tested technique for hiding the pain in a budget or autumn statement, at least temporarily, is to make the difficult decisions sound like a list of boring technical changes only of interest to economists and policy wonks. That was deployed during the 2012 budget. A pledge to “simplify age-related allowances” was soon dubbed a “granny tax” that would save the government at least £3 billion by 2017.

financial year. Last year’s shifting of PAYE liabilities in response to the reduction in the additional rate of income tax depressed receipts growth in the early part of 2014-15.”

The level of tax receipts may bounce back once the self-assessment returns are paid next month. The OBR could also rule that the structural deficit is bigger than expected because low earnings growth combined with the new, more generous tax brackets is pushing fewer people into higher tax brackets.

Mr Osborne will also throw his weight behind devolving corporation tax in principle to Northern Ireland but will stop short of making it happen in this parliament. Effectively, it will be a bargaining chip that could help Tories do a deal with the unionist DUP party.

George Osborne: hit by lower tax receipts

rehistory was made at Stonehenge yesterday when the government tried to convince neolithic man that a tunnel under their monument was indeed new or even neo.

“Barney!” cried Fred Heelstone, a distant relation to his Stone Age relative Flintstone. “Some guy named Patrick McLoughlin says he has a new five-year funded plan to relieve traffic on the A303.” Barney dropped his chisel. “Hah! They’ve been saying that for millenia!”

Its “neo” announcement couldn’t have come at a worse time for Stonehenge. This may be the world’s most important prehistoric monument but for the likes of Fred and Barney it is a place called home.

They’d already been busy preparing for the mid-winter solstice madness, already overbooked by druids when, just after sunrise, always busy at Stonehenge, a stranger arrived.

“Some sect called the Liberal Democrats sent their leader called Nick Clegg,” moaned Fred, “to walk through the stones and talk to us about bottlenecks!” Fred and Barney and the other neolithics rolled their eyes. They’d never seen a day like it (well, OK, maybe there was that day back in 2030BC but since then . . .).

Nick Clegg in the morning and then, just before sunset, another frantic time in the stone circle world, a man named David Cameron arrived.

Dave had wandered among the stones, looked mystical and chanted something unintelligible. “The plan for the tunnel is robust,” mumbled Dave, “the money in the national budget is there, the vital importance of infrastructure is now accepted by everybody. I think this is now unstoppable.”

“Robust?” asked Fred, looking at

Barney who just shrugged. These sects and their crazy ideas.

“Unstoppable?” They laughed.

Some things were unstoppable, the seasons say, or even Christmas sales.

But the tunnel under Stonehenge wasn’t one of those things.

Back in the Commons, Patrick McLoughlin was insisting all that was neo was indeed new. “New schemes. New action. Set out in one investment plan for the first time ever.” It was worth £15 billion, there were “smart motorways” and dualled A-roads and even “dancing in Lancing” over the A27.

Mr McLoughlin insisted the new Stonehenge tunnel was “essential”.

The monument would be improved “massively”. This caused even more eye-rolling at Stonehenge where, surely, they know all about massive, not to mention monumental. Mr McLoughlin then started burbling about “cycle-proofing” which, the neoliths gathered, had nothing to do with the seasons.

But it wasn’t only Fred and Barney who were sceptical. Labour’s Michael Dugher — a bit oldfashioned but not quite prehistoric — insisted that the neo was nothing of the sort. “If the government was as good at upgrading roads as they are at making announcements about upgrading roads, then life would be considerably easier for Britain’s road-users.”

Mr Dugher said the new tunnel under Stonehenge, along with the other zillions of roads, junctions and potholes included in the £15 billion, was more to do with the general election than anything else. It was “motorways for the marginals” and “trunk roads for the Tories”.

“If the original prehistoric builders who began work on Stonehenge had had the same approach to construction as the current government does,” said Mr Dugher, “then we’d be still waiting for the first stone to be erected 4,500 years later.”

Fred and Barney looked up, between the stones, at the darkening sky, the future still unclear.

Plan for northern powerhouse to rival London’s economy Continued from page 1

powers in Scotland were announced last week, local government chiefs have demanded devolved rights over council tax, business rates and welfare spending.

Some local government figures expect that Mr Osborne may also signal new powers for the West Midlands, including Coventry and Birmingham.

Labour council leaders have openly praised the chancellor for tackling concerns that they had have held for decades over a lack of infrastructure investment and Whitehall centralisation.

Even John Cruddas, the party’s head of policy, said last week that Mr Osborne had “been agile enough” to make a land grab of Labour’s agenda to solve the English democracy question through devolution to cities.

The Manchester research institute will have a “commercial arm” to ensure that innovations in technology and manufacturing are sold to businesses in Britain. Jim O’Neill, chairman of the City Growth Commission, which has campaigned for more power in the north, said that too often technology inventions in laboratories in English

universities were sold abroad before the potential was recognised in Britain.

Mr O’Neill, who has been helping the chancellor to broker a deal with the northern local authorities to give them extra powers, said that Mr Osborne’s announcement about HS3 and faster rail links would be vital to ensure that scientists would be attracted to the north.

Charlotte Alldritt, secretary to the commission, said that the research funding “will help to make the northern powerhouse a global economic force to be reckoned with”.

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, said yesterday that Labour would be “tough on the deficit and tough on the causes of the deficit”, if it won power, but he acknowledged differences with the Tories by promising to get the deficit down in a “fairer way”.

Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Treasury select committee, said that detailed plans to give the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent watchdog, the power to scrutinise election manifestos should be drawn up in the next Parliament.

Rachel Sylvester, Opinion, page 17

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

News

Hundreds of lives at risk from stroke staff shortage Christmas Appeal Unfilled specialist positions mean that urgent round-the-clock care is not available, Kat Lay writes

A shortage of stroke doctors and nurses could be costing hundreds of lives, according to a new report on stroke services at NHS hospitals.

One in four hospitals in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has an unfilled post for a consultant stroke physician and there are not enough doctors being trained to fill them, experts warned.

The audit, run by the Royal College of Physicians, also found that only 50 out of 183 hospitals had three qualified nurses on duty per 10 stroke patient beds — the recommended level — at 10am on weekends.

Tony Rudd, chairman of the Inter-

collegiate Stroke Working Party and one of the report’s authors, said: “Staffing ratios need to be even higher to reduce death rates.”

Research last year found that there would be one excess death for every 25 admissions to a unit with 1.5 nurses per 10 beds, compared with units that had three nurses per 10 beds.

There are approximately 152,000 strokes every year in the UK, roughly one stroke every three and a half minutes.

Professor Rudd added: “There are still too many patients receiving suboptimal care. To correct these issues we need more stroke consultants and

services that deliver treatment seven days a week.”

Researchers also found that the time of day and day of the week a patient was admitted affected their care. Arriving after 5pm made patients significantly less likely to get a brain scan within 12 hours.

Patients were also less likely to get admitted to a specialist stroke unit within four hours on a Monday than on Thursday to Saturday, and if they arrived at hospital in the early morning.

Jon Barrick, chief executive of the Stroke Association, said: “Stroke is an emergency and it can happen at any time. Patients should receive specialist

Generosity matched To mark Giving Tuesday, the first £1,000 of donations to The Times Christmas Charity Appeal today will be matched by Charities Trust, the organisation that processes readers’ donations.

care around the clock and a lack of staff will mean they will suffer.

“There is a considerable body of evidence showing the level of care you receive in the first few hours after your stroke, as well as in the longerterm, can make a big difference to your recovery.”

The report was commissioned on behalf of NHS England by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership.

It also found success in some areas, with reorganisation of acute stroke services meaning nearly all hospitals could provide access to “clot-busting drugs” at all times.

Three quarters of hospitals now offer access to stroke-specific services which let patients return home early with the same level of support they would have received in hospital. Professor Rudd said: “That still means 25 per cent do not. We need to make sure people get longer-term support.”

The Stroke Association is a beneficiary of this year’s Times Christmas charity appeal. Donations will be matched by ICAP, the leading markets operator .

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For a healthy brain at 70, eat well and exercise at 50 Kat Lay

Middle-aged people with diabetes will decline mentally roughly five years earlier than their healthy counterparts, according to a new study.

US researchers, who looked at 15,792 adults aged 48 to 67, found that patients with diabetes had a 19 per cent greater cognitive decline than those without.

Elizabeth Selvin, the study leader, said: “To have a healthy brain when you’re 70, you need to eat right and exercise when you’re 50. There is a substantial cognitive decline associated with diabetes, pre-diabetes and poor

glucose control in people with diabetes.

We know how to prevent or delay the diabetes associated with this decline.”

The research is published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr Selvin added: “If we can do a better job preventing and controlling diabetes, we can prevent the progression to dementia for many people.”

Laura Phipps, of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “This study adds to a large body of evidence linking diabetes to thinking and memory problems in later life, and suggests that controlling blood sugar in midlife may have long-term benefits for brain health.”

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Time to put the Turner out to grass TIMES PHOTOGRAPHERS, ADRIAN BROOKS, RICHARD MILLS; DUNCAN CAMPBELL / RODEO GALLERY / THE TATE / PA

This year’s award should have been withheld due to general indifference, suggests Rachel Campbell-Johnston And the winner of the 2014 Turner Prize is . . . Forget the faces caught in a state of expectant anticipation and those dramatic drum rolls of suspense.

The Turner may once have been coveted as the single most important art award in this country, but its hold on the public imagination has, for some time now, been slipping. This year it finally lost its grip.

Duncan Campbell, who was announced as the winner at a dinner in Tate Britain last night, was no doubt the best choice. His It For Others, a perplexing video piece blending archive material, documentary footage and his own fictional or imaginary images, might not have been any more visually striking than that of his competitors, but the inquiry that he launched into the value of art, into the way that an object’s meanings can be manipulated by way of ownership, was at least worthy of attention. In truth, he was merely the best of an indifferent bunch.

Thirty years have passed since the Turner was launched. Over that period it played a powerful role. It stirred up public debate, raised heated opinions to boiling point. It forced us to look at the contemporary, to consider the experimental, to come to terms with the conceptual. It brought us the bisected bovines of Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread’s cast of an entire Victorian house, Martin Creed’s infamous on-and-off light switch — not to mention the most notorious non-winner ever: Tracey Emin’s unmade bed.

A stuffy British art scene was rebooted with showbiz glamour. In 2001, Madonna pitched up on the podium. Grayson Perry, the crossdressing potter, took his prize in full transvestite rig.

However, the heyday of the Turner, when every London cabbie had an opinion, when even the most traditional of Tate crashers could be goaded into voicing his piece, has gone. It’s hardly surprising. We have run through the novelties: no painters; the first female winner, the first work of sound art, the first performance piece. However, a nation simply cannot turn up four major talents every year. It can’t even produce one for every generation.

The Turner selectors are now scraping at the bottom of a barrel.

Good luck to Campbell. Let’s hope

Ketchup video artist wins prize

Jack Malvern Arts Correspondent

Damien Hirst won in 1995 with Mother and Child (Divided) above; Grayson Perry collected his prize in a dress in 2003; and in 1999 Tracey Emin’s My Bed took all the headlines but not the prize

It for Others, by Duncan Campbell, was the best of an “indifferent bunch”

that his win coaxes him towards something more inspiring than his semi-philosophical cut-and-paste essay. Steve McQueen, his Turner prize-winning predecessor, swapped

the boredom of the interminable art video for the big screen and won Oscars for his 12 Years a Slave. Let’s hope that Campbell takes a leaf out of his book. Why wear out an audience with navel-gazing disquisitions when you could take their imaginations by visual storm instead?

The Turner Prize needs an overhaul. It’s not enough for it merely to ring the changes by going out on the road. Last year, in Derry, it stamped a valuable imprimatur on a perhaps controversial choice for a capital of culture. But when it came to the art, it didn’t offer much. How many people remember that Laure Prouvost was the winner?

Other long-running awards have encountered similar problems. The Man Booker responded by expanding

its parameters.

This year’s prize was taken by an Australian. Now it’s the Turner’s turn. It should ould be staged only every third year. And to make the point, this year’s prize should have been withheld, cancelled due to general indifference.

Exclusive to members

Video Duncan Campbell on his prize-winning film On tablet and at thetimes.co.uk/arts

A film featuring African masks, choreographed Marxist theories, an IRA volunteer and comedic bottles of tomato ketchup has been declared the most invigorating work of art at this year’s Turner Prize.

Duncan Campbell’s It for Others, a 54-minute sequence with no conclusion, baffled most critics but won praise from judges, who described it as “an ambitious and complex film which rewards repeated viewing”.

The artist, who was born in Dublin in 1972, has previously contributed to Scotland’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale and made films about Bernadette Devlin, the former MP who once crossed the floor of the House of Commons to slap Reginald Maudling, the home secretary, and about John DeLorean, the hapless car maker whose sports car appeared in Back to the Futur Future.

It for Others is less accessible.

Campbell said that the film was “b “basically about objects, about how you can understand certain histories through objects”.

It is partly a response to Statues Also Die, an obscure French film from 1953 by Chris Marker and Alan Resnais about the effects of colonialism on west African art.

He also presents footage of Joe McCann, an IRA activist whose death became a cause célèbre. Campbell said that the archive film he used “isn’t some kind of transparent window on to reality. What’s contained in these archives is highly constructed and partial”.

The overall work was open-ended: “It’s a moment in thought as opposed to being some kind of conclusion.”

Campbell was given the £25,000 prize by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the actor best known for his Oscar-nominated performance in 12 Years a Slave. Campbell said that he was glad of the prize money because his video works, unlike paintings, were difficult to sell.

The other nominees, Ciara Phillips, James Richards and Tris Vonna-Michell, each received £5,000.

Want to know a secret? Prince Harry suffers from stage fright Valentine Low

Prince Harry has admitted that he gets “incredibly nervous” before speaking in public. In a frank confession of how bad his stage fright is, he said that he became anxious at any official engagement that called for him to walk into a room full of people while wearing a suit.

The prince, who is seen as one of the more relaxed and easy-going members of the royal family, made the admission as part of a campaign to reduce the stigma associated with HIV/Aids.

He has persuaded several celebrities,

including the singers Gemma Arterton, Joss Stone and Nicole Scherzinger, to reveal their secrets on video in support of the charity Sentebale’s #FeelNoShame campaign for World Aids Day. Harry’s confession sheds a new light on the prince, who in some circumstances — partying in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, for instance — seems wholly free of self-consciousness. The revelation that he suffers from nerves in public carries echoes of his great-grandfather George VI, who struggled to overcome a crippling stammer.

He said: “On today, World Aids Day,

Prince Harry: “I get incredibly nervous”

my secret is — believe it or not — I get incredibly nervous before public speaking, no matter how big the crowd or the audience. And despite the fact that I laugh and joke all the time, I get incredibly nervous — if not anxious, actually — before going into rooms full of people when I’m wearing a suit.

“And now that I’ve confessed that, I will probably be even more worried that people are looking at me.”

The celebrity confessions include Ricky Tomlinson, the actor, admitting he gets a professional cleaner for his house when his wife is away and then

tells her has done it himself, and Arterton revealing that she has never seen Star Wars or Back to the Future.

Harry co-founded Sentebale with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho two years after travelling around the country in 2004 and seeing the effect of HIV/Aids on the nation, particularly the children.

Lesotho has the third highest HIV/ Aids prevalence in the world. More than 37,000 of Lesotho’s 500,000 children are HIV positive, and approximately 200,000 have lost parents to Aids.

Video of Prince Harry’s confession: www.thetimes.co.uk/royalfamily

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News LYNNE CAMERON / PA

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

No room for Jesus in the new nativity Rosemary Bennett Social Affairs Correspondent

Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus are being edged out of schools’ Christmas productions, with only a third performing the traditional nativity play this year.

Most schools now opt for an updated version, with about half blending in modern characters and themes with the traditional Christmas story. One in eight schools hold Christmas performances with no religious references at all.

Some have even ditched the word

Super saver A new £2 million lifeboat, the Edmund Hawthorn Micklewood, arrives in Hoylake, Merseyside, after a five-day trip from the RNLI headquarters in Dorset

“Christmas”, referring to their event as “winter celebrations” or “a seasonal play”. Among the roles schools are introducing to their modern nativity stories are aliens, recycling bins, a Sir Alan Sugar-style “Lord Christmas”, punk fairies, Elvis, footballers, a lobster and a drunken spaceman.

The rejection of the Christmas message comes despite two thirds of families wanting a traditional Christmas service at their child’s school, according to the online forum Netmums, which polled its members. Siobhan Freegard, founder of the forum, said it was a shame that the true meaning of Christmas was being forgotten.

Rundown Muslim school ‘spent £1m of state funds in Pakistan’ Maths A level ALHIJRAH.WEBS.COM; HENRY NICHOLLS / SWNS.COM;

Greg Hurst Education Editor

Up to £1 million intended for a statefunded Muslim school in Birmingham was instead used to fund a boarding school in Pakistan, according to claims being investigated by the city council.

Al-Hijrah School, one of only 14 state-funded Islamic schools in England, has a deficit of almost £900,000 and its governing body was removed after it failed an Ofsted inspection.

An inquiry is looking into whether public funds intended for the school helped to fund an Islamic school for boys in Ziarat, near the city of Quetta, close to Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

Al-Hijrah, which has primary and secondary sections, opened in 1999 in Bordesley Green, east Birmingham.

After failing inspections in December and May, it was placed in special measures.

A new governing board imposed by the council was twice denied entry before it took control. There are also concerns about the upkeep of its buildings. Its sister school, Al-Hijrah

Tale of two schools: Al-Hijrah in Birmingham, left, and its sister site in Pakistan

Residential School and College, Ziarat, which opened in 2004, is said to be in good condition. Its website describes it as “a beautiful gift [from] overseas Pakistanis to the deprived children of their homeland” in Baluchistan province.

The Birmingham Mail newspaper quoted an anonymous source as saying: “The school is falling apart, its roof is leaking and there is little space for outdoor play. Yet the trust has used £1 million to build a new school in Pakistan. It beggars belief.”

The local authority confirmed that

further inquiries were warranted and it is said to be ready to pass details to the police if it finds suggestions of criminal behaviour.

A Birmingham city council spokesman said: “We have gathered enough information to warrant further investigation into the use of public funds and we continue to work with the relevant statutory agencies.”

The new board has access to the school’s accounts and has been looking at where money was spent.

The Al-Hijrah Trust, a charity formed in 1988 to address the

educational needs of Muslim children in Britain, set up the school. Its website has links to a mosque in nearby Small Heath, a community centre with a weekend Islamic school, hostel and hall, and an Islamic library and internet café.

Its former chairman of governors, Waseem Yaqub, and other former governors were banned from the premises in June. He was later issued with a writ by the council, accusing him of trespass and harassing members of the new board. He is facing a damages claim of up to £100,000. He denies any harassment.

The school was not one of 21 inspected by Ofsted in the Trojan horse saga, but people linked to that controversy have links to its charitable trust.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said: “We are aware of these serious allegations. We are liaising closely with [the council] and continue to monitor the situation. The school is in special measures and we have approved the council’s choice of interim executive board.”

The Times asked Al-Hijrah Trust for comment, but received no response.

Inspections miss warning signs of extremism Greg Hurst

Inspections of Muslim schools have declined in quality and some are failing to look closely enough at how well children are protected from extremism and radicalisation, Ofsted has said.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector, criticised some of the work of the Bridge Schools Inspectorate in an annual report looking at inspection arrangements for private faith schools.

Inspectors were reluctant to challenge head teachers and governors of

private faith schools about what they did to minimise risks of radicalisation and were too ready to rely on their assurances, he said.

About 130 private Muslim schools come under a separate inspection regime, as do 41 largely evangelical Christian schools. They are visited by the Bridge Schools Inspectorate, with approval from the Department for Education and monitored by Ofsted.

Sir Michael, in a letter reviewing the Bridge inspectorate’s work over the past year, said that sampling checks

suggested that its work was “less strong than in previous years”.

“The inspectorate has not ensured that inspectors are able to identify warning signs of extremism and radicalisation in school settings with enough rigour,” Sir Michael said. “[Ofsted] inspectors found that [Bridge] inspectors do not always probe sufficiently deeply to verify whether schools’ arrangements for safeguarding pupils are effective. At times, inspectors rely too heavily on the assertions of school leaders and not enough on sub-

stantive evidence.” He said that inspectors should “probe deeply” into how schools prevented extremism and radicalism and checked safeguarding arrangements, and should record a lot of evidence to check claims made by head teachers and governors.

Sir Michael added that separate inspection arrangements for private schools were working well, although he said the Independent Schools Inspectorate, which monitors larger private schools, must be clearer on whether they met regulatory requirements.

postponed for being too hard

Greg Hurst

New A levels in maths and further maths have been delayed for a year after experts warned that they would be too difficult for many sixth-formers who studied the current GCSE course.

Both the exams regulator, Ofqual, and a body set up by Russell Group universities to advise on the content for reformed A levels had asked for a delay.

Nick Gibb, the schools minister, yesterday confirmed that the re-written maths A and AS levels will be taught in schools from autumn 2017, with the first examinations in the summer of 2019.

Maths and further maths had previous been left out of the first batch of redesigned A levels in core subjects that will be introduced in schools from September next year, following advice that syllabuses for maths and further maths needed more substantial re-writing.

The proposed introduction date of 2016 was resisted by the A-Level Content Advisory Board (Alcab), which was set up by Michael Gove, as education secretary. It had argued that the first group of sixth-formers to study new A levels in maths and further maths could struggle with the higher level of demand unless they had first completed the bigger, tougher new maths GCSE that will be taught in schools from 2015 and first examined in 2017.

Professor Nigel Thrift, vice-chancellor of the Warwick of University and chair of Alcab, said: “ The qualifications are designed to align in that way. This is fair to students and schools, and should give the new A level a good start.”

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

Nurse jailed for faking baby after one-night stand Simon de Bruxelles

A nurse who claimed to have given birth after a one-night stand has been jailed for forging a birth certificate and a paternity test.

Charmaine Wilson, 25, borrowed a friend’s baby and faked the documents to trick Liam Griffiths into believing he was the father. Mr Griffiths, 31, was heartbroken when he discovered the child was not his after all.

Charmaine Wilson forged a DNA test and birth certificate

For six months Wilson encouraged Mr Griffiths to bond with the baby boy, even allowing him to take him on visits to see his “grandparents”.

The deceit was only discovered when the boy’s uncle spotted a photograph of him with Mr Griffiths on Facebook and demanded to know why he was pretending to be the father.

Wilson was jailed for fraud last month but freed after an appeal to a judge at Cardiff crown court, having served 23 days of a 16-week sentence.

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Judge David Wynn Morgan yesterday ordered her to go on a “thinking skills” course instead of completing her sentence. He told her: “The feelings of your victim and his family were needlessly engaged. The discovery of the child’s real identity has left them with a feeling of loss similar to bereavement.”

Mr Griffiths said: “I am devastated and heartbroken to have lost a child that I thought was my son and had bonded with this child.” His family had showered the mother and baby with gifts, even buying her a car so she could get to her job at the Princess of Wales hospital in Bridgend.

The court heard that Mr Griffiths had wanted nothing more to do with Wilson after they had sex after a party.

Wilson began “stalking” him on social media. He blocked her and changed his telephone number.

Wilson spotted Mr Griffiths when he visited his grandfather in hospital. She approached with a friend’s child and insisted it was his. When he asked for proof she forged the documents.

Wilson pleaded guilty to two counts of forgery. The court heard that she had told police: “It was a lie that snowballed out of control and I did not know how to stop it.”Her sentence was doubled to 32 weeks but suspended on condition she attend a victim awareness course.

News MERT ALAS & MARCUS PIGGOTT / INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

Madonna began her career in 1983 and releases her 13th studio album next year

Latex and lace: Madonna, 56, turns back time At 56, Madonna appears to be the popstar who refuses to age. In a photoshoot for Interview magazine, the motherof-four, including her two adopted Malawian children, wore corsets and latex and went topless for a series of shots reminiscent of her one of her earlier more raunchy periods.

Shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, she is pictured contorting on beds and sofas, and posing beneath a snake draped around a crucifix.

In the interview, with her friend David Blaine, she talks about her love of the graffiti artist Banksy, her obsession with death and how people take drugs to get closer to God. Of her own drug use, she added: “I tried everything once, but as soon as I was high, I spent my time drinking tons of water to get it out of my system. As soon as I was high, I was obsessed with flushing it out of me.”

Madonna, who began her career in 1983, is recording her 13th studio album, out next year. Over 31 years, she has starred in films, spoken about her use of yoga and appeared in a variety of styles.

Earlier this week, Madonna took her son David Banda, 9, to see his biological father, a peasant farmer, during a visit to the Home of Hope orphanage in Mchinji, Malawi. However, the trip ended badly for Sadon Maunde, grandfather of her other adopted child, Mercy James, who accused the singer of “betraying” her real family by failing to tell them that she had returned.

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

News

Families wait 12 days for bin collection Jill Sherman Whitehall Editor

Families are having to wait 12 days on average for their black-bin rubbish to be collected while, for many, fees for waste services are spiralling.

Charges made by local authorities for making collections of rubbish such as garden and bulky waste have jumped by 50 per cent in two years, according to figures obtained by Labour under the Freedom of Information Act. Only 17 authorities of the 285 that replied collected all bins weekly, representing just 6 per cent of all councils.

This comes despite a repeated pledge by the Conservatives that they would

restore people’s fundamental right to have their bins collected once a week, according to Hilary Benn, the shadow communities secretary.

“This comprehensive study fatally undermines Eric Pickles’ boast when he was in opposition and in government that he would return Britain to weekly collections and keep extra charges down,” Mr Benn said. “ It is Tory councils that are charging the most — three times as much as Labour councils — and there was a 50 per cent increase in charges across England in the past two years.”

Overall householders have to wait an average of one week and five days for

black-bin rubbish to be collected and have to contend with an average of four bins each for different types of waste.

Many authorities have moved to twicemonthly collections for some refuse.

Recycling bins were collected every 13 days on average, while food waste, collected separately in 116 areas, is picked up every nine days. Garden waste is collected every 13 days.

The survey shows that in 2011-12, councils in England made £36.2 million from charges for services such as garden waste collection, extra waste bags and bulky waste collection. By last year, the figure had risen to £54.3 million.

The highest charges are in Purbeck,

Dorset, where residents have to pay £40 a year for fortnightly collections of a bin containing garden waste.

Residents are also charged for collection and disposal of bulky waste — £30 for a single item and £6 per subsequent item.

“Eric Pickles talks a lot about localism but he clearly doesn’t understand what it means,” Mr Benn said. “Local people should be able to hold their local representatives to account, including through the ballot box, for decisions they take. Mr Pickles blustered for years that he would impose new controls on local authorities and local communities but this has been exposed as pompous hot air.”

Government sources said that Labour’s analysis was misleading, since it counted garden waste as something that should be collected weekly, when that has never been the case in most places.

About 14 million homes in England still have weekly collection of smelly rubbish “in some form”, the government insisted.

Mr Pickles said: “The Labour government bullied councils into axing weekly collections and were planning new bin taxes on family homes. Conservatives in government have kept to our promises. We have abolished Labour’s bin taxes, reined in bin snoopers and have actively supported weekly collections, while keeping council tax down.”

He added that he had changed the law to scrap unfair fines for not putting rubbish out correctly.

The government is considering introducing laws to force more councils to bring back weekly bin collections. Mr Pickles said that it had taken Labour ten years to “destroy” the traditional weekly service and suggested that it would take as long to restore it.

Care workers on zero hours and underpaid Rosemary Bennett

Pay and conditions for care workers who help thousands of elderly people to stay living in their own homes are among the worst in the labour market, according to a new report.

Two thirds are on zero-hours contracts and more than 200,000 are paid below the minimum wage, the Burstow Commission found.

The commission said that staff turnover was about 20 per cent, meaning up to a fifth of the workforce leave their jobs each year, a main source of disruption for the elderly people they serve.

Companies get away with paying less than the minimum wage by not covering the hours that care workers spend travelling between appointments, which is considerable.

Earlier this year Revenue & Customs fined a leading care company £600,000 for failing to pay its staff for journeys, in a clear warning to others that it is against the law.

The commission was led by Paul Burstow, the former minister for care.

He said that elderly people were suffering the consequences of an underpaid and overstretched workforce.

“As publicly funded care continues to be squeezed the danger is that good providers are driven out, and those providers who make a profit by exploiting workers thrive,” he said.

“The price of poor care is paid for by the most frail and vulnerable in our community, and by the care workers they rely on who get a raw deal.”

Physical examination is best prostate test The best way to detect prostate cancer is to have a digital rectal examination, because blood tests are not always an accurate indicator, according to research by doctors at St James’s Hospital

in Dublin. In its study it gave a rectal examination to 74 men whose blood tests had been normal, and 39 per cent of them were then found to have the disease. Of those, 76 per cent had “clinically significant disease”.

109 false rape cases At least 109 women have been prosecuted for making false rape allegations in the past five years, says Women Against Rape. The charity has collected figures on the number of women prosecuted for perverting the course of justice or wasting police time after making allegations of rape which police said were false. Its figures suggest that 98 convictions out of 109 prosecutions were for perverting the course of justice, which can result in a life sentence.

Fewer were charged with wasting police time, which carries a sixmonth maximum sentence.

Sex taunt stabbing A man stabbed his wife’s lover in a shopping centre after she taunted him over his sexual performance, a court was told.

David Barrow, 46, had confronted his wife of 19 years, Nicolette, 43, and Jason Earle, with whom she had been having an affair, when she told him: “He’s better in bed than you, just deal with it.”

Barrow repeatedly stabbed Mr Earle, puncturing his liver.

Barrow, of Patchway, near Bristol, was jailed for four and a half years after admitting wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm at Bristol crown court.

Beckham ‘crashes’ Audi

David Beckham was involved in a collision with another car as he picked up his son, Brooklyn, from Arsenal’s training complex.

Although Beckham’s Audi was badly damaged and the other car was believed to be a write-off, only minor injuries occurred.

Head injury ‘crime risk’ Offenders who have suffered a traumatic injury to the brain are more likely to commit violent offences than those with no injuries, according to a study.

Research with inmates at Leeds prison found that on average they had sustained their first injury before offending, suggesting that a serious blow to the head may be a risk factor leading to criminal behaviour.

The report, from research for the Disabilities Trust Foundation, said: “Participants who reported a traumatic brain injury showed high levels of reoffending.”

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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News HERITAGE AUCTIONS / BNPS; ASTRID KIRCHHERR - K & K / REDFERNS / GETTY IMAGES

Yesterday, when all their troubles seemed so far away

R

are colour pictures of three of the Beatles on holiday before they achieved international superstardom are expected to fetch £6,000 when they are sold at auction (Simon de Bruxelles writes).

Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were taking a break in Tenerife with Astrid Kirchherr, a photographer and the fiancée of Stuart Sutcliffe, the “fifth Beatle”, who died the year before.

In April, 1963, after their first UK number

one, Love Me Do, Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, suggested that they had a break from touring. While he went to Spain with John Lennon, the other three visited the Canaries.

Paul and George were photographed wearing long-sleeve shirts and swimming trunks as they smoked cigarettes by the sea. One image shows Ms Kirchherr cuddling George while another shows Paul, 20, with a plaster on his nose to protect it from the sun.

The trip came just before they were swept

up by Beatlemania following the band’s second number one From Me to You in May, 1963. It was one of the last times that the band were able to appear in public without being mobbed.

Kirchherr was meant to produce 100 sets of prints from her negatives, but fewer than 15 were printed.

One of these is being sold at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas.

Eric Bradley, of Heritage, said: “A close friend of the band had a family home on Tenerife and it was decided that it would be the perfect location. These pictures are simply photos of good, close friends. It is clear they are quite relaxed in each other’s company. They are still able to be unguarded in public, something they weren’t able to do ever again, anywhere in the world, just a few months later. Once the fame occurred, the Beatles were not allowed to be private citizens again."

Kirchherr took the photos with a Rolleicord twin lens reflex camera and she signed each print.

None of the other prints is believed to have ve been sold publicly before.

Astrid Kirchherr is comforted by

the Beatles in Tenerife after the death of

Stuart Sutcliffe, left with the band

Wars Sony suspects North Korea after Star stormtrooper hackers ‘release’ new blockbusters strikes back Jenny Booth

James Dean Technology Correspondent

Fury, the new Second World War drama starring Brad Pitt, has been illegally downloaded at least one and a half million times after a huge hacking attack at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Four unreleased films from the American movie house including Annie, a remake of the 1982 musical comedy, and Mr Turner, the biopic of the British artist, have also been posted to pirate websites since last Monday.

Sony Pictures’ computer systems have been attacked by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace. The FBI is believed to be investigating the hack, which froze the company’s computers worldwide and led to the possible leak

of private details of stars including Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz.

Sony is investigating the possibility that the hackers are working for North Korea, according to reports on Re/code, the technology website. One of Sony Pictures’ forthcoming releases, The Interview, starring Seth Rogen, involves a CIA plot to kill Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.

A spokesman for the regime was quoted by the state news agency, saying: “Making and releasing a movie on a plot to hurt our top-level leadership is the most blatant act of terrorism and war and will absolutely not be tolerated.

If the US administration allows and defends the showing of the film, a merciless counter-measure will be taken.”

By last night Annie, which stars Diaz

and Jamie Foxx, had been illegally downloaded 220,000 times, according to figures from Excipio, a consultancy that tracks breaches of copyright online.

Still Alice, a drama about a psychologist who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, starring Julianne Moore, had been downloaded 118,000 times and Mr Turner 74,000 times. To Write Love on Her Arms, starring Kat Dennings and Rupert Friend, had been downloaded 24,000 times.

Fury is still showing in cinemas but has not yet been released on DVD. It was the fifth most downloaded film on the popular BitTorrent file-sharing platform last week, according to the TorrentFreak news website.

A spokeswoman for Sony Pictures

said: “The theft of Sony Pictures Entertainment content is a criminal matter, and we are working closely with law enforcement to address it.”

Last Monday Guardians of Peace posted messages on Sony Pictures employees’ computer screens warning that it would release “top secrets” to the world unless its “request be met”.

The hack reduced Sony Pictures staff in London to “sitting at their desks trying to do their job with a pen and paper”, an insider told The Times last week.

Files allegedly stolen by Guardians of Peace include one named “Diaz, Cameron — passport” and another, “Angelina Jolie passport”.

A source at Sony Pictures said yesterday that some computer systems had been restored.

I studied Monty Python to play Moses, says Bale Jack Malvern Arts Correspondent

Monty Python instructed people, even those being crucified, always to look on the bright side of life. Christian Bale decided to heed their advice when he was cast as Moses in the latest Hollywood adaptation of the Old Testament.

The actor said that he was wary of appearing in Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ridley Scott’s latest swords-andsandals film. His first move was to consult the Pythons’ biblical film of 1979.

“The Life of Brian was the first film I

rented when I got the part,” he said in an interview with Esquire magazine.

“Not just because it’s fantastic, but because you’ve got to recognise that you can very easily [slip into parody].”

Exodus has already had its share of controversy for the casting of white actors in Middle Eastern roles, including Joel Edgerton as an Egyptian pharaoh, but reviewers have concluded that its interpretation of the Old Testament is unlikely to upset Christians or Jews.

Justin Chang, of the influential film magazine Variety, predicted that it

would prompt less outrage than Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s film of the ark myth. “This is an uncommonly intelligent, respectful but far-from-reverent outsider’s take on Scripture,” he wrote. “Exodus is less madly eccentric and more firmly grounded in the sword-andChristian Bale, in Ridley Scott’s Exodus, took tips from The Life of Brian

sandal tradition than Aronofsky’s film.”

British newspapers have given the film a lukewarm reception, but Bale suggested that he would be unperturbed by a caustic response. “I enjoy harsh criticism.There’s a perverse kind of enjoyment to that,” he said. “I think it comes from an awareness that [acting] can be one of the most vain jobs going.”

A British actor has just four words to say to the Star Wars fans who questioned why a black man should play an imperial stormtrooper in the latest film: “Get used to it.”

John Boyega, from London, is the first character seen on screen in the teaser for The Force Awakens, popping up in the Tatooine desert with his helmet off, looking hunted and sweaty.

The 90-second trailer has been viewed more than 40 million times since it was posted on YouTube on Friday, but its success has been overshadowed by the egregious racism in many of the 64,000 comments left underneath the footage.

Some objectors were Star Wars aficionados claiming to make an obscure plot-related point, such as Red Offset, who wrote: “I’m not trying to be offensive in any way but why the hell is there a black stormtrooper? Weren’t they all originally clones of Jango Fett, who is sort of Asian?” In reply, ShadowShinobi06 reassures him: “Clone troopers and storm troopers are not the same thing.”

Boyega, 22, who was picked by Screen International as one of the UK Stars of Tomorrow 2011, expressed his delight at being cast in one of the lead roles in the Star Wars prequel, the seventh instalment in the space opera franchise.

“Thank you for all the love and support!” Boyega wrote on Instagram yesterday. However, showing that he had not been oblivious to negative comments about his casting, he added: “To whom it may concern . . . Get used to it.”

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

News

MPs defiant after China bans Hong Kong visit Francis Elliott Political Editor Leo Lewis Beijing

MPs have been granted a rare emergency debate on China’s decision to ban a Commons committee from Hong Kong as the diplomatic dispute over the snub deepened.

Beijing warned the foreign affairs committee not to ignore its demand that it cancel a planned visit to the former colony, which is convulsed by pro-democracy protests.

“If certain British MPs insist on coming, that’s what we call overt confrontation and this is not conducive to China-British relations,” Hua Chun-

ying, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, said. David Cameron ordered a toughening of Britain’s stance yesterday as the ban was condemned by politicians in Hong Kong and London.

Hugo Swire, the foreign office minister, told Guo Yezhou, the Chinese vice-minister for international affairs, that the decision to block MPs inquiring into UK-China relations was mistaken and counterproductive, a Downing Street spokesman said.

The action had “amplified” concerns about the situation in Hong Kong, which has enjoyed a degree of autonomy from Beijing under the “one country, two systems” arrangements

Inside today

Beijing’s bullies Leading article, page 20 Hunger strike is last stand, page 24

instituted at its handover from British control in 1997.

Granting an emergency debate, John Bercow, the Speaker of the Commons, said that China’s decision was “an extremely serious matter”. Sir Richard Ottaway, the Tory MP who chairs the foreign affairs committee, described it as “an affront to men and women of the free world”. Beijing insisted that the

planned visit was an “attempt to interfere in China’s domestic affairs”.

The spokeswoman said: “China’s policy with any country is clear and consistent. We’re willing to develop relations on the basis of diplomatic respect, equality, mutual benefits and not interfering in other countries’ internal issues, but we strongly oppose other countries interfering in China’s internal policies. For those who are sincerely promoting China and UK’s friendship with passion, the door to China is always open, but for those who want to interfere in internal affairs we won’t tolerate that.”

Claudia Mo, a Hong Kong legislator,

said she was dumbfounded that Beijing would assert its control over the island’s immigration matters.

“Beijing is nailing another nail into the coffin of ‘one country two systems’.

They’re the boss. They decide,” she said.

“The MPs are not diplomats. They will not be in HK on behalf of the UK government. Why insult them by denying them entry? They should have every right to have a look to see how the Sino-British declaration has been implemented.”

Dozens of people were injured in the Admiralty district of Hong Kong when scuffles erupted as police arrested 40 people overnight.

Financial pressure forcing new mothers back to work Most first-time mothers return to work for financial reasons after the birth of their child, according to a study of new parents (Rosemary Bennett writes).

It found that four out of five new mothers return to work largely to pay the mortgage and other bills, although more than half said that they felt torn about leaving their child.

Concerns over the quality of child care was of more concern that the cost, the study also found.

The research, part of a two-year study by the National Childbirth Trust, found new mothers were more likely to return to work if their job

offered flexible hours. However, a third said that their employers did not offer part-time work or other options.

About a quarter of fathers took less than their two weeks’ statutory paternity leave and only one in ten took more than two weeks.

All employees have the right to request flexible working, and the government is going to allow parents to share 50 weeks of leave between them from next year.

Gaenor Bagley, head of people at PwC, said: “There are lots of dads who do want to take time off and current legislation doesn’t make it easy to do that.”

Passer-by’s photo leads to sentence for sword attacker An attacker who slashed a man in the back with a samurai sword has been jailed for five years after being caught on camera by a witness.

An amateur photographer took pictures of Gareth Devlin, 28, from Port Clarence, Teesside, brandishing the weapon in a street in the area in July, and handed the images to the police who were investigating the incident. A second man had suffered facial injuries after being punched.

At Teesside crown court Devlin admitted wounding with intent, affray and possession of an offensive

weapon. Another man had admitted affray. Both men had been wearing hoods at the time of the attack in an attempt to disguise themselves.

Council chief was given £90,000 Porsche as a perk The chief executive of a struggling council was given a £90,000 Porsche sports car as a perk of the job.

Bryn Parry-Jones, 62, had the Panamera luxury car leased for him while he earned a £195,000 salary plus benefits.

Mr Parry-Jones quit his post at Pembrokeshire council after receiving thousands of pounds in cash instead of pension contributions. Police investigated Mr Parry-Jones, who was given a £280,000 golden handshake after leaving his post this year.

The independent-run council hid the fact that he was using a Porsche

for work because the information was “private”.

Paul Miller, who leads the opposition Labour group at the council, said it was “absurd” that the taxpayer had funded the car. He said: “Why a council chief executive needs a Porsche is completely beyond me.

It’s an absolute disgrace.” He added: “He was a dictator and it got to the point where he thought he could do whatever he wanted.”

Mr Parry-Jones left the council in October and under his leadership more than 1,000 members of council staff had pay cuts of up to £5,000.

Sale time for clock that helped Darwin to make his name A marine chronometer that helped Charles Darwin to reach the Galapagos Islands and which was thought to have been lost off the Turkish coast in 1916 is to be sold next week. The chronometer, which helped sailors tell the time by determining longitude by celestial navigation, was used on board HMS Beagle when Darwin sailed to the Pacific islands between 1831 and 1836. The timepiece performed so well that the

Admiralty bought it from the ship’s captain. In 1916 it was thought to be on board HMS Irrestible when she was sunk by a mine off Turkey.

During the Second World War it reappeared on a Liberty ship used by the Russians to carry arms between Vladivostok and the US. The chronometer was given to a radio operator and is being sold by his nephew at Bonhams in London, where it is expected to fetch £50,000.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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News

£125 gene test can predict your risk of future diseases Nic Fildes Technology & Communications Editor

A company planning to create the “Google of DNA” is to start selling offthe-shelf genetic testing kit in Britain for the first time.

It will allow users to check for the likelihood of suffering future health issues. 23andMe, a Google-backed company, will sell the tests for £125. It was set up in 2006 by Anne Wojcicki, the former wife of the Google cofounder Sergei Brin, to cut the cost of genetic testing.

The test involves a patient spitting into a tube and sending the sample to 23andMe, which takes its name from the number of pairs of chromosomes in the human body, to analyse. The sample can highlight potential health issues such as breast cancer, Alzheimer’s and cystic fibrosis as well as genetic and ancestry information.

Ms Wojcicki said that the tests hand control of health monitoring to citizens and away from doctors.

She cited Angelina Jolie as an example of how private genetic tests can be used to pre-empt health issues. The actress opted for surgery because a genetic mutation gave her a high chance of suffering breast cancer. “A lot of healthcare is inflated in price

because too many people are involved.

There should be a trend where people pay out of their own pocket, but it has to be affordable. This allows people a lot more freedom and control,” she told The Times.

The company hopes to build a gigantic database of genetic information that can be used by scientists and pharmaceutical companies to speed up the development of new treatments.

Users can “opt out” of providing personalised information but Ms Wojcicki said that 80 per cent of the 600,000 people who sent in samples had agreed to hand over their health information to the company.

Genetic testing has become a hot area for investment by technology companies looking to collate as much DNA data as possible for analysis.

Ms Wojcicki has held talks with the NHS about integrating her company’s data. She has had problems in the US, where regulators have intervened. The Food and Drug Administration has argued that the company is performing medical tests without its approval and without any oversight by clinicians.

Ms Wojcicki argued that the test is not designed to cut doctors out of the system and would instead make people more proactive in addressing health issues by generating their own data.

SAMUEL ARON / HOTSPOT MEDIA

Along for the ride Starlings find a comfortable spot to perch on the back of a female red deer in Richmond Park, London

NHS cash injection to fund DNA research Kat Lay

The NHS will invest in genetic research to find treatments for rare diseases that have been neglected, the health secretary said yesterday.

Jeremy Hunt said he planned to expand current NHS work on genetics.

He said: “We are establishing the Genomics England Clinical Interpretation Partnership to bring together external researchers with NHS clinical

teams . . . so that we can go further and faster in developing diagnostics, treatments and therapies for rarer diseases and cancers. Too often, people with such diseases have suffered horribly because it’s not economic to invest in finding treatments. We want the UK to lead the world in using genetic sequencing to unlock cures previously beyond our reach.”

The plans would also help to strengthen the economy, he claimed.

“The NHS can attract jobs to the UK by playing a pivotal role in our life sciences industry. We have already attracted £3.5 billion of investment and 11,000 jobs in the past three years,” Mr Hunt said.

He also said that hospitals would have to show plans to abolish paper records by 2018. An official report last month said patients should have access to their GP records online by next year, and to records held by hospitals by 2018.

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the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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comment pages of the year

What’s the fairest way to cut a birthday cake?

Philip Collins Page 18

Opinion

The coalition is deeply divided on tax and spend The chancellor wants to minimise the pain that will inevitably follow the election. But the Lib Dems won’t play ball pupil premium, the chancellor wants to neutralise other parties’ strong points to focus attention on what he believes is the Conservatives’ greatest asset — the economy. As Jim Messina, the former Obama aide now working for the Tory party, likes to say, every day spent talking about Ukip issues such as Europe and immigration is a wasted day for the Conservatives, while every day spent talking about the economy is an opportunity. The autumn statement this week will, Mr Osborne hopes, be the pivotal point that tips political debate back on to Tory turf and makes recovery, and the risks to it, the dominant issue up to the election.

With Mr Cameron insisting that “red warning lights are flashing” on the dashboard of the global economy, the Conservative message for the general election is now clear: Britain is on the right track but dangers remain, so “stay the course for prosperity”. It worked for New Zealand’s centre-right National Party, which secured a victory in September with the help of

Rachel Sylvester

@rsylvestertimes

G

eorge Osborne is turning into the Miniaturist chancellor. In Jessie Burton’s magical novel, yesterday named Waterstones book of the year, the tiny figures in a 17th-century doll’s house eerily mirror their counterparts in the real world. In the same way Conservative policies have mysteriously started to echo those outside the party walls.

David Cameron sought to head off the Ukip threat last week by copying Labour’s promise to limit in-work benefits paid to immigrants from the European Union. The chancellor announced this week an extra £2 billion for the NHS, almost matching the figure Ed Miliband pledged to the health service in his most recent party conference speech.

There will be more money for house-building (another Labour plan) as part of an infrastructure programme that also includes flood defences and roads, many running through Tory marginal seats.

Meanwhile Mr Osborne’s promise to create a “northern powerhouse”, with more money and power for cities, is a pale imitation of Lord Adonis’s more radical Labour package to boost growth and independence in the regions.

It’s all about politics, of course, for the Conservatives’ strategic puppetmaster. From the referendum on Europe to the income tax threshold rise, the tax avoidance curb to the

Every day talking about Ukip issues is a day wasted for the Tories Lynton Crosby’s business partner, Mark Textor. Indeed, “Tex”, the Australian “Svengali of spin”, recently told senior Tories that they needed to stick to the economic line and hold their nerve about Ukip because support for a similar populist party in New Zealand collapsed, but not until the very last minute.

From now on the Conservatives will talk about everything, from the Labour leader’s character to NHS funding, in terms of the country’s economic future, ramping up the threat posed by a change in direction

with increasingly aggressive attacks on the opposition. As one No 10 strategist explains, the line will be: “It’s not funny that Ed Miliband is incompetent, it’s a real risk. There are consequences for your job, your mortgage, your living standards in voting Labour or Ukip.”

Mr Osborne’s problem, however, is that the Treasury package to be announced tomorrow will also signal the end of coalition unity on the economy. Although the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives agree on the broad outlines of a plan to balance the books by 2017-18, there are now fundamental disagreements about how to deal with the deficit.

The need to secure the nation’s finances after the economic crash was the founding principle of the coalition, but there would be no consensus second time around as deep splits have emerged over taxation and spending plans.

While the Tories have promised to raise “not a penny more” from taxes, the Lib Dems argue that this would mean unacceptable spending cuts, including to the welfare budget.

Instead Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, insists that the 80:20 distribution between cuts and tax rises that the coalition enforced during this parliament should be maintained. If a fiscal tightening of about £30 billion is required (and that is likely to be confirmed in the autumn statement) that means a huge £6 billion gap between the coalition partners’ plans.

This will form a key part of the Lib Dems’ attempts to differentiate themselves from the Conservatives between now and the election. They will paint the Tories as ruthless axemen who want to slash and burn the state and punish the hard-working poor by cutting welfare while refusing to increase taxes on the wealthiest.

Osborne has now confirmed several times he wants to do.”

The Lib Dems also intend to promise to ring-fence spending on education, allowing them to claim that, unfettered by the Lib Dems, the Tories would cut the schools budget.

“We are going to relish the debate on the economy over the coming months,” says one Lib Dem strategist.

“Really sharp divisions have emerged within the coalition and we will look

Lib Dems say that Osborne’s plans are unnecessarily punitive

Unlike the fictional one, Osborne’s doll’s house has no magical powers

That attack, which plays into existing stereotypes, could shift the balance in the public’s mind between perceived security and risk.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, has already torn into the Conservatives for promising £7 billion of new tax cuts at a time of renewed uncertainty about the global economy, saying that it is “total fantasy” to think they could be delivered without raising other taxes or making huge extra cuts to public services. Nick Clegg reinforced that message yesterday when he told the BBC that the Conservatives’ economic strategy was “complete and utter nonsense”. “There is not a single developed economy anywhere in the world that has balanced the books and only done so on the backs of the working-age poor, which

to highlight them. The Tory plans are socially unjustifiable and unnecessarily punitive.”

The Miniaturist Chancellor hopes to minimise voters’ perception of the pain that will follow the election, glossing over details of many of the cuts necessary to implement his plan.

Although before the last election, he happily boasted that he would soon be the most unpopular man in Britain, he now fears people have had enough of austerity. He doesn’t want life in the doll’s house he is creating to seem too unpleasant. His reputation, though, depends on events beyond his control, whether the future of the eurozone economies, oil price fluctuations or the political manoeuvring of the Lib Dems. Unlike the fictional Miniaturist, Mr Osborne does not have magic powers.

Red Box Damian McBride writes exclusively about Gordon Brown’s retirement thetimes.co.uk/redbox

Today Cold but dry over eastern Europe. Showers or spells of rain over Italy and the Balkans. Max 20C (68F), min -18C (0F) Today’s temperatures forecast for noon

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Maximum 17C (63F), minimum -3C (27F).

sunshine, but rather cloudy elsewhere with outbreaks of snow, heaviest and most persistent over northern Norway. Maximum 4C (39F), minimum -8C (18F).

Italy, Switzerland, Austria, southern Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Balkans Rather a cloudy day with showers or some longer spells of rain, falling as snow over the higher Alps. Maximum 20C (68F), minimum -2C (28F).

Western Russia, Belarus, Ukraine A cold but bright day with spells of hazy sunshine, and most places should stay dry.

Maximum 6C (43F), minimum -18C (0F).

The Low countries, northern Germany, Denmark, Poland, the Baltic states A fine day with little in the way of cloud and some long sunny spells. Maximum 5C (41F), minimum -6C (21F).

Norway, Sweden, Finland Mainly dry over southern Sweden with some

British Isles Cloudy over southeastern England with some patchy rain, but mainly dry elsewhere with sunny spells and just an isolated shower. Maximum 10C (50F), minimum -1C (30F).

Outlook Staying unsettled over southeastern Europe with outbreaks of rain. Dry through central Europe but with more snow over Scandinavia.

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Speak directly to one of our forecasters on 09065 77 76 75 6am to 6pm daily (calls charged at £1.50 per minute plus network extras) For more information on the services we can provide, visit our website: quest www.weatherquest.co.uk weatherq

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Opinion

Whitehall has failed. Tear it up and start again MPs and officials haven’t a clue how to run complex projects. Bring in top-class people who do and shaping the new institutions, displacing the EU and UN, that will emerge as the world makes painful transitions in coming decades. It would provide a focus for financial priorities and Whitehall’s urgent organisational surgery. It’s a goal that could mobilise very large efforts across political divisions, as the pursuit of knowledge is an extremely powerful motive.

Next, we must train aspirant leaders very differently so they have the skills and experience of managing complex projects. We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as a spin doctor.

In 2012 Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal-winner in mathematics, sketched a “maths for presidents” course to teach 16 to 18 year-olds crucial maths skills, including

Dominic Cummings

T

here is growing and justified contempt for Westminster. No 10 has become a tragi-comic press office with the prime minister acting as Über Pundit.

Cameron, Miliband and Clegg see only the flickering shadows of the news on their cave wall — they cannot see the real world behind them. As they watch floundering MPs, civil service officials know they will stay in charge regardless of an election that won’t significantly change Britain’s trajectory.

Our institutions failed before 1914, before 1939, and over Europe. They are now failing to deal with a combination of debts, bad public services, security threats and profound transitions in geopolitics, economics, and technology. They fail in crises because they are programmed to fail. It’s the disaster of Britain’s rail franchise system writ large.

How can we achieve this reform?

We need a new goal. Britain should focus on becoming the best country for education and science. Pericles described Athens as “the school of Greece”; we could be the school of the world because this role depends on thought and organisation, not size.

This would give us a central role in tackling humanity’s biggest problems

Departments must be focused; thousands need to be fired probability and statistics, that can help to solve real problems. It starts next year. A version should be developed for MPs and officials. (A similar physics-for-presidents course has been a smash hit at Berkeley.)

Similarly, pioneering work by Philip Tetlock, who leads the Good Judgment Project, has shown that training can reduce common cognitive errors and can sharply improve the quality of political predictions.

If we want leaders to make good

Entrepreneurs such as Larry Page have important lessons for aspiring leaders

decisions amid huge complexity and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who’ve proved they can do it.

Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.

Finally, because better training can only do so much, we must open political institutions to people and ideas from outside SW1. A few people prove able repeatedly to solve hard problems in theoretical and practical fields, creating important new ideas and huge value. Whitehall and Westminster operate to exclude them from influence. Instead, they tend to promote hacks and apparatchiks and promote narcissism and bureaucratic infighting skills.

How can we open up the system?

First, a prime minister should be able to appoint secretaries of state from outside parliament — the likes of Bill Gates, say, as health secretary.

Second, the 150-year experiment with a permanent civil service should end and Whitehall must open up to outsiders. The role of permanent secretary should go and ministers should appoint departmental chief executives so they are really responsible for policy and implementation. Expertise should be brought in as needed, with no restrictions from the destructive civil service “human resources” system.

Mass collaborations are revolutionising science; they could revolutionise policy. Real openness would bring urgent focus to Whitehall’s disastrous lack of skills in basic functions such as budgeting, contracts, procurement, legal advice and project management.

Third, Whitehall’s functions should be amputated. The Department for Education improved as Michael Gove shrank it. Other departments would benefit from extreme focus, simplification and firing thousands of overpaid people. If the bureaucracy ceases to be “permanent”, it can adapt quickly. Instead of obsessing about process, distorting targets and micromanaging methods, it could shift to incentivising goals and decentralising methods.

Technological changes are bringing revolution. Better to undertake it than undergo it.

Dominic Cummings was campaign director of the anti-euro campaign 1999-2002 and Michael Gove’s special adviser 2007-14

Philip Collins Notebook

A baguette, please, and don’t try to diddle me

A

part from the champagne we’re drinking, I always find that the thing to make a party go with a swing is a bit of maths. As I serve pepperoni to a rowdy birthday party group of boys, I tell them that the formula for calculating the volume of a pizza is pi x z x z x a.

They all look at me mystified. What about the fact that a famous paper on the maths of pancake flipping was written by an undergraduate called William H Gates, later known as Bill? They’ve never heard of him.

When they decide that baguettes are better as swords than as food, I tell them that the mathematician Henri Poincaré once weighed his daily 1kg baguette every morning for a year. Plotting the baguettes on a graph, Poincaré was not surprised to find that they formed a bell curve.

He was outraged, though, to see the peak at 0.95kg. He

was being conned out of 50g per baguette.

Overreacting slightly, Poincaré called the police. Today, though, thanks to Poincaré, trading standards officers plot baguettes on a graph. If they don’t form a bell curve the baker has to stand in the corner, hands on head, fingers on lips.

Scissors kick

S

underland versus Chelsea is on in the background which is a perfect example of “the birthday paradox”. I ask the boys how many people you need before it becomes more likely than not that two of them share a birthday.

The smartypants kids divide 366 by 2 and guess 183. The answer is just 23.

I start to google (which, as I say, comes from the term for 1 with 100 zeros after it) the 22 players on the pitch plus the referee. They are impressed that Jozy Altidore (Sunderland) and Andre Schürrle (Chelsea) were both born on November 6.

Including all the substitutes, there are in fact four pairs

of players whose birthdays match.

Suddenly I am Euclid in their eyes so I start a game of rock-paperscissors (RPS). After they have proved it right, I tell them that boys are far more likely than girls to throw rock first, something proved

by World RPS Society research.

In 2005 the Japanese electronics corporation Maspro Denkoh, which was auctioning its art collection, decided to choose between Sotheby’s and Christie’s by staging a game of RPS. The director at Christie’s asked his 11-year-old twin daughters for advice.

Knowing boys, they correctly told him rock was the most common move.

They reasoned that Sotheby’s would work this out and therefore throw paper. The man fr from Christie’s duly we went for scissors and won the business.

Kindest cut

T

he law of parties decrees it must end with the cutting of the cake.

One problem is that cutting the cake exposes it to the air and makes it dry. In his 1906 paper Cutting a Round Cake on Scientific Principles

Francis Galton solved the problem.

Don’t cut the cake in half; cut a strip out of the middle instead that allows you to push the pieces back together again. That doesn’t help you to cut the cake fairly, though. Fortunately, I have not neglected to read Robertson and Webb’s seminal Cake Cutting Algorithms. Cutting a cake fairly between two people is easy.

The principle, which goes back to Babylon, is: “I cut, you choose.”

But when there are more than two people it gets trickier. In 1944 a Polish mathematician called Hugo Steinhaus devised a solution. Person A cuts a third of the cake. If Person B thinks it’s too large he trims it and passes the trimmed piece to Person C who can then either take it or leave it. If Person C takes it, then the other two play “I cut, you choose” with the rest of the cake.

But, if Person C declines the trimmed piece, then Person B, who trimmed it, has to eat it. Trust me, it works.

Though not the wonky way I cut it. Too much champagne is proving the wisdom of the old calculus joke that it is very dangerous to drink and derive. The mums come to collect the kids and it is all I can do not to turn to one of them, wink, and say: “Here’s looking at Euclid.” @pcollinstimes

Enough Americana.

Bring back proper British festivals Oliver Moody

‘T

he only society more frightful than one run by children,” the American anthropologist Paul Shepard noted after reading Lord of the Flies, “might be one run by childish adults.” It is a shame he didn’t live to see Black Friday.

In the space of a decade, a discounting strategy by US retailers to kick-start demand the morning after Thanksgiving has blossomed into a sort of secular festival across much of the developed world.

The British version is spectacular.

In one photograph from an Asda superstore in Wembley last Friday, a woman falls to her knees clutching one end of a 40in plasma television while two teenagers seize the other, and four dozen copies of the Brent & Kilburn Times carpet the floor like spent rounds of ammunition.

Subtract the odd Dyson and puffer jacket, add a few horsehair crests and the tableau could be the Sack of Troy.

Something is wrong here, and it is

A cynical marketing concoction borrowed from 3,500 miles away not the commerce. Like a secular echo of the first Sunday of Advent, which falls two days later, Black Friday is the starting gun for Christmas. This is fine. There is not really much harm in allowing mawkish corporate dross to settle on red letter days like the sad fake snow on Oxford Street. If people feel an itch to buy a food processor after watching a small boy discover the mysteries of love through a toy penguin on TV, they are absolutely entitled to go ahead and do so.

Christmas will survive any number of Christmas adverts.

But Black Friday isn’t a red letter day at all. It’s a cynical concoction trading on ersatz memories of nothing, borrowed from a country 3,500 miles away. And this is the problem: most modern British festivals, from Father’s Day to the thundering plastic juggernaut of Hallowe’en, are American gimmicks.

It’s not the chaos of Black Friday that offends — British crowds always enjoy an outbreak of hysteria — so much as the sheer emptiness of the chaos. According to Waitrose, one in six Britons now celebrates Thanksgiving. What are they giving thanks for, beyond the febrile vapours of a marketing executive’s whiteboard?

There is a clear and understandable appetite for excuses to spend money. People like to feel part of something. Our calendar is stuffed with festivals that have all but fallen into disuse: bring them back. It is time to replace “Walmart Black Friday from Asda” with All Souls or Michaelmas. Only a nation of childish adults would bankrupt itself on another country’s feast day.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

19

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Opinion

Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk

Politicians won’t save us, so the Bank must The trade gap is causing that burning smell from the economic engine. We mustn’t fear the rate rises that can fix it Robert Peston

@peston

W

hen David Cameron and George Osborne were installed in Downing Street four and a half years ago, their expectation was that by now they would be able to announce generous tax cuts as a reward (cough, bribe) to voters for the long slogging years of austerity.

There is no chance of the chancellor promising any huge giveaway in this week’s autumn statement — and if he were to attempt it, he would risk losing whatever goodwill he has built up among the UK’s creditors for his putative fiscal rectitude.

Although the Tories and Liberal Democrats have delivered significant and painful cuts in departmental budgets, greater than many thought possible, there remains a proper hole in the government’s finances.

The main reason is that tax revenues are recovering much more slowly than anticipated: the official forecast from the Office for Budget

Responsibility was for the money coming in to rise by almost 5 per cent this year. However, the rate of increase in tax receipts in the first seven months of 2014-15 is 2.2 per cent.

This is pretty extraordinary, given that the UK, with America, is by some way the fastest growing of the big, rich, developed economies, with GDP rising at about 3 per cent annually.

Normally in a recovery of this strength “operational gearing” clicks in: taxes increase faster than GDP because lots of people get pay rises that nudge them into higher tax brackets.

But you don’t need to be told that salaries have been stagnating and that vast numbers of new jobs are on low wages. This squeeze on income

Believe it or not, the housing market hasn’t boomed enough tax receipts has been exacerbated by increasing the tax-free allowance faster than inflation, to £10,000.

Also, believe it or not, for all the hysteria about an unsustainable boom in the housing market, especially in London and the south east, it hasn’t been boomy enough: revenues from stamp duty on housing transactions are much lower than expected.

All this means that net government

borrowing so far this year is up by 6.1 per cent, compared with plans for it to fall by 11.2 per cent. So even if, as expected, there is a bit of a surge in tax payments at the turn of the year, there is no chance of the public sector deficit falling meaningfully in the year as a whole.

Which matters: it leaves the deficit in the vicinity of £100 billion or nudging 6 per cent of national income, considerably bigger than in countries many scorn as being on the road to ruin, such as France and Italy.

So the only serious fiscal argument that the main parties probably ought to be having between now and next May is over what kind of action needs to be taken in an emergency budget after the election to restore the health of the public finances: the talk in Whitehall is how an incoming government should immediately announce a big tax increase or a further hacking of welfare spending.

But somehow I don’t expect Ed, David, Nick and Nigel to be accusing each other of not having the cojones to make us poorest, fastest, for our own long-term good. None of them has an interest in shouting too loudly that there’s no money in the kitty.

So in this period of pre-election fiscal denial, monetary credibility from the Bank of England is more important than ever — but the Bank faces its gravest challenge since

Mark Carney became governor.

The problem is that our economy may be performing too well. What on earth do I mean? Well, consumer spending and business investment are both rising at a fair clip, more than compensating for a worsening trade balance. That deterioration, which should not surprise the prime minister, who recently warned of red lights flashing on the dashboard, stems from the eurozone’s inability

In the ugly contest, Britain’s economy is not quite the ugliest to break free of stagnation, Japan’s recession and China’s slow down Here is the burning smell wafting from the engine: with demand from most places apart from America weaker, the momentum of growth in Britain can only come from domestic consumption and investment — so we will continue to suck in imports faster than we export.

The trade deficit is likely to worsen and so too, probably, will our current account deficit, the gap between what we pay the rest of the world and receive from it, including the balance of investment income. The current account deficit has been a record 5 per cent or so of GDP for a year.

For reasons that are mysterious, the City and those who lend to the UK do not seem unduly bothered that we are farther away from paying our way in the world than at any time for sixty years. Perhaps their sangfroid is because things look even nastier in the eurozone: in the ugly contest, we are not quite the ugliest.

But what if early next year the current account deficit widened to 6-7 per cent, while the deficit showed little sign of reducing from a similarly large percentage of national income? And what if that weakening coincided with opinion polls showing that a hung parliament is likely, or with a general election that precipitated days and days of uncertainty about whether any kind of economically coherent coalition government could be created?

Well my chums who control gazillions say that sterling would be then seen as toxic and the pound would be dumped, with seriously inflationary consequences.

That said, the Bank can’t and shouldn’t raise interest rates pre-emptively to ward off contingent risks of a sterling crisis, for fear of obfuscating its purpose. But perhaps we should be less scared of small rate rises that will happen anyway than of the Bank not raising rates early enough to take the deficit-widening oomph out of domestic spending.

20

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Leading articles Daily Universal Register UK: Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, announces plans for a £2.3 billion investment for 1,400 flood defences in the UK; Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, and Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, speak at the Future of Health debate in London.

Sweden: The World Health Organisation hosts a global meeting to improve tracking of antibiotic resistance.

Beijing Bully

China’s decision to ban a group of MPs from visiting Hong Kong is testing the limits of Britain’s patience. It is an outrage, and David Cameron must say so For 30 years Beijing has grown rich through foreign trade while muzzling foreign criticism of the way China is run. Its most successful technique has been a form of commercial blackmail — the implied threat of cutting access to its markets and manufacturing sector in retaliation for “interference” in its domestic affairs.

Fearful of such a reaction, David Cameron has waited three months before lodging a public complaint about Beijing’s move to ban British MPs from visiting Hong Kong to investigate the slow pace of reform there. The delay is unconscionable, because the ban is outrageous. If allowed to stand it will leave Hong Kong’ s pro-democracy protesters without a single significant show of support from abroad after ten weeks on the streets. Worse, it is part of a crude recalibration of Chinese diplomacy according to the maxim that whatever Beijing can get away with must be acceptable.

Barring entry to Hong Kong for members of the House of Commons’ foreign affairs committee is not acceptable. China and Britain are co-signatories of the 1984 deal on Hong Kong’s future in a “one country, two systems” framework and the committee has an entirely legitimate role in ensuring the deal is being honoured. The evidence since Xi Jinping’s arrival in power in Beijing sug-

gests it is not being honoured. This was the context for a meeting last week at which China’ s deputy ambassador to London withheld visas for eight members of the committee and reminded its chairman, Sir Richard Ottaway, that Britain was “not still a colonial power”.

For a middle-ranking Chinese diplomat to stop parliament doing its job and lecture one of its senior members on the basics of British history is not just “overtly confrontational”, as Sir Richard noted. It is arrogant and absurd. Yesterday Mr Cameron said the Chinese ban was “mistaken” and “counter-productive”. He must now move beyond timid reproach to unambiguous condemnation, and order an urgent review of ways to ensure that the committee can fulfil its mission.

The parliamentary visit was planned this summer to mark the 30th anniversary of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong. The declaration includes a pledge to introduce universal suffrage by 2017, but universal suffrage is meaningless when all the candidates for power must be approved by a one-party Communist state. That rider was announced by Beijing in August, and the response has been explosive.

The protests in the Admiralty and Mong Kok districts have presented the most serious chal-

lenge to Beijing’s authority since the Tiananmen Square rebellion of 1989. The crowds have shrunk since their peak but a determined core of protesters continues to defy police. Yesterday one of their leaders, Joshua Wong, declared a hunger strike.

Beijing has been careful not to demand of the Hong Kong police a crackdown that might inflame the city and spread insurrection to the mainland. But its de facto representative there, Cy Leung, has not addressed the protesters’ demands, much less give an inch on the central question of why Hong Kong should not be allowed to choose from its own list of candidates for leadership.

No one should be surprised. Intrigued by what Vladimir Putin has accomplished by pushing the normal rules of diplomacy to breaking point, Xi Jinping has unveiled a new doctrine of “big country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics”.

Meaning, roughly, look out. The west must brace itself for a new and highly aggressive Chinese swagger abroad and extreme defensiveness when challenged close to home. Beijing is normalising a situation in which even its richest trading partners behave as if criticism of its dictatorial governance and appalling human rights record were off limits.

It is not. Such criticism is essential, and Mr Cameron must be prepared to voice it.

Public Utility

wages have fallen and the price on the open markets has dropped. Wholesale price rises seem to be passed on to the consumer while falls in price seem to flatter the corporate balance sheet. Travelling by rail can require a second mortgage and the standard of carriage, especially into cities at peak time, can be dire.

However, it is worth pausing to recall the actual performance of these industries when they were in public hands. Terrible industrial relations meant the lights were unreliable. British Rail was the staple of comic routines in the 1970s. The infrastructure on which gas, electricity and rail all relied began to fray. To take just one example, in the six years before privatisation the public water authorities invested £9.3 billion. In the six years after privatisation the newly formed companies between them invested £17 billion. More people travel by train today than have ever done so before.

The postal service is quicker and more reliable. It is hard to imagine what the mobile phone market would look like if it had been left in state hands. Or indeed if it would have really developed at all.

The debate is incomplete, however, if it is posed

purely as a choice between the two extremes of state ownership on the one side and a pure market on the other. The truth about network industries such as electricity, gas, railways and the postal service is that they are not markets in the pure sense.

The writ of competition does not run entirely. This is because, as vital utilities, the companies have public service obligations to provide electricity, gas, water, post, travel facilities to everyone, even the hard-to-reach and the needy. Utilities cannot pick and choose their segment of the market in the way that, say, a supermarket can. It is also obvious that competition for a rail service — which can only accommodate one company at a time — is not the same as it is for baked beans.

This means the crucial governance of the utilities is done through regulation. The strangesounding formula of “RPI-X” caps the profits of utilities by placing a ceiling on prices. That puts the onus on regulators to be tough, acting for the consumer. In water, electricity, gas and rail, regulators have been too weak. Public disapproval is certainly pointing to a genuine problem. The solution, though, is technical rather than ideological.

The Rusty Chancellor

Gordon Brown’s best years may yet be ahead of him The long, melancholy withdrawing roar is almost over. Gordon Brown will stand down at the general election after 32 years in the Commons. In one sense, it is long overdue: he has turned up for barely one vote in eight since 2010. But now, as Britain tentatively returns to growth, it is a fitting time for a man whose career has been more closely tied to the financial crisis than any other to depart.

In his first two years as chancellor, Mr Brown earned a reputation for fiscal probity that lasted him well into the subsequent decade of largesse.

He kept Britain out of the euro after an ill-advised flirtation, and secured the independence of the

Bank of England. Yet from 1999 new Labour’s budgetary discipline evaporated, and voters were compelled to sit through the painfully protracted Bildungsroman of a man who would be prime minister.

Mr Brown proved to be the Hamlet of modern British politics, a gifted but deeply flawed statesman whose ambition ran forever one step ahead of his talents.

He turned a balanced budget into a £156 billion deficit and oversaw the wilting of financial regulation that allowed more than £800 billion in household debt to accumulate. In so far as any one British politician bears responsibility for the collapse

Walkers on beaches may now sometimes see a flock of small dark birds sweep past, making a hard, metallic twitter.

These are twites, which are very similar to linnets, but can be distinguished from them in winter by their yellow beak. The twites also have an orange glow around the throat and a longer tail. When they settle on the beach to feed, they form a loose column in order to pick up seeds that have been washed in by the waves. The column moves along as the birds at the back fly over the heads of all those in front of them, and come down again at the head of the queue. So all the members of the flock, which can consist of as many as a hundred birds, have a turn at getting first peck of the seeds lying on the sand. Twites nest mainly on the heathery uplands of western Scotland, but come down to sea and estuary shores in winter. There are many of them now in the Scottish islands, in Morecambe Bay and along the Norfolk coast. “Twite” is nowadays pronounced to rhyme with “white”, but it used to be pronounced “tweet”, echoing its call-note. derwent may

Birthdays today

Disapproval of network industries should be fixed by regulation not nationalisation In 1988 a young economist wrote a book with the grand title of Privatising the World. That rather neatly summed up the mood of the time. The nationalised network industries and utilities in Britain were all privatised during the 1980s and at no point since has there been a serious suggestion that the decision would be reversed. Indeed, that young economist, Oliver Letwin, is now policy guru to the prime minister.

Which is not to say that all is well. YouGov research for The Times has shown that, by 56 per cent to 21 per cent, the British people support renationalisation of gas and electricity. Public ownership of the rail network is supported by 59 per cent of the nation, with only 21 per cent against. There is also a substantial victory for the proposition that reducing the scope of private sector involvement would be beneficial to the NHS. It is not our place to tell the people that they are wrong but it may be that this is an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo rather than a full-blooded commitment to public ownership.

There is every reason for people to feel annoyed.

Energy prices in Britain have kept rising even as

Nature notes

of the credit system, it is Mr Brown. His three bruised years as an unelected prime minister will largely be remembered for long troughs of indecision, poisonous internal politics and clunking faux pas. Yet he also galvanised the sluggish international response to the crisis at the 2009 G20 summit in London.

History could be gentler in its final judgment on Mr Brown. The test will be whether he uses the freedom and authority of an elder statesman wisely, as Sir John Major has done, or squanders them, like Tony Blair. Retirement may suit Mr Brown better than the highest office ever did.

Patricia Hewitt, pictured, chairwoman, UK India Business Council, and secretary of state for health, (2005-07), 66; Brendan Coyle, actor, Downton Abbey, 51; Alfred Enoch, actor, How to Get Away with Murder, the Harry Potter films (2001-11), 26; Sir David Green, chairman, the Soumik Datta Arts charity, and director-general, British Council (19992007), 66; Nelly Furtado, singer, Glow (2006), High Life (2012), 36; Michael Green, founder, Carlton Communications, 67; James Lancelot, master of the choristers and organist, Durham Cathedral, 62; Dr Brian Lang, principal emeritus, University of St Andrews, 69; the Hon Philip Knatchbull, chief executive, Curzon World cinema group, 53; Tom McGuinness, guitarist, Manfred Mann, 73; Michael Neale, industrial consultant and engineer, directorgeneral, engines, Ministry of Defence (198087), 85; Monica Seles, tennis player, world No 1 in March 1991 and bronze medallist in the 2000 Olympics, 41; Mary Ward, cofounder and artistic director, the Chickenshed theatre company, 70.

On this day In 1697, the quire, the first part of Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral to be finished, opened for worship; in 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself as emperor of France in Paris; in 1942, in Chicago, a team led by Enrico Fermi created the first controlled nuclear chain reaction; in 1971 six states formed the independent United Arab Emirates.

The last word “A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher, from a conversation in 1930.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Letters to the Editor

1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF Email: letters@thetimes.co.uk

How pilots stop errors becoming catastrophes

Better welfare Sir, George Osborne will be making tough decisions ahead of tomorrow’s spending review. We urge him to stop viewing social security as a bill to be cut and to see it instead as an investment in individuals, communities and society. The present welfare system wastes money because it reacts to crisis rather than prevents it. Its nature is short term: focusing on getting individuals off benefits rather than helping them towards a sustainable career. Social security should be about more than survival. It should enable people to thrive and also prevent problems from recurring.

Today Community Links and the Early Action Task Force launch two reports. Just About Surviving sets out how reform has eroded people’s ability to improve their lives despite a willingness to do so. Secure and Ready reimagines the social security system so that it would enable people to take the opportunities available to them. geraldine blake CEO, Community Links david robinson Chairman, Early Action Task Force bishop tim stephens and three more signatories whose names can be viewed at thetimes.co.uk/letters

Lift the cap Sir, Investment in housing is needed urgently. New homes can help to create jobs, cut benefit bills, form stable communities and address the backlog of housing need, a key concern for employers. One way to make this happen is to lift the cap on local authorities’ housing revenue accounts, which would allow councils and their partners to maximise the social and economic value of house building. It would be one of the most sensible decisions that George Osborne could announce in his autumn statement tomorrow. sir steve bullock London Councils baroness jo valentine London First stewart baseley Home Builders Federation colin stanbridge London Chamber of Commerce and 10 more signatories whose names can be seen at thetimes.co.uk/letters

Corrections and clarifications

Sir, Matt Ridley characterises the accident that befell Air France 447 incorrectly. The root cause was a failure of the pitot system which fed erroneous data to the automatic systems on which Ridley would have us rely. The accident can be attributed in part to human error because the crew did not diagnose or compensate for the failure of automatic systems which were in the process of crashing the aircraft.

Other cheek

Milking cows

Sir, Desmond Swayne’s analysis of the comparative records of violence between Muslims and Christians is flawed. (“Isis violence matched by Christians”, Dec 1). Humans are capable of unlimited violence, but Christianity restrains them. Its dominant ethic is that of “turning the other cheek”. Islam’s dominant texts, in the post Medina part of the Koran, sanction violence, and they take precedence over other texts that do not. It is for this reason that we do not hear moderating Muslim voices raised in theological dispute — and urging restraint — with what the media call “radical Muslims”. the rev canon dr gavin ashenden Chaplain to the Queen, Vicar of St Martin de Gouray, Jersey

Sir, Your editorial (“Milk and money”, Nov 29) omitted an important point: should an upturn in attitudes and events in the dairy industry encourage farmers once more to invest in milking herds, the tap cannot be turned on quickly.

It takes fives years to replace a milking cow in full production. Many farmers could not afford to wait that long. henry moore Hereford

on this day december 2, 1914

6 The mayor of Ashkelon did not bar Palestinian construction workers from schools (“Israel poised to vote on law for ‘Jewish state’”, Dec 1). He proposed doing so, but backed down after criticism.

THE KING AT THE FRONT

6 The Ashbourne title is a barony, not a baronetcy (“Aristocrat who drunkenly assaulted PC loses appeal”, Dec 1).

From our Special Correspondent, a town in France.

The King arrived unexpectedly yesterday. He was accompanied by the Prince of Wales who, with other officers attached to General French’s Staff, came down from headquarters to receive him. After lunching at the hotel he visited the hospital. His Majesty first inspected the men’s wards. His sympathy and solicitude for them were touching

The Times is committed to abiding by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (“IPSO”) rules and regulations and the Editors’ Code of Practice that IPSO enforces. Requests for corrections should be sent by email to feedback@thetimes.co.uk or by post to Feedback, The Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

make mistakes, just like every other group in a highly complex industry.

The airline industry needs to do a lot better at balancing the combination of automation and on-the-spot human intervention. captain steve last Air safety technical pilot (retired), Marlow Bottom, Bucks

Sir, Matt Ridley appears to have a peculiar blind spot about automatic systems, especially in aviation (“This isn’t your captain speaking. It’s a robot”, Dec 1).

He says events likes Chesley Sullenberger’s ditching of his plane in the Hudson River are rare compared to “human error” catastrophes. But the action of pilots regularly prevents many unforeseen “human errors” becoming newsworthy catastrophes.

Aircraft are astonishingly complicated physical machines exposed to extremely complicated conditions. Does Ridley think they design, build, certify and maintain themselves? Every aspect of their existence and operation involves humans on the ground, who are just as fallible as pilots.

The 2010 Qantas A380 uncontained engine failure and 2008 BA B777 double engine failure are only two among the most spectacular of a catalogue of “impossible” events, the vast majority of which have never reached Ridley’s attention precisely because pilots succeeded in preventing them becoming catastrophic.

It’s relatively easy to remove humans in land-based transport: in the worst case the vehicle stops and you get out. Try that in an aircraft.

Pilots are human and they do

Sir, While pilotless planes may well come about, one fallacy in Matt Ridley’s article is that removing the pilot removes the possibility of human error — it does not.

Aeroplanes are designed and built by humans. Any pilotless aircraft has its software written by humans and entered into computer systems by humans. All of these actions are potential causes of error. Human error will always be there. john c pettit BA captain (retired), Long Crendon, Bucks

Coins and notes Sir, I sympathise with the amusement industry over the introduction of the new £1 coin (News, Dec 1). At least the Treasury has a case in that the and manifest, and he expressed his concern that the number of wounded had been so large. The King spoke in German to a wounded German officer and was anxious that the German wounded should be well supplied with literature, because their lot was rendered additionally hard by the fact that they could not converse with the other wounded men. The Prince of Wales noticed a private in his own regiment — the Grenadier Guards — who is 6ft 6in in height.

He is said to be the tallest private in the British Army, and a special bed has had to be provided for him.

In the officers’ wards the King spoke to each patient in turn, and asked many questions: “What was their regiment? Were they in pain?

Were they making good progress?”

One officer had a story which greatly interested His Majesty. He said that while he was reading a newspaper in the trenches a bullet went through the page. When he examined the paper he found that the bullet had traversed the name of a great friend of his — a member

And no machine would have elected to land on the Hudson River: only a human pilot could have followed that decision path.

Reliance on drones raises new safety questions, not least of which is how to proof control systems against hijackers who may take over without even being on board. patrick malone Withiel, Cornwall Sir, Matt Ridley’s piece calls to mind the prediction of a few years ago that soon every flight deck would be crewed only by a man and a dog.

The man’s job would be to feed the dog; the dog’s job would be to bite the man if he tried to touch anything. clive toomer Emborough, Somerset Sir, I was fascinated by Vanessa Gebbie’s letter (Dec 1) about her husband disagreeing with sat-nav instructions voiced by a female.

Years ago, studies showed that pilots reacted more expeditiously to a female voice from warning systems.

These are now in use. I can only conclude that either Mrs Gebbie’s husband was a pilot who was told to “pull up . . . pull up” too often or he has a rather different home life to many households. chris brockman Crowthorne, Berks integrity of coinage suffers from high levels of counterfeiting.

Contrast this with the Bank of England decision to introduce polymer notes. This may cost the retail industry more than £400 million, yet the bank has declined to do a cost-benefit analysis and levels of note counterfeiting are low and falling. brendan doyle CMS Payments Intelligence, Manchester

New bellringers Sir, Does Boris Johnson, who “looks at banning cars on Sundays” (News, Dec 1), expect elderly couples to get lifts to church on other people’s handlebars? tom mcintyre Frome, Somerset of His Majesty’s suite. “Is my friend with you today, your Majesty?” he inquired. The friend was present and was summoned to the bedside.

The wounded officer explained that, directly after the paper was hit, he sat down to write a letter to his friend, relating the incident, and he cut out the pierced piece of the paper to send to him. It was while he was thus occupied that he was himself hit by a bullet.

Later in the day the King visited the Indian Hospital, where he spent 40 minutes talking with the wounded. He was impressed by the extraordinary hardihood and patience with which these men bear their wounds. One had had his leg amputated in the morning. He had borne the pain after the operation stoically, but when the King spoke to him his eyes filled with tears and he could not answer. sign up for a weekly email with extracts from the times history of the war ww1.thetimes.co.uk

Child abusers Sir, Libby Purves (“Yes, there really are virtuous paedophiles”, Dec 1) makes her point well that those who remove themselves from temptation may be helped by psychological treatment. Yet those who deliberately choose the company of their victims are monstrous.

We are all sinners, and some sins become compulsions. In spite of this, we do have choice: a teacher can get out of teaching; a doctor can forgo the comforts of his practice by turning to research.

Those that don’t are monsters not by the strength of their compulsions or their remorse, but by the terrible harm they do. If they are not condemned and punished, what case is there for punishing any crime? vivian crellin Baldock, Herts Sir, Elements of Libby Purves’s “better way” to help paedophiles seeking an offence-free life do exist in Britain.

Since 2002, Circles UK has offered a community-based programme run with the approval of the police and probation service. Our volunteers support and monitor those seeking to overcome their inner demons. stephen hanvey Chief executive officer, Circles UK

Hong Kong Sir, It is important to get facts right before people outside Hong Kong, no matter how well meaning, rush to support the “pro-democracy” protest in the former British colony (“China stokes old tensions as MPs banned from Hong Kong”, Dec 1).

First, recent polls all indicated that a clear majority of people in Hong Kong do not support the continuation of the protest, which has caused disruption and challenged the excellent legal system that Hong Kong has established.

Second, when Hong Kong was under British rule, democracy was suppressed. There was never any form of election to select the chief executive, and the “governors” who exercised almost unopposed control were always appointed by the British government. jane tam Birmingham

Spare us the rods Sir, Your item (News, Nov 29) extolled the virtues of teaching maths using pictures. Such ideas are not new, however.

Anyone who taught maths in the Sixties will remember Cuisenaire rods, which used Piaget’s theory and practice of allowing children to manipulate apparatus before they could move on to the abstract concept of numbers. They proved effective but the rods were, however, the bane of the tired teacher’s life when at the end of the day you had to scour the floor to find the tiny cube units. ann tyas Brampton Bierlow, S Yorks

Wheet-whoo Sir, I was pleased to see Kevin Maher’s piece on wolf-whistling (Dec 1). As a woman well past the menopause, I remember with nostalgia a builder telling me that he whistled at all the women. He told me: “The young ones expect it and the old ones appreciate it.” Those were the days! moya hermon Kidlington, Oxon

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News DAVID MIRZOEFF / NATIONAL PICTURES

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Poles leading the march of 1.3m east European migrants Richard Ford Home Correspondent

Almost a quarter of the foreign nationals living in Britain are from the ten eastern European countries that joined the EU in the last decade, according to official figures published yesterday.

Poles account for the largest migrant group setting up home in Britain, with almost 680,000, followed by migrants from India and Ireland.

The figures show that 1.27 million of nearly 5 million foreign nationals in the country are from the ten former Soviet bloc states that joined the EU after 2004. Half of the migrants from eastern Europe come from Poland, a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said.

Lord Green of Deddington, chairman of Migration Watch UK, which campaigns for lower immigration, said: “These figures confirm that Britain is the destination of choice for most

migrants from eastern Europe. However, nearly 90 per cent of them are in low-paid work so the benefit to the exchequer is mostly limited.”

Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU in 2004, triggering one of the largest flows of migration in British history. These eight states were followed in 2007 by Romania and Bulgaria.

The OECD figures showed that the number of foreign nationals — those born overseas who have not taken British citizenship — rose by more than 3 per cent to 4.9 million last year, representing 7.9 per cent of the total population. It said that a record 2.66 million foreign nationals were working in Britain and that more than a third of them are highly skilled.

The report showed that in 2012, for the first time, the number of migrants moving within the EU through free

movement rules matched legal migrations from outside the union.

However, Germany is by far the most popular destination for migrants.

Almost 30 per cent of migrants in 2012 went to Germany, compared with just 7 per cent going to the UK, the OECD said.

The report also highlighted the disparity in education levels between the foreign population and natives.

“This pattern is particularly stark in the UK, where 46 per cent of the foreignborn population are highly educated compared with just 33 per cent of the native population,” it said.

David Cameron last week unveiled plans to make Britain a less attractive destination. Under his proposals, EU jobseekers without an offer of employment will not be allowed to claim universal credit when they arrive in the UK and will be required to leave if they do not find work within six months.

New arrivals find home on GCSE syllabus Greg Hurst Education Editor

Glittering prize Divya Pande, of Bonhams, with a pearl, emerald and diamond necklace expected to fetch up to £180,000 when it is auctioned on Thursday

Immigration is to find its way into the syllabus after a leading exam board announced plans for a GCSE topic on migration into Britain.

Pupils who take the history course would look at why people have migrated to Britain across centuries, their ex-

perience as minority communities and how they helped to shape the country.

The arrival of the Huguenots and other Protestants and the black population of London in the late 18th century could all be studied.

The course, which has yet to be approved, has been devised in response to the redesign of history GCSEs ordered

by Michael Gove when he was the education secretary. From 2016 they must include a thematic study to understand change in a sweep of history over centuries. OCR, an exam board owned by the University of Cambridge, has developed two history GCSEs incorperating the option of a study on migration to Britain.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

Doctor jailed for sex attacks on boys with cancer Sean O’Neill Crime Editor

A hospital consultant sentenced to 22 years in jail yesterday for sexually abusing young cancer patients in his care could face further charges.

Detectives are investigating claims from two other possible victims of Myles Bradbury, who have come forward since the paediatric haematologist pleaded guilty to 25 offences against 18 children. The case remains open and police say that the full scale of Bradbury’s offending might never be known.

Bradbury, 41, a married man, carried out his assaults on boys aged between 8 and 17 while treating them for leukaemia and other disorders at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where he worked for four years until his arrest last December.

The abuse often took place when the Myles Bradbury used a “spy camera” pen, below, to record his victims

children were separated from their parents behind a curtain or in a treatment room, where Bradbury would make them strip naked or perform unnecessary examinations. He made one boy come back for appointments even though tests showed that he was well enough to be discharged.

Police found 16,000 indecent images of children on computer disks at his home and more than 170,000 pictures of boys taken with two pens that contained “spy cameras”.

Sentencing Bradbury at Cambridge crown court, Judge Gareth Hawkesworth told him that his offences had created trauma, fear and distress. He added: “I’ve never come across a more culpable or grave course of sexual criminality which has involved such a gross and grotesque breach and betrayal of your Hippocratic oath and trust

reposed in you by your patients. There are almost too many aggravating features to enumerate in this prolonged, carefully planned, cruel and persistent campaign of abuse. At the top of the list comes the breach of trust.”

The judge said that Bradbury, who will serve half his term, had disposed of his computer hard drive before he was arrested: “Nobody will ever know the precise extent of your activities, thus increasing the agony of those you pretended to treat and their families.”

The family of one victim said yesterday that they were moving house to get away from the place where their child was abused. The boy was eight when he was found to have leukaemia and began to be treated by Bradbury. The doctor abused him from January 2012 until the boy told his parents what was happening in November last year.

The boy’s mother said of Bradbury: “I trusted him implicitly. He was going to make my son better. He betrayed us all.

He was very nice and approachable and I had no reason to suspect what was going on.”

Bradbury could have been caught more than a year before he was arrested if the National Crime Agency had distributed intelligence it had received from the Canadian authorities about suspected online paedophile activity.

He was one of more than 2,300 British customers who bought films from a Canadian retailer who was under investigation for selling DVDs of naked boys. The list of Britons was sent to the NCA in July 2012 but was not sent to local police forces until November last year. By then police were investigating Bradbury.

The doctor pleaded guilty in September to six counts of sexual assault and 13 counts of engaging in sexual activity with a child, three counts of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, one count of voyeurism and two counts of making indecent images of a child.

Cambridgeshire police said that they were still seeking information about Bradbury’s activities before he arrived in Cambridge.

Life term for paedophile who ran children’s homes Jenny Booth

The founder of a chain of north Wales children’s homes who lorded over his vulnerable children “like a god” has been jailed for life for abusing 18 boys and one girl in his care.

John Allen, who has served time in prison before for sexual abuse, continued to proclaim his innocence from the dock as the judge sentenced him to serve a minimum of 11 years before he can be considered for release.

The 73-year-old, of Needham Market, Suffolk, was convicted last week at Mold crown court of 31 separate sexual offences against victims aged between 7 and 15. The crimes were committed between 1968 and 1991 at his Bryn Alyn community of residential care properties around Wrexham.

Allen had no childcare qualifications, yet at one time he ran 11 care homes housing 120 children. Many offences

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were committed in the presence of other children but no one spoke out because of their fear of him.

Allen was given a discretionary life sentence for seven serious sexual assaults. He received concurrent terms of ten years for 23 indecent assaults, and two years for an act of gross indecency with a child. He was cleared of two other serious sexual assaults.

The jury could not reach verdicts on three counts of indecent assault and one count of indecency with a child.

He is likely now to be questioned by the Metropolitan police about allegations made last week by Dennis Parry, a former leader of Clwyd county council, who accused Allen of transporting children to London to be abused at paedophile sex parties.

Scotland Yard said it was looking into three murders after a witness said he had seen a boy strangled to death by a Conservative MP at one of the parties.

News BEN BIRCHALL / PA

Farewell The funeral in Bristol yesterday of Ben Pocock, 20, who died on the Malaysia Airlines jet shot down in Ukraine

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

World

Iraq paid 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers’ who never existed Iraq

Tom Coghlan Foreign Correspondent

Iraq has been paying salaries to 50,000 “ghost” soldiers, the prime minister has admitted — highlighting the challenge the country faces in overcoming the Islamic State militants who occupy more than a third of its territory.

On paper, the Iraqi armed forces, trained and equipped by the US, number more than 300,000. However, Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister, told parliament that tens of thousands of fictional soldiers were on the payroll and that more could come to light. His announcement that 50,000 salaries had been halted was met with applause from MPs. “Over the past few weeks, the PM has been cracking down to expose the ghost soldiers and get to the root of the problem,” Mr al-Abadi’s spokesman, Rafid Jaboori, said. The crackdown follows the dismissal of 26 generals and senior commanders last month for incompetence and corruption.

Serving Iraqi soldiers said that two types of “fadhaiyin” — which translates as “space men” — existed in the force.

“Each officer is allowed, for example, five guards. He’ll keep two, send three home and pocket their salary or an agreed percentage,” one officer said.

“The second and bigger group is at the brigade level. A brigade commander

Efforts to rebuild Iraq’s armed services have cost the US taxpayer $25 billion

usually has 40 or more soldiers who stay at home or don’t exist.”

Analysts believe that Iraq’s army has been hollowed out by years of mismanagement and political meddling under the previous regime of Nouri al-Maliki.

Toby Dodge, director of the Middle East Centre at the LSE, said that ghost soldiers were created in part to pay an endemic system of bribes needed to achieve promotions within the army.

“You have to pay $3,000 to get into officer training school. To get promoted to general costs $30,000. Everyone is

Jihadist quit, claiming Isis forced him to clean toilets India

Robin Pagnamenta Mumbai

An Indian jihadist who travelled to Iraq to fight for Islamic State has returned home to Mumbai after claiming to have been “humiliated” by the menial tasks he was forced to perform, including cleaning toilets.

Areeb Majeed, a 23-year-old engineering student from the Mumbai suburb of Kalyan, was arrested on Friday after returning from a sixmonth visit to Iraq, via Turkey.

In an interview with officers from India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA), Mr Majeed said that Isis fighters refused to allow him to participate in frontline activities and instead forced him to fetch water, clean toilets and supervise road construction.

Disillusioned with the “very disappointing” experience, and after suffering an unexplained bullet wound, Mr Majeed contacted his family and said that he wanted to return home to India.

“Only after I begged them [Isis] was I taken to a hospital,” Mr Majeed was quoted as telling NIA officers.

“There was neither a holy war nor

were any of the preachings in the holy book followed. Isis fighters raped many women there,” he said.

Mr Majeed, who said that he had wanted to join Isis after viewing jihadist websites and participating in chatrooms, had travelled with three friends from the same neighbourhood who remain missing in Iraq. His father, Ejaz, said that he was delighted by the return of his son, who he hoped would now resume his engineering studies.

India is the second biggest Muslim country in the world by population, with 176 million followers of the religion. The community is traditionally moderate and only a handful of people have been drawn into violent extremism. However, the recruitment of Indian Muslims to fight for Isis has fuelled fears that some are being radicalised on the internet.

Mr Majeed is understood to have told intelligence officials that he knew of at least 13 Indian men who were fighting with Isis in Syria and Iraq.

Some had travelled from India while others had previously been living in Gulf states.

asset-stripping the payroll to pay back the investment they needed to get promoted,” he said.

The system helped to explain the abject performance of Iraqi troops, he added. “Any member of the military is aware of the hierarchical corruption of the bosses. Why fight for them when they are asset-stripping you?”

By some estimates, the Iraqi forces could number as few as 85,000 active troops. US officials have said that a further effort to rebuild the Iraqi army — which has already cost the American taxpayer $25 billion — would be pointless. Instead, a smaller, intensively trained force of 45,000 is proposed, with additional local militias being raised on a province-by-province basis.

Recent advances against Isis militants north of Baghdad have relied heavily on the presence of peshmerga fighters and Shia militias with links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, rather than official Iraqi army units.

Footage shot by an Al Jazeera news crew on November 30 in Diyala province showed what appeared to be an Iranian Air Force jet supporting Shia militias — proof of the intervention of Iranian forces in Iraq. The aircraft was an ageing F4 Phantom, sold by the US to Iran before the 1979 revolution.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Turkey and the US were close to clinching a deal that would see the creation of a US-policed no-fly zone along the Turkish-Syrian border, in exchange for US access to Turkish airbases. Citing Turkish and US officials, it said that the buffer zone would be much smaller than a “no-fly” zone originally conceived by Ankara to cover much of northern Syria.

Turkey would allow the training of about 2,000 Syrian opposition fighters on its territory, the newspaper said. The mooted agreement comes after a visit to Turkey by the US vice-president, Joe Biden, last week.

Inside Isis-held Iraq there were reports yesterday of an outbreak of water-borne diseases in Mosul. Despite the Utopian vision presented by the jihadists’ polished propaganda machine, residents in the northern city said that basic services were breaking down.

“The biggest and most dangerous problem now is because of our harsh circumstances and the absence of services,” a man named Abu Ali told AFP. He said that families were digging wells themselves.

The United Nations said yesterday that it was suspending a food voucher programme used by 1.7 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt because many donor nations had failed to deliver on their promises of funding. “The suspension of WFP food assistance will be disastrous for many families already suffering,” Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the World Food Programme, said.

Hong Kong police officers attack pro-democracy protesters who tried to surround

Hunger strike is the last Hong Kong

Suzanne Sataline Hong Kong Leo Lewis Beijing

The teenage ringleader of Hong Kong’s ten-week-old pro-democracy protests went on hunger strike last night as riot police armed with pepper spray, batons and water hoses put many of the demonstrators to flight.

Joshua Wong, 18, began a desperate new protest alongside two others as violence and panic gripped the largest site of the protest. The encampment in Admiralty, in the financial district, now appears hours away from being completely dismantled by police.

Amid a flurry of arrests, and running street battles, angry student demonstrators acknowledged that their campaign had failed because of a tactical decision over the weekend to surround government buildings..

That led to confrontation with the ri-

ot police and pledges by the Hong Kong authorities to mount a new crackdown, which appears on the verge of ending the protests. Yesterday, 40 people were arrested and dozens were injured as police cleared activists from Lung Wo Road.

“As a whole, it was a failure,” Alex Chow, leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, told local media, “The whole plan [to surround ministries] did not achieve its objective of paralysing the government.”

In an ominous escalation of rhetoric, Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s chief executive, described the protesters’ efforts as futile and vowed that the city would take “resolute action” to clear the protesters as public support ebbs away.

“We cannot sustain for long enough.

They can close this down in one or two days,” said Thomas Kwok, 32, a property salesman who was among the protesters yesterday. “The numbers of

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Coco Chanel’s role as a Nazi agent revealed Page 27

VINCENT YU / AP

Putin declares gas war on Europe with Turkey pipeline deal Russia

Ben Hoyle, Matthew Luxmoore Moscow

government buildings. They were quickly dispersed and admitted their attempts to challenge Beijing were close to collapse

Toxic legacy of world’s worst industrial disaster Page 28

The Kremlin unleashed the full force of its gas diplomacy yesterday, cancelling a £25 billion gas pipeline to southern Europe and replacing it with a new route via Turkey that binds Ankara closer to Moscow.

On the day that the rouble endured its worst single-day fall since the default crisis of 1998, President Putin was in Turkey reshaping Russia’s export map.

He said that the EU’s refusal to approve the planned South Stream pipeline had made it unworkable, and outlined how Europe would suffer as a result.

Some Russian energy resources would be redirected to other markets, he said. Bulgaria would lose out on €400 million (£320 million) a year in gas transit fees, and should demand compensation from Brussels.

The row over the pipeline is tied to the battle for influence in Ukraine that has ruptured Moscow’s relationship with the West. Russia moves half of its Europebound gas through Ukraine, and the proposed South Stream project would have bypassed the war-torn country and piped 63 billion cubic metres of Russian gas a year under the Black Sea, before running through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia and Italy.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the prime minister of Ukraine, said yesterday that the South Stream pipeline “is not needed”.

He called it a “political project of the Russian Federation”.

Hungary’s government had overtly backed the project, in defiance of European diplomats’ efforts to present a united front against Russia’s actions in Ukraine this year. Serbia staged a military parade for Mr Putin when he visited last month.

Russia and Turkey, despite very public differences on foreign policy in Syria and Ukraine, are also building closer relationships. Yesterday, Mr Putin announced a 6 per cent cut in the

Berlin Kiev UKRAINE

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Cancelled pipeline

price that Turkish customers will pay for Russian gas and offered to build a new gas hub on the Turkish-Greek border to serve southern Europe.

Alexei Miller, head of the Kremlin’s gas monopoly Gazprom, confirmed that the South Stream project was dead.

“The project is closed. This is it,” he said.

It would be replaced, he said, with a pipeline in Turkey with an annual capacity of 63 billion cubic metres.

Russia and Turkey are committed to increasing bilateral trade from £20 billion to more than £60 billion by 2020.

As with China, on Russia’s eastern border, Turkey is a big regional trading partner whose importance to Moscow has become much more acute since the European Union and United States imposed tough industry sanctions as punishment for Russia’s actions in Ukraine this year.

Anton Siluanov, Russia’s finance minister, said last week that sanctions would cost the Russian economy £25 billion this year, but that the falling oil price would cost it £60 billion. The price of a barrel of oil has dropped sharply since then and the rouble has followed it.

Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the largely silenced liberal opposition, said that the gathering economic crisis meant that the “long-term perspective is terrible for Putin”.

Rouble slumps, page 31

stand for Hong Kong protest leader Dead baby on beach sparks people coming in [to protest] cannot compare with two months ago. I’m really down, I don’t have too much hope.”

Since the protests began in September, the Admiralty site has become a colourful, art-laden testament to citizens’ demands for democratic elections free from interference by Beijing. Yesterday, the fragility of the rows of tents and other structures became clear as protesters streamed through them on the run from police.

“If we can’t hold this ground, how can we fight for democracy?” said Chester, a 21-year-old audio engineer.

He would not give his full name for fear of arrest. “All these people see the The protest leader Joshua Wong has started an “indefinite” hunger strike

movement as a beautiful, gorgeous thing but they don’t understand what we’re fighting for.”

Several protesters blamed their leaders for urging supporters to surround government buildings, leading hundreds to attempt a futile bid to block one of Hong Kong’s most important roads on Sunday.

The crackdown led Wong, the teenage inspiration for the protesters, to begin what he described as an “indefinite” hunger strike. “Living in these troubled

times, there is a duty. Today we are willing to pay the price, we are willing to take the responsibility,” Wong and two others wrote on Facebook. “Our future, we will take it back.”

It followed a grim few days for the protest movement, which was driven out of its stronghold in the Mong Kok district, engaged in violent confrontations with police and forced to consider the closure of the main site.

The protest started as an attempt to force the Chinese government to allow a free election for the position of Hong Kong chief executive.

A legal mechanism for the end to the occupation appears to be gathering strength. On Thursday, Hong Kong’s High Court will consider a temporary injunction request by transport companies that could end the occupation on Harcourt Road — the highway that runs through Admiralty.

soul searching in Australia Australia

Bernard Lagan Sydney

Safe boxes where unwanted babies can be left may be installed at Australian hospitals after two young boys found an infant’s body while digging in sand dunes at a popular Sydney beach.

The discovery follows the rescue two weeks ago of a baby who was left for dead in a Sydney drain before his cries were heard by passing cyclists.

Preliminary post-mortem results released by Sydney police revealed the baby was a girl.

The body was about 30cm (1ft) below the surface on Sunday. She has not been identified and decomposition has made her age difficult to determine.

The New South Wales government said it was considering options for

parents who want to abandon their infants, including the installation of baby hatches at hospitals.

The systems, used in China and Germany, provide a safe place to leave unwanted infants. They are often built into hospital walls and include an alarm to alert hospital staff that a child has been left.

Stuart Ayres, the New South Wales police minister, said the government now accepted that it needed to give women who wanted to abandon their new–born babies better options. “We find ourselves with two cases . . . that require us to think seriously about what we need to do to help families that are in crisis,” he said.

Andrew Scipione, the police commissioner, agreed that desperate women might need more options.

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World

Israeli soldiers shoot female attacker Israel

Gregg Carlstrom Jerusalem

A Palestinian woman was in a critical condition in a Jerusalem hospital last night after trying to stab an Israeli man, and being shot by security forces immediately afterwards — the latest in a series of attacks that have rattled the country.

The woman’s intended victim, a civilian who was named as Yehoshua Lorch, suffered only light injuries and was treated at the scene, paramedics said.

Palestinian sources identified the attacker as Amal Taqatqa, 22, from the

village of Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem.

She has served time in Israeli jails.

Footage circulated by Israeli media showed several soldiers shooting in the woman’s direction after the attack. She was taken to the Hadassah hospital.

Clashes broke out in Beit Fajjar hours later after Israeli troops raided the family home and detained Ms Taqatqa’s father, Jamal.

The attack took place at the same junction in Gush Etzion, West Bank, where Palestinian militants abducted and killed three Jewish teenagers in June. The cluster of illegal settlements south of Jerusalem has been the scene of numerous attacks by Palestinians on

Israelis. A Palestinian youth from east Jerusalem was kidnapped and killed to avenge the murders of the three Jewish teenagers, sparking months of unrest.

Tensions have risen in recent weeks after violent clashes at the Temple Mount, a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims.

Eleven Israelis have been killed in the recent spate of stabbings, shootings and hit-and-run attacks across Israel and the West Bank. One of them, a 26-yearold woman, was stabbed to death last month barely half a mile from the site of yesterday’s stabbing.

The attacks have prompted several instances of anti-Arab assault and van-

dalism, including a fire that was started on Saturday night at a mixed JewishPalestinian school. On Monday, a Palestinian taxi driver was pepper-sprayed in central Jerusalem, police said.

The Israeli government has deployed more than a thousand additional police officers to Jerusalem, and two additional army brigades to the West Bank.

The unrest comes as MPs prepare to vote on a controversial bill labelling Israel the “nation-state of the Jewish people”. The cabinet approved a draft of the law last week, overriding the objections of centre-left ministers, and the bill is scheduled for a first reading before the full Knesset tomorrow.

Call to honour student who died trying to save girls Germany

David Charter Berlin

German police have launched a fresh appeal for witnesses to the fatal assault of a young woman who is being considered for a national bravery medal after she came to the aid of two girls being harassed by thugs.

More than 100,000 people have signed an internet petition calling for the nation to honour Tugce Albayrak for her courage in reacting to the screams of the girls in the lavatories of a McDonald’s restaurant.

Ms Albayrak rescued them from three men but was later set upon in the car park of the restaurant in Offenbach, western Germany, and suffered head injuries that left her in a coma.

Her parents agreed to have her life support machine turned off on Friday on her 23rd birthday after being told that the student teacher would never recover. Below the hospital window 1,500 wellwishers held a vigil.

The case of Ms Albayrak, who was of CCTV footage was released yesterday of the fatal attack on Tugce Albayrak in a McDonald’s restaurant car park

Turkish origin, has gripped Germany.

President Gauck of Germany sent his condolences to the family and said that he would consider her for the Federal Order of Merit, the highest award for civilian bravery.

“Like countless citizens, I am shocked and appalled by this terrible act. Tugce has earned gratitude and respect from us all,” Mr Gauck wrote to her parents.

“Our entire country mourns with you.

Where other people looked the other way, Tugce showed exemplary courage and moral fortitude.”

Volker Bouffier, president of the state of Hesse, said that he would formally nominate Ms Albayrak for the award.

CCTV footage of the attack, released yesterday by Bild newspaper, shows a young man being shepherded away from the scene by another man but returning to strike Ms Albayrak.

About 150 people held a vigil on Sunday in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, which has a large Turkish community.

Police renewed their appeal yesterday for the two girls whom Ms Albayrak rescued to come forward.

An 18-year-old Serbian man has been arrested on suspicion of assault resulting in unintentional manslaughter.

Boko Haram blamed for two city bombs Bauchi Suspected Boko Haram extremists have carried out attacks in two northeastern cities of Nigeria, with double suicide bombings at a crowded market and a raid on a police base. At least five people were killed in the blasts at the market in Maiduguri, which were caused by two girls, a witness said. In Damaturu, explosions and gunfire were heard. The attacks were the latest in a week of violence linked to Islamic militants that has killed more than 170 people in the country. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Boko Haram, the Islamic militant group, has been linked to similar attacks in the area. (AP)

Pro-Europe parties look for Moldova coalition Chisinau Moldova’s pro-European

parties began talks on forming a coalition government after Sunday’s parliamentary election.

With 90.6 per cent of the vote counted, the three pro-European parties were ahead with about 44.6 per cent, with 39.3 per cent for the two pro-Russia parties.

Moldova, like Ukraine, has a proRussia separatist region in its east. (AP)

Hollande staff moved after Élysée photos Paris Five members of President Hollande’s staff are being transferred to different jobs amid questions over who took photographs published in the gossip magazine Voici showing him in the Élysée Palace with his girlfriend, the actress Julie Gayet.

French media reported that they were taken last month from within the presidential private apartments. (AP)

Presidential rival vows to reform Sri Lanka A Sri Lankan politician running against President Rajapaksa in national elections next month has pledged to scrap the presidential system and implement democratic reforms. Maithripala Sirisena, a former health minister who quit the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom party with eight other ministers, has promised to install an all-party national government and crack down on corruption.

Aide who criticised Obama’s girls resigns Washington An aide to a

Republican congressman has resigned after her comments about President Obama’s daughters were met with fierce criticism. Elizabeth Lauten, communications director for Stephen Fincher, commented on a photo of Malia and Sasha at a White House Thanksgiving ceremony, advising the girls to“try showing a little class”. (AP)

Human rights activist jailed in absentia Bahrain A human rights activist was jailed for a year in absentia for assaulting two policewomen and insulting the king, the Gulf island state’s official news agency reported. Maryam al-Khawaja, director of advocacy at the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, said in a statement that she had not returned for the trial because she did not recognise the court’s independence. (Reuters)

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Chanel Number F-7124: designer’s wartime role as German spy exposed HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES; LIPNITZKI / ROGER VIOLLET / GETTY IMAGES; KAMMERMAN / GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES

France

Adam Sage Paris

Coco Chanel is remembered in France as a woman who revolutionised the fashion industry with creations such as the little black dress.

However, a more sombre view of the designer was presented last night by a French television documentary that produced evidence that she was a Nazi spy. A document proving that she worked for the Abwehr, Hitler’s military intelligence agency, was broadcast during the programme on the subject of the role of French artists during the Second World War. L’Ombre d’un Doute (The Shadow of a Doubt), broadcast on the state-owned France 3 channel, also raised awkward questions about Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier, the singers, and Sacha Guitry, the author and director. Although historians have long doubted the official French line — that the country’s celebrities either boycotted the Nazis or entered the Resistance — the truth has rarely been aired on primetime television in France.

The taboo has now been broken just as France finds itself in the midst of an anguished debate on its war years after a bid by right-wing intellectuals to justify the collaboration with Germany.

According to the programme, presented by Franck Ferrand, the historian, Chanel returned to Paris shortly after the collapse of the French army in 1940 and took up residence at the Ritz Hotel, the headquarters in France of the German air force.

She began an affair with Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, an attaché at the German embassy who was also a high-ranking Gestapo officer. “Chanel was on the best of terms with the Germans,” the programme asserts.

Mr Ferrand said she sought to exploit Nazi laws that prevented Jews from owning a company to recover Chanel No 5, having sold her perfume business to the Jewish Wertheimer family in 1924. She failed only because the Wertheimers had sold their stake to a nonJewish businessman at the start of the German occupation of France.

For the first time, Mr Ferrand also

Chanel, left, met Churchill and his son; the reputation of Edith Piaf is also questioned

made public a Nazi document held in the French Defence Ministry archives, which showed that Chanel was a German agent. Her Abwehr number was F-7124 and her codename was Westminster — a reference to her affair with the Duke of Westminster 20 years earlier.

“This proves that Coco Chanel was recruited by the German intelligence services,” said Frédéric Quéguineur, a researcher at the archive unit.

Chanel knew Sir Winston Churchill — they had been introduced by the Duke of Westminster — and the Abwehr sent her to Madrid in 1943 to contact British officials with the offer of a truce with Germany.

Churchill never responded, according to Henry Gidel, the historian. “She displayed incredible megalomania and naivety in imagining that she could change Churchill’s mind,” he said.

Piaf’s wartime experience was more ambiguous but nevertheless tainted, according to Mr Ferrand. Not only did Piaf continue to perform in France during the war, she twice accepted Nazi invitations to sing to French prisoners in Germany.

Chevalier and Guitry also saw their careers flourish during the occupation.

The programme says that all these stars were whitewashed by officials after the war in the name of French national unity. Chanel was questioned for just two hours before being released while Piaf emerged with a congratulatory note after saying that she had made false identity cards to help French prisoners to escape from Germany.

The programme said this was a lie that everyone chose to believe to maintain Piaf’s reputation.

The documentary contrasted the actions of Piaf and Chanel with those of Josephine Baker, the black American-born singer and dancer who became a prewar star in France before taking French nationality.

Baker joined the Resistance as an intelligence agent when France was occupied before organising a concert tour that allowed her to travel and provide information on Germany military positions.

World

Most-wanted Nazi helped train Syrian torturers Germany

David Charter Berlin

The world’s most-wanted Nazi fugitive, who had a hand in the murder of more than 120,000 Jews, evaded justice by dying a free man in Syria, the group hunting him has revealed.

Alois Brunner, the righthand man to Adolf Eichmann, was responsible for the deportation of 128,500 people to death camps. Investigators at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre have established that he died of natural causes in Damascus at least four years ago, when he would have been 98. The centre’s chief Nazi-hunter said he remained an unrepentant antisemite until his death.

Brunner lived in Damascus for decades under the pseudonym Georg Fischer. Despite certainty in the West as to his true identity, the Syrian government led by Hafez al-Assad, the current dictator’s father, refused repeated requests to extradite him.

He is believed to have worked as a security adviser to Rifaat al-Assad, brother of the former president, and schooled the Syrian regime in the interrogation and torture techniques used by the president to cement his grip on power.

He was twice thought to have been wounded by mail bombs attributed to Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and surrounded himself with security guards at all times.

In his last known interview, in 1987, he told the Chicago Sun-Times that his Jewish victims “deserved to die because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage”. He had “no regrets and would do it again”, he said.

Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s chief Nazi hunter, said that the Syrian civil war made it impossible to confirm Brunner’s death, but that there was no doubt in his mind. “I took his name off the list”, Mr Zuroff said.

Born in Austria, Brunner led the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna from 1939 to 1943.

He had been condemned to death after being found guilty in France in 1954 of crimes against humanity.

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World

‘Bhopal is still killing us, 30 years on’ SONDEEP SHANKAR / AP

Poisonous politics has left a toxic legacy at site of world’s worst industrial disaster, says Robin Pagnamenta The poison gas began to drift through the window of the shack in Bhopal at about midnight, as Sanjay Verma and his family lay sleeping. Within hours, his mother and father, three sisters and two brothers were dead, along with thousands of other residents of the densely packed JP Nagar slum who had inhaled the lethal methyl isocyanate gas.

“My sister wrapped herself up in a blanket and ran with me,” said Mr Verma, who lived directly opposite the Union Carbide insecticide factory and was just six months old when the gas leak occurred on the night of December 2, 1984.

He grew up in an orphanage with his only surviving sister. “We boarded a bus and managed to get away,” he said.

Local hospitals were

Rescuers carry away some of the victims after the Bhopal gas leak in December 1984. An estimated 25,000 people died

overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster in central India, regarded as the world’s worst industrial accident.

NR Bhandari, now 82, was the medical superintendent at the nearby Hamdia hospital at the time. “There were so many dead bodies coming in together,” he said.

“They were brought in the trucks and autorickshaws and taxis. They were being put up on the shelf like you put files.”

Three decades after the gas leak from tank E-610, which Amnesty International says eventually resulted in the deaths of 25,000 people, the site still poses a deadly threat, with thousands of tonnes of toxic waste having leached deep into the soil and groundwater.

Efforts to clean up the Americanowned factory remain bogged down in a legal quagmire. A plan to airlift 347 tonnes of toxic waste to Germany

for processing collapsed in 2012 after a disagreement over insurance and freight costs.

“The factory still stands and is still killing people even today,” said Mr Verma. “The priority should be the clean-up.”

Hans-Hermann Dube, a toxic waste specialist for GIZ, a German government-owned company that offered to dispose of the material, said: “The waste is still on the site, being stored in terrible conditions and in broken containers.”

Rachna Dhingra, an activist with the Bhopal Group of Information and Action, said that much of the contamination of soil and water pre-dated the gas leak by up to seven years, to a period starting in 1977 when Union Carbide was allegedly routinely dumping dangerous chemicals into solar evaporation ponds only 400 metres north of the main plant.

Damage to the soil and the groundwater would have come about with or without the tragic events of December 1984, activists say.

The ponds, which were poorly sealed, leaked carcinogenic chemicals, including carbaryl, lindane and mercury, into the soil and groundwater, which was the main source of drinking water for 50,000 residents.

It was not until 2009 — 33 years after the dumping began and 25 years after the gas leak — that the Bhopal government installed a rudimentary pipe system to supply clean water.

“To date there has been no study of the depth and spread of the chemical contamination in the groundwater,” Ms Dhingra said. “But people who drank the water have nowhere to go for healthcare. People being born in the area still suffer from birth defects.

We are asking for a full clean-up and rehabilitation.”

‘There were so many dead bodies. They were put up on the shelf like you put files’ Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said that a new generation of victims, many of whom had not even been born in 1984, were suffering serious health issues.

He said: “We have an ongoing tragedy on our hands. We are seeing mental health issues, increased rates of cancer, gynaecological disorders and miscarriages.”

He drew a contrast with BP, which has paid out $26 billion (£16.5 billion) after an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed far fewer people.

The Dow Chemical Company (TDCC), which acquired Union Carbide in 1999, has said that the site is the property of the state government of Madhya Pradesh, which bears responsibility for any clean-up.

“Issues relating to Bhopal are not TDCC’s responsibility,” the company said.

Fair settlement is a distant prospect Behind the story Robin Pagnamenta

W

arren Anderson, the chairman and chief executive of Union Carbide at the time of the accident, died at a nursing home in Florida in September.

In the days after the leak in 1984 he had travelled to India to deal with the aftermath, but later fled the country when he faced manslaughter charges.

In 1992 he was declared a fugitive by an Indian court, which sought to try him for culpable homicide, but he never returned to stand trial.

US authorities said there was insufficient evidence to extradite him to India, and since then the legal wrangles over responsibility have intensified, offering little respite for the tens of thousands of

survivors, many of whom are still suffering, or who have given birth to children who are.

Union Carbide, which always maintained that the gas leak was caused by sabotage, paid what was meant to be a final settlement of $470 million in 1989 to the Indian government.

Campaigners say that it provided compensation for only about 5,000 victims and relatives, most of whom got only $500 each.

Many of the 570,000 people exposed to the gas got nothing.

Since then, the Survivors are still giving birth to disabled children

discovery of contamination of the site’s soil and groundwater, which pre-dates the leak and never formed part of the settlement, has added to demands for a bigger payout.

The government filed a legal petition in 2012 asking for more compensation from Dow Chemical, which acquired Un Union Carbide 17 ye years after the disaster, but the case has made little headway in India’s gummedup legal system.

The fight has been made worse by disputes over

ownership and liability.

In 1994, Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary to a buyer who resold the property four years later to the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Union Carbide was then purchased by Dow in 2001, and questions of liability became more complex.

Dow maintains that it bears no responsibility.

The battle continues.

Only this month, Dow was criticised for failing to show up for a hearing in India, where the government has just agreed to revise the number of victims of the disaster who are liable for compensation.

With so little agreement over how many died, what went wrong and who was to blame, it’s hard to envisage a meaningful resolution.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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World

Outrage as US schools return to same-sex classes United States

Will Pavia New York

A growing number of American schools have begun operating singlesex classrooms, offering tuition tailored to supposed differences between the developing brains of boys and girls.

The practice provoked fierce complaints from some women’s rights advocates who say the schools are perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Complaints filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) allege that such schools presume boys will be naturally inclined towards risk-taking, geometry and physical activity and assume that girls will be better at verbal

and language skills and only excel in mathematics for “a few days each month”.

Most social scientists argue that there is little clear evidence suggesting that boys and girls schooled separately do better academically. However some schools point to preliminary data suggesting improved grades in single sex classrooms.

About 750 public schools now offer separate classrooms for boys and girls — a dramatic rise since 2002, when only about a dozen are said to have offered them.

Single sex education was once widely regarded as illegal for public-funded institutions under America’s Title IX

amendment, which prohibited discrimination by gender and allowed for separate classes only in areas such as sex education and contact sport.

However in 2006, following the passage of the No Child Left Behind law, the Department of Education published regulations that expanded the use of same sex education.

Over the same period, a campaign founded by a paediatrician from Pennsylvania had begun advocating single sex education. Leonard Sax, founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, and author of Why Gender Matters, argued that boys and girls were innately different and required different curricula to achieve

their full potential. He said that more than five hundred schools were offering single-sex education by 2012, though he later removed the list of schools from his organisation’s website, after named schools became the target of complaints from the ACLU. In Broward County, Florida, where three schools offer single-sex education, boys in the third grade of Charles Drew Elementary School learn in a blue classroom decorated with pictures of racing cars and American football players.

The corresponding girls’ classroom is pink and adorned with pictures of animals and a sign that instructs pupils to “act pretty at all times”.

GARY TINDALE / MERCURY PRESS

In a complaint against the school district, filed with the Department of Education, the ACLU says the separate curricula are based on the theories of Dr Sax. They say he instructed that “a boy who likes to read and does not enjoy contact sports, and who does not have a lot of close male friends has a problem” and should be “required to spend time with ‘normal males’ and made to play sports”.

In an email yesterday, Dr Sax said he had “long ago stopped reading what the ACLU says about me” and added: “They have concocted a largely-fictional person and attached my name to their creation.”

Facebook threat case ‘could curb free speech’ David Taylor US Editor

Pincer movement Millions of red land crabs begin their migration from the jungle to their breeding grounds on the beaches of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean

Obama orders cameras for Pilot survives second crash police as race row deepens by landing plane on bus lane Devika Bhat Washington

Police across America are to receive $75 million to equip officers with body cameras, President Obama announced last night. The cameras, pinned to policemen’s chests, could help to bridge deep mistrust between police and the public, the White House said.

President Obama’s move is in response to a series of violent incidents involving white officers and black people. Last week riots erupted in the Missouri city of Ferguson after a grand jury decided to take no action against a white police officer who shot dead Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

Mr Obama was due to meet young civil rights activists last night before hosting a gathering of community leaders, local politicians and law enforcement officials.

In Missouri tensions continued to simmer after five members of the local football team staged a protest against the verdict. Players from the St Louis Rams raised their hands together in a

gesture of solidarity with protesters in Ferguson — a reference to claims that Mr Brown had his hands up before he was killed in August.

St Louis Police Officers Association called for the National Football League to apologise and discipline the players.

The row came as another grand jury in New York was poised to rule in a similar case. Eric Garner, 43, an unarmed black man, died in July after being put in an apparent chokehold by a white officer. Meanwhile, in Michigan, footage emerged of Brandon McKean being stopped by a white policeman because he was walking with his hands in his pockets, “making people nervous”.

Mr McKean, who filmed the exchange, said: “Wow, walking by, having your hands in your pockets makes people nervous to call the police, when it’s snowing outside? There’s 10,000 people in Pontiac right now with their hands in their pockets.”

The officer responds: “You’re right.

But we do have a lot of robberies, so just checking on you. You’re fine, you’re good.”

Will Pavia New York

An amateur pilot is thinking of giving up flying after he survived his second crash in six years.

Danny Hall was in his Cessna Skylane over Connecticut when he experienced a familiar sinking feeling. “It just started to gradually lose power,” he said yesterday. “It started to go down — I couldn’t get the power back.”

He had experienced the same sudden loss of power while flying over Rhode Island in 2008 and had landed in a river.

Investigators found that a family of mice had built a nest in the engine.

This time he was above Hartford, but too far from the city’s airport. Searching the ground, he saw a long, straight road that seemed empty of traffic. It was a bus lane, still under construction, with a concrete barricade and high fence.

As he brought the plane down, Mr Hall, 48, sent a message to the air traffic control tower: “If I don’t make it, tell my kids I love them.”

On the ground, Oscar Sosa saw an aircraft passing the end of his garden.

The wing of the Cessna was torn off

“It stopped right against my back yard,” he said. “Then the rear kind of lifted up.” The right wing was lying 100 yards away. Mr Hall climbed out of the plane.

“He was shaking his head,” Mr Sosa said. “He was awfully calm.”

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the cause of the crash. “I got lucky,” Mr Hall said yesterday, adding that he had consulted his family on whether to give up. “My daughter, who is 11, said don’t do it again. My son, who is nine, said he wants to go with me next time.”

The question of how far the law should protect people who use social media sites to send violent and menacing threats was tested yesterday by America’s highest court.

The case, which has just opened at the Supreme Court, is being perceived as a fundamental test of the extent of Americans’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

Nine Supreme Court judges yesterday heard a one-hour oral argument and appeared concerned about the possibility that free speech could be criminalised.

They are fearful that ill-advised remarks by teenagers on social media and violent lyrics in rap songs would undermine freedom of speech if other cases follow the pattern of yesterday’s attempted prosecution by the US government of an angry ex-husband who took to Facebook to threaten his former spouse.

In order to understand the case, the judges of the Supreme Court have been given a crash course in popular culture as they grapple with such questions as who is Eminem and what is an emoticon? They are expected to make a decision on Elonis v United States in June next year.

An unlikely coalition of free speech groups, campaigners for animal welfare and anti-abortionists have weighed in to support the case of the ex-husband who used his Facebook page to air violent threats after he and his wife separated.

At stake is the question of whether Anthony Elonis ever intended to carry out the threats aimed at his former wife, Tara, or was just, as he put it, “blowing off steam”.

Mr Elonis, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, has already served time in prison after he was given a sentence of almost four years for posting the violent messages. In one, he asked if her court protection order was “thick enough to stop a bullet”. In another, he fantasised about how he wished he had killed her and covered up her murder. He claimed this was intended to be read as rap lyrics in the style of Eminem.

The US Constitution protects free speech, but has an exception for “true threats” such as a murder plot. The government says that requiring proof of intent would undermine prohibiting threats. Mr Elonis’s lawyers argue that usage of the word threat “turns on the speaker’s intent” and he had no intention of acting upon his messages.

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India hails sisters who fought back India

Robin Pagnamenta Mumbai

Two sisters who fought back against men molesting them on a moving bus have been hailed as heroes and offered a cash reward by the government, in a country blighted by horror stories of sexual abuse.

Arti and Pooja Kumar, aged 22 and 19, were travelling on a crowded bus on Friday to their home in Rohtak, near Delhi, in the northern state of Haryana, when three men started making lewd remarks and behaving inappropriately towards them. Another female passenger filmed the sisters reacting to the assault by lashing out at the men with belts and their bare hands. She later uploaded the clip on to the internet, where it went viral.

“On the bus they made obscene gestures, touched us and abused us,” Pooja told an Indian TV channel. “No one

Video of the assault has gone viral

came to our help. In fact, they tried to stop us and scare us by saying the men would come for us and attack us or throw acid on us.”

The three men, clearly visible in the video footage grabbing other women in the bus aisle during the attack, have been detained by police.

ML Khattar, the chief minister of Haryana, has offered to give the girls a cash reward of 31,000 rupees (£310).

“I am proud of them and expect other girls to follow them in future,” Rajesh Kumar, the girls’ father, said.

The video, which has been screened widely on Indian TV, has prompted praise for the sisters on social media — and much criticism of other male passengers sitting on the bus who failed to intervene.

“My greater despair is for the onlookers who did nothing,” tweeted one commentator, Rahul Bose.

Adding to popular anger was the fact that the girls were eventually thrown off the bus after being overpowered by the men.

Sexual harassment of women in India remains widespread and is often referred to as “eve teasing”, a phrase that can encompass everything from making lewd remarks to groping and sexual assault.

However, public revulsion at the illtreatment of women has grown in strength since the horrific gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a Delhi bus in December 2012.

SILVIA IZQUIERDO / AP

Excited brides wait to take their vows along with 2,000 others in Rio, the biggest such ceremony hosted by city authorities

Rio rocks as 4,000 say ‘I do’ on the cheap Brazil

James Hider Sao Paulo

Rio de Janeiro has staged its largest mass wedding on record, with 2,000 couples tying the knot in unison at the Maracanazinho stadium.

The annual event is hosted by the city to allow couples who earn less than £640 a month to get married without the financial burden of staging expensive ceremonies themselves. It is pre-

sided over by priests from the Roman Catholic and evangelical churches.

The Rio event, dubbed “I Do Day,” was more popular than ever, with 12,000 people gathering at the venue, next to the more famous Maracana stadium, to watch the service. The city authorities had to lay on additional commuter trains to carry the couples, their families and friends.

As the volunteer pastors pronounced the happy couples man and wife, the

participants — all of whom were given their wedding certificates for nothing — kissed en masse.

For all its size, the event could not compete with a 2009 ceremony staged by the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He married 20,000 “Moony” couples in an auditorium near Seoul, with another 20,000 couples taking part in simultaneous ceremonies staged in locations in the US, Brazil and Venezuela.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

A new star of the screen China sets sights on Tinsel Town Page 33

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Is breaking up so hard to do?

Don’t sell your baby

Page 34

Working life, page 39

Balfour receives bid for PPP division

Business

Entrepreneur warns against start-up sale

CHARLES PLATIAU/REUTERS

Bidder’s eye for an opportunity business commentary Alistair Osborne

S

hrinking a company is a doddle for some chief executives. But how many get the chance before they’ve even arrived? Step forward Leo Quinn, the man who moved the market by £220 million in a single day in October just by switching jobs. News that he’d soon be in the Balfour Beatty hard hat added £55 million to the value of that profits warning machine, while the company he’s leaving, QinetiQ, took a £165 million hammering.

The mighty Quinn arrives in January, but guess what? He’s been ambushed already by the John Laing Infrastructure Fund (report, page 44). Spotting that nobody’s really in charge at Balfour just now, what with the chairman, finance director and two non-execs rushing for the exit, JLIF has tabled a “non-binding proposal”. It fancies buying Balfour’s best-performing business for £1 billion — quite an asset, too, given that the entire group’s valued at £1.3 billion.

JLIF’s taken a shine to Balfour’s PPP portfolio: stakes in about 60 infrastructure projects spanning hospitals, student digs, roads and US military housing. Its approach is cheeky, relayed via a weekend leak and priced below the £1.05 billion at which Balfour revalued the portfolio in August, bumping up its worth by 46 per cent. Pointedly, Balfour noted that it would review the bid “once received from JLIF”.

Still, Balfour’s left the door open for the break-up of a group that, under Steve Marshall, the outgoing chairman, has produced five profits warnings, rebuffed Carillion and sold its other quality business, Parsons Brinckerhoff, for £753 million.

Balfour said it was “open to value creation opportunities”, even if Mr Marshall has known of JLIF’s designs since its first (unannounced) approach in May. True, selling PPP could put an immediate 140p a share in Mr Quinn’s pocket — a big chunk of the current 191.1p share price, up 4 per cent yesterday. Even so, he’d be nuts to sell at this price. The portfolio is highly prized, producing long-term yields of 4 per cent in a low interest rate world. So, if he wanted to sell, he’d auction it. It also gives him flexibility to cash in on individual PPP investments while he tries to turn around construction. There’s another clue to how low-ball JLIF’s sighting shot looks: since revaluing the portfolio, Balfour has sold one asset, at a 28 per cent premium.

Time to retreat

M

aybe Sir John Hood enjoys a stonking pay row. The head of BG Group’s remuneration committee has form: he’s got the same role at WPP, where in June almost 27 per cent of investors refused to back a near-£30 million wedge for Sir Martin Sorrell.

That was just a minor skirmish though. At BG, it’s been hard to find a single shareholder who thought a £12 million golden hello for its new chief executive, Helge Lund, the Statoil boss, was tickety-boo (report, page 43). Sure, investors didn’t want to lose their man from Norway. But not only did the planned award rip up the pay policy they had voted through only six months earlier, it came with candyfloss performance targets, retrospectively disclosed, judging his personal performance on such nonsense as sustainability.

The whole thing set a terrible precedent, not least with Mr Lund already in line for a potential £14 million a year. So it’s no surprise that Sir John, not to mention Andrew Gould, the chairman, has been forced into an embarrassing retreat, namely by allowing Mr Lund to max out under the current policy on LTIPs. Even now, it doesn’t help that BG confusingly presents the new signing-on fee as having a face value of £10.6 million but an “expected value on award” of £4.7 million. At least it has some proper targets, notably total shareholder return. Sir John has been the chairman of the committee since 2011. Time for a change?

New job, new rules

I

t’s not every day that Britain’s biggest supermarket chain says it is putting a rookie retailer in charge. So what about telling investors that Dave Lewis, Tesco’s new chief executive, will now be manning the tills from January 1, having temporarily taken over “the day-to-day leadership of the UK operation” (report, page 43)? Or that the man from Unilever has just instigated a sweeping management shake-up, also including the exit of two top execs and the return of one suspended during the inquiry into a £263 million accounting black hole?

Such changes to the business at the core of Tesco’s value are price sensitive. So how come Mr Lewis squirreled them away in emails to staff rather than announcing them to the stock exchange? Mr Lewis may prove a talented manager. But now he’s running Tesco — not Unilever’s shampoo and soap arm.

Steady in oil slick

A

s strategies go, what beats taking a 20 per cent stake in Vladimir Putin’s oil company, Rosneft, when oil was topping $100?

Bob Dudley, the BP boss, pulled that one off in March 2013, since when Mr Putin has become an international pariah, oil is down to $72 and the rouble at a record low, down almost 40 per cent this year alone. BP’s shares? Just 9 per cent down. Remarkably resilient.

alistair.osborne@thetimes.co.uk

Key points Marchers in Paris carried locks and chains yesterday to symbolise how business was being held back by French red tape and excessive charges. The protest was organised by the Confederation of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Rouble hardest hit in rout of oil producers Philip Aldrick, Patrick Hosking

The Russian rouble suffered its sharpest one-day fall against the dollar since the dark days of its 1998 financial crisis as oil currencies across the globe continued to plummet on the back of the volatile oil price.

At one point yesterday, it had fallen 6 per cent before traders marked up the price of oil. Investors also claimed that Russia’s central bank was intervening in the markets to prop up the currency in the face of speculative attacks. The rouble has lost about 35 per cent of its value since the start of the year.

The currency rout continued to spread across the world as investors singled out the oil producers Canada, Norway, Nigeria, Mexico and Malaysia.

Nigeria’s naira tumbled to a record low, while the Norwegian krone fell to a new five-year low.

The krone has lost 15 per cent since June, the second hardest hit petrocurrency after the rouble. Nigeria is not far behind, with the naira having slipped by 10 per cent against the dollar since mid-October. Before its rebound, the rouble had collapsed yesterday alone by 6 per cent to 53.95 roubles to the dollar, an all-time low, amid growing fears for the country. Late yesterday it was trading at 51.65 roubles.

Stephen Lewis, an economist at ADM Investor Services International, said: “The steep slide in oil prices since

the middle of this year carries serious implications for some oil-producing countries. The focus has been on Russia, where government finances depend on tax and royalty receipts from the oil industry.”

Russia is the world’s second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, pumping out 12 per cent of consumption. Oil and gas account for about two thirds of

Inside today

Giants pull the plug on expensive investments Pages 36-37

Russia’s exports and half of state revenues, making its economy and asset prices heavily dependent on global energy prices.

Mr Lewis pointed out that the currency’s depreciation would help to keep up state revenues, as the dollar income converts into more roubles. However, Russian banks and companies have to repay $134 billion in external debt

between now and the end of 2015. Rosneft, the Russian oil and gas giant, has to repay $32 billion in foreign loans.

The falling rouble is driving up inflation, forcing the central bank to raise rates. Adam Slater, at Oxford Economics, said: “It looks likely that further interest rate hikes are on the way.” He forecasts a Russian recession next year.

Traders said the rouble’s relatively sudden rally in the afternoon pointed to intervention. “The central bank is definitely in the market,” one trader at a big western bank in Moscow told Reuters.

The central bank has not intervened in the foreign exchange market since it floated the rouble on November 10, saying that it would do so only if it considered the currency’s fall a threat to financial stability.

The price of Brent crude dived as low as $67.53 a barrel, before rallying amid speculation that higher-cost US shale producers would have to cut production. Late yesterday it was trading at $72.20 a barrel. Barclays lowered its expected average Brent crude price for 2015 to $72 a barrel, from $93 previously, in the wake of the Opec decision last week not to cut production.

The naira plunged through Nigeria’s central bank target band yesterday in spite of last week’s 8 per cent currency devaluation. It closed 2.9 per cent down at 184.1 naira to the dollar.

Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer and most populous nation.

32

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

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Business

Need to know Your 5-minute digest economics UK manufacturing: Activity in Britain’s factories picked up to a four-month high in November as strong domestic demand more than offset weak exports. Orders from overseas fell for a third month running on the back of weakening economies in Europe and the emerging markets, according to the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index, compiled by Markit.

November’s PMI rose to 53.5, above October’s 53.3, where any reading higher than 50 indicates growth. Page 34 Office for Budget Responsibility: Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the Treasury select committee, has written to the three main political parties formally setting out his desire for the fiscal watchdog to be given powers to cost the parties’ policies in the run-up to a general election.

banking & finance 1.28% Investors in Financial Reporting: The International Accounting Standards Board has launched an initiative designed to give institutional investors a greater say in setting standards of financial reporting. Among those investors taking part in the programme, known as Investors in Financial Reporting, are BlackRock, Fidelity, Henderson and Hermes.

Aberdeen Asset Management: Customers withdrew more than £20.4 billion from the fund manager during the year to the end of September, threatening to cast a cloud over better-than-expected underlying pre-tax profits of £490.3 million. The withdrawals, driven by turbulence in Asia and the emerging markets, slowed dramatically during the fourth quarter of the year, according to Martin Gilbert, the chief executive, calming investor worries. Shares ended 7½p higher at 457½p.

EY: The Big Four accountant won a licence to offer legal services in England and Wales, and immediately recruited three law partners and unveiled plans to hire thirty new employees during the next six months. EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young, emphasised that it had no desire to compete directly with traditional law firms but wanted to offer legal advice as a complement to its existing services.

B and C: A former senior HSBC banker who resigned in the wake of its $1.9 billion (£1.2 billion) fine for money laundering has re-emerged at the top of a rebranded British bank. Sandy Flockhart, who for several years ran the Mexican division of HSBC that later was found responsible for laundering billions of dollars for drugs gangsters, has been appointed chairman of the deposit-taker B and C, or Bank and Clients.

construction & property 0.51% Balfour Beatty: The troubled builder confirmed an approach worth £1 billion for its public-private partnership portfolio of assets in Britain and America from John Laing Infrastructure Fund, one of Europe’s largest listed infrastructure funds, in what could prove the start of an eventual break-up of Britain’s biggest construction company.

Page 34; Tempus, page 40

Mortgage market: Mortgage approvals for home movers have slumped to their lowest level in 16 months, providing fresh evidence that the housing market is cooling, while consumer credit grew at its fastest pace since July 2006.

Figures from the Bank of England showed a sharp divergence in household borrowing behaviour in October, as unsecured credit on cards, overdrafts and hire purchase grew by 6.4 per cent over the year and mortgage lending expanded by 1.8 per cent. Household borrowing is rising at 2.3 per cent a year, the fastest pace since February 2009. The debt owed by UK households is £1.46 trillion.

Affordable homes: The government announced that it was scrapping the requirement for developers to provide affordable homes on developments of ten homes or less outside designated rural areas. Rachel Fisher, head of policy at the National Housing Federation, said that the announcement was another hammer blow to the 1.7 million people waiting for social housing across the country.

consumer goods 0.75% Cawston Press: William Kendall, chairman of the soft drinks company, is best known for building and then selling The New Covent Garden Soup Company and Green & Black’s, the chocolate brand. However, inspired by his search for a business that grabs his interest as much as Green & Black’s, which he sold to Cadbury in 2005, and a growing interest in family businesses, he has started to tell entrepreneurs that a sale should usually be a last resort. Working life, page 39

engineering 2.30% Vesuvius: A tie-up between two of the country’s engineering titans has fallen apart after Vesuvius abandoned a proposal to take over Morgan Advanced Materials. The metals engineering group had proposed an all-share, “nil-premium” merger with Morgan and had said that the combination would create a lower-cost, higher-margin global leader in advanced ceramics technology with “complementary business models, strategies and cultures”. Page 34

leisure 0.60% Gondola Group: Cinven, the restaurant operator’s private equity backer, secured a higher-than-expected £250 million from the sale of its ASK Italian and Zizzi chains after Bridgepoint won the hotly contested auction.

Club Med: Nelson Tanure, a Brazilian investor, teamed up with Fosun, the Chinese conglomerate, to bid for the holiday group. Mr Tanure said that he would make up to 20 per cent of the offer. Andrea Bonomi, the Italian billionaire, also wants to buy Club Med. Bookmakers: Big betting companies, including Ladbrokes and William Hill, escaped further censure on lucrative big-jackpot gaming machines after a report by the Responsible Gambling Trust failed to identify a “silver bullet” to reduce problem gambling.

World markets FTSE 100 6,656.37 (-66.25)

natural resources 1.35% BG Group: The FTSE 100 oil and gas company has backed down over a controversial pay-and-perks deal for its incoming chief executive amid widespread condemnation.

BG said that it had made revisions to Helge Lund’s package that would cut his share award from about £10 million to £4.7 million after a “significant” number of shareholders had complained.

16,400

6,800

16,000

6,700

15,600

6,600

Wed

Mon

Fri

Thu

Dow Jones 17,776.80 (-51.44)

6,500

Wed

18,000

Thu

Fri

Mon

Nikkei 17,590.10 (+130.25)

17,600 17,200

17,600

Tue

Wed

Fri

Mon

16,800

17,400

Wed

Thu

Fri

Mon

16,400

Commodities Gold $1,210.10 (+38.22)

$ 1,220

Brent Crude (6pm) $72.66 (+1.39)

$ 80

1,200

75

1,180

70

1,160

Wed

Thu

Mon

Fri

1,140

Wed

Thu

Fri

65

Mon

Currencies £/$ $1.5741 (+0.0015)

$ 1.600

Wed

Thu

Mon

Fri

£/€ €1.2605 (+0.0030)

¤ 1.280

1.580

1.260

1.560

1.240

1.540

1.220

Wed

Thu

Fri

Mon

The day ahead The government must be hoping that activity in the construction sector picked up last month after a slowdown in October. The purchasing managers’ index for October dropped to a five-month low of 61.4, from 64.2 the previous month, below forecasts for 63.5.

Although the reading remained well above the 50 mark, which indicates growth, the slowing pace of activity, combined with

weaker manufacturing in recent months, prompted economists to warn that GDP growth could struggle in the final three months to match the previous three quarters.

The pace of activity in the housing market has been the biggest drag on the construction PMI. It has been slowing because many would-be buyers are waiting until after the general election in May.

Graph of the day Gold bugs started the week in despair as the price plunged more than 2 per cent after Switzerland voted against boosting the size of its bullion holdings. Then, as the price of crude oil climbed, so too did gold.

1,230

$ per oz

1,210 1,190 1,170

Page 33

Oil currencies: The Russian rouble suffered its sharpest one-day fall against the dollar since the dark days of its 1998 financial crisis as oil currencies across the globe continued to plummet on the back of the volatile oil price. Page 31 Oil turmoil: Oil companies are planning to axe their most expensive projects after the price of crude fell below the industry’s long-range forecasts and threatened to blow a hole in their balance sheets. A 40 per cent slide in oil prices since June has led to a reappraisal of several long-term investments across the sector. Pages 36-37 African Minerals: West Africa’s largest iron ore producer has shut down its mine in Sierra Leone while it negotiates the release of $102 million in funding from its Chinese backer. The Tonkolili project in Sierra

15,200

18,000

17,800

media 0.43% Lionsgate/MGM: The lure of Hollywood has proved to be irresistible for one of China’s richest and most ambitious businessmen. Wang Jianlin says that he is in talks to buy stakes in Lionsgate and MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, the studios behind the Hunger Games and James Bond film franchises.

The move by his Dalian Wanda Group is the latest in a string of deals between Hollywood and Chinese groups. Page 33

FTSE 250 15,719.77 (-131.99)

6,900

1,150 Tue

Source: Thomson Reuters

Wed

Thu

Fri

Mon

1,130

Results in brief Name

Pre-tax figure Profit (+) loss (-)

Aberdeen (finance FY) Bonmarché (consumer HY) Intelligent Energy (resources FY) Jubilant Energy (resources FY)

£354.6m (£390.3m) £6.4m (£3.8m) -£59.6m (£29.8m) -$4.6m (-$3.5m)

Dividend 18p f 11.25p p Feb 6 2.3p p Jan 23 0p 0p

6 Results in brief are given for all companies valued at more than £30 million. f = final p = payable

The day’s biggest movers Company Croda International Deutsche Bank says “buy” Balfour Beatty Hopes of a break-up SSP A push by Jefferies Morgan Advanced Materials Rebuffs a takeover approach Aberdeen Asset Management Hopes of a share buyback Vodafone M&A speculation InterContinental Hotels UBS says “sell” Tullow Oil Worries about the oil price Afren Broker caution Rose Petroleum A fundraising

Change 4.6% 4.3% 4.3% 3.0% 1.7% -2.9% -3.8% -6.0% -11.8% -15.9%

Leone will be put on “care and maintenance” until it can secure funding. Shares in African Minerals have already been suspended. The company has suffered from falling iron ore prices and governance concerns.

professional & support services 0.76% Auditing review: Auditors for banks and building societies have raised their game during the past 12 months, but have “no room for complacency”, according to the findings of a thematic review by the Financial Reporting Council, the regulator. The FRC embarked on the review a year ago after identifying the need for improvement among the auditors of financial sector businesses. Having reviewed thirteen audits, the FRC said that ten were good or needed only limited improvements, while three required work, two of those extensive.

retailing 0.01% Bonmarché: The fashion retailer, which specialises in womenswear for the over-50s, became the latest chain to note a slowdown in sales in the three months to the end of September, because of the unseasonally warm weather, although halfway profits before tax were up 15 per cent on an underlying basis to £6.4 million. Tempus, page 40 Tesco: Dave Lewis, chief executive of the supermarket chain, is to take over day-to-day control of its British operations, despite having no retail experience.

Tesco announced the move in an internal email as part of a wider management reshuffle.

Page 33

technology 0.03% Acompli: Microsoft has confirmed its acquisition of the San Francisco-based start-up specialising in an email app for mobile phones, at a rumoured cost of $200 million. The app is expected to be integrated into Office 365 and the deal is the second to be completed by Satya Nadella, the new chief executive, after he acquired the developer behind Minecraft, the popular video game.

telecoms 2.78% Vodafone: The prospect of a blockbuster move on Liberty Global, the owner of Virgin Media, by the British telecoms group has knocked its shares as investors balked at the prospect of it making a huge bid. BT’s talks with the owners of O2 and EE regarding a takeover of one of Britain’s two largest mobile phone networks are thought to have forced Vodafone to consider a bid for Liberty. Shares in Vodafone fell by 6¾p to 227¼p. Page 41

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Business COLUMBIA PICTURES

The Chinese have stars in their eyes

T

he lure of Hollywood has proved to be irresistible for one of China’s richest and most ambitious businessmen (Leo Lewis and Alexandra Frean write).

Wang Jianlin has already bought a chain of cinemas in the United States and now he says he is in talks to buy stakes in both Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studios behind the Hunger Games and James Bond film franchises.

The move by his Dalian Wanda Group is the latest in a string of deals between Hollywood and Chinese groups, tightening links between Tinsel Town’s producers and distributors with the world’s fastestgrowing market.

Talks with Lionsgate remain at an early stage and its owners have been

willing to sell only a minority stake, Mr Wang said, adding that he had also held discussions about investing in MGM and wanted to acquire large cinema networks in Europe as part of his ambition to control 20 per cent of the global market by 2020.

Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst at Rentrak, an industry specialist, said that Lionsgate, flush with success from the Twilight and Hunger Games series, would make a perfect strategic acquisition for Wanda.

“They have become major taste-makers and their marketing and distribution is very effective,” he said.

There is also an element of Back to the Future.

Industry sources believe that Mr Wang is aiming to recreate the model of the old Los Angeles studio system, in which one group or

Dalian Wanda of China is targeting Lionsgate, which owns the Hunger Games, left, and James Bond film franchises

Tycoon has Beijing’s backing to take on world Profile Wang Jianlin

W

hen Wang Jianlin paid $28 million for Claude and Paloma, a painting by Picasso that was expected to sell for $12 million, many Chinese were horrified (Leo Lewis writes).

Social media sites raged at the lack of patriotism.

How could this tycoon — a former People’s Liberation Army soldier

and the hero of one of China’s greatest rags-toriches stories — spend so much money on a piece of foreign art?

The 59-year-old billionaire, right, found support in the editorial pages of one of China’s most notoriously nationalistic tabloids.

“Only an enterprise with culture can understand art and collect the best artwork in the world,” it said. “China should be

proud.” It was a signal of endorsement from Beijing as Mr Wang attempts to create China’s most recognised international brand. The message was that the ambitions of the Wanda Group, which he founded in 1988 and has turned into the country’s largest entertainment and property conglomerate, were tightly aligned with those of China itself. Mr Wang

BG bows to investor anger by cutting chief’s pay deal Miles Costello

An avalanche of pressure from shareholders has forced BG Group to cave in and scrap a one-off share award worth £12 million to its incoming chief executive.

The oil and gas group had sparked outrage among investors with plans to award Helge Lund a lucrative signingon package that was criticised as excessive and subject to weak and woolly personal performance targets.

Investor groups including Institutional Shareholder Services, the Investment Management Association and the Institute of Directors condemned the offer and urged shareholders to veto it at a specially convened meeting this month.

After a round of behind-thescenes negotations, BG Group told the stock market yesterday that it was dropping the plan in favour of a revised contract with Mr Lund, who is due to start in March but had the right not to join if shareholders had defeated the Helge Lund’s original package sparked shareholder protests

pay proposal. Instead of the one-off award, Mr Lund will receive shares with a face value of £10.6 million under the group’s long-term incentive scheme, subject to him meeting targets on total shareholder return, cashflow and capital efficiency.

BG said that the total expected payout under the revised package was likely to come in at about £4.7 million, just under half the roughly £10 million that the group had expected the original offer to have been worth for Mr Lund. The group said that the plan now fell within a pay policy that had already been approved by shareholders and so there was no longer any need to convene the special meeting.

It also made clear that Mr Lund, who left Statoil, the Norwegian state-owned group, in October when he was named as BG’s new boss, had been directly involved in agreeing the new pay deal.

“Both the board and Mr Lund recognise and wish to respond to shareholder concerns,” BG Group said.

Critics of the original deal welcomed the about face.

Sacha Sadan, director of corporate governance at Legal &

General Investment Management, said: “We are encouraged to see BG responding positively to shareholders’ concerns.”

Simon Walker, director-general of the IoD, said: “While substantial, the total remuneration is reduced and now falls within proper limits for a company of BG’s size and international importance.”

While shareholders said that the reversal had taken the heat out of a looming row, they also indicated privately that they were irritated at BG’s handling of the matter. One said that he expected Sir John Hood, the chairman of the group’s remuneration committee, to face a significant protest in the vote on his re-election at next year’s annual shareholder meeting. “He’ll come under pressure,” he said.

Mr Lund will still receive a generous pay and bonus package that could be worth up to £13.5 million a year. He will receive a base salary of £1.5 million, plus an annual cash bonus of up to £3 million and an annual share award under a long-term incentive plan of up to £9 million.

BG shares have lost almost 30 per cent of their value in the past 12 months, after missed production targets and several profit warnings.

The shares closed up 4½p at 904½p.

does buy less controversial assets overseas — such as the AMC cinema chain in 2012 — but likes his luxuries — Sunseeker, the British yacht maker, was next in 2013.

What he has in mind for Wanda is the ownership of entertainment in all its forms.

company controls both the production and distribution of films. In August, Dalian Wanda announced that it had acquired a plot of land in Beverly Hills and would spend $1.2 billion on a development there as its “first important step into Hollywood”.

Two years ago, the group bought AMC Entertainment, the American cinema chain, and it is rumoured to have its eye on Odeon in Britain.

The company has also built a colossal studio site in the coastal Qingdao province and is creating a film festival that is intended to rival the greatest anywhere in the world.

Wanda Cinema Line, meanwhile, its cinema business, has received approval for a Chinese IPO that could raise about £200 million. Mr Wang is already planning to list Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties, in Hong Kong. Both IPOs are expected to be completed by the end of the year, with the cash raised likely to be funnelled into more purchases.

Lionsgate shares rose 5 per cent at one point yesterday, although they dropped back later to be 3 per cent up at $34.92 in afternoon trading. The company declined to comment.

All change at top of Tesco as Lewis takes a hands-on role Richard Fletcher Business Editor

Dave Lewis, the newly appointed chief executive of Tesco, is to take over day-to-day control of the supermarket chain’s British operations, despite having no retail experience.

Tesco announced the move in an internal email yesterday as part of a wider management reshuffle. The changes will involve two senior executives leaving the business, the appointment of a new strategy director and the return of one of eight executives suspended after the discovery of accounting irregularities earlier in the year.

Mr Lewis, a former executive at Unilever, the consumer goods company, made no public comment about the reshuffle and a spokesman for Tesco refused to discuss the changes publicly.

However, in the email to staff, seen by The Times, Mr Lewis claimed that the changes were “designed to put the customer at the heart of everything we do”.

“My sole intention is to build a tight team of experts who pull together to drive the turnaround in performance that we are all looking for,” he wrote. “I will, on a temporary basis, take over the day-to-day leadership of the UK operation and we will all work together to make sure the transition is smooth.”

The reshuffle, which comes as Tesco

enters the crucial Christmas trading period, is likely to raise fears of a lack of retail experience at the top of the chain.

6 Benny Higgins, a former Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS banker, will take on responsibility for group strategy, in addition to running Tesco Bank.

6 Robin Terrell, a former Amazon executive, will become head of customer.

6 Jill Easterbrook is to lead the business transformation programme.

6 Matt Atkinson and David Hobbs, both members of the retailer’s executive committee, are expected to leave in the new year.

In a separate email, Mr Lewis announced that Matt Simister, one of the executives suspended while Tesco investigated the accounting irregularities, would return to the business.

“During our [investigation] it became clear that Matt, in fact, worked tirelessly to resolve the issues we faced. Matt is one of our most capable leaders, and I am confident his leadership will support our agenda in Commercial going forward,” wrote Mr Lewis.

Three other directors who were suspended as part of the investigation — Chris Bush, Kevin Grace and Carl Rogberg — were reported yesterday to have left the business. Shares in Tesco have fallen 44 per cent since the start of the year after a series of profit warnings and the accounting scandal.

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Business

PPP sale could spell break-up for Balfour Deirdre Hipwell

Britain’s biggest construction company could be broken up after receiving a £1 billion offer for its public private partnerships investment division.

Balfour confirmed yesterday that John Laing Infrastructure Fund had tabled an offer.

The PPP portfolio holds investment stakes in projects that Balfour’s construction business has helped to build and has long been considered a jewel in its crown, with investments in more than 60 projects such as student housing schemes, hospitals and the M25.

For Balfour’s shareholders — who have had to endure a string of profit warnings and a failed merger with Carillion — it could prove an attractive offer, but it may also spark a break-up of the former FTSE 100 construction giant.

The Times understands that JLIF has been interested in the PPP division for some time and approached Balfour earlier in the year before the construction group’s merger talks kicked off

with Carillion. It is understood that JLIF had suggested buying Balfour’s PPP assets and indicated what it thought was “fair value” for the assets.

However, its approach was rejected

by Balfour, which eventually went on to sell its Parsons Brinckerhoff unit in America for $1.3 billion. The sale of the project management division ultimately caused the collapse of the proposed £3 billion “mega construction” merger with Carillon.

JLIF is one of Europe’s largest listed infrastructure funds and works in partnership with public sector groups worldwide to deliver local and national infrastructure projects. In the past four years it has raised £850 million to buy assets and has stakes in 54 infrastructure projects in Britain, continental Europe and North America.

Sources said that JLIF was keen on all or part of Balfour’s PPP assets as it regarded itself to be the “logical owner” and believed that a sale would generate value for shareholders in both companies. Sources said that a sale could release cash to Balfour, which it could

Balfour Beatty’s PPP portfolio Portfolio value, and % increase December 2013 to end June

£1.051bn 46%

Projects by sector Roads Hospitals

North America portfolio value

If Balfour sells the portfolio it will be left with

5

Schools Other

UK portfolio value

13

£801m

8 11

UK total 37 US military housing Hospitals

£250m

distribute to shareholders or invest in other parts of its business, while shareholders in JLIF could be attracted to a deal that increases its scale in the sector. If JLIF were to succeed in secur-

Morgan blows out Vesuvius merger plans

21

£8bn* annual revenue from UK, North America and international construction businesses

2

Other

3

US total 26

*approximately

ing a deal, it said that it would finance the acquisition through a rights issue.

However, a sale would strip Balfour of one of its largest assets and would leave the company with only its conNIGEL TREBLIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

struction business, which has been at the heart of its profit warnings during the past 18 months. The quality and value of the PPP portfolio also formed a key part of Balfour’s defence against a hostile proposal from Carillion earlier this year.

Investment bankers queried the timing of JLIF’s approach a month before Leo Quinn, the former QinetiQ boss who was appointed to run Balfour, starts work as chief executive. It is understood, however, that JLIF wanted to formally express its interest ahead of Mr Quinn kicking off any wholesale strategy review of the business.

The 109-year-old Balfour has become a takeover target since it revealed the extent of the problems in its construction division — in September it discovered a £75 million shortfall that will wipe out most of its earnings this year — and merger talks with Carillion collapsed.

Shares in Balfour closed up 7.8p at 191.1p and shares in JLIF closed down 3.2p at 120.1p a share.

Tempus, page 40

Kier becomes latest suitor for Mouchel

Deirdre Hipwell

Deirdre Hipwell

A tie-up between two of the country’s engineering titans has fallen apart after Vesuvius abandoned a proposal to take over Morgan Advanced Materials.

The metals engineering group had proposed an all-share, “nil-premium” merger with Morgan and had said that a combination of the two companies would create a lower-cost, highermargin global leader in advanced ceramics technology with “complementary business models, strategies and cultures”.

However, the board of Morgan rejected the approach and said that the offer “fundamentally undervalued” the existing business and its prospects.

Morgan began life in 1856 in south London when six brothers began to supply crucible containers to customers such as the Royal Mint. Today it produces components and cutters made from graphites and other ceramics, as well as a high-tech insulation product known as Superwool.

Vesuvius said it was disappointed but added that it had its own “clearly defined growth strategy for Vesuvius and a track record of delivery”. Shares in Morgan closed 8½p higher at 300½p, while Vesuvius fell 4p to 412½p.

Mouchel, the outsourcing company that manages a third of Britain’s roads, has received a £400 million takeover approach from Kier, the builder.

Kier, which collects rubbish for 3.3 million households, repairs 900,000 council homes a year and maintains 35,000km of roads, confirmed that it had made an approach but said there was “no certainty that an acquisition will be completed”.

Analysts said there could be strong logic for a combination of the two groups as Kier’s water, environmental and highways business would fit in well with Mouchel’s work in maintaining roads, water mains and running councils’ back offices. Kier would also benefit from Mouchel’s expertise in the Middle East, they said.

Mouchel was a darling of the outsourcing market in the first decade of the century and became a takeover target of VT Group, then Costain and finally Interserve, but began to lose cash during the downturn. In 2012, it fell into the hands of its bankers — Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and Barclays — which wrote off £87 million of debt for 100 per cent control and which still own the group alongside management.

London-based Vesuvius provides heat-resistant products and technologies, principally for the steel and foundry industries

Factories benefit from a little domestic bliss as activity rises Philip Aldrick

Activity in British factories rose to a four-month high last month as strong domestic demand more than offset weak exports.

Orders from overseas fell for a third month running on the back of weakening economies in Europe and the emerging markets, according to the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index.

Foreign demand for goods from the United Kingdom has tailed off since it became clear that the eurozone was mired in low growth. Sanctions against Russia as a result of the conflict in Ukraine and slowing growth in the developing world have also taken their

toll, Markit, the survey’s compiler, said.

Yet despite dwindling exports, Britain’s manufacturers have been buoyed by strong domestic business. November’s PMI rose to 53.5, above October’s 53.3, where any reading higher than 50 indicates growth.

Lee Hopley, chief economist at EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation, said: “Today’s data confirms that the picture remains one of expansion in the final months of the year, particularly for manufacturing sectors focused on the domestic market.

“Despite more disappointing results in key markets such as the eurozone, this year should be the strongest year for industry since 2010.”

Britain’s manufacturing industry re-

6 Mortgage approvals have slumped to their lowest level in 16 months, providing fresh evidence that the housing market is cooling rapidly, although consumer credit grew at its fastest pace since before the crisis (Philip Aldrick writes).

Figures from the Bank of England showed a sharp divergence in household borrowing behaviour in October, as unsecured credit on cards, overdrafts and hire purchase grew 6.4 per cent over the year and mortgage lending expanded by only 1.8 per cent. Mortgage approvals for house purchases fell to 59,426 in October, the fewest since June last year.

mains 4 per cent smaller than its precrisis peak, but it has been growing for six consecutive quarters. In a promising sign, the pace of job creation hit a four-month high. Factories have been expanding their workforce for 19 consecutive months.

Rob Dobson, senior economist at Markit, said: “The UK manufacturing sector is continuing its solid expansion.

Despite easing from the stellar pace set in the first half of the year, growth is still coming from a broad base that will aid its sustainability.

“Production and new orders rose across the consumer, intermediate and investment goods industries and at SMEs and large companies alike.

“The news on the domestic front was

especially positive, with solid new order inflows from the UK market the main pillar supporting the expansion. The only real negative from the survey came on the export side, with new export business suffering a further slight decline.”

Separate manufacturing data for the eurozone underscored the stagnation that has hit Europe. Factory activity for last month was revised down to 50.1, with Germany experiencing contraction at 49.5 — its lowest reading since May 2013.

French manufacturers continued to struggle, with the index languishing at 48.4. Spain, on the other hand, showed some positive movement, with activity levels at 54.7.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Business

Motorists can only dream about tolls reaching end of the road IMAGINECHINA/CORBIS

China in numbers

leo lewis

16,000km...

. . . is the total estimated length of Chinese motorway whose right to charge a toll has officially expired over the past two years. Four weeks from now, another 15 motorways in Shandong province are, in theory, due to join them as their licence to charge for use runs out. These are glorious days for Chinese motorists.

Except that they’re not. Just as the middle-class car owners of Shandong were planning their toll-free January jaunts and road hauliers were contemplating an era of slightly-better-than-awful margins, Shandong’s traffic authorities announced that the cancellation of the tolls for all 15 of those motorways had been “postponed” indefinitely.

That puts the Shandong 15 in good company. According to Chinese media, over the past two years 234 motorways that had reached the end of their licence to charge tolls suddenly found reasons to extend that right.

The vague explanation offered in the case of Shandong was that these motorway companies “need to pay off bank loans”. That sounds plausible. China has been engaged

China’s toll roads are proving hugely profitable and local governments are keen to keep the income stream flowing strongly

for years in a prolonged splurge of infrastructure spending, much of it on projects hastily brought forward by the global financial crisis and lent-to heavily in an attempt to generate GDP and employment when things looked nastiest.

Flapping behind the “need to pay off bank loans” are the usual red flags concerning the economic wisdom of those big projects.

Economists straining to identify the triggers of a potential Chinese financial crisis wonder about the true extent of bad loans on the

books of the country’s city-level banks. These have operated under far less competent regulatory scrutiny than the national mega-banks, they are opaque and the targets of their lending are often inefficient state-owned enterprises.

Yet, in the case of the motorway operators, business conditions appear to be quite good — to the point where the burden of paying off loans starts to look far lighter than the Shandong authorities and others claim. Experts quoted by Chinese media suggest that the

Obama veto threat puts tax breaks in jeopardy Alexandra Frean Washington

President Obama is locking horns with Republicans over a congressional plan to renew tax breaks for businesses, a rift that could make it virtually impossible to negotiate a revamp of America’s tax code, including a clampdown on tax inversions.

Congress has returned to Washington from the Thanksgiving recess with politicians facing a December 11 deadline to pass spending legislation that will keep federal services operating and avoid a government shutdown.

At the same time, hopes are fading that a deal to renew dozens of expired tax breaks for businesses can be settled by the end of the year. Mr Obama has threatened to veto plans to renew dozens of expired tax breaks, arguing that the way they have been drawn up “helps well-connected corporations while neglecting working families”.

The breaks, known as “extenders”, include allowances on business investments in new equipment and research and develop-

ment and are worth about $400 billion in total. Most of these measures are renewed every year or two and have broad political backing from both sides of the political divide.

This year negotiators from both the Democrat and Republican parties, including Harry Reid, the outgoing Senate majority leader, indicated that they wanted to make several of the tax breaks permanent and even to expand several of them, without saying how they would be funded.

Under the proposals, permanent extensions of tax breaks would be locked-in for corporations, college students and public transport. However, the plan omits provisions sought by many Democrats to renew expansions of the earned income and child tax credits that benefit low-income families and are scheduled to expire at the end of 2017.

Mr Obama’s veto threat is based on a calculation that by agreeing to the permanent extensions now, it would make it harder for his administration to negotiate a total and longawaited overhaul of the US tax code with RepubliMr Obama could veto renewed tax breaks

cans once they take control the Senate in January.

He has made piecemeal attempts at tax reforms, including rules to crack down on companies that shift their tax domicile abroad to reduce their tax bill, known as a tax inversion. However, reports last week that Stryker, a Michigan-based company that makes equipment used in knee surgery, may renew a $16 billion bid for Smith & Nephew, a British rival, suggest that the new rules have been ineffective.

Mr Obama’s choice of Antonio Weiss, a Lazard banker, for the post of Treasury under-secretary has been criticised by prominent Democratic lawmakers over his firm’s involvement in similar inversion deals.

Although there is agreement on both sides of the house that the tax code needs to be streamlined, and that the corporate tax rate should be cut from 35 per cent to about 28 per cent, attempts at rapport have been stymied by bipartisan bickering.

With only a few weeks of a lame duck session in Congress remaining before Republicans take control of both houses, the window for immediate action on the tax extenders is closing and many observers believe that a potential deal may not be achievable until after the 2016 presidential election.

best-run motorways may be enjoying profit margins higher than that of the financial or property sectors. They cite the Guangzhou to Shenzhen motorway, which cost 11.4 billion yuan to build and has made cumulative tolls of 41 billion yuan. Nine motorways in Guangdong appear to have had profit rates of an average of 26 per cent in the first half of this year.

These enterprises were established with a goal of running at just slightly over break-even: the most credible explanation for what has happened is simply that Chinese road traffic has spectacularly exceeded projections.

Beyond the profits, there are other compelling reasons why Shandong and other local governments would want to keep the tolls coming in. The decline of land prices (and the economic squeeze on developers) is starting to erode what has been local government’s most reliable source of income. Motorways over-employ and can be made to support hundreds of maintenance crews and other staff. Profits can be channelled into other projects and, inevitably, there is the appeal of embezzlement.

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Business Oil turmoil

Price crash leaves oil sands among projects facing axe Tim Webb

Oil companies are planning to axe their most expensive projects after the price of crude slumped below the industry’s long-range forecasts and threatened to blow a hole in their balance sheets.

A dramatic 40 per cent slide in oil prices since June — with the latest sell-off triggered by Opec’s refusal on Thursday to cut production — has led to a reappraisal of several long-term investments across the sector.

Oil sands projects, which need oil at about $100 a barrel to be viable, are most vulnerable, with prices briefly hitting $67.53 yesterday, a new fiveyear low. Many oil companies use a long-range price forecast of $80, but other factors, such as project costs and expected tax take, also decide the economics of a project.

Shell is expected to shelve its multibillion-dollar Jackpine mine expansion for its Athabasca oil sands project in Canada by 100,000 barrels per day, or 40 per cent. The expansion plan received approval from the Canadian government a year ago, but it is awaiting a final investment decision from Shell, whose new chief executive Ben van Beurden has promised to review all projects on the drawing board.

The Anglo-Dutch company tests the economics of new projects against a long-range price forecast of between $70 and $110, but it said that the range “is subject to review and change”.

Iain Reid, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, the investment bank, said:

Oil sands, with their thick, bituminous deposits, need a high oil price to be viable

“Companies are going through their budgeting process for 2015 and will be looking for lower costs and a reduction in capital expenditure.

“Ben van Beurden was already looking to defer Shell’s oil sands expansion, but the fall in oil prices has probably put the final nail in the project’s coffin.”

Shell is unlikely, too, to go ahead with plans to build a liquefied natural gas export terminal in British Columbia in Canada, costing up to $40 billion, if oil prices remain at their present levels. It would have operated the LNG Canada project and contributed 40 per cent of its funding.

The prices of LNG and oil are linked while prospective buyers of the gas in Asia are reluctant to sign long-term

purchase agreements in the expectation that prices will fall further.

A wave of new LNG projects are about to come online in Australia, while the United States will start to export the gas soon, threatening to create a glut.

Mr Reid said: “The fall in prices will make it much harder for companies to achieve the oil-linked gas price they need to make LNG projects economic.”

He added that the slide in oil prices was threatening to derail Mozambique’s ambitions to become a big gas exporter by developing its huge offshore finds from the Rovuma basin.

Anadarko Petroleum, of the United States, and Eni, of Italy, are leading the $30 billion project to build a giant logistics base and LNG terminals on the

coast. The companies, which are under pressure from Mozambique’s government to begin exports in 2019, are supposed to take a final investment decision within 12 months.

The oil industry began belt-tightening last year under pressure from investors fed up with soaring costs on new projects and meagre returns.

In September, Helge Lund, then the chief executive of Statoil — who has since been poached to run BG Group — complained that despite oil prices leaping from $40 to $100 over the past decade, oil majors’ returns had fallen by 30 per cent over the same period.

He blamed higher investment, costs, complexity and risks as companies look for and produce oil and gas in more technically challenging environment, such as ultra deepwater and the Arctic.

The recent slump in oil prices is forcing companies to redouble their efforts to cut costs, Richard Mallinson, an analyst from Energy Aspects, a consultancy, said. “A shift emerged in the industry to concentrate on cost control and that process will now become more drastic,” he said.

Even when oil prices were above $100, executives were keen to emphasise that they would sanction new projects only if they could make a return even below their long-term oil price assumption.

Mr Mallinson said: “Companies will always say they budget for a lower price, but now we will see just how well prepared they are.”

Producing oil from the sandy deposits

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Oil turmoil Business

ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTY/RALSTON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Banks face losses in billions as company loans are put at risk Harry Wilson

in remote parts of Canada is an expensive and controversial process that has provoked opposition from environmentalists

Americans feel pain of Saudi attack on costs

Oil price per barrel Ten years

$ 160

Oil prices staged a rebound from a fiveyear low after it emerged yesterday that American shale oil producers were planning to slash production in the face of the global glut in crude supplies.

On a day of wild gyrations on oil markets, prices were heading for their biggest one-day rally since June to $72.20, a rise of more than $2 on the previous day.

The jump was all the more significant after prices touched a five-year low of $67.53 only hours before as markets fretted over the implications of Opec’s refusal last Thursday to cut production to arrest the slide in prices.

The unlikely rally was sparked by the release of data from Drillinginfo, an advisory firm, which showed that drilling permits for new shale oil wells in the United States dropped by 15 per cent in October.

The data provided the first firm evidence that shale oil companies, which have higher costs than most other producers, were starting to feel the pain from Allen Gilmer: “This is a pullback. People are being careful”

Source: Thomson Reuters

Tim Webb

2005

2008

2011

Six months

$ 120

140

110

120

100

100

90

80

80

60

70

2014

the slump in prices and have slowed their drilling frenzy.

Prices have fallen by 40 per cent since June, hitting shale oil companies, which need oil at about $80 to make a decent return.

The news will hearten Saudi Arabia, which blocked attempts by other members of the cartel of oil-producing nations to cut Opec’s production.

The Saudis are digging in for a price war with US shale oil companies, which they want to put out of business by driving down crude prices.

A decline in the number of permits issued for the 12 biggest shale formations in the US is expected to translate into a lower rig count within two to four months.

Production is likely to start to slow six months

Jun Jul

Aug Sep Oct Nov

60

later. Allen Gilmer, the chief executive officer of Drillinginfo, said: “This is a pullback from the acceleration. People are being careful.”

However, the number of permits issued is still close to a record high. Texas, a big shale oil producer, issued a record 934 permits in September before dropping to 885 in October, still more than double the level in 2010.

Philip Verleger, an energy consultant, predicted that many US shale oil companies would be unable to cope with lower oil prices.

However, he cautioned that it would be some time before production fell significantly, as many drillers had taken out hedges one or two years into the future to protect themselves against such a slump.

“We will have a lot of shale oil drilling companies going bust over the next 18 months,” Dr Verleger said. “We are going to have chaos for a while. We have gone wild creating all this capacity and now it’s going down.”

British banks are sitting on potentially billions of dollars of losses linked with loans to oil services companies made increasingly risky by the slump in global energy prices.

Barclays, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland could face bad debt writedowns of about $1 billion each on high-yield loans from oil and gas sector companies that might still be held on their books, according to Sanford C. Bernstein. Standard Chartered could be hit with a $400 million charge, the American broker believes.

In the past two years alone, British banks have been involved in just less than $40 billion of high-yield borrowing by energy companies, although RBS and Standard Chartered have curtailed their business with smaller borrowers in the last 12 months.

“In terms of momentum, Barclays and HSBC have not only been growing in the past two years but stepped on the gas this year. On the other hand, RBS and Standard Chartered have actually retreated from the space — the first in line with their strategy of exiting highyield and the second in line with its derisking objectives,” Chirantan Barua, a senior banks analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said.

The exposures of British lenders are dwarfed by those of American and Canadian banks, involved in more than $140 billion of high-yield loan deals for companies across the oil and gas industry and its support industries.

Risky energy companies have been the biggest issuers of junk bonds —

debt that is rated below “investment grade” by credit ratings agencies — and over the past three years have sold about $650 billion of debt.

Such has been the acceleration of junk debt sold by smaller energy players that, from just under a third of the market three years ago, high-yield bonds issued by oil and gas companies in 2014 has made up almost 45 per cent of all sub-investment grade debt.

“When you see $650 billion highyield issuance in a sector that has been levering up across the supply chain, any shocks in the underlying business will have risk ripples across the financial system, both in the banking and the shadow banking system,” Mr Barua said.

With oil prices hitting a five-year low yesterday, many of these businesses could face problems servicing the debts they have built up in recent years as energy majors slash spending on big projects and mothball many existing investments.

Yields on the debts of several oil industry services companies have begun to rise dramatically already as investor fears about the fallout from the drop in prices spread.

KPMG warned last week in the wake of a turbulent meeting of Opec that the cartel’s decision not to cut supply and to allow the creation of a glut of oil on world markets could be disastrous for peripheral industry players.

The share prices of oil services companies, including Weir Group and Petrofac, of Britain, have collapsed since the summer as energy markets have fallen.

Britain among winners if level sinks to $60 a barrel Philip Aldrick

A long-term collapse in the oil price to $60 a barrel would give Britain and the global economy a boost, leading economists have said.

With the price of Brent crude hitting a five-year low yesterday, experts said that oil-importing countries would enjoy a boost through lower inflation and greater spending power.

While oil producers such as Russia, Norway, Canada, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia would be expected to suffer, the overall impact on global growth would be positive.

Adam Slater, a senior economist at Oxford Economics, said: “The oil price decline to date already represents a positive shock for the world economy, generating windfall gains in real income for consumers and lower costs for energy-using businesses.”

He estimated that, should the price of oil fall to $60 a barrel and remain there for two years, the global economy would expand by 3 per cent in 2015 and 3.5 per cent in 2016, compared with present forecasts of 2.8 per cent and 3.2 per cent, respectively.

“This would be the strongest twoyear period of growth since 2010-11,” Mr Slater said. China, the United States, the eurozone and Japan would be the main beneficiaries, but the positive effect would be felt by “most of the major advanced and emerging economies”.

Oxford Economics’ analysis was reinforced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The think-tank said its modelling

showed that a 10 per cent fall in the price of oil added about 0.1 percentage points to growth in the OECD region, “with somewhat larger effects in those countries with the highest energy import intensities”.

Britain would be one of the countries likely to enjoy a larger impact. Mr Slater said that oil at $60 a barrel would add 0.4 percentage points on average to growth for the next two years.

His analysis appeared to be supported by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

In 2010, the OBR found that a 20 per cent rise in oil prices would knock 0.34 percentage points off GDP growth in the first year and more in the subse-

‘The oil price decline to date already represents a positive shock for the world economy’ quent year. In March, the OBR predicted that the oil price would stabilise at $100 a barrel next year. Last month, the OECD said that its central forecast for next year was $85.

Currency traders said that falling oil prices could reflect a weak global economy, which would be bad for all nations, but that the present scenario was simply a case of oversupply.

The boost to global growth comes because most oil-importing nations are advanced countries with high levels of consumption. Redistributing income from producers to importers gives the global economy a spending boost.

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Business

Louise Cooper

Apple lies at the core of tumbling tech stocks

Food shopping is a funny old game . . . until you reach the checkout

‘‘

Louise Cooper is a financial analyst and Goldman Sachs alumna. Follow her on @Louiseaileen70 Last week I spent £166.63 in Tesco on my weekly family food shop. Bizarrely, at the checkout, the cashier split my trolley into four lots because every £40 spent was rewarded with a £5 money-off voucher. In total I received four £5 “Helping Hand” coupons, worth £20.

But I had to pay four separate times with my debit card. This is clearly a poorly thought through price promotion. What is going on?

Reading the small print, the £5 coupon is not such a good deal. It can be redeemed only in store — not online — and for groceries, but not for infant formula milk. They are valid for only one week and only one coupon can be used at a time, necessitating splitting the trolley into £40 lots again.

I was also given four additional “Tesco Price Promise” money-off coupons: “Today your comparable grocery shopping would have been cheaper elsewhere, so here’s the money back.” However, Tesco compares prices only with Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, tacitly confirming that it cannot compete with Aldi and Lidl. It also says in the terms and conditions that customers will get this money back “in the unlikely event your comparable grocery shopping was cheaper [elsewhere]”. But every one of my four lots of shopping could have been bought at lower cost at Asda, Morrisons or Sainsbury’s. It is not an unlikely event — the probability in my experience was 100 per cent.

Tesco has admitted that pricing obfuscation has lost it customers, that too many discounts and promotions mislead. Yet its latest “helping hand” and “price promise” offers made me feel confused and ripped off. I thought that Dave Lewis, the new chief executive, was brought in to change these failed strategies of the past. Clearly not, so far.

My £20 of coupons expired unused because I shopped online this week.

Why can’t Tesco simply cut its prices by 12.5 per cent — the equivalent of £5 on £40? And Tesco is explicitly saying that it is more expensive than the other big three supermarkets, thanks to its price promise. In total I was “overcharged” by £30.82. On an annual basis, that equates to £1,602.

That buys a week’s family holiday. I

TINA NORRIS

Curry houses are complaining about a shortage of chefs coming to Britain

Where immigration is a hot topic

T

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

he nation’s curry industry celebrated its success with the tenth annual British curry awards last night. A quarter of a million voted for their favourite curry house in the industry “Oscars”. About 10,000 restaurants have a combined annual turnover of £3.6 billion. This is big business.

However, it is threatened by a skills shortage. The offspring of

first- generation Asian immigrants tend not to want to become chefs.

And the government’s crackdown on immigration means that “every kitchen in the country is having problems hiring staff ”, according to Enam Ali, the organiser of the event.

Mr Ali adds: “Curry can be bought in India but we’re making it great in Britain.” For that to continue, skilled immigrants are needed.

also want to understand why I spent £166.63 when my normal online weekly bill is between £80 and £90 — half the amount. Looking through my four till receipts, I notice that I bought more items in store. On average I buy about 57 items online, yet I bought 76 in the shop.

Online I just click and choose my favourites. I never see other items and so am not tempted to buy them. In the shop I was enticed by non-necessities, such as Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, mulled wine spices and Christmas DVDs. Second, I didn’t always buy the cheapest product in the store. It is easy to compare prices online; the

price per kilogram is clearly displayed, there is a search function for special offers and I can select from only the Everyday Value range. In the shop, it is much more difficult and time consuming. If I couldn’t compare and calculate the cheapest price within 30 seconds, I just grabbed the nearest item. Even so, it took me an hour to walk round. To compare prices fully would have taken me at least double that — time I could spend doing something I enjoy. By comparison, my online food order takes me about 15 minutes.

If my shopping is a guide, then online orders are smaller and more price conscious than in-store

shopping. If online continues to grow, it may hurt the supermarkets. It is also interesting that the Big Four stock tens of thousands of product lines, but that I buy 55 to 60 products a week.

The “cost” of this excess of choice is higher prices. And it is a cost that I am increasingly unwilling to pay, given that I do not need the choice.

Discounters offer fewer products but with much lower and more transparent prices. I just need Aldi or Lidl to allow me to shop online.

Bernhard von Stengel is a maths professor at the London School of Economics and an expert in game theory. He also does his family’s weekly food shop and says that he saves about 30 per cent. Remarkably, he knows the exact prices of all the products he buys regularly.

Unlike David Cameron and Boris Johnson, he not only knows the cost of a pint of milk but can also explain the rationale behind its pricing. His expertise in game theory also helps him to outwit retailers’ attempts to persuade him to spend more.

It is interesting what the professor says about price promises such as Tesco’s. Game theory suggests that they may enable retailers to charge more because customers trust that there is a guarantee and so don’t bother comparing prices. He also suggests that consumers rarely make use of the guarantees. No wonder Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons offer some sort of price promise.

However, Professor von Stengel has a warning for the Big Four in trying to fight back against the discounters.

Game theory suggests that competing against everyday low prices by using promotions is a failing strategy.

It is better to offer a product at £1.50 all the time, rather than alternating between a full price of £2 and a promotional price of £1.

Mr Lewis should go to one of the professor’s lectures.

A “confusopoly” is a group of companies with similar products that intentionally confuses customers instead of competing on price. I can’t think of a better word to describe British supermarket food retailing.

If the only way to understand pricing is to have a PhD in maths and an expertise in game theory, what hope do the rest of us have?

’’

Alexandra Frean Washington

Technology stocks fell heavily on Wall Street yesterday, led by Apple, which fell by more than 3 per cent in one minute soon after the opening bell.

The iPhone maker’s volume spiked to 6.7 million shares at about 9.50am in New York in the largest one-minute volume of trading in more than a month, according to Reuters. Apple shares later made up some of the early losses and were down by 2.2 per cent at lunchtime at $116.14.

Shares in Facebook were down by 2.6 per cent at midday, and Amazon also helped to drag down the techheavy Nasdaq index, which dropped by more than 3 per cent at one point after Moody’s changed its outlook on the company to “negative” as it filed to sell four tranches of senior unsecured notes.

Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce giant, whose American depositary receipts are listed on the NYSE, fell by 4.8 per cent, while Baidu, the Chinese web services company, fell by 4.5 per cent.

Apple’s retreat came a week after its market value exceeded $700 billion, a level that no other American company has reached. The drop at the start of this week was triggered by Morgan Stanley, which trimmed its position in the company by 1 per cent.

In a note to clients yesterday, Adam Parker, Morgan Stanley’s chief US equity strategist, said that his model had suggested a “modest reduction” in Apple shares after the stock doubled in three years. He also lowered his recommendation on the technology industry to “hold” from “buy”.

Some traders suggested that a price target increase on Apple’s shares yesterday from $120 to $140 by Barclays might have scared off investors who believed that some analysts were getting too bullish. Others indicated that Apple may have fallen victim to caution about retail stocks, after sector-wide disappointing Black Friday sales.

Analysts suggested that the sell-off may be the result of year-end profittaking. Shares in Apple are up by 44 per cent this year; Facebook has climbed by 27 per cent.

The tech sector sell-off came on a depressed day for all stocks after disappointing Thanksgiving retail sales, data showing a deceleration in US manufacturing growth for a third successive month in November, and confirmation of a manufacturing slowdown in China.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

39

FGM

Working life Business TIPPING POINT Entrepreneurs do not need to cash in on their successful businesses with a sale to a bigger bidder

You want an exit strategy? Try to avoid it

Where to go and where to eat Hazel Davis, Jeff Mills

BEN GURR/TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER

He made his name by selling Green & Black’s, but William Kendall is more wary now, reports James Hurley

W

illiam Kendall is often asked to present talks on “the exit”, from tips on preparing your company for sale to tactics on how to get a good price. The invitations could be about to dry up. He suspects that the advisers who organise such events are growing uncomfortable with his message.

Mr Kendall is the chairman of Cawston Press, a soft drinks company, but is best known for building and then selling The New Covent Garden Soup Company and Green & Black’s, the chocolate brand. Yet, inspired by his lengthy search for a business that grabs his interest as much as Green & Black’s, which he sold to Cadbury in 2005, and a growing interest in family businesses, he has started to tell entrepreneurs that a sale should usually be a last resort, rather than their primary goal.

“We sold Green & Black’s ten years ago. I wish someone had said to me: ‘Have you thought about the implications of this?’ ” With the organic chocolate maker going for about £20 million, Mr Kendall appreciates that some may take his warning over selling up too quickly with a pinch of salt. “I don’t want to say ‘I wish I’d never sold it’, because we took a lot of money out and it was fun, but I do think there should be more options on the menu for entrepreneurs.

“We have a culture of encouraging entrepreneurs to sell. When you go to a business event, it’s ‘there’s so and so, he sold x for y’, not ‘there’s a bloke running a fifth-generation family business.’ ” Mr Kendall believes that the economy, business owners and workers in smaller companies would all benefit if more entrepreneurs were encouraged to sell minority stakes rather than 100 per cent of a

LIFESTORE

postcard from . . .

Valletta, Malta

“

William Kendall still finds small businesses, such as his own Cawston Press, refreshing and is wary now about the rush to sell

When you sell, you tend to discount the value of the business you created and you end up with a bureaucracy that slows things down company when they want to release value from their ventures. “When you sell, you tend to discount the value of the entrepreneurial business you created and you end up with a bureaucracy that slows things down.

“Small businesses are able to run circles around major competitors. You hope a new owner will expand it, but most new owners make a bit of, or

total, hash of it. It becomes not as much fun and people drift away.”

Mr Kendall is bearing in mind those lessons, as well as what he’s picking up from being an adviser to numerous family businesses, as he builds up Cawston Press. Cawston began as a DIY wine kit maker but now sells fruit juices and what Mr Kendall calls “grown-up soft drinks”, giving an option to those on a night out who don’t want to booze but don’t want a coke or water, either. It has sales of more than £5 million, with a small team of mostly part-time workers that adds up to the equivalent of only seven full-time staff. It also has no managing director or head office. “We have stretched the concept of outsourcing, we’re a bit too virtual — but we’ve saved a lot of money.”

Mr Kendall technically is a non-executive director at the business. So who is running the show? “That’s a good question.”

Alongside a senior team, which includes Nick Beart, his long-term business partner, and Mark Palmer,

Pret A Manger’s marketing director, Mr Kendall has taken an almost job-sharing approach to steering the company. “All of us have run it collectively so far and it’s worked.”

That said, the company is about to hire a full-time managing director and more full-time staff are expected to follow. But Cawston’s commitment to outsourcing as much as is practical, from manufacturing to back-office functions, will remain.

If it proves to be another hit for Mr Kendall, presumably he’ll be in no rush to cash in? “Who knows if I’ll do things differently, but there is certainly a broader debate to be had.

“Selling up should be at the end of the line of choices, rather than the only one. It’s great if you sell and start another business, but there’s a drag factor. A lot of people buy something like a ski chalet, something that’s far less productive. And it can take a long time to find something with the same level of excitement that people who love early stage businesses crave — that entrepreneurial head rush.”

Valletta may have been founded for returning crusaders, but there’s plenty for modern-day business travellers. European Union funding is improving the infrastructure Man on the ground “An excellent climate and friendly people make Malta a pleasant and comfortable environment for business,” Jim Dunn, a British ex-pat, says Refuelling Stay at the five-star Corinthia Palace Hotel for easy access to all the big business areas and plenty of bars and restaurants for entertaining contacts

working lunch Jesmond Dene House Newcastle upon Tyne What to expect Understated luxury and food with what the restaurant calls “simple but firm principles”. It has an idyllic leafy location only a few minutes from the city centre What to order For breakfast, treat your companion to a taste of Craster kippers and seaweed butter. For lunch, enjoy a couple of Lindisfarne oysters

40

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

FGM

Business Markets companies news

Martin Waller Tempus Buy, sell or hold: today’s best share tips

aberdeen asset management Revenue £1.11bn

Dividend 18p

M

Aberdeen share price

Net outflows

p 500 480 460 440 420 400 380 Q1 2014

Q2

Q3

Q4

360

artin Gilbert, the chief executive of Aberdeen MY ADVICE Buy Asset Management, WHY Emerging markets thinks that the falling have recovered their poise, oil price will boost those emerging markets that are net if only temporarily. There are importers of the stuff, as well as the good prospects for a share manufacturing industry generally. buyback next year Those emerging markets, about 25 per cent of assets under management at Aberdeen after the acquisition of Scottish Widows outflow was swelled by the loss of Investment Partnership in April, one mandate worth £4 billion. By the could do with all the help they can fourth quarter the outflow from get. They accounted for much of equities had ended as investors the outflow of assets over the recovered their nerve. year to the end of Aberdeen ended the September, £16 billion from financial year with £324bn Aberdeen’s original £324 billion under Total assets under management, up from business and £4.4 billion management from SWIP. £200 billion, as a result of The latter looks like a the SWIP purchase, which well-timed deal for Aberdeen, added about £135 billion to then, rebalancing it towards UK the total. Recurring fee income equities. Aberdeen lost about was up by 7 per cent, but £4.4 billion of funds in the first performance fees tumbled from quarter and another £4.3 billion in £50.8 million to £21.7 million. the second. The third-quarter Aberdeen has been adding balfour beatty Value of JLIF offer £1bn

T

he break-up of Balfour Beatty might be the best outcome for its long-suffering shareholders, but it is not going to be as a result of the offer for its public-private partnership assets in Britain and America that is on the table from John Laing Infrastructure Fund.

This is pitched at £1 billion; the assets were valued at £1.05 billion in the autumn. Since then, £61 million has been received from several disposals, but this amount has been reinvested in the United States.

JLIF effectively has conceded that

EY has won the right to set up shop in Britain’s legal services market after the Big Four auditor was granted a licence to operate by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the profession’s regulator. EY said yesterday that it had recruited three legal partners and planned to recruit a further thirty people to build up a law practice in England and Wales in the next six months.

Matthew Kellett, Daniel Aherne and Philip Goodstone will hold the senior roles.

bonmarché

Staunching the outflows

Source: Thomson Reuters

Cash is piling up as balance improves

EY offers legal services

it will probably have to pay a bit more, if it can gain access to the books. The deal would double the size of the fund overnight, but the assets are exactly the sort that JLIF was created to invest in. It would require a sizeable issue of equity, but there will be no shortage of takers for the new shares because of the 5.4 per cent yield on them, which looks assured.

The offer has caught Balfour Beatty on the hop, because Leo Quinn, the new chief executive, is not due to join until the new year.

The best that the board can do is to set up an auction for the assets. The market capitalisation, at yesterday’s closing price of 191p, up 7¾p, is a little

Q4, 2013

Total

Equities

Revenue £91.1m

Dividend 2.3p

A

ccording to Bonmarché, the over-50s account for 48 per cent of all consumer spending and it is this market that the retailer, Q1, 2014 floated last November, is targeting. £4.3bn Yet even that demographic failed to £5bn spend much on warm clothing in the mild autumn and in the second Q2, 2014 quarter to the end of September £8.8bn like-for-like sales were up by only £4.6bn 2.1 per cent.

This was a feature for most Q3, 2014 clothing retailers, as noted in trading £2.8bn statements from Next, among others. £200m The warm weather continued into October and November gradually to its shareholding and Bonmarché admits that follow me in Standard Chartered the start of the second half on twitter Bank as the price has of its financial year was for updates nose-dived. This is a brave challenging. @MartinWaller10 move and the company Like-for-like sales in the now accounts for about 8 per first half were up by 7.8 per cent of the bank’s shares. cent in its stores, while further Mr Gilbert has placed a large bet growth is coming from its online that the much-feared rights issue will business. There was some decline in not materialise. gross margin — the company pays Total dividends for the year are up for half of its stock in dollars — and by 2p at 18p. One noticeable feature hedging against currency of the results is the amount of cash movements was more expensive this that is piling up, £654 million at the time. financial year’s end. By the spring, That over-50 demographic can and the halfway results, Aberdeen only increase, while Bonmarché is will have cash on its balance sheet putting more outlets into garden surplus to regulatory requirements, centres and the likes. The shares, and some sort of share buyback floated at £2, fell 2½p to 267p. They seems inevitable. sell on 13 times this year’s earnings, The shares have been a strong which looks fully valued for now. market since the start of October as emerging markets returned to favour.

That potential buyback will provide MY ADVICE Avoid further support. Up 7½p at 457½p, WHY Shares look fully valued they change hands on 13 times this despite growth prospects year’s profits. Worth a buy at that level for the long-term prospects. £4.4bn £3.1bn

north of £1.3 billion, so a higher offer for the PPP assets would seem to be putting no value whatsover on the battered construction division.

This would seem to be about what it is worth, because valuing such businesses is always difficult. There is every prospect that the KPMG report will find further horrors in the new year. Balfour Beatty shares are a highly speculative bet and I would continue to steer clear. Sell.

MY ADVICE Sell WHY Too much downside risk to bet on break-up

No ‘silver bullet’ found Bookmakers escaped further censure on big-jackpot gaming machines in betting shops after a report failed to identify a “silver bullet” to reduce problem gambling. William Hill shares jumped by more than 3.6 per cent and Labrokes shares rose by 1.2 per cent after the Responsible Gambling Trust’s study concluded that the incidence of punters racking up huge losses in a single session was low.

Rato payment query A judge at the national criminal court in Spain asked Lazard Bank to explain a €6.2 million payment to Rodrigo Rato, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. Judge Fernando Andreu asked the bank to give details about the payment, which was made in 2011. Mr Rato worked as an adviser to Lazard Ltd from 2007 after he left the IMF, where he had been managing director since 2004.

Booking into Club Med The appeal of Club Med has attracted a Brazilian investor to the battle to win control of the French holiday group. Nelson Tanure said that he was joining a bid by Guo Guangchang, the Chinese billionaire. Fosun, Mr Guo’s conglomerate, has made an €897 million offer. Mr Tanure said that he would make up to 20 per cent of the offer. Andrea Bonomi, the Italian billionaire, is also hoping to buy the company.

And finally . . .

I

f the price of oil shares continues to fall, at some stage they are going to look like good value again, on the assumption that oil itself cannot drop too far below $70 a barrel. Westhouse Securities has called the bottom on one stock, Tullow Oil, a member of the FTSE 100. The broker has gone through the numbers and believes that at $70 a barrel there is little risk of a rights issue and that its cashflow and balance sheet look solid enough. A brave call: Tullow shares were falling again yesterday, down another 6 per cent.

Read these stories in full online thetimes.co.uk/ business

PRICES Major Indices New York Dow Jones Nasdaq Composite S&P 500

London Financial Futures 17776.80 (-51.44) 4727.35 (-64.28) 2053.44 (-14.12)

Tokyo Nikkei 225

17590.10 (+130.25)

Hong Kong Hang Seng

23367.45 (-620.00)

Amsterdam AEX Index Sydney AO Frankfurt DAX

423.47 (-2.39) 5190.70 (-107.40) 9963.51 (-17.34)

Singapore Straits

3305.64 (-44.86)

Brussels BEL20

3277.21 (-10.70)

Paris CAC-40

4377.33 (-12.85)

Zurich SMI Index DJ EURO Stoxx 50

9146.18 (-4.28) 3232.91 (-18.02)

London FTSE 100 6656.37 (-66.25) FTSE 250 15719.77 (-131.99) FTSE 350 3623.79 (-35.19) FTSE Eurotop 100 2804.34 (-17.17) FTSE All-Shares 3558.94 (-34.38) FTSE Non Financials 4129.71 (-35.54) techMARK 100 3384.15 (-26.20) Bargains 1235478 US$ 1.5747 (+0.0140) Euro 1.2608 (+0.0060) £:SDR 1.08 (+0.00) Exchange Index 87.0 (+0.3) Bank of England official close (4pm) CPI 128.50 Oct (2005 = 100) RPI 257.70 Oct (Jan 1987 = 100) RPIX 257.20 Oct (Jan 1987 = 100) Morningstar Long Commodity 775.69 (-30.09) Morningstar Long/Short Commod 4538.08 (+35.71)

Long Gilt 3-Mth Sterling

3-Mth Euribor

3-Mth Euroswiss

2 Year Swapnote 5 Year Swapnote 10 Year Swapnote FTSE100 FTSEurofirst 80

Period Dec 14 Mar 15 Dec 14 Mar 15 Jun 15 Sep 15 Dec 15 Dec 14 Mar 15 Jun 15 Sep 15 Dec 15 Dec 14 Mar 15 Jun 15 Sep 15 Dec 14 Mar 15 Dec 14 Mar 15 Dec 14 Mar 15 Dec 14 Mar 15 Dec 14 Mar 15

Open 118.48 117.68 99.440 99.400 99.340 99.250 99.120 99.910 99.920 99.930 99.925 99.910 100.03 100.07 100.10 100.11 111.60 127.70 149.00 6672.0 6624.0 3924.5

High 119.07 118.25 99.440 99.400 99.350 99.270 99.160 99.915 99.920 99.930 99.930 99.915 100.04 100.09 100.12 100.13 111.60 111.56 127.74 100.00 149.06 100.00 6684.0 6624.0 3924.5

Commodities Low 118.48 117.64 99.430 99.390 99.330 99.240 99.120 99.905 99.905 99.910 99.905 99.890 100.02 100.07 100.10 100.11 111.57 111.55 127.57 100.00 148.54 100.00 6638.5 6588.0 3924.5

Sett 118.80 117.96 99.440 99.400 99.340 99.250 99.140 99.915 99.915 99.920 99.915 99.905 100.03 100.07 100.11 100.12 111.57 111.57 127.60 127.60 148.75 148.75 6659.5 6606.5 4277.0 4278.5

Vol 16656 162742 38243 41159 59685 47568 39612 38444 38183 40603 37353 38334 7184 9929 2496 1596 146 104 482 3 131 3 106634 5542 1

Open Int 41827 444750 389983 414302 478921 341796 341030 449272 399721 353002 338420 305823 70646 80880 63196 29728 21865 11186 6048 572703 21520 76

Mar

ICIS pricing (London 7.30pm) Crude Oils ($/barrel FOB) Brent Physical Brent 25 day (Jan) Brent 25 day (Feb) W Texas Intermed (Jan) W Texas Intermed (Feb)

71.80 72.45 72.85 69.00 69.10

+2.70 +2.35 +2.35 +2.85 +2.85

Products ($/MT) 648.00 652.75 360.00 583.00

650.00 654.75 362.00 585.00

-78.00 -10.00 -5.00 -4.00

654.50-654.00 651.25-650.75 662.00-661.50

Brent (9.00pm) Jan 72.96-72.93 Feb 73.36-73.32

Cocoa Dec Mar May Jul Sep Dec

1964-1924 1927-1908 1914-1760 1899-1855 1890-1761 1869-1711

Nov Jan Mar May

2094-1910 2114-2062 2158-2015 2100-1890

Mar May Jul

1866-1840 1847-1770 1750 BID Volume: 22069

Mar Apr

664.25-663.00 722.25-663.75 Volume: 170270

Apr May

75.00-70.20 91.30-73.54

Jul Sep

2116-2080 2146-2070 Volume: 31843

White Sugar (FOB) Reuters

ICE Futures Gas Oil Dec Jan Feb

Volume: 720494

RobustaCoffee

Spot CIF NW Europe (prompt delivery) Premium Unld Gasoil EEC 3.5 Fuel Oil Naphtha

73.84-73.77

LIFFE

Mar May Aug

409.10-375.00 424.10-417.10 474.00-424.20

Oct Dec Mar May

518.50-437.30 522.00-433.00 455.70-448.20 458.70-448.00 Volume: 8105

London Grain Futures LIFFE Wheat (close £/t) Jan Jul

132.50 138.65

Mar Nov

134.85 144.50

May 138.75 Volume: 372

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

41

FGM

Markets Business

STUART C. WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

Barratt bounces back after months in wilderness Gary Parkinson Market report

T

he property market may be cooling, but a couple of housebuilders are poised for promotion to the Footsie.

Barratt Developments and Taylor Wimpey, respectively the 82nd and 86th most valuable companies quoted on the main market, should win inclusion in London’s leading index at the next quarterly reshuffle of constituents, based on closing prices tonight.

Subject to rubber-stamping by the FTSE EMEA committee, which is responsible for its indices in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, final confirmation of who’s in and who’s out will come after the market closes tomorrow. Both companies will assume their positions in the FTSE 100 a fortnight on Monday. Barratt,

natural resources

Dragon Oil loses its appetite

W

ith oil shares clobbered across the board thanks to cratering crude, Petroceltic International was hit harder than the rest.

Back in early October, Dragon Oil, dripping with cash and hungry for growth, confirmed that it was in talks to buy Petroceltic for 230p a share — and Petroceltic, with its shares surging 40p to 218½p, said that it was happy to recommend an offer at a 30 per cent premium to shareholders.

Yesterday, those

Wall Street report Technology investors returned from Thanksgiving weekend with a headache and the likes of Apple, Amazon and Tesla shared the pain.

The Dow Jones industrial average did, too, a little, closing 51.44 points down at 17,776.80.

Investors aren’t up for Voda’s new look

T

he prospect of a blockbuster move on Liberty Global, the owner of Virgin Media, by Vodafone has knocked shares in the British group as investors balked at the prospect of it making a huge bid (Nic Fildes writes).

BT’s talks with the owners of O2 and EE regarding a takeover of one of Britain’s two largest mobile phone

networks are thought to have forced Vodafone — which sponsors London Fashion Week, above — to consider a bid for Liberty.

An acquisition of Virgin Media, as well as other cable assets owned by Liberty in Germany and the Netherlands, would add a residential fibre-optic network to its armoury and millions of broadband and television customers.

Liberty has an enterprise value, which includes debt, of $80 billion.

Top executives at Vodafone met in London last week to

AHDB meat services Average fatstock prices at representative markets (p/kg lw) Pig Lamb Cattle GB 0.00 172.95 149.41 (+/-) +0.00 +2.57 -22.17 Eng/Wales (+/-) Scotland (+/-)

0.00 +0.00

172.95 +2.57

149.41 -22.17

unq

0.00 +0.00

0.00 +0.00

London Metal Exchange (Official) Cash

3mth

15mth

Copper Gde A ($/tonne) 6384.0-6385.0 6312.0-6313.0

7310.0-7320.0

Lead ($/tonne) 2024.5-2025.0

2028.0-2029.0

1980.0-1985.0

Zinc Spec Hi Gde ($/tonne) 2194.0-2195.0 2194.5-2195.0

1943.0-1948.0

Tin ($/tonne) 20130.0-20135.0

20125.0-20200.0

Alum Hi Gde ($/tonne) 2020.5-2021.0 1997.5-1998.0 Nickel ($/tonne) 16200.0-16205.0 16250.0-16275.0

20165.0-20215.0 2280.0-2285.0 18770.0-18870.0

discuss their options, which fuelled speculation of an imminent move for Liberty Global, which is owned by John Malone, the billionaire.

Shares in Vodafone fell by 6¾p to close at 227¼p yesterday.

UBS remains unconvinced that Vodafone would launch a bid for Virgin Media’s owner soon.

Polo Tang, the bank’s analyst, said that it would be difficult for Vodafone to consider any transformational deal for Liberty, or Sky, until its share price rose.

Gold/Precious metals (US dollars per ounce) Bullion: Open $1151.70 Close $1209.87-1210.33 High $1211.42 Low $1146.52 AM $1178.75 PM $1194.00 Krugerrand $1197.00-1270.00 (£760.00-806.35) Platinum $1246.00 (£791.11) Silver $16.61 (£10.55) Palladium $817.00 (£518.73)

which dropped out of the top Petrofac, the oil services flight only in September, company adroit at pushing remains on track for 15,000 out profits warnings, down follow us completions this year. Its 24p at £11.57p and 17p at on twitter shares, steady at 460½p, 808p, respectively. for updates have run on more than Again, the wider stock @timesbusiness 36 per cent since early market was all about August, valuing the company commodities, which sent the at a touch shy of £4.6 billion.

Footsie 66.3 points lower to Taylor Wimpey, ¼p easier at 134p, 6,656.4. Oil touched a five-year low commands a market value of nearly because Opec failed to agree a £4.4 billion after growing by a quarter production cut to shore up prices last over the same period. It was last in week, before bouncing off the bottom, the Footsie in March 2008. for now.

Confirmation of their promotion Oil shares were battered again in should come a week after news from sympathy. Tullow Oil, the Footsie’s the Nationwide that house price only pure exploration play, fell a growth slowed in November for the further 25½p to 400½p. Westhouse third consecutive month and days tried to catch the knife, telling clients after the Bank of England said that that now was the time buy the shares. new mortgage approvals had fallen to Afren, a FTSE 250 explorer, retreated the lowest level since June 2013.

6p more to 45½p.

Based on last night’s closing prices, Copper sank to its lowest since the two housebuilders will fill spots June 2010 before bargain-hunters vacated by IMI, one of those stepped in. Its prolonged weakness exporting engineers hurt by a reflects, in part, the price of oil. The sputtering eurozone economy, and price of the metal, used heavily by the

Dollar rates Australia Canada Denmark Euro Hong Kong Japan Malaysia Norway Singapore Sweden Switzerland

1.1730-1.1733 1.1332-1.1336 5.9549-5.9574 0.8004-0.8004 7.7541-7.7551 118.17-118.19 3.4195-3.4215 6.9195-6.9235 1.3048-1.3054 7.4216-7.4256 0.9624-0.9626

Argentina peso Australia dollar Bahrain dinar Brazil real Euro Hong Kong dollar India rupee Indonesia rupiah Kuwait dinar KD Malaysia ringgit New Zealand dollar Singapore dollar S Africa rand U A E dirham

13.433-13.435 1.8470-1.8480 0.5894-0.5970 4.0186-4.0343 1.2606-1.2608 12.211-12.213 97.501-97.564 19322-19347 0.4567-0.4592 5.2929-5.4947 1.9912-1.9932 2.0548-2.0558 17.321-17.336 5.7786-5.7849

2 mth

3 mth

1mth

3mth

6mth

12mth

0.10

0.15

0.23

0.48

0.50

0.55

0.68

0.97

-0.13

-0.05

0.05

0.21

Sterling Euro

6 mth

12 mth

0.5026

0.5253

0.5528

0.6784

0.9712

Clearer CDs

0.58-0.43

0.60-0.45

0.65-0.50

0.80-0.65

1.07-0.92

Depo CDs

0.58-0.43

0.60-0.45

0.65-0.50

0.80-0.65

1.07-0.92

Eurodollar Deps

0.04-0.14

0.08-0.28

0.24-0.39

0.31-0.51

0.54-0.73

Eurodollar CDs

0.15-0.08

0.18-0.12

0.22-0.15

0.36-0.21

0.52-0.38

Sterling spot and forward rates

Dollar

power and building industries, continues to be hit, too, by an unconvincing economy in China, the world’s hungriest consumer.

Antofagasta, a Chilean copper miner, eased 2p to 735p, while BHP Billiton, which derives about a third of its earnings from oil, fell 33p to £14.84.

Gold had been at a five-year low — not China this time, but Switzerland, which voted against lifting its reserves — but it also rallied as bargain-hunters stepped in and Moody’s, one of the credit ratings agencies, cut its rating on Japan, sending skittish investors scuttling for havens. Fresnillo, more a Mexican miner of silver than gold, added 7p to 719p.

Finally, Balfour Beatty, Britain’s largest construction company, which pushed out its fifth profit warning in two years in September, was chased 7¾p higher to 191p amid hopes of an auction for its public private partnership assets after John Laing Infrastructure Fund offered £1 billion for them.

Money rates %

1 mth

Currency

shares tanked 34.8 per cent to a three-year low of 113½p after Dragon, up 1½p at 502p, walked away. It blamed “market conditions”, referring to an oil price that has rattled back

Base Rates Clearing Banks 0.5 Finance House 1.0 ECB Refi 0.05 US Fed Fund 0-0.25 Halifax Mortgage Rate 3.5 Treasury Bills (Dis) Buy: 1 mth 0.48; 3 mth 0.46. Sell: 1 mth 0.38; 3 mth 0.38

Interbank Rates

European money deposits %

Dragon Oil has lost interest in buying the rival Petroceltic

Mkt Rates for Copenhagen Euro Montreal New York Oslo Stockholm Tokyo Zurich

Range 9.3012-9.3879 1.2620-1.2538 1.7831-1.7943 1.5588-1.5760 10.898-11.023 11.448-11.690 185.09-186.28 1.5084-1.5177

Close 9.3790-9.3810 1.2609-1.2606 1.7844-1.7854 1.5747-1.5750 10.898-10.903 11.688-11.695 186.08-186.16 1.5159-1.5161

1 month 36ds 3pr 11pr 2ds 108pr 29ds 15ds 9ds Premium = pr

3 month 133ds 10pr 27pr 10ds 265pr 105ds 33ds 26ds Discount = ds

Other Sterling

nearly 40 per cent since late June.

Malcolm GrahamWood, Hydrocarbon Capital founder, was unsurprised: “On the list of things you thought might happen, an absolute cert was Dragon walking away.

“Whilst there may be a return at a lower price some day, with the oil market in such turmoil negotiating the price down at the moment is probably a waste of time until some semblance of stability returns.

Ironically, Petroceltic may be one of the most immune to the troubles.”

Exchange rates Australia $ Canada $ Denmark Kr Egypt Euro ¤ Hong Kong $ Hungary Indonesia Israel Shk Japan Yen New Zealand $ Norway Kr Poland Russia S Africa Rd Sweden Kr Switzerland Fr Turkey Lira USA $

Bank buys Bank sells 2.010 1.750 1.950 1.690 10.050 8.810 12.370 9.840 1.370 1.200 13.070 11.500 423.410 348.350 22031.500 17573.500 6.710 0.000 201.030 174.100 2.240 1.890 11.880 10.270 5.800 4.750 83.350 69.410 19.170 16.230 12.440 11.060 1.660 1.430 3.860 3.090 1.710 1.500

Rates for banknotes and traveller's cheques as traded by Royal Bank of Scotland plc yesterday

Data as shown is for information purposes only. No offer is made by Morningstar or this publication

42

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Register Obituaries

Lady Juliet Townsend

Literary lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret who advised on books and etiquette and became a great friend of John Betjeman

When Princess Margaret decided that she needed a lady-in-waiting who could help her to make up for what she felt was her lack of formal education, she was recommended Lady Juliet Townsend, the daughter of the 2nd Earl of Birkenhead, a woman of letters and a friend of the poet John Betjeman.

The princess, who was naturally bright and inquiring, had always resented the fact that she and her sister had been educated mainly at home by their governesses, and that her mother, Queen Elizabeth, had, in the words of Randolph Churchill, “never aimed at bringing her daughters up to be more than nicely behaved young ladies”.

It was 1965. Townsend was invited to a dinner party given by the Queen and was surprised to find both Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon present.

Little did she know that she was being interviewed for the job. Afterwards she felt that, in her nervousness, she had talked too much, but a few days later she was invited to join the princess and she worked for her full time from 1965 to 1971 and part-time until the princess’s death in 2002.

The princess particularly wanted a woman with literary connections. Recommended by Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, Lady Juliet fitted the bill; her parents were both authors and, over the next 40 years, the princess was always asking her what she should be reading.

Townsend advised Princess Margaret during many royal visits. In pre-revolutionary Cambodia she helped to defuse a potentially fraught exchange of official gifts. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country’s leader, had given the princess a large and ostentatious present of silver. The princess’s gift was also silver — smaller in size but of superior quality. According to Lady Ju-

She was often an emollient to Princess Margaret’s tantrums liet’s husband, John Townsend, “They had to dress it up carefully, and invent a way of presenting it to the prince so that it looked good but did not cause offence.” Lady Juliet liked to tell the story of how, on a visit to Japan, Emperor Hirohito insisted on giving the princess an exhaustive tour of his collection of sea shells and that, far from finding it dull, the princess was fascinated and bombarded the delighted emperor with questions.

A gregarious woman with a pronounced sense of fun, Townsend was often an emollient to Princess Margaret’s famous tantrums; and when that failed, she simply ignored the royal histrionics. Townsend also became close to the princess’s two children, Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, and was fiercely protective of them in the years leading up to Princess Margaret’s separation and divorce from Lord Snowdon in 1978. She greatly disapproved of those who made public their experience at court.

Both of Townsend’s grandfathers had important roles in public life in the first part of the 20th century. Her grandfather was FE Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead, who was appointed lord chancellor; his wit in court, speeches in

Lady Juliet walking behind Princess Margaret during a royal visit, and, below, pictured with her husband, John Townsend

parliament and judgments continue to be quoted. Her mother’s father was William Berry, the first Lord Camrose, who arrived in London in the early 1900s determined to make his way in newspapers. In this he succeeded,

building a press empire by purchasing The Sunday Times, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph.

In her childhood, Lady Juliet came to know and love John and Penelope Betjeman — her aunt had married Penelope’s brother Roger — and she spent many holidays with them. Here she was introduced to the joys of riding over the Berkshire Downs. Penelope Betjeman, an expert horsewoman, would drive carriages at a fearsome pace and Townsend enjoyed recalling how, on one occasion, Mrs Betjeman had agreed to transport some nuns and set off at such a lick that when she looked behind her, the unprepared sisters had fallen out of the carriage and were strewn on the grass. She revelled in the Betjemans’ eccentric lifestyle and loved receiving letters from them; as well as the beautiful prose, she treasured the headed notepaper which, after the address, said “No telephone, thank God”.

John Betjeman later invited her to write The Shell Guide to Northamptonshire and the Soke of Peterborough. This series had been started by Betjeman and David Piper before the war. In gathering information Townsend visited every village and town in the county. Her book was affectionate but

did not quail from criticising a Norwich Union building close to Peterborough Cathedral. Shell ordered her critical passage to be removed, but John Betjeman was so furious at the censure that he resigned as editor of the series.

She also wrote a children’s book on the Indian Mutiny, Escape from Meerut, and edited the Faber Book of Best Horse Stories. For many years she reviewed books for The Spectator and each

She organised camps for girl guides from London on the family lawn Christmas compiled a round-up of children’s books. She was a passionate believer that children should read and would give any of her six grandchildren a pound if they learnt a poem and could recite it to her word perfectly.

Juliet Margaret Townsend was born in Ascot in 1941. Her father, the 2nd Earl of Birkenhead, whose wartime exploits included a well-documented expedition in Yugoslavia with Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh, wrote distinguished biographies of Lord Halifax and Walter Monckton. His bio-

graphy of Rudyard Kipling was suppressed by the author’s family for years.

Her childhood was spent in Charlton, some 20 miles north of Oxford. The house had been adapted and enlarged

by FE Smith from two small farmhouses. Educated firstly at Francis Holland School in London and later at Westonbirt, she studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, under the terrifying Mary Lascelles, who was a foremost expert on Jane Austen. At tutorials, one stray word would be pounced on. When reading the word “dedicated” in one of Townsend’s essays, Lascelles looked up sharply from her reverie: “Dedicated!

Juliet? Dedicated to whom?”

Her association with Princess Margaret enabled her to renew a love for the girl guides; she had once been an enthusiastic brownie. The princess had become president of the girl guides in 1965 and Townsend accompanied her when she visited a pack in east London. Keen to help in a deprived area, Townsend volunteered to assist on Monday evenings. The girls, mainly from poor families, came to love this eccentric, aristocratic lady who would organise camps at her family estate, orchestrating singalongs around the campfire and riotous games of “kick the can” on the immaculate lawn. She was still supporting the troop towards the end of her life.

In 1970 she married John Richard Townsend whom she had met at a country house party in Wales, which had been hosted by Davina Wallace — later the wife of Lord Howell of Guildford and the mother-in-law of George Osborne, the chancellor. Soon afterwards they moved to Newbottle Manor in Northamptonshire, which is near to the Birkenhead family estate in Charlton. She ran a Sunday school in the village, bred Arab horses and loved watching athletics. Her love of books was shared by her husband and together in 1977 they opened the Old Hall Bookshop in Brackley. John Townsend survives her along with their three daughters: Alice, who runs the family estate; Eleanor, an exhibitions manager for the V&A; and Margaret, who is studying at Birkbeck College for a postgraduate degree in US politics.

With the death in 1985 of her only brother, Robin, the third and last Lord Birkenhead, the Townsends found themselves responsible for the family farm and estate. She was determined to keep the estate intact and particularly “the Cottage” in Charlton, which had been FE Smith’s home. In 1998 she was appointed lord lieutenant of Northamptonshire. Her health failing, she reluctantly resigned earlier this year, but it was a huge pleasure to her that she was able to go to Windsor in October to be made a Dame Companion of the Victorian Order by the Queen.

Townsend was a devoted mother to her three daughters and would organise memorable birthday parties for them with themes including the Olympics, Cluedo, Red Indians and Halo’ween. Her own birthday fell on September 9, and on the 9/9/1999 she invited 99 guests who sat down to dinner at 9 minutes past 9pm.

Lady Juliet Townsend, DVCO, lady in waiting, was born on September 9, 1941.

She died of cancer on November 29, 2014, aged 73

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

43

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Register

Richard Pasco

Actor who earned acclaim for his performances of Shakespeare, befriended Judi Dench and recited poetry with Grace Kelly SOPHIE BAKER/ARENA PAL. BELOW: REX

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1973 production of Richard II ranks among the greatest productions of the play by that company or any other.

Much of this was down to the vision of director John Barton, but equally crucial were the powers of the actors Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco.

The pair alternated the parts of Richard and his rival Bolingbroke, starting each performance by appearing onstage to be assigned their role by an actor dressed as Shakespeare, who would place a crown on one of their heads. For Pasco — who played the king as a sturdy and not very sensitive optimist, rather than the usual romantic melancholic, and Bolingbroke as an extrovert hardened by experience — it was his finest hour. That same year, he gave another classic performance as Jaques in As You Like It, also at Stratford, depicting the character as a playboy gone to seed. The critic Benedict Nightingale wrote of this “unkempt, glazed creature in a white suit, a run-down dandy, blinking through his specs at the light, half staggering and half loping across the stage . . . twitching and sneering as he stammered over the word ‘p-pleasure’.” For many he stole the stage from Rosalind, played by Eileen Atkins.

Unlike Shakespeareans such as Ben Kingsley, Pasco chose not to focus on film, though he slummed it in Hammer

He shared the first male-to-male television kiss with Sean Connery melodramas including The Gorgon in 1964. On the small screen, too, he had a sporadic career, although one role in a 1960 BBC production of Jean Anouilh’s Colombe gave him the unusual distinction of sharing the first male-to-male kiss on television with Sean Connery.

That the future James Bond was playing a jealous brother wanting to see if Pasco’s character was a good kisser did little to reduce the sensation.

He formed a more lasting bond with another future Bond star, Judi Dench.

She was already a friend of his second wife, the actress Barbara Leigh-Hunt, when he was brought in at the last minute to play Orsino in an RSC tour of Twelfth Night in Australia. The original actor in the part, Charles Thomas, had killed himself (reportedly over his unrequited love for Dench), and a bond was formed between the two new leads.

Pasco as Richard II and, right, with Christopher Lee in the film Gorgon

Pasco learnt the role in three days, but it was said he refused to wear the dead actor’s costume. Many years later Dench personally requested that he take the part of Dr Jenner in the 1997 film Mrs Brown in which she played Queen Victoria. “We will all have such fun in Scotland,” she told Pasco.

His other great passion — poetry — brought him together with Grace Kelly.

At the 1976 Edinburgh Festival, he and Princess Grace of Monaco (as she then was) gave a recital of American verse to celebrate the US bicentennial. Press interest was intense and the event was such a success that the pair teamed up again in 1980 for Birds, Beasts and Flow-

was a golden voice.” He also had a talent for comedy. Adrian Noble, who directed Pasco as Schastlivstev in Ostrovsky’s The Forest, remembered his good humour both on and off stage. When Pasco and his fellow cast members were not practising their lines, they were enjoying “hilarious lunches in the local greasy spoon café which boasted a Rennies machine on the wall”.

Richard Edward Pasco was born in Barnes, London, in 1926. His parents, Cecil and Phyllis, sent him to King’s College, Wimbledon, but he left at 16 to become an apprentice stage manager and bit-part player at the nearby Q Theatre, close to Kew Bridge. Studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama, he won the Gold Medal and then, after National Service, joined the Old Vic Company in 1950.

He continued his training with the Birmingham Rep and the English Stage Company, where in 1956 he took the lead in a revival of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger at the Lyric Hammersmith. The following year he was Frank Rice, son of Laurence Olivier’s Archie, in the first run of Osborne’s new play The Entertainer at London’s Royal Court. Despite Osborne’s forbidding reputation, Pasco befriended him.

He was married first to the actress Greta Watson, with whom he had his only child: William now works for the BBC. After their marriage was dissolved in 1964, Pasco moved to the Bristol Old Vic. There he met Leigh-Hunt, who was memorable in Hitchcock’s Frenzy and as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the 1996 BBC adaptation of

ers, a programme of poetry and music that included Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Pied Beauty and Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat.

Though he brought distinction to modern roles, verse — and Shakespeare in particular — gave full rein to his rich voice and wide tonal range. For him the monologue was a natural home.

Terry Hands, the former artistic director of the RSC, said: “His

Pride and Prejudice. They married in 1967 and worked together often, notably in a long West End run of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls.

By the time Pasco left the Bristol Old Vic for the RSC in 1969 he was a distinguished stage presence. He was appointed CBE eight years later.

When he moved to the National he won plaudits in David Hare’s state-ofthe-nation trilogy, particularly for his performance as an imperious bishop in Racing Demon. He was reluctant to return to television but nevertheless took on lead roles in period dramas such as Sorrell and Son. Pasco and Leigh-Hunt always remained close to the RSC. In his book Him & Me, Pasco’s agent Michael Whitehall recalled a 1996 visit to “Dickie and Bar, as everyone called them”. At

Despite his kind nature, he enjoyed success in a ruthless industry that time he had three children under the age of eight — including the future comedian Jack Whitehall — and he found their house “in no way a childfriendly place”. Pasco and his wife were avid collectors, filling their cottage in Stratford “with books, leather-bound first editions down to rare theatrical folios, fine china, bronzes, paintings large, small and very small.. .”

Surprisingly, the only breakage that occurred during that visit was inflicted

by Pasco, who managed to drop the Whitehall family’s newly purchased video camera. Jack promptly turned to his father and said: “Well Daddy, we didn’t knock anything over.”

Despite Pasco’s kind and exceptionally gentle nature, he enjoyed success in an otherwise ruthless industry.

He made his final appearance for the RSC on the night before the Royal Shakespeare Theatre closed for redevelopment in 2007. The hushed audience listened as he delivered Jaques’s Seven Ages of Man speech one last time.

Richard Pasco, CBE, actor, was born on July 18, 1926.

He died on November 12, 2014, aged 88

Le Minh Thai Renowned photojournalist who used his contacts in the government and military to document the Vietnam War Had the 20th century not unfolded as it did, Le Minh Thai would most probably have led a life of privilege, either as a wealthy merchant, a senior officer in the army of nationalist China or as court photographer to the Laotian royal family.

Instead he spent 20 years documenting the torment of his native Vietnam as it moved from French colony to partitioned state — a “democratic” south and a communist north — and finally to the unified socialist republic that it is today.

Hoi An, the port city in which he was raised, sat just south of the border between the two Vietnams that were established following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It went overnight from being the buckle in the belt that held the two ends of the country together to besieged frontier town, cut off from half its natural hinterland, flooded with immigrants fleeing the

AP PHOTO/QUYNH THAI

Thai at the Battle of An Loc in Vietnam

forces led by General Vo Nguyen Giap.

Thai, a natural conservative from a background steeped in the traditions of imperial China, always hoped that South Vietnam would survive as an independent republic. Instead, the many thousands of photographs he took of the conflict between north and south overwhelmingly recorded defeat and disaster.

Thai, who was born in 1921 (the exact date is unknown), grew up in a world dominated by trade, the army and government service. French Indochina, administered for the most part from Hanoi, encompassed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, a volatile grouping held together by a combination of force and a Paris-educated mandarin class.

The invasion of China by imperial Japan, beginning in 1931, posed an obvious threat to the status quo in Vietnam.

Thai decided to throw in his lot with nationalist China. He joined the intelli-

gence section of Chiang Kai-Shek’s army, identifying Japanese sympathisers, who then faced arrest and either death or imprisonment. But he also saw action during what was a long and bloody campaign. Wounded during one exchange, he carried a bullet in his side for the rest of his life.

In 1945, he returned to Vietnam just in time to see it convulsed by fighting between the communist forces of Ho-Chi Minh and the Frenchsupported regime of the nominal emperor, Bao Dail. He acted as a war correspondent, mainly for Paris Match, and photographed the communist insurgency, winning plaudits for his images of protesting students and dissident Buddhist monks.

When the Americans arrived in 1963, he used his contacts in Saigon to provide Time-Life and AP with pictures not only of the fighting, but of Saigon’s ruling class, including General Nguyen

Van Thieu. He will perhaps be best remembered for his photographs taken during a rare South Vietnamese victory, the Battle of An Loc, in 1972, at which a ground offensive by the North was halted and ultimately repulsed.

The end, when it came, left Thai with no choice. The Americans were scuttling and, in 1975, Thai followed suit, moving to Los Angeles with his wife Ying. Before he left, he worked tirelessly to secure the safety of his Time-Life co-workers, arranging for them too to be given sanctuary in the US. His concern for some years thereafter was the plight of Vietnamese refugees, whose distress was a constant of late-1970s photojournalism. After retiring in 1984 he continued to work on a freelance basis.

Le Minh Thai, photojournalist, was born in 1921. He died of natural causes on October 10, 2014, aged about 93

44

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Television & Radio/Announcements Births, Marriages and Deaths

Today’s television BBC ONE

6.00am Breakfast 9.15 Fake Britain 10.00 Homes Under the Hammer 11.00 Claimed and Shamed 11.30 Channel Patrol 12.15pm Bargain Hunt 1.00 BBC News; Weather 1.30 BBC Regional News; Weather 1.45 Doctors 2.15 The Doctor Blake Mysteries 3.10 Escape to the Country 3.55 Tom Kerridge’s Proper Pub Food 4.25 Flog It! 5.15 Pointless 6.00 BBC News 6.30 BBC Regional News 7.00 The One Show 7.30 EastEnders 8.00 Holby City 9.00 The Missing 10.00 BBC News 10.25 BBC Regional News; Weather 10.35 Imagine: Colm Toibin — His Mother’s Son 11.40 Film 2014 12.10am FILM: Skeletons (2010) 1.50-6.00 BBC News

BBC TWO

6.05am Homes Under the Hammer 7.05 Channel Patrol 7.50 Claimed and Shamed 8.20 Sign Zone 10.35 HARDtalk 11.00 BBC News 11.30 BBC World News 12.00 Daily Politics 1.00pm Live Snooker: UK Championship. From the Barbican Centre 6.00 Eggheads 6.30 Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two 7.00 The Great Interior Design Challenge 8.00 MasterChef: The Professionals 9.00 Secrets of the Castle with Ruth, Peter and Tom 10.00 The Sarah Millican Television Programme Christmas Special 10.30 Newsnight 11.20 Snooker: UK Championship 12.10am Snooker: UK Championship Extra 2.10-2.40 Sign Zone: Film 2014 4.00-6.00 BBC Learning Zone

ITV London

6.00am Good Morning Britain 8.30 Lorraine 9.25 The Jeremy Kyle Show 10.30 This Morning 12.30pm Loose Women 1.30 ITV News; Weather 2.00 Peter Andre’s 60 Minute Makeover 3.00 Secret Dealers 4.00 Tipping Point 5.00 The Chase 6.00 Regional News 6.30 ITV News; Weather 7.00 Emmerdale 7.30 No Place to Call Home: Tonight 8.00 Emmerdale 8.30 I’m a Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here! 10.00 ITV News at Ten and Weather 10.30 Regional News 10.40 FILM: Public Enemies (2009) 1.15am Jackpot247 3.00 Loose Women 3.45 ITV Nightscreen 5.05-6.00 The Jeremy Kyle Show

Channel 4

6.20am The King of Queens 7.10 3rd Rock from the Sun 8.00 Everybody Loves Raymond 9.00 Frasier 10.00 Daily Brunch 11.00 Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals 11.30 Come Dine with Me 12.00 Channel 4 News Summary 12.05pm Come Dine with Me 2.10 Countdown 3.00 Fifteen to One 4.00 Deal or No Deal 5.00 Come Dine with Me 5.30 Coach Trip 6.00 The Simpsons 6.30 Hollyoaks

7.00 News 8.00 Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners 9.00 17 Kids and Counting 10.00 Gogglebox 11.05 Skint 12.05am Poker 1.05 Trans World Sport 2.00 KOTV Boxing 2.25 Cycling: Revolution Series 3.20 Snowman Triathlon 3.45 Phil: Secret Agent Down Under 4.40 A Place in the Sun: Home or Away 5.35-6.20 Countdown

Sky1

5.30am News 5.43 Prayer for the Day 5.45 Farming Today 5.58 Tweet of the Day 6.00 Today 8.31 (LW) Yesterday in Parliament 9.00 The Reith Lectures 2014 9.45 (LW) Daily Service 9.45 Book of the Week 10.00 Woman’s Hour 11.00 Shared Planet 11.30 Soul Music 12.00 News 12.01pm (LW) Shipping 12.04 Home Front 12.15 Call You and Yours 1.00 The World at One 1.45 Terror Through Time 2.00 The Archers (r) 2.15 Afternoon Drama: Behind Closed Doors 3.00 The Design Dimension 3.30 Mastertapes 4.00 Trauma Medicine 4.30 A Good Read 5.00 PM 5.54 (LW) Shipping 6.00 News 6.30 Tom Wrigglesworth’s Hang-Ups 7.00 The Archers 7.15 Front Row 7.45 Carol 8.00 Teaching Economics After the Crash 8.40 In Touch 9.00 All in the Mind 9.30 Document (r) 10.00 The World Tonight 10.45 Book at Bedtime 11.00 What the Future? 11.30 Today in Parliament 12.30am Book of the Week (r) 12.48 Shipping Forecast 1.00 As BBC World Service 5.20-5.30 Shipping Forecast

Sky Sports 2

6.00am The Real A&E 7.00 Sun, Sea and A&E 7.30 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part One Special 8.00 Futurama 9.00 NCIS: Los Angeles 11.00 Hawaii Five-0 1.00pm NCIS: Los Angeles 3.00 Obese: A Year to Save My Life USA 4.00 Sun, Sea and A&E 5.00 The Simpsons 5.30 Futurama 6.30 The Simpsons 8.00 The Flash 9.00 NCIS: Los Angeles 10.00 Britcam: Emergency on Our Streets 11.00 Hawaii Five-0 2.00am Brit Cops: Zero Tolerance 3.00 Road Wars 4.00 Stargate Atlantis 5.00-6.00 Airline USA

6.00am Game Changers 7.00 WWE: Afterburn 8.00 WWE Special 11.00 Racing News 11.30 Sporting Greats 12.00 Game Changers 1.00pm National Badminton League 3.30 Sporting Greats 4.30 WWE Slam City 5.00 WWE: Smackdown 7.00 Football Gold 7.35 Live Eredivisie Football: PSV Eindhoven v Feyenoord (Kick-off 7.45) 9.45 Football League Gold 10.00 SNF: Match Choice 11.30 National Badminton League 2.00am Poker 3.00 The Strickland Story 4.00-6.00 Sporting Greats

BBC World

Sky Sports 3

6.00am BBC World News 6.30 World Business Report 6.45 BBC World News 7.30 World Business Report 7.45 BBC World News 8.30 World Business Report 8.45 BBC World News 9.30 HARDtalk 10.00 BBC World News 10.30 World Business Report 10.45 Sport Today 11.00 BBC World News 12.00 GMT 1.00pm Impact 2.30 World Business Report 2.45 Sport Today 3.00 Global 4.30 HARDtalk 5.00 Outside Source 5.30 Focus on Africa 6.00 Outside Source 6.30 World Business Report 6.45 Sport Today 7.00 World News Today 8.30 World Business Report 8.45 Sport Today 9.00 Business Edition 9.30 HARDtalk 10.00 BBC World News America 11.00 Newsday 11.30 Asia Business Report 11.45 Sport Today 12.00 Newsday 12.30am Asia Business Report 12.45 Sport Today 1.00 Newsday 1.30 Asia Business Report 1.45 Sport Today 2.00 BBC World News 2.30 Asia Business Report 2.45 Sport Today 3.00 BBC World News 3.30 Asia Business Report 3.45 Sport Today 4.00 BBC World News 4.30 HARDtalk 5.00 BBC World News 5.30 World Business Report 5.45-6.00 BBC World News

6.00am Great Run Series 7.30 Road to Kona Ironman 8.00 Live International Premier Tennis League.

Micromax Indian Aces v UAE Royals and Singapore Slammers v Manila Mavericks 2.30pm Sporting Greats 3.30 Sporting Rivalries 4.00 Live Hockey Champions Trophy: Australia v Germany (Push-back 4.00) 5.30 Sporting Greats 6.00 Sportswomen 6.30 Live Hockey Champions Trophy: England v Argentina (Push-back 6.30) 8.00 Sporting Rivalries 8.30 Football Gold 9.00 Live Hockey Champions Trophy: China v New Zealand (Pushback 9.00) 10.30 Football Gold 10.45 Football League Gold 11.00 Sporting Rivalries 11.30 Live Hockey Champions Trophy: Netherlands v Japan (Push-back 11.30) 1.00am Sporting Greats 1.30 Road to Kona Ironman 2.00 Great Run Series 3.30 Road to Kona Ironman 4.00 Terrain Unleashed 5.00-6.00 Sporting Heroes: Peter Schmeichel Interviews Peter Shilton

British Eurosport

6.00am Football Gold 7.00 Barclays Premier League Review 8.00 Soccer AM: The Best Bits 9.00 Premier League U21s Football 10.00 FL72 Review 11.00 Scottish Cup Football 11.30 Football Gold 12.00 Barclays Premier League Review 1.00pm Premier League U21s Football 2.00 The Club That Vanished

7.30am Snooker: UK Championship 9.00 Eurogoals 9.45 NFL Round-Up 10.45 Ski Jumping 12.00 Snooker: UK Championship 1.00pm Live Snooker: UK Championship 4.00 Snooker: UK Championship 5.00 The Ronnie O’Sullivan Show 5.30 Strongest Man: Giants Live 6.00 Snooker: UK Championship 7.00 Live Snooker: UK Championship 10.00 Snooker: UK Championship 10.45 GT Academy 2014: Masterclass 11.00 FIA World Endurance Championship 11.3012.30am Rally: Australasian Safari

BBC World Service

Radio 3

Sky Sports 1

Today’s radio

Radio 4

3.00 Football Gold 4.00 Fantasy Football: The Highlights 4.30 Football’s Greatest Teams 5.00 Football League Gold 6.00 Football Gold 7.00 Live Mosconi Cup Pool 11.00 Football League Gold 11.30 SNF: Match Choice 1.00am Football’s Greatest Players 2.30 Football Gold 5.00 Football’s Greatest Teams 5.30-6.00 Football’s Greatest Players

5.00am Newsday 8.30 Business Daily 8.50 Witness 9.00 News 9.06 The Forum 9.50 More or Less 10.00 World Update 11.00 News 11.06 Outside Source 12.00 News 12.06pm Outlook 1.00 News 1.06 The Inquiry 1.30 Discovery 2.00 Newshour 3.00 News 3.06 Business Daily 3.23 News About Ebola 3.30 Sport Today 4.00 The Newsroom 4.30 The Documentary 5.00 The Newsroom 5.30 World Business Report 6.00 World Have Your Say 6.50 News About Ebola 7.00 The Newsroom 7.30 Click.

Technological news 8.00 News 8.06 The Inquiry 8.30 The Documentary.

Investigating global developments, issues and affairs 9.00 Newshour.

The stories behind the latest headlines 10.00 The Newsroom 10.30 World Business Report 11.00 News 11.06 Outlook 12.00 The Newsroom 12.20am Sports News 12.30 Click 1.00 News 1.06 Business Matters 2.00 The Newsroom 2.30 The Documentary 3.00 News 3.06 Outlook 4.00 Newsday 4.30-5.00 Click

6.30am Breakfast 9.00 Essential Classics 12.00 Composer of the Week: Lord Berners (r) 1.00pm News 1.02 Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert. Music by Mozart, Borodin and Schumann from the Martha Argerich Project in Switzerland 2.00 Afternoon on 3. Dvorák’s New World Symphony and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis from the Lucerne Festival 4.30 In Tune.

With Vladimir Ashkenazy, Septura, Jim Naughtie and Niamh Cusack 6.30 Composer of the Week: Lord Berners (r) 7.30 Live Radio 3 in Concert. The pianist Yevgeny Sudbin plays classics and Russian favourites 10.00 Free Thinking. Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Brian Cox and Christopher Frayling discuss Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey 10.45 The Essay: Decameron Nights — Ten Italian Indelicacies Remixed from Boccaccio. John Finnemore stars as a lovelorn knight in Robin Brooks’ remix 11.00 Late Junction. Music by the Velvet Underground and Jacquelyn Hynes 12.30am-6.30 Through the Night

the times.co.uk/announcements

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

45

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Games Bridge Andrew Robson

Word Watching Paul Dunn Dealer: North, Vulnerability: East-West Teams

♠J 8 4 ♥KQ 7 ♦A 6 ♣A K 8 4 2

♠9 5 2 ♠3 N ♥10 6 5 3 W E ♥A J 9 4 2 ♦9 5 4 ♦K 10 8 3 2 S ♣10 9 7 ♣Q 6 ♠ A KQ 10 7 6 ♥8 ♦Q J 7 ♣J 5 3 S

W

N

Contract: 6♠ , Opening Lead: ♦5

falls and the rest is history. If only low clubs appear under the aceking, you cash the king of hearts throwing the jack of clubs, ruff a club, cross to the ace of diamonds and discard your queen-jack of diamonds on dummy’s two long clubs. andrew.robson@thetimes.co.uk

Chess Raymond Keene Thud and blunder This week I am focusing on missed opportunities by great players in the wake of the recently concluded Carlsen-Anand World Championship, where failure to find the coup juste at the appropriate moment seemed to be the order of the day.

Nobody is immune from this syndrome and I have to admit that I have suffered from it myself on more than one occasion. The game I give today was one of my very first on the international circuit and achieved instant worldwide fame for me, though of the wrong type.

White: Hans Hecht Black: Raymond Keene Brunnen 1966 Caro-Kann Defence 1 e4 c6 2 d4 d5 3 Nc3 dxe4 4 Nxe4 Nd7 5 Bc4 Ngf6 6 Ng5 e6 7 Qe2 Nb6 This variation of the CaroKann Defence was very fashionable at the time.

8 Bd3 8 Bb3 is an alternative which I faced twice prior to this game; 8 ... h6 9 N5f3 a5 10 a4 (10 a3 a4 11 Ba2 Be7 12 Bf4 Nbd5 was N.LittlewoodKeene, Bognor Regis 1965) 10 ...

Be7 11 Be3 Nbd5 12 Ne5 Bb4+ 13 Kf1 0-0 and Black stood well in Lambshire-Keene, Richmond 1965.

8 ... h6 9 N5f3 c5 10 dxc5 Bxc5 11 Ne5 0-0 12 Ngf3 Nbd5 13 a3 a5 14 0-0 b6 15 c4 Ne7 16 Rd1 Qe8 17 Bd2 a4 18 Bc3 Nf5 19 g4 This is a very aggressive thrust but also weakens White’s king’s defences along the h1-a8 diagonal.

19 ... Nd6 20 g5 hxg5 21 Nxg5

Bb7 22 Bc2 g6 23 Nd7 Qxd7 24 Bxf6 Qc6 25 Rd5

________ árD D 4kD] àDbD DpD ] ß 0qhpGpD] ÞD gRD H ] ÝpDPD D D] Ü) D D D ] Û )BDQ) )] Ú$ D D I ] ÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈ

25 ... exd5 Accepting White’s sacrifice is a blunder which allows him a fantastic finish. The retreat 25 ... Ne8 completely refutes White’s concept and leaves Black winning.

26 Qh5 A brilliant move which I had completely overlooked.

26 ... Bxf2+ 27 Kxf2 Ne4+ 28 Nxe4 gxh5 29 Rg1+ Kh7 30 Nc5+ Black resigns After 30 ... Kh6 31 Bg7 is mate.

A great treat is in store for the London chess audience when the London Classic commences on December 10 and runs through to December 14. The players include two former world champions, Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik, the current world ranked number two, Fabiano Caruana, the exciting American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and Britain’s number one, Michael Adams.

Games can be followed in real time via the 2seeitlive link on the header of The Times twitter feed @times_chess. For regular updates direct to your twitter account just click on the “follow” button.

________ á D D DkD] Winning Move àD D gp0 ] ßpDbDph D] White to play. This position is from World Championship ÞDpD 1 H ] Alekhine-Euwe, (Game 16) Netherlands 1935. Ý ) D D !] Here Alekhine failed to live up to his ÜD H D ) ] reputation as a tactical wizard, playing the ÛPG DP) )] feeble 1 a3. What should he have done? ÚD d D I ] For up-to-the-minute information follow ÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈ my tweets on twitter.com/times_chess.

Solution right

Talman a. A mascot b. A holy book c. A cupboard Glance a. Frog spawn b. Glacial deposits c. Lead ore Chevet a. A feature of a church b. Goat’s milk yoghurt c. A small stripe

T2 CROSSWORD Times Quick CrosswordNo 6573 1

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No 6573 4

E

1♣ 1♥ 1♠ Pass 1NT(1) 2♦(2) 3♠ (3) Pass 4♦(4) Dbl (5) 4NT(6) Pass 5♥ (7) Pass 6♠ End (1) 15-17 balanced (many modern partnerships have adjusted their Notrump rebid ranges: 1NT 15-17, 2NT 18-19, 3NT gambling based on the suit opened. The 3NT rebid to show a balanced 19 is unwieldy).

(2) Bold at the adverse vulnerability facing a passing partner.

(3) Forcing in North-South’s methods.

(4) Ace-showing cue bid showing a slamsuitable hand agreeing partner’s spades.

(5) Prefers a diamond lead – setting up his king – than a heart.

(6) Pleased North can control diamonds, South launches into Roman Key Card Blackwood, spurred on by his excellent spades and singleton heart.

(7) Two of “five aces” (incl: ♠ K); no ♠ Q.

Sudoku No 6994

Fill the grid so that every column, every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9 Solutions tomorrow, yesterday’s solutions below

Killer No 4030 6

Moderate 7min

30

7

22

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7 24

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19 Polish dance (7) 22 Oriental (7) 23 Attractive (5) 24 Carry out (a command) (4) 25 Lively dance (6)

Across

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Ballroom dance (3-3) Pretence; bogus (4) Australian landmark (5) Great happiness (7) French dance (7) Lacking in originality (5) Upper classes (11) Happen (5)

Solution to Crossword 6572 RAMS R N T U EGO I S T E M H F L OUR E L Y E S K I MO T S P AR T NE N E M A L GA I E S T P YRENE

E V I I C T DO R I A R V NE I AN

I L I N A I S E A E G O RWA R S A I A I DR I F L A D I B L F L T E S

G T Y H U T E S

1 2 3 5 6 7 8 14

Held tightly (to) (5) Trembling (7) Frequent (a place) (5) Caribbean nation (5) Stately dance (6) Process of growth (11) — Mitty (6) Computer managing network resources (6) 15 (Of illness) deep-seated (7) 16 Spanish dance (6) 18 Hindu class (5) 20 Striped creature (5) 21 Indo-European language (5)

Check today’s answers by ringing 09067 577188. Calls cost 77p per minute.

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How you rate 15 words, average; 20, good; 25, very good; 30, excellent

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No 2257

Numbers are substituted for letters in the crossword grid. Below the grid is the key.

Some letters are solved. When you have completed your first word or phrase you will have the clues to more letters. Enter them in the key grid and the main grid and check the letters on the alphabet list as you complete them.

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Talman (a) A mascot, alternative spelling of talisman.

Glance (c) Another name for Galena or lead sulphide, the main ore of lead.

Chevet (a) A semicircular or polygonal east end of a church, especially in the French Gothic style.

Winning Move solution

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Word Watching answers

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Fill the grid so that every column, every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9. The digits within the cells joined by the dotted lines add up to the printed top left hand figure.

Within each dotted line ‘shape’, a digit CANNOT be repeated.

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Yesterday’s answers alum, ark, arm, arum, auk, auld, dal, dam, dark, dram, dual, dural, lad, lam, lard, lark, laud, luma, mad, mar, mark, marl, maul, mudlark, mudra, mural, rad, raku, ram, udal

8 4

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Polygon From these letters, make words of three or more letters, always including the central letter. Answers must be in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, excluding capitalised words, plurals, conjugated verbs (past tense etc), adverbs ending in LY, comparatives and superlatives.

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Down

1 Qh8+! Kxh8 2 Nxf7+ Kh7 3 Nxe5 leaves White two pawns ahead with an easy win.

People often wish me “Good luck” before a tournament. And they’re right. Even though all top events use duplicated boards (we all play the same deals – you do not win by holding better cards), luck is a vital component: over the years I’ve played well and come near bottom; and I’ve played poorly and won.

You might bid a pushy slam that makes on a successful finesse. Or avoid a marginal slam which goes down on a losing finesse. You might play a particular board against a pair who make their one howler of the session. Luck is vital.

The Allfrey team were undoubtedly lucky in the 2014 Premier League, which I’m pleased to say we won comfortably (we played okay too). Here was an iffy slam that teammates David BakhshiAndrew McIntosh brought home.

Declarer won West’s diamond lead with dummy’s ace (knowing from the bidding East held the king). He cashed two top spades from hand, then, leaving West’s third spade out (needing the jack of spades dummy entry), crossed to the ace-king of clubs.

Delighted to see East’s queen of clubs fall doubleton (on which the success of his slam depended), he led to his jack of clubs, then returned to the jack of spades to cash dummy’s two long clubs. Away went two of his three red cards and that was 12 tricks and slam made.

Declarer has more chances on an opening heart lead to the (queen and) ace and (say) a second heart. Best is to ruff the heart, draw trumps, then lead over to the ace-king of clubs. Here the queen

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 1

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Sudoku, Killer and Codeword solutions 3 8 2 7 5 4 9 1 6

6 1 4 9 8 3 2 7 5

5 7 9 2 6 1 4 3 8

8 9 5 1 7 2 3 6 4

No 6991

7 2 3 6 4 9 8 5 1

1 4 6 5 3 8 7 9 2

4 6 7 3 2 5 1 8 9

2 3 1 8 9 6 5 4 7

9 5 8 4 1 7 6 2 3

6 1 9 5 2 4 7 8 3

2 8 7 9 6 3 5 4 1

3 4 5 7 1 8 2 9 6

1 9 4 6 5 2 8 3 7

No 4028

5 7 2 3 8 1 4 6 9

8 6 3 4 7 9 1 2 5

9 2 8 1 3 7 6 5 4

7 3 6 2 4 5 9 1 8

4 5 1 8 9 6 3 7 2

T A X A T I O N B U C K

J C MA Z E P N D E P T R N S P E A AN L DRA OB T A E ANON K T

ROS S A F B L I B E L OOS E S A I E I V Y S E V E N C T E T WO H U R EQU E S T MA U G N ANGE R L D E R A O O R E N EW UMMY G N

No 2256

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times2 REX FEATURES

At 50, I’m adrift from mainstream culture Robert Crampton

T

here comes a moment in every man’s life when, having reached a certain age, surveying the world around him, he must admit that he no longer fully understands what on earth is going on. That after all these years he finally finds himself adrift of the mainstream.

The flow. The contemporary cultural current. His moorings have been slipped, his bearings lost . . . or whatever other antiquated nautical metaphors may come to mind.

By tradition the moment arrives when the man is watching the television news or reading the paper.

This moment — call it the Ukip moment, if you will, or perhaps the Meldrew moment — is classically signalled either by a bewildered shake of the head or a confused mutter of “Eee dear, whatever next?” Or, for the more melodramatically inclined, both. In rapid succession.

Having hit 50 last summer, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the arrival of my own version of the Ukip moment. This weekend it came. Quite a relief, I must say. The waiting is the hardest part.

A number of disparate events coalesced. First came Black Friday.

What the heck is Black Friday, I thought. I’ve never heard of it before . . .

Oh OK, it’s about spending money on stuff you don’t need. Hard on the heels of Black Friday came Cyber Monday.

What the heck is Cyber Monday, I thought. I’ve never heard of it before . . . Oh OK, it’s about spending money on more stuff you don’t need. Eee dear, whatever next?

Bracketed by the twin eee-dears of

Mordaunt and the asterisks

Black Friday and Cyber Monday came news of a flourishing social networking website called Bristlr.com.

Hang on, while I’ve just about got on board (intellectually if not as an active participant) with Grindr and Tinder (both, as I understand it, convenienceshagging apps for gays and straights respectively), I’m struggling with anything more niche. Such as (despite the admittedly superb name), this Bristlr business, which is aimed at putting together men with beards with women who enjoy stroking beards.

Bit specialist for me, that.

Then, apparently randomly but within the current context not randomly at all, I learn that sales of Christmas hampers majoring on quinoa (a grain but not a full-on cereal, and fashionably light on glutens) are proving hugely popular this year. I know what quinoa is; I even eat the stuff and to be fair it’s not at all bad (although it turns out that, discussing the news with a friend, I have no idea how to pronounce it correctly). And yet I can’t deny I’m still shocked that a significant number of people want to scoff the stuff at Christmas. I mean, taste-wise, even quinoa’s best mates would be forced to concede that Yorkshire puds swimming in gravy it ain’t.

Eeee dear.

All that said, here’s my point: while this Ukip moment may come to us all, what matters is how we react.

As always in life, there’s a choice.

We don’t have to go down the “stop the world I want to get off” route. We can instead respond along these lines: blimey, spraying money up the wall?

Casual beard-related how’s your father assignations? Unfamiliar sources of calorific intake? Granted it’s all a bit bizarre, it’s not really my thing, I can’t say I understand it, but hey, the world turns.

It used to be Boxing day sales (I never held with those either), a smart clean shave and roasties drowning in bread sauce. But now it’s not. And so what? It’s not the end of civilisation as we know it. It’s just the way things go.

And the same goes for Penny Mordaunt MP, currently in receipt of a medium-sized press and public kicking for making a marginally risqué speech in the Commons during which she repeated the word “cock”. A word so appalling,

apparently, that many newspapers feel the need to asterisk out its middle two letters.

While ostensibly speaking about poultry, Mordaunt was in fact fulfilling a dare proposed to her by some Royal Marines of her acquaintance to

It’s just feminism: get over it I can’t help feeling — this may seem a bit tangential, please bear with me — that many of these current anxieties, not just those fuelling the popularity of Ukip but those stoking other, infinitely more worrisome trends elsewhere — owe a great deal to male resentment over the historically increased confidence of women.

In India some saddo slaps a Bollywood actress because he thinks her skirt is too short. In Saudi Arabia the authorities get upset because a woman challenges the ban on females driving cars. In the US the teenage Obama girls are blasted for showing some leg and acting a bit arsey when their dad tries to involve them in an embarrassingly lame Thanksgiving turkey-pardoning photo op.

Big deal. Guys, if we’re as rational and sensible as we claim to be, we also have to say all of the above female behaviour is absolutely fine.

deploy the dread word in the hallowed chamber. A feat she managed to accomplish fully six times.

After much consideration, I can’t find it within myself to say anything other than good effort, that woman.

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Affluent neglect: when did you last see your kids?

A headmistress has accused rich parents of not talking to their children enough.

So are the well-off falling short, asks Helen Rumbelow

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potted at a Saturday hockey match in west London: a man cheering for the girl he had driven to the pitch. An endearing scene, timeless in its way, except that the man was the girl’s chauffeur and her parents were spiritually and physically elsewhere.

You wonder at the chauffeur’s motives: contractually he could have stayed in the car, but did he pity her?

Or feel a kind of adoptive father’s love, as if through the sheer man hours spent ferrying her between Kumon and ballet he had seen this little girl grow up in his rear-view mirror?

The problems of the rich have always been exposed through their servants and the servants are the ones sounding the alarm now. Admittedly Clarissa Farr is a high-ranking kind of governess, but as head of the St Paul’s girls school in west London she presides over one of the world’s epicentres of moneyed parenting. At the weekend Farr told The Times that her charges were falling victim to “affluent neglect”: family life wasn’t spent with family any more.

There’s a key scene in Downton Abbey in which a relative tries to comfort the lady of the house about her childcare responsibilities. “It’s only an hour a day,” he says, to which she rejoins wearily: “Yes, but every day?”

Since the second half of the 20th century we have scorned the aristocratic approach to childrearing, as research on attachments grew stronger. This was shown most memorably in the experiment to see whether an orphaned monkey would choose milk or the comfort of a bit of furry cloth. It chose the furry mother substitute and since then parents have stopped packing their kids off to board at four or to the nursery until

they were able to pass the port.

However, a new neglect is slipping into the lives of the ultra-rich — and the merely affluent — that would give the poorer among us the opportunity to gloat vengefully were it not a pressure felt, less strongly, on the lives of us all. Mary Bousted, general secretary of the union the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, told me that because of the increasing demands of work, all of us are affected by lack of time. “This is not a problem of working women, as the majority of families need two parents in work now,” she says. “But what is particular to affluence is the extracurricular curriculum. If your life is timetabled along someone else’s lines, that’s no preparation for independence.”

Rich children are no longer exiled in nurseries or dormitories but to the care of the Filipina weekday nanny, the Polish weekend nanny, the tutors and the tennis coach, plus the multiple iPads relied upon to fill in when human staff aren’t available. It’s the £100 cashmere beanie hats worn by a child whose head is empty of the basics of the adult world that are normally acquired by dinnertable chat.

Suniya Luthar, professor of psychology at Columbia University, is the foremost researcher on the vulnerabilities of rich kids, which she says boil down to two causes: “literal and emotional isolation” from parents combined with a parental pressure to succeed. They are outsourcing the parental contract, but as any outsourcing business knows, a profit is expected on that investment.

Luthar has conducted three major studies comparing children from the poorest neighbourhoods with those from the richest and found that both

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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times2 GETTY IMAGES

Neglectful parenting: take the test

By Shaun Phillips Early learning meant . . . a) Reading old Janet and John books with our toddler b) Reading the Economist to our toddler c) Reading the riot act to our toddler d) You’ll have to ask his nanny about that sort of thing Your attitude to homework is best summed up by . . . a) It’s our child’s homework, but we are always on hand to help b) He was interested in physics, so we took him to CERN c) Do kids still do homework? d) You’ll have to ask his Kumon teacher about that sort of thing Every day at the school gates . . . a) I meet Daisy and we walk home together discussing the school day b) I pick up Daisy in the Mercedes, and we listen to audio books c) I ask for spare change d) I warn the nanny not to get another parking ticket My participation in my child’s school could be summed up by the word . . . a) Whole-hearted b) Dutiful c) Negligible d) Financial spent the same — tiny — amounts of time with parents, but the richer children suffered far more from anxiety, depression and drug and alcohol misuse. Especially vulnerable were the richest teenage girls.

“Although in no way detracting from the formidable challenges faced by the poor,” Luthar wrote in one of her studies, “it is vital that psychologists correct their longstanding lack of concern with the isolation unique to affluence. No child should want for either food or affection; at the same time it is worth remembering that, forced to choose, baby monkeys preferred the latter.”

So, for instance, a prep school teacher told me that her children mirrored exactly the children she had taught in a deprived state school just a few miles across London. Both saw their parents infrequently and had problems speaking enough English (the rich children because they spend so much time with Filipina nannies with limited vocabulary): “A lot of the children I work with are pretty much left to their own devices with nannies that don’t talk to them or out at clubs.”

A tutor who works the west London circuit told me that he deals with mothers on the phone but does not meet them — the mother has a managerial role organising her child’s

The nanny provides tea but does not sit down with the children schedule, often owing to her experience in a previous or current high-flying career. “There will always be a nanny or housekeeper, so they let you in and you just go upstairs to find the children and start. It feels very Downton: staff dealing with staff,” he said. In a nation of increasingly dualearning households only two thirds of children eat a main meal with their parents at least three times a week.

Among the super-rich that figure is lower. The nanny provides tea but does not sit down to eat with the kids.

If the mother does not work she may be getting ready for a social event, usually charity-related.

I call up the anonymous author of the Notting Hill Yummy Mummy blog nottinghillmummy.com, whose latest post begins: “In West London, the motto of the pushy mummy brigade is ‘Good is not good enough, only excellence will do,’ . . . There is now a collective social anxiety, bordering on hysteria.” She tells me: “My nanny

used to work for a Russian who didn’t work but preferred getting her nails done with her friends to childcare.

That’s less common. It’s usually lots of time-poor working parents who are listening to Sheryl Sandberg and leaning in, but that means travelling three days of the week or not getting home until after 8pm. So I’ve heard it multiple times: mums finally getting home and saying, ‘Give mummy a hug’ and the little child hugs the nanny.

“When both parents work so hard in the week, it is quite common to have a weekend nanny. They’ll say, ‘It’s important as it’s the only time I get with my husband.’ Or in one family I know the parents go away one weekend a month, just the two of them. That’s not something most of us could afford, but perhaps we’re lucky in that.”

Things have moved on from Downton: now quality time spent with children is in the morning not the evening. After school there is a flurry of activities until bed, but the morning school run is spent with a parent who is either in the back of the chauffeured car or in the front of the Land Rover.

Working and non-working mothers alike are still expected to drop their children off at the school gate. It’s not much, but it is a glimmer of hope for the modern family, who meet a new dawn, briefly, together.

Is that Daddy picking the children up or the chauffeur? Below left: St Paul’s Girls’ School, whose head coined the term ‘affluent neglect’

On Saturday morning . . . a) I never miss watching Ritchie play football b) I never miss watching Richard play rugby, although sometimes I spend half the match on a call to Beijing c) Saturday morning? I always miss Saturday morning d) The chauffeur never misses Richard play rugby. If he did, he would be fired While the children eat dinner you . . . a) Chat with them about the day’s events, while sitting around the kitchen table b) Chat with them about world events, even if it’s on Skype from New York c) Chat with them about X Factor, while sitting on the sofa d) Implore them not to annoy the baby-sitter, before you go off to have dinner at a posh restaurant How did you answer?

Mostly As. You’re probably not loaded; you’re definitely not neglectful Mostly Bs. You’re affluent but not neglectful Mostly Cs. You’re not affluent but you may be on first-name terms with a social worker Mostly Ds. Affluent neglect? The term was invented for you

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

times2

‘They would probably be killed if they said they wanted to go home’ Melanie Smith tracks the women who want to marry into Isis. The 22-year-old King’s College researcher tells Stefanie Marsh why so many British girls are desperate to become jihadi brides

I

n a bedroom in Birmingham, a well-educated 15-year-old girl logs on to her computer and leaves another hopeful message for Omar Yilmaz: “You have beautiful eyes,” this one reads.

“I just want to be with you.”

Compared with the boys she knows at home, Yilmaz — a soldier in the Dutch army not long ago, now living in Syria — is a man of action and strong moral character. The girl is drawn by his fervour, his notoriety, his astonishing good looks and the pictures he often posts on the internet of stray kittens nestled in the crook of his machine gun. She has read — and disregarded — the reports of mass rapes and sex slavery perpetrated by jihadis against Christian women in Syria.

When news broke that another girl — 19-year-old “Aicha”, a Catholic — had met Yilmaz online, converted, then run off to Syria to marry him, she felt, frankly, jealous. In some ways it’s not so shocking: a sheltered teenage girl’s infatuation with a famous bad boy. She comes from a strict family. Her parents are convinced she will go to medical school and become a doctor. All she thinks about is running away from England to become a jihadi bride.

In another room, in London, a woman is watching the girl. She’s on her own computer, on the website Ask.fm where Yilmaz and other Islamic State (Isis) fighters can often be found updating the world on their jihadist thoughts and activities. Today Yilmaz has about 2,000 messages; so many that when she downloads them, Melanie Smith’s laptop crashes. It never fails to stun, amuse or trouble her — the overriding content of these messages to jihadis from young western girls: “I’d say 90 per cent of the Ask.fm messages to these jihadi men are marriage proposals. It’s: ‘You’re so attractive. Will you marry me if I come to Syria?’ ” Melanie Smith is 22, the same age as Khadijah Dare, a London woman who arranged to marry an Isis fighter via Facebook, moved to Syria in 2012 to wed him and now posts photographs of her four-year-old son holding an AK-47 rifle. She is two years older than Aqsa Mahmood, the radiography degree drop-out from Glasgow who was reported missing by her parents a year ago, then surfaced in February, also in Syria, having married an Isis fighter and become one of the group’s most hardline internet activists under a new name, Umm Layth. She is six years older than Salma and Zahra Halane, the twins from Manchester — 28 GCSEs between them — who left their family home in the middle of the night in July for Syria, via a flight to Turkey. Smith’s job is to track them.

We arrange to meet off the Strand, in London, in a café around the corner

from King’s College International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, the think-tank Smith joined in January fresh from a master’s in geopolitics, territory and security.

In June this year Isis fighters first declared a new “Islamic caliphate” in the region that straddles Syria and Iraq. It is thought that 1,000 men from Britain joined their ranks. “I think,” says Smith, “that’s why so many women took up the call over the summer. Because the declaration said: ‘We need doctors, lawyers, the pillars of foundation for a new state, but above all, women. No women with skills. Just men with skills. And women — separately.’ ” As the terrorist group has gained more land, girls and women — they need to be under 26, unmarried and pretty, their potential husbands will emphasise when quizzed on such matters on the internet — have become a key element of Islamic State building. Their online activism is prolific, ardent, bloodthirsty and confusing: why would an educated western woman want to travel to Syria, marry a man she has never met and live under Sharia in a mongrel state where healthcare is rudimentary and where women are subordinated to and controlled by men? The dream of every jihadi-wife wannabe, as articulated in her secret Facebook account, is: “I can’t wait to have my own jihadi baby.”

“When I started we had a database of about 515 male foreign fighters which we researched through social media,” explains Smith. “We’re now hoping to create the same thing, but for women — women that we know of who have gone to live in the Islamic State.” She’s in direct contact with 53 girls and women from Europe who have either attempted to go to Syria

British women who joined the jihadists: Khadijah Dare, above, and Aqsa Mahmood, left, who tweets under the name Umm Layth

or who have made it there; 11 of them are British. “Seven operate and live together and are all married to husbands who fight together.” They swap recipes online (food for bulking up their wartorn husbands), garland their tweets with emojis, encourage other girls to come out to Syria and chastise men who haven’t done so as unislamic “kuffar cowards”.

Umm Layth runs a blog that’s 600 pages long and posts messages up to 200 times a day. She’s become the go-to jihadi bride for advice on what you’ll need to bring if you go out there — warm clothes and a lifetime’s supply of Dairy Milk (hair straighteners and deodorant are available). Like many of her British “sisters” she has a fanatic’s zeal that makes her an outstanding enforcer of the moral standards of other women in the fledgeling state she is attempting to help create.

Umm Layth is one of several British women who are thought to now form

One said: ‘I’m a fulltime mum.’

The reply: ‘Just bring your kids’

a police force in Raqqa, making sure that the wrists of other women are covered at all times that they appear in public, as she does in her own selfies, covered in a niqab that obscures even her eyes. She dislikes Twitter as a social medium because of the “free mixing”.

She posts her favourite hadiths in capitals: “THE BEST OF WOMEN ARE THOSE WHO DO NOT SEE THE MEN AND WHO ARE NOT SEEN BY MEN.” But Smith detects in her messaging a change of tone: “The Twitter account that she used to have just didn’t match up with her blog. She was very much making contact with other women out there and posting photos of them together and saying, ‘I’m going to make you this for dinner, isn’t it going to be great?’ And yet the blog is very formal and devout — she seemed a lot older. And you have to wonder: how much control does someone have?” It’s always possible that behind any woman blogging on behalf of Isis is a man with a gun.

Much as we’d like to regard them as victims, however, Smith tells me that there are indications that British women are involved in running brothels for Isis fighters, a not unbelievable notion when you look at the comment that another British female jihadi, Umm Farriss, wrote recently on social media complaining that a sex slave had dared to look her in the eye. “I wish I did it,” is how another young woman responded when she was asked on social media about the beheading by Isis men of the Israeli-American journalist Steven Sotloff. “Boom Boom Day” is how a friend of hers refers to September 11.

A tweet on the suspended Twitter account of an unidentified female friend and associate of Layth’s reads: “Drove passed the body of the man who was crucified in manbij for raping a 70 year old. Perks of living under the shade of Shariah.”

Eleven British jihadi brides doesn’t sound like many, I say. “There must be hundreds of girls wanting to go across,” says Smith. “Hundreds. I come across girls every day who say, ‘I’m so desperate to go over there but it’s just so hard for me.’ I saw someone say this morning, ‘I want to come but I’m a full-time mum.’ And someone said, ‘Just bring your kids.’ The proportion of girls who eventually make the transition from wanting to go to physically going is tiny. But there are so many people that want to go. And it’s fairly overwhelming.”

Tighter border controls mean that the journey to becoming a jihadi bride is trickier now than it was over the summer, but the principle is the same: get to Turkey, either by flying there direct or fly first to Amsterdam or Spain then fly to Turkey, and get a bus to the border where your fixer will

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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times2

COVER: POSED BY MODEL. PETER DAZELEY/GETTY IMAGES. BELOW: TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MIKAEL BUCK, REX FEATURES

pick you up, hide you in his truck and drive the narrow and very dangerous route through contested territory to Raqqa.

Finding a fixer is difficult but getting married is a cinch: “The pairing is very quick,” says Smith. “I was talking to a girl on Ask.fm and asked her whether there was a jihadi Tinder.

She told me there is a thing called Jihad Matchmaker that works on Twitter: you follow it, it follows you back, you send a picture of yourself with your veil and the men choose from hundreds of headshots.” Another girl Smith spoke to told her: “A lot of the time they’ll do a parade. They’ll get a male foreign fighter in a room and the girls will all walk up and down covered and the fighter will then get the opportunity to look at their face and he will choose one.” Prospective wives are advised by female jihadis to “bring something nice to wear because there aren’t any shops left that sell wedding outfits”.

In the press these women are often referred to as “female fighters”, but that is a misnomer, Smith says. “It’s very much a domestic housewife role,” at best. “It’s not much of a life. You also have to wonder — in a few years’ time, these women who are being impregnated: what about their kids and the kids they bring with them?

And the children of the Yazidi women being used as sex slaves. Is the idea that these women and their daughters are going to be living in a permanent special-purpose ghetto? Are there going to be women that are going to be abused in the same way for generations?”

Many women are lured to jihad for humanitarian reasons, but it’s notable, says Smith, how much more hardline than the men they can become once they leave for Syria. “On Monday, the women were writing messages like ‘Thank God those soldiers have been beheaded.’ ” This morning, “a girl had tweeted a picture of Adolf Hitler with

Jihadi bride expert Melanie Smith. Above right: Samra Kesinovic, an Austrian teenager who joined Isis in Syria

Once there you aren’t supposed to leave.

It’s the rest of your life

the words, ‘I could have extinguished every Jew in Europe but I left them so you would be able to do it for me.’ This was a British woman.”

Islamic State is a religious quest, supposedly, but it’s sometimes easier to understand the women who want to join it if you think of it — simply — as an extreme, authoritarian, “revolutionary” cult or sect populated by a good many stragglers, petty criminals, drop-outs and fugitives from unhappy or constricted childhoods and ruled over with an iron fist by a charismatic, brutal man. Think of the Manson Family or Jonestown.

The recruits of Isis are often dropouts or ex-criminals. Often they are just malleable or lost or looking for a cause. For women, Smith says, the lure is independence. “There may be pressure from parents: you should study for your A levels so you can go to university so you can be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer.

‘No. Don’t want to do it.’ That’s classic.

I remember as a teenager myself: ‘No, I don’t want to do any work. I’m too cool for that.’ There’s a lot of that kind of mentality. It’s laziness, really.

“And they’re bored with their life here. They say they have more freedom in IS: they see eight women living in a house in Raqqa who all get on famously and they tweet each other all the time. That’s something they haven’t had, the sense of community and independence. A lot of them could be pissed off with their parents for whatever reason: ‘I’m going to run away and go on an amazing adventure.’ ” What is the amazing adventure likely to look like once they get to Syria? “We can only speculate,” says Smith, “but obviously the reality is not that great.” Around 100 Isis men, originally from the UK, have returned from Syria citing injuries but unless you’re Aicha, who last week was rescued by her mother after Yilmaz married another woman and Aicha found herself in what appeared to be frightening circumstances, returning home will not be an option for women.

“Men will say: ‘Everything was great

but it didn’t work out.’ It’s a sense of bravado that the women don’t have,” says Smith. Take Sabina Selimovic, 15, and Samra Kesinovic, 17, who left Austria for Syria in April. In October reports surfaced that both girls wanted out. Shortly afterwards, Selimovic gave a Paris Match interview dismissing the claims. Austrian authorities believe she was ordered to do so. In another case, the brother of a 15-year-old French girl, Nora el-Bathy, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, travelled to Syria to bring her home but was blocked by her fixer. The brother said her face looked yellow and that she was being held in a house against her will with other women and girls. “The people around you and the entire state in which you live would probably kill you if you said you wanted to go home openly,” says Smith. “Once you’re there you’re not supposed to leave. It’s the rest of your life.”

The young girls in their bedrooms in Birmingham — don’t they worry about what will happen to them if they leave for Syria? “They want to go so badly and they believe with complete conviction that’s the path.

Isis thinks there is no such thing as rape, so I think these women accept it as their due.”

There are just two so-called “reverts” — converts to Islam — among the jihadi brides that Smith is monitoring. Does she think there will be more in the future? “If someone’s staying in their bedroom, hates their life, hates their parents and wants to do something drastic that is one option now that never used to exist.”

She adds that: “In your very Muslim community, in whichever UK city, it’s considered desirable and your obligation to Islam: someone breaks out of the group and moves to Syria and tells their friends what a great time they’re having and their friends will move over. We have a lot of girls in the database who have been to school together but have gone at different times.”

It’s an ever-widening circle, she says, “by association: ‘Oh, the girl five years above me made it to Syria.’ ”

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You got through Cyber Monday — prepare yourself for Viral Tuesday Dr Mark Porter

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

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ou may have survived Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but today you face the biggest threat of all: Viral Tuesday. You are more likely to pick up a viral infection over the next 24 hours than at any other time of year, and the ensuing cough, cold or bout of flu is going to ruin the build-up to your festive season.

OK, so I made that up. Like all PR hype, though, Viral Tuesday touches a nerve as we are all worried about catching other people’s germs running up to Christmas and there is a whole industry catering to that paranoia.

Many supplements supposedly “boost” our immune systems and protect against viral invaders but can you really protect against colds and flu?

Vitamin C and the herb echinacea are two of the most popular and there have been numerous studies into the efficacy of both, with mixed results. A review carried out by the Cochrane Collaboration suggests that vitamin C (in doses of 200mg or more a day) has no protective effect on your chances of catching a cold but there are exceptions to the rule — five of the trials reviewed by Cochrane did show some benefit in people subjected to extreme physical stress (such as marathon runners and cross-country skiers). In this small group taking regular vitamin C halved the chances of catching a cold.

Echinacea is claimed to fight viruses through a combination of direct antiviral properties and the ability to boost the body’s natural defences by stimulating the immune system. Yet once again, studies suggest it fails to live up to the hype. The most striking evidence for its benefits comes from research at the Common Cold Centre in Cardiff, which showed that healthy volunteers taking echinacea were less likely to get colds than those on placebo, and required less medication to ease their symptoms if they did.

So far, so good. Yet while the benefits were statistically significant, that doesn’t mean they translate into useful advantage outside the lab. Or, to put it another way, the research suggests that people taking echinacea will, on average, have cold symptoms for around two days over a fourmonth period, while a group taking nothing can expect to be sneezing and sniffing for about 12-18 hours longer.

You pays your money and takes your choice, but I wouldn’t bother with either echinacea or vitamin C. In practice, the best way to avoid the viruses is to steer clear of people who

QA Why don’t doctors and pharmacists do more to warn women about the interaction between antibiotics and oral contraceptives? My daughter is pregnant despite taking the Pill, having recently been prescribed antibiotics for an infected cut.

It has proved a happy accident, but it could have been very different.

JOE MCLAREN

are obviously infected, to avoid touching surfaces touched by lots of others, and to wash your hands frequently (in many cases, rather than being breathed in, the viruses gain entry through the eyes, nose or mouth via contaminated fingers).

Another less practical option is to leave the country and spend the cold season in hotter climes where the viruses are less prevalent. If you choose to, be careful on the flight.

There isn’t much you can do about breathing the same air as hundreds of other passengers, but where you sit and what you touch might make a difference. Research by an American microbiologist, who took swabs from surfaces throughout a number of different planes, suggests window seats are less hazardous than aisle ones from a viral point of view. And don’t go to the loo, or rifle through the magazines in the pockets in front of you, as both are likely to be heavily contaminated with viruses.

Preventing flu is easier than avoiding colds. The annual flu jab offers 70-80 per cent protection against the strains most likely to cause problems over the next six months, so if you are concerned visit www.nhs.uk to find out if you are eligible. Be warned: an appointment with your GP or practice nurse to get the jab is likely to involve sitting in a waiting-room full of other people, some of whom will be shedding the very viruses you are trying to avoid.

If you do get a cold . . .

0 Take paracetamol or ibuprofen for headache/“fluey” symptoms 0 Use a decongestant nasal spray for a blocked nose. Try to limit use as, paradoxically, if taken for too long they can perpetuate the problem 0 There is no need to see your GP. We can’t cure colds. Antibiotics don’t help. And you will just pass it on to everyone else, including your doctor

We don’t warn women these days because we now know there isn’t a significant interaction between the two — taking antibiotics (at least the more common types used by your GP) won’t prevent oral contraceptives from working, and there is no need to take additional precautions.

There are, though, lots of other things that can go wrong. Despite having a failure rate of less than 1 per cent in clinical trials, in the real world the Pill is nowhere near as

effective due to people forgetting to take it, or not absorbing it properly due to illness.

I always caution my patients that for every 20 young women on the Pill, at least one should expect to become pregnant every year. This is the main reason doctors are so keen on longer-acting contraceptives such as implants which can’t be forgotten, or vomited back up.

If you have a health problem, email drmarkporter @thetimes.co.uk

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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body&soul

Are you suffering from ‘gym face’?

GARY MILLER/FILMMAGIC

Over-exercising in mid-life can ruin your looks.

To fix this some resort to cosmetic procedures, says Peta Bee

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each a certain age and there comes a tipping point with weight loss that begins to make you wonder if it’s all worthwhile. Start to work out more from your late thirties and you’ll see the fat melt away from your middle-age spread, but also from the place that you least want to lose any plumpness: your face.

As your body looks more youthful, you pay the price of drawn features, sunken cheeks and hollow eyes. It’s a phenomenon familiar to women, some of whom will switch the ratio of their fitness regimen to avoid it. Throwing yourself into triathlons, cycling and ultra-endurance challenges can backfire when you look in the mirror, and the realisation of that has lead to a sharp rise in treatment for what experts are calling “gym face”.

Cosmetic surgeons in the UK say that alongside Botox, dermal fillers are the most popular, designed to fill any deep crevices in the skin and increase lost volume. The market, worth £2.6 billion in 2010, is projected to rise to £3.6 billion by 2015 with clinics reporting a 20 per cent increase in the number of men receiving dermal fillers over the past two years.

Many who choose to go under the needle share a new-found love of extreme fitness. Endurance activities are the main culprit, partly because they cause dramatic weight loss but also inflict the kind of prolonged wear and tear that exacerbates a drop in skin’s youthful plumpness.

As they reach their mid-thirties, both men and women are prone to subcutaneous fat loss in their faces and it’s accelerated by exercise.

“It’s something that has become common in people who cycle, row or run a lot,” says Dr Tracy Mountford, director of The Cosmetic Skin Clinic in Harley Street and Buckinghamshire.

“I see men and women exercisers mainly for facial-volume loss, particularly in the cheek area, which makes them look prematurely aged. When you try to keep body fat low there’s an unfortunate trade-off — and it’s that the face will invariably suffer.”

The phenomenon has led growing numbers of women to abandon the excessive back-toback cardio and weights workouts that led to the sinewy and gaunt look that Madonna flaunted a decade ago. Sylvia Denton, 44, from Henley-onThames says she stopped running specifically because it left her with “gym face”. “I took

Gym faces?

Matthew McConaughey and, below, from left, Madonna and Jake Gyllenhaal it up three years ago and lost a lot of weight, which was the aim, but I became wiry and scrawny,” she says. “A girlfriend told me straight that it had aged me and although I loved running I swapped it for Pilates, weights and an HIT session with a trainer.” She says that she is typical of many who realise that “being outdoors for hours, pounding or pedalling is just not going to leave you looking fresh-faced”.

Miles Berry, a consultant surgeon for Cosmetic Surgery Partners in London, says he sees it all the time among colleagues who throw themselves into mid-life endurance challenges. “One surgeon I know lost three st stone after taking up cy cycling. He now has a great body but looks ga gaunt. You can always te tell hardcore exercisers when they first walk in because they generally look older than they should.”

Women may have the double whammy of the hormonal desert of the menopause (which causes facial muscles to slacken), but men have their own skin issues too. “The shape of a man’s face can really change when the fat pads positioned above and below the cheekbones diminish with age and excessive exercise,” says Dr Patrick Bowler, medical director of the Courthouse Clinics. “The face can become squarer, creating the dreaded jowls that are very ageing.” Thinning lips are another ageing sign that men are addressing.

Celebrities aren’t immune either, as yo-yo workout and diet plans to lose weight for roles take their toll. When Matthew McConaughey, 45, lost weight for Dallas Buyers Club, it showed nowhere more starkly than on his face. Jake Gyllenhaal, 33, looked decades older when his cheekbones protruded after he lost 25lb last year to play a reporter in Nightcrawler (neither McConaughey nor Gyllenhaal have opted for cosmetic surgery).

Regaining weight can sometimes restore a little cheek-plumpness, but as Bowler says, “you can’t choose

where you gain weight and the face is often the last place to show it”.

In Hollywood, many stars over 40 have a personal dermatologist.

Manhattan-based Dr David Colbert says that 25 per cent of his celebrityloaded client list is male. “What men don’t want is to lose their masculine features,” Mountford says. “With something like a filler you can restore volume to the mid-face so that it softens the harshness of their face and makes them look less tired and worn.

That’s the look men are after now.”

It’s exactly the effect that Phil Walker, 40, from Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire, hoped for. Describing himself as the last person you would expect to volunteer for cosmetic enhancement, the father of two was incredibly unfit and a smoker until a few years ago when, in his thirties, he took up jujitsu and started lifting weights. What he hadn’t anticipated was friends remarking that he was looking older. “It was fine to start with, but I got seriously into the jujitsu and it’s a very vigorous martial art that burns shed-loads of calories. I looked muscular and well-built, but ancient as all the exercise left me drawn.” The gauntness persisted when injury forced him to cut down on exercise.

As is often the case, it was his other half who suggested he opt for the needle. “She watches a lot of those body makeover programmes and suggested that I have a dermal filler,” says Walker, who is a manager for an energy company. After a consultation at a cosmetic clinic, he opted for a six-month course of Sculptra, a “facial injectable” that works by stimulating the growth of the skin’s natural collagen. “I had it in my jaws, across my temple and in my cheeks,” he says. “It wasn’t immediately noticeable, but I had the final lot in October and everyone is commenting on how healthy I look.

I feel better about myself in the knowledge that I can keep training but not look 90 as a result.”

Walker told some of his close friends about the injections and was surprised when they admitted that they’d had Botox. In general, though, men are more coy in admitting to a little aesthetic help. “They like to keep quiet about it,” Bowler says. “Subtlety is key.”

He predicts increasing demand as people keep more active in their later years. Surgeons already perform laser facial skin resurfacing on those who have spent years playing golf or skiing without sunblock. “With any fillers, the key is to be cautious,” Berry says.

“In the wrong hands an injectable can leave a man looking very feminine with too high cheekbones and full lips, while women just look hamstercheeked. You need a good surgeon.”

There’s another catch. As with grey roots and a six-pack, warding off gym face requires upkeep and maintenance.

It’s not a one-off job. Fillers typically last about a year, after which the choice is to go back to the surgeon or hang up the Nike Flyknits. It’s increasingly likely to be the former.

“People are realising that a youthful appearance helps them in their careers and if they start dating after divorce,” Bowler says. “They can have it all — the super-toned body and a face that doesn’t look like a mismatch.”

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

arts

Hooray and up she rises: the hot young director taking on Treasure Island Polly Findlay tells Alex O’Connell why she has turned the hero of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic into a heroine for the National’s Christmas show

W

hether it’s nominative determinism or happy coincidence, a Polly putting on Treasure Island at the National Theatre was always going to provide fodder for humorists. “The jokes have only just started,” says Polly Findlay, the director of the theatre’s Christmas family show. “I’m so glad I got to week four of rehearsals. Now I feel as though I’m back at school,” she says.

It’s a tribute to Findlay that she hasn’t ditched the pesky parrot by now. Rather, the audiences will see a bird who originated not on a South Sea island but in Stoke Newington, north London. The human Polly is keeping schtum on details (“it’s a surprise”) and whether it will utter the dreaded words, “Pretty Polly.”

Findlay, 32, is telling me about her latest £250,000 project, which will turn the entire Olivier Theatre into a ship, as we sit in the crow’s nest of the National — a tiny, triangular cubbyhole with a huge glass window that looks out to a choppy sea — well, the River Thames, but one can dream.

Findlay, dressed in working clothes of jeans and sweater, has rushed in from rehearsals and is balancing a canteen lunch on her lap while

enthusing about the new adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic coming-of-age story. It’s by Bryony Lavery, the accomplished playwright who scored a Tony nomination for her 1998 play, Frozen. They have just finalised the working script and Findlay says it has Lavery’s characteristic wit and humour.

The National Theatre had wanted to produce Treasure Island for some time and the duo were brought on board in November 2013. “It’s very timely and it’s a deeply interesting book from a moral point of view,” says Findlay, playing with her mushy peas. “There seems to be a real ambiguity about treasure and who deserves it, who has earned what and the absolute obsession with financial security. We have been keen to try to find the seed of real-life danger that runs through the story rather than reverting to a default panto-pirate mode.”

To smell the fear, Findlay watched lots of Spielberg films as well as Paul Greengrass’s thriller about modernday Somali piracy, Captain Phillips. “It is a fiendishly difficult book to adapt,” she says. “I have been surprised that it is such a popular theatrical adaptation in a way because it was written as a serial novel. Some weeks Stevenson was just filling in and writing instalments just to get his pay cheque.

So there are all kinds of potentially unhelpful cliffhangers that were just at

Stephanie Street in Polly Findlay’s production of Nightwatchman

the end of this week’s episode, which don’t actually work dramatically. The business of trying to take on that sprawling structure while keeping the spirit of Stevenson is a challenge.”

Findlay is still anchoring the play in the 19th century — although the year is non-specific — and the metaphor at the core is of a girl stepping away from the solid ground of her childhood to navigate by herself and “learning to sail the ship as metaphor for working out how to work out what you feel is important in the world.”

Yes, you read right — a girl. Jim, the ship’s boy, is female.

“Stevenson made a point when he published the book of saying that it was a story ‘for boys only’ and that he wasn’t interested in girls being interested in his story,” says Findlay matter-of-factly.

“The population of the book is “T entirely male. There is one woman in it — Jim’s mother who wo ruins things by fainting — and we ru just felt that wasn’t appropriate for a show that we wanted all kids to come to and enjoy. [Our] Jim Hawkins is absolutely as the character is in the book: bright, forward-thinking, clever, up for adventure, but is just called Jimima because her grandmother can’t spell.”

Findlay insists that she is not interested in the “gender

perspective” and that she just wanted to make it democratic. I wonder how being a girl affects ship life. “Not at all,” she says. “There were female pirates so that was very authentic. The idea that there were ships with no women on is just perpetuating another version of the myth.”

With a pesky parrot and an unwieldy story it must help that the cast are all adult — unlike in last year’s family show Emil and the Detectives. Patsy Ferran, who plays Jim, is fresh out of Rada. Long John Silver is played by Arthur Darvill, who played the reverend in Broadchurch and the companion

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER DAVID BEBBER

Jodie Whittaker and Christopher Eccleston in Sophocles’ Antigone

to Matt Smith’s Time Lord in Doctor Who. Findlay and the designer Lizzie Clachan wanted to avoid cliché. “So we have no sand, no palm trees, no Bristol accents — apart from one actor who is from Bristol so he is allowed — and we have tried to think about the story as something that has happened in the designer’s imagination.” The auditorium will become a planetarium (“so she [Jim] can learn to navigate by deciphering the stars above the audience’s heads”) and the story will be fuelled by sea shanties written by John Tams. “It starts with Jimima in the future looking back to being a little girl. So the whole story has the Instagram filter of her memory, so we felt we could make it madder, like a

cross between Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman,” says Findlay.

I don’t imagine it will be long before the next generation talk about their own productions being “a bit Polly Findlay”. Nicholas Hytner, the outgoing artistic director of the National Theatre, has described her as “fiercely intelligent” andFindlayy is already more experienced and accomplished than many older directors and has been in the business since she was a child.

She grew up in Wandsworth, southwest London. Her mother was a charity worker and her father a legal journalist. They encouraged her love of the theatre and she became a child actor, performing with the RSC aged 12, and

Director Polly Findlay.

Below: Richard Wilson in Krapp’s Last Tape

worked consistently until she went to Oxford University. It was there that Findlay realised that directing was more her bag and on leaving she trained at the National as an assistant director and hasn’t looked back — supported by Hytner.

In 2011 she directed Prasanna Puwanarajah’s Nightwatchman as part of the NT’s Double Feature season and moved on to Sophocles’ Antigone with Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker in 2012 at the Olivier when she was just 30. More recently she put on the first foreign language version of War Horse in Berlin (she had to learn German from scratch) and Krapp’s Last Tape with Richard Wilson at the Crucible in Sheffield this summer. Of her recent version of Arden of Faversham for the RSC, The Times’ critic wrote: “Findlay loves gore . . .

Titus Andronicus Andr eat your heart out.”

It should ould stand her in good stead for this pirat pirate-fest. So should another previous ious job: directing the stage show ow of illusionist Derren Brown’s Svengali tour. “I am so interested Sveng in magic,” she says. So we can expect frightening illusions (from expec Chris Fisher, not Brown) all root oted in nightmare, to get into Jim’ m’s mindset. The play has a tenplus age recommendation. “The story in the book is extraordinarily violent, ent,” says Findlay, with some relish.

Would you bring a seven-year-old?

“Oh absolutely. We have chosen to put a ten-plus certificate on it because that seems like a responsible thing to do.

It’s not a 18 certificate! There will be some moments of sword fighting and proper blood and guts, but it is absolutely not the Tarantino version,” she laughs.

After Treasure Island Findlay is directing The Merchant of Venice at the RSC (“I feel the direction the company is going in is more exciting now”) and then to Aarhus in Denmark for Strindberg’s Mies Julie “in Danish”, she whispers. “I tried to learn German for War Horse. I need to find a window to do that with Danish.”

When she is not being posted afar Findlay lives in London and Berlin (her partner is based in Germany). She confirms that she did have a discussion for the top job at the Almeida (which eventually went to Rupert Goold) but it can only be a matter of time before Findlay gets her own train set to play with. Not a

We have no sand, no palm trees and no Bristol accents priority, she says, with great cool: “I am having a lovely time freelancing.”

With Josie Rourke running the Donmar, Vicky Featherstone the Royal Court and Sarah Frankcom the Royal Exchange, I wonder whether she feels women have reached equality in executive positions in British theatre. Findlay sighs politely. “We still end up using the word female director; we wouldn’t if we were lawyers or dentists,” she says, ticking me off, with some charm. “We have more women in executive positions than most other industries but somehow the desire to talk about the people doing those jobs is there and that’s contradictory.

“The work that Josie and all that gang have done to set this wonderful new norm — all power to them! They have done it — and the best tribute is to stop talking about it. I think.” Aye aye, captain!

Treasure Island, Olivier Theatre, from Dec 10 to Apr 8, 2015. National Theatre Live: Treasure Island will be broadcast to cinemas on Jan 22, 7pm

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The Times: first for football

Sport

Watch all tonight’s Premier League goals on your smartphone moments after the ball hits the net On The Times phone app or via the Times Sport app

Retirement of Mania is wake-up call for powers to address geographical bias Alan Lee Racing writer of the year

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n the very day of the bouncer that killed one of Australia’s most vibrant young cricketers last week, the sporting world paid forgivably scant attention to the abrupt retirement of a jockey.

Racing, though, must now reflect on why a young man who won the Grand National only 18 months earlier would walk away from the sport with such apparent relief.

Ryan Mania was the same age as Phillip Hughes, with a similarly engaging personality. Like Hughes, he had savoured an early taste of the best his tough, attritional sport could offer. Unlike the tragic batsman, Mania had lost his appetite for more.

His decision was so sudden it took even his employers aback. Sue and Harvey Smith hand-pick their jockeys and mould them to the challenging specifications of their yard on the moorland of West Yorkshire. They felt they had a good one in Mania, a bright, uncomplicated boy who had ridden a highly respectable 53 winners in the season after his Aintree glory on Auroras Encore.

Last Tuesday, however, Mania told them he would not be taking his four booked rides on the Sedgefield card.

He would not be taking any more rides at all. “I didn’t know this was

coming until that morning,” Sue Smith said.

It shocked me, too. Winning the National can do odd things to a jockey but, in the weeks after his win, Mania conducted endless media duties quite splendidly. He was helpful, charming and lucid, spinning tales from his upbringing in the Scottish Borders, where he was a hero, and evidently relishing the attention. He was a credit to himself and his sport.

So what changed? Weight was a key issue. Mania is tall and not naturally lean. Last summer, he was 11st 7lb, excess poundage that demanded effort and sacrifice to shift.

This was not an unusual imposition for a jockey but Mania was no longer sufficiently motivated to conquer it.

One militating factor was the alarming decline in northern jumps racing, a subject dear to the crusading heart of Harvey Smith. “Everybody has felt the pinch and owners aren’t willing to have horses up north because it’s bad racing,” Mania said.

“It’s made the whole job a lot harder.”

That a 25-year-old jockey could cite this among his reasons for such premature departure is a withering indictment that the executives of the sport must not ignore. Too little has been done, for too long, to prevent the decline of northern jump racing.

Yet there is much more to Mania’s retirement than that. It is essentially a reminder that longevity in jockeys — especially those who ride over jumps — cannot be taken for granted.

1.30

Sedgefield Rob Wright

12.30 Always Tipsy 2.30 Apache Pilot 1.00 Mount Haven (nb) 3.00 Baltic Pathfinder 1.30 Ballydague Lady 3.30 Skylander 2.00 Nautical Twilight Thunderer’s double 1.00 Attention Seaker.

2.30 Apache Pilot (nap).

Going: soft At The Races

12.30 Novices' Hurdle

1 2 3 4

Handicap Chase (£2,729: 2m 4f) (4)

-3134 ROSEVILLE COTTAGE 21 (B) J Wade 7-11-12 B Hughes 63321 BALLYDAGUE LADY 6 (P,D) N Mulholland 7-11-11 D C Costello 21355 CARA COURT 23 (P,CD) Miss J Foster 8-11-10 Mr D Burton (7) 11P-2 PRINCE BLACKTHORN 21 (CD) W Amos 8-10-12 B Harding

7-4 Ballydague Lady, 11-4 Prince Blackthorn, 3-1 Cara Court, 4-1 Roseville Cottage.

Wright choice: Ballydague Lady escapes a penalty for her easy win at Fontwell Park Danger: Prince Blackthorn

(£3,509: 2m 4f) (7)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

33-21 MASTER DEE 25 (C) D McCain 5-11-5 -6532 ALWAYS TIPSY 25 N Alexander 5-10-12 00 CLENAGH CASTLE 20 C Grant 4-10-12 /45-2 QUEST MAGIC 24 G Bewley 8-10-12 -3625 QUICK BREW 21 (H,T) M Barnes 6-10-12 P1P-2 TROUBLED 199P D Thompson 7-10-12 1/3-P ZERMATT 25 (BF) J J Quinn 5-10-12

J M Maguire Lucy Alexander D O'Regan (7) J Bewley (5) S Mulqueen (7) T Kelly (3) D C Costello

2.00

Handicap Hurdle (£3,509: 2m 1f) (9)

012P- BENZANNO 233 (H) D McCain 5-11-12 J M Maguire 320-3 HELIUM 12 (D) A Dunn 9-11-10 Mrs A Dunn (5) 22252 SILVER SHUFFLE 21 (T,P) Mrs D Sayer 7-11-7 J Reveley 01-60 TODD 15 Anabel Murphy 4-11-6 R Mahon F53-0 SERENITY NOW 38 B Ellison 6-11-3 D Cook 213-6 LIGHT THE CITY 21 (CD) Mrs R Carr 7-11-3 J Greenall 34-22 PERTUIS 17 (P) M D Hammond 8-11-0 J Colliver (5) 26-25 SAM LORD 33 (CD) J Moffatt 10-11-0 G Watters (5) 0-522 NAUTICAL TWILIGHT 33 (B) J M Jefferson 4-10-13 B Hughes

Rob Wright’s choice: Always Tipsy is open to improvement raised in trip Dangers: Master Dee, Quick Brew

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1.00

5-1 Benzanno, Nautical Twilight, Silver Shuffle, 6-1 Serenity Now, 8-1 Helium, Pertuis, Sam Lord, Todd, 9-1 Light The City.

15-8 Master Dee, 5-2 Zermatt, 5-1 Always Tipsy, 11-2 Quick Brew, 7-1 Quest Magic, 14-1 Troubled, 50-1 Clenagh Castle.

Maiden Hurdle

(£2,464: 2m 5f 110y) (9)

045 CRAIGDANCER 63 Miss J Foster 5-11-0 D C Costello 1 0-10 DARING EXIT 36 (C) R Bewley 5-11-0 C Bewley (7) 2 D Bourke (5) 3 -3305 DIBDABS 25 (H,T) M Barnes 6-11-0 J M Maguire 4 232-F GREENSALT 21 (T,P) D McCain 6-11-0 T Scudamore 5 2-142 MOUNT HAVEN 33 (BF) D Pipe 4-11-0 J Reveley 6 5434P THE LAST LEG 24 Karen McLintock 5-11-0 4 WATERCLOCK 18 Jedd O'Keeffe 5-11-0 B Harding 7 52 ATTENTION SEAKER 18 T Easterby 4-10-7 D Cook 8 9 51P0- JENNYS LAYLA 225P D Thompson 7-10-7 S Mulqueen (7)

Wright choice: Nautical Twilight has been improved by blinkers on her past two starts Dangers: Pertuis, Sam Lord

2.30 1 2 3 4

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Novices' Handicap Chase

(£4,679: 3m 3f) (4)

F5312 SILVER DRAGON 13 (B,BF) T Coyle 6-11-12 D C Costello P2-32 STRIKE FAST 13 (V) W Kinsey 9-11-11 J Reveley 06443 GENEROUS CHIEF 15 (V) C Grant 6-11-5 B Hughes -062V APACHE PILOT 7 (T,BF) M Barnes 6-10-5 M J McAlister

DAN ABRAHAM / RACINGFOTOS.COM

O’Neill struggles to maintain pace

T

his was supposed to be the season when Jonjo O’Neill, below, made a serious bid for the trainers’ championship but, to the dismay of many who were relishing the extra competition, his challenge is looking increasingly deflated. Despite saddling Merry King to take third place in the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury on Saturday, the form of O’Neill’s string has tailed off grimly. He banked 42 summer winners and, at the end of August, boasted a strike rate of 20 per cent. That has halved in the three subsequent months and a dismal November brought just four winners from 61 runners.

Alan Lee, right, accepts his award from Lord Derby yesterday after being named racing writer of the year for a record-equalling third time at the 48th Horserace Writers’ & Photographers’ Association Derby Awards in London. Lee, racing correspondent of The Times since 1999, also won the prize in 2001 and 2004

The daily rituals of travel, pain and self-denial are too much for some.

Leighton Aspell, who won the Grand National this year, stopped riding for two seasons in 2007. Oliver Sherwood, for whom Aspell won the Hennessy Gold Cup on Saturday, ascribed the sabbatical to “curing gremlins in his head”.

Perhaps the case of Harry Derham is still more striking. The nephew of Paul Nicholls seemed to have it all — balance, timing and opportunity — but in September, aged 19, he quit, saying he had lost 3.00 1 2 3 4 5 6

the key ingredients of confidence and enjoyment.

Derham has found another role in Nicholls’s yard and Mania has the personality to do something completely different. Their decisions were brave, and require no grieving.

Instead, racing must celebrate ever more the singular fortune of having a pair of indestructible giants in our midst — Tony McCoy still setting himself unfeasible targets at 40 and Richard Johnson, at 37, enjoying the richest time of his career. We will be lucky to see their like again.

Novices' Handicap Hurdle

Bet of the day

(£2,339: 2m 1f) (6)

P26-6 PIXIE CUT 18 A Whillans 4-11-12 H Challoner (3) 521-4 BALTIC PATHFINDER 22 (P,C) J Ewart 10-11-6 Mr James Smith (7) 4-002 BARABOY 20 (T) F Murtagh 4-11-2 B Harding 50-40 KHELAC 10 (B) M D Hammond 4-10-13 J Colliver (5) 04001 ZERO VISIBILITY 16 A Dunn 7-10-0 Mrs A Dunn (5) 42204 BEYONDTEMPTATION 18 (H,T) J Haynes 6-10-0 D O'Regan (7)

Duchess Of Gazeley (3.40 Wolverhampton) Is coming down the weights and ran well for a long way last time

3-1 Pixie Cut, Zero Visibility, 7-2 Baraboy, 9-2 Baltic Pathfinder, 6-1 others.

Wright choice: Baltic Pathfinder is nicely treated over hurdles relative to his chase mark Danger: Zero Visibility

3.30 1 2 3 4 5 6

NH Flat Race (£1,643: 2m 1f) (6)

5 CAPTAIN REDBEARD 127 W S Coltherd 5-11-2 J Reveley CLOUDY DREAM J M Jefferson 4-11-2 B Hughes PB06- DARK CAVIAR 422 G Bewley 6-11-2 D C Costello 0-0 DUTCH CANYON 36 (T) N Alexander 4-11-2 Lucy Alexander PLUM TREE D McCain 4-11-2 J M Maguire -3213 SKYLANDER 103 (T) D Pipe 5-11-2 T Scudamore

13-8 Skylander, 9-4 Cloudy Dream, Plum Tree, 14-1 others.

Wright choice: Skylander may have found the ground too firm on his debut under Rules Danger: Cloudy Dream

Southwell Rob Wright

12.15 Cruising Bye 2.20 Brigadoon 12.45 Riddlestown 2.50 Jigsaw Financial 1.15 The Tourard Man 3.20 Formidable 1.50 Bandit Country Going: good to soft At The Races Tote Jackpot meeting

12.15

Handicap Chase (£2,274: 3m 110y) (6)

P0-56 ICY COLT 133 (B) P Webber 8-11-12 P Brennan 32522 CRUISING BYE 12 (H,P) P Bowen 8-11-11 S Bowen (7) 04040 HARANGUE 10 (P,C) P J Gilligan (Ire) 6-11-11 A E Lynch 10-U4 LEGENDARY HOP 14 C Bealby 8-11-10 T Messenger 22-P2 THE LAST BRIDGE 13 (P,CD) S Johnson 7-11-3 R Johnson U0-21 TYPICAL OSCAR 22 (CD) M Blake 7-11-3 A P McCoy

2-1 Mount Haven, 5-2 Greensalt, 6-1 Attention Seaker, 9-1 Daring Exit, 11-1 Dibdabs, 12-1 Craigdancer, Waterclock, 14-1 The Last Leg, 66-1 Jennys Layla.

6-4 Apache Pilot, 9-4 Silver Dragon, 3-1 Strike Fast, 6-1 Generous Chief.

1 2 3 4 5 6

Wright choice: Mount Haven caught a fair sort when runner-up on his hurdling bow Danger: Greensalt

Wright choice: Apache Pilot ran well (unlucky second) in the void race here a week ago Danger: Silver Dragon

11-4 Typical Oscar, 3-1 The Last Bridge, 100-30 Cruising Bye, 11-2 Legendary Hop, 7-1 Icy Colt, 8-1 Harangue.

12.45 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Handicap Chase

(£3,899: 2m 4f 110y) (7)

0-U30 TIDAL WAY 19 (P) C Longsdon 5-11-12 N Fehily 46F00 CHURCHFIELD CHAMP 10 (T) P J Gilligan (Ire) 8-11-11 A E Lynch 20-32 GOLD INGOT 14 (D) Mrs C Bailey 7-11-10 A Thornton 22112 JEWELLERY 14 (T,CD) V Dartnall 7-11-7 D F O'Regan 112-P RIDDLESTOWN 204 (D) C Fryer 7-11-5 H Skelton 06-3F BALLYMOAT 18 Mrs S Smith 7-11-5 J England (3) 13043 O'CALLAGHAN STRAND 20 (D) Jonjo O'Neill 8-11-4 A P McCoy

3-1 O'Callaghan Strand, 7-2 Jewellery, 4-1 Gold Ingot, 11-2 Ballymoat, 13-2 Riddlestown, 9-1 Tidal Way, 14-1 Churchfield Champ.

1.15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Novices' Hurdle (£3,249: 3m 110y) (7)

11526 BYRON BLUE 17 M Gillard 5-11-12 S Bowen (7) 2-116 HENLLAN HARRI 38 P Bowen 6-11-12 J E Moore 2-25 CRACK OF THUNDER 27 C Longsdon 5-10-12 N Fehily 10/P- MAC'S RETURN 347 (T) D Skelton 7-10-12 H Skelton 2- MACKERYE END 338P (T) Jonjo O'Neill 5-10-12 A P McCoy 2U20- MONDO CANE 242 C Pogson 7-10-12 A Pogson 12-32 THE TOURARD MAN 27 A King 8-10-12 R Johnson

9-4 The Tourard Man, 3-1 Mackerye End, 4-1 Henllan Harri, 9-2 Byron Blue, 7-1 Mac's Return, 20-1 Crack Of Thunder, 25-1 Mondo Cane.

1.50 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Handicap Hurdle (£3,249: 3m 110y) (7)

3413- SPANISH ARCH 304 (T,BF) M Keighley 7-11-12 A Coleman 33-22 BANDIT COUNTRY 30 (BF) Jonjo O'Neill 5-11-11 A P McCoy 1346- TRUCKERS DARLING 253 (CD) D Cantillon 7-11-5 J Sherwood (7) 1-1P3 RUN ON STERLING 29 (T) P Webber 5-11-5 L Treadwell P0-24 BANGKOK PETE 110 Jamie Poulton 9-11-2 J McGrath (3) 4-126 THE ROAD AHEAD 38 (V) P Bowen 7-10-12 S Bowen (7) 32-64 RASCAL 10 (P) D Skelton 5-10-12 H Skelton

9-4 Bandit Country, 5-1 The Road Ahead, Truckers Darling, 6-1 Bangkok Pete, Spanish Arch, 8-1 Rascal, Run On Sterling.

Newbury could do more with less

N

ewbury has a big decision to take over the future of its Hennessy meeting. Despite welcome advances in attendance and atmosphere this year, the racing on the first two days does not exert sufficient appeal for spectators or, evidently, horsemen.

Field sizes were poor and two novice chases, collectively worth £61,000, drew a total of eight runners. There will be money to invest, once the on-site housing developments mature, but Newbury must decide whether it is better to confine the fixture to two, richly endowed days.

2.20

Maiden Hurdle (£1,949: 2m) (10)

A Coleman 1 5F-25 ASK A BANK 25 D Dennis 4-11-0 BRIGADOON 38F M Appleby 7-11-0 R Johnson 2 Peter Carberry (3) 3 600-0 HOPE FOR GLORY 31 J Ward 5-11-0 L Aspell 4 06P-3 LEMONY BAY 40 (D) O Sherwood 5-11-0 24-3 MAD JACK MYTTON 20 Jonjo O'Neill 4-11-0 A P McCoy 5 0 NORMAN BATES 15 Mrs C Bailey 5-11-0 A Thornton 6 03/ RANSOM NOTE 672 (BF) N Twiston-Davies 7-11-0 S Twiston-Davies 7 13-0 SOME BUCKLE 216 T George 5-11-0 P Brennan 8 F VALENTINE'S GIFT 7 N Bycroft 6-11-0 G Lavery (7) 9 BOND'S GIFT 67F G Oldroyd 4-10-7 J England (3) 10 6-5 Lemony Bay, 11-2 Mad Jack Mytton, 8-1 Brigadoon, 9-1 others.

2.50 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Handicap Hurdle

(£2,053: 2m 4f 110y) (10)

-3425 FLASH TOMMIE 147 (P) M Appleby 6-11-12 R Johnson P44-0 LIARS POKER 31 O Sherwood 7-11-11 L Aspell 2-0F0 ARTHUR MC BRIDE 28 Fergal O'Brien 5-11-11 C Shoemark (3) 3P-03 BELLE DE FONTENAY 14 (P,C,D) C Dore 9-11-10 Peter Carberry (3) -6125 JIGSAW FINANCIAL 9 (CD) Mrs L Young 8-11-8 A P McCoy P302- AMAZING SCENES 225 (T) B Powell 5-11-7 B Powell 450-5 PRESENT TREND 55 (T) C Longsdon 5-11-5 N Fehily -1430 DAWNIERIVER 26 M Scudamore 4-11-3 L Treadwell 0-332 LANDERBEE 22 J S Mullins 7-10-6 Kevin Jones (7) PP0P- ZELOS DIKTATOR 253 (C,D) C Fryer 8-10-0 Miss B Andrews (7)

5-1 Belle De Fontenay, Present Trend, 11-2 Jigsaw Financial, Landerbee, 6-1 Flash Tommie, 15-2 Amazing Scenes, 8-1 Liars Poker, 10-1 others.

3.20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

NH Flat Race (£1,643: 2m) (7)

1 KINGUSSIE 198 (D) B Pauling 6-11-7 CENTRAL SCHOOL D Loughnane 4-11-0 22P- DIAKTOROS 256 (BF) B Haslam 4-11-0 FORMIDABLE T George 4-11-0 JUST SKITTLES R Harper 6-11-0 3 NORTH COUNTRY BOY 40 P Niven 5-11-0 3 ROBINSSON 181 O Sherwood 4-11-0

D Bass A P Cawley A P McCoy P Brennan C Poste W Renwick L Aspell

100-30 Diaktoros, Kingussie, 7-2 Formidable, North Country Boy, 8-1 Robinsson, 14-1 Central School, Just Skittles.

Blinkered first time: Sedgefield 1.30 Roseville Cottage.

2.30 Strike Fast, Generous Chief. Southwell 1.50 The Road Ahead. Wolverhampton 4.10 Llandanwg.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

55

FGM

Sport

Peaty heads small Britain squad that is big on potential Swimming Craig Lord

At the start of the year, Adam Peaty was an unknown in international waters. By the time he turns 20, on December 28, the British breaststroker may have taken his tally of medals at this year’s leading championships into double figures.

Peaty won two golds and a silver at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and four golds at the European Championships in Berlin. His achievements have made him a candidate to be named Fina world swimmer of the year and a nominee for BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

From tomorrow until Sunday, his focus will be the World Short-Course Championships in Doha, where he is part of a small Great Britain squad whose record in 2014 is among the most impressive in world-class competition.

Among them is Hannah Miley, who will defend her title from 2012 in the 400 metres medley.

After defeating Cameron van der Burgh, the 2012 Olympic 100 metres breaststroke champion from South

Africa, at the Commonwealth Games in July, Peaty won the 4 x 100 metres medley relay and missed by a fingertip a second triumph over the same man, who is also the world record-holder, in the 50 metres breaststroke.

The next month, in Berlin, Peaty conquered Europe. World records fell to him in the 50 metres breaststroke, in which he clocked 26.62sec, and, with Fran Halsall, Jemma Lowe and Chris Walker-Hebborn, as a member of the mixed 4 x 100 metres medley relay team, who won the fledgeling event in 3:44.02.

However, it was his performance in the 100 metres in Berlin that caught the eye. Having become the first British man to break 59 seconds in the event at the Commonwealth Games, Peaty took more than a quarter of a second off that mark in the semi-final in Berlin, clocking 58.68 on the way to the gold medal.

Only Van der Burgh, with his world record of 58.46, has swum the event faster in a textile suit.

Peaty looks good for a shot at joining David Wilkie, Duncan Goodhew, Adrian Moorhouse and Nick Gillingham in the pantheon of British

BORIS STREUBEL/BONGARTS/GETTY IMAGES

Short-course form horses Jazmin Carlin Commonwealth champion for Wales in the 800m freestyle in Glasgow in July, she enjoyed a breakthrough season with two European titles, at 400m and 800m freestyle, in Berlin Fran Halsall Commonwealth gold for England at 50m butterfly and 50m freestyle, she added three European titles in Berlin, including 50m freestyle and 50m backstroke Ben Proud At 19 a Commonwealth champion for England in both the 50m freestyle and 50m butterfly, he was also part of Britain’s 4 x 100m medley relay-winning team in Berlin

Heading for greatness: Peaty goes into the World Short-Course Championships close to establishing himself among Britain’s elite group of breaststrokers

breaststroke greats. He is not alone: Michael Jamieson, the Olympic silver medal-winner in the 200 metres breaststroke in London, is another with the same potential.

“I couldn’t believe it when I looked at the scoreboard,” Peaty said of the Berlin semi-final in a season when his mosthopeful target had been 59.1 seconds.

“Hopefully in two years’ time [at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro] it’s going to be a very good race.”

He has come a long way since first dipping a toe in the pool. “I was scared of water,” he said. “I hated going in the shower, hated going in the bath and every time I went to the pool I used to climb up my mum’s arms. I hated it.”

Fears overcome, club swimming led him to the City of Derby club but his was not an auspicious start under Mel Marshall, the head coach. “He was in the third lane with the 11-year-old girls,” she said. “But then I saw him do breast-

stroke and I thought, ‘This kid’s good.’

He raced at the regionals and I saw a real racer in him.”

Marshall, an Olympic finalist for Britain in Athens ten years ago and the winner of six medals for England at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, is described by Peaty as “invaluable, brilliant, challenging . . . someone who always comes with new ideas.”

She taps into old and new: digital breakdowns of his stroke analysed on an iPad; blood taken from his ear to monitor his recovery. He will race in Doha at his “fittest ever”.

Watch out for the racer we saw in the summer. “It’ll be great to race Cameron again and show what I can do for the country,” Peaty said. “I’m not hiding behind anything. I’m going in there kicking and fighting.”

Results Football Vanarama Conference North Hyde

(0) 0

330

Worcester C (1) 3 Taylor 14, Symons 65 Dunkley 76

FA Trophy: First-round draw: Aldershot Town v Burgess Hill Town; Altrincham v Macclesfield Town; AFC Fylde v Gainsborough Trinity; AFC Telford United v Chester; Barwell or FC United of Manchester v Harrogate Town; Basingstoke Town v Gosport Borough; Bedford Town or Weston-super-Mare v Farnborough; Bishop’s Stortford v Torquay United; Bradford Park Avenue v Kidderminster Harriers; Braintree Town v St Neots Town or AFC Sudbury; Bristol Rovers v Gloucester City or Bath City; Concord Rangers v Barnet; Dartford v Solihull Moors; Ebbsfleet United v Welling United; Forest Green Rovers v Merthyr Town or Didcot Town; Gateshead v Halesowen Town; Guiseley or Rushall Olympic v Chorley or Stalybridge Celtic; Hemel Hempstead Town v Sutton United; Hyde v Spennymoor Town; Lowestoft Town v Dover Athletic; Lincoln City v Alfreton Town; Maidenhead

United v Staines Town or Poole Town; North Ferriby United v Boston United; Nuneaton Town v Grimsby Town; Ramsbottom United v Stockport County; St Albans City or Wealdstone v Hayes & Yeading United; Southport v Wrexham; Tonbridge Angels or Bromley v Leiston; Weymouth v Havant & Waterlooville; Wimborne Town v Oxford City; Worcester City v FC Halifax Town; Woking v Eastleigh.

6 Ties to be played December 13 William Hill Scottish Cup: Fifth-round draw: Dundee v Celtic; Falkirk v Annan Athletic or Brechin City; Hibernian v Arbroath; Queen of the South v St Johnstone; Partick Thistle v St Mirren or Inverness Caledonian Thistle; Rangers v Raith Rovers; Spartans v Berwick Rangers or Albion Rovers; Stranraer or Dunfermline Athletic v Dundee United.

6 Ties to be played February 7-8

American football NFL Atlanta 29 Arizona 18; Baltimore 33 San Diego 34; Buffalo 26 Cleveland 10; Green Bay 26 New England 21; Houston 45 Tennessee 21; Indianap-

2.40

Wolverhampton Rob Wright

2.10 Evacusafe Lady 4.10 Yard Of Ale 2.40 Red Perdita 4.40 Miniskirt 3.10 Kaufmann 5.10 Habeshia 3.40 Duchess Of Gazeley (nap) Going: standard Draw: 7f, low numbers best At The Races

2.10

Apprentice Handicap (£2,911: 1m 1f 103y) (10)

R Hornby 1 (8) 63661 STARFIELD 14 (V,C,D) M Appleby 5-9-7 G Mahon 2 (9) 03311 ELYSIAN PRINCE (T,C,D) P Cole 3-9-4 3 (3) 0-000 REFRESHESTHEPARTS 13 (T,C,D) G Baker 5-9-3 A Davies (5) 01400 WELL PAINTED 19 (T) A Turnell 5-9-3 P Vaughan (5) 4 (7) 5 (5) 53130 ORATORIO'S JOY 136 (C,D) J Osborne 4-9-3 Kirsten Smith (5) H Crouch 6 (4) 23635 LEAN ON PETE 11 (C,D) O Pears 5-9-2 1 PERSONA GRATA 53 (C) E Walker 3-9-0 C Lee (5) 7 (1) 8 (6) 14564 EVACUSAFE LADY 6 (T,CD) John Ryan 3-8-11 C Bennett 9 (2) 1-650 HAYMARKET 46 (D) R Mike Smith 5-8-7 M Kenneally (3) 10(10) 02156 TETE ORANGE 82 (H,D) S C Williams 3-8-5 Aaron Jones 3-1 Persona Grata, 4-1 Starfield, 6-1 Elysian Prince, 7-1 Lean On Pete, Tete Orange, 8-1 Oratorio's Joy, 10-1 Evacusafe Lady, 16-1 others.

1 2 3 4 5 6

olis 49 Washington 27; Jacksonville 25 New York Giants 24; Kansas City 16 Denver 29; Minnesota 31 Carolina 13; Pittsburgh 32 New Orleans 35; St Louis 52 Oakland 0; Tampa Bay 13 Cincinnati 14.

Cricket Fifth one-day international Bangladesh v Zimbabwe Dhaka (Zimbabwe won toss): Bangladesh beat Zimbabwe by five wickets Zimbabwe (balls) H Masakadza b Hossain 52 (54) Raza c Rahim b Mortaza 9 (14) V Sibanda c Mortaza b Shakib 37 (51) †B R M Taylor b Shakib 9 (11) S F Mire lbw b Taijul 9 (16) T Maruma b Hossain 1 (9) *E Chigumbura not out 3 (4) T Panyangara b Taijul 0 (5) J Nyumbu lbw b Taijul 3 (6) T L Chatara b Taijul 0 (1) T Kamungozi c Mahmudullah b Shakib 2 (9) Extras (w 3) 3 Total (30 overs) 128

Seller (2-Y-O: £2,102: 7f 32y) (6)

0 EDW GOLD 14 P D Evans 8-12 (1) 0 SNAPPY MANN 141 W Musson 8-12 (5) 04 BEAU SPARKLE 36 S Hollinshead 8-7 (6) (4) 60000 KIDMEFOREVER 1 (P) J Moore 8-7 (2) 30354 PENELOPE PITSTOP 8 K Dalgleish 8-7 (3) 32232 RED PERDITA 28 G Baker 8-7

G Gibbons C Catlin Hayley Turner J Gordon (7) J Fanning Martin Dwyer

1-2 Red Perdita, 4-1 Penelope Pitstop, 10-1 Kidmeforever, 12-1 others.

3.10

Median Auction Maiden Stakes

(2-Y-O: £2,102: 7f 32y) (12)

T Hamilton 1 (2) 246 BLEU ASTRAL 32 (BF) R Fahey 9-5 BOLD GROVE E Bevan 9-5 E J Walsh (5) 2 (7) Martin Dwyer 3 (10) 60200 CLEVER LOVE J Hughes 9-5 00 COME UP AND SEE ME 55 J Jenkins 9-5 P Aspell 4 (4) 0 GYPSY MAJOR 109 F Watson 9-5 G Lee 5 (5) 6 KAUFMANN 19 (BF) J Gosden 9-5 R Havlin 6 (12) 0 STRAIT OF MAGELLAN 13 Michael Bell 9-5 Hayley Turner 7 (8) THE DREAM FAST Rae Guest 9-5 C Catlin 8 (6) 0 THERMAL COLUMN 11 R Fahey 9-5 G Chaloner 9 (11) 00 MINNIE 32 J Farrelly 9-0 S Donohoe 10 (9) J Fanning 11 (1) 53423 SPINAMINNIE 6 M Johnston 9-0 Luke Morris 12 (3) 0433 VIVRE LA REVE 19 J Unett 9-0 15-8 Kaufmann, 9-2 Bleu Astral, 5-1 Spinaminnie, Vivre La Reve, 8-1 others.

3.40 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Fall of wickets: 1-16, 2-95, 3-108, 4-109, 5-112, 6-120, 7-120, 8-124, 9-124.

Bowling: Mortaza 5-1-23-1; Hasan 3-1-23-0; Shakib 7-1-30-3; Taijul 7-2-11-4; Hossain 8-0-41-2.

Bangladesh (balls) Tamim Iqbal c Mire b Panyangara 10 (15) Anamul Haque c Masakadza b Chatara 8 (13) Soumya Sarkar c Raza b Chatara 20 (18) Mahmudullah not out 51 (55) Shakib Al Hasan c Masakadza b Panyangara 0 (8)

Snooker Coral UK Championship York Barbican: Third round: J Higgins (Scot) bt M Stevens (Wales) 6-2; J Trump (Eng) bt F Patrick (Scot) 6-3; D Morris (Ire) bt D Gilbert (Eng) 6-2; A McGill (Scot) bt N Bond (Eng) 6-5; R Walden (Eng) bt K Doherty (Ire) 6-1; S Murphy (Eng) leads J Lisowski (Eng) 5-4; R McLeod (Eng) level with M Selt (Eng) 3-3; M Fu (HK) leads D Poomjaeng (Thai) 3-2.

Fixtures Football Kick-off 7.45 unless stated Barclays Premier League: Burnley v Newcastle; Crystal Palace v Aston Villa (8.0); Leicester v Liverpool; Manchester United v Stoke; Swansea v Queens Park Rangers; West Bromwich Albion v West Ham (8.0).

Sky Bet League One: Barnsley v Doncaster; Sheffield United v Milton Keynes Dons.

Handicap (£4,852: 1m 5f 194y) (9)

(2) 30050 DUCHESS OF GAZELEY 32 (D) D Ivory 4-10-0 S Sanders Luke Morris (1) 53320 SAGESSE 138 (P) Sir M Prescott 4-9-12 T Hamilton (8) 00000 VERY GOOD DAY 11 R Fahey 7-9-11 J Haynes (3) (5) 45244 ARIZONA JOHN 39 J Mackie 9-9-10 (3) 51322 SIOUX CHIEFTAIN 15 (BF) M Appleby 4-9-10 R Winston K Shoemark (5) (7) 0030- DAGHASH 178J W S Kittow 5-9-9 S W Kelly (6) 20563 LINEMAN 11 (P,C) A Hollinshead 4-9-4 D Swift (9) 16500 ARASHI 15 (V) D Shaw 8-9-0 J Fanning (4) 24213 ROWLESTONE LASS 15 (C) R Price 4-9-0

5-2 Sioux Chieftain, 7-2 Very Good Day, 9-2 Sagesse, 15-2 Duchess Of Gazeley, 8-1 Rowlestone Lass, 9-1 Lineman, 14-1 Arizona John, 16-1 others.

4.10

†Mushfiqur Rahim c Taylor b Chatara 11 (23) Sabbir Rahman not out 13 (16) Extras (lb 6, w 10, nb 1) 17 Total (5 wkts, 24.3 overs) 130 Abul Hasan, *Mashrafe Mortaza, Taijul Islam, and Jubair Hossain did not bat.

Fall of wickets: 1-18, 2-28, 3-47, 4-58, 5-93.

Bowling: Panyangara 10-1-49-2; Chatara 10-044-3; Kamungozi 4-0-21-0; Mire 0.3-0-10-0.

Umpires: C B Gaffaney (NZ) and Sharfuddoula.

6 Bangladesh won five-match series 5-0

Maiden Stakes (£2,911: 7f 32y) (7)

1 (5) 04605 PATRON OF EXPLORES 102 (T) P Holmes 3-9-5 D J Bates (3) THE FENLAND MAN J Unett 3-9-5 L Jones 2 (1) G Gibbons 3 (2) 05202 YARD OF ALE 19 (BF) K Stubbs 3-9-5 ZAT BE ZAT Mrs V Jordan 7-9-5 S Drowne 4 (4) C Catlin 5 (3) 600 GIFTED SPIRIT 45 W M Brisbourne 4-9-0 P Makin 6 (7) 04325 LLANDANWG 28 (B) B Smart 3-9-0 L Keniry 7 (6) 623 QUAINTRELLE 69 E Vaughan 3-9-0 4-5 Quaintrelle, 7-4 Yard Of Ale, 8-1 Llandanwg, 25-1 The Fenland Man, 33-1 others.

4.40

FA Trophy: Third qualifying-round replays: Stalybridge v Chorley; Rushall Olympic v Guiseley; Didcot Town v Merthyr Town; Weston-superMare v Bedford Town; Bromley v Tonbridge Angels; AFC Sudbury v St Neots Town; Wealdstone v St Albans; Bath City v Gloucester; Poole Town v Staines Town.

Vanarama Conference: Alfreton Town v Gateshead; Chester v AFC Telford; Dover v Torquay; Eastleigh v Dartford; Halifax v Forest Green; Kidderminster v Nuneaton; Woking v Altrin-

Median Auction Maiden Stakes

(£2,264: 1m 141y) (6)

J Haynes (3) (4) 60026 NOUVELLE ERE 6 (H) A Carroll 3-9-5 Luke Morris (6) 32022 RIGHTWAY 6 (BF) A Carroll 3-9-5 LAIKA 27J B Ellison 5-9-2 B A Curtis (3) C Catlin (5) 2-4 MINISKIRT 50 Rae Guest 3-9-0 (1) 5050 TILSWORTH ANNALISA 17 J Jenkins 3-9-0 Shelley Birkett (5) 60 UNDULATE 15 P Niven 3-9-0 G Lee 6 (2)

1 2 3 4 5

8-13 Rightway, 3-1 Miniskirt, 5-1 Laika, 16-1 Nouvelle Ere, 20-1 others.

Course specialists Sedgefield: Trainers J J Quinn, 7 winners from 18 runners, 38.9%; N Mulholland, 3 from 9, 33.3%.

Jockeys J M Maguire, 39 winners from 128 rides, 30.5%; B Hughes, 51 from 269, 19.0%;.

Southwell: Trainers D Cantillon, 4 from 5, 80%; B Haslam, 3 from 8, 37.5%. Jockeys J McGrath, 4 from 13, 30.8%; A P McCoy, 41 from 135, 30.4%.

Wolverhampton: Trainers J Gosden, 41 from 137, 29.9%; S C Williams, 29 from 113, 25.7%.

Jockey K Shoemark, 8 from 36, 22.2%.

5.10

cham; Wrexham v Bristol Rovers. North: Stockport County v AFC Fylde; Tamworth v Lowestoft Town.

William Hill Scottish Cup: Fourth-round replay: Inverness Caledonian Thistle v St Mirren.

Scottish League Two: Annan Athletic v Albion; Elgin v Arbroath; Montrose v Berwick.

Other sport Snooker: York Barbican: Coral UK Championship.

Handicap

(£2,264: 1m 141y) (13)

J Fanning 1 (9) 04-06 WARDEN BOND 17 (P,C,D) W Stone 6-9-7 S W Kelly 2 (10) 50003 BOWSERS BOLD 12 M Tregoning 3-9-5 C Beasley (3) 3 (7) 35165 ICE MAYDEN 28 (D) B Smart 3-9-3 M Kenneally (7) 4 (2) 60011 HABESHIA 6 Michael Bell 4-9-3 5 (3) 42004 LORD OF THE STORM 3 W G M Turner 6-9-2 R While (5) 6 (6) 000-6 BRYANT PARK 97 Jane Chapple-Hyam 5-8-13 P Cosgrave R Winston 7 (13) 50060 CELESTIAL DAWN 54 J Weymes 5-8-12 S Pearce (3) 8 (11) 53604 OLNEY LASS 10 L Pearce 7-8-12 00404 SPOKESPERSON 69 F Watson 6-8-12 G Lee 9 (5) P Makin 10 (8) 05-00 KOPENHAGEN 14 (P) E De Giles 3-8-11 Luke Morris 11(12) 03650 CLASSICAL DIVA 128 M Appleby 3-8-11 J Mitchell 12 (4) 02653 FOCAIL MEAR 13 John Ryan 3-8-10 13 (1) 50004 PERCYS PRINCESS 3 M Appleby 3-8-10 Alistair Rawlinson (5) 3-1 Habeshia, 5-1 Bowsers Bold, 6-1 Focail Mear, 7-1 Percys Princess, 10-1 Lord Of The Storm, Warden Bond, 12-1 Ice Mayden, Olney Lass, 14-1 others.

Rob Wright’s midday update thetimes.co.uk/sportsbook

Yesterday’s racing results Plumpton Going: soft 12.40 (2m hdle) 1, Dusky Lark (D A Jacob, 8-1); 2, Lord Navits (4-1); 3, Civil War (9-4 fav). 11 ran. NR: Bonnie Major. 1Kl, 7l.

C Tizzard.

1.10 (2m 1f ch) 1, Chris Pea Green (Joshua Moore, 1-6 fav); 2, Romeo Americo (6-1); 3, What's For Tea (100-1). 4 ran. 26l, 21l.

G Moore.

1.40 (3m 1f 110yd hdle) 1, Grape Tree Flame (Sean Bowen, 10-1); 2, Cove (2-1 fav); 3, Cannon Fodder (3-1). 6 ran. 2Kl, 7l. P Bowen.

2.10 (2m 4f ch) 1, Head Spin (A Thornton, 2-1);

2, Alright Benny (5-4 fav); 3, Bobbits Way (11-4). 4 ran. 16l, 11l. J Mullins.

2.40 (2m hdle) 1, Hold The Bucks (Freddie Mitchell, 9-2); 2, Maria's Choice (11-10 fav); 3, Dude Alert (50-1). 7 ran. NR: Zero Visibility.

1Kl, 15l. D Steele.

3.10 (3m 2f ch) 1, Ballyvoneen (M D Grant, 5-1); 2, Brunette'sonly (5-1); 3, Cheat The Cheater (2-1 fav). 7 ran. 4Kl, 5l. N King.

3.40 (2m 2f flat) 1, Tambura (Mr Z Baker, 16-1); 2, Rude And Crude (9-2); 3, Oh So Fruity (7-2). Corner Creek (5th) 8-11 fav. 8 ran.

NR: Toohighforme. 1Nl, 4l. G Maundrell.

Placepot: £34.40.

Quadpot: £15.70.

Wolverhampton Going: standard

12.55 (1m 5f 194yd) 1, Indian Scout (Miss Joanna Mason, 20-1); 2, Blue Valentino (7-1); 3, Perennial (20-1). Greeleys Love (4th) 11-4 fav. 13 ran. 2l, sh hd. Mrs A King.

1.25 (7f) 1, Lady Charlie (J Fanning, 14-1); 2, Clampdown (5-1); 3, Ya Halla (7-2). First Summer (4th) 2-1 fav. 9 ran. NR: Pyrocumulus.

1Kl, hd. J Hughes.

1.55 (7f) 1, What Usain (Barry McHugh, 33-1); 2, You Be Lucky (7-2); 3, Fast Scat (3-1). Total Demolition (6th) 9-4 fav. 10 ran. 1Ol, hd.

G Oldroyd.

2.30 (7f) 1, Boogangoo (J Fanning, 7-1); 2, Bint

Dandy (11-4); 3, Diamond Blue (25-1). Be Royale (6th) 7-4 fav. 8 ran. Kl, Ol. Grace Harris.

3.00 (1m) 1, Splash Of Verve (Joey Haynes, 3-1; Rob Wright’s nap); 2, More Drama (6-1); 3, As A Dream (50-1). 13 ran. 1Nl, Kl. P Kirby.

3.30 (2m) 1, Entihaa (J Fanning, 8-1); 2, Cousin Khee (7-1); 3, Dame Lucy (10-1). Uncle Bernie (5th) 2-1 fav. 7 ran. 2Ol, 1Ol. G Swinbank.

4.05 (1m 1f 103yd) 1, Auld Fyffee (L Morris, 9-2); 2, Blue Burmese (16-1); 3, Missandei (11-8 fav). 6 ran. 1l, hd. J Ryan.

4.35 (5f) 1, Shirley’s Pride (Hayley Turner, 3-1 fav); 2, Your Gifted (9-1); 3, Scatty Cat (12-1).

10 ran. NR: Extreme Supreme, Oil Strike, Telegraph. 1l, nk. M Appleby.

Jackpot: not won (£3,851.57 carried forward).

Placepot: £4,199.50.

Quadpot: £77.60.

Kempton Park Going: standard

2.20 (1m 2f) 1, Time Square (Jim Crowley, 15-8 fav); 2, Understory (5-1); 3, Estibdaad (10-1).

13 ran. NR: Assoluta. Nk, Kl. A Carroll.

2.50 (7f) 1, Monsieur Chevalier (A Kirby, 4-9 fav); 2, Doc Hay (2-1); 3, Schottische (33-1).

NR: Aqua Ardens, Trojan Rocket. 1Nl, Ol. J Osborne.

3.20 (7f) 1, Biting Bullets (M Dwyer, 11-10 fav); 2, Chetan (4-1); 3, Mecado (4-1). 5 ran. 4l, ns.

J Hughes.

3.50 (1m) 1, Greatest Hits (R Havlin, 11-4); 2, Pathway To Honour (4-9 fav); 3, Captain Koko (16-1). 7 ran. NR: Levelling. 2l, 6l. J Gosden.

4.20 (1m) 1, Dana’s Present (P Cosgrave, Evens fav); 2, Henry Grace (10-1); 3, Bloodsweat– andtears (11-2). 11 ran. Ol, nk. George Baker.

4.50 (1m) 1, Bosstime (R Havlin, 12-1); 2, Movie Magic (10-1); 3, Ambella (7-1). Dreaming Again (5th) 11-4 fav. 10 ran. 1l, 1l. J Holt.

5.20 (7f) 1, Pretty Bubbles (P Aspell, 50-1); 2, Ertikaan (11-2); 3, Light From Mars (33-1).

Holiday Magic 5-4 fav. 10 ran. Ns, hd.

J Jenkins.

5.50 (6f) 1, Stellarta (David Probert, 8-1); 2, Tychaios (7-2 jt-fav); 3, Divine Call (16-1).

Classic Pursuit (4th) 7-2 jt-fav. 12 ran. 2Nl, 1Kl. M Blanshard.

Placepot: £27.90.

Quadpot: £18.00.

56

Sport Webber suffers from crash in Brazil event Motor racing Mark Webber, the former Red Bull driver, said that he had been left with a “stinking headache” after a high-speed crash at the Six Hours of Sao Paulo event. Webber, racing for Porsche in the World Endurance Championship after quitting Formula One, was taken to hospital from the Interlagos circuit on Sunday after his car collided with Matteo Cressoni’s Ferrari. Webber’s car hit a barrier and caught fire, below.

Caterham have been given special dispensation to compete in next year’s F1 world championship with this year’s car should a buyer be found for the British-based team. The move, due to be ratified this week, would limit the costs incurred by any new owner.

Taijul’s debut hat-trick Cricket Taijul Islam, a left-arm spinner, became the first player to take a hat-trick on his debut in a one-day international as he set up a five-wicket victory for Bangladesh over Zimbabwe in Mirpur. The win yesterday gave Bangladesh a clean sweep in the five-match series and comes after the hosts recorded a 3-0 win over the visiting side in the preceding Test series. Taijul, 22, finished with figures of four for 11.

Beeston pair called up Hockey England have been forced to make two late changes to the Champions Trophy squad who open their campaign with a match against Australia in Bhubaneswar, India, on Saturday.

Phil Roper, of Wimbledon, has been ruled out with a knee injury and Harry Martin, from Beeston, has pulled out with a bruised bone in his foot. Ollie Willars and Sam Ward, from Beeston, are the replacements.

FGM

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Wasps bank on broadening appeal by putting down roots at new home TRINITY MIRROR

Rugby union

John Westerby

We will be hearing a great deal over the next year, around the time of a home World Cup, about the desire to take rugby to new audiences. By opting to relocate to the Ricoh Arena in Coventry later this month, Wasps are already committed to opening a new market in geographical terms, but they are also aiming to spread the net further in social terms too.

Three weeks before their first game in Coventry, the Aviva Premiership fixture against London Irish on December 21, Wasps are hopeful of a crowd of more than 20,000. They have given away 3,500 tickets to local clubs and schools and they hope to attract most of the club’s 2,800 season ticket-holders.

More significantly, though, they have sold more than 10,000 tickets, of which almost half have been purchased by spectators from lower income brackets.

“That’s really exciting because we’re trying to look much broader than the traditional rugby demographic,” Nick Eastwood, the chief executive, said yesterday. “You can’t build a rugby club, with crowds of 12,000 to 15,000 or upwards, out of 45 to 55-year-old ABC1 males. It’s got to be people from all walks of life. We want to attract all ages from kids to grandparents, people from the Asian community and all ethnic backgrounds. We’re starting with a blank sheet in a rugby heartland.”

The drive to attract a broader audience is underpinned by attempts to put down roots around their new home, the purchase of which they recently completed. Once they have played their final game at Adams Park, against Castres a week on Sunday — they travel to France to face the same opponents this weekend — they will begin to call the 32,600-seat stadium in Coventry their home. Their highest attendance at Adams Park this season has been 7,397.

“The most successful clubs are those strongly entwined with the regional identity,” Eastwood said. “Look at Gloucester, they’d describe themselves as a blue-collar club and they’re very much a part of the city. The Tigers are the same in Leicester and the Saints in Northampton. It’s going to take time, but that’s what we want to be.”

Local hero: Goode, left, who was born and bred in Coventry, helps to switch on the Christmas lights in the city centre

Grounds for change Wasps have been looking for a place to call home since the dawn of the professional era . . .

1867 formed at the Eton and Middlesex Tavern. Their first home was on Finchley Road 1923 moved to Sudbury, which many supporters consider their spiritual home 1996 onset of professionalism led to a groundshare with Queens Park Rangers at Loftus Road 2002 relocated to Adams Park, sharing with Wycombe Wanderers 2014 Wasps own their ground after buying the Ricoh Arena

The local council, demonstrating their own enthusiasm for Wasps’ move, involved the club in the ceremony to switch on the city’s Christmas lights last week. Whereas Take That performed the honours in Regent’s Park, Coventry city centre was illuminated by Andy Goode.

There has been considerable opposition to the move from other parties: fans near London and High Wycombe, other clubs in the Midlands, notably Coventry, of National League One, and Worcester Warriors, who had concerns over their academy catchment area. In business terms, Wasps insist, the move was the only way to secure their longterm future, moving from close to financial oblivion two years ago to owning a business that has the highest turnover among Premiership clubs.

They will share the ground with Cov-

entry City, but the rugby club now own the stadium complex, which includes a four-star hotel and a casino. New training facilities should be completed for the 2016-17 season and discussions have begun over a player-sharing agreement with Coventry. All of which recently persuaded Joe Launchbury to sign a new contract and led Dai Young, the director of rugby, to state memorably that, in his player recruitment, “I’m shopping in Marks & Spencer now after being in Lidl for three years.”

“A big-name signing has a huge symbolic effect,” Eastwood said. “But I think everybody at the club wants to recruit smartly and Dai’s record at that is very good.” Goode, the fly half, grew up in Coventry and believes the club will benefit from the local area’s talent pool. “This is a big rugby area and it’s the right move for Wasps,” he said.

Net gains suggest England could turn attention back to Hales GARETH COPLEY/GETTY IMAGES

Cricket

Richard Hobson Deputy Cricket Correspondent Hambantota

England have failed to bat out their full 50 overs in six of their past seven oneday innings, a record that ought to have the tour selectors pondering a change even if they decide in the end to stick with the unit that collapsed to 185 all out in Colombo on Saturday.

There was plenty of time for thought yesterday as the squad, minus Mark Ramprakash, the batting coach, made the four-and-a-half hour journey from bustling Colombo to the safari resort town of Udawalawe, the base for the third game in the seven-match series against Sri Lanka, which takes place at Hambantota tomorrow.

Ramprakash has left the tour early as part of an agreement reached with the ECB before he was confirmed in his new post. Doubtless he has conveyed his thoughts to Peter Moores, the head coach, and evidence from first practice at the Mahinda Rajapaksa Stadium

All-round effort: Bopara’s bowling may allow Hales a way back into the team

suggests that Alex Hales is ahead of James Taylor for any vacant slot.

Hales was unfortunate to lose his place to Moeen Ali for the start of the series. While Ali has quickly justified

the switch, attention remains focused on Alastair Cook, who would struggle to keep out Hales were he not the captain, as Kevin Pietersen, Michael Vaughan and others have suggested.

England batted in pairs in the nets, Cook and Ali in one, Hales and Ian Bell in the second and Joe Root and Eoin Morgan in another. Theory goes that this better replicates a match situation.

Meanwhile, Taylor, who was in fine 50over form for Nottinghamshire last season, offered throwdowns on the outer reaches before padding up himself.

Batting order in the nets can be revealing. On such evidence, word spread of Ali’s promotion alongside Cook at the start of the tour. Hales, who was expected to retain his place after a reasonable start against India in the summer, found himself on the fringes.

But things are not always so clear cut.

Adil Rashid and Stephen Parry have remained in Colombo with the Performance Programme having served at practice in the capital city. England were thus short of slow bowlers and needed the medium pace of Ravi Bopara alongside James Tredwell’s offspin for the session to work logistically.

Chris Woakes missed practice because of a stomach upset.

It is just about conceivable that Hales

may replace a bowler — England could use as many batsmen as they can cram in — but that would leave Bopara as the third seam bowler. A more plausible scenario would involve Hales replacing Bell or Eoin Morgan. Meanwhile, Mahela Jayawardena has been granted leave by Sri Lanka from the coming game for personal reasons.

Cook has attracted criticism on social media for not attending the funeral of Phillip Hughes tomorrow. ECB officials spoke to James Sutherland, the chief executive of Cricket Australia last weekend, and were told that official representation may be more appropriate at the memorial service later in the month than a funeral largely for friends, family and team-mates.

The memorial service may clash with the later stages of the Sri Lanka series, and Cook will ultimately decide himself whether he feels he should go. At least two players with recent England Test experience in Nick Compton and Sam Robson, who were friends of Hughes, will be at the funeral in Macksville, Hughes’s home town.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

57

FGM

Rugby union Sp Sport

Less is more for those at top of the form Owen Slot Chief Rugby Correspondent

D

JED LEICESTER / ACTION IMAGES

oodling over my team of the month, two observations quickly struck. One: only one of them is English. Two: even if some of them were English, they might well be no use to England anyway.

Jonathan Sexton The Irishman was the stand-out stand-off of the autumn. He controls the contest so well, he mixes his game and, this is where he would have had Stuart Lancaster drooling: he kicked so meticulously, from hand (where Owen Farrell struggled) and at the posts (where there is work to be done for George Ford).

Sexton has slowly matured into a world-class player (plenty of time for Farrell and Ford, although the next World Cup may come a bit too soon).

The only problem here is that he plays his club game in France — which would make him ineligible if he were English. More to the point, you hear all that negative publicity about French rugby, its poor conditioning and its poor player management, but it has not done a bad job of Sexton.

You could say the same of his club-mate, the best No 12 of the northern hemisphere, Jamie Roberts.

Richie McCaw If I can’t have McCaw at No 7, I’ll take Sam Warburton, though I fear neither would have been much use to Lancaster because both are the recipients of the kind of playermanagement that is beyond the Aviva Premiership club system. McCaw had a six-month sabbatical in 2013 and he is not slow to observe that was the making of him. Warburton plays sparingly for Cardiff Blues so that his best tends to come when he is playing for Wales.

For instance: Warburton had started six club games before the autumn, Chris Robshaw had started eight. Warburton’s contract allows him only 16 club games per season; Robshaw would already be halfway there. Robshaw is a phenomenal athlete; if Warburton played as much as Robshaw does for his club, it is unlikely that he would be the player

My team of the autumn R Kearney (Ireland); T Thomas (France), A Ashley-Cooper (Australia), J de Villiers (South Africa), J Savea (New Zealand); J Sexton (Ireland), C Murray (Ireland); J Marler (England, above), A Creevy (Argentina), O Franks (New Zealand), B Retallick (New Zealand), P O’Connell (Ireland), J Kaino (New Zealand), R McCaw (New Zealand), K Read (New Zealand).

he is for his country. And no, no English player has been given a sixmonth sabbatical; only when they are injured.

Nick Phipps and Bernard Foley Not essential, but a half-back partnership lifted straight from the club game clearly has an advantage; any unit does. Phipps and Foley, two Waratahs, are most obvious (Phipps had four touches of the ball in Australia’s move before his try against Ireland; Foley had three including the scoring pass).

Meanwhile, Rhys Webb found his

feet in international rugby, possibly because he had Dan Biggar, his Ospreys team-mate, outside him, who also had his best series of games in a Wales shirt. Maybe it is no surprise that the improving Scotland side went for a proven back line with six of their seven backs from Glasgow. And the All Blacks pack are mainly Crusaders.

In England, talent is spread over 12 Premiership teams (in Wales four, in Australia five) so ready-made combinations are less likely to fall into Lancaster’s lap.

That said, Lancaster has stated on the record that he is not swayed by

club units in selection; maybe he should be.

Jean de Villiers We will not talk about England and No 12s here; we’ve done that topic to death this past month. But how South Africa will miss De Villiers if his injury from Saturday is as bad as is feared, especially with their two other seasoned centres absent: Jaque Fourie has just announced his retirement and Frans Steyn has exited to Japan in an anti-Springbok huff.

Here’s a question, though: which national side will be stronger if/when

they get their injured players back?

Not Australia; they have injuries aplenty, although none where they really need reinforcements, in the props. Ireland have Sean O’Brien and Cian Healy out long term, but this category is won jointly by South Africa and England.

The Springboks will get back a better No 9 (Fourie du Preez or Ruan Pienaar) and two world-class flankers (François Louw and Willem Alberts); England get a whole new/old front five. Where England will be really boosted, though, is in the return of Manu Tuilagi. The more England’s attack stuttered, the more they seemed to miss him.

This sounds like a positive for England, though really it is not. It is the nature of the national game that as soon as some return from the rehab department, others will get injured.

Brodie Retallick Here is a question: what good does it really do to beat the All Blacks? We assume that a big victory empowers a team (Wales are suddenly world heavyweights after beating South Africa), yet since the Springboks beat New Zealand, two months ago, they have slid backwards. Likewise, we hope that defeat might dent the armour of the All Blacks yet they licked their wounds and came back stronger.

The missing link here is Retallick.

The one important international Retallick missed all year (with apologies to Scotland) was the one they lost to the Springboks (when he was out with concussion). Retallick has been on the losing side in only one of the 36 internationals of his career (Twickenham, two years ago).

His record is astonishing.

The All Blacks have maintained their distance ahead of the rest of the world. What we know is that they can be caught. The rest of the world is an interesting place, though, with six teams in a scrap that, on any day, one against the other, any of them could win. In the battle for dominance, though, it remains the case that England make it harder for themselves and know no other way.

58

FGM

Sport

Brailsford strives to halt Sky fall

Cycling

Josh Burrows

Chris Froome was scarred by the crashes that put him out of the Tour de France this year, but four months later it appears that the anguish at Team Sky in 2014 was felt most keenly by Sir Dave Brailsford.

The team principal left his job as performance director at British Cycling in April to hunt greater success with his trade team. Instead, he found himself firefighting as Sky slipped from second to ninth in the UCI World Tour team rankings, without a stage victory in the grand tours.

Such is Brailsford’s disappointment that he has declared the end of an era and started on a five-year plan, aiming to prove his belief that success is cyclical.

“You’ve got to have those nights where you’re wide awake because you don’t think it’s going to work,” he said.

“And we’re back there now. I’m having the sleepless nights and I’m worried sick. But the way I’m thinking about it at the minute, I’m going to rip it up and start again.”

Brailsford, 50, was speaking in London at the Champions of CycleSport dinner, an annual fundraiser for Action Medical Research, the children’s charity. Judging by the four-figure bids flying in during the auction of Team Sky bikes, dinners and training camps, a difficult 2014 has barely dented the team’s popularity, but Brailsford fears complacency more than failure.

“We had a period of sustained success and I think that success does something to you and it’s very, very difficult to keep your hunger,” he said.

“The question I have to ask is ‘Were we hungry enough going into this season?’

“I’ve got to take a lot of responsibility for that. But in my world the negatives are what drive you on.”

Brailsford declined to elaborate on specific changes that he has planned but, ever curious, he is researching innovations in the gaming industry and at Nasa in an effort to wring as much success as possible from his riders.

Recent history shows that marginal gains can offer Sky a cutting edge, but if that is not enough, prominent winter signings have also provided the team with six new sledgehammers (see panel).

In recruiting proven foreign riders, Sky’s ability to trade on its Britishness is diluted, but Brailsford insists that having founded the team in 2009 with a five-year plan to win the Tour de France with a clean British rider, he needs a new outlook.

“I think you’re in danger of having Groundhog Day, where you stick to the same solutions to the same problems,” he said. “I think there’s another chapter now, because I don’t think we’re in the

New talent to rekindle old glories

Andrew Fenn

The powerful Scot, 24, won the junior Paris-Roubaix race in 2008

Ron Lewis

s Words by Josh Burrows

Athletes could face doping bans for associating with banned coaches or doctors even if they do not test positive for an illegal substance, under rules being introduced next month.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) code includes for the first time rules about “prohibited association”, meaning an athlete can face a ban for working with someone who is banned for a doping offence or engaged in conduct that would be considered a doping offence.

The rule has been brought in to ensure that undesirable people are kept

away from sport. An athlete suspected to be working with such a coach or doctor would be told to break the association and, if they did not, they could face a two-year ban.

The code is stricter than previous versions with harsher punishments and it doubles the automatic ban from two years to four for intentional doping offenders. It is the use of the phrase “intentional” that UK Anti-Doping (Ukad) believes will lead to a string of court cases next year as those falling foul of the new rules argue whether the offence was intentional or not.

“Four years in an athlete’s career is a lot more to lose so there is more reason to fight,” Graham Arthur, Ukad’s legal

Snooker

Hector Nunns

Higgins made four half-centuries and one century break

his CV is “long overdue” but he insists that his main aim will always be the Tour de France.

“There’s no doubt about it, if you’re going to be involved in sport then you’ve got to aim for the biggest prize and the biggest prize in our sport is the Tour de France,” he said.

That comment came in the week that senior figures at Sky insisted Froome would commit to the 2015 Tour, after the 2013 champion had suggested that the proliferation of summit finishes on the route announced in October had tempted him into an tilt at the GiroVuelta double instead.

And what of Wiggins? Will he go back to stage racing, where he won the Tour de France in 2012 and the Tour of California this year? Or back to the

ck squad, where he is a Great Britain track four-time Olympic champion and, according to his team-mates, still the best pursuit rider in the world?

Alternatively, a ninth-place finish at Paris-Roubaix in April, two spots behind Geraint Thomas, suggested that he could be the man to win a first spring classic for Sky. But an attempt at the hour record in July or August appears to be top of his 2015 agenda.

If Brailsford knew Wiggins’s intentions, he was not letting on. “We’re very stuck in how we see solutions,” was his cryptic reply when asked to comment on the rider’s rumoured plans to leave Sky and establish his own team. “What he has done for the sport in this country is phenomenal and nobody can take that away.”

Clampdown on athletes working with banned coaches Drugs in sport

Higgins gets the breaks he needs to see off Stevens John Higgins claimed that he could see some green shoots of recovery in his win over Matthew Stevens yesterday at the Coral UK Championship.

Higgins, three times the winner of the title, has struggled for form in the past 18 months, but looked back in the groove during a 6-2 victory at York’s Barbican Centre. The 39-year-old compiled breaks of 59, 81, 62, 128 and 52 in moving into the fourth round.

The contest against Stevens, also a former UK champion, was a repeat of the 1998 final when Higgins prevailed 10-6, and the match seemed to bring back some good habits in the Scot.

“I am a lot happier with that than some of the recent matches,” Higgins said. “I was trying to get my timing back and it worked well most of the match.

There were two frames where I cleared up to win, they were the turning points.

If you are going to win events, they are the ones you have to win.”

Next for Higgins is an all-Scottish clash against Anthony McGill, who edged past Nigel Bond 6-5 in a marathon six-and-a-half-hour match that ran on into the evening session.

Judd Trump, the 2011 champion, raced through the 300 career century breaks barrier in his 6-3 success over Fraser Patrick, another Scot.

Trump, 25, made a break of 129 to reach the milestone, then 130 and 104

Leopold König The Czech, 27, was seventh in the 2014 Tour de France at his first attempt Lars Petter Nordhaug Former team leader returns after two years spent elsewhere Wout Poels Climber, 26, becomes the first Dutchman to ride for Team Sky Nicolas Roche The Irishman, 30, has ridden 13 grand tours and is a potential team leader Elia Viviani The Italian sprinter, 25, has his sights set on success at next year’s Giro d’Italia

same place as we were when we started Team Sky. For me, it’s all about what the best team in the world looks like in 2020: work back from there and start again.”

While there were notable stage race victories this year for Sir Bradley Wiggins in California, Peter Kennaugh in Austria — and a second place for Froome at the Vuelta a España — that was not enough for the team that started the season with ambitions to win the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France.

Sky’s new signings are mostly proven grand tour heavyweights, though many of the team’s supporters would have preferred a boost for the classics squad, which has yet to produce a victory.

Brailsford says that filling that gap on

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

director, said. Andy Parkinson, Ukad’s chief executive, said that the code must be administered evenly by all federations. “We want Wada to take compliance really seriously to make sure that we are looking to that global ambition of a level playing field,” Parkinson said. “Without it there is no point in having the code.”

Ukad said that it had prosecuted 21 Parkinson wants the code to be applied globally

doping violations in 2014, ten of which had resulted from intelligence gathering rather than testing. There have been three eight-year bans and one lifetime ban, but the ease of getting hold of a large range of supplements online makes the need for education increasingly important.

“The availability of substances on the internet is growing day by day,” Parkinson said. “Young people don’t know what they are buying — it could say it is growth hormones, but you have no idea what it is and you can have it delivered to your door within 24 hours.

“We have to instil in young athletes a good culture and that you can win clean.”

to seal the win. “I am really up for this event and am looking to go as far as possible,” Trump said. “I am targeting getting to the semi-final and then seeing where it takes me.”

Barry Hearn, the chairman of World Snooker, has reacted strongly to Ronnie O’Sullivan’s criticism of the playing conditions at the tournament.

O’Sullivan, 39 this week, was unhappy over being forced to play in a four-table arena in the early rounds.

Hearn has told the players to get on with it, insisting the 128-player Open event format is here to stay and meant to benefit all and not just the elite.

O’Sullivan also said there was no atmosphere, told officials to “get a proper venue” and to “stop cutting corners”, saying he felt like Roger Federer stuck out on Court 13 at Wimbledon “in front of three men and a dog”.

“We always try to improve but this is the look of this event and it is not changing,” Hearn said. “This is the second-biggest tournament and it is open to every player.

“The top players all want a single table with 16 players, but that isn’t the case in this event for the early rounds, and it isn’t going to be — I want to reward the York public for their support.

“In their world, the top 16 are interested in the top 16, but this is a 128player event, so they need to get on with it. We make decisions for the game, not individual players.”

However, Hearn conceded that O’Sullivan had a point over the poor state of the tables. “Complaints about the tables are worthy of consideration,” Hearn said. “I think they have been disappointing. The job must be done better, so I take that criticism.”

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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Bullard happy to talk a good game in the jungle

Sport

REX FEATURES

Giles Smith Sport on television

W

hen people reminisce about Jimmy Bullard’s time in the jungle (last night’s phone vote made him the first evictee), it will surely be the banter for which they remember him.

Well, the banter and some of those superb, full-tilt bolts across the campsite in response to hassle from the resident fauna, or when freshly released from the unhappy confines of an insect-rich trial. (The great training ground instruction “Just run it off, son,” is clearly embedded in the Bullard genes. Certainly nobody in the history of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! has put so many yards between themselves and trouble so quickly. Not even Linford Christie in 2010.)

And I guess we can’t leave out the former Wigan Athletic midfielder’s endearing habit of keeping up a football-style commentary on himself, because people will remember that, too, and not least people who are able to associate the reflex warmly with the school playgrounds of their childhood. As Jimmy is wont to say, while engaged upon a task: “This is tailor-made for Bullard in the midfield.’ ” Or, as he has tended to shout, at moments of personal triumph: “Bullard!”

Plus, I suppose, there will be a place in the annals of memory for the surprisingly intimate bromance that Bullard has kindled with Carl Fogarty, despite the slightly prickly retired superbike champion’s declared reluctance to get involved in cuddling, especially first thing in the morning, and especially with Jimmy. It hasn’t stopped him. As a consequence, live broadcasting almost certainly has not offered such an intense exploration of unrequited homoeroticism since Adrian Chiles fruitlessly squeezed the exposed knees of Fabio Cannavaro on Copacabana beach during ITV’s World Cup coverage last summer.

Oh, and of course let’s not omit that moment when, shut in a box of rats and simply unable to endure any

Bantz and Dec: Bullard sees the lighter side of life with Quickenden although it was unclear where the boundary lay between banter and simply being annoying

more, Jimmy clutched for the legendary code phrase (the clue being very much in the title here) that would see him freed, only to miss it, several times. “Celebrity! Get me the f*** out of here! Ranger! Ranger! Get me out of here! Celebrity jungle!”

At the heart of it all, though, will be the banter. Right from the word go, banter has been the central plank of the Bullard game plan. For as he said only the other day to Jake Quickenden, the former X-Factor contestant: “You’ve run out, ain’t ya?

You done your b******s early doors, didn’t you? Gone. Nothing about you, son.”

Classic bantz.

Now, it’s true that Jimmy’s dexterity with bantering has not always been backed up by raw action when it

mattered. Right from day one, when the erstwhile England squad member left Melanie Sykes to do the majority of the dirty work seeking plastic stars in a tub of crabs, and contented himself with an extended bout of wincing on the sidelines, it was clear that Jimmy was not going to be the kind of player to grind out a performance in a six-pointer against, say, a tough selection of eels. In fact, we seemed to be looking at that supposedly mythical figure: an English player who didn’t fancy it on a wet Tuesday night in the rainforest.

But this too could be felt to illustrate a fundamental point about banter and about those who noisily dish it out — that banter isn’t its own guarantee and is, in fact, quite often the opposite. There are so many

conundrums, though, on which the social historians of the future, surveying this period, will have to get a grip. For example, at what point does banter cease being banter and become, simply, being insulting to someone? And where, exactly, does the boundary lie between “classic bantz” and merely being really, really annoying?

Michael Buerk, one senses, would have a view on this right now, and possibly will share that view upon his eventual exit. This is the first immersive experience in a banter-led culture for many in the camp, and almost certainly for Buerk, it being highly unlikely that, with five seconds to go before the BBC News at Ten, the legendary newscaster ever had Sophie Raworth in his face shouting

“Waaaay, Mikey. You’ve got nothing, son. Nothing. That Autocue’s gonna be all over yer, mate.” We allege as much because we imagine news broadcasting isn’t quite like this, except, possibly, Newsnight, in the vexed twilight of Jeremy Paxman’s time there.

So for more than a fortnight now, Buerk has looked on in quiet amazement while Bullard hoisted high the flag for banter. The retired newsman appears to be a little worn — and no wonder.

Which reminds me: I left out the bit where Bullard bashed a spoon on a pot lid and ad-libbed a droning tune on life in the jungle. For about 20 minutes. People will continue to talk about that too. Especially the people who were there.

Benteke’s return will add touch of class, says Lambert

Noble’s loyalty rewarded

Redknapp retains belief

Paul Lambert, the Aston Villa manager, says that he will be able to call on “one of the best strikers in Europe” in his hour of need, with Christian Benteke set for a recall for tonight’s match away to Crystal Palace (Brendan McLoughlin writes).

Lambert is under mounting pressure with his side having gone nine Barclays Premier League matches without Le a win after conceding a late penalty to draw away to Burnley on Saturday.

Having lost the first six of those, Villa have at least stopped the rot by drawing their past three games.

Lambert hopes the return of Benteke, the Belgium striker who has scored 29 goals in 59 Barclays Premier League starts, from a three-match suspension after a

Sam Allardyce, the West Ham United manager, believes Mark Noble is now reaping the rewards of choosing to stay at the club after they were relegated three years ago. The midfielder, born in Canning Town, is enjoying his 11th season in the first team and Allardyce is the fifth manager he has worked for. On the eve of tonight’s match against West Bromwich Albion, Allardyce said: “He’s seen a lot of turmoil, a lot of change, but he’s still been there.”

Harry Redknapp, the Queens Park Rangers manager, believes the positive attitude of his squad can ensure they stay in the Barclays Premier League. Redknapp’s side remain in the relegation zone despite a morale-boosting 3-2 win over Leicester City at the weekend, and travel to Swansea City tonight aiming for their first away point of the season. But Redknapp said: “I’m more confident of staying up. I’m lucky that I have a good group of lads.”

Ings future still in doubt

Touré shrugs off criticism

Football in brief Ronaldo and Messi battle for another Ballon d’Or Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are again the leading contenders to win the Fifa Ballon d’Or for the world’s best player.

The pair are on the three-man shortlist for the next edition with Manuel Neuer, the Germany and Bayern Munich goalkeeper.

Ronaldo and Messi have won the award six times between them.

Ronaldo, 29, of Real Madrid and Portugal, won the prize for the second time last year and is again considered the favourite having scored 50 goals in 46 appearances for club and country in 2014.

Messi, 27, broke the overall goalscoring record in La Liga last month.

The winner will be announced in Zurich on January 12.

Benteke is back

red card against Tottenham Hotspur, can tip the scales in Villa’s favour during what is a pivotal run of fixtures for the Scot. Matches against Leicester City and West Bromwich Albion follow the visit to Selhurst Park.

“When Christian’s on his game I think he’s one of the best in Europe, let alone Britain,” Lambert said.“I’ve seen some brilliant strikers in my time and when he’s on his game that guy is up there. His match fitness is still going to be down because he hasn’t played for a number of months [after a lay-off with a ruptured Achilles], but when he has played for us he has been fantastic, so him coming back will be a massive bonus.”

Lambert has survived sticky patches in the previous two campaigns yet patience is wearing thin among supporters. The departure last week of Roy Keane, the assistant manager, who informed the club he had found it “impossible” to juggle the dual demands of being No 2 with Villa and Ireland in addition to his family life, also came as a setback.

Burnley remain in talks with Danny Ings over a new contract but Sean Dyche, the manager, has not ruled out the striker leaving next month. Dyche revealed negotiations were continuing with the England Under-21 player, with Ings’s contract set to expire next summer. Southampton have been linked with a £7 million bid for Ings, and Dyche said: “Who knows what the future brings?”

Yaya Touré, the Manchester City midfielder, insists he has not been affected by the criticism of his performances this season.

The Ivory Coast player is adamant he can tune out such assessments, and said: “Sometimes people are not thinking that we are human beings, so I never think about those things. I always try to focus on my team.”

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Sport Football

‘Machiavellian’ provides further indignity for once proud club CLIVE GEE/PA: EMPICS SPORT

Rick Broadbent seeks to unravel the latest chapter in tainted reign of Massimo Cellino, the Leeds United owner

Have we not been here before?

Yes. The Football League barred him from taking over Leeds in March. However, Cellino successfully appealed against that decision after an independent QC said that his actions had not involved conduct that would “reasonably be considered to be dishonest”. Cellino said the club was technically bankrupt when he took over from Gulf Finance House, who retained a 10 per cent stake and managed the remainder. He bought the club for £11 million and agreed to service the £24 million debt.

So is this the end of Cellino?

Not on your Nelie. His conviction will be spent on March 18 so he will be free to be the owner from then. He believes the Football League has a “personal

Given the push: Cellino makes a point to Hockaday, whose tenure as Leeds head coach was an unsurprisingly fleeting one

vendetta” against him and last night was considering whether to appeal. He says his family own the club through Eleonora Sports Limited, but that is unlikely to get him off the hook given that he is a director. He may drag it out until March or he may assume as backseat role until then.

Is he the backseat sort?

Far from it. He wants to manage the team and have a coach to train it. He sacked Brian McDermott before he had taken over the club and was duly forced into a farcical about-turn. He appointed Dave Hockaday on the back of four years in the Conference. He lasted two months. His replacement, Darko Milanic, lasted six games. Neil Redfearn is the latest coach but only after standing up to Cellino who wanted to keep him on his academy coaching salary.

Three coaches in four months? He must be unpopular with the fans.

Cellino has a lot of support in the city.

He stands with the fans at matches, has

undoubted charisma and showed plenty of passion with a rant against players and former owners when a supporter rang and recorded him.

Sample quote: “Eighteen million on wages for a s*** team like that!”

How does he compare with the previous owners?

Gulf Finance House (GFH) bought Leeds from Ken Bates for £17 million in 2012 and quickly started looking to offload it. David Haigh, a GFH employee, became Leeds’s managing director. He has been in jail in Dubai since May after GFH accused him of embezzling £3 million. He denies all charges and has written to the Football League making allegations against GFH before its takeover. It is believed these include the claim that Iranian money was used in the purchase, contravening a United Nations Security Council resolution.

The Bates era was marked by being docked 25 points in 2007, relegation to League One and his claim that those protesting against him were “morons”.

Before Bates’s time it was alleged by the Sunday Mirror that a director had discussed hiring a hit man to get Gary Kelly off the wage bill. There is history.

Is the club in debt?

In July Cellino said the club was close to being debt-free and had £20 million of working capital. However, the club pay £2 million a year to rent Elland Road and their Thorp Arch training ground.

Cellino is in Bahrain finalising a £20 million investment plan with GFH.

Arsène Wenger is planning to offload Lukas Podolski and Joel Campbell when the transfer window opens next month as part of an overhaul at Arsenal.

After an inconsistent start to the season the Frenchman has concluded that his squad contains too many strikers, with Olivier Giroud, Danny Welbeck, Yaya Sanogo and Alexis Sánchez all most comfortable operating up front, but it is short of numbers in defence and central midfield.

Podolski and Campbell have barely featured this season and have started only the Capital One Cup defeat against Southampton, leading Wenger to reason that he can cope without them. The pair have still attracted plenty of interest despite their limited game time, however, with Inter Milan and Cologne competing to sign the

Germany player and Swansea City, Everton and West Bromwich Albion chasing Costa Rica’s World Cup star.

Wenger will aim to set up permanent transfers rather than loan deals, and is planning to use any funds generated to bolster his defensive resources.

He has been given £20 million to spend by Arsenal’s board next month, but because of the Podolski could return to Germany in January

perceived lack of quality available during the January window he is unlikely to spend such a budget, and will instead focus on pragmatic short-term signings such as the loan deal that brought Kim Kallström to the club last season.

Alex OxladeChamberlain has been passed fit to face Southampton tomorrow after sustaining a knee injury during the win over West Bromwich Albion on Saturday and is likely to keep his place in Arsenal’s starting line-up on the right of their attack. Nacho Monreal (knee) and Kieran Gibbs (ankle), who also picked up knocks at The Hawthorns, will be assessed in training today before Wenger decides whether they are fit enough.

They’re wasting money for what? I’m striving to make the club break even and they are not helping.”

Leeds issued a statement backing their owner. It said: “The steps that the League wishes the club to take — to remove Mr Cellino only to reappoint him in three months’ time — will be destabilising for the club, its supporters and sponsors and cannot be in the best interests of any party.”

It could be hard to enforce a ban on Cellino, with the League merely saying any new management structure would have to meet the standards of its test.

Leeds have no chief executive and are run as one-man band.

It is the latest twist in the saga of a fallen club. Cellino’s reign has been controversial, with three head coaches having been sacked, along with Graham Bean, the FA’s former compliance officer. Bean, in charge of the day-to-day running of the club, was dismissed when Cellino became enraged by his decision to change the date of a fixture against Reading.

There is also a bitter battle being played out between GFH and David Haigh, Leeds’s former managing director. He has spent six months in jail in Dubai after GFH accused him of embezzling funds. He denies any wrongdoing and has now written to the League with allegations surrounding GFH’s takeover in 2012.

Earlier this year, Haigh claimed that spy cameras were installed in the boardroom and toilets at Elland Road due to suspicions that Class A drugs were being used on the premises.

Can it get worse?

Always. Cellino has another court case coming up regards unpaid duties on a second yacht named Lucky 23. That was due to be heard last month but was postponed when the judge stepped down because she had heard the earlier case.

Is there a team in there too?

Leeds beat Derby County, the Sky Bet Championship leaders, 2-0 on Saturday.

Podolski and Campbell face Arsenal exit Kane wants Matt Hughes Deputy Football Correspondent

Cellino vows to fight on after League imposes ban Continued from back page

Leeds United are the club who crashed and burnt. From “living the dream” under Peter Ridsdale and making the 2001 Champions League semi-final, they plummeted to the third tier of football, suffering points deductions, fire-sales and last month’s winding-up order. Now the former managing director is in a Dubai jail and the new owner has been told to resign because of what an Italian judge termed “Machiavellian” misbehaviour.

Why does Massimo Cellino have to resign?

The Italian has failed the Football League’s owners and directors’ test that prevents those with “unspent convictions for offences of dishonesty” from owning clubs. His suspended sentences for deceiving the Italian Ministry of Agriculture out of £7.5 million (1996) and false accounting with Cagliari (2001) are deemed spent. However, the League made its decision after reading the full judgment from the Italian court, which fined him £500,000 in March for failing to pay £300,000 import duties on his yacht, Nelie.

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Spurs to keep going forward Gary Jacob

Harry Kane says Tottenham Hotspur are unlikely to change their approach when they take on Chelsea at Stamford Bridge tomorrow evening.

Chelsea offer the acid test of Tottenham’s recent revival, in which a third 2-1 win in four Barclays Premier League matches has kept them in touch with the challengers for the top four places.

Kane believes Tottenham will stick to chasing and harrying. which proved effective in helping to force a winning goal against Everton on Sunday.

“We’ve been working on it all season, and we’ll be looking to probably do the same against Chelsea — press them high up the pitch, win the ball higher and create more chances,” he said.

Tottenham were labelled gutless by

Haigh is presently in prison in Dubai

Tim Sherwood, their head coach at the time, after a 4-0 defeat by Chelsea in March. “[That loss to] Chelsea could have started the bonding,” Kane said.

“That was obviously a defeat that we did not like, especially by that margin.

“It might have had an effect and urged us on a bit. We were honest with each other that day and had to be at that stage. You need to look at yourself and dust yourself down and stick together and push on. We’re going there with a completely different mindset.”

Kane believes that Tottenham may benefit from Diego Costa’s absence through suspension. “They are missing their main man up front, so they have to change a few things,” he said. “I don’t think the game is a be-all and end-all, but it would add to the great momentum we have if we beat Chelsea.”

Three men have been charged over the pitch invasions at White Hart Lane during Tottenham’s 1-0 win against Partizan Belgrade in the Europa League last week. Nathaniel Thompson, 23, Helder Gomes, 22, and Daniel Jarvis, 26, have been bailed to appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court on December 18.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

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United beginning to strike fear into sides, Carrick says James Ducker Northern Football Correspondent

Michael Carrick believes Manchester United’s attack will be “scary” to play against once the team hit their stride.

The United midfielder is confident that momentum is building after three successive wins and the club are gradually re-establishing a fear factor.

United are expected to be without Ángel Di María against Stoke City at Old Trafford this evening after the Argentina winger underwent a scan yesterday on a hamstring injury that he sustained in the 3-0 victory at home to Hull City on Saturday.

Louis van Gaal is hopeful that Di María will not face an extended spell on the sidelines as he continues to wrestle with a glut of injuries to his players.

There was some good news yesterday, however, with Rafael Da Silva, the right back, returning to full training after five weeks out with a groin problem.

With Wayne Rooney, the England striker, scoring his eighth goal in nine matches for club and country against Hull, Robin van Persie claiming his first goal in four games for United after a poor run of form, and Radamel Falcao looking lively on his return as a substitute after six weeks out with a calf

injury, Carrick believes that United’s attack will be difficult to contain.

“When you have got Robin and Wayne scoring, and Falcao coming off the bench and nearly scoring, we’ll be a threat to anyone,” the England midfielder said. “You want those boys when they’re flying and it’s scary to play against.

“What Robin and Wayne did against Hull, we’ve seen that happen so often in the past, and hopefully we’ll see that in the coming weeks again. When you’ve got those lads scoring goals and creating chances, it gives the whole team huge confidence and belief that, even if we’re not playing great, we’re always in the game.

“All the boys’ movement is so good that it does give me a better chance of picking something out [with a pass], and hopefully more often than not I’m able to do it.”

Saturday was the sixth time that Van Gaal has deployed a 4-3-1-2 formation this season, during which time United have scored 18 goals, but while Carrick said the system plays to United’s strengths, he believes that the squad have shown an important ability to adapt to different formations.

“In some ways it might help us longer term, knowing we have played different

RICHARD LEE/BPI/REX

Football Sport

Stoke hope to pull off double in Manchester Brendan McLoughlin

Midfield maestro: Carrick hopes the improving form and better movement of Rooney, Van Persie and Falcao will make it easier for him to pick the right passes

systems and can learn from all of them, so if we do have to change again, we know we can adapt,” he said.

“Some have worked great, some haven’t worked so well, but certainly with that system [against Hull], we looked dangerous.

“We believe we can have a really good season. [The performance

against] Hull was the sort of standard we want to be at — dominating teams and winning.

“We’ve done it in the past, but the past is the past. We need to do it again, and hopefully, as time goes on, we can carry on like this, and that fear factor will creep back. We can’t look too far ahead. We’ve never done that.”

Mark Hughes says that there will be no trepidation in the ranks of the Stoke City team he manages when they take to the field at Old Trafford tonight.

The former Manchester United forward was an integral figure in helping make the ground an intimidating place for visiting teams during the Sir Alex Ferguson era.

Yet he maintains that his team have cause to believe they can pull off a second successful trip to the city having already masterminded a triumph away to Manchester City this term.

Hughes says that the Premier League is far more closely contested from top to bottom than it was when Ferguson was in charge of United. “The Premier League is a bit different now,” he said.

“Mid-table teams approach games against the big teams with less fear across the board.

“A lot more teams are going to Old Trafford and having a go. If there is any apprehension or lack of cohesion about their defence then good teams will find that out. They found that to their cost initially but seem to have settled down.”

Hughes will look to in-form Bojan Krkic to lead his team’s attempt to cause an upset. “He won’t be fazed by going to places like Old Trafford,” he said.

“Some players can go there and not enjoy the experience because it is foreign to them, but that’s not the case with him, he’s played all over the world.”

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Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

Sport Football

Injuries mean Pardew must be resourceful

George Caulkin Northern Sports Correspondent

Coping with adversity is something that Newcastle United have made a virtue of this season and they must do so again if they are to emerge with a positive result away to Burnley tonight.

Alan Pardew can take only 19 senior players to Turf Moor — not all of them fully fit — as he confronts an injury list he describes as “critical”.

Tim Krul, Fabricio Coloccini, Ryan Taylor, Mehdi Abeid, Rolando Aarons, Gabriel Obertan, Davide Santon and Siem de Jong are among Newcastle’s confirmed absentees, while Daryl Janmaat, Massadio Haïdara and Mike Williamson have travelled but will have late fitness tests. Moussa Sissoko and Jack Colback are both suspended.

With Newcastle’s defence badly affected, Pardew could be forced to hand debuts to Lubomir Satka and Remie Streete, who was recalled from a loan spell at Port Vale last month.

“We’ve lost the core of the team and it’s not ideal going to Burnley,” Pardew said. “We’re a bit thin on the ground.”

Yet with his own position under question from supporters and a number of key personnel missing, Pardew’s team embarked on a run of six matches without defeat in all competitions that was ended by their 1-0 defeat at Upton Park on Saturday. “We’ve been in this position before and won,” Pardew said. “The squad has strength so I hold no fear.”

Pardew is an admirer of Danny Ings, the Burnley striker whose contract is up in the summer and who has been linked with Newcastle. “We’ve never offered any interest in him but he’s someone I’ve always kept my eye on,” he said.

Pearson stays upbeat during lean period Ian Baker

Nigel Pearson, the Leicester City manager, is adamant that the club’s owners will not make rash decisions as he seeks to end the eight-match winless streak that has sent his side to the bottom of the Barclays Premier League.

The Srivaddhanaprabha family, the Thailand billionaires who own the club, have not made any kneejerk reactions during Pearson’s three-year spell in charge, even when his side won only once in 14 games while going for promotion in 2012-13 and then lost in the play-offs that year.

They were rewarded when Leicester won promotion as winners of the Sky Bet Championship last season but they have now found things more difficult as they adjust to life in the elite league.

“I have a thick skin,” said Pearson, who was upbeat before the match at home to Liverpool tonight. “I trust the people I work with. My job is to manage this football club in good times and bad times. We are currently having a bad time but we need to work through it.

“The owners have been like this throughout my entire time. They are private people and will do what they think is right for the football club.”

Leicester’s most recent win was over Manchester United, 5-3 in September, and how Pearson could do with a boost of similar proportions. “I’m very much of the opinion that we do have quality and players capable of making a longterm adjustment to this league,” he said.

Fading force: Gerrard has reached the age of 34, meaning that a reduction of his powers is natural, so it should not have felt dramatic when he was recently dropped

Gerrard must re-evaluate role to remain useful for Liverpool Oliver Kay writes that the Liverpool legend needs to accept a drop in game time for his own long-term benefit

B

rendan Rodgers was unequivocal yesterday in laying out his vision for Steven Gerrard’s future. “For me, there would always be a position here for Steven as a player,” the Liverpool manager said, adding that he hoped that association would continue, perhaps even alongside him in the dugout, long after his captain has hung up his boots.

It is an appealing thought as Gerrard prepares to return to Liverpool’s starting line-up away to Leicester City tonight, but the “job for life” stuff seldom seems to work out in football these days.

Raúl González always imagined he would play out his days with Real Madrid, not Schalke, Al Sadd and New York Cosmos; Xavi Hernández is wondering, at 34, whether to sever the umbilical cord that has tied him to Barcelona since childhood; Frank Lampard, an icon of the modern Chelsea, is now enjoying himself so much in a different shade of blue, at Manchester City, that his new start with New York City might be postponed for a few weeks.

The only way to secure the status of a one-club man is by accepting a diminished status and, usually, a diminished wage.

Ryan Giggs became accustomed to seeing his wage cut and his

appearances rationed during the extended twilight of his Manchester United career. Paolo Maldini accepted that he would be used more sparingly towards the end of his illustrious time with AC Milan. John Terry, who will be 34 this week, took a pay cut to re-sign with Chelsea last May, even if he could justifiably claim this season to be playing his best football in years.

It is an age at which a re-evaluation is required, not just from a player, pondering how best to enhance or preserve his legend and legacy, but often from his manager. José Mourinho reluctantly concluded last summer that he and Chelsea could not offer Lampard the same status at 36 as they could Terry at 33. By contrast, Sir Alex Ferguson persuaded Giggs and indeed Paul Scholes to keep extending their contracts on the understanding that it was in all parties’ interests for them to play less.

Gerrard is 34. If his powers are waning — and in truth it had seemed to be heading that way before his and Liverpool’s spectacular resurgence last season — it is hardly a shock. Great players seldom age as gracefully as Maldini or Franco Baresi did.

Giggs and Scholes extended their careers only after adjusting to the reality that they would be helped by playing less often and, crucially, with more restraint.

Giggs was 34 when Ferguson announced, after United’s Champions League triumph in 2008, that it was time to begin “phasing out” him and Scholes, a year his junior. The pair went on to play for another six and five years respectively, but Giggs saw his number of starts for United in all competitions drop from the age of 32: from 39 in 2006-07 to 33 to 27 to 23 to 27 to 22 to 18 to a mere 15 in 2013-14. Injury restricted

Gerrard to 27 and 28 starts for Liverpool and England in 2010-11 and 2011-12.

Over the past two seasons that figure was 48 and 49.

He is a different physical specimen to Giggs or Scholes, but his and Rodgers’s plan this summer, after his retirement from international football, was that he would be used more sparingly in readiness for returning to the Champions League. It was never meant to reach a situation where, after starting all 12 Barclays Premier League matches and four out of five in the Champions League, it would feel like a dramatic moment when, for his own good as much as the team’s, he was dropped to

Vital statistics

687

Number of appearances Gerrard has made for Liverpool since 1998

1,476

Minutes he has appeared in Barclays Premier League and Champions League matches so far this season (out of 1,620)

2.1

Tackles Gerrard has made per 90 minutes in the Premier League this season, down from 3.1 last season

15

Premier League matches started by Ryan Giggs in 2008-09, when he was voted PFA player of the year

the bench for the home game against Stoke City on Saturday.

“You get to the stage of your career where you can’t play every minute of every game,” Rodgers said yesterday.

“But it’s interesting; whenever Steven plays three games in a week, I hear he’s not capable of playing three games.

Then the minute he’s out for a game, everyone asks why he’s not playing.”

That is what happens when a player is, as Rodgers said yesterday, a “proper legend” at a club, but rotation is easier to accept — not least for the legend being rotated — when it is merely a case of changing from one winning line-up to another. Giggs and Scholes never, in their mid-30s, suffered the difficulty of being a lightning rod for criticism in an underperforming team.

United could always look to others for inspiration. Liverpool, on this season’s form, seem unable to do so.

Rodgers suggested that money was the last thing Gerrard would consider with regard to the contract offer Liverpool have made him. The deciding factors, the manager said, “are as much about life as football”.

Part of that, you suspect, is about Gerrard’s need to feel a sense of comfort and enjoyment with his role at Anfield, where he has been so bound up in Liverpool’s fortunes for the past 16 years that he would be forgiven a sense of weariness. He might well look at Lampard, refreshed by his move to City and with a new start in America ahead, or Raúl and see the appeal.

He might equally draw inspiration from Giggs or Francesco Totti. If the love affair is to continue, though, it will have to be on different terms.

For him still to be the man who bails Liverpool out game after game, week after week, is more than either he or the club can expect.

the times | Tuesday December 2 2014

63

FGM

Football Sport

Premier League preview

Kick-off 7.45pm unless stated

Burnley v Newcastle

Swansea v QPR

TV Highlights, Sky Sports 2, 10pm

TV Highlights, Sky Sports 2, 10pm

Michael Duff is a doubt for Burnley, who are without the injured Sam Vokes and Matt Taylor. Newcastle have Moussa Sissoko and Jack Colback suspended, while Tim Krul and Fabricio Coloccini are injured.

Mike Williamson, Daryl Janmaat and Massadio Haïdara are doubts.

Swansea have Federico Fernández injured. Richard Dunne is back from suspension for QPR, who also expect Bobby Zamora and Yun Suk Young to be fit. Only 16 per cent of Swansea’s throw-ins have gone long (23 yards or more) this season, the smallest percentage in the Premier League.

Burnley (4-4-2) T Heaton — K Trippier, M Keane, J Shackell, S Ward — M Kightly, D Marney, D Jones, G Boyd — A Barnes, D Ings

Swansea City (4-2-3-1) L Fabianski — Á Rangel, K Bartley, A Williams, N Taylor — Ki Sung Yueng, J Shelvey — W Routledge, G Sigurdsson, J Montero — W Bony

Newcastle United (4-2-3-1) R Elliot — S Taylor, M Williamson, P Dummett, M Haïdara — C Tioté, V Anita — Y Gouffran, M Sissoko, S Ameobi — A Pérez

Queens Park Rangers (4-4-2) R Green — M Isla, R Dunne, S Caulker, Yun Suk Young — N Kranjcar, J Barton, K Henry, L Fer — E Vargas, C Austin

Referee P Dowd

Referee K Friend

7

32

Predictions

Newcastle red cards in 2014 — all when playing away from home

31

27

H

D

42

Age gap between the managers: Monk, 35, and Redknapp, 67

A

Predictions 61

H

23

16

D

A

Leicester v Liverpool

C Palace v Aston Villa

TV Live, BT Sport 1, 7pm

TV Highlights, Sky Sports 2, 10pm

David Nugent is a doubt for Leicester City and Dean Hammond is unlikely to return in time to play after a calf injury. Liverpool have Mamadou Sakho back in training but Mario Balotelli has a groin injury. Simon Mignolet has played 91 consecutive league games in goal for Sunderland and Liverpool.

Dwight Gayle is a Palace doubt.

Damien Delaney and Adrian Ma Mariappa are out. Villa have Chris Christian Benteke back from suspension. Ciaran Clark should play despite suffering blurred vision on Saturday. In the past ten months, Palace have had more league defeats at home than away (six to five).

Leicester City (4-4-2) K Schmeichel — R De Laet, M Wasilewski, W Morgan, P Konchesky — R Mahrez, E Cambiasso, M James, J Schlupp — L Ulloa, J Vardy

Crystal Palace (4-4-1-1) J Speroni — J Ward, S Dann, B Hangeland, M Kelly — J Puncheon, J Ledley, M Jedinak, Y Bolasie — M Chamakh — F Campbell

Liverpool (4-1-4-1) S Mignolet — G Johnson, M Skrtel, K Touré, J Enrique — Lucas Leiva — J Henderson, S Gerrard, P Coutinho, R Sterling — R Lambert

Aston Villa (4-3-3) B Guzan — A Hutton, J Okore, C Clark, A Cissokho — A Westwood, C Sánchez, T Cleverley — J Cole, C Benteke, G Agbonlahor

Referee L Mason

Referee M Oliver

17

Predictions 54

Games in row for Raheem Sterling with no goal for club and country

24

22

H

D

A

Bojan Stoke City

0

League starts in 2014 by Joe Cole before starting for Villa at weekend

Kick-off 8pm

Predictions 49

H

27

24

D

A

Man United v Stoke

West Brom v West Ham

TV Highlights, Sky Sports 2, 10pm

TV Highlights, Sky Sports 2, 10pm

Manchester United are without Ángel Di María because of a hamstring injury but Wayne Rooney should play despite suffering a knock to the knee.

Stoke City have Phil Bardsley back after illness but will miss the injured pair of Steve Sidwell and Glenn Whelan.

Sébastien Pocognoli and James Morrison are West Brom doubts and Claudio Yacob is suspended. Mark Noble is a West Ham doubt and Diafra Sakho is out injured but Enner Valencia is fit. West Ham’s past two goals have been scored in the 56th minute.

Manchester United (4-1-3-2) D De Gea — A Valencia, C Smalling, M Rojo, A Young — M Carrick — A Herrera, M Fellaini, J Mata — W Rooney, R van Persie Stoke City (4-2-3-1) A Begovic — P Bardsley, R Shawcross, M Wilson, E Pieters — C Adam, S N’Zonzi — J Walters, Bojan, O Assaidi — M B Diouf Referee J Moss

86

Predictions 54

Years ago since United hosted first midweek action in December

H

26

20

D

A

Touchline Tony Tony Cascarino

Manchester United v Stoke City Stoke are a better side away than at home at present, and perhaps that will suit Bojan Krkic this evening at Old Trafford, where the onus may be on quick breaks.

If you are a defender and the Spaniard is running at you, you are in trouble because he has great feet.

You would much rather he gets the ball when you are close to him and he has his back to goal. He offers something different for Stoke compared with the likes of Peter Crouch and Jonathan Walters. Manchester United’s win on Saturday was hard to assess because Hull City let them ease through the match without any trouble. We will not know where United stand under Louis van Gaal until after Christmas.

Kick-off 8pm

West Bromwich Albion (4-4-1-1) B Foster — A Wisdom, C Dawson, J Lescott, S Pocognoli — G Dorrans, C Gardner, Y Mulumbu, C Brunt — S Sessègnon — S Berahino West Ham United (4-4-1-1) Adrián — C Jenkinson, J Collins, J Tomkins, A Cresswell — M Amalfitano, M Noble, C Kouyaté, M Jarvis — S Downing — A Carroll Referee M Jones

5

West Brom wins in past 30 home league games

Predictions 41 H

26

33

D

A

Goals! Goals! Goals!

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Sport

Tuesday December 2 2014 | the times

The Times in the winners’ circle Th Alan Lee was named racingg writer of the year yesterdayy for a record third time Read him today on page 54

thetimes.co.uk/sport

british press awards — sports team of the year

Leeds owner vows to fight League ban Rick Broadbent

Massimo Cellino will fight attempts to force him out of English football after accusing the Football League of waging a vendetta.

The Leeds United owner and president will appeal after failing the League’s owners and directors’ test for a second time, and insisted he would not sell the Sky Bet Championship club.

“It looks like a personal vendetta,” he said. “They are surprised I am running the club in the right way. I’m not a criminal. I’m not dishonest. I’m working night and day to fix this club because they have been ripped off by everyone for the last 13 years.”

League rules prevent anyone with unspent convictions for “offences of dishonesty” from owning clubs. Cellino failed the test in March after an Italian court fined him for not paying £300,000 import duties on his yacht Nelie. He won his appeal because “dishonesty” had not been proved, but the League has now received the court’s “reasoned” judgment, which accuses Cellino of a “Machiavellian simulation”.

The conviction will become spent on March 18, but the waters could become stormier still when another tax case is heard about a second yacht named Lucky 23. That was postponed last month.

Cellino, who has spent convictions

for fraud and false accounting, is adamant that the latest twist is personal.

“I don’t know if I have to resign or not, but if it was for the good of Leeds then I would,” he said. “But how can I walk away? I engaged myself with my partners [Gulf Finance House] and they trusted to sell to me. They thought I was the best one. Now the fans can see new hope. How can I walk out from the club? How can I leave them like that?”

The League said that Cellino “must resign as a director of LUFC forthwith”.

The board’s decision was unanimous, although Shaun Harvey, the League chief executive, did not vote because he held the same position at Leeds until last year. Cellino’s appeal will buy him 28 days before the ban takes effect.

A forced sale would be complicated given that Cellino bought Leeds for £11 million and agreed to service a £24 million debt. He is in Bahrain agreeing a £20 million investment deal with GFH, which retains a stake in the club.

Under the terms of the takeover, GFH can buy back the club for £1 if Cellino’s company fails to make any of their agreed payments. GFH are due £6 million later this month.

“The League are wasting their time against me,” he said. “I want to know how much they pay their lawyers. If we go to appeal, how much will it cost?

Continued on page 60

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