The spectator 17 june 2017

84-page glossy quarterly magazine with Prue Leith, Rachel Johnson, Sarah Vine, Roger Scruton, and featuring…

Drinking with Murdoch 17 june 2017 [ £4.25

by Piers Morgan

Ban kids in pubs

by Henry Jeffreys

www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

Rebooting the Maybot James Forsyth on the Tories’ new mission Nick Timothy on what went wrong

Labour’s miracle Isabel Hardman Blame Brexit

Is Corbyn our Trump?

Hugo Rifkind

Freddy Gray

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The thin blue line

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he lessons to be learned from the Conservatives’ poor showing in the election could fill more pages than the national curriculum. Don’t unleash on the public a manifesto which has not even been tested among senior ministers. Don’t think you can get through a seven-week election campaign by endlessly repeating the same mantra, especially when you are being ridiculed for it. Don’t underestimate how quickly public opinion can change. Sell yourself, your party and its ideas, rather than just attacking your opponent.

Yet there is a serious danger that Theresa May and the rest of the Tory party could pick up the wrong message. There is a growing narrative that the Tories lost their majority because voters did not really want Brexit, even though four in five voted for parties whose manifesto promised Brexit. The party of Remain, the Liberal Democrats, did not manage to rally many people to its cause.

The country has moved on from the EU referendum even if certain politicians (and David Cameron) have not.

The more interesting discussion is about what Britain would look like after Brexit, a conversation the Tories did not really start.

Which brings us to the next wrong lesson from the election: that the public have voted against ‘austerity’. It must be tempting for MPs who have survived an electoral fright to think that opening the spending taps could save them from oblivion. But piling debt on to the next generation is as immoral now as it was in 2010, when a combination of recession and Gordon Brown’s overspending nearly collapsed the economy.

‘Austerity’ is just a populist phrase to describe good economic sense. There is nothing really austere about our public spending, which has grown year-on-year. In the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

spite of cuts to some budgets, the government is still borrowing about £50 billion a year — overall government debt has doubled since the crash to stand at £1.7 trillion. Paying interest on that debt already costs more than educating our children, and almost as much as defence. And that is with interest rates at historic lows.

An internal Labour party report into why Ed Miliband lost concluded that the Tories triumph was not in spite of ‘austerity’ but because of it: ‘Labour lost because voters did not believe it would cut the deficit.’ Why would voters who two years ago rejected Labour spending plans now accept Jeremy Corbyn’s much more irresponsible

It’s tempting for MPs who’ve survived an electoral fright to think opening the spending taps could save them plans? Perhaps because the Conservatives did not raise the subject until the final week of the campaign, and only then with the facile jibe about Corbyn’s ‘money tree’.

Theresa May’s single biggest error was the failure to provide proper costings in her manifesto, which robbed her of any authority to criticise Labour’s figures. It allowed Corbyn to get away with promising largesse to various parts of the electorate without proper scrutiny. Had it been applied, the size of Labour’s tax bombshell might have focused minds. The argument was, and is, there for the making: the corporation tax rate has plunged, yet UK companies are paying more tax than ever before. The 50p rate of income tax was abolished and, as a result, the highest-paid are shouldering an ever larger share of the tax burden. Since the cuts started, eight jobs have been created in the private sector for every public

sector role that has been shed. The Conservatives lost their nerve in the campaign and failed to make the case for conservatism. It would be disastrous if, as a result, they felt they had to ditch it altogether. The point about Tory reforms is that they were progressive; welfare reform was tough, but it helped so many back to work that the incomes of the lowest-paid rose faster than any other group under David Cameron.

Conservative reforms led to record employment, and forced inequality to a 30-year low.

The Tories can proudly talk about social justice, fairness and equality — and show how Conservative reforms are the surest route to success. If the party has a nervous breakdown now, and decides (for example) that this election result was somehow a demand for a soft Brexit, then it will make a bad situation far worse. Jeremy Corbyn has presented himself as some kind of novel political force, yet his success is really down to a trick which is as old as democracy itself: bribing the people with their own money.

What is new is that no one challenged him. Where it took Gordon Brown a decade to ruin the public finances, Corbyn and John McDonnell would, between them, achieve that in months. Yet the Tories never make that point.

Thankfully, Jeremy Corbyn did not win the election, and — at least for now — Labour will not have the chance to do as it has always done in office: spend and borrow its way into an economic crisis. That is why the Conservatives almost always lead the polls when it comes to questions of economic competence. The tax cuts worked, welfare reform led to a jobs boom. But an addiction to self-flagellation (and an obsession with Brexit) has stopped the Tories from playing their strongest card.

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Snack time, p39

Melting point, p26

En marche! p18

THE WEEK 3

Leading article

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Portrait of the Week

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Diary How we got it wrong

Nick Timothy 10 Politics Labour’s happy surprise Isabel Hardman 11 The Spectator’s Notes Surveying the wreckage Charles Moore 17 Rod Liddle The right kind of loser 21 Hugo Rifkind Blue Sky Fantasies 22 James Delingpole Youth’s revenge 24 Barometer Dead woman walking 27 Letters Divining Rod, those lefty deplorables and post-truth Pilate 28 Any other business This time, May needs to take business seriously Martin Vander Weyer Deborah Ross is away.

BOOKS & ARTS 12 Rebooting the Maybot The Tories hope to reprogram, rather than depose, Theresa May James Forsyth

BOOKS 30 Sam Leith Farewell to the Horse, by Ulrich Raulff

13 Connie Bensley ‘Stroke’: a poem

33 Sofka Zinovieff The Unfinished Palazzo, by Judith Mackrell

14 Hands off our Ruth Scotland needs its Tory leader Alex Massie 18 The Macron miracle France’s new de Gaulle Jonathan Fenby 20 Alt-hate Who knew the left was so vicious?

Julie Burchill 23 Fad diets are junk Just ignore the advice of diet gurus Prue Leith 24 Jeremy Trump The Jez and the Donald are the same Freddy Gray 26 Oceans apart The death of global warming’s ‘pause’ Phillip Williamson

34 Robert Carver Hitler’s Monsters, by Eric Kurlander 35 Adrian Woolfson The Matter of the Heart, by Thomas Morris Julian Stannard

‘Any Tickets Please?’: a poem 36 David Kynaston Outskirts, by John Grindrod 37 Christopher Hawtree A Forger’s Tale, by Shaun Greenhalgh 38 Thomas W. Hodgkinson Stiff Upper Lip, by Alex Renton 39 Anna Aslanyan Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk Helen R. Brown

On Eating Insects, by Nordic Food Lab 40 Lewis Jones Between Them, by Richard Ford 41 Johanna Thomas-Corr A Boy in Winter, by Rachel Seiffert

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Geoff Thompson, Bernie, Nick Newman, Mike Turner, Paul Wood, RGJ, Grizelda, Phil Disley, Dredge, Evans, KJ. Lamb, GG. www.spectator.co.uk Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: editor@spectator.co.uk (editorial); letters@spectator.co.uk (for publication); advertising@spectator.co.uk (advertising); Advertising enquiries: 020 7961 0222 Subscription and delivery queries Spectator Subscriptions Dept., 17 Perrymount Rd, Haywards Heath RH16 3DH; Tel: 0330 3330 050; Email: customerhelp@subscriptions.spectator.co.uk; Rates for a basic annual subscription in the UK: £111; Europe: £185; Australia: A$279; New Zealand: A$349; and £195 in all other countries. To order, go to www.spectator.co.uk/A151A or call 0330 3330 050 and quote A151A; Newsagent queries Spectator Circulation Dept, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: dstam@spectator.co.uk; Distributor COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QX Vol 334; no 9851 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952 The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP Editor: Fraser Nelson

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the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Nick Timothy’s confession, p9

Finding his forté, p42 Horsepower, p30

LIFE ARTS 42 Interview Evgeny Kissin: child prodigy and political heretic Damian Thompson

44 Theatre Barber Shop Chronicles; Common Lloyd Evans Radio

Kate Chisholm 46 Television James Walton 47 Exhibitions Raphael: the Drawings Martin Gayford 48 Opera Hamlet; Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria Richard Bratby 49 Cinema Churchill A.N. Wilson

LIFE 55 High life Taki Low life Jeremy Clarke

56 Alistair Elliot ‘The Old Man Considers the Gender of a Boat’: a poem 57 Real life Melissa Kite Bridge Susanna Gross AND FINALLY . . .

52 Notes on…

West Middlewick Farm William Cook

58 Chess Raymond Keene Competition Lucy Vickery 59 Crossword Doc 60 Status anxiety Toby Young Battle for Britain

Michael Heath

50 Live music Jeff Mills: From Here to There Arthur House John Greening

Central to Nazi beliefs was the theory that white ‘Aryan’ man was not descended from the apes, but rather from ‘divine sperma’ brought to earth by meteors Robert Carver, p34 If there is coalition between the Conservatives and the DUP, we’ll have never had it so good. Yippee!

Taki, p55 Almost all the social, sexual, pharmacological, geographical and educational value of university is probably delivered in year one.

After that, the buggers can pay Rory Sutherland, p61

61 The Wiki Man Rory Sutherland Your problems solved

Mary Killen 62 Drink Bruce Anderson Mind your language

‘Adaptation’: a poem

Dot Wordsworth

CONTRIBUTORS Prue Leith, a cook and writer, will replace Mary Berry in the next series of The Great British Bake Off. She rails against fad diet gurus on p.23.

Sofka Zinovieff is the author of The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me. She explores life, love and art in Venice on p.33.

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Robert Carver, who examines the Nazis’ obsession with the supernatural on p.34, is a travel writer. He once taught in an Australian high-security prison.

Adrian Woolfson is the author of two books on genetics and is writing another, on ‘the art of living well’. He reviews a rigorous history of heart surgery on p.35.

A.N. Wilson, who confesses to being Churchill-allergic on p.49, has written biographies of Queen Victoria, Hitler and John Betjeman among other works.

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heresa May, the Prime Minister, spent the week confronting the consequences of the general election that she had called to bring ‘stability and certainty for the future’. It had instead surprisingly left the Conservatives with no overall majority. They won 318 seats (a loss of 13) and Labour 262 (a gain of 30). The Scottish National Party won 35 (a loss of 21), with the Conservatives gaining 12 extra seats in Scotland, even capturing Stirling. Labour won an extra five seats in Scotland. Angus Robertson, the SNP leader at Westminster, lost his seat, as did Alex Salmond. Nick Clegg, the former Lib-Dem leader, lost his seat, but Sir Vince Cable won back Twickenham.

Paul Nuttall resigned as leader of Ukip, the collapse of whose vote left the Tories with a total of 13,667,213 votes (42.4 per cent) and Labour 12,874,985 (40 per cent).

Labour’s organisation among students led to its winning seats such as Canterbury by 187 votes and Kensington, after three recounts, by 20. The annual rate of inflation, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, rose to 2.9 per cent in May from 2.7 in April; measured by the Retail Prices Index, the rise was to 3.7 per cent from 3.5. A huge fire engulfed a west London tower block, injuring dozens and trapping many inside.

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onservatives disagreed about whether Theresa May would have to resign.

George Osborne, the former chancellor of the exchequer, now editor of the London Evening Standard, said: ‘Theresa May is dead woman walking.’ In order to secure

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Abroad a majority, Mrs May sought from the Democratic Unionists (with ten seats) a confidence and supply arrangement.

This upset Ruth Davidson, the leader of the 13 Scottish Conservatives, who is keen on same-sex marriage, which is illegal in Northern Ireland. Delays meant that the Queen’s Speech was rescheduled. Mrs May’s weakened position led her to give immediate assurances that there would be no change in the cabinet positions of Boris Johnson, David Davis, Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond or Sir Michael Fallon. A small cabinet shuffle brought back from the wilderness Michael Gove as Environment Secretary, with Andrea Leadsom becoming Leader of the House.

Damian Green, Mrs May’s friend, became First Secretary of State.

Corbyn, the Labour leader, spoke Jeremy as if his party had won the election. He paused to smell a rose outside his house and said: ‘Aren’t they beautiful these roses? And such a glorious day.’ Lord Hague floated the notion of a cross-party commission to decide the hardness or softness of Brexit.

Conservative backbenchers were so angry at the election result that they demanded that Mrs May arrange an extra television interview to apologise to candidates who had lost seats. She also complied with another demand: to dispense with her two bosom advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. Mrs May addressed a meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee, saying, ‘I got us into this mess — I’ll get us out of it,’ and was met with sounds of approval.

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n American circuit court of appeals upheld the judgment of a lower court against the lawfulness of President Trump’s revised travel ban on people from six mainly Muslim countries. US special forces supported Philippine armed forces in efforts to retake the city of Marawi from supporters of Isis. In Syria, fighting continued to take the city of Raqqa from Isis. Saif Gaddafi, a son of the late Libyan ruler, was let out of jail after six years. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the foreign minister of Qatar, flew to London for talks with Boris Johnson, who called for a resolution of the boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other neighbours.

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undreds of people were arrested at anti-corruption demonstrations in Moscow and St Petersburg. Juha Sipilä, the Prime Minister of Finland, said he must withdraw from a coalition with the Finns party after it chose an opponent of immigration as its leader. Norway is to introduce a law against the Muslim fullface veil in schools and universities, on the grounds of its hampering communication.

Travis Kalanick, the founder of the Uber minicab set-up, took a leave of absence.

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n the first round of the French general election, Emmanuel Macron’s new party, La République en Marche, and its ally MoDem, won 32.3 per cent of the vote, with a turnout of 48.7 per cent. Mrs May came to visit Mr Macron to discuss security.

McDonald’s began to supply cutlery at its outlets in France.

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Nick Timothy

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obody inside CCHQ was prepared for election night’s 10 p.m. exit poll. Lynton Crosby’s last text to me predicted that we were going to ‘do well’, which according to our expectations would mean a Conservative majority of more than 60. A late projection, based on data from the ground and Jim Messina’s modelling, suggested we would win 371 seats, giving us a majority of 92. In the end, the Conservatives got their highest share of the vote since 1983, and more votes than Tony Blair managed in any of his elections, yet still we ended up with a hung parliament.

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kilful leadership may deliver stability, but the absence of an overall majority means the nature of the Brexit deal the government negotiates is more uncertain. There has long been talk of a choice between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of Brexit, with the latter requiring membership of the EU’s single market. Since that would involve accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, vast annual membership payments to the EU, and the continuation of free movement rules, people who voted to leave the European Union might wonder whether advocates of a ‘soft’ departure really do understand that Brexit means Brexit.

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ecause this election failed to produce the majority we needed, it is impossible to call the campaign anything but a failure. Before it began, we envisaged a return to traditional campaigning methods, with daily press conferences to scrutinise Labour and promote our policies. Theresa, never comfortable hogging the limelight, expected to make more use of her ministerial team. On the advice of the campaign consultants, and following opinion research that showed Theresa to be far more popular than the party or her colleagues, we eschewed our instincts. We were wrong to do so.

can disagree with Theresa’s prescription — a strategic role for the state to broaden economic opportunity, a clampdown on corporate excesses, rights for workers, intervention in dysfunctional markets and, through school reform, house-building and tax policy, a determination to make Britain the world’s Great Meritocracy — but it is very difficult to disagree with her diagnosis.

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hat is why the Conservative manifesto, which I authored jointly with the

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y biggest regret, however, is that we did not campaign in accordance with the insight that took Theresa to Downing Street in the first place. While the referendum result was undoubtedly an instruction for Britain to leave the EU, it was also a vote for change. One the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

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brilliant Ben Gummer, rejected ‘untrammelled free markets’ and ‘selfish individualism’, and declared that ‘our responsibility to one another is greater than the rights we hold as individuals’. I was surprised to read some commentators describe these statements as ‘left-wing’ when the manifesto was consciously Burkean in its style and substance. Burke’s great revelation was that if we value something, we must be prepared to reform it in order to keep it. I fear the election will cause many to conclude that we should return to the modern consensus politics of pure social and economic liberalism, which I believe is one of the causes of the division we see in Britain today.

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he manifesto was later written off as ‘the worst in history’. One of the criticisms is that, instead of offering voters giveaways and bribes, we spelt out where cuts would fall. While I accept that the manifesto might have been too ambitious, I worry that the implication of this argument is that politicians should not be straight with the electorate.

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he biggest complaint, though, was about our social care proposals. You can criticise the policy, but we need to be honest with ourselves. Since we have an ageing population, we need to spend more on health and care, and we need to decide how to pay for it. We can ask older people to meet the costs, subject to certain protections, from the wealth they have accrued through life, or we can tax younger generations even more.

Somehow we have reached a point where older people with assets expect younger, poorer people to pay for their care. With Britain’s demographics, that is not sustainable; neither is it socially just.

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ersonal attacks come with the job when you work in government, but at times like these, you find out who your true friends are, and you realise that the people who are hurt most by the criticism are your loved ones. So the biggest lesson of the past week for me has been a reminder of the importance of friends, family and love.

Nick Timothy was the PM’s chief of staff from July 2016 until last week.

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POLITICS|ISABEL HARDMAN

Labour’s happy surprise

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cience,’ wrote Jules Verne, ‘is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’ Perhaps this is why politics, which claims to be a science, is so littered with tremendous errors at the moment.

It wasn’t just the pollsters and the pundits in Westminster who called this election wrong. People embedded in constituencies couldn’t even correctly predict their own results. These days, politics seems a lot more like alchemy than a real science.

On the night before polling day, a group of Labour MPs compared notes about how things were looking in their patches. It was a miserable conversation in which many were resigned to being dumped by their electorates. Everyone outside a particular metropolitan multi -ethnic bubble reported a hatred of Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep; hatred of an intensity none of them had seen before. The next day, things still looked bleak. Campaigners knocking on doors in seats such as Wirral South found voters who had once committed to Labour turn around and say they were now off to back the Tories.

Meanwhile, Tory MPs with relatively strong majorities were telling one another that their vote was holding up and they couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over so they could get on with their lives.

None of those Labour MPs who’d told their colleagues they expected to lose did so.

And perfectly confident Conservative MPs suddenly found their majorities had disappeared, either to nothing or to just a few votes. In all, 33 Tories lost their seats, and 22 of their colleagues who held on did so by a margin of 1,000 or less.

Normally, after knocking on so many doors, parliamentary candidates get to the end of an election with the most detailed picture possible of what voters want from their party. This time around, far too many MPs had reached the wrong conclusion. The doorstep is sacred ground in politics, yet even experienced campaigners were utterly misled by the conversations that took place on it.

MPs are well-versed in reading between the lines of what voters say. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to vote’, for instance, tends to mean: ‘I’m voting for the other party but because I’m British I’m not going to say it to your face.’ So what did they miss?

‘Looking back,’ says one Labour MP who had spent weeks listening to voters complain 10

about Corbyn, ‘I think for those of us who were hearing “We don’t like Corbyn”, what we didn’t hear was anything about Theresa May. And so we didn’t realise that the silence from the voters meant they didn’t like her either.’ At the start of the campaign, candidates in both parties reported voters describing the Prime Minister as a ‘woman who gets things done’. After the botched manifesto launch, voters just stopped talking about her.

It’s not the first time Labour voters have complained about the party’s leader, either.

Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s election campaign chief, confesses that he’d forgotten how unpopular Tony Blair was on the doorstep in 2005. ‘We sometimes feed our own

The doorstep is sacred ground, yet even experienced campaigners were misled by their conversations on it fears on this. If I’m honest, in 2005 when we won I got on the doorstep: “I would vote Labour but not for Tony Blair and what he’s done in Iraq.” We forget that.’ Corbynites also suspect ‘moderate’ Labour MPs were suffering from confirmation bias: only hearing what they already thought about their leader and not looking for evidence that challenged it.

Another mistake both sides seem to have made is turning up on the wrong doorsteps. The Tories managed this spectacularly by focusing on the wrong seats, leaving incumbents to fight alone while parading confidently around the north-east. They also took the Remain vote for granted, forgetting that Theresa May had managed to insult the 48 per cent who wanted Britain to stay in the European Union by calling them ‘citizens of nowhere’.

‘Take you to my leader?

OK, but we’d better be quick.’

Labour MPs were so frightened by what they thought Jeremy Corbyn had done to their party’s appeal that they became obsessed with retaining their existing voters, not looking for new ones. After weeks of phoning this slice of the electorate, which contained some of the most negative attitudes to Corbyn, the candidates started to believe everyone felt this way.

Meanwhile, both parties were neglecting or struggling to reach a group of voters who appear to have turned out in greater numbers than expected to vote Labour: young people. Not just students, but the under-45s, who are more likely to live in blocks of flats which are difficult for canvassers to access, more likely to be out in the evening when parties are canvassing, and are more likely to have housemates or parents who come to the door and suggest a household is voting one way when its younger inhabitants plan to vote another. Some voters had registered so late that the parties just didn’t have any data on them at all. Anyone who has spent much time in politics knows the saying about non-voters — the main thing about them is that they don’t tend to vote. Well, in this election, some of those non-voters turned out for Corbyn, unnoticed by campaigners who thought they knew it all.

How do parties reach these mysterious people? Both parties threw vast sums at Facebook campaigning but are not yet comfortable standing on the virtual doorstep.

The Tories spent more than £1 million on attack ads on the site, yet lost seats. Labour strategists argue that what helped them was online posts not written by official propagandists but by campaign groups like Double Down News and Red Labour, which shared viral posts suggesting an establishment conspiracy against Corbyn.

Labour is now considering changing its model of canvassing so it is able to collect much more useful data than the basics needed to help get out the party’s vote on polling day.

Neither Labour nor the Tories won a majority in the election, and both have lessons to learn. But the problem with a science as inexact as politics is that by the time of the next election, the landscape will have changed sufficiently for there to be a whole load more mistakes available to make.

SPECTATOR.CO.UK/COFFEEHOUSE

Hourly updates from the coalition of chaos. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Charles Moore

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efore knowing the result of the election, I composed my Chairman’s message in the newsletter of the Rectory Society. In it, I noted that Theresa May was the third prime minister in a row to have been brought up in a parsonage house. The first was Gordon Brown, son of the Scottish manse. The second was David Cameron, inhabitant of an old rectory owned by his stockbroker father.

And now there was Mrs May, only child of a High Anglican vicar in Oxfordshire.

‘Whatever our political views,’ I went on, ‘I feel we [in the Society] should be proud of the fact that the buildings we love continue to produce unusual people capable of leading our country’. In the light of subsequent events, I suppose I should have put more emphasis on the word ‘unusual’, less on ‘capable’. My conclusion was that ‘The psychology of the parsonage child would make a most interesting study.’ I stick by that.

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ince no one now wants to stand up for ‘Theresa May and her team’, I have been trying to find out a bit more about how the wreckage looks from their point of view. On the one hand were Mrs May and her advisers, led by Nick Timothy, determined to have proper policy in the manifesto in order to get a popular mandate. Mrs May’s mantra was ‘I want to be different’, addressing difficult questions which had been postponed for too long — notably social care. The policies were not chucked in without thought at the last minute: they had been developed intensively ever since Mrs May became Prime Minister.

On the other hand were Crosby Textor and their ‘testing’. This reported strongly that voters disliked the Tories but liked Mrs May. Hence the decision to shrink the word ‘Conservative’ almost to invisibility and encourage Mrs May to say ‘Vote for me’. At the time, these two functions seemed complementary. Here was a strong leader with strong policies, different from the game-playing of the past. The country would like it. Crosby Textor framed the campaign accordingly.

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ut there was a missing bit. Normally, manifesto preparations can be acknowledged. The approach of an

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

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election is known. In this case, there had to be secrecy. The most striking thing about the manifesto work is that no minister, apart from Ben Gummer wielding the pen, was involved. Cabinet ministers discussed sections relating to their subjects, but none was present to help produce the whole.

So the manifesto was almost as unknown in advance to, say, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary, as to the average voter. I have never heard of this happening before. The salesmen knew incredibly little about the product.

Something similar applied to the method of campaigning. Cabinet ministers milled around on the ground floor of CCHQ in Matthew Parker Street dealing with their briefs — Jeremy Hunt on health, for instance — but few reached the fourth floor, where the ideas were being generated. None was consistently involved in strategy or tactics. After a couple of weeks, Mr Timothy was heard to say, ‘She’s looking very lonely out there.’ Mrs May felt uneasy about all the focus being on her, but by then it was too late. Anything that might have been done to try to change the whole presentation was scuppered by the two terrorist attacks, so serious that they blew all other considerations away.

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t doesn’t seem right — though it can sometimes be fun — to blame advisers.

What is truly dysfunctional nowadays are the relations between leaders and their ministerial colleagues, their MPs, and their party in the country. Mrs May depended for victory upon the goodwill and trust of millions of party supporters, thousands of activists, hundreds of candidates and dozens of ministers, yet the spirit of the age told her she had to scorn them in order to win. She asked people to trust her, but didn’t trust others. So she didn’t win.

n Monday night, David Cameron broke his silence at a comically recherché occasion. He spoke to launch a biography of a schoolmaster (The Enigma of Kidson by Jamie Blackett, Quiller).

The subject, Michael Kidson, was a master at Eton in the ex-prime minister’s time. The book contains a photograph of Cameron’s ‘leaver’ (the inscribed photograph of themselves that boys give to staff and friends when they leave), which he gave to Kidson. Young David stands at the garden gate of his parents’ old rectory (see above). He begins, ‘I know you think I know less history than your dog [a celebrity called Dougal]’ and goes on to say he has little hope of getting into Oxbridge ‘but the strangest things can happen’. They did. Other ‘leavers’ feature, including those from Cornelius Lysaght, Dominic West and the present Archbishop of Canterbury, a mixture of occupations which Kidson enjoyed.

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idson was the classic eccentric bachelor schoolmaster — potentially a very annoying stereotype. But he was unusual among teachers seriously interested in their subject in preferring pupils who weren’t top of the class. So the launch party was largely a gathering of men who happily describe themselves as ‘thickoes’, a fact of which Cameron made well-judged play. Eton has a good system by which boys have a ‘modern tutor’ (chosen by them), who looks after their academic and intellectual welfare outside class. Kidson was genially rude to his pupils, often calling them ‘completely illiterate’, but he cared about them.

The nicest thing in this book is the way he stuck up for his boys. Of one, who he fears will be thrown out for failing exams, he writes to the head master: ‘He is, in my view, a thoroughly good man…

He is kind, cheerful, honest, well-liked; frequent peccadillos can’t damage the good side. If there were a conventional war tomorrow, you couldn’t wish for a better companion in a slit trench… To send him away would do him no good, & only put a great load on his mother’s shoulders.’ How much better educated millions of teenagers would be if each had a crusty grown-up who saw it as his job to be their advocate.

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The Maybot 3000 The Tories hope to reprogram, rather than depose, the Prime Minister JAMES FORSYTH

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ad Theresa May won the election with the landslide she expected, she’d have fired several of the cabinet with her trademark brutality. They knew who they were. And last Monday, three of them took the opportunity to tell the Prime Minister where she had gone wrong. In the first meeting of the political cabinet since she blew her party’s majority, Philip Hammond asked why there had been no economic message in the campaign. Andrea Leadsom said that while May had repeatedly claimed the election was all about Brexit, she had never said what Brexit was actually for. The most pointed contribution, though, came from Sajid Javid, who lambasted the highhanded way that May’s team had run No. 10.

However, this was ritual humiliation, not a mutiny. The Tories have decided to keep Theresa May who, in turn, has agreed to the departure of her two chiefs of staff, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy. She knows, as her cabinet knows, that she has just committed the greatest unforced error in modern political history. In normal circumstances, she would be gone. But the Conservative party is in shock, petrified of another election and fearful that Jeremy Corbyn could become prime minister. Instead of deposing May straight away, they are going to try to reprogram her: to make her a different kind of politician.

Aside from the total collapse in May’s authority, the biggest change prompted by this general election is in the Tories’ attitude to Jeremy Corbyn. He used to be a figure of ridicule — and hope — for them. He was the great loser, the man who had captured the Labour party and rendered it unelectable for a generation. How things change. From the cabinet down, Tories are now worried that Corbyn is in a position to win an election. ‘The Tory party’s one job is to keep the hard left out — and we are about to fail at that,’ says one influential Tory MP. Last Monday’s political cabinet soon ended up comparing notes about an aggressive left-wing tide moving across the country. They lamented how Tory posters were defaced, the venom on social media, and how pro-Corbyn students seem to be. It took the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, who has had to deal with the cyber-Nats and far worse, to point out that her English colleagues had better get used to this. She told them she had just spent months having been accused of being a ‘rape apologist’ because 12

of the Tory policy of exempting rape victims from its two-child tax credits cap.

At first, Tories saw Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as a virus in the Labour party. They are now wondering if that virus has infected the electorate, and might take him to No. 10.

‘The Tory party’s one job is to keep the hard left out – and we are about to fail at that,’ says an MP Their current priority is to avoid a second election for as long as possible. A leadership campaign might quickly descend into chaos and give Mr Corbyn the entrée he needs. The upshot is that May will be given time to bed down this minority government and prove it can function before she is replaced.

But it will not be business as usual for her; the cabinet has made that clear. She will have to consult senior colleagues on all major decisions, widen her circle and deal promptly with ministers’ concerns. Tellingly, her new chief of staff is not a Mayite but the unseated Tory minister Gavin Barwell, who worked at Tory HQ for years before becoming an MP. His loyalty will be to the party

as a whole, not just the Prime Minister personally. I understand Barwell is already asking secretaries of state what they need from No. 10, and to let him know if anything is being held up on the Prime Minister’s desk.

Quite a contrast from the telephone terrorism that his predecessor, Fiona Hill, used to take pleasure in practising.

Ministers are also hoping to make May more empathetic, to avoid a repeat of her illjudged speech outside Downing Street the day after the election, which didn’t acknowledge her failure to win a majority. It turns out that she only had one speech, drafted in the expectation of a landslide, and she decided to tweak it rather than write a new one. The few lines about the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists were the only concession to the new reality she found herself in.

In her appearance in front of Tory backbenchers last Monday, May was contrite.

She took responsibility for the election failure and acknowledged that she was only in the job for as long as the party wanted her.

‘The new Maybot 3000 comes with an added empathy chip,’ joked one cabinet minister.

Throwing herself on the mercy of her MPs the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

was the easy bit, though. The far more challenging thing will be to alter the way she operates on a day-to-day basis. Some are sceptical of her ability to do this.

I understand that one reason George Bridges, one of the most able ministers in the last parliament, has quit the Brexit department is that he doesn’t think Theresa May really will start consulting others, even now. May sacked his colleague, the Brexit minister David Jones, without first discussing it with his boss, David Davis — an indication that old habits die hard.

No one seriously thinks she will ever recover her stature. ‘It is like with Gordon, once you have seen the flaws, you can’t unsee them,’ says one minister. Some of her cabinet colleagues have been astonished at her handling of negotiations with the DUP. Her decision to declare publicly that she wanted a deal with them and to send her chief whip to Belfast to negotiate it suggested a failure to grasp the basics of negotiating technique. Why was she willing to accept their demand for a written deal, rather than govern as a minority and call their bluff, given they’d never put Corbyn in No. 10?

If she struggles in negotiations with patriotic Ulstermen, how will she handle Brexit? ‘She’s a busted flush,’ warns one minister. ‘She can’t carry out these nego-

This is why the Tories are behaving so well: they’re afraid of Corbyn, yes, but they’re just as afraid of each other tiations; just look at the cartoons of her in the foreign press.’ A Dutch newspaper has depicted the Prime Minister in Brexit talks repeatedly hitting her head with a hammer to the bemusement of her counterparts.

There is no obvious successor, however.

Boris Johnson, Amber Rudd and David Davis are regarded as the frontrunners when May goes. Others, such as Nicky Morgan and Sajid Javid, will probably throw their hats into the ring, too. There are also young turks who will push Dominic Raab to run as the candidate of a new generation of free-enterprise Tories.

None of these candidates is ideal. Boris Johnson is far from universally popular — and if the election was in part a backlash against Brexit, in a country still split on this question, should the Tory party be led by the Leave campaign’s most recognisable face?

In the party, there are those determined to stop him. Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, loathes him and considers him toxic north of the border. She would throw her ever-growing political power behind whoever was the ‘Stop Boris’ candidate (she had her own meeting with Amber Rudd when she came to London last Monday). There are also Tories who fret that the EU couldn’t be seen to give a good deal to Boris, given his role in the referendum. Another concern the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Stroke The last time I fell in love was just before I died.

It was a pleasure and a delight. She always called me by my surname: Sorry Mr Lacey-Watson I’m a little late today. Has Ellie left?

Her uniform so temptingly decorous. Her movements quiet and swanlike. She busied herself counting tablets, adjusting the blind, and God knows what else as I watched covertly and covetously.

The last thing I remember is her pale fingers on my left wrist; and her expression as I covered them with my unpredictable, laboriously lifted right hand.

— Connie Bensley is that Boris means drama, and the country has had quite enough of that from the Tories in the past 12 months.

Then again, Boris is the Conservative antidote to Corbyn. He oozes optimism, likes meeting voters, connects with the public and twice won in London, a Labour city.

No one could accuse him of being a robotic politician, and he has done naughtier things than running through a wheat field. As one cabinet minister toying with the idea of backing him puts it: ‘To beat a populist, you need a populist.’ Several influential Tory donors have also come to this conclusion.

Then there is David Davis. His closest allies are letting it be known that he is currently holding the Prime Minister together.

If she fell apart, he’d be in the running to replace her. As Brexit secretary, he would offer continuity. Aged 68, he may appeal to younger MPs who want a temporary leader: young cardinals tend to vote for old popes.

Then again, he ran in 2005 and lost, so picking him would make the Tories seem as if they were going back to the pre-Cameron era. Some of his critics ask if he has the work ethic or attention to detail required of a prime minister.

Amber Rudd is the great hope of those in the party who want a softer Brexit, one of the few in Theresa May’s team to emerge from the campaign with any credit. A liber-

ally minded Tory, she is the ideal candidate, say her supporters, to win back Canterbury, Reading and Kensington. But she has a gossamer-thin majority: if 174 voters in her constituency changed their mind, she’d lose her seat. Even those attracted to her candidacy fret that it would lead ‘to the rest of the country being held hostage by a couple of hundred voters in Hastings’. Those who know her best say that she doesn’t regard her majority as a bar to her running for the leadership. But I understand she would happily stand aside in favour of Ruth Davidson if the leader of the Scots Tories swapped her plan to be First Minister for a stint in No. 10.

So much is at stake. The Tory party schism over the EU was closing, but it has now been reopened by the indecisive election result. The differences over policy and personnel within the parliamentary party, on Brexit and austerity, are such that many Tories think the party is entering one of its most dangerous periods in living memory. ‘It could be explosive enough to blow the party apart,’ warns one former cabinet minister.

This is why the Tories are behaving so well: they’re afraid of Corbyn, yes, but they’re just as afraid of each other.

This is why so many Tories will hope that the reprogrammed Maybot can keep functioning. Not out of admiration or respect, but because they desperately need to buy themselves some time and hope that the contradictions in Corbyn’s Labour coalition begin to become apparent. If they cannot hold themselves together, the Tories will face the wrath of an electorate enraged by the drama that they have unleashed on the country.

SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST

‘Quick! To the batgrave!’

James Forsyth and Andrew Rawnsley on Theresa May’s future.

13

Hands off our Ruth

BAROMETER

Saving Conservatism – and unionism – in Scotland is a ten-year project

Keep walking George Osborne called Theresa May a ‘dead woman walking’. The expression ‘dead man walking’ was called out by US prison officers to clear the way for a condemned inmate on his way to execution. It fell into disuse in the 1960s but was rekindled in 1993, first by the publication of a book of that title about a death row inmate called Elmo Patrick Sonnier, then by a successful film version starring Sean Penn. Sonnier was convicted in 1978 of the murder of two teenage lovers and executed in 1984. If Theresa May spends that long on political ‘death row’, it will last beyond a five-year parliamentary term.

Against the bias Britain’s electoral system used to favour the Conservatives, then Labour, and now it seems to favour the Tories again.

Number of votes received per seat won: Year Conservative Labour 2017 .................... 42,927...............49,266 2015 .................... 34,347...............40,290 2010 .................... 34,979...............33,358 2005 .................... 44,368...............26,908 2001 .................... 50,374...............25,968 1997 .................... 58,187...............32,340 1992 .................... 41,943...............42,658 1987 .................... 36,598...............43,795 1983 .................... 32,776...............40,463 1979 .................... 40,406...............42,870

Youth will out Labour’s unexpectedly strong election result was linked to young-voter turnout.

How has turnout percentage varied among old and young in recent elections?

Year 18-24 Over 65 1997 61% 87% 2001 43% 82% 2005 40% 85% 2010 45% 88% 2015 56% 84% Source: British Social Attitudes survey

Gay unionism Some protested at a pact between the Conservatives and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) over the latter’s stance on gay marriage. An Ipsos MORI poll in 2015 found that 68 per cent of people in Northern Ireland supported gay marriage. A similar poll in 2014 found support in Britain running at 69 per cent.

The NI poll broke down support for gay marriage by political affiliation: Sinn Fein ...80% UUP .....49% Alliance .....79% DUP .....45% SDLP............61% In the Irish Republic, support for gay marriage was found to be 62 per cent.

14

ALEX MASSIE

A

t last, there is light in the north. The long Scottish Tory winter has finally ended, giving way to the freshest spring imaginable. Just ten days ago, leading Scottish Tories believed they might win half a dozen seats at the general election. Even on election night they struggled to accept the reality of what was happening. ‘Ayr? Really?’

But they did win Ayr. And Stirling. And Angus. And Gordon. And Moray.

This was emphatically not Theresa May’s victory. It was Ruth Davidson’s. Now, in the aftermath of this Ruthquake, a question arises: if Ruth can save the Scottish Tories, couldn’t she do something similar south of the border?

Every newspaper has carried a version of this fantasy. It shows once again that there’s nothing so powerful as wishful thinking.

Although Jeremy Corbyn helped Labour to a better-than-expected result, this was not a contest between right and left in Scotland. It was, once again, nationalist vs unionist. ‘Politics is different here,’ says one senior Tory, ‘so we had to run our own campaign.’

Much to the fury of May’s advisors, the Scottish Tories dumped the UK party message. Would-be MPs were branded ‘Ruth Davidson’s candidate’, not Theresa May’s, and by the end of the election Scottish Tories feared that May’s less than strong and stable campaign risked costing the party seats in Scotland.

Tories pining for Davidson to leave Edinburgh for London forget that she has a considerable job still to do. Project Ruth is only half-complete; it ends, in her imagination at least, with her becoming first minister after the 2021 Holyrood elections. That was once such a laughably unlikely goal that even she did not think it possible; now it is merely improbable. Nevertheless, her elevated ambition shows the seriousness of the Tory revival in Scotland.

This election was a mighty victory for unionism — the three pro-UK parties won 61 per cent of the vote — and a disaster for Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP. Even so, canny unionists appreciate it was not the final word on the national question. Support for independence remains above the 40 per cent needed to keep the issue alive.

There is no prospect of a second referendum before 2021, but the next Holyrood

election may yet be fought as a proxy vote on the issue. If — a hefty if — a pro-independence majority is returned, precedent suggests it would be damnably hard for the UK government to block another referendum.

Thwarting that remains Davidson’s biggest task and helps explain why, even if she wanted to flit south, it would be irresponsible for her to do so. Few politicians are truly indispensable but it is difficult to imagine how the Scottish Tories could replace Davidson.

Doing so would put the party’s revival at risk.

There remains a great deal of work to do before the Tories are seen as a credible party of government in Edinburgh. Davidson’s

Few politicians are truly indispensable but it is difficult to imagine how the Scottish Tories could replace her allies concede her strengths lie in campaigning more than in policy development. Their task is to develop a policy infrastructure on schools, health and the economy that will make a vote for the Tories something more than a constitutional protest.

Davidson’s opposition to independence was enough to deliver the Scottish Tories’ best vote share since 1979. But it was not an endorsement, as Davidson knows, of Conservatism. Her 13 MPs are Scots who happen to be Tories, not Tories who happen to be in Scotland. ‘As a party, we have to reflect our Scottishness,’ says one of her closest allies.

That does not mean the Scottish Tories will break away, but it does mean their unionism must be infused with a small-n nationalism.

When the Tories last dominated Scottish politics they did so as nationalist-unionists. In 1950, Winston Churchill avowed that he could ‘never accept the view that Scotland should be forced into the serfdom of socialism as a result of a vote in the House of Commons’.

Devolution, however, means a political career can be forged outside London. This should be understood as a feature, not a bug.

The Tory gains in this campaign were the culmination of five years’ work, but Davidson has always known that rescuing Conservatism — and unionism — is a ten-year project.

That means it is only half-completed. Project Ruth has a way to go yet and the work must be done in Edinburgh, not London. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

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ROD LIDDLE

Where are the Tory hordes shrieking ‘lefty scum’?

T

he Conservative party lost the general election, even if they are still in power (at time of writing). It was a defeat — as awful and fundamental a defeat for the political right as any I can remember.

Brexit is now endangered. And few would doubt that a subsequent election would mean a victory for a very left-wing and jubilant Labour party. It is, then, a catastrophe for the right. And here’s what hasn’t happened as a consequence: 1. There are no hordes of right-wing demonstrators on Westminster Green screaming ‘Labour scum’ and spitting at anyone they think might be a socialist. Nobody has, to my knowledge, set fire to their own training shoes in protest. There are no enraged conservatives mounting a picket outside Jeremy Corbyn’s house and hurling abuse. Nor have conservatives daubed paint on monuments, smashed up shop-fronts or brought traffic to a standstill while they attack the ‘pigs’ in a an expression of unconstrained toddler rage.

2. Conservatives have not denigrated those who voted for Mr Corbyn. Nobody has questioned the right of bone-idle people who soak up millions of taxpayers’ money in benefits to vote for whom they wish. Nor the obese northern losers in low-paid menial jobs. Nor the students who impose themselves upon a town or city for three years and have the right to vote there and utterly change its culture. Nobody, rightly, has attacked these voters. It hasn’t been mentioned (apart from here, obvs).

3. No Conservatives have questioned the very outcome of the poll based on a blithe and arrogant assumption that the Labour voters were thick, uneducated imbeciles who have been serially lied to by Mr Corbyn et al. There has been no demand for a rerun because conservative people didn’t like the result. There will be no challenges in the courts, superficially based on some arcane technicality, but really because people don’t approve of democracy when the vote goes the way they don’t like. Nobody on the right questions the veracity of the poll.

4. Conservatives are not screaming blue murder about how it was the biased meeja wot won it. There are no petitions to have the BBC and Channel 4 wound up. No assaults on the warped journalism presented the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

each day in the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, the Independent, or weekly in the Observer.

Nor any allegations that the election was lost as the consequence of ‘false news’. Or that it was down to Putin and the Russians.

Or some kind of world conspiracy.

5. Conservatives are not bombarding Facebook with harrowing posts about how they’ve been sobbing uncontrollably since the result and cannot face life any more. The letters pages of the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator are not full of pitiful, self-obsessed, virtue-signalling whining.

6. Right-wing academics, if there are any, have not announced that they are ‘defriending’ anybody who voted Labour, because they are callous and heartless bastards who

There are no enraged conservatives mounting a picket outside Jeremy Corbyn’s house and hurling abuse want to suck up to jihadi terrorists, hamstring the aspirational and overtax hardworking clever people who are good at stuff. My guess is that nobody has been ‘defriended’ as a consequence of this election on any social media site.

7. Right-wing columnists have not been gripped by adolescent tantrums and attacked Jeremy Corbyn as an evil purveyor of lies and cant. Indeed, pretty much every columnist on the right has commended Corbyn for his campaign and congratulated him, generously, upon his success (including the most splenetic of them all, Katie Hopkins). Instead, the right has concentrated on an examination of its own failings.

‘Just how many lives does Michael Gove have?’

8. No right-wing journalists, on the eve of the poll, suggested that anyone who didn’t vote Conservative was malign. Caitlin Moran announced that anyone who didn’t vote Labour was a ‘cunt’ — which will have come as a charming surprise to the majority of her readers at the Times who are pretty much down-the-line Tories. If anybody who buys the Times still reads the woman.

9. Nobody on the right has suggested that voting Labour was synonymous with being an evil, sick bastard who doesn’t deserve to live. There was simply an acceptance that other people have different views and opinions — maybe wrong opinions, but that doesn’t make them a bad human being. And on this occasion the left won: so be it. Will of the people etc.

10. Ruby Tandoh, who once nearly won a television cooking contest, demanded that all chefs must vote Labour. I am not aware of any chefs who said that all other chefs must vote Conservative or Ulster Unionist or Monster Raving Loony. Right-wing chefs, if there are any, presumably thought that the way one voted was down to the individual and there was no professional imperative either way. Ditto the other celebs — assuming we count the ridiculous Tandoh as a celeb.

My guess is that future productions of Hamlet or The Good Woman of Szechuan will not be interrupted by right-wing actors, if there are any, haranguing the audience about what a complete bastard Corbyn is, spittle dripping from their stupid lips.

None of that happened. It never does when the right suffers a reverse, no matter how calamitous that reverse might be. People may be angry — very angry indeed— but their anger is focused on where the right went wrong, rather than sprayed about willy-nilly in the direction of anybody anywhere who dares to gainsay them.

I mention all this as a form of consolation, really. Last Thursday’s vote was pretty unpalatable. And it is a little irking to hear the liberal-left exulting and see the smirks on the faces of the BBC correspondents. But at least you have this over the lot of them.

You are a democrat. And an adult.

Julie Burchill on how a book-club banishment inspired her Brexit play (p.20).

17

The Macron miracle France’s supercharged president is shaping up to be a new de Gaulle JONATHAN FENBY

Paris hile Theresa May flounders in a mess of her own making, Emmanuel Macron is striding out on to the sunlit uplands of French politics.

Six decades after Charles de Gaulle set up the Fifth Republic, his seventh successor is charging ahead with his attempt to restore a quasi-monarchical authority to the occupant of the Elysée Palace. After three hollow presidencies, the 39-year-old hope of the European reformist centre is bent on turning the clock back in terms of presidential power with a broad-based electoral appeal, positioning himself above the sclerotic political world that has alienated most voters and blocked structural change in France since the 1980s. This has involved an audacious gamble that carried him to the presidency last month and has now set him on course for a crushing majority after the second round of the National Assembly elections this weekend.

His new party, La République En Marche (REM), with its array of untried candidates, is heading for an overall majority of anywhere from 350 to 450 of the 577 seats, according to pollsters. Party managers now say they are worried that too many untried deputies will flock into the Palais Bourbon with excessive expectations of change.

What a contrast to the mainstream centre-right Republicans, predicted to win 85-125 seats, the humbled Socialists with 20-35, the hard-left La France Insoumise (The Unbowed) with 11-21 and the National Front with as few as three to ten.

A mixture of the presidential attraction factor and public disdain for the established parties has given a huge boost to the young contender, and he has been brilliant at making the most of every opportunity presented to him. So Macron should be in a strong position to push through his programme to reform the labour laws, cut corporate taxes and start reducing the state deficit.

A law to ‘moralise’ politics will be hard to oppose after the scandal that hit the ill-fated François Fillon, the centre-right presidential runner for the Republicans, though it also poses a problem for the new president,

W

18

since one of his closest associates, Richard Ferrand, is under a cloud because of revelations about ‘sweetheart’ deals done with his partner by a housing association he headed.

But there are three more substantial grains of sand in the Macronite oyster. The first is that the voter abstention rate in the National Assembly first round reached a record 51 per cent, reflecting voter boredom after an endless succession of primaries and elections. This hit the National Front and La France Insoumise hardest — the Front won just 3 million votes compared to 7.7 million for Marine Le Pen in the presidential ballot, while on the other side of the political spectrum Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement

How well Macron resists extremist attempts to stir things up will be the key to his presidency slumped from 7 million to 2.5 million. In contrast, only 38 per cent of Macron’s original voters stayed away last Sunday. His opponents are hoping to galvanise supporters this weekend, but the logic of returning a parliament that reflects the president remains strong. Still, the low turnout will prompt wailing from anti-Macronites that he enjoys overweening powers on the vote of less than half the electorate.

Secondly, if the forecasts are correct (and French polls have been pretty accurate) the skewed nature of the likely outcome will be another cause for complaint. Taken

‘I don’t care what her name is — why can’t you do something useful like invent a wheel?’

together, the Socialists, the National Front and La France Insoumise got more votes last Sunday than REM, but Macron’s party is on course to win ten times as many seats.

Fairness would point to proportional representation, but this would open the door to an unruly legislature.

Thirdly, the potential for extra-parliamentary action remains high, given the small representation likely for opponents from the hard left and right. Macron can take some comfort from the fact that the more reasonable trade union federation, the CFDT, has outstripped the more militant CGT in numbers — but the Communist-led group showed it still has the power to cause trouble with mass demonstrations against the Hollande administration’s more timid changes to the labour laws.

How well Macron resists extremist attempts to stir things up will be the key to his presidency. If he retreats, as Nicolas Sarkozy did, France will be back to the old treadmill.

If he stands firm, backed by his majority in parliament, the door will be open to the kind of change France has needed for decades.

T

he aim is to make the nation a more efficient competitor in a cut-throat world while retaining enough of the lures that make it the globe’s leading foreign tourist destination. In the process, the political system would go through a process not seen since the early years of the Fifth Republic.

The Gallic Humpty Dumpty is no more — barring a stunning reverse in Sunday’s second round of voting, the old political egg has finally crashed off the wall in the latest stroke of good fortune to accompany Macron’s rise to the summit.

The shell is scattered far and wide whichever way you look. The Socialists have split into three competing factions, have lost their heartland in the north and have seen their leaders eliminated one by one. On the Republicans’ side, prominent centre-right figures agreed to be prime minister and economics minister in the pre-election government, while others are at sixes and sevens about how to deal with the Macron surge, fearing that cooperation may lead to him

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

gobbling them up. Left-winger Mélenchon has become a self-anointed prophet wandering in the wilderness and spewing invective against everybody else. Marine Le Pen has to bear the burden of her terrible campaign for the second round of the presidential election, along with National Front splits that have seen her main lieutenant under concerted internal attack and her charismatic niece staging a withdrawal from politics to care for her two-year-old child — no doubt awaiting a call to return as the party’s Joan of Arc. To compare Macron’s elevation with de Gaulle’s return in 1958 may seem ridiculous. The new boy lacks the General’s historic stature (not to mention his height) and is nearly 30 years younger than his predecessor was at the time. In the place of the wartime leader of the Free French who then plunged into domestic political battles is a man who has just fought his first-ever election, the embodiment of technocratic modernity compared to the old soldier with his romantic attachment to the country ‘of which I have a certain idea’. While de Gaulle was a past master at aloofness and had no time for small talk, Macron is a charmer who stays on after dinner parties to shoot the breeze.

It is also hard to imagine the ultra-conservative Madame de Gaulle — ‘Tante Yvonne’, who hoped her husband would

‘I don’t fancy being stuck in the jungle with Paul Nuttall!’

ban miniskirts — feeling at home with Brigitte Macron, 24 years her husband’s senior and described by the Financial Times fashion editor Jo Ellison as a ‘smoking-hot 60-something woman with a killer smile’.

If Macron stands firm, the door will be open to the kind of change France has needed for decades But the parallels are there, all the same.

One man tilting against a political system that many people think has lost its way, a discredited political establishment, a challenge from the far right, and violent attacks

from extremists. A rush of hope in place of pervasive morosité, falling national confidence, flagging trust in institutions, entrenched vested interests on left and right and a loss of economic competitiveness with the partner/rival across the Rhine. A confident leader with a fine sense of the theatre of politics who knows how to grasp the opportunities presented to him and manipulate the ambitions of the old order to his advantage while striking out on the world stage in a way the French relish — one who, beneath his promise to change everything, embodies many of the beliefs of the establishment he professes to repudiate.

Searches for l’homme providentiel usually end in disappointment when the man on the white horse turns out to be all too human.

But the long and deep nature of the travails that have shrouded France since the inevitable failure of François Mitterrand’s attempt to chart a leftward path in the early 1980s may have created the context for a change in the national mindset akin to the one that brought the end of the Fourth Republic.

It is still early days, of course, but after all those wasted years, France may be in with a better chance of making more of itself.

Jonathan Fenby is the author of the History of Modern France and The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved.

THE CONSERVATIVE ROUTE TO FIGHTING POVERTY: LESSONS FROM THE LAST SEVEN YEARS THURSDAY 29 JUNE, 8 A.M. – 11.30 A.M. | ONE GREAT GEORGE STREET, WESTMINSTER, LONDON ‘Those that can, should; those who can’t, we will always help’ – that was the Conservative rallying cry on welfare during the coalition years. But how successful have the government’s reforms – including Universal Credit – really been?

And with Brexit dominating the domestic agenda, what does the government plan to do next to improve social justice?

In association with

REGISTER HERE www.spectator.co.uk/socialjustice | 020 7961 0044

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

19

Alt-hate Who knew the left had so much venom?

JULIE BURCHILL

A

t the start of the year, a Facebook friend messaged me, telling me that she and a chum had been asked to leave their north London book group (how I hugged myself on reading those words!): she for posting a link on Facebook to a Spectator piece by me — pleasingly and rather reasonably headlined ‘The Brexit divide wasn’t between young and old but Ponces and Non-Ponces’; her friend for liking it.

I was naturally fascinated, my curiosity driven by righteous indignation and unrighteous glee. I asked for more information and Judith — my penpal’s suitably heroic name —wrote back: ‘The last line from the email of the man who runs the book group was “I am therefore asking you to resign from the group. This would be the honourable course for you to take.”’ Judith, he claimed, was ‘unable to engage in rational discussion’, an accusation levelled by men at women who dare to disagree since the dawn of time.

Judith’s like-happy chum Jane, a charming, pretty novelist, was so shocked by the book group’s behaviour that she decided to write a play about it. Would I like to be a coauthor? I would.

That was January; in April the Prime Minister called a general election; by May our play was written, and in June the people went to the polls and a nation once more woke up, looked at the person sleeping next to them and thought: ‘Who are you?’ To say that these are interesting times is like saying Sarah Vaughan could carry a tune. I’ve always been somewhat sceptical of the phrase ‘The personal is political’, but when Relate relate that one in five of their councillors has worked with couples who have fought over Brexit, we know that times have rarely been more interesting.

Who knew, either, that there was so much hate within the left? Growing up in a communist household, I thought ‘Tory’ was a curse word till I was a teenager. My father was the kindest and, yes, most noble of men — maybe the fact that his socialism was a product of being genuinely working class, rather than a pose struck to impress/shame others, had something to do with it — but I had no idea until Brexit of the bigotry that lurks within the Brotherhood of Man. We are often reminded of the ‘hatred’ the referendum and recent election ‘stirred up’ in our society — warned off democracy by those 20

who would control us for our own good, as if we were wayward children eyeing the biscuit tin. What these sorrowing sad-sacks fail to add is the hate comes largely from their side.

Too much democracy has merely flushed the poison out. Brexit did indeed unleash hate — but the hate it unleashed was not that of the British for foreigners but rather of the liberals for the masses.

It sounds strange coming from someone who has made a lovely life out of peddling vitriol for pleasure and profit, but I’ve been amazed — and not a little amused, comparing their swivel-eyed social media savagery with their mollycoddling manifestos — at the level of nastiness that the Great and the Good (or, as I think of them, our Betters and Wetters) have displayed over the past year. During my entire career of evil, from

The hate Brexit unleashed was not that of the British for foreigners, but rather of the liberals for the masses 17-year-old enfant terrible to 57-year-old grande dame, I only recall wishing death on one person — well, two: the Eurythmics. But my dad, when he shouted ‘Tory!’ at the TV, was content to leave it at that.

What my dad didn’t do, unlike Alastair Campbell, was compare those who thought differently from him to jihadists. He wouldn’t, unlike Julian Barnes, have wanted those who thought differently from him ‘punished’ by an unelected club of bureaucrats. Unlike Ian McEwan, he didn’t look forward to a time when those who’d voted differently from him were ‘freshly in their graves’. He wouldn’t, as Paddy Ashdown did, have referred to those who disagreed with him as ‘Brownshirts’.

‘You’re not by any chance related to George Osborne?’

My dad left school at 14. He had no privilege. Yet he knew more and was capable of far more decent behaviour than these privileged, highly educated men. He was from the working class, so he knew better than to dismiss the working class for thinking that they deserve something better than sleeping six to a room and working weekends for the minimum wage. If he’d seen the tax-avoiding multi-millionaire Bob Geldof and his boatful of Remainer mates mocking a flotilla of men worried about making a living under EU rules, he’d have known which one was the ship of fools.

What is this alt-hate, this caring, sharing cruelty? When comedians had to stop telling jokes about non-whites, I felt no need to hear jokes which demonise the old, the Jews and spirited women instead, but weirdly a number of comedians seem to feel the need to tell them. And these are also the most frequent victims of hatred from the alleged left.

There’s something reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Two Minutes Hate about it: The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Brexit — and the wounding of Mrs May — seems to have brought out the beast in the most mild-mannered herbivores. And unlike those of us who have always enjoyed malice and spite as small parts of a balanced emotional diet, those kept in check — castrated even! —by their membership of the Brotherhood of Man seem highly susceptible to getting high on their supply of the new taste-thrill of hatred. They call people who don’t agree with them Nazis — or eject them from north London book groups even! — at the drop of a hat.

So our play is not just about Brexit, but about the intolerance of those who define themselves as tolerant. We’re anticipating it won’t be the easiest thing to sell — the arts world is probably 99.9 per cent Remoaner — but Jane and I remain emboldened by a review from the estimable Susannah Clapp, theatre critic of the Observer, of the shockingly bad anti-Brexit play cobbled together by the Poet Laureate: ‘It is old hat… We are in a different, more obviously dark condition, the closest to civil war than any time in my life. Old friends cannot bear to be in the same room with those who voted differently.

That is the country I’d like to see on stage.’

And here we are! Ms Duffy may have the National Theatre and the BBC on her side — but we have the truth. Who will buy? the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

HUGO RIFKIND

The Conservatives’ real problem? It’s that the electorate now sees them as reckless

T

he opposition wants to raze your house to the ground. No, bear with me. Analogy. They say they’ll pull it down, and build a new one with, I don’t know, walls of gold, and hot and cold running unicorns. ‘You can’t trust them,’ says the government, ‘because they want to knock your house down!’ And normally, normally, this would be quite an effective message. Only this time it is delivered from inside the cab of a JCB by a government that also wants to knock down your house, and has already demolished your garden wall.

‘Honk honk!’ they’re going, on that pull-down-horn thing, with eyes gleaming like those of actual maniacs. ‘Those guys are crazy!’ they’re saying, with foam frothing from their own lips. ‘They’ll make you poorer!’ they’ll say, as the caterpillar tracks crunch over your bird table and garden gnome. And all the while, they genuinely do not understand why their message of stability is not getting across.

They don’t get it. A week after an election which saw the Conservative majority recede like an alarmed turtle’s head, they are not even close to getting it. They think, I think, that it was all to do with Jeremy Corbyn being unexpectedly charming, or Theresa May being unexpectedly like a malfunctioning android, or Nick Timothy accidentally greenlighting a manifesto with an actual policy in it. Whereas, truthfully, the Tories’ real problem was that they went into this election entirely bereft of their usual Unique Selling Point. The Conservatives were not conservative. They were not a safe pair of hands. That normal vibe the Tories exude of ‘you don’t need to love us, but at least we can hold stuff together’ was missing the entire last part. They were not, in a nutshell, a safe and lazy vote for the risk-averse.

Nobody was. And thus, in an election with only mad, risky shit on offer, there was simply no particular reason for the electorate to choose the particular mad, risky shit that was wearing a blue rosette.

To grasp this, you do not need to believe that Brexit will inevitably be a disaster. Even the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

I don’t believe that Brexit will inevitably be a disaster. (Only probably.) You simply need to accept that there’s a risk it might be. That we are in uncharted territory, that the kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, and before they settle we must reorder this world around us. For me, personally, this is why I was against it. Like independence for Scotland, it seemed to me to be a major, apocalyptic act of political irresponsibility.

Worse than that, an act of political callousness — a risky gamble made by people who can afford to lose, but with the costs to be borne by people who cannot. Only it hap-

The Tories went into this election bereft of their usual selling point.

They were not a safe pair of hands pened anyway, and that’s it. We’re gambling now. And since the wheel is already spinning, there’s no particular reason to think you’ll be safer on blue than on red.

The Tory division on Europe is not just a division about Europe. It is also a division between ideologues and technocrats, flair and prudence, headbangers and bean-counters. During the referendum, it was startling to see Conservatives whom I had always regarded as solid to the point of tedium — people who had always claimed that their economic beliefs were to do with prudent economic stability, and their foreign policy beliefs were to do with prudent diplomatic

‘They say do you mind going round the block a few thousand times?

They’re still working on it.’

stability — suddenly hurl all of that out of the window and run helter-skelter towards Brexit. It was like they’d been pretending all along; like rebellious senators with swords under their togas, hiding out as a secret fraternity among Conservatives who called themselves conservative and meant it. Then they won, and the party became their party, and Theresa May became their creature.

Yet somehow they expect the electorate to regard them as every bit as prudent, cautious and safe as the people they’ve overthrown.

Even though, if they were, they wouldn’t have overthrown them in the first place.

Pre-referendum, David Cameron would have been able to defeat Jeremy Corbyn with little more than a raised eyebrow of disdain. ‘Don’t rock the boat!’ he’d have said, which wasn’t an option for Theresa May, because she’s about to scuttle it, anyway.

Were Labour’s flagship policies of free university education, more NHS funding, more infrastructure spending and a higher minimum wage reliably costed? Nope. But then neither is leaving the EU, because we don’t know what terms we’ll be leaving on. Everything is levelled. We are at the Ground Zero of political credibility. The election was a choice between Blue Sky Fantasy Politics 1.0 and Blue Sky Fantasy Politics 2.0. And given a choice between someone offering you £50 and someone offering £100, when you don’t believe either of them, why not take the latter?

It may be years before the Tories grasp just how cheaply their intrinsic advantageous edge — of economic deference, of that firm handshake with the bank manager — was squandered on the side of a bus. On any sane metric, a vote for Corbyn should have felt horrifyingly risky. He’s eyebleedingly cavalier about our economy, he’s utterly uncommitted to our oldest, firmest diplomatic alliances, and he shows no sign of actually being up to the task of running anything so complex as a whelk stall. Remind you of anyone? No, I don’t think they get it.

But they will.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

21

JAMES DELINGPOLE

I don’t blame millennials for voting for Corbyn

O

n the morning after the election I was drinking coffee with one of my heroes, Sir Roger Scruton. We talked about the moment during the 1968 Paris évenéments when Scruton, who had been fairly apolitical up to that point, suddenly discovered he was a conservative.

He had watched the educated children of privilege wantonly destroying the property of their social inferiors in the name of something or other, and realised: ‘Whatever they are for, I am against.’ That was the reason he has spent so much of his life since trying to develop a philosophy of conservatism as thorough, persuasive and enticing as the variations on Marxism so compelling to those students.

I do wish some of those kids who came out en masse for Corbyn last week would google the marvellous essay Scruton once wrote on the subject. Actually, though, I think the people who need to read it even more are the ones who’ve been holding the reins of the Conservative party these past few years, plus their financial backers and apologists among the commentariat. It might remind them of something they appear pretty much to have forgotten since the Thatcher era: the key question, ‘Why we fight’.

Let me quote one recent example of this phenomenon: a tweet from a conservative friend and colleague — and this, mark you, after the result — describing Theresa May’s election manifesto as ‘bold and visionary’.

No it wasn’t. I read the manifesto through quite carefully. I had to because I was going to be grilled by Andrew Neil on BBC1’s This Week that evening and you don’t want to go into such an encounter unprepared.

My thesis was that this Tory manifesto was so red it ought to be renamed Das Kapital.

I was half joking, but what struck me forcibly as I read it was just how easy it was to find examples to make my case: worker representatives in boardrooms; stuff about the ‘gender pay gap’; the creation of a ‘National Productivity Investment Fund’…

Yes, all water under the bridge now, you might have hoped after seven days of postmortem. Except it’s not, is it? The impulse that led to May’s red manifesto was no different from the one that led to Cameron’s

22

hug-a-husky nonsense or the one which, even now, is causing conservative commentators to argue that maybe May’s ‘social justice’ agenda didn’t go quite far enough.

But ‘social justice’ is a meaningless, feelgood term designed by the left to give a faux-moral gloss to whatever cause they’re currently championing. It cannot, by definition, ever be an attainable conservative goal, because it was framed by leftist propagandists with the sole intention of making conservatives look nasty. The moment conservatives take such concepts seriously they’ve already lost, because they’re fighting a war on the enemy’s terms.

To put it another way, if one party is offering ‘Free cake for all, but responsibly admin-

Conservatives have made conservatism look uninspirational, valueless, undynamic and self-hating istered, with due regard for calorie and sugar content’ and the other is offering ‘Free cake — as much as you like, with cherries, hundreds and thousands and flavours so delicious you’ll hardly believe they could exist’, which do you think will have more appeal?

We’re often told that conservatives need to make their message relevant to the millennials, who see no likelihood of ever getting a foot on the housing ladder, who despair of seeing a halfway decent return on their expensive degrees, and who quietly resent the older generation for rigging the system and stealing their future. I totally

‘I’ve never been to a conversion to Corbynism ceremony before.’

agree. But it’s never going to happen until those conservatives fess up to the fact that for years they’ve been part of the problem.

At the moment, it’s far too easy for the disaffected young to point at the broken system, the gulf between the 1 per cent and the rest, and say: ‘This is why we need socialism.’ That’s because successive conservative administrations — not just in Britain — have failed to explain that the current globalist, communitarian, crony-capitalist, interventionist, central-bank-rigged stitch-up has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism.

Not only have conservatives failed to repudiate the myth; they’ve actually gone along with it. From the money-printing that’s enriched the asset-owning class (and driven housing ever further beyond the reach of first-time buyers) to micro-managing such as the minimum wage, sugar taxes and the attempt to regulate the ‘gig economy’, Conservative governments have actively conspired against many of the principles — equality of opportunity, personal responsibility, minimal state, free markets — which are the bedrock of true conservatism.

Conservatives have made conservatism look so uninspirational, valueless, undynamic and self-hating that it’s no wonder they’re failing to capture the imaginations of the young who are not — as they’re sometimes glibly mischaracterised — stupid; but who are most definitely passionate and idealistic.

To win the argument, conservatism must do three things. First, it must regain its intellectual coherence. It needs, for instance, to make the case that, while definitely pro-cake, it does not believe it is government’s job to provide it — not least because this will only deny opportunities to those who might prefer blancmange or a steak sandwich instead.

Secondly, it needs to regain the revolutionary zeal that Scruton captures perfectly when he says: ‘I started as a rebel against rebellion.’ Thirdly, it needs an emotional heart: something quite different from all the patronising, touchy-feely nonsense it has been dabbling with ever since someone — I forget who — branded it the ‘nasty party’.

Scruton again: ‘Conservatives are people who love something actual and want to attain it.’ Yes! the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Fad diets are just junk Eat good fresh food and ignore health bloggers and nutrition gurus PRUE LEITH

W

hy do we do it? We really need to stop supporting the snakeoil industry. We know there is no such thing as a miracle diet, a magical health cure, a mystical practice or a strange (and always expensive) product that is going to make us youthful, happy and, above all, thin.

When Planet Organic first opened in Westbourne Grove, it was a great shop, with a butcher, fishmonger and baker as well as a good range of veg and groceries. Now a third of the shop is shelf upon shelf of supplements, beauty preparations and diet books; another third is a café; and what meat and fish there is comes in vacuum packages.

You can’t blame the owners. We are addicted to coffee and a cup of it nets the shop about £2 in profit. And they wouldn’t sell all those unnecessary supplements if we didn’t buy them. The profit on a £100 bottle of seaweed detoxifying purge is a lot more than on a £100 basket of real food.

We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less. If it doesn’t go in, it can’t go on, as my husband John says to me when I reach for a biscuit. Keep under 2,000 calories a day if you’re a woman, 3,000 if you’re a man, and you won’t gain weight. Keep under 1,500 and you will slowly lose it.

All weight-loss diets, however dressed up, boil down to eating less. The Blood Sugar diet, Dopamine diet, Paleo diet, Juice diet, Gut diet, Body and Soul diet, 5:2 diet, Lean in 15 diet, Raw Food diet, Cambridge diet, the New Atkins diet — all restrict one food group or another and so limit calories. The truth is any diet will work if you stick to it, but our only hope of staying slim is by training our bodies to be happy with fewer calories, every day, for ever. Boring but true.

If you want to be healthy as well as thin, you need a balanced diet — which means a lot of fresh veg and fruit, some carbs (preferably unrefined), not much protein and very little fat. And you have to stay off sweet and salty junk and cheap processed food. This is all common sense of course. If you spend your 2,000 calories on chips and ice cream, they’ll be gone by lunchtime and you’ll be hungry again. Just a single maxi milkshake can be 1,000 calories.

And then there are the dietary fads that unfortunately come and happily go. Only the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

1 per cent of us, at most, are gluten intolerant, and yet you seldom sit down to a meal with six people without one at least demanding gluten-free food. Or grain-free.

Or sugar-free. Or dairy-free. Or fat-free. Or something-free.

It’s largely about fashion, I think. Even foodstuffs have to be fashionable. At the moment the hot picks are avocado pear, pomegranates, blueberries, yuzu fruit, acai, goji berries, chia seeds, green tea, kale, ginger, turmeric, apple cider vinegar, dark chocolate, coconut oil, miso and kimchi.

Extravagant health-giving claims are made for all of them. My advice is to eat them if you like them and forget them if you don’t.

And don’t reach for supplements. There are

quite enough nutrients in ordinary fresh food to keep you healthy without spending a fortune on weird ingredients or pills.

The US public spends $500 million a year on antioxidant supplements alone. Supplements are very big business.

I think we should just eat good fresh food and ignore the diet gurus, the health bloggers, the pill-pushers and the scaremongers.

They haven’t a clue what’s true and what isn’t, and neither do we. But they do talk an awful lot of bosh. ‘Wellness expert’ Jasmine Hemsley uses a tongue scraper because, she says, ‘all your toxins come out on your tongue’. David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe claims coconut oil ‘rids the body of lice and parasites such as tapeworms, kills infection in the gut, destroys viruses that cause influenza, herpes, measles, hepatitis and more’.

In my career, I’ve seen eggs, butter, cream, meat, salmon, orange juice, chocolate, bananas, and I’m sure a whole lot more that I can’t remember, vilified as actually bad for you, and then resurrected as healthgiving natural foods.

Then there’s all this nonsense about having to have a ‘clean gut’. Which often means buying some expensive products to give you the runs, and others to ‘detox’ (meaningless word) your digestive tract.

Unless you’re ill — in which case you need a doctor, not some self-styled ‘nutritionist’ — your body has a perfectly good system of elimination called (I’m sorry about this) defecation. And healthy fresh food is all your gut needs to make it happen.

By the way, don’t be fooled by medi-talk on the net. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. To be a dietitian, you need to have a recognised qualification.

And just to complete the health info that you don’t need because you’ve known it for ever, you need to exercise too — and to limit the booze intake.

But if you really want to understand how much bad science and money-driven marketing surrounds ‘healthy eating’, you have to read The Angry Chef by Anthony Warner (Oneworld, £12.99). And if you want to check some too-good-to-be-true health ‘fact’, use the Sense About Science website.

Oh, and the occasional blow-out won’t kill you. Spread the word.

23

Corbyn copy As political phenomena, the Jez and the Donald are (almost) the same FREDDY GRAY

S

ince the election, Jeremy Corbyn has been parading himself as primeminister-in-waiting. ‘Cancellation of President Trump’s State Visit is welcome,’ he tweeted this week, ‘especially after his attack on London’s Mayor and withdrawal from #ParisClimateDeal.’ The message was clear: unlike ‘Theresa the appeaser’, Jeremy is willing and able to tell that climate change-denying Islamophobe across the water to get stuffed. Jez we can, Jez we can.

There may be another reason why Corbyn is glad to think that Trump might not come to these shores, and that’s because the more the British see of the dreaded Donald, the more they might recognise how much he and the Labour leader have in common. For Labour voters, the unpalatable truth is that the British equivalent of Trump is not Brexit, as everyone says: it’s Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn, 68, and Trump, 70, are both anti-establishment insurgents who have been married three times. They both like dictators and dislike Nato. They both have embarrassing pasts which should disqualify them from high office. When they were elected to lead their parties, Trump and Corbyn were both dismissed as jokes. Their emergence was seen as a sign that their parties had gone mad — but it turned out the electorate was just as mad, and the laughing stopped. Both men then got lucky: they stood against seemingly invincible women who took victory for granted and turned voters against them with their arrogance.

Until recently, the British prided ourselves on how sensible our politics was compared to the populism ravaging so much of the developed world. Look, we said, Ukip is perishing; the BNP is all but dead. We’d never fall for a rabble-rouser like Trump.

But this analysis missed a rather important point: Corbyn was the torchbearer of British populism, and his politics is staggeringly popular. He has increased Labour’s share of

24

the vote by more than any other leader since Clement Attlee in 1945. The man who had been dismissed as a hangover of the 1970s has proved to be very good at 21st-century general elections.

Clearly the similarities between Corbyn and Trump only go so far. One is a capitalist nationalist; the other an internationalist anti-capitalist. Trump worships money and doesn’t like refugees; Corbyn professes to love migrants and doesn’t like rich people.

Donald calls terrorists losers; Jeremy calls them friends. As political phenomena, however, the Jez and the Donald are almost the same. They represent grassroots and online movements which thrived precisely because the media never took them seriously. Their rhetoric has been at times identical — indeed, Corbyn was much mocked for copying Trump’s talk of a ‘rigged system’ that benefits the few and not the many.

During their campaigns, both men drew huge crowds, and generated enormous buzz on social media — yet journalists just

scoffed and said they didn’t stand a chance.

Voters aren’t altogether stupid: they noticed the bias and turned against it.

Corbynistas won’t take kindly to being compared to Trumpists. For them, Corbyn means hope and Trump means hate — apparently those are the only two forces in global politics. On the left, the American version of Corbyn is thought to be Bernie Sanders, another admirably stubborn codger who appeals to radical young people in spite — or possibly because — of his age.

The politics of Corbyn and Sanders are fashionably retro.

They are both politically correct in a comfortingly fuddyduddy way — something which could not be said of Trump.

Corbyn and Sanders identify with each other, and have often expressed mutual admiration.

Last weekend, Bernie declared himself ‘delighted’ at Labour’s achievements. ‘People are rising up against austerity and massive levels of income and wealth inequality,’ he said.

Seeing Corbyn’s success, American left-wingers have taken to lamenting that Sanders failed to beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic Party nomination last year. The ‘Bernie would have won’ hashtag has started trending again on Twitter, as it did after Clinton lost to Trump in November. But Americans are more allergic to socialism than the British, and Bernie wasn’t the Democratic nominee.

The truth is that in terms of recent history, Labour has a lot in common with the Republicans. Both parties rebranded and repositioned themselves in the 1990s to win back power, much to the unease of their base. Both parties then alienated supporters by dragging the country into war in Iraq. Labour and the Republicans were still in power when the financial crisis struck in 2008, and subsequently lost the next election. The Republicans lost again with Mitt Romney in 2012, as did Labour with Ed Miliband in 2015. Then their voters on the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

both sides of the Atlantic started to revolt.

Instead of accepting the wisdom of the party elites, they turned to men thought to be laughably unelectable.

It seemed at first that Trump and Corbyn had destroyed their parties — or at least that their ascents had shown just how moribund Labour and the Republicans had become. It was assumed that their freakish popularity would burst upon contact with democratic reality. Both Labour and Republican party hierarchies tried to organise coups against the insurgent. This only ended up re-enforcing the new leader’s strength, and the party bigwigs despaired.

Yet far from condemning their parties to decades in the wilderness, Trump and Corbyn turned out to have had a much broader appeal than their predecessors. Their popularity was viral — ‘infectious’, as Corbyn called it on television last weekend. It didn’t just excite the angries and the radicals on the fringes; it infected the moderate middle, too.

Swing voters were not put off by Trumpist or Corbynite radicalism; they were enticed.

That’s why Trump, a New York tycoon, was able to win in traditionally Democratic states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. It wasn’t just the left-behind poor who voted for Trump in these areas; it was also half of those earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year. They knew how they were

‘You’ll have to subscribe to hear the rest of his sentence.’

meant to vote, and they did the opposite.

Some similar dynamic might explain why Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, led by lifelong

Instead of accepting the wisdom of the party elites, voters turned to men thought to be laughably unelectable enemies of the propertied classes, won in Kensington, Britain’s richest constituency.

When Trump won last year, the Republican leaders who had made such seemingly principled stands against him suddenly declared that they had learned to love the

Image: Prague, lithograph after S. Prout.

Donald, and they showered him with praise.

Trump relished their humiliation, and allowed them to kiss his ring.

Something similar is now happening in Labour. Senior party figures who have spent the past two years conspiring against Corbyn are now offering him their loyalty and support. Chuka Umunna now praises Corbyn’s ‘energetic and engaging’ campaign. Yvette Cooper, who had been plotting to oust Corbyn after the general election, is now offering to serve on his shadow frontbench. An unexpected sense of unity is breaking out within Labour, and Jeremy Corbyn is telling the world that he is willing to be generous towards his former enemies. He’s a man of peace, after all.

The key difference, for now, is that while both men failed to win popular majorities, Trump assumed power and Corbyn has not.

Trump’s approval rating has now dipped to 38 per cent, and his presidency is widely regarded as a shambles. Corbyn’s popularity, on the other hand, continues to surge, and the bookmakers say no one is more likely to become our next prime minister.

So we can all laugh at Donald Trump: his simplicities, his demented ideas and the craziness of a country that elected him. But in Britain, we could be just one general election away from playing out our own version of the same drama.

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25

Oceans apart As global warming believers and sceptics argue, the sea heats up PHILLIP WILLIAMSON

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eaders of The Spectator will be familiar with the argument that climate change, like Britpop, ended in 1998.

Raised on a diet of Matt Ridley and James Delingpole, you may have convinced yourself that climate scientists, for their own selfish reasons, continue to peddle a theory that is unsupported by real-world evidence.

You may also have picked up the idea that the ‘green blob’, as it has been called in these pages, is somehow suppressing the news that global warming is a dead parrot.

That was the case made by Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Forum in a Spectator blog in February last year. He accused the world’s media of ignoring a paper in Nature Climate Change which concluded that the rise in global surface temperature had stalled, contrary to the narrative of manmade climate change. In contrast, an earlier paper by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Science magazine, which questioned the existence of that hiatus, had been given huge coverage.

Those of us who work in climate research do not, of course, ignore evidence. A study published in Nature Climate Change does not go unnoticed. But the particular paper to which Whitehouse referred does not counter the reality of man-made change.

By the time he wrote his piece, the hiatus in global air temperatures had already come to a blistering halt. The years 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the three hottest years on record — an unprecedented run.

But this is only part of the story. Anyone who considers climate change to be all about air temperatures at the Earth’s land surface misses something rather important.

The evidence is not just blowing in the wind; it is 500 fathoms deep.

As a land species, it’s hardly surprising that we’re more concerned about what’s going on in the atmosphere than with conditions under the sea — but in the context of global warming that’s a big mistake. Around 93 per cent of the extra heat gained by the Earth over the past 50 years has sunk into the ocean, while 3 per cent has made ice melt, 26

and 3 per cent has warmed the land. Only around 1 per cent has stayed in the atmosphere. So if we just measure air temperatures, we’re looking in the wrong place for climate change. Recent analyses by the World Meteorological Organisation and independent researchers have looked at deep-ocean as well as sea-surface temperatures, and both groups found that significant increases in total ocean heat content began around 1980, continuing more rapidly after 1998.

Not all the heat which is absorbed by the ocean stays there. Changes in circulation in the Pacific involve warm water shifting

New analyses suggest that sea levels could rise by up to a metre, maybe more, in our children’s lifetimes towards South America, raising air temperatures as it does so. Such El Niño events have contributed to the sharp rise in global air temperatures over the past three years.

The apparent slowdown in global temperature rise in the early years of this century was nothing more than the Earth’s climate system expressing its natural variability. Like the weather in London, the Earth’s climate is fickle: what we see in the climate from year to year is much like what we see in the weather from day to day, or week to week. The years between 1998 and 2013 were the equivalent of a spell of cool weather following a heatwave.

‘What climate change?’

Yet all the while, taking air and ocean heat content combined, the Earth was warming.

Now that the most recent El Niño event has ended, global air temperatures ought to be falling, but they aren’t. The world saw its third hottest January ever, followed by the second hottest February, March and April.

The atmosphere and the ocean are warming in tandem, as predicted by climate models.

It is not easy to measure how much extra heat has entered the ocean as a result of human influences on the climate. Given that seawater is around 1,000 times as dense as air, small increases in water temperature represent a huge amount of heat being absorbed. It’s tough to demonstrate a whole-ocean average temperature increase of less than 0.1°C in about 1.4 billion cubic km of seawater. Tough, but not impossible — steadily, scientists have managed to complete the picture. Four years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that such ocean warming was ‘virtually certain’. Following new findings of recent weeks and months, the qualifier ‘virtually’ is now unnecessary, putting to bed any contention that global warming ended in 1998 — it is just that for a while the main effect was on water, not air, temperatures.

What happens in the ocean matters, because rising sea temperatures reinforce climate change in several ways. Warmer sea water can release methane trapped on the sea floor. Some of it finds its way to the surface and into the atmosphere, where it acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat — at least 30 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. Warmer water also means less sea ice.

That matters, because ice reflects the sun’s rays. With less sea ice, the ocean will absorb even more heat. As the ocean warms, it expands, lifting coastal ice-shelves and making it easier for glaciers to slip into the sea.

New analyses now suggest that sea levels could rise by up to a metre, and maybe more, in our children’s lifetimes.

Genuine scepticism can be constructive, since science responds to challenges by obtaining new evidence to test ideas.

But those who summarily dismiss evidence when it has become overwhelming no longer deserve the name sceptics — it’s then outand-out denial. There is no hoax; scientists like me gain nothing from exaggeration.

Yet the worst-case scenarios are not inevitable. They can be averted by action to reduce, and eventually end, greenhouse gas emissions. While Donald Trump and others might dismiss inconvenient truths, science is now in no doubt that the planet is warming, and that there is a need to take action on a worldwide basis. The Paris agreement will be the future, whereas the so-called globalwarming hiatus is already history.

Dr Williamson works at the University of East Anglia as a science coordinator for the Natural Environment Research Council. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

LETTERS

Divining Rod Sir: Please congratulate Rod Liddle on being the only commentator who accurately forecast the uncertain general election result (‘This is the worst Tory campaign ever’, 27 May). His prediction of the ‘stickiness’ of the Labour vote and the likelihood that Ukippers would return to the Conservatives in the south, where they mostly were not needed, were especially prescient. Mr Liddle goes to show that instinct, common sense and a sceptical nous are worth more than all the pseudoscience of polling. Well done him. Poor old us!

Dr Barry Moyse North Petherton, Somerset

Our lefty deplorables Sir: An astonishing 41 per cent of the British electorate voted for Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister. Last year in the US, Hillary Clinton unwisely spoke in public about the ‘deplorables’. But she was on to something, and the general election result has shown that we have plenty of our own ‘deplorables’ — they’re just concentrated on the left rather than the right. Corbyn is truly our Trump, even if he didn’t secure power. British politics looks set to become as bitterly polarised as American politics, and our head of government as weakened as the US President. What a shambles.

Jeremy Stocker Willoughby, Warwickshire

Post-truth Pilate Sir: Roger Scruton (‘Post-truth, pure nonsense’, 10 June) states that the theories of Marx and Foucault are partly responsible for the erosion of the distinction between facts and fabrications. But the seed of the post-truth mindset was sown much earlier.

Jesus tells Pontius Pilate that He has come into the world to ‘bear witness to the truth’ (John 18:37). (Note that He says ‘the truth’, not any old subjective truth.) Jesus adds, ‘Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.’ Pilate responds with the famous rhetorical words, ‘What is truth?’ That, with its deliberate indefinite, is where it all went wrong.

John O’Byrne Dublin

How to boost trade Sir: Martin Vander Weyer (Any other business, 10 June) is right that ‘sending token civil-servants-turned-salesmen’ to nine trade commissions scattered round the world will not rejuvenate Britain’s sluggish exports. We have had UK trade and the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

investment spending of £400 million or so for each of the last 25 years to little effect.

Civil servants do not understand business, let alone exporting, but still presume to tell small companies how to do it.

In essence, we have too many grandees and too few practical advisers making the commercial links exporters need. The British Chambers of Commerce could take care of the UK side of the equation; and overseas, our embassies would benefit from a mass exodus of all those Brits bored with trade. The people best placed to make local connections are local people.

For big companies, missions are indeed important and that needs ministers and senior civil servants both in the UK and in our embassies — but that would still leave Britain’s international trade HQ far smaller than it is now. In short, we need a major revamp, not nine new commissioners.

Tim Ambler Senior Fellow, Adam Smith Institute, London SW1

News hounds Sir: Luminous was a worthy champion at the Surrey Union Hound Show, as Charles

Moore points out (Notes, 10 June). Our hound, Dragon, was reserve champion, but no hard feelings. At the South of England Hound Show on election day, our hounds won Best Couple Entered Dog Hounds.

In the light of events, events, events, their names too had poignancy: ‘Mascot’, but more especially, ‘Mandate’.

Robin Muir MFH Chiddingfold, Leconfield & Cowdray Hunt, Petworth, West Sussex

Blame the teachers Sir: Ross Clark’s otherwise excellent article (‘Generation wars’, 10 June) does not credit the role of our schools in creating a generation which is prepared to vote for Jeremy Corbyn. As a case in point, my wife’s daughter attended until recently an ordinary sixth-form college in Southampton. As part of her education, the sociology department offered a school trip to Cuba. The English teacher railed against studying the work of dead white men, and instead prescribed racist poetry written by a black woman. The history teacher told his students that Ukip are like the Nazis, despite clearly being aware of the Nazis’ race-baiting, street-fighting and militaristic rise to power, which is in stark contrast to Ukip’s policies.

If we do not address the prevailing leftist dogma in our schools, we risk having to relearn first-hand the lesson of the 20th century that extreme socialist policies are not a source of hope, but a cause of impoverishment and misery.

Richard North Hayling Island, Hampshire

Solace at Horse Guards Sir: I read with sorrow about Andrew Roberts’s understandable disappointment when he revisited the National Army Museum after its recent makeover (The Heckler, 3 June). Sic transit gloria mundi.

May I suggest he seeks solace by popping over to the unique, if smaller, Household Cavalry Museum at Horse Guards — a gem among military museums, and unique because it’s actually in Horse Guards itself, a living museum with a large window looking into the stables behind, where you can see the horses of the Queen’s Life Guard at rest in a scene that hasn’t changed for 357 years. He could also delight in seeing such objects as the Earl of Uxbridge’s cork leg after Waterloo, and other fascinating militaria. No maudlin introspection — his only ‘challenge’ will be how to tear himself away.

Jeremy Harbord Devizes, Wiltshire 27

ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER

Let’s have a dose of business sense in Downing Street before it’s too late

T

ake no notice of the resilience of the FTSE100 index, which, having reached record pre-election highs, shed barely 100 points at its opening last Friday and recovered most of them by Monday. Dominated by multinational companies, it is being sustained by global market sentiment and the relative weakness of the pound, which makes our blue chips look good value; it is not offering a signal that investors think all is well. But do take notice of the Institute of Directors, speaking largely for mid-sized businesses, when it says that confidence among its members has crashed since polling day: from 34 per cent optimistic vs 37 per cent gloomy last month, to 20 per cent upbeat against 57 per cent ‘quite or very pessimistic’ now.

That reflects an election during which, as IoD director general Stephen Martin says: ‘The needs of business and discussion of the economy were largely absent’ — followed by an outcome that offers no encouragement at all to consumers and entrepreneurs, and no clarity about trading prospects abroad or the future status of EU workers here, without whom many UK businesses would face soaring wage rates and skills shortages.

And there you have it in a nutshell, politicos of several stripes will respond. ‘The needs of business’ are always the same: they want low costs; an ultra-flexible workforce; low taxes; less regulation; easy, familiar trading paths; and unrestrained boardroom pay.

What they don’t want is to have to respond to external challenges and political imperatives, so there’s no wonder a report from Harvard Kennedy School of Business (coauthored by Ed Balls) found that ‘almost all’ of more than 50 businesses and trade associations surveyed would prefer to stay in the EU single market and customs union.

But that’s just not the direction of travel: the British people voted to leave the EU with all that implies, and if there are outbreaks of electoral turmoil before we get there, that’s only to be expected in the pursuit of the most fundamental political change since we went into Europe in the 28

first place. Business should brace up, get with the programme and grab the global opportunities on offer.

As you might expect, I beg to differ. The only real measure of Brexit ‘success’ will be whether as a nation we feel more prosperous in five or ten years’ time than we do now; and that depends entirely on the ability of companies to sustain well-paid jobs, generate rising profits and invest in growth, despite changing circumstances. ‘The needs of business’ are in that sense absolutely central both to Brexit and to policymaking more broadly, and current evidence suggests strongly that the people who run our businesses are wiser, less flaky and less accidentprone than any of the people who aspire to run our government.

A deep failing of Theresa May’s prime ministership, as I’ve remarked before, has been her complete lack of interest in business of all kinds. Nor for her the factory-floor photo-ops beloved of George Osborne, nor the blue-sky enterprise schemes given Cabinet Office houseroom by David Cameron, nor the coterie of lordly corporate chiefs who once had Margaret Thatcher’s ear. Last week I praised Greg Clark’s efforts as business secretary and I’m glad he remains in post for the time being — but what Downing Street needs next, assuming the Tories cling to power, is an influx of industrial éminences grises and a dose of plain business sense.

The curse of Qatar, again While fate’s stormy blusters were causing political havoc last week, I took it as a terrible omen that a single mighty thunderclap over my Yorkshire town of Helmsley provoked a magnificent beech tree in my garden to rip its roots out of the ground and keel over — though miraculously without causing major damage. The relatively good news over the same few days was that balmy breezes and sunny spells were boosting the renewable energy industry to record levels of output: in perfect conditions and for short periods (which are, of course, times

when very little power is required for heating purposes), more than half the UK’s electricity demand can now be met from wind and solar sources. Even if this subsidy-based, green-tinted Utopia will depend for the foreseeable future on carbon-based backup generation and requires great advances in electricity storage capacity to make it truly viable, let’s agree it represents a useful step towards the narrowing of the UK energy gap about which I often fret.

And that’s timely, because another conflict the world doesn’t need has just kicked off in the Gulf, threatening the source of some 30 per cent of our gas supplies. This is the diplomatic isolation of Qatar, and severance of transport and trade links, by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE, evidently in response to Qatari ties with Iran, support for the Muslim Brotherhood and badmouthing of Saudi leaders. I have written before of what I call ‘the curse of Qatar’ in commercial relations with the UK — and late last week two Qatari liquefied natural gas carriers bound for the South Hook terminal near Milford Haven were reported to have reversed course before reaching the Suez Canal, where they would likely have been denied passage, causing the market price of gas to blip sharply upwards. If the supply disruption drags on into a sunless, low-wind winter, stand by for an extra slice of gas-powered inflation.

Meanwhile, a drain on deposits in Qatari banks, denied funding by their hostile neighbours, could lead to a withdrawal of funds from London — perhaps including sales of some of the many real-estate trophies and investment assets amassed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and ruling Al Thani family.

That in turn could suggest to other foreign investors that what with Downing Street paralysis, Brexit stalemate and the real possibility of Corbyn in power after a second election, now might be a good time to depart these shores, taking another little slice of our economic prospects with them. Ah well, at least those offshore wind turbines will be waving farewell. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

© PRIVATE COLLECTION

Robert Carver wonders whether it was Hitler’s passion for the occult that lost him the war Sofka Zinovieff admires the Marchesa Casati’s bizarre theatricality Helen R. Brown discovers that eating whales might be more sustainable than eating insects Damian Thompson enjoys the politics of piano prodigy Evgeny Kissin as much as his playing James Walton believes Poldark is what critics call a pile of old tosh Richard Bratby finds Glyndebourne’s Hamlet sunny and life-affirming – only joking

‘Head of a Muse’, c.1510– 11, by Raphael Martin Gayford — p47 the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

29

BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS

In praise of neigh-sayers Sam Leith canters through a fascinating, if eccentric, history of man’s long partnership with the horse

Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relatonship

by Ulrich Raulff, translated from the German by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp Allen Lane, £25, pp. 448 Wallace Stevens gave us ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. The German scholar Ulrich Raulff, in this meaty book about the history of man’s partnership with horses, gives us many more than 13 ways of looking at a horse. Horses have had ‘more meanings than bones’, he writes. And those meanings have been central to the human experience since pre-history. Evidence from the abraded teeth of horse skeletons indicates that man first slipped a rope into a horse’s mouth as long ago as 3,700 BCE. Horses are what Raulff calls ‘converters’: they can unlock the energy in plants and make it available for man’s use. As draught animals they were ‘oat-powered engines’, a single horse delivering roughly seven times the power of a single man. As mounts, they were the first thing that gave us the experience of speed — opening up space to hunting, to new forms of warfare, to colonisation and in the end, to politics.

And, as the long iconography of man on horseback shows, they also, literally, raised us up. A king was not a king without his horse. They were, of our many animal companions, first among equals. The man-horse relationship — which Raulff calls ‘the Centaurian Pact’ — only really 30

started to lose its significance in the 20th century — and late, at that.

Raulff divides his survey into what he calls three ‘economies’ in which horses have participated: ‘energy’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘pathos’. That is, their economic or military roles and transformative historical effects; the overlapping and changing fields of first practical, then theoretical or scientific knowledge to do with everything from breeding (the English Stud Book predates Burke’s Peerage by 35 years), to judging horseflesh as a buyer (Xenophon had

The rolling eyes of the great warhorse in battle mirrored the feelings of the infantryman facing a cavalry charge some warnings about how not to get ripped off by your horse-dealer), biomechanics, engineering, veterinary science and anatomy; and finally their role in the mythopoeic imagination.

Horses have meant everything from kingship to sex (there’s a slightly creepy line, in this very male-dominated book, about ‘the latent sexuality of endless waves of young girls, who throughout the centuries have transformed the riding school into a pleasure ground of pubescent and teenage nymphs’) to wild terror (as in Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’, but also in the way that the rolling eyes and wild ears of this great flight-animal, in battle, mirrored the

feelings of the infantryman facing a cavalry charge) to death itself; the Pale Rider, the revenant horseman. In pursuit of this aspect of horses Raulff offers some bravura discussions of art history and literature, though he doesn’t, disappointingly, find space for Jilly Cooper.

Particularly admirable is the way Raulff attempts to recreate the sensorium of the big city, and the rural village, in the high age of the horse. What did it mean to live in Paris when ‘every 13th Frenchman was a horse’ — the smell of the dung-filled streets; the perpetual danger of boltings and pile-ups (traffic laws being a latecomer, and the invention of the kerb a vital innovation to protect pedestrians); the incessant ring of horseshoes, the neighing and whinnying; or, in rural areas, the absolute centrality of the blacksmith’s forge to village life?

One of the subtlest and most interesting points Raulff makes is that the coming of industrial technologies didn’t immediately supersede the horse: for most of the 19th century they meant we needed even more of them to supply the energy for those innovations. The first combine harvesters were pulled by teams of up to 40 horses. And in war, too, though traditional sabre-swinging cavalries were ever more vulnerable to infantry with repeating rifles, the horse was still vital in the great wars of the 20th century as a draught animal. Even where you had motorised vehithe spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

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Study of horses by Théodore Géricault

cles, a horse could make its way through the mud of the battlefield more reliably than any of them — and when they foundered it was with teams of horses that they were pulled out. Horses dragged artillery, and the bigger the artillery the more horses were needed. The German army used 1.8 million horses in the first world war, and 2.7 million in the second — one for every four soldiers. And the casualty figures for the horses were much higher.

About two thirds of them perished.

There are lots of nuggets of fascinating knowledge. Did you know that the first cowboys in America were Jewish (contra the anti-Semitic trope, popular among Cossacks, that Jews were less than human because they didn’t ride)? Or that the use of horses by what Raulff controversially calls ‘Red Indians’ (in fairness he’s busy at the time talking about the fictionalising of the Old West, and they were Injuns in the old ‘horse operas’, no question) was a very late development? Native Americans went on foot, hunted on foot and fought battles on foot, for most of their history. And we meet Comanche, the only non-Indian survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn, a war hero in retirement and — somewhat unusually for a horse — an amiable alcoholic.

But reader, be warned. Here is an eccentric, deeply learned, frequently brilliant and frequently infuriating book — packed with good things but with all the discipline the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

and composure of an unbroken mustang that has just glimpsed a rattlesnake. Raulff discusses, at some length, around page 54, how Madame Bovary’s husband is mocked for his inelegant horsemanship; and then on page 274 returns to the subject as if it has just occurred to him. The outset of one chapter, set in the Gobi desert in 1879, digresses instantly into a two-sentence discussion of a German science fiction series from a century later that happens, also, to be set in the Gobi desert; there seems to be no more connection than that.

The first cowboys in America were Jewish – and the native Indians fought battles on foot One moment we’re in the 19th century, the next we’re in the late Neolithic. One moment we’re talking John Wayne and Teddy Roosevelt; the next we’re with Cossacks. Another chapter moves from talking about ancient breeds (Przewalski’s Horse, from the aforementioned Gobi desert), to historical etymology (Germans have, we learn, 63 different words for a horse); then we’re onto the story of Clever Hans, the horse claimed in the early 1900s to be able to do arithmetic; the next we’re getting a potted discussion of the invention and importance of the stirrup. It’s demented.

More than the lack of organisation, it is the style that frustrates. Raulff lurches

from the concrete and empirical — the 270,000 litres of horse piss produced each day in the New York of 1900, say — to passages of clumsy lyricism, to the conjectural and to the theoretical. Here he’ll be discussing archaeological evidence; there he’ll jump the fence into the paddock containing Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger and Lacan. 270,000 litres, indeed.

It abounds with writing that is obscure or plain bad. ‘The centaur dominates the 19th century like a landmark,’ he opens one chapter; to which the reasonable reader will respond: nope. Or elsewhere, early on: ‘But the question of evaluation is perhaps one I manage to skirt around without truly answering it; more than something to have and hold, such a question is more of a desideratum: something to hope for or aim at.’ Backward ran sentences, as the man said, until reeled the mind. Put it this way: it’s a book that even in translation still reads like it’s in German.

In 1913, a visitor to his retirement stables found Clever Hans in a diminished state.

He, who had led ‘a puritanical, monastic existence, devoted to celibacy, scholarship and arithmetic’, had allegedly been so inflamed at the sight of a beautiful mare that he had bounded over hedges and fences, ripping the underside of his body so badly that the vet had had to come and stuff his entrails back inside and sew him up.

Can’t blame him, really. One wonders which way Clever Ulrich will go.

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Sisters in scandal Sofka Zinovieff

The Marchesa Casati as an Indian dancer

by Leon Bakst (1912)

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice

by Judith Mackrell Thames & Hudson, £19.95, pp. 408

In our age of elasticated leisurewear, ready meals and box sets on telly, it is exhilarating to read about people who would come down to dinner in peacock-feather headdresses, swathed in large snakes and dripping ornamental chicken blood. The Marchesa Casati has a loyal cult following and her bizarre style still influences fashion designers; but by placing her alongside two sisters in scandal in this triple biography, Judith Mackrell has done something very clever and entertaining. The author, the Guardian’s dance critic, has already championed controversial women in her multiple biography Flappers and in Bloomsbury Ballerina, about Lydia Lopokova. Now she recounts the lives of three wildly ambitious yet vulnerable women with page-turning pace and intelligence.

Hordes of visitors to Venice wind up at Peggy Guggenheim’s renowned museum on the Grand Canal — a one-storey edifice that was destined to become an 18th-century pile until the Venier family went bust at the ground floor. Confronted by Guggenheim’s lasting legacy, it is easy to overlook two equally intriguing previous chatelaines of this ‘unfinished palazzo’.

They make a marvellous trio. All three women arrived there after crises and broken marriages to make the place their personal stage, with Venice providing the perfect backdrop. Traditionally tolerant towards the carnivalesque and the erotically audacious, this exquisite city ‘sprung from the sea’ allowed them all to be large, exotic fish in a small lagoon. If Luisa Casati became a walking work of art in the gothic belle époque, Doris Castlerosse used her sexual glamour to ascend through the shiny 1930s, garnering as much jewellery as possible along the way.

Peggy Guggenheim was also a collector of lovers, but one who merged art and life until her home became an astounding gallery.

Orphaned as a shy, gangly teenager and left with a vast fortune, Casati transformed herself into a bizarre creature of theatrical beauty. She paid the Ballets Russes designer Leon Bakst to create over 40 fantastic costumes for her; as St Sebastian, she was covered in arrows containing tiny electric lights, which short-circuited and sent her flying. From 1910–1924, she became a Venetian attraction, clad in Fortuny gold or tiger skins, sprawled on her gondola with a cheetah or parading with her extravagantly dressed black manservant. Her pets included monkeys, parrots, greyhounds, snakes and albino blackbirds dyed differthe spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

GETTY IMAGES

ent colours. She was involved with the poetsoldier-seducer D’Annunzio and had a fling with Augustus John (who painted her), but was not so sexually wild as often supposed; in fact, Mackrell convincingly suggests that she was aspergic.

Hailing from middle-class Streatham, Doris Delevingne was equally keen on reinvention, if less partial to gothic drama and snakes. She and Luisa had friends in common (‘La Casati’ visited the eccentric Lord Berners with her boa constrictor, while Lady Castlerosse intrigued his unshockable

‘La Casati’ became a Venetian attraction, clad in gold and sprawled on her gondola with a cheetah guests by seducing Cecil Beaton); but Mackrell doesn’t labour the connections. Via a series of generous boyfriends, Doris married Lord Castlerosse, but continued to declare that ‘an Englishwoman’s bed is her castle’ (Churchill fell under her spell and painted her).

After her divorce in the late 1930s, Doris took up with a sporty American heiress, who didn’t like parties, but bought her outsize jewels and then the ‘unfinished palazzo’. The place was modernised, with marble bathrooms and a motorboat moored outside and Doris (the salonnière) threw glamor-

ous cocktail parties — guests included Noël Coward, Douglas Fairbanks and the young Prince Philip of Greece. Nevertheless, war loomed and her era was soon over.

In 1948, a middle-aged Peggy Guggenheim seized the opportunity to reconstruct her life after a disastrous second marriage to Max Ernst. Rich and discerning enough to have assembled an astonishing collection of contemporary art, she had groundbreaking galleries in her native New York and London, bought up masses of art in wartime Paris as the Nazis approached (a daring enterprise for a Jew) and later championed Jackson Pollock before anyone else.

In Venice, she helped revive the postwar Biennale and, like Luisa, became a local attraction, floating about in a fancy gondola with her Lhasa terriers, and sporting ostentatious dark glasses.

Mackrell’s subjects didn’t know each other. They had different nationalities, characters and ambitions, yet this book connects them as a fascinating trinity of divas, analysed beyond the easy caricatures and clichés. Experts in seduction (artistic and erotic), they were calculating yet reckless and atrocious at traditional feminine skills and domesticity. Each had a complex and difficult life in various locations, but flourished at the Unfinished Palazzo, blossoming like strange, beautiful flowers rising from the murky Grand Canal.

33

BOOKS & ARTS

swinging the lead in an attempt to find the whereabouts of the Italian dictator. In the end Otto Skorzeny’s commandos found the Duce and rescued him, but Wulf avoided returning to Sachsenhausen, and was soon working for Himmler as his personal astrologer, claiming it was he who had found Mussolini through magic.

Professor Kurlander traces supernatural belief in Nazi Germany to the countercultural, mystical theories which abounded in fin-de-siècle Austria and Weimar Germany. Helena Blavatsky’s Great White Brotherhood of hidden Mahatmas in Tibet, and Rudolf Steiner’s theories of anthroposophy and bio-dynamic blood and soil agriculture were two such strands.

Central to the Nazis’ mystical beliefs was World Ice Theory, propounded in the 1912 book Glacial Cosmogony by Hanns Hörbiger. This held that white ‘Aryan’ man was not descended from the apes, as were other inferior races, but rath-

Aware of the Nazis’ weakness for magic, the British parachuted in pessimistic horoscopes about Hitler

Obsessed with the occult: Hitler and Helmut Schreiber, head of the Magic Circle, at the Obersalzberg in 1943

Nazis and the dark arts Robert Carver Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

by Eric Kurlander Yale, £25, pp. 448

When he came to power Hitler had a dowser scour the Reich Chancellery for cancerous ‘death rays’. Before flying to Scotland Rudolf Hess had his horoscope drawn up by a personal astrologer. Himmler backed research on the Holy Grail and medieval devil worship (‘Luciferism’) and sent an SS expedition by the explorer Dr Ernst Schafer to Tibet in 1938 to investigate the ancient Indo-German ‘Aryan’ origins of Buddhism. Himmler also founded the SS Witches Division, which collected evidence in eastern Europe in the second world war that Teutonic ‘wise women’ had been persecuted and burnt in a JewishCatholic Inquisition plot against volkisch German culture and blood. In 1939 Goebbles sat up late at night reading the prophecies of Nostradamus, which he revealed to an enthusiastic Führer as evidence that the British were soon to be defeated.

One could be forgiven for thinking the above might be the fevered imaginings of a Hollywood schlock movie producer or the 34

midnight fantasies of a pulp-comic writer. In fact they are the sober truth, just part of the immense trove of bizarre material on Nazis and the supernatural that eight years of research by Eric Kurlander has uncovered.

The British had ASDIC or radar to find German U-boats: the German Navy had the Pendulum Dowsing Institute in Berlin. Here, over a large map of the Atlantic, a one-inch model battleship was moved about, as an expert in pendulum-dowsing swung a metal diviner on string above the map, watched by fascinated German admirals. If the pendulum dowser ‘reacted’ over the toy ship this indicated a genuine British battleship in the vicinity.

The Germans had convinced themselves that the British were finding U-boats by pendulum dowsing. After Mussolini was toppled and arrested, Operation Mars was launched: 40 experienced astrologers, tarot-card readers, magicians and dowsers were released from concentration camps and installed in a villa in Berlin’s Wannsee, under the leadership of top magician Wilhelm Wulf.

‘Find the Duce!’ were their orders. ‘These magicians cost the SS a pretty penny,’ complained the SS General Schellenberg; ‘they demanded — and got — huge quantities of luxury food, alcohol and tobacco before they could start work.’ A large map of Italy was unrolled and the pendulum dowsers started

er came from ‘divine sperma’ brought to earth by meteors. These developed into the godlike Supermen of the ancient civilisation of Atlantis-Thule which employed parapsychology and mystical electricity ‘like Thor’s hammer’. Atlantis was destroyed by ‘icy moons’ crashing into earth, and refugee Supermen established Buddhism and Hinduism in Tibet and the Himalayas and Shintoism in Japan. Jesus Christ was a White ‘Aryan’ of Atlantean descent, as were the Knights Templar and the Cathars, who held the mysteries of ancient Thule in the Holy Grail. The white Supermen were locked in a struggle for mastery with the ape-like ‘Tschandala’ or ‘monstrous humanoids’ — Jews, Slavs, blacks and ‘mongrel breeds’.

This overtly racist worldview was believed in by Hitler, Hess, Himmler and other senior Nazis. Julius Streicher was convinced that Jews gave off a particular odour and that he could ‘smell out a Jew’ at several metres, like the medieval witchsniffers. Himmler tried to get World Ice Theory taught instead of Darwinian evolution in German universities. This theory explains why Himmler felt able to enrol Arabs, Indians and even Turkestaners in SS units. It also justified genocide, horrific medical experiments and mass population displacements, and convinced Hitler that ‘Nordics’ could tolerate cold better than ‘Slavs’, with dire results at Stalingrad. Himmler wasted much time and money on research into magic rays which he hoped would find oil and gold in the Rhine.

Kurlander believes that Nazi reliance on magic encouraged the development of the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

pointless and wasteful ‘wonder weapons’ such as the V1 and V2 rockets, which killed many civilians but did not affect the Allied war effort. Not all Nazis believed in this tosh.

Speer, Bormann and Heydrich attempted purges of magicians and astrologers, especially in the Hess Action, after the flight of the Deputy Führer to Scotland. Thousands were rounded up and put in camps, but within months most were free again, many working for Himmler. In 1943, at a time of acute labour shortage, an estimated 3,000 tarotcard readers were still working in Berlin alone.

The British knew all about the Nazi weakness for magic and parachuted faked copies of the astrological magazine Zenit into Germany which contained decidedly pessimistic horoscopes for Hitler and his acolytes.

Deeply researched, convincingly authenticated, this extraordinary study of the magical and supernatural at the highest levels of Nazi Germany will astonish — and provide scholars and the general reader with much food for thought. Without such widespread crackpot beliefs the Nazis might just have won the war. ‘Every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he sees a better fatherland,’ claimed the renegade, defrocked Nazi Herman Rauschning. Thank heavens they did.

Take heart Adrian Woolfson The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations

by Thomas Morris Bodley Head, £25, pp. 401

In this magnificent book, Thomas Morris provides us with a thoughtful, engaging and rigorous account of how cardiac surgeons through history have sought to undo the ravages wrought on the heart and its associated major blood vessels by abnormal genes, imperfect development, bacterial infections such as rheumatic fever, venereal diseases, unhealthy lifestyles and a host of other factors. He also offers an insight into the nature of scientific discovery, the mindsets of the characters driving it and the ever-present role of luck.

It was, indeed, a simple mistake made in 1947 by a young researcher called Arthur Voorhees that led to a chance observation which resulted in the development of the first artificial grafts to replace damaged blood vessels. Having in error placed a silk stitch into the one of the chambers of the heart, he noticed that it became covered with normal heart tissue. This emboldened him to sew a silk handkerchief into a tube and use it to replace a dog’s aorta. The makeshift artery functioned for just one hour, but when a year later he was sent a the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Any Tickets Please?

How nice to have a ticket and then be asked to show one!

The man’s hirsute arm leans across and then he doodles on the ticket.

The Kurt Schwitters of South West Rail.

Calvin Harris says: These are the good times of your life.

— Julian Stannard sample of a tough fabric used for the construction of parachutes, he was able to fashion a more robust prototype.

This pioneering work was picked up by the cardiac surgeon Michael DeBakey, who, using his wife’s sewing machine, stitched together the first polyester Dacron graft, with which he successfully replaced a patient’s diseased lower aorta.

Like the pioneering US air force test pilots of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Morris’s pantheon of surgeons took tremendous risks; not with their lives but their consciences, livelihoods and reputations.

Often faced with the vitriolic disapproval of their colleagues, and overshadowed by a catastrophic collection of their own failures, the discoverers of the armatorium of cardiovascular surgical techniques showed remarkable intransigence. Fortunately this bloodymindedness frequently paid off. The results are a triumph both of the human imagination, emotional resilience and supreme self-confidence.

Consistent with their reputation at the time of the first heart transplants as a glamorous club of medical elites, some of the giants of cardiac surgical history weren’t driven by altruism so much as by professional rivalry and gargantuan self-belief.

Morris offers a whirlwind tour of the history of cardiovascular surgery viewed through a series of breakthrough operations: from heart valve transplants and the repair of congenital heart defects, to the treatment of coronary heart disease with angioplasty, correction of arrhythmias with cardiac ablation, aortic dissection repair, insertion of pacemakers and the crowning pinnacle of their achievements, heart transplantation, using a machine that mimics the operation of the heart and lungs. It is peppered with vibrant anecdotes as well as biographical accounts of the individuals who made these important contributions.

We learn how the discovery was made that the heart is not just a simple pump, but rather a pumping device controlled by electrical activity; and of the remarkable

finding that it may be brought back to life through the external application of electricity, a procedure known today as cardiac defibrillation. The latter resulted, in part, from the work of a certain Mr Squires, a resourceful amateur scientist who on 16 July 1774 appeared at the site where his three-year-old neighbour had fallen from a window onto the street. She having been pronounced dead, he took it upon himself to connect her chest to an electrostatic generator and found that he had managed to bring her back to life.

Seemingly obscure biographical details give pointers to the sources of some of these key discoveries. The surgeon Charles Bailey sold ladies’ underwear to fund

In 1774, an amateur scientist with an electrostatic generator revived a toddler who had been pronounced dead his way through medical school, and was struck by the similarity between girdles and the mitral valves of the heart. Suspenders offered firm but flexible support to the stockings; much like the chordae tendineae, tough strings of tissue that anchor the valve leaflets to muscles on the inner wall of the heart. These insights led him to develop a new method for treating mitral stenosis, a condition in which this heart valve is thickened and obstructs the flow of blood.

It is unnerving that an organ as vital as the heart can fail in so many different ways; human hearts, although often functioning seamlessly for multiple decades, may all too easily be broken. This is certainly not a book for hypochondriacs. It reminds us, however, that we are not the perfect products of optimal creation.

But as a result of the historic work of the larger-than-life giants of cardiovascular surgery, the repertoire of surgical interventions they invented, and the discovery of drugs such as heparin that prevent blood from clotting, damaged hearts may now be routinely repaired.

35

BOOKS & ARTS

Ever decreasing circles David Kynaston Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt

by John Grindrod Sceptre, £`16.99, pp. 368

‘The area’s isolation has given it a strong sense of community and independence,’ runs the Wikipedia entry on New Addington.

The presence of the library, youth clubs, leisure centre, shops, churches and street market enables locals to lead full lives in many ways. The Addington Community Association has provided an important hub for the community. It has been notable for its local gangs.

John Grindrod’s illuminating and enjoyable Outskirts is in part a memoir about growing up in New Addington, in part an intimate family history, and in part a history-cum-gazetteer of the green belt, along with a meditation on its uncertain future. My strong suspicion is that most Spectator readers, even if Londoners, barely know where New Addington is, let alone have been there. It is in fact a 1930s settlement, much expanded in the 1950s, that lies conveniently at the end of the tramline from Croydon and is in effect a hilltop town — albeit not quite a San Gimignano — almost wholly surrounded by fields, a.k.a. the green belt. ‘I grew up on the last road in London,’ is Grindrod’s opening gambit, and a glance at the map shows that he is not really exaggerating.

His previous book, Concretopia, was a fascinating, if for my taste too promodernist, historical tour of the rebuilding of postwar Britain, and here he takes us surefootedly through the protracted and often controversial story of the green belt’s origins and evolution. First comes Octavia Hill’s ringing statement of 1888, in an essay that coined the instantly resonant term ‘green belt’: ‘The need for quiet, the need for air, the need of exercise, and, I believe, the sight of sky and of things growing, seem human needs common to all men, and not to be dispensed with without grave loss.’

This is followed by the proselytising efforts of those anti-urban, pro-garden city pioneers Ebenezer Howard and Frederic Osborn; the patchy Metropolitan Green Belt of the 1930s; the dispersion-driven planners (Sir Patrick Abercrombie et al) of the 1940s and 1950s; the game-changing circular by Duncan Sandys in 1955, in effect directing local authorities to create green belts in order to ‘check the unrestricted growth of built-up areas’ and to ‘safeguard the surrounding countryside against further encroachment’; and the ensuing decades of frequent, bitter battles, even as green belts spread around most major conurbations.

It has been a rich, often contradictory 36

history, closely bound up with images and assumptions about what kind of country England should be. ‘Boundless leisure, bounteous nature, timeless beauty,’ reflects Grindrod about ‘the most complex web of hopes and ideals’ that the green belt came to embody. ‘Things the green belt had never hoped to stand for, and could not possibly hope to protect or create.’

Quite so — and one of the great virtues of his account is that, tolerantly and unsentimentally, he gets us close up to the green belt as it actually is today. Predominantly farmland, yet also full of commuters; a landgrabbing plethora of golf courses (Grindrod is rather less tolerant here); and ‘strange small towns, landfill sites, abandoned military facilities, motorway service stations and follies’, not to mention being a favoured venue for dogging. Crucially, and attractively, he is no purist, robustly pointing out that whereas in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty there are de haut en bas aesthetic judgments involved, in the green belt the landscape can be ‘ugly, useless and barren’, but would still be more or less doing its job: Towns have been built, pylons erected, residents have trampled it and dumped mattresses and burned out cars. If you want a pretty bit of skirt, go and wolf whistle at an AONB…

What lies ahead? As the housing crisis inexorably intensifies, especially in London and the south east, will the developers or the conservationists win? For myself, and I imagine like most people, I want somehow the best of both worlds. Ian Nairn (everyone’s hero) may in the 1960s have rightly called the green belt ‘a tourniquet which stops the bleeding but doesn’t heal the wound’. Yet half a century on I can’t bear the thought of it gradually disappearing, as in the past few years (to judge by the granting of planning permissions) it has shown unmistakable signs of starting to do; though at the same time, it is the truest, if least original, of clichés.

Grindrod himself (his days on the edge long behind him) adopts no doctrinaire position either way, instead wanting grown-

‘Feeling cheap, used and empty usually means the detox has worked.’

up debate allied to give and take. He is not optimistic: To city dwellers the green belt is tightening around our throats. To country folk we are ignorant barbarians, intent on its destruction.

Once the green belt was a mechanism for trying to help us get along. Now it is the chief cause of antagonism.

All this would be enough to make Outskirts thoroughly worthwhile. But what truly lifts it is the personal element, above all Grindrod’s portrayal of family life. His father John (an HGV mechanic) and mother Marj moved with two sons from Battersea to New Addington in 1969, a year before the author was born. ‘Generally, as a family, we were very quiet,’ he recalls. ‘I sometimes suspected that, had we removed sitcoms and cats from the conversation, we would have barely spoken.’ The effect was to make such conversation as there was ‘a hall of mirrors, operating on so many layers of artifice and irony that any real content became impossible to decipher’.

Like most nuclear families, probably now as well as then, the Grindrods kept themselves tightly to themselves, a costive insularity typified — in those odd moments of communication — by a private vocabulary, notably the word ‘ticket’ to mean almost anything. ‘We were happy with our own language, even if between us — inside us — we couldn’t agree what these words actually meant.’ Historians of modern Britain still know dishearteningly little of what really went on behind the impenetrable walls of suburban domesticity; and though there is always the problem with any memoir of representativeness or otherwise, I for one found some of his passages revelatory.

I also found it impossible to resist making my own debut trip to New Addington. On a sunny Friday morning, first impressions were predictable enough: overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly working-class, a lot of seriously overweight people — the left behind, and all that. The rather battered looking shops on Central Parade —Vapepit, Captain Pawn, Bloomin’ Lovely Florist, Booze Bank, Favorite Chicken & Ribs, Beaches & Cream (a beauty parlour), not a reassuring Pret or Caffè Nero in sight — were similarly out of journalistic central casting.

Yet as I walked around and became acclimatised, it all seemed perfectly good-natured and harmonious (the gangs perhaps still in bed, or giving their teachers grief), with everyone apparently at ease in their own skins as they got on with their daily lives: in short, a world of its own, inhabited by like-minded people of similar background.

Whether or not that adds up to the good society is of course another question. But a starting point for those who doubt it might be to acknowledge that the certainties of place, whether social or geographical, confer particular blessings. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Shaun Greenhalgh claims to have painted ‘Before Kick-off’ (signed L.S. Lowry, 1923) and ‘La Bella Principessa’ (attributed to Leonardo da Vinci — but, according to Greenhalgh, based on a girl at the Co-op checkout in Bolton in the 1970s)

Sheen of authenticity Christopher Hawtree A Forger’s Tale

by Shaun Greenhalgh Allen & Unwin, £16.99, pp. 369

In 2006, after five decades, Shaun Greenhalgh lost his enthusiasm for the British Museum. From a very early age, he had been inspired by its contents to a profitable and diverse career in art forgery from his Bolton garden shed. A teenage talent for faking Victoriana had led him on to make an array of millennia-traversing art works, in all media, which he sold with the help of his ageing parents and which came to rest in eminent quarters both private and public.

His work was taken by one American president to be that of the distinguished neoclassical sculptor Horatio Greenough.

Others took him for Leonardo, Lowry, Gauguin, Moran or Hepworth. Among the few to acquire a genuine Greenhalgh was none other than Barbara Hepworth herself.

She hurried away without paying for the booty under her arm: a ‘shark with a toothy grin, hanging tail up, its head resting on a lobster pot and some nets.’

For years, Greenhalgh had flown high over the heads of experts and dealers, but he came too close to the sun with the British Museum. Hitherto a happy customer, it backed away just in time from paying at least £300,000 for a supposed Assyrian relief of a priest dating from the seventh century BC. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

When Scotland Yard arrived at his front door, one of the arresting officers remarked that the crammed house was ‘the northern annexe of the British Museum’; you could also see it as an off-shoot of Ealing Studios. But despite all the chicanery (redolent of Kyril Bonfiglioli’s art-dealer Mortdecai) here is riveting and affecting Northern realism: Greenhalgh’s knowledge is as daunting as it is inspiring.

Born somewhere between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, he had little time for the era’s music. ‘My own favourite sound is the wind in full-leaf trees, something unmatched by any composer.

Nature, at full stretch, always surpasses art.’ His modest family circumstances were no obstacle to his talent. When he was two or three, his father guided the pencil in his hand so that ‘a creature would appear magically before me’. He was off.

He learned on the hoof, inspired by Bolton Museum’s Egyptology department, even sneaking away from a Doctor Who movie to study the mummies (‘I got a good slapping for my trouble. I’ve rarely been to the cinema since’). Omnivorous, forever alert, he revelled in a childhood holiday in St Ives — where Hepworth acquired that shark picture when she passed by. There were other enthusiasms, including falconry and motorcycling, and, although shy, he chose geography over history, such were his adolescent hopes of the teacher in a short dress.

Formal education ended at 15, but two years earlier his garden sculptures had netted as much as a friend’s police-sergeant father made in a month. So it went on. The

book is most fascinating in detailing his many techniques, which span the centuries and avoid such pitfalls as trying to age oils.

Here are paper treatments and a walking stick’s antler head creating corrugation. All this supports his assertion that ‘there’s more to art than just art history. Those expert bodies probably need a few practical people on their staff’.

Perhaps best of all is a short, painful section about a girlfriend who died from a brain tumour. Had she lived, he suggests, his life might have taken an entirely different course. As it is, his story brings to mind David Bowie: ‘I’ve never caught a glimpse / of how the others must see the faker, / I’m much too fast to take that test.’ Greenhalgh’s pace matches Bowie’s, and only later does one start to reflect that the border between taking inspiration and promulgating fakery is fluid. For a chameleon, the fork in the road can bring either acclaim or, in Greenhalgh’s case, four years in jail.

Meanwhile, all those who sold on his works remained at large — even one who ensured that a piece reached the Royal Collection, for a low price (apparently no one outbids Her Majesty). But Greenhalgh himself is most startled that the ‘Greenough’ bust of Jefferson is now Bill Clinton’s property. He had made it by ageing some ‘bog-standard’ Stoke clay with squirts of Mr Sheen.

Meanwhile, whether or not that early shark picture survives in the Hepworth archive, perhaps a canny spirit could recreate it. There are many out there who would delight in claiming ‘I’ve made a killing with an early Greenhalgh!’

37

BOOKS & ARTS

Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class

by Alex Renton Weidenfeld, £16.99, pp. 384

I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now think there must be some other explanation. Because the truth is that, when I was still pretty young, my parents banished me to an isolated community where for years on end I was compelled to dress in heritage costume, endure the uncanny absence of women and participate in ritualistic group activities, often of a physical or religious nature. That’s right. I am an Old Harrovian.

On the face of it, this seems like an odd choice for my parents to have made for me — although it isn’t as bat-cave crazy as Alex Renton tries to suggest in Stiff Upper Lip, his rich, righteous diatribe against the public school system. ‘This is not a book about me,’ he announces in his opening sentence, but that’s not entirely true. All books are to some degree about their authors. Before Eton, where he was wretched and rebellious, Renton attended a prep school in East Sussex, where he was sexually manhandled by one teacher and madly thrashed by the headmaster, a drink-sodden sadist. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, he’s angered by these memories. This is an angry book.

So don’t be misled by the wry title and inviting cover design, which has been got up to resemble a school blazer. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a fun read, although it is compelling and provocative. As long as you know what you’re getting, you won’t be disappointed.

Stiff Upper Lip is three things. First, it’s a baffled inquiry into why, almost uniquely, the brutish British have routinely sent their children away to boarding schools. Second, it’s an outraged history of corporal punishment in such institutions, the structural fact of it, which now strikes us as shocking, and its gross abuses. And third, it’s a gruellingly close analysis of the sexual abuse that has taken place in many of these schools.

In his chapters on beating, even Renton is occasionally torn between horror and humour. He describes how, at a Yorkshire prep school in the 1970s, the older boys were invited one evening to their headmaster’s study. He received them clad only in a dressing gown, dispensed brimming glasses of sherry, and confessed that he may perhaps have been a little harsh at times with his floggings. Then he shrugged off his gown and stood before them naked. ‘Now boys,’ he declared, handing one of them a cane, ‘you may get your own back.’

There’s nothing funny about paedophil38

children away to board. How could anyone?

So let me present the other side of the argument, since it isn’t something you’re going to find in this otherwise sound and sobering book. First, consider the Harry Potter books, which I’ve long suspected, with their arcana and incantations, were really an elaborate allegory for the study of classics. But the point is that J.K. Rowling’s success is a multi-million-pound proof that many children love the idea (at least) of boarding school.

Many love the reality, too.

While reading Stiff Upper Lip, I took a straw poll of friends who had boarded. Most memories of prep school were very happy, of public school quite happy. Presumably, that’s partly because of the absence of parents, hard as that may be for some parents to accept. Not that the parents aren’t loved. But their distance gives the adolescent the space to test or develop more daring aspects of personality, which isn’t so easy under the benign parental gaze.

This must be one way in which, for some children, boarding school works. Yet I doubt if it’s the main reason adults choose to send their children to Harrow or Eton. Nor am I convinced by Renton’s argument that this is part of some insidious psychological process of ‘normalisation’, meaning that adults convince themselves that they had happy childhoods by forcing their children to repeat them. (By that rationale, anyone who tells you they enjoyed their schooldays is to be mistrusted.) Social advancement is his other suggestion, and there may be something in that. But I believe the main motivation is something slightly different. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of any other way to put this. It’s the public school product.

I’m not talking about the negative stereotype, the uniformed hoorays and uninformed hearties, although God knows they exist. I’m talking about the positive stereotype. There are a few of them around, too. I mean someone who’s confident, wellmannered and articulate; resilient and resourceful; at ease in the world; with a surprising, self-deprecating sense of humour.

Someone, that is, a bit like the author of this book. (You see, Alex, it is about you, after all.)

I’m guessing that the rich, foreign parents whose children now make up 30 per cent of pupils at these eye-wateringly expensive institutions met a run of Old Etonians, and caught a lucky break. The result was they found themselves thinking: I’ll take one of those.

MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY

Sink or swim Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Tom Brown’s School Days, illustrated by Solomon van Abbe

ia; nor about the way teacher-pupil abuse has been covered up at some schools, which revealed themselves to be no more than amoral money-making machines. Yet Renton’s horrified fascination with the subject throws his book off-balance. There are 140 pages about sex and 30 about beating, but no chapter on bullying, which is bizarre.

J.K. Rowling’s success is a multimillion pound proof that many children love the idea of boarding school Now that beating is banned, and stricter background checks on staff enforced, isn’t bullying likely to be the major concern of potential boarding-school parents?

As for the foremost question, it’s not properly addressed. What was it with the British, that they started sending their children away to be educated? There’s a cursory suggestion it may have been because rich families lived in large, isolated rural houses. But that was true of other nations.

Or was it that colonial couples, living and working abroad, felt compelled to send their offspring home for a better quality of education? Ditto. It turns out Renton isn’t all that interested in explaining the phenomenon of British boarding schools.

He’s more comfortable with it being inexplicable. He didn’t enjoy Eton. Why would anyone? He wouldn’t dream of sending his

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Travelling hopefully Anna Aslanyan Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99, pp. 400

Olga Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fastmoving world. The award-winning Polish writer channels her wanderlust into reflections upon the places she visits, sometimes in a handful of lines, sometimes in longer chapters, telling other people’s and her own stories. Her prose, however, is anything but conventional travel writing, and she is the first to point out the danger she would be in otherwise: ‘Describing something is like using it — it destroys.’

Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that, despite the apparent lack of a single plot, tightly weaves the text’s different strands — of fiction, memoir and essay — into a whole. Some chapters are more akin to traditional travel notes: sketches of airport encounters, fellow travellers’ ‘confessions of whole lifetimes’, and other things people often jot down when on a journey.

There are also beautiful set pieces, occasionally split into recurring threads. In one, a man is looking for his wife and young son who have disappeared without a trace.

Another is about a seaman who happens upon a book that serves as a ‘course in literature and whaling and psychology and travel’.

Soon he begins to speak in a newly discovered manner: ‘Flukes! Man, what makes thee want to go a-whaling, eh?’ Jennifer Croft’s confident translation leaves no doubt as to what book he has been reading.

Flights features a number of historical figures, among them Philip Verheyen, a 17thcentury Flemish anatomist, who ‘attempted to prove that since the body and soul are in essence one and the same, there must be between them some sort of proportionality designed by the Creator’. Having lost a leg in his youth, he feels phantom pains (a term he invents but hesitates to use, suspecting himself to be delusional) for the rest of his life.

The surgeon who amputated the limb preserved it, and Verheyen later wrote letters to it, quoted here as studies in human wholeness and pain.

Tokarczuk’s — or, rather, her narrator’s — own experience is recounted in the subtlest of terms, in contrast to the kind of personal writing that resembles a stream of selfies. In one chapter her narrator buys sanitary pads with trivia printed on the packaging, such as ‘The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue’. She can see the point: ‘Paper was created to be the bearer of ideas.’

She prefers to be anonymous when travthe spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

elling and avoids contact with her fellow countrymen; a casual chat with a Brit who feels the same confirms her suspicion that she is not alone in her bias.

A world that’s constantly on the move requires one to redraw boundaries. Airports, Tokarczuk argues, have now stopped being mere transport hubs and become our regular habitat. In one vignette she describes her own home as a pleasant hotel where she doesn’t mind staying for a bit longer. ‘What does “we were there” really even mean?’ is the main theme of the book, and whatever the answer, to make it a valid question you have to address it both to your body and your soul.

Hornet highballs anyone?

Helen R. Brown On Eating Insects: Essays, Stories and Recipes

by Nordic Food Lab Phaidon, £39.95, pp. 336

After school last Wednesday, I watched my five-year-old daughter pop a dead cricket on to her tongue and proclaim it: ‘Like fishy popcorn!’ ‘MMMm, delicious!’ squealed her friend, reaching for more as a third little girl spat hers, discreetly, back into her palm. ‘I’m getting pistachio,’ said the spitter’s mum,

We should find a sensible way to eat whales if we want to cause the least environmental damage picking up the packet for closer scrutiny.

I popped one into my own mouth and got stale, mealy, chewy: like a morsel of dusty, old crab-paste sandwich.

I bought the edible Acheta domesticus at my local farm shop. They were stacked, like a drinking bet, above the local gins under a sign reading: ‘Sharing for the Daring.’

Mealworms with Sesame and Cumin; Grasshoppers with Paprika and Crickets with Sweet Mango. Pretty pricey at £6.50 for 14g.

Suburban Essex’s answer to TV’s Bushtucker Trials and tabloid splashes about Angelina Jolie frying scorpions with her kids.

‘Darling, they’re playing our ringtone!’

More seriously, entomophagy (eating insects) is often pitched to us as the sustainable protein source of the future. If the human population reaches the estimated nine billion by 2050, our current environment trashing rates and methods of meat production won’t keep up. Compared to beef and pork, insects are also a healthy choice: low in fat and high in calcium.

But the myth of bugs as ‘the new food Messiah’ is briskly scotched in the opening pages of Phaidon’s beautiful new book On Eating Insects. Mark Bomford, Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, says the problems we face as ‘a moderately successful social animal with a poor feed-conversion ratio’ are far too complex to be solved so easily. Although entomophagy would cause far less environmental damage than cattle farming, he thinks we can do better. He goes on to make the surprising claim that we’d be more humane, take far fewer lives and cause much less environmental damage if we could find a sensible way to eat large whales.

Why bother with this book then? Because, says Bomford, ‘eating insects is provocative.

To eat a novel food — especially one that elicits initial fear or disgust — is the essence of eating mindfully.’ The chefs and academics of the non-profit Nordic Food Lab collective have assembled a series of essays, travelogues and recipes designed to take readers on a journey through ‘land, life, culture, ecology, meaning and mystery’.With ‘open hearts and mouths’ they investigate ‘where and when specific insects can help cultivate more diverse, resilient local food systems’.

Although the prose sometimes feels, like its subject, a little dry and mechanical, I was still gripped.

For most of us, the elegantly illustrated recipe section will only ever make a coffeetable curiosity. It features instructions for assembling bee larvae tacos, chocolate cochineal, grasshopper garum, wax moth-cured egg yolk and hornet highballs. If I end up with one of those this summer, it’ll be more by accident than design.

The travel section is fascinating, though, exposing the absurdities of every culture’s arbitrary ideas of what’s edible (when and for whom) and what’s not. We in the west think nothing of slurping shellfish but bat away flies, while others do the reverse. Now we learn that ants can taste of ginger and lemongrass. When Amazonian people first tried ginger they exclaimed: ‘It’s just like ants!’

In Uganda and Peru the team stew thumb-sized palm weevil larva which taste like ‘caramelised bacon’. In Japan lethal liquors are rendered deep and musky by the infusion of giant hornets and a delicate, scented tea is brewed with caterpillar droppings. We discover Australian green tree ants that zing like kaffir lime. Witchetty grubs are disappointingly flavourless, but our authors are sent into epicurean ecstasies by the 39

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‘ambrosial’ honey of the African stingless bee: ‘like Sauternes with all the good bits and none of the shit!’

In Kenya competitive young men drum on termite nests to mimic the sound of rain and lure the winged insects out. Some men also blow in smoke, claiming ‘it lowers inhibitions, it makes them brave. Tobacco is fine but bang [marijuana] is better’. The fatty, egg-fuller abdomen of the termite queen is hailed as ‘god’s handmade sausage’.

Cricket farming there could solve the serious problem of zinc and calcium deficiency rife among young children, as the critters are high in both and easy to breed in buckets at home. One variety of giant crickets have legs tasting like chicken, heads ‘like lambs’ brains’ and bodies that are ‘mild, creamy and slightly sweet’. But the gathering of flying insects by huge lights causes severe photokeratisis (snow blindness) for practitioners. In Thailand, Cambodian children with perma-grazed fingers are paid a pittance to rip wings from popular snacks.

At a Dutch insect farm (originally producing pet food but now serving a growing human market) we are asked consider the ethics of killing the bugs. They’re frozen. The company owners think this is painless for the cold-blooded creatures, but how can we know? As the vegan comedian Sarah Pascoe likes to say: ‘everybody thinks they empathise exactly the right amount.’ We all draw the line somewhere. For me, that line was at the crickets. For now. But next time my daughter proclaims herself so hungry she ‘could eat a whale’, I might swallow my horror and give Bomford a call.

Three for the road Lewis Jones Between Them: Remembering My Parents

by Richard Ford Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp. 179

One of the great challenges in life, writes Richard Ford in Between Them, ‘is to know our parents fully — assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing and it is physically possible’.

Leaving aside the question of whether we can ever know anyone fully, Ford’s knowledge of his parents, Parker and Edna, was limited. They did not survive long enough, or at least his father didn’t. Soon after Ford’s 16th birthday, his father ‘came awake in his bed on a Saturday morning and died’, aged 55, of a heart attack, as Richard administered CPR. Nor were they particularly worth knowing, whatever that means; his description of them as ‘country people and insufficiently educated’ gives some idea. They were 40

‘big, courteous, stand-offish’, with ‘a susceptibility to being overlooked’ and a bad temper which sometimes led him to beat young Richard.

Ford thinks his father’s temper was born of frustration, and that he may also have been depressed, though he would not have known the word.

His ‘truest and most affectionate assessment’ of him was that he was ‘not a modern father’.

Parker spent most of his working life as a travelling salesman, driving around the southern states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, bits of Texas, Florida and Tennessee — for the Faultless Starch Co., but he began it as a grocery clerk in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which is where he met Edna Akin, who was dark and pretty, and whom he would marry.

When Edna was born, in 1910, her mother was 14; Ford recalls that during his own schooldays in the 1950s and early 1960s plenty of his fellow pupils married and had babies at that age. ‘This was the south.’ When Edna’s mother remarried, to ‘a quick-witted gigolo’, she shaved eight years off her age and pretended Edna was Parker, Edna and Richard Ford, V-J Day 1945 her sister.

Ford remembers his mother as ‘volatile’, a ‘shouter, a smacker, ‘ordinary’, the sort of people who feature in a frowner and a glowerer’, someone who Ford’s novels. ‘would not be taken advantage of, even So he did not know his parents as well though I suspect no one wanted to take as he might have wished, and this book, his advantage of her’. first work of non-fiction, is his attempt to They sound rather grim, Ford’s parents, know them better. It is a slim volume, but like the mum and dad in Larkin’s ‘This Be double-barreled, comprising two ‘remem- the Verse’. But they had fun, even during the brances’. The one of his mother was written hard times of the Depression, roistering on shortly after her death, aged 71 in 1981, and booze acquired from bootleggers. For the that of his father 55 years after his death in My father wept ‘Boo-hoo-hoo, 1960. They are presented in reverse order, he explains, because his father’s life goes more Boo-hoo-hoo’, as if he’d learned deeply into the past, and his mother’s is closhow to cry from reading a book er to the present.

Ford makes a virtue of his uncertainty about many of the details of their lives, first 15 years of their marriage, until Richard which he handles soberly, reverently, repeti- was born, Edna travelled with Parker, eating tively. ‘I have,’ as he says quite often, ‘men- in roadside joints, staying in hotels. And for tioned this.’ Time is personal and apt to shift: a while after his birth, in 1944, they went on ‘Dates are no more clear than reasons.’ He the road together as a family. is insistently vague, beginning successive He remembers all of them in bed togethsentences with ‘I don’t think’, or ‘Maybe’: er, and his father weeping, ‘Boo-hoo-hoo.

‘Maybe I was nine or seven or five’. But Boo-hoo-hoo’: ‘Those were the sounds he as he sifts through old photographs and made, as if he’d learned how to cry from ‘small events’ — his father packing a suit- reading it in a book.’ case while whistling ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Another time, when he was three or Zip-a-Dee-ay’ — his parents loom into four, they had a flat tyre on the bridge over unsteady focus. the Mississippi at Greenville, and while his Both of them were ‘Arkies’, from the father fixed it his mother held him so tight backwoods of Arkansas. Parker was the he could hardly breathe. He is still not comson of a suicide, a ‘dandified farmer’ who fortable on high bridges. ‘I have come to my lost everything to bad investments and poi- fear,’ he reflects, ‘from the recesses of my soned himself ‘out of dismay’. Parker was mother’s love.’ the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Because Ford was an only child, and has had no children himself, his long-dead parents seem to have assumed an almost overwhelming importance in his life. They loved him, he thinks — ‘By all accounts, they were happy to have me’ — and he certainly loved them, as he shows in this aching tribute to them. If his memory of them is incomplete, his love is not. ‘Most everything but love goes away.’

Cries and whispers Johanna Thomas-Corr A Boy in Winter

by Rachel Seiffert Virago, £14.99, pp. 240

There’s a moment in A Boy in Winter where a young Ukrainian policeman has to escort his town’s Jewish population to a churnedup field under the watchful eyes of his new Nazi masters. It’s November 1941 and Mykola has been told that all he has to do is relieve the Jews of their luggage and move them along. He assumes that they know what’s coming to them.

In his mind, the Germans are ‘bastards’ but no worse than his former Soviet occupiers, who burned his family’s fields and grain

stores as they fled eastwards. So Mykola has deserted the Red Army and joined the auxiliary police under the Germans, the only way to make a living in the occupied town.

As he watches ‘policemen with their coshes raised, and the Jews bent under them’, his instinct is not only anger at the situation but also impatience with the victims. ‘All the people here are ugly in their cowering and in their raging; he hates their fear most of all, and he wants only to get away from them.’

Rachel Seiffert’s speciality is human blind spots, how ordinary people are drawn, often incrementally, into humanity’s bleakest episodes. The British author — whose grandparents were Nazis — came to fame with The Dark Room, her 2001 Booker-nominated novel about the legacy of the Third Reich on German lives. Here, she turns to the largely neglected history of the Ukrainian holocaust — where an estimated one and a half million Jews were shot dead by the SS — and the complicity of the locals, which still remains a controversial topic.

The question of what it feels like to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is threaded throughout the interlocking stories of men, women and children in an agrarian backwater. Ephraim and Miryam, a Jewish merchant and his wife, are rounded up

at daybreak by SS soldiers and held in one room of a small factory with their daughter and hundreds of fellow Jews. Their son Yankel flees in the night with his little brother Momik in tow. Seeking a place to hide, they encounter a farmgirl, Yasia, who is searching for Mykola, hoping he will return home to marry her. Meanwhile, Otto Pohl, a German engineer appalled by Hitler’s ‘over-reaching madness’, believes he has sidestepped the slaughter at the Front by coming to Ukraine to build a road for the Nazis. Instead, he finds himself in the midst of a greater atrocity.

Before she was a writer, Seiffert was a film editor — and it shows. The story hurtles along in vivid set pieces, gaining a frightening momentum once the Jews begin to speculate about their fate. In a cold factory, where he can see the breath of his fellow internees, Ephraim watches ‘the whispers as they pass from head to head around him; clouds of rumour passing from one group to the next’. It’s just a shame her focus on exterior action comes at the expense of the characters’ inner lives — often sketched.

However, the novel casts valuable light on one of the darkest chapters of the war.

Seiffert understands that all too often we despise the victims of misfortune and loathe those whom we have wronged. In the interests of wanting to press on with our lives, we look the other way.

TH Un E ive UN IV rsi ER ty SI TY of th OF eY BU CK ea IN rf GH or AM Te ac hin gQ ua lity

Master’s in the Historyof Sport c.1800-2000 October 2017 to September 2018

Based in London, this groundbreaking Master’s programme offers students unique access to world-class scholars, thinkers and practitioners drawn from the world of sport and its academic study.

It is directed by Ed Smith, the distinguished commentator, historian of sport, and former cricketer for England, Middlesex & Kent.

The course enables the student to undertake research on a specific topic, agreed with the supervisor, in any aspect of the history of sport over the last two centuries. Assessment is by a dissertation, written under expert guidance over the course of the year.

A central feature of the programme is its series of thirteen evening seminars and post-seminar dinners in a London club.

For further details contact: Maria Floyd, Admissions Officer T: 01280 827514 E: london-programmes@buckingham.ac.uk or visit: www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ma/historyofsport the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Speakers will include: • Mike Brearley OBE, former Captain of the England Cricket Team and former President of the MCC • Dr. Kasia Boddy, Lecturer at Cambridge University and author of Boxing: a cultural history • Mervyn King, Lord King of Lothbury KG, GBE, FBA, former Governor of the Bank of England & ex-Director, Aston Villa Football Club • Professor Christopher Young, historian of sport, Cambridge University • Simon Kuper, author and Financial Times columnist THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES 41

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ARTS

Kissin in action The great, enigmatic pianist has always divided critics. He talks to Damian Thompson about his heretical opinions on Horowitz, Israel and Brexit

I

s Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you stretch the definition of ‘concert pianist’ to encompass the circus antics of Lang Lang, the 34-year-old Chinese virtuoso who — in the words of a lesser-known but outstandingly gifted colleague — ‘can play well but chooses not to’.

But you could certainly argue that Kissin has been the world’s most enigmatic great pianist since the death of Sviatoslav Richter in 1997 – though, unlike the promiscuously gay Richter, his overwhelming concern with privacy does not conceal any exotic secrets.

He has recently married for the first time, but chooses not to publicise the fact. I don’t see why I should name his bride, since he hasn’t, but it was obvious when I met him last week that he’s very happy.

No one close to Kissin will have been surprised that details of his romantic life are entirely missing from his Memoirs and Reflections, just published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The book is a mere 190 pages long and that includes a ‘select discography’ from which key recordings have been omitted — for example, the Mozart D minor concerto K466 that Kissin directed from the keyboard with the Kremerata Baltica in 2010. It’s the most gloriously full-bodied performance — powerful, delicate, with legato arches that could hold up a Bruckner symphony. To anyone who thinks Kissin did his best work as a wunderkind, I’d say: listen to this.

On the other hand, no one can forget that he was a prodigy, and nor should they: at the age of 12, he produced a recording of the Chopin piano concertos that still rivals the finest in the catalogue. In his mid-twenties he gave the first ever solo piano recital at the Proms. Not one of the hundreds of juvenile virtuosos from the Far Eastern piano factories has come close to equalling his achievement.

Although there are many things missing from Memoirs and Reflections, it’s also revealing. Kissin is still only 45, looks younger, and yet recorded Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Herbert von Karajan. The maestro had decided that he wanted this warhorse to amble along. Kissin was told that he ‘must not race’, or Karajan would hold back even further. ‘The result was a vicious circle,’ writes Kissin — though 42

in the end he concluded that ‘Karajan filled these tempi with all the forces of his genius’.

Critics didn’t agree.

Stories like this suggest that the teenage Kissin was as comprehensively trapped as any pianistic prodigy in musical history.

Philips made him one of the 100 ‘Great Pianists of the 20th Century’ before he turned 30. Society hostesses treated themselves to another facelift in the hope of seducing him.

‘He inspires adulation so irrational that it defies analysis’, wrote Stephen Wegler in International Piano magazine in 2004. Yet, he added, no pianist of his calibre received reviews that were ‘so personally nasty, even malicious … Because his curly hair tends to rise into a beehive. American critics seem particularly fond of comparisons with Elsa Lanchester’s grotesque appearance in Bride of Frankenstein.’ Kissin’s book hints that these were disorientating and suffocating years. Yet, it must be said, he can also

Society hostesses treated themselves to another facelift in the hope of seducing him dish it out. For example, he writes that he finds something ‘blasphemous’ in the way Josef Hofmann and Vladimir Horowitz approached certain works of Chopin.

Memoirs and Reflections is ‘compiled and edited’ by Marina Arshinova and translated

by Arnold McMillin. So it’s a transcript of interviews, which is fair enough — but after talking to him for over an hour in the Spectator offices I’d say the last thing Evgeny Kissin needs is a translator.

His English is immaculate. You get the impression that a mixed-up tense annoys him as much as a dropped note in the whirlwind finale of Schumann’s Carnaval. Both things happen, but very rarely.

Kissin tends to pause for a long time before answering a question. I thought at first that he was tidying up his English in advance — but, actually, the extreme precision is necessary because he’s moving through a political minefield. No one asked him to enter it, but he feels he has no choice.

We’re not talking about musical politics here, but actual politics. And it’s a minefield because Kissin despises the soft-left consensus embraced by artistic aristocracy.

‘I am a staunch supporter of Western

values,’ he says, ‘but in recent years I began to realise that unfortunately the Western establishment was often betraying those values. And one of the manifestations of such betrayal was its anti-Israel stance.’

In 2009, Kissin wrote to the BBC’s then director-general, Mark Thompson, accusing the corporation’s Persian service of perpetuating the ‘blood libel’ by reporting that Israel was harvesting the organs of dead Palestinians. What response did he get? ‘A letter trying to get out of it.’

Kissin describes himself as an Israeli-Russian-British citizen. The Israeli passport is the most recent — he took citizenship in 2013 — and apparently the one he values most.

He has celebrated his Jewish identity since his Russian childhood, ‘when amongst the people the word “Jew” was perceived as slightly indecent and better avoided’. As a young man he taught himself Yiddish and has recorded several CDs in which he recites Yiddish poetry.

His journey to becoming ‘a soldier for Israel’, however, was a long one — and inspired by the writings of a non-Jew, Vladimir Bukovsky. In 1994, the former Soviet dissident published a book called Judgment in Moscow. ‘For me it was a revelation, not because it exposed numerous communist crimes — these were no secret to me — but because it exposed how corrupt the Western establishment had been for many decades.’

Bukovsky’s book has never been published in English — ‘but I have it in my archive,’ says Kissin, and starts reading from his mobile phone. He chooses a passage in which Bukovsky says that ‘if you have the guts to keep killing people for long enough… then you are no longer a terrorist but a statesman and Nobel Peace Prize winner. This will not remain unnoticed by Hamas, nor the IRA…’ At which point, given that we were two days away from the general election, I couldn’t resist mentioning Jeremy Corbyn.

‘My late uncle, Lord Kissin, must be turning in his grave,’ he says. Harry Kissin, a Labour peer and refugee from the Nazis, helped secure permanent UK residency for the pianist and his family, plus his beloved teacher Anna Cantor, now in her 90s.

I wondered what Evgeny Kissin made of the European Union that Bukovsky detests.

‘I certainly don’t like what has become the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES

of it,’ he says. ‘Having grown up in the former Soviet Union I am for the independence of states. A common market is one thing but political centralisation is something completely different which I do not like.’ So he doesn’t blame Britain for voting to leave? ‘No.’ To be fair to Kissin’s critics, many of them simply do not warm to his playing, whose the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Evgeny Kissin in 1993

So Kissin doesn’t blame Britain for voting to leave? ‘No.’

first fruits of his new exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, a double album of Beethoven sonatas? It’s impossible to say.

But somehow I doubt that Evgeny Kissin could care less.

est heresy in classical musical circles. You have to wonder: will his pugnacious opinions influence the critical reception of the

Memoirs and Reflections by Evgeny Kissin is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, price £20.

emotional detachment troubles them. On the other hand, defending Brexit is the grav-

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Theatre Party piece Lloyd Evans Barber Shop Chronicles Dorfman, in rep until 8 July Common Olivier, in rep until 5 August

The National Theatre could hardly resist Barber Shop Chronicles. The play shines a light on a disregarded ethnic community, black urban males, who like to hang around in barber salons seeking friendship, laughs and tittle-tattle. Setting the play in a single venue would just be a sitcom, like Desmond’s, so the show establishes a series of shops stretching from London to the capitals of various sub-Saharan nations. This makes it a global epic. In theory, at least.

In fact, it’s still a sitcom with some melodramatic bits on the end. The disjoined structure is tiresome at first as the action keeps legging it from Britain to Nigeria and Ghana and back again.

Inevitably, the intellectual level is pretty undemanding, somewhere between musichall and panto. The guys lounge around on chairs swapping jokes, telling old sto-

Youngsters forced to experience this bolus of drivel will probably shun the theatre for decades afterwards ries and haggling over politics. Some of the comments are amusing. On Africa’s disdain for punctuality: ‘Time cannot contain us!’ On black women’s obsession with wigs: ‘Why can our wives get away with murder?

Because their DNA will be traced to a bald woman in India.’ There’s a great speech by an embittered South African who blames Mandela for his policy of reconciliation which left the black populace ‘emasculated’ and seething with unexpressed rage that manifests itself today in the ceaseless waves of violent crime.

The show’s big attraction is its party atmosphere. Before curtain-up, the cast jig around on stage or mingle with the audience. Afterwards, everyone is invited up for a disco. Director Bijan Sheibani has assembled some of the finest comic talents around. Hammed Animashaun is a superb vaudevillian and Sule Rimi delivers one of the best impersonations of affronted Nigerian masculinity you’ll ever see. The gameplan, presumably, is to draw black males to the South Bank and to hope they’ll return for the classical repertoire. Maybe it’ll work.

Common by D.C. Moore is set in England in 1809 at the time of the enclosures.

We meet Mary, a fortune-telling prostitute, who claims to be an aristocrat of French 44

descent. She also identifies herself as a ‘thief’. The dialect of the play is contrived, antiquarian and vulgar. ‘If my language some offends, fist-fuck you all,’ says Mary, charmingly. In the opening scene she asks a peasant for directions to ‘the Cock Inn’, a name selected, rather optimistically, to get laughs. The peasant is helped by an automated raven that can talk. After this baffling overture the play lurches from one obscurity to another. There are arguments in taverns, stand-offs between uppity rustics and sneering toffs. A turnip-picker is murdered and his crimson entrails are yanked from within his Ribena-stained smock. Synchronised scythe-dances give way to troops of actors trudging across the stage carrying rucksacks containing leafless branches.

Mary’s character is impossible to pin down. She’s a swindler. She’s a visionary.

She’s a lesbian. She’s a dispenser of sage advice. Suddenly she’s pregnant. She begs her girlfriend to emigrate with her to Massachusetts. She uses a tantric-sex dance to persuade a snooty toff to moderate the effects of land reforms. Later, she seduces his maid. The craziness multiplies. A Geordie gamekeeper murders a she-bumpkin dressed as a he-bumpkin. Two men rush on stage pretending to thump each other in the face. A pint of ketchup later, their fisticuffs are halted by an ooh-arr yokel with a Swindon accent. This is Mary’s lover, who is ardently propositioned by her own brother. She advises him to drop incest and take up revolution. A male figure appears with his beige penis frontally presented and urinates on the stage. (I thought this was an audience member but it turned out to be one of the cast.) Mary is lynched and buried alive by masked yokels but she later exhumes herself and has a chat with the automated raven.

I haven’t made these scenes up. A simple oversight lies behind this confusion.

Where’s the trajectory? We never find out what the main character wants and why.

D.C. Moore has ignored the mission-seeking blueprint that underlies every piece of drama ever written, from the Odyssey (man returns home) to the dead parrot sketch (man returns pet).

What an embarrassment for the National. Lots of baffled ticket-holders bailed out at the interval. The Olivier’s auditorium looked like an empurpled jaw following multiple extractions. Local schoolchildren may be recruited to fill the voids. An awful prospect. Youngsters forced to experience this bolus of drivel will probably shun the theatre for decades afterwards. The production highlights a key difference between subsidised and commercial art. Bad commercial art gets ignored and forgotten. Bad subsidised art enjoys a life-support system, also subsidised, that can lure the innocent into its toxic embrace. Please, National The-

atre, spare the kids this one. It could take a generation to repair the damage.

Radio Making history Kate Chisholm ‘History is not the past,’ says the writer Hilary Mantel in the first of her Reith Lectures on Radio 4 (produced by Jim Frank, Tuesday). ‘It’s the method we’ve evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.’ In Resurrection: The Art and Craft, her series of five talks, Mantel shows her mettle as a novelist (most notably of the award-winning Wolf Hall and its sequel) and as a historian, too, arguing the case for historical fiction, once much-maligned as a literary genre precisely because it twists the facts to create a narrative, usually of a highly romanticised flavour. But facts are not truths, Mantel asserts provocatively. ‘The moment we are deceased we become the subject of stories. The process of fictionalisation is instant and natural and inevitable.’

Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, interpretation begins.

But to begin with she didn’t like making things up. She looked for evidence, spent

Like a Mystic Meg, Mantel delves into the lives of the dead and resurrects them ages reading up on the facts only to realise, as she was researching a book set in revolutionary France, that there are so many gaps in the record. It was these ‘erasures and silences’ that turned her into a novelist. How to fill them? She determined that although she ‘would make up a man’s inner torments’ she would never invent the colour of his drawing-room wallpaper. That detail she needed to know so that she could ‘look around the room through his eyes’.

(A ‘snide’ critic complained of the book that followed that there was ‘a lot of wallpaper in it’.)

Aged 12, on a visit to Hampton Court Palace, Mantel remembers bursting into tears as she sat on the floor in Cardinal Wolsey’s closet. It was as if in some way she knew then how her life would be mapped out. ‘I have in fantasy,’ she says, ‘fulfilled what I imagined that day. I have seen Cardinal Wolsey sitting by the fireplace and I have lain my elbow on the windowsill and I have conversed with him.’ It’s this ability to enter into the past, Mantel’s uncanny intuition, that makes her novels set in the court of Henry VIII and focused on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, engineer of the English Reformation, so compelling. They feel so authentic, so remarkably true to what it must have been like to be there in that closet the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

dominic welch On show in the Gallery 28 June – 14 July Continually evolving his distinct sense of abstraction, Welch realises solid, yet fluid forms in Kilkenny limestone, Ancaster Weatherbed, Carrara marble and bronze. Rooted in the natural world, his purity of form is inspired by the organic logic of seeds, pods, shells and fish, suggesting natural harmonies that both calm the senses and spark the imagination.

Embryonic Form bronze, an edition of 11 32 x 32 x 4 cms 12 5⁄8 x 12 5⁄8 x 15⁄8 ins

2 8 Cor k S t re e t , L o n d o n W1S 3 N G + 4 4 (0)2 0 7437 55 4 5 i n f o @ m e s s u m s .co m w w w. m e s su m s .co m

BOOKS & ARTS

with Wolsey. Like a psychic, a Mystic Meg, Mantel delves back into the lives of the dead and resurrects them as if they could be alive and with us now.

Her intention, she says, is ‘to introduce a wobble into the fabric of reality’, to make us less certain about how things were. ‘Any worthwhile history,’ she says, ‘is a constant state of self-questioning.’ You might think that a novelist who has spent the past decade or more immersed in the 1500s would have little to tell us about our own times.

But Mantel’s grasp of our relationship with the past is so sure, so inflected with meaning, that she illuminates the present, too.

‘They have something to tell us,’ she says of the ‘restless’ dead. ‘Something we need to understand.’

On the World Service, Kanishk Tharoor introduced another programme in his series Museum of Lost Objects, which traces buildings and artworks, treasures and personal artefacts destroyed in the violence in the Middle East, reimagining them through memories, legends and the person-

Mantel remembers bursting into tears as she sat on the floor in Cardinal Wolsey’s closet al stories of those who once owned or knew them. Surprisingly, this virtual museum is not always about loss and destruction as Tharoor discovered when he returned to Aleppo.

He meets Zahed Tajeddin, an archaeologist who had restored a large medieval courtyard house in the suburb of Jdeideh, built at the height of the city’s affluence in the 15th century, amid bathhouses, mosques and churches, and alleyways filled with the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle.

Tajeddin left his treasured home in 2012 because he no longer felt safe in the city, but Abu Ahmed, a pharmacist, moved into Jdeideh at the very same time to see if there was anything he could do to help. He went door to door offering first aid, applying dressings, dispensing medicines to the wounded and distressed and, discovering the house left by Tajeddin, he camped in its courtyard and set up a makeshift pharmacy there.

‘Every day was stressful,’ says Ahmed.

‘I used to have panic attacks, when you see that things are getting worse and there is no solution ahead.’ There were many victims of the violence for whom he could do nothing except stem the blood and soothe the pain. ‘Sometimes you feel like you want to die, but then you think about it again, and realise the reason you were there. Helping others gave me purpose.’ He would sit in the courtyard and smell the jasmine that Tajeddin had planted. ‘Those moments I savoured.’

The house acquired a new history, another layer of meaning, and when Tajeddin 46

eventually went back in 2015 to see if his home had survived the bombing he found it intact, if submerged by dust and debris, a single jasmine flower taking him back to its medieval origins, its past.

Television Never knowingly understated James Walton At one uncharacteristically low-key point in Sunday’s Poldark — back for a third series on BBC1 — Ross (Aidan Turner) left off the brooding and cliff-top galloping for a while to review his finances. They were, his genial banker Harris Pascoe told him, in good shape. Hearing that Ross’s marriage was going through one of its happier phases too, Harris then turned even more reassuring.

‘What could possibly go wrong?’ he concluded with a cheerful smile.

Which just goes to show that Harris Pascoe must never have seen Poldark — because the answer to his question was, of course, ‘Almost everything’. Ross’s wife Demelza could, for example, be summoned, along with her cleavage, to attend her estranged father who lay in bed dying — or ‘a-dying’ as she duly preferred to call it.

Ross could also arrange a secret marriage between Caroline Penvenen and Dr Enys, only for both to be dramatically called away on their wedding night: she, to her beloved guardian who was doing some a-dying himself; he, to help Elizabeth Warleggan deliver a baby that we and Ross know is Ross’s rather than horrible husband George’s.

Ross’s initial response to the birth was essentially threefold. He downed a series of port shots, went sprinting along the coastline (presumably, in his anguish he’d forgotten his horse) and finally headed up to George’s place to spy through the windows. Luckily for us and our entertainment, he arrived just as Aunt Agatha was going into mad-oldcrone overdrive.

The baby, you see, had been born on the night of a black moon, causing Agatha to cry, ‘’Tis a bad omen, mark my words!’ (If you wanted to turn Poldark into a drinking game with some port shots of your own, I’d recommend taking a slug every time a sentence begins with ‘’Tis’ — as well as whenever anyone uses ‘be’ instead of ‘is’, or reverses normal word order.) She then offered George some slightly more specific information: ‘That child of yours! Cursed he be!’ (An impressive two slugs in three words.)

George, though, had other things on his mind. For a start, he had to confirm his allround ghastliness by remaining entirely indifferent to his wife’s postpartum state.

He also had to give a masterclass in dramat-

ic irony by talking endlessly about his new ‘son and heir’ and proudly noting the baby’s unmistakable resemblance to himself.

In some shows, this might have been enough for an opening episode. But not, needless to say, for Poldark (possible motto: Never Knowingly Understated), which still had plenty of implausible twists up its sleeve. We met several new characters too, most of them introduced with the question ‘Who be this, then?’ — and at least one of whom looks set to be involved at some stage in a serious brood-off with Ross. We’ve even had the beginnings of a whole new romance between two of the newbies: Demelza’s brother Drake — who, it seems, will soon be taking over the main torso-baring duties — and a governess called Morwenna. ‘’Tis a lilting, musical name,’ a smitten Drake observed on their first meeting.

By all known criteria, Poldark is what we critics call a pile of old tosh. And yet, somehow that doesn’t stop it from being undeniable if distinctly bonkers fun. ’Tis good news, in other words, that back it be.

ITV’s new drama series Fearless isn’t short of incident either. The main character Emma (Helen McCrory) is a human-rights

Poldark may be what we critics call a pile of old tosh but that doesn’t stop it from being bonkers fun lawyer who on Monday managed to overturn the conviction of a man who’d spent 14 years in prison for killing a teenage girl.

In between times, she visited another of the week’s dying fathers, had flashbacks to some sort of childhood trauma at Greenham Common, smoked heavily, sought to foster a child, and sheltered the wife and son of a Syrian refugee whom the authorities suspect of terrorism.

Fearless is written by Patrick Harbinson who, somewhat improbably, cut his teeth on Heartbeat, before moving to Hollywood and the more glamorous likes of 24 and Homeland. Here, fortunately, it’s his American shows that are an obvious influence — both in the efficient pacing and in the way the various plot strands are intriguingly coming together. The dead girl, it appears, was killed at a US airbase and the British and American intelligence services are mysteriously keen on having the original verdict upheld.

The result looks like being a classy and dark paranoid political thriller — but also, perhaps, an unluckily timed one. When the series was filmed, it must have seemed a good idea to portray the secret services as sinister invaders of privacy and the state as a ruthless protector of its own skin. Now, I imagine that most viewers wouldn’t mind if the privacy invasion was cranked up a bit more — and would much rather see the state portrayed as a benevolent protector of our skins. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

© ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Exhibitions The better angels of our nature Martin Gayford Raphael: the Drawings Ashmolean, until 3 September

Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics and art historians.

While we were admiring the Raphael frescoes that fill these private apartments of the Renaissance popes, Matthias Wivel, curator of the Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition at the National Gallery, made the most eloquent case for the painter I have ever heard. Suddenly, I felt a new enthusiasm for Raphael.

Essentially what he said is that Raphael is the supreme master of depicting human beings in interaction. Each of the frescoes around us, Wivel pointed out, was made up of a huge number of figures, all

Raphael is the supreme master of depicting human beings in interaction engaged with each other in fluently orchestrated groups. Indeed, Raphael organised his figures in almost musical terms — single notes, trios, quartets, cadences. The frescoes in that room are about the elements of civilisation. The ‘School of Athens’ is a choral assembly of philosophers — responding, debating, reacting, expounding. Other frescoes summarise the achievements of poetry, law and theology.

Here, Wivel argued, ‘You see people dependent on each other for the thoughts they express and the questions that they think about. This is what human civilisation is about; Raphael’s way of composing pictures is an expression of the fact that we can’t exist on our own. That’s why he is so intensely moving as an artist. He shows us the better angels of our nature: what we should aspire to as a society.’

In the modern age, many, I suspect, secretly feel Raphael (1483–1520) is a bit of a bore. Lucian Freud so detested his work he claimed he couldn’t tell which way up Raphael’s drawings were supposed to be.

Even in the mid-18th century Joshua Reynolds confessed the ‘disappointment’ he had felt on first seeing Raphaels in the Vatican Stanze.

Years later, in his Discourses on Art, Reynolds praised Raphael for all the academic virtues that an RA student ought to cultivate, such as ‘correctness’ of drawing.

But when he came to weigh up which of the two Renaissance giants was the greater, Michelangelo or Raphael, it was clear where Reynolds’s heart lay. He described Michelangelo’s ‘vast and sublime’ ideas, the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

‘Study for Charity’, c.1519, by Raphael 47

BOOKS & ARTS

‘Poetic Inspiration’, ‘Genius and Imagination’. Raphael, in contrast, was awarded all the unthrilling qualities: ‘correct’ drawing, ‘judicious’ composition, ‘Taste and Fancy’.

This comparison — Michelangelo versus Raphael — is one that can be made for the next week by visiting the Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition (soon to close), then taking a train to Oxford to see the fabulous show Raphael: the Drawings at the Ashmolean Museum.

The 120 drawings demonstrate why for centuries Raphael was the most influential figure in western painting. Looking at them is like looking into his mind — you see ideas beginning, developing, being polished. In a few cases — such as an image of a horse’s head, charged with titanic energy — you see pieces of the cartoon: the full-scale template for the final picture.

Raphael was the great synthesiser of early 16th-century Italy. A generation younger than Leonardo (b.1452) and nearly a decade junior to Michelangelo (b.1475), he learnt from both and from his own master, Perugino. You can see

Lucian Freud so detested Raphael he claimed he couldn’t tell which way up his drawings were supposed to be the process of assimilation in the drawings he did after Leonardo’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ (c.1507) and Michelangelo’s ‘David’ (c.1504). Raphael’s version of Leonardo’s nude Leda comes out less weird, more sensual — much more the work of someone who liked looking at naked women (another of Raphael’s unique selling points in contrast to the two older artists). Similarly, his David — seen from behind — is more elegant than the original, and also less heroic.

Raphael wasn’t just mixing and matching other styles, there was an emotional tone that was all his own — graceful, urbane, but also full of subtle feeling. In a 16th-century dialogue on art, one of the speakers argues that Michelangelo represented porters — with mighty muscles that could only come from manual labour — whereas Raphael depicted gentlemen: a good joke, and a clue to the limitations of each.

It is clear that everyone liked Raphael, the man. He was charming and easy to deal with. This was perhaps because he possessed a high level of empathy, which might have been why — unlike Michelangelo, who was notoriously cantankerous and antisocial — Raphael was a supreme portraitist.

His emotional intelligence is visible in a great drawing such as ‘Heads and Hands of Two Apostles’ (c.1519–20), which ends the exhibition. You can read their reactions of awe at and reverence to the miracle in their faces — and also in the language of their gesturing fingers (a speciality of Raphael’s).

48

Such highly detailed drawings, worked up with observations of living models, were a late phase in his working process. Raphael usually began with the idea for the whole composition. Then, when he had planned the rhythms and melodies, he would look at the individual components, studying them, often posed naked in his studio, to get the anatomy just right.

Yet such studies aren’t exercises in truthtelling (which is no doubt why Lucian Freud hated them). His ‘Study for Psyche presenting to Venus the Vase of Proserpine’ (c.1517– 18) is as delicately erotic as a Watteau — and clearly based on observations of a real body.

But as he drew, he was altering, idealising — transforming her into a goddess.

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose (if I were forced, I would still plump for Michelangelo). But this exhibition makes Raphael’s genius clear. True, some of his magical charm has faded with time; I doubt anyone will ever again warm to those vapid Madonnas of his. But there is so much tender, brilliant and beautiful draughtsmanship on show that you could stay there all day, just looking.

Opera Art of darkness Richard Bratby Hamlet Glyndebourne, in rep until 6 July Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria The Grange Festival, in rep until 2 July

Brett Dean’s new opera for Glyndebourne is a big-hearted romantic comedy, sunny and life-affirming. Only joking — this is contemporary opera, after all. It’s about the usual stuff: neurosis, violence and toxic sexuality. Those seem to be the emotions most naturally suited to the language of mainstream contemporary classical music, and Dean speaks that language as brilliantly as Richard Strauss handled the idiom of an earlier generation. Whatever else this operatic adaptation of Hamlet might be, it’s a polished piece of work.

That takes some doing: Shakespeare isn’t naturally suited to the opera house. It was Verdi’s librettist Boito who first realised that the best way to retain the essence of Shakespeare while still leaving room for a composer is to dismantle the play and rebuild it on operatic terms. Dean’s librettist Matthew Jocelyn has done precisely that, trimming and reassembling Shakespeare’s text to zip efficiently through all the bits you can remember of Hamlet’s multiple plotlines, and playing some ingenious little games along the way. ‘To be or not to be’ is hinted at by the Prince but finally deliv-

ered, piecemeal, by the Players. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (cast as a pair of preening countertenors) are merged with Osric, and are therefore present at the end to be slaughtered by Hamlet himself, and very satisfyingly too.

Dean has done the rest, with a score whose glinting textures, shattering climaxes and queasy, deliquescent microtonal slides generate a powerful sense of something rotten in the fabric of this opera’s world. As you’d expect from Dean, it’s wondrously refined. An unseen chorus (distinct from some powerful choral crowd scenes on stage) smudges the orchestration while electronics generate unexpected thuds and rumbles around the auditorium — all suitably unsettling. There’s wit too (Dean uses an accordion to droll effect in the Players’ scene). But like a miasma or a migraine, the tension never really lifts. The whole opera feels like an extended mad scene, quite apart from Ophelia’s set piece wig-out in Act Two — as stylised in its trilling, gargling, chest-beating vocal writing as anything by Donizetti, and delivered

by Barbara Hannigan with showstopping bravura. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

RICHARD HUBERT SMITH

right place. Visually, though, this was all over the shop. Sure, enormous cat’s cradles and gods on bicycles are great as a means of mirroring the richness and fantasy of Monteverdi’s astonishing score. Not so great when they obscure crucial plot points. But I’ll give the new team at The Grange the benefit of the doubt because the performances were generally strong, with a lively band under Michael Chance, a sweet-toned, heroic Ulisse sung by Paul Nilon with a gleam in his eye, and above all, Anna Bonitatibus as Penelope: proud, passionate and able to maintain a regal dignity even while wearing something that looked less like a dress than a gazebo.

Cinema 1944 and all that A.N. Wilson Churchill PG, Nationwide

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world: Barbara Hannigan (Ophelia) and Allan Clayton (Hamlet) in Hamlet at Glyndebourne

That’s certainly the impression created

by Hamlet himself. It’s a colossal role, performed by Allan Clayton with fearless mastery of what sounded like wrenching vocal demands. Fumbling, shuffling, twisting his fingers, under Neil Armfield’s direction it’s never at any point clear that this Hamlet is fully sane — which may of course be the only sane response to the world depict-

Ophelia’s set-piece wig-out is delivered by Barbara Hannigan with showstopping bravura ed here. Dean’s musical characterisation is deft. Polonius (Kim Begley) has a quiet, mumbling motif for low clarinets and flutes and Ophelia’s two-note sigh of ‘Never’ recurs to haunting effect.

But there’s a lot of story to get through, and outside of the set pieces — which included a magnificently macabre turn from John Tomlinson as the Gravedigger (he also, neatly, appears as the Player King and the Ghost) — it didn’t feel like there was quite enough space for all the characters to develop. It’s hard to judge on a first night, and I’d be interested to revisit Hamlet on its third the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

or fourth production. But with a cast of this quality — Rod Gilfry as Claudius, Sarah Connolly dignified and distraught as Gertrude — there was no shortage of dramatic weight. Vladimir Jurowski conducted with icy intensity, and Ralph Myers’s elegant sets never got in the way.

Armfield gave us a properly gory dénouement, too, with plenty of swordfighting and buckets of blood. That’s never guaranteed these days. At the climax of Tim Supple’s new staging of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse, as Ulisse, thrillingly, strings his bow and butchers the suitors, the goddess Minerva sauntered on with a paint pot and casually dabbed a red splodge on each of them. That was it. Later, stagehands fumbled awkwardly with firelighters and audience members sniggered as Ulisse and Penelope shared their heartrending recognition scene. For much of the final act the surtitles were illegible, at least from my seat.

This is the debut production by The Grange Festival in the venue recently vacated (don’t ask) by the company still calling itself Grange Park Opera, and it’s clear that their artistic priorities are in the

The star of this film is the music, composed

by Lorne Balfe. I really liked it, which was just as well, because it plays for about half the 98 minutes, while a superannuated Churchill, played by Brian Cox, moons about on beaches, deeply penitent for his catastrophic authorisation of the Gallipoli disaster in which a quarter of a million Allied troops lost their lives on the beaches of Turkey. It is the summer of 1944, and an apparently almost pacifist Churchill is timidly begging Eisenhower and Montgomery not to go ahead with the Normandy landings. He dreads the loss of life, you see.

Not being a Churchill scholar, indeed being, I must admit, Churchill-allergic, I have no idea if this is true or false. It did not ring any more true to me than the depiction of a benevolent and politically astute Mountbatten in Viceroy’s House,

1944 seems a bit late to be turning Churchill into an agonised Hamlet woodenly rendered by Hugh Bonneville.

After all, this Churchill is the man who, as well as being responsible for Gallipoli in his younger days, would gleefully offer the British people blood, toil, sweat and whatever. He would round off his war career by bombing the civilians of Dresden and then casually handing over eastern Europe to Stalin, the worst mass murderer in modern times. By 1944, the death toll, for which he was directly responsible, must have been in the tens of millions; 1944 seems a bit late to be turning him into an agonised Hamlet. In one scene, Churchill, whose agnosticism is well documented, kneels down and prays.

This film concentrates on Churchill the self-doubter, Churchill the sufferer from 49

BOOKS & ARTS

black dog, and Churchill the foully bad-tempered bawler-out of secretaries. Here, no doubt, we’re on surer ground, for it is a matter of record that, especially when drunk, this is what he was like. The film-makers soften the truth, however, by making him melt when the latest pretty young secretary (Ella Purnell) tells him that her fiancé is a midshipman. Most improbably, Churchill manages to receive a personal message from the midshipman, who ‘sends his love’ to the secretary directly from the Normandy beaches. How this feat was achieved before the days of mobile telephones the audience is not informed.

Luckily, it was the cue for another sequence of scenes in which Churchill does not say anything at all, and perambulates beaches, gardens and enormous empty rooms while Lorne Balfe’s swirling tones waft around our ears.

Brian Cox does his best with an appalling script: there are some exchanges between Churchill and his wife Clemmie so leaden that you wonder how Cox and Miranda

I long for good thrillers with witty dialogue and sexy heroines rather than these endless ‘historical’ distortions Richardson managed to say them with the conviction that they, nonetheless, heroically muster. When Clemmie goes behind his back to prevent him and the King sailing with the troops to Normandy he grumpily asks, ‘Is this about the war or is it about you and me?’ Can you imagine Churchill using ‘about’ in this sense? She replies, ‘Do you want to be coddled, Winston? Then don’t complain when someone tells you the truth.’ In another of these marital spats, she says, ‘Try acting like a hero, Winston, and then maybe we’ll think you are one again.’

He replies, ‘Why don’t you just have me stuffed?’ It could just as easily have been, ‘Why don’t you just get stuffed?’ for all the realism of the scene.

Miranda Richardson is a superb actress, of course, and there are moments when we are reminded less of Lady Churchill than of her glorious rendition of Pamela Flitton (Lady Widmerpool) in the televised Dance to the Music of Time. Fans of that show will recognise James Purefoy, who played Nick Jenkins in Dance, here making a brave stab at King George VI. He does the stammer and the voice well (by understatement) even though he does not, of course, remotely resemble that monarch.

I just pine for someone to make some good thrillers that aren’t too frightening and which have witty, snappy dialogue, ingenious plots and sexy heroines, rather than these endless ‘historical’ distortions. If you like this sort of ‘history’, though, you’ll probably go and see it, and agree with me that Churchill is well acted by all its principals, badly written and poorly directed.

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Live music Detroit spinner Arthur House Jeff Mills: From Here to There Barbican Centre

When techno first appeared amid the urban wasteland of mid-1980s Detroit, its futuristic sound palette was inspired by the whirring and clanking of the Motor City’s defunct assembly lines. Early techno was darker and more hypnotic than its close cousin house, but you could still dance to it. There was still soul in the machine. The music brought people together on dance floors in abandoned warehouses, offering hope amid decline. By the end of the decade, thanks to the crossover hits ‘Good Life’ and ‘Big Fun’, techno had taken root in the UK. Europe and the world would follow.

Jeff Mills belongs to the second wave of Detroit techno: the guys who took themselves too seriously and forgot that it was meant to be fun. As part of the Underground Resistance collective, he jealously guarded the ‘Detroit sound’, stripping the music back to its harshest, most industrial elements.

A solo career followed, with records called things like AX-009ab and 4 Art/UFO. Mills completed his migration into high-culture pretension by moving to France, where last month he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His residency at the Barbican, From Here to There, was a fitting way to celebrate the achievement.

Life to Death and Back mostly consists of a contemporary dance film — rarely a phrase to inspire confidence — in which three dancers in slinky black outfits perform among the exhibits in the Egyptian wing of the Louvre. Pyramids and clouds flash portentously across the screen while Mills plays a live electronic ‘score’ on turntables and laptop at the back of the auditorium: all looped bleeps and chaotic, layered percussion that never settles into a regular beat. If it sounded like it was being made up

on the spot, that’s probably because it was.

The dancers shuffle around the museum, occasionally undulating a limb or two or feigning awe at a sarcophagus. Later they appear — for real! — in the auditorium, holding glowing spheres which they continue to shuffle around onstage with, never threatening to do impressive or beautiful things with their bodies. Around the hour mark, they take off their clothes — some reward at least for those who haven’t left yet. I am told the whole thing had something to do with the reincarnation of pharaohs, but there was no way of knowing. At the end, they put down their big shiny balls and lie down, folding their arms over their chests, mummy-style, to the great relief of the audience.

For The Planets, an orchestral and electronic work inspired by Holst’s 1918 suite, Mills chucks the Greek mythology in favour of ‘actual data from Nasa’ — including the planets’ ‘rotation speed, their mass and density, the existence of water composites and other known facts’. Quite how this transpires to make Mercury sound like a subRite of Spring, or Jupiter like Gershwin, we can only guess. Earth, reduced to menacing woodwind semitones, gets a bad rap. Perhaps it was the ‘water composites’.

The piece is described as a ‘cosmic tour or field-trip excursion to visit each planet’. Mills — by this logic the geography teacher of the electronic-music world — is a nothing-if-not-conscientious guide, supplementing the individual planets’ themes with electronic compositions to conjure up the distances between them. These vaguely cosmic sounds are interrupted by a sudden flurry of pizzicato strings between Mars and Jupiter — an asteroid belt! (Presumably.)

Still, Mills looks at home onstage with the Britten Sinfonia, dressed in a suit behind a bank of gizmos near the double basses over to the right. He is at pains to explain in the programme that this position ‘isn’t the focal point for the guest artist, but I realise that the return audio from my machine sometimes helps that section for synchronisation’.

Ah, Mr Mills, ever magnanimous — even on a trip to Uranus.

Adaptation The day he pruned the TV aerial thinking it was Virginia Creeper, and the day she bathed her eye using a bottle of nail varnish remover were not the same day, but they both marked the advance of age, the way it creeps up on you and strips the colour out of your late play.

—John Greening the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

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NOTES ON …

West Middlewick Farm

By William Cook GETTY IMAGES

I

n springtime in our family, we always have the same old argument: where should we go on our summer holiday (I know, I know — we should have booked it months ago). Every year I make the same suggestion, and every year I’m shouted down. ‘Let’s go back to West Middlewick Farm,’ I say, more in hope than expectation. ‘No! There’s nothing to do there!’ reply my wife and teenage children. ‘But that’s exactly why I like it,’ I protest, before we go and book an overpriced villa in Spain or Italy.

This year, however, I’m feeling a bit more optimistic. The exchange rate is rotten, the British weather is balmy (hurrah for global warming) and the prospect of doing nothing on a farm in Devon is looking increasingly attractive, even to two jaded teenagers more accustomed to the Costa Brava.

I first came across West Middlewick Farm six years ago, when my daughter wanted to be a farmer (these days, there’s nothing she’d like to do less). It sounded just right for her — a working farm where you could help with all the chores: collecting eggs; feeding lambs and piglets; bringing the cows in for milking. It sounded delightful, and it was.

Midway between Dartmoor and Exmoor, not far from the old market town of Tiverton, it’s surrounded by countryside, but well off the tourist trail. My daughter and I spent

Sheep thrills: holidaying on a working farm

a weekend there and we had a great time. A calf was born and my daughter named her.

We saw her take her first steps.

The next summer we went back with my wife and son and spent a week there, exploring the woods and meadows, pottering around the farm. You can camp or bring a caravan, stay in one of their comfy log cabins, or do B&B in the farmhouse. For townies, it’s a wonderful introduction to country life.

We returned home with a tiny kitten who

soon turned into a fierce tomcat. ‘You never should have got a farm cat,’ said our neighbours (after our cat had bitten them) but we adored him. He was a reminder of one of the happiest family holidays we’d ever had.

West Middlewick Farm is owned by a friendly couple called John and Joanna Gibson. John grew up here; his parents and grandparents ran this farm before him.

Like a lot of farmers, they always had a few campers here in summertime. Unlike a lot of farmers, they always encouraged campers to muck in. Jo was one of those. She came here as a teenager with her parents, and fell in love with John, the farmer’s son. Today they run the farm with their three children. I’ve never met a family who seem more contented, despite the constant toil it takes to make a living from farming nowadays.

My fondest memory is watching John playing for the village cricket team. There were players of all ages and abilities, and that was what made it so special. Everyone knew each other. John had a fine innings and his daughter laid on a delicious tea. We went back a third time, but it wasn’t quite the same. I guess my children had outgrown it (childhood is so fleeting — especially if you’re a big kid, like me). This year, I’m hoping they’ll be grown-up enough to appreciate it once again.

Theatre

MUSIC BY TOM DEERING BOOK AND LYRICS BY HADLEY FRASER AND JOSIE ROURKE, EDITED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT OF THE EVIDENCE SESSION What happens when something goes wrong? Who holds us accountable?

On 15 October 2015, as part of an inquiry into ‘The collapse of Kids Company’, Camila Batmanghelidjh and Alan Yentob gave evidence to The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. The Donmar Warehouse have transformed that evidence session into a new musical.

020 3282 3808 | DONMARWAREHOUSE.COM

52

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the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

‘Academic ability, like chess-playing ability, is a one-way signal of intelligence’ — Rory Sutherland, p61

High life Taki

I was busy explaining to a 23-year-old American girl by the name of Jennifer why the election result was not a disaster. She is a Spectator reader and wants to work in England, preferably in politics. She called the result the worst news since her father had abandoned her mother. I begged to differ. Actually, it was a far better result than it would have been had the Conservatives won a majority of 100, I told her. She gasped in disbelief, but soon enough she was hooked.

Do not be alarmed, dear readers. I have not taken LSD. Nor am I suffering from populist-nationalist rage at global elites and starting to hallucinate. No, I just read a piece in the New York Times by an ignoramus who said that Britain’s voyage to inglorious isolation is a consequence of the Brits not listening to people such as Heath and Wilson who took Britain into Europe. What would we do without such fools writing such drivel?

Heath and Wilson, God help us.

I was pleased with the result mainly because I never trusted Saint Theresa but do trust the DUP. My other reason is that when lefties cry that plans to crack down on Islamic extremism raise worries about rights, I know that soft Conservatives will fold quicker than you can say ‘coward’. Not the DUP, however, whose enemies call it bigoted, xenophobic, isolationist and other such goodies. Oh yes, it also opposes tranny bathrooms and same-sex marriage. Who wants the British to end up like the Americans, too scared to utter certain opinions about race and gender.

So sorry, you wet ones, if there is a coalition between the Conservatives and the DUP, we’ll have never had it so good. Yippee! And now for more good news: the leftwing media in America have flown into a quasi-psychotic rage over Russian interference during the last election. The fact that it never happened, and was invented by the Deep State, is neither here nor there. The ignorant among us believe it to be true. Putin the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

is now considered to be behind the Trump victory. In fact, the adjectives used against him are far worse than any used to describe the Führer before war was declared. They don’t even call him Herr Putin, as British politicians referred to Herr Hitler.

Never mind. My new buddy Oliver Stone has come to the rescue. It all started one night about ten years ago when my close friend Michael Mailer seated me near Oli-

I never trusted Saint Theresa but do trust the DUP ver. Not only were the director and I not on speaking terms; I had publicly announced that if he ever crossed my path I’d hit him so hard he’d have to look up to tie his shoelaces. Well, beware of answered prayers. During an event honouring Norman Mailer, I stood up, faced Oliver Stone and told him that I had switched sides — after the Iraq disaster — and agreed with him on everything, including cheating on one’s wife (which he and I had always agreed on).

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and I distinctly remember a dinner at Michael’s house when John Buffalo Mailer, who has often acted in Oliver’s films, and I first discussed going to Moscow, me playing judo with Vlad, Mailer interviewing him.

To call John Buffalo an optimist would be a gross understatement. The deal was signed and sealed as we finished yet one more bottle of red, our last words being, ‘Oh boy, the pussy in Moscow will rock.’

Well, we never got to Moscow and never got to see Putin, but Oliver Stone did and sold the story to Showtime. It’s 50–50 whether he got the idea from us — he was present, after all, when we hatched our plan – or when he made his movie Snowden, about the guy who spilled the beans. When asked by the newspaper that prints only the news it invents about Putin influenc-

‘Sorry I’m late.’

ing the American election, Stone snorted and answered that Putin had no influence whatsoever, whereas Sheldon Adelson (a billionaire Las Vegas vulgarian), the Israeli government and the Koch brothers had real power in DC. So now I am in the enviable position of defending Oliver Stone, who smelled a rat about Iraq back before millions had become refugees and hundreds of thousands had died. Now he tells the hysterical opposition to Trump that Russia played no role in his election, but few are listening. Why would they? The same people who perpetrated the Iraq disaster are still in power, and they want to keep the war machine going. It’s money in the bank. Oh yes, I almost forgot, the latest Saudi obscenity — the sheer barbarism of its football team refusing to observe a minute’s silence for the victims of the London Bridge terrorist attack. (Most likely funded by the Saudis to begin with.) Next time you see any of those scumbags racing up and down Sloane Street, remember that obscenity, if nothing else. If we had a government with some cojones, the relevant Saudis, Qataris and Kuwaitis would be banned from merry old England. Let them eat their dates in Belgium or Luxembourg.

Low life Jeremy Clarke

French supermarket cashiers won’t be hurried. Nor will their customers, many of whom seem caught out by a bill at the end, then laboriously write out a cheque. This might be a contrarian French anti-capitalist attitude (‘no, Monsieur: time is not money’), which is wholly admirable, of course, except when I’m in a tearing hurry and waiting to pay. While the pensioner in front of me fruitlessly riffled through her handbag for her chequebook for the third time, I stared out of the window and was instantly rewarded by the sight of a Fiat reversing into the rear of a parked Citroën. Wallop!

The drivers leapt out to view the dam55

LIFE

age, which was negligible, apparently. The driver of the Fiat was a small middle-class woman: the owner of the parked Citroën a big hairy farmer type wearing a sweatstained vest. They then struck up a friendly conversation that was, I think, unrelated to the collision. The farmer expressed himself gracefully and expressively with huge hands. The woman stood close to him and looked pleasantly up into his earnest face.

A happy ending.

The chequebook was located in a secret pocket; the cheque inscribed and presented to the cashier. I paid for my bottle of gin and two lemons in hard cash, carried them out to my car, started up and reversed — bang — into the side of the Citroën as it headed for the car-park exit. Farmer Flingshit got out, I got out, and together we inspected the damage to his door.

I was frightfully apologetic. Fortunately, his door had numerous other dents and it was unclear which was mine. He opened and closed the door twice to see if it was still aligned. Satisfied, he said, ‘Ça va,’ and dismissed the incident with an underarm pétanque bowl in the general direction of an inscrutable future. I got back into the car and drove away loving him and his country.

The next day I flew back to England.

My friend Charlie rang up. Charlie is a petrolhead and owns numerous cars, some

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56

of them bargains sniffed out on eBay. Did I want to borrow a car to use while I was back in the UK? I could have the Renault Clio again, he said. He bought it ten years ago for a couple of hundred quid and has never spent any money on it. One of the mirrors is broken and the phone number of a local welder is written on the dashboard in Tippex, just in case, but it’s a car. I hadn’t planned to presume on his kindness this time round, I said. But it took six buses to get to the zoo and back the other day, and eight more to the oncologist and back. So yes, please.

I went to his house to collect it. Earlier, he had been strimming in his garden and a small stone had flicked through the Renault’s rear window, smashing it. He had secured it with polythene and sticking tape, but hadn’t had time to clear up the broken glass littering the back seat. The fuel tank was empty but he found two inches of diesel in a can and shoved that in. A front tyre was deflated. I turned the key in the ignition and the oil warning light flickered. The diesel got me to the nearest garage, howev-

er, and I bought oil and put air in the tyre.

Then I drove to town and parked while I went to the cashpoint. When I returned, I found a party of tourists gathered around the car laughing at it. ‘My other car is a Ford Orion,’ I told them as I climbed in. On the way home the head gasket went, the Clio was enveloped in white smoke, the engine lost all power, and that was that.

‘Oh well,’ said Charlie, when I rang him to tell him his car was broken beyond economic repair. ‘It doesn’t owe me anything.

Leave it to me and I’ll sort you out another.’

Amazed at his kindness and phlegmatic attitude, I was abjectly grateful. ‘Meet me at the pub this evening,’ he said. ‘You can drive it away from there.’

At the pub he presented me with a car key to a navy blue Fiesta automatic, parked outside. ‘For God’s sake, don’t wreck that one as well,’ he said. ‘I’ve borrowed it from a friend and it’s in perfect condition.’ Four hours later I came out of the pub, located the car, started it up, and drove it straight into a wall. Bumper and number plate bent, radiator wrecked. Two days later, Charlie rang

The Old Man Considers the Gender of a Boat A tall ship and a star to steer her by She was Odette. Why was she feminine?

The breasty sails? The smoothness of the keel?

She used no make-up; not one dab of varnish had touched her wood for years; that skin was real.

We loved the way she moved, the way she nosed and leaned into the wind, the pull of life against our hands, and the opposing wills like the manoeuvering of man and wife.

Do women sailing feel their boat’s a he, a stallion coaxed to move the proper way?

Are big ships neuter? Why do they have the before their names? The Exeter we say, the Ajax, the Queen Mary, the Graf Spee...

Still to the crew a vessel’s shapeliness suggests completeness, femininity.

So boats are launched by someone in a dress, a woman with a bottle, who must smash the glass against the bow to make it wet — like christening a baby with a name that ought to suit the gender etiquette — and then this midwife adds, to much applause a heavenly and human formula that no one wants to change, for it brings luck: ‘God bless this ship, and all who sail in her.’

—Alistair Elliot the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

me up to ask how the Fiesta was performing. ‘Brace yourself. I’ve broken that one as well,’ I said. Charlie was a lot less phlegmatic about the Fiesta — a lot less — than he was about the Clio.

Real life Melissa Kite

And so, as it must, the pilgrimage to find a local GP surgery begins. This is a great British tradition, and I have been honoured in my lifetime to have taken part in many and varied official registerings at different NHS surgeries.

Having been ceremoniously relieved of my first GP in London, and invited to find another one because they had redrawn the boundaries, last year I was on the road again after they closed the second one down.

I found myself at a surgery on a sink estate where the first language — and indeed the second, third and fourth languages — appeared not to be British and where I was asked if I would like a female chaperone because of all the religious objections I was likely to have.

I never actually got an appointment there, although I did secure an emergency phone consultation with a doctor, after my prescription for strong antihistamine ran out. He sounded very weary, like he would rather tell me his problems than hear mine.

When I asked about the pains in my feet he sighed and said: ‘Mine are the same.’

After moving to the country, I knew I would have to find another GP but I put it off. Needing advice about some more routine mechanical failures — bits really have started to fall off me in middle age like an old Ford Capri — I happened upon a private doctor, recommended by a reader, a few minutes’ walk from my home.

She told me there was very little wrong with me. However, she thought I would benefit from ‘mindfulness’. She wrote this word down in huge letters on a blank sheet of paper, as people always seem to.

I don’t know what mindfulness is, exactly, because no one does. But from my rudimentary attempts to pin it down, I think it is probably the exact opposite of what it sounds like.

Mindfulness involves a sort of meditation whereby one allows oneself to be powerfully present and connected to the moment.

But, of course, one can only do this by emptying one’s mind. I mean, totally emptying the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

it, draining it right down to the very last ‘oh shit, I left the washing out’ or ‘I bet he’s forgotten to walk the dogs and I’ll have to do it when I get in and my feet are killing me’.

The idea with mindfulness, as with all these wellbeing fads, is to sit staring at a statue of Buddha, thinking nothing, and feeling the buzz of connectivity to the eternal consciousness. So it really ought to be called Mindunfullness.

‘Yes,’ I said to this otherwise sensible private GP. ‘Everyone always tells me about mindfulness.’

‘Well, now you’ve got a doctor telling you,’ she shot back.

You’re a sparky one, I thought, making a mental note to come and see her as often as possible. But realistically, I can’t afford £75 every time I want a prescription for antihistamine or Diclofenac.

So off I went to The Village medical centre, whose logo I fully expected to be a penny-farthing bike. Half an hour later, I was

I don’t know what mindfulness is, exactly, because no one does knee deep in NHS questionnaires and equality forms in which the only ‘ethnicity’ to tick that was anywhere near mine was ‘British’.

Really? Is British an ethnicity now?

‘What is your marital status?’ I wrote: ‘Undecided’. It’s the truth.

Did I smoke, and if so how many per day? ‘Ten per year’, I wrote. It’s the truth.

I could have explained further by adding ‘when constipated’.

‘Do you look after someone, or does someone look after you?’ I left that blank.

The builder boyfriend often says he should get a carer’s allowance, but I don’t think they will see it that way.

The most impertinent question, as usual, was about my alcohol consumption. Why is the NHS unable to grasp the simple concept of abstinence?

‘Tick one box for each question. 1.) How often do you drink alcohol?’ A. Never.

‘2.) How many drinks do you have on a typical day?’ No option for none. It was either ‘1 or 2’, ‘3 or 4’, ‘5 or 6’, and so on all the way up to ‘10 or more’. For the ravers, you understand.

Right at the end of the form it told me the name of the ‘named accountable GP’ I will be registered with. This had to be Freudian. Obviously, the GP will be totally unaccountable, or they wouldn’t have gone down that road.

Then there was a plethora of smaller forms about total nonsense, including one inviting me to be part of a panel giving feedback and which asked me to ‘Please tick which smiley face is your preferred contact method — please feel free to tick more than one!’

So I ticked both email and phone smiley faces. You only live once.

Bridge Susanna Gross How is it possible to be assigned four ‘away’ matches on the trot? Strange, but that’s how it was for my Young Chelsea team, competing in the National Inter-Club Knockout: lots of driving down country lanes in Essex or Buckinghamshire in the gloaming, seeking out our opponents’ houses. At last, when it came to Round 5, we were assigned our first home match. We popped down the road to play — and were promptly knocked out

by Tunbridge Wells. They had a strong team (Espen Erichsen and Norman Selway among them), but then we did too (Phil King and Mike Bell), so it was a blow — especially as I’ve loved partnering Phil. Phil is one of England’s top players, and a superb teacher and coach. I doubt there’s anyone in this country who has thought as deeply and analytically about bidding. But he’s not just Mr Logical, he also has some wonderfully imaginative ideas — for instance, ‘fake-Blackwood’: Dealer East

Neither vulnerable

z K 10 8 y— XA 9 7 wAQ 9 z 2 yAJ

9 8 653

2

N W

E S

XQ 4 w 10 6

z AQ 9 y Q7 X J 10 3 wJ 3 West

3y Pass

5 7 52

z J 6 3 y K 10 4 XK8 6 wK84

2

7 54

North

East

South

4NT 6z

Pass pass All pass

2z 5w

I opened 2z (8–11 points), and Espen overcalled 3y. Phil knew he was going to bid 6z whatever, but wanted to deter a diamond lead. He reasoned that a direct jump to slam would tip Espen off that he had a shapely hand and probable void — in which case Espen may well not lead a top heart but consider an alternative. So he bid slam via key card Blackwood to give the impression of a more balanced hand! Espen led the yA. I ruffed and then played a low club to my wJ, East ducking (hopping up with the wK wouldn’t have helped). Then I simply drew trumps, played a club to the ace, ruffed a club, and returned to dummy with that precious ace of diamonds. Sadly it wasn’t enough to win the match — but beat you next year, Tunbridge Wells!

57

LIFE

Chess Stavanger Raymond Keene The powerful tournament in Stavanger, Norway, draws to a close at the end of this week. World champion Magnus Carlsen dominated the blitz event which preceded the main competition.

Sadly for the home crowd, Carlsen got off to a very bad start in the classical time limits competition that followed, with the energetic American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura seizing the leading role. Here are some key extracts from play.

Competition Song for Europe Lucy Vickery Diagram 2

WDWDW4kD 0WDWDp0W W0WDnDWD DWDPDW)W qDWDWDW) DWGPDQDW WDWDWDWD DWDWDRIW

Aronian–Carlsen: Norway Chess, Stavanger 2017

WDb4WDWD DW!WDW0k pDPDpDWD DW)qDWDW W)W)WDWD DWDWDWDP WDWDW)PD DWDRDWIW

unaccustomed élan. At the critical juncture Anand overlooks the most tenacious defence.

31 ... Nc5 Better is 31 ... Qxh4 32 dxe6 Qxg5+ 33 Kh1 Qh6+ 34 Kg2 Qxe6 with chances to resist. 32 g6 Qd7 33 Bb4 Black resigns Nakamura–Vachier-Lagrave; Norway

Chess, Stavanger 2017

WDWDW4kD DpDnDWhp WDW0WDpD DWDPDp1W W)PDpDWD 4WHWDWDW WDWDB)P) DW$QDRIW

In this tense situation, where White has a mass of pawns in exchange for a bishop, Carlsen conceives of a plausible defensive plan to resurrect his dormant bishop and ferry it round to the defence of his king. Paradoxically, this logical try turns out to be defective. 31 ... e5 Black can put up more resistance with 31 ... Rf8 trying to target White’s pawn on f2 and leaving his bishop on c8 as a blockader. The text leads to a swift debacle. 32 Rd3 exd4 33 Qe7 Bf5 34 Rg3 Bg6 35 Qh4+ Black resigns Giri–Anand: Norway Chess, Stavanger 2017

(see diagram 2) Former world champion Viswanathan Anand lost two games out of his first five without winning any, and found himself in the unusual situation of being the tournament troglodyte. In the extract that follows, Dutch grandmaster Anish Giri — widely renowned as a devotee of the anodyne draw — has been conducting an attack with

PUZZLE NO. 461 White to play. This is a variation from KarjakinGiri, Stavanger 2017. Can you spot White’s fine winning coup? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 20 June or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Ne7+ Last week’s winner Kevin Kiernan, London EC2

58

The final extract this week shows a win by Hikaru Nakamura, who cashes in on his queenside advantage while Black thrashes wildly around in search of salvation on the opposite wing. 22 c5 Ne5 23 c6 Nh5 24 27 30 33

Bxh5 gxh5 25 Kh1 Qh4 26 Qd4 Ng4 h3 f4 28 Kg1 e3 29 hxg4 hxg4 cxb7 exf2+ 31 Rxf2 g3 32 Rxf4 Qh2+ Kf1 Black resigns

WDW4WDkD 0p1W0WDW WDpDPDpD DWDWDpGn WDWDWDWD DWDWDWDW P)PDQ)WD DKDWDW$W

In Competition No. 3002 you were invited to provide lyrics to the European anthem.

The anthem has as its melody the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 but dispenses with Schiller’s words. I wondered if anyone might go back to his 1785 ‘Ode to Joy’ and repurpose the following lines: ‘Yea, if any hold in keeping/ Only one heart all his own/ Let him join us, or else weeping/ Steal from out our midst, unknown.’ No one did, though there were frequent nods in the entry to other parts of the ode.

Over to the winners, who pocket £25 each. John Whitworth was an unlucky loser and W.J. Webster takes the extra fiver.

Fair Europa’s old, old story — Innocence seduced by bull: She was covered, not with glory, Maid unmade, a trusting gull.

Out of such unnatural union Came a still-born Eurostate, Comity without communion, Rule by distant delegate.

Symbol of this misconception, Mined from German mother lode, Sounds an anthem-like deception, Brussels’ grand symphonic ode.

Joy is hymned as wealth increases Where good trade for some has flowed: Others, when the music ceases, Only know a vast debt owed.

W.J. Webster Freud and Schoenberg, Goethe, Foucault, Cocteau, Faust and Nibelungs; Overrated Goya, Munch and Friedrich Schiller, Heine songs!

Who needs Bach or Schubert’s Lieder, Beethoven, Brahms or Janacek?

Diderot, Descartes, Derrida? — When you could have Ant and Dec! How we’ll miss the great tradition Of our friends across the wave: Noddy Holder, One Direction, Chuckle Brothers, Chas & Dave.

Ah! Your Only Fools and Horses, Benny Hill and TOWIE styles — What we’ll miss the most, of course, is You — dear cultured Europhiles!

David Silverman Brothers of this greater union Daughters of Elysium Firm we stand in grand communion Staving off oblivion Meeting at our various summits Shaking one another’s hands While the euro ever plummets Shafting all our southern lands.

Quislings of the UK funken Navigate their leaking boat Clearly they are dead and sunken By their futile Brexit vote the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

LIFE Leave us to our federating Underneath this twelvefold star With one voice communicating Of our Mutter Angela.

Paul Carpenter Sworn to see all hatreds vanish, Friends from Portuguese to Balt, Harmonised but never clannish, Democratic to a fault.

Other nations try to sell us Monstrous schemes of government.

Don’t believe them when they tell us We are the Lost Continent.

We are honest, well-intentioned, In our union good thoughts reign, And the war is never mentioned Lest it trigger members’ pain.

Farewell then to island nations Who refuse to share our dream.

We shall last for generations, Europe, mega-state supreme!

Basil Ransome-Davies Ten long years she’s pushed her trolley Down that Brussels corridor; Serving tea and being jolly, Joy at Britain’s Euro core…

Now the Brexit exit’s nearing, Joy’s recalled for one mishap: Prompting universal cheering, She spilled tea in Nigel’s lap!

London-born, and proudly British, Joy’s decided to remain; Her solution may seem skittish, But she’s keen to stay, it’s plain…

When the Brexit vote was carried She pursued a local boy.

She’s remaining, now she’s married, This salute is owed to Joy! Paul Evans Mighty Europe, wisely guided, Merkel’s daughter, Juncker’s son, We, its members, undivided, Bound in union, bow to none; Conquerors in tribulation, Willing slaves to Brussels’ writs, Friends we’ll be with every nation, All, except the bolshie Brits.

Blessed with Continental ardour On we’ll march to pastures new, And, by working ever-harder, Lead the world in all we do; Wars forgotten, wrangles righted, Freed from ruptures, rifts and splits, We, with all, shall be united, All, except the bolshie Brits.

Alan Millard

NO. 3005: BROUGHT TO BOOK

Anthony Lane’s ‘The Book of Jeremy’ appeared recently in the New Yorker (‘And there came from the same country a prophet, whose name was Jeremy. His beard was as the pelt of beasts, and his raiments were not of the finest…’) You are invited to contribute your version of either ‘The Book of Boris’, ‘The Book of Theresa’, ‘The Book of Tim’ or ‘The Book of Nicola’. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 28 June. the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Crossword 2314: 4÷4=8

by Doc

1

2 9

3

4

Across 1 Border force on bank guarding river (8) 5 View of a hill removed from a magazine (6) 10 Take steps against token performance (10) 12 As a physician, I must conceal ill feeling (6) 16 Composer having business with French joiner (5) 17 French abbot from Swiss city with primitive plough (7) 18 Curved pathway for car (7) 25 Scotland’s own Foreign Department (3) 26 One or two, say, splitting place in tomb (7) 28 Emirates’ manager endlessly in charge in his element! (7) 29 Pheasant’s brood back from covey, naturally (3) 31 Subdue little boy having wrecked site (8) 34 Buddy leaves bodybuilders worried and warms up again (7) 36 Drink, after accepting job as missionary? (7) 39 Still moving, sways to the music (5) 40 Send away in advance for camera equipment (4,4) 41 Posh car’s two birds (6) 42 Destroys crate with a side damaged (10) 43 Exercise arranged before afternoon, making money (6) Down 1 Meat in iron container, served thus? (6)

6

7

8 11

10

12

13

14

15

16 17

The unclued four-letter words can be paired in a particular way to form the remaining unclued lights, one of two words. Elsewhere, ignore two accents.

5

18 20

21

24

25

19

22

23

26

28

27

29 30

31

34

32 35

37

38

33

36 39

40

41 42

43

44

3 Supplement from newspaper ultimately taken by trendy group (6) 4 Amy’s hit injured bather dropping sort of bar (5) 6 George Beach (4) 7 They study the character of eight stools when moved (11) 9 Again, but for the last time presumably (4,4) 11 Greyhounds lasting the race are those in residence, apparently (7) 14 French thought Candide excellent in part (4) 15 Tomtom, perhaps, just for show? (4) 16 What are in the chests?

French port and wines, reportedly (11) 23 Art critic and the Spanish rodent (8) 24 Wage-earners vote about race-course (7) 27 Letters record dreadful lies about saint (8) 31 Renault’s model muse (4) 32 Steps going up and round French police series (6) 33 Old rifle was not missing fuel (6) 35 One in bed’s getting up, indifferent to pain (5)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 3 July. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. (UK solvers can choose to receive the latest edition of the Chambers dictionary instead of cash — ring the word ‘dictionary’.)

Entries to: Crossword 2314, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Name Address

Email

SOLUTION TO 2311: KEITH II The unclued lights, as well as KEITH, are Scottish place names. TARBERT was required at 28A, rather than LARBERT. First prize Una Lynch, Haywards Heath, West Sussex Runners-up R.R. Alford, Oundle, Peterborough; J. Anson, London SE5

59

LIFE

Status Anxiety Nick’s a visionary – he deserves a second chance Toby Young

I

first met Nick Timothy in July 2015. He had just been appointed director of New Schools Network, the free schools charity I now run, and wanted to talk about the future of the policy. He has been portrayed in the media in the past week as a right-wing thug, as well as a swivel-eyed Brexiteer, but that wasn’t the impression he gave as he sipped his builders’ tea. On the contrary, he was trying to think of ways to weaken the association between free schools and the Tory party, particularly within the education sector. His mission, he explained, was to create cross-party support for the policy by setting up more free schools in disadvantaged areas.

He was in the job for less than a year before joining Theresa May in Downing Street, having worked as her special adviser from 2010-15, but in that short time he went some way to achieving his objective. He set up an outpost of NSN in Manchester to spread the gospel of free schools in the north. He launched numerous successful campaigns, including one to persuade teachers to set up their ‘dream school’. And he created an advisory council that boasts several Labour grandees. It’s also worth noting that NSN staff enjoyed working for him, as did many of his colleagues in politics — I only heard the words

Nick’s hope that ‘Mayism’ could transcend the tribalism of British politics turned out to be too optimistic

‘arrogant’ and ‘high-handed’ from his enemies.

This ecumenical desire to reach out beyond the Conservative church was also evident during Nick’s stint at No. 10. In May’s first speech as Prime Minister outside Downing Street, which he helped to write, she pledged to fight against the ‘burning injustice’ of various forms of inequality and govern on behalf of ‘everyone’, rather than the ‘privileged few’. In the weeks that followed, Nick helped May to define herself as a ‘meritocrat’, which underlined the fact that she was only the second woman to become Prime Minister and was a way of putting some distance between her and her predecessor. The emphasis on the ‘just about managing’ also pointed to a broader strategic objective, which was to win over disillusioned Labour supporters who had voted to leave the EU. It’s true that Nick is in favour of Brexit, but more out of instinct than ideology. He was born in Birmingham, the son of a steel worker, and educated at King Edward VI Grammar School and Sheffield University.

To borrow David Goodhart’s terminology, he’s a Somewhere rather than an Anywhere, and has never quite lost his outsider’s suspicion of the metropolitan elite. When David Cameron kicked him off the candidates’ list, that cemented his antipathy towards the then Prime Minster and his gilded inner circle (the equivalent of Chelsea in contrast to his beloved Aston Villa).

When Theresa May uttered her most memorable line at last year’s Conservative party conference, it could only have been written by Nick: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.’

Is that also true of the 2017 manifesto, which some blame for the Conservatives’ failure? Nick didn’t devise every policy, obviously — and he didn’t come up with the ‘dementia tax’ or put it in the manifesto at the last minute. But you can hear his voice when you read it, and the Blue Labour theme is his. I’m thinking of the rejection of ‘untrammelled free markets’ and ‘selfish individualism’, as well as the energy cap and the pledge to build more council houses.

The proposal to deal with the pending social care crisis was genuinely bold, as was the means testing of the winter fuel allowance and the abandonment of the triple lock. Had the Conservatives won a majority, the manifesto would have given the Chancellor room to cut the deficit without further cuts to public services. It would also have enabled the government to do more for the younger generation, which was of a piece with Nick’s vision of a May premiership that could help to heal the schisms exposed by the EU referendum.

It didn’t go to plan, obviously, although it’s worth remembering that the Tories won 42.5 per cent of the popular vote, more than Tony Blair in 1997, and they might have done even better had the manifesto not blown up on the launch pad. In the end, Nick’s hope that ‘Mayism’ could transcend the tribalism of British politics turned out to be too optimistic. I was sorry when he resigned and hope the party gives him a second chance. British politics needs people as thoughtful and talented as Nick.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

MICHAEL HEATH

60

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

The Wiki Man Universities should offer one-year courses Rory Sutherland

I

n every respect bar one, those bloody Corbyn-supporting students have a much tougher time of it than I did, what with my full grant and my tuition fees paid. But by God, learning stuff is easy nowadays. The young of today just cannot conceive what a chore it was to eke out enough material for an essay in 1984. To find out anything took hours of mostly wasted effort in a library. If you imagine a world where every page of Wikipedia took half an hour to load, it should give you some idea of what it took to educate yourself back then.

That’s why we were all drunk and on drugs: we needed to recover from a tiring week finding out the significant dates of the Delian Confederacy.

So why, pray, do university courses still last three years? Can people not learn any faster now? In his forthcoming book, The Case Against Education, economist Bryan Caplan argues that most education does not really add human capital or skills commensurate with its time or cost.

It is instead a signalling mechanism where prospective employees must

The young of today cannot conceive what a chore it was to find out information.

It took hours in a library

jump through hoops to advertise their innate intelligence and self-discipline to employers. Yes, graduates may make good employees, but they would have made good employees anyway without the three years and spiralling debt required to prove it.

I think Caplan’s half right. Most people end up in jobs which have no connection to their degree course. And it’s telling that some canny Americans now game the system by approaching Silicon Valley firms armed only with a letter offering them a place at an Ivy League university. They realise that getting admitted to, say, Princeton is almost as valuable a signal to an employer as graduating from there — and, unlike a degree certificate, the admission letter doesn’t cost $150,000.

I would also argue that academic ability, like chess-playing ability, is a one-way signal of intelligence. If you are good at passing exams or playing chess, you are probably intelligent, but the reverse does not apply: it is not fair to infer that someone who cannot play chess, or who flunks exams, is stupid. This makes higher education a wasteful form of talent-finding.

But let’s cut to the chase. Is it possible that the expansion of Britain’s educational industrial complex has been a disaster? Though designed to widen opportunity, it may have achieved the opposite. First of all, by creating an academic apartheid where the career prospects of the 50 per cent

without degrees are unfairly curtailed.

Secondly by creating more expectation than there are good jobs. And thirdly by creating a system so large that it can only be funded by placing millions in debt. Debt by definition reduces opportunity. It forces graduates to work in those few places and sectors which pay enough to make their sacrifice worthwhile. The resulting hyper-competition transforms universities from healthy places of enquiry into CV-factories. I don’t mind someone leaving Oxford to work in a bank; I do resent someone going to Oxford in order to work in a bank.

So here’s my Corbynite compromise. We should pay people’s fees and living costs for one year, thus forcing universities to offer one-year courses.

Ninety per cent of the social, sexual, pharmacological, geographical and educational value of university is probably delivered in year one. After that, the buggers can pay.

I lecture on a lot of one-year courses. They seem excellent. Would these people be three times more employable after three years? Not a bit. I’d prefer they were learning on the job.

This approach may not work for brain surgery. But for 95 per cent of jobs, if you can’t learn to bluff it in a year, you probably shouldn’t be doing it at all.

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

what he is seeing. ‘Look! Just on that shrub in front of you — that thin tree where I’m pointing!’

The instructions are imprecise and I always miss the sighting, which causes him immense frustration. Any suggestions?

—W.A., Knutsford, Cheshire Q. Having retired, my husband is now an enthusiastic observer of the goldfinches, greenfinches and bullfinches in our garden.

Their numbers have increased dramatically since he planted ornamental thistles and teasels, and put out feeders with nyger seed. Our kitchen has French windows which offer a commanding view over the large garden. My problem is that my husband, who has a very keen eye while I do not, keeps spotting some sort of bird activity and urgently requiring me to look at

A. Print out a colour photo of the view from your kitchen onto A3 paper. Stick the page to the wall next to the window and make your husband point with his finger to the bush or shrub in question. This will allow you to focus your eyes on the right spot.

Q. I now commute by train 60 minutes into London and occasionally see local people on the platform whose company I enjoy and who I would like to join me on the journey. My problem is that I always travel

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

first class and these folk always travel second. Would it be grand or patronising to ask one of them to join me and offer to upgrade them? I thought not — but last time I tried this out the man insisted on paying for himself. I am pretty sure he couldn’t afford it but wanted to save face. How should I more tactfully issue the invitation next time? Don’t ask me to join them in second. I am too old and, my wife says, too big a person all round.

—Name and address withheld A. Approach them on the platform and ask in conspiratorial tones if they would do you a favour by joining you in first. Say ‘I’ve got to do some spending on travel for business reasons this week so it would be very helpful if you’d let me upgrade your ticket.’ If they ask you to explain the accountancy

issue, shudder and say ‘It’s too boring and complicated’ before changing the subject.

Q. May I pass on a tip to readers?

I recently attended a wedding in Venice with celebrations over three days. It was the groom’s second marriage and the bride’s first — she is in her forties. They realised that lots of their friends arriving would not know each other and so they issued each of us with a smart but discreet lapel badge for everyone to wear on the plane over and in the days ahead. In this way we could recognise others who were going to be at the wedding and we could all bond. It was a most successful idea which other readers may like to copy.

—Name and address withheld A. Thank you for this tip.

61

LIFE

Drink Uncorking the past Bruce Anderson

I

have been thinking about the Dark Ages. This has nothing to do with Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn. A friend of mine, Chase CoffinRoggeveen, has a doctoral thesis in mind about the increasing use of wine for liturgical purposes during the English Dark Ages. Like all scholars who address that period, he has to wrestle with slender sources. Those who do not leave documents tend to be written out of history: think of the Wends.

There are revisionists, such as Sally Harvey, who contrast the surviving beauties of Saxon civilisation — consider the manuscripts — with the Normans’ brutality. There is an obvious three-hour essay question: ‘How dark were the Dark Ages?’

Chase is well qualified to address such topics. As his name might suggest, he has family links with Nantucket.

Seagirt, sea-tossed, with none of the Lib-Dem meretriciousness of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket has a bleak ethos, wrested out of subsistence fishing, whaling and God. (At this point, a confession is called for. I find Moby-Dick unreadable. Per contra, I would claim

We were not just drinking aged and fading wine – we were drinking history

‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ is the greatest American poem.)

But today’s Nantucket is not all austerity. Chase has been a sommelier in charge of a serious wine list.

At a recent auction in Scotland, he bought some old bottles. He resold one, an 1860 Armagnac, which paid for all the rest, dating from the second European dark age. We started with two bottles of Mouton d’Armailhac 1929: the onset of the Great Depression, and a couple of years before the Rothschilds bought the château. One was hopeless: the other was still fighting against the dying of the light.

The same was true of a Cos d’Estournel ’34. Traditionally, Cos is as long-lived as any Bordeaux, with the exception of Latour. But there are limits. Although it was trying hard to cling on to taste-worthiness, we were in dementia-tax territory. Eric Mouillefarine, who served in the French marine corps and whose family has always seemed to find their way to the front line in France’s wars, serving under the Tricolour, but with the esprit of the Fleur-de-Lys, shook his head: ‘I do not understand the British taste.

This is not oenophilia: it is necrophilia.’

One sees his point. Even so, there

‘The general or the infirmary? I’m easy either way.’

is a fascination in drinking wines that are older than oneself. That was especially true of the final bottle, which we enjoyed the next day. In 1943, France was still beset by darkness. Intrepid radio listeners might have heard about the Kursk salient or the invasion of Sicily, but the liberation of France must have seemed a long way off — while the finest French produce was still seized by the conqueror.

That was especially true in Champagne, which must have been particularly galling for the wine makers: the wine of joy plundered for the gullet of evil. The House of Pommery had invented Brut champagne, designed for the British palate, with unending success. By the depths of the war, it had become a favourite of Goering’s.

Everything they bottled was supposed to be reserved for his consumption.

But ways were found. In the spirit of Asterix and Obelix, subterfuges were devised to ensure the swastika did not take everything. A few bottles were concealed and we drank one of them.

This was a 1943 Pommery & Greno, by appointment to His Majesty King George VI, reserved for Great Britain and the Commonwealth.

As for taste, it clung to a few bubbles. But there was nothing remarkable. I might have identified it as an aged Palo Cortado: Eric, as a vin de paille. Yet that is not the point. Imagine the feelings — and fears — of the workers who smuggled it into concealment: the consequences if they had been caught. We were not just drinking aged and fading wine — we were drinking history. So we raised a toast to the France, to victory and to the heroes of the vineyard.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Trooping the Colour Language is a weapon to do down others. ‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella disdainfully of Pip in Great Expectations, while noting how coarse his hands were. Words like the and of are also useful shibboleths to show someone doesn’t belong to our club.

‘No denim’ says the advice for entry to today’s Queen’s Birthday Parade, on pain of entry being refused. It is the occasion of Trooping the Colour. Of course my husband, especially, and I too call it, Trooping the Colour, never interpolating the fatal of. The ceremony is said to go back to Marlborough, but 62

one of the earliest references cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1816, calls it the trooping of the colours.

The colours are also associated with what the OED calls Mounting of the Guard and with the popular ceremonial known as the Changing of the Guard. The colour is trooped just as the guard is mounted or changed. It is hard to see why the of is forbidden to the colour. Think of parallels. As

Lent approaches Easter, there is the stripping of the altar, from which in 1992 Eamon Duffy took the title for his celebrated book. The old song from 1798 said: ‘They are hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.’ Jerome K. Jerome wrote a short story called The Passing of the Third Floor Back.

A similar shibboleth is the the with Albany, the rooms off Piccadilly. It is supposed not to have one. Yet after having breakfast with Macaulay there, Lord Carlisle put in his journal for 12 February 1849: ‘His rooms at the top of the Albany are very liveable.’ It is also forbidden

to call Guildhall in the City the Guildhall. Yet the OED itself, in defining Lord Mayor’s Banquet says: ‘a banquet held at the Guildhall on the Monday after the Lord Mayor’s Show’.

Members of Middlesex Cricket Club call it MCC, not the MCC. But Richard Cashman, the cricketing historian, writes of the bodyline controversy: ‘The MCC rejected the Australian cable that the tactics were ‘unsportsmanlike’.

I suppose I shall continue saying Trooping the Colour and not the Trooping of the Colour, but I sympathise with Pip and — Dot Wordsworth his Jacks.

the spectator | 17 june 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

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