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November 20, 2022 · Issue No 10,341 · sundaytimes.co.uk £3.50 · only £2.70 to subscribers (based on 7 day Print Pack)

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Britain mulls Welcome to Qatar’s grand festival of bonkers

MARTIN MEISSNER/AP

Josh Glancy Doha

Swiss-style ties
Early on Thursday evening in Doha,
about 100 men in Argentina shirts
charged down the Corniche, the
seaside promenade, screaming
Lionel Messi’s name. Some were
almost in tears with the passion

with Brussels
coursing through them. They
carried a 30ft Argentine flag,
waving it aloft like a holy gonfalon.
You find this sort of raucous
male jingoism at any World Cup,
it’s what football runs on. Except
this time there wasn’t an actual
The government believes EU relations are Argentinian in sight. These men
were all Bangladeshi migrant

thawing and could lead to ‘frictionless’ trade
Caroline Wheeler, Harry Yorke
and Tim Shipman
Senior government figures are
planning to put Britain on the path
to a Swiss-style relationship with
the European Union.
The move, intended to forge
closer economic ties, is likely to
infuriate hardline Conservative
Brexiteers.
Last week Jeremy Hunt, the
chancellor, signalled that Downing
Steet intended to break from the
approach of Boris Johnson and
remove the majority of trade
barriers with the bloc. In private
senior government sources have
suggested that pursuing such
frictionless trade requires moving
to a Swiss-style relationship over
the next decade. However, they
insist this would not extend to a
return to freedom of movement.
“It’s obviously something the
EU would never offer us upfront
because they would say you are
trying to have your cake and eat it,
but the reason I think we will get it
is that it is overwhelmingly in the
businesses interests of both sides,”
one said.
Ministers are confident that the
EU’s approach to relations with the
UK is thawing. “I think we will be
doing everything within our power
to make changes to improve things
when it comes to the EU,” one
source said.
“The bigger picture on this is the
EU seeing something they weren’t
expecting, which is massive sup-
port for European security from
the UK with respect to Ukraine,
and they can see we are serious
about being sensible grown-ups,
with the biggest military in
Europe, doing our bit.
“I think there is a very good way
through this with more trust than
we were ever going to have with
either Boris Johnson or Liz Truss.”
Tory Brexiteers are fiercely
opposed to any move that risks
returning the UK to the EU’s regu-
latory orbit.
Switzerland has access to the
European single market through a
series of bilateral agreements.
However, the model also involves
more liberal migration arrange-
ments and payments to the EU
budget, with the bloc in recent
years also pushing for the Euro-
pean Court of Justice to have
greater jurisdiction in the relation-
ship. The Swiss have frequently
debated restricting free movement
from the bloc, but in the most
recent referendum they opted to
keep it.
These are all red lines for mem-
bers of the rebellious European
Research Group. It was also an
approach that Johnson and Lord
Frost, his chief Brexit negotiator,
ruled out when they drew up the
UK’s negotiating mandate in 2020.
Last night Frost said: “Any
approach requiring the UK to align
with EU rules to get trade benefits,
whether as part of a Swiss-style
approach or any other, would be
quite unacceptable. Boris Johnson
and I fought very hard to avoid any
such requirements in 2020 and
ensure the UK could set its own
laws, and we should not contem-
plate giving this away in future.”
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today
programme last week, Hunt
rejected the prospect of rejoining
the single market but backed work-
ing to strengthen Britain’s relation-
ship with Brussels.
He said: “I think having unfet-
tered trade with our neighbours
and countries all over the world is
Continued on page 2 →
workers, hailing from Dhaka and
Chittagong.
Every hour I’ve spent in Qatar
has thrown up similarly bemusing
moments. Why is all this happen-
ing? Doha in the build-up to this
most bizarre of tournaments has
felt like globalisation on a heavy
acid trip. Five Nepalese lads in
Holland shirts brought over from
Kathmandu. A Keralan family
simultaneously supporting Ger-
many, Brazil and England. It is a
grand festival of bonkers.
This is a city state barely bigger
than Yorkshire, so everyone is
packed into the capital: migrant
workers, up to one million fans, an
army of temporary labourers and
even a few Qataris walking around
regally in their thobes and abayas.
It looks like Las Vegas, sounds like
Babel and prays like Mecca.
On the Corniche, I found
Jahadu, an English-speaker. “How
come you are all supporting Argen-
tina?” I asked. “Did someone pay
you?” He shook his head. “We have
been waiting for this tournament
for years and there is no Bangladesh
team to support. This is Messi’s last
chance to win a World Cup.”
Which is very true, but I’m not
sure it quite gets to the nub of the
matter. To find out more, on Friday
England fans find some shade beneath an art installation at Doha’s Corniche metro station. For previews, morning I headed to Asian Town,
predictions and the Fifa president’s surreal rant, see our 16-page World Cup supplement Inside Sport Continued on page 3 →

NEWMAN’S
VIEW Cash-for-honours police pass file on King’s aide to prosecutors
Dipesh Gadher, Gabriel
Pogrund and Megan Agnew
A file of evidence into the “cash-
for-honours” scandal embroiling
the King and his longest-serving
aide has been passed by police to
the Crown Prosecution Service.
Prosecutors are expected to
decide before Christmas if charges
will be brought after Charles, then
Prince of Wales, personally pre-
sented a wealthy Saudi business-
man with a CBE after donations to
royal causes worth £1.5 million.
If the case goes to trial, the
King’s involvement — including
meetings with the businessman in
London, Scotland and Riyadh —
will be played out in court, poten-
tially before the coronation in May.
It is claimed that Michael Faw-
cett, 59, the King’s former valet,
helped to secure the honour for
Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mah-
fouz in 2016. The private investi-
ture ceremony was held at Buck-
ingham Palace and not recorded
on the Court Circular.
Last year Fawcett quit as head of
the Prince’s Foundation, one of the
King’s flagship charities, after The
Sunday Times revealed his alleged
role in the affair.
The Metropolitan Police opened
an investigation into potential
offences committed under the
Honours (Prevention of Abuses)
Act 1925 in February. Detectives
from the Met’s special inquiry
team, which also investigated the
Downing Street “partygate” scan-
dal, appeared to make little head-
way at first. However, on Septem-
ber 6, officers interviewed under
caution a man in his fifties and a
man in his forties. Last night the
Met confirmed that evidence was
passed to the CPS on October 31.
Prosecutors will have to decide
if there is sufficient evidence to
bring charges and whether the
case meets a public interest test.
Some palace officials are believed
to think it would not be in the pub-
lic interest for the case to proceed.
The King, 74, has not been spo-
ken to or given a statement to
detectives. He is protected by the
concept of “sovereign immunity”
from being compelled to give evi-
dence in court, a move which
could jeopardise any trial.
It is unclear if Mahfouz, 52, has
been questioned by police.
Fawcett did not respond to a
request for comment. Last night it
emerged that he received a five-fig-
ure pay-off when he quit the foun-
dation. According to its latest
accounts, Fawcett got £59,582 in
the final five months of his employ-
ment. Of that, there was £1,200 for
independent legal advice provided
by the Prince’s Foundation,
£21,923 of accrued holiday pay and
a pension contribution of £822.
In total, Fawcett received a total
of £190,000 between April and
September of last year, including
his salary from the charity, based
at Dumfries House in Ayrshire.
He was the King’s longest-serv-
ing aide, holding office for more
than 40 years, described as “indis-
pensable”, so close that he would
“[squeeze] Charles’ toothpaste so
the heir could brush his teeth”.
Buckingham Palace said it
would not comment on an ongoing
police inquiry. William Bortrick,
49, a paid fixer who helped to bro-
ker Mahfouz’s CBE, has previously
declined to comment.
@DipeshGadher
y(7HA9F6*LNSRRP( |||+[!.'
2 2GN V2
NEWS
ELLIOTT FRANKS
Tell Sid . . . to turn
down the thermostat
Ministers hope a public
information campaign
will persuade us to
save £400 of energy
Caroline Wheeler Political Editor
A public information campaign encour-
aging us to cut energy usage by 15 per cent
is to begin before Christmas. The aim is to
save each household £400 a year.
Cutting consumption by 15 per cent is
expected to reduce the nation’s domestic
energy bill by £28 billion. Advice will
include turning down thermostats by 2C,
reducing the flow rate of boilers and
installing energy-efficient lightbulbs.
In April the cap on average household
bills is set to rise by £500 to £3,000. The
government’s programme of energy bill
subsidies will end in 2024.
The efficiency campaign, to be
announced by Grant Shapps, the busi-
ness, energy and industrial strategy sec-
retary, represents another government
U-turn: Liz Truss blocked a similar
scheme when she was prime minister.
The Treasury scorecard from the
autumn statement makes no provision
for government support for energy bills
beyond the next financial year — despite
projections that costs will remain signifi-
cantly above average levels for the rest of
the decade. Government sources have
said that this is because no decision has
been taken on whether to extend the
guarantee beyond March 2024.
However, it is understood that Jeremy
Hunt, the chancellor, has decided the
scheme must end.
A senior government source said:
“This is a contract with the public where,
if you are middle class, the government is
helping you this year with £900 off your
bills and helping you again next year with
£400 off your bills, but after that it’s going
to be left up to you. Most families can
reduce their energy consumption by 15 to
20 per cent by smarter energy usage and
insulation — so we need them to take
responsibility for that.”
Disquiet among Tory MPs over the
autumn statement continued to mount
yesterday, with several warning that
Rishi Sunak and Hunt’s plans to raise the
tax burden to the highest level since the
Second World War could spell electoral
disaster for the party.
One senior backbencher said the big-
gest concern among figures on the right
of the party was the lack of detail in
Hunt’s plans for how to expand the econ-
omy. “What we’re left with is a high-tax
economy for the indefinite future.”
Hunt is understood to have contacted
a number of likely rebels before a vote on
the Finance Bill, which will require Tory
MPs to vote for tax increases.
He said last week he wanted Britain to
cut energy usage by 15 per cent by 2030 to
reduce bills, catching up with European
neighbours already prioritising such
measures.
Most He announced that the government
would spend £6 billion from 2025 to
families 2028, on top of the £6.6 billion already
being provided until 2025, to help
can improve energy efficiency, including for
public buildings and industry. Funding
reduce will also be available for further insula-
tion schemes.
their The government source added: “The
state will deliver about half of the 15 per
usage cent efficiency savings required . . . and
then the good citizens of Britain will have
by 15% to rise to the challenge. They have a big
market incentive, which is higher prices.”
In August the EU passed a regulation
under which member states agreed to
reduce gas demand by 15 per cent from
the average consumption of the past five
years by March next year.
A government source said the UK was
preparing to copy its European neigh-
bours, adding: “We won’t do exactly the
same package, because we do not face
quite the same energy security problem,
but it will be a similar approach.
“We have to have a national plan that
essentially transitions us to cheap, green
energy and is not dependent on what
dictators do on the opposite side of the
world.”
Migrant dies after six days at Manston centre
Dipesh Gadher
and Harry Yorke
A migrant who may have
been detained unlawfully for
almost a week at the
government’s controversial
Manston immigration centre
died yesterday.
The man, who was in his
thirties and from the Middle
East, is believed to have
suffered organ failure after
being transferred to a
hospital on Friday night.
His death is the first fatality
of an individual held at
Manston, in Kent, where
conditions have been
described by inspectors as
Britain
mulls
closer ties
to Brussels
→ Continued from page 1
very beneficial to growth. I
have great confidence that
over the years ahead we will
find, outside the single
market, we are able to
remove the vast majority of
the trade barriers that exist
between us and the EU.”
One rebel said they feared
“unfettered trade” sounded
eerily similar to the ill-fated
Chequers deal drawn up by
Theresa May in 2018.
10.15am Health minister Will Quince
10.35am Shadow work and pensions
secretary Jon Ashworth
2.05pm Iranian chess player Shoreh
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Starmer plans to replace
Lords with elected house
Caroline Wheeler
Political Editor
Sir Keir Starmer will abolish
the House of Lords and
replace it with a new elected
chamber as part of a plan to
“restore trust in politics”.
The Labour leader told the
party’s peers he wanted to
strip politicians of the power
to make appointments to the
Lords as part of his first-term
programme of government.
Starmer, who first mooted
the idea in his Labour
leadership campaign, said the
public’s faith in the political
system had been undermined
by successive Tory leaders
handing peerages to “lackeys
and donors”.
It is understood Labour
will hold a consultation on
the composition and size of a
new chamber as well as on
immediate reforms to the
appointments process. Final
proposals will be included in
the party’s next election
manifesto.
In a meeting last week
Starmer told Labour peers
there was now strong support
for reform of the Lords, both
across party lines and among
the public. According to The
Observer newspaper he
outlined “some very clear
principles” for reform,
“wretched”, with outbreaks
of diphtheria and scabies.
Suella Braverman, the
home secretary, has been
repeatedly warned by
officials over the legal risk of
detaining migrants at the site
for more than 24 hours.
The migrant is believed to
have been smuggled across
the Channel illegally in a
small boat last Saturday.
Whitehall sources say he
was unwell when he was
originally registered in Dover
by immigration officials and
he was sent to a local
hospital. However, he was
discharged later the same day
and transferred to Manston,
The Labour Party, while
ruling out rejoining the single
market and customs union,
has said there are elements of
Johnson’s Brexit deal that can
be “fixed”. This includes a
veterinary agreement with
Brussels — helping to smooth
problems with the Northern
Ireland protocol — and a deal
that would see each side
recognise the other’s
professional qualifications.
There are also mounting
concerns in the ERG that the
government is preparing to
give ground to Brussels to
resolve the disagreement
over the Northern Ireland
protocol.
Insiders have said a deal
could see the EU drop most of
its checks on goods passing
between Great Britain and
Northern Ireland if the UK
takes a less ideological
position on the role of the
Bayat, who fled the country after being
accused of wearing her headscarf
incorrectly
2.20pm Mohammed Kamel, a teacher
FIND US ON
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
including that any new
chamber should be elected by
voters rather than appointed
by politicians.
“I want to be clear that we
do need to restore the trust of
the public in every part of the
United Kingdom in our
system of government,” he
said. “House of Lords reform
is just one part of that . . .
People have lost faith in the
ability of politicians and
politics to bring about change
— that is why, as well as fixing
our economy, we need to fix
our politics.”
He added that the new
chamber should be “truly
representative” of the UK’s
nations and regions and
should have a clear role in
protecting devolution.
However, he said his
proposals would ensure it did
not take over any of the
functions of the Commons —
it would remain a second
chamber charged with
scrutinising and amending
legislation. The Commons
would retain exclusive
powers over the public
finances and the formation of
governments.
Starmer told party peers
on Wednesday that he
regarded reforming the Lords
as a critical part of his agenda,
aimed at “promoting
where he was held in the
main section with other
migrants for three days.
On Tuesday his condition
is believed to have worsened,
and he was placed in a
medical bay until Friday
evening, when his condition
deteriorated further and he
was taken back to hospital.
Last night a Home Office
spokesman said: “We can
confirm a person staying at
Manston has died in hospital
after becoming unwell. We
wish to express our heartfelt
condolences to all those
affected.
“There is no evidence at
this stage to suggest that this
European Court of Justice in
Northern Ireland.
But doing so would lead
the group to try to “bring
down the government”,
warned one senior member.
The Brexiteers Chris
Heaton-Harris and Steve
Baker are ministers in the
Northern Ireland Office and
are working on a deal with
Brussels.
But it is understood that
warnings have been sent to
Downing Street that it is the
EU, not the UK, which must
give ground on the ECJ.
Similar warnings have been
passed to the German
embassy.
“Just because people like
Mark Francois have not been
going on about the ECJ does
not mean that they have
changed their view,” said an
informed source. “They
would rather bring down the
from London, who landed role of Dodi
Fayed’s uncle in The Crown
4.35pm Jemima Olchawski, head of
the Fawcett Society, on Equal Pay Day
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A CRACKING
PERFORMANCE
”Snowflakes” dance on
stage in the Birmingham
Royal Ballet’s production
of The Nutcracker, which
opened last night. Sir
Peter Wright’s classic
version of the Christmas
tale runs until December
10 at the Hippodrome.
inclusive growth and
restoring trust in politics”.
While he said the peers would
continue to play a “vital role”
in the campaign to win the
next election, reform was
needed to show the public
that Labour would provide a
fresh start after a string of
Tory scandals.
“We should be rebuilding
trust in politics,” Starmer
said, “but this can’t just be an
article of faith — we need to
show how we will do things
differently. Reforming our
second chamber has to be
part of that.”
Four peerage nominations
put forward by Johnson in his
latest honours list were
blocked by the independent
body that vets appointments
to the Lords, as was one by
the Democratic Unionist
Party. Lord Bew, chairman of
the House of Lords
Appointments Commission,
had previously written to
party leaders to tell them
recent nominees had put his
panel in an “increasingly
uncomfortable” position.
Johnson’s honours list is
said to include the ultra-loyal
MPs Nadine Dorries and Nigel
Adams, his adviser Ross
Kempsell, 30, and Charlotte
Owen, a former assistant who
is even younger.
tragic death was caused by an
infectious disease.”
Five sensitive Home Office
papers, which were sent to
ministers and senior officials
in September and October,
revealed that Braverman was
presented with advice and
options to move migrants
from Manston as it became
increasingly overcrowded.
Since her return to the
department, and Robert
Jenrick’s appointment as
immigration minister,
overcrowding at Manston has
subsided and it now holds
about 1,200 migrants, 400
below its capacity.
@DipeshGadher
government than accept the
supremacy of a foreign court
over any territory of the UK.”
A Downing Street source
said Sunak was “taking the
fight” to the EU but was also
hopeful that a more
constructive approach on
both sides could bear fruit.
“Rishi wants to get this
sorted as quickly as possible;
there’s definitely a deal to be
done,” a No 10 source said.
“It’s our team’s sense that
there is much more of a
landing zone, in terms of
what we would be happy
with, than there has ever
been.” But they added: “He’s
taking the fight to them. He’s
not going to be giving up
stuff that he and the party
would not be happy with him
giving up.”
Sunak’s countdown
conundrum, pages 6-7
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS
The Qataris
only half
care what
the rest of
us think
→ Continued from page 1
the large migrant labour camp on the
outskirts of Doha, where Jahadu and
thousands of others live. Row upon row of
hulking barracks stretch across the
fenced camp, each one numbered. The
bedrooms are small and musky, packing
four or even eight men into tight gloomy
spaces. Friday is a day of worship, so
hundreds of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis
in their white prayer robes followed the
muezzin’s call to the mosque. Everyone
else took the opportunity to buy some
food: it is their only day off.
I wonder if Gianni Infantino, the Fifa
president who claimed in an outlandish
press conference yesterday that “I feel
African, I feel gay, I feel a migrant
worker”, has any idea what life is like
here at the coalface. Because this is what
it takes to make the unlikeliest of World
Cups happen. Qatar has spent an esti-
mated £200 billion on this tournament.
It’s built futuristic stadiums, endless
training pitches, immense irrigation
systems and a metro system from scratch.
But to really make this thing go, it
needs men. Young men from Africa and
India willing to wave glowsticks, hump
luggage and build fences. Men willing to
leave their families and work exhausting
hours for low pay because it’s somehow
better than what’s available at home.
In Asian Town, I met Sylvester Owusu,
30, a Ghanaian in an Arsenal shirt. Along
with his brother Evans, he has come to
The hosts see
the World Cup
as just a rung
on the ladder
Doha on a six-month contract as a
baggage handler at the airport. Back in
Accra, he is a physician’s assistant and
hopes to put the money he earns in Qatar
towards becoming a paediatrician. He
earns $300 a week and manages to save
$200. His wife and two kids are at home.
Is it worth it? “I wish I hadn’t come,” he
said. Why? “I work 12 hours a day. There
is no social life. I’m not happy.” Owusu is
trying to continue his medical studies in
the evenings, but he’s usually too tired.
Some of the other men visit brothels,
where about £40 will buy you a moment’s
oblivion. I shudder to think how these
women get here, or how they are treated.
Owusu’s only bright spot is the tourna-
ment itself, but isn’t sure he wants to
spend any of his savings on a ticket for a
Ghana game. “We will watch when we
can, though,” he said. The tournament is
a respite from drudgery, a flicker of splen-
dour in a hard life. That’s what brought all
those Bangladeshis out to the Corniche.
The heat in Doha never stops. It bakes
into buildings during the day and radiates
out at the night. It is humid and fierce. In
2015, five years after winning the bid,
Qatar moved this tournament to “winter”
to avoid a meltdown. Normally it would
have rained by now. But not this year.
The city is a plutocrat’s fever dream,
magicked from the desert by petrodollars
and the ruling Al Thani family’s will to
power. It is an array of magnificence and
squalor. When the oil and gas money
started pouring in during the 1970s, the
Qataris wanted everything quickly, so
they import most of their brand names:
restaurants by Nobu and Hakkasan; uni-
versity campuses from Georgetown and
Carnegie Mellon; sculptures by Jeff Koons
and Damien Hirst. The 30ft spider that
looms over the lanyard-wearing hordes at
Fifa media centre is Maman by Louis
Bourgeois. The 50ft fire-breathing spider
at the Qatar 2022 electronic music festival
is from Glastonbury. The World Cup is
the engine of this journey. A chance to
show how far Qatar has come since it was
a pearl-fishing backwater, run as a protec-
torate by the British from 1916 until 1971.
“The World Cup isn’t the end point, it
is just a rung in the ladder for Qatar,” said
Sulaiman Timbo Bah, my guide to the
Education City Mosque. “There is plenty
more to come.” The tournament is all
part of Qatar’s 2030 national vision,
to be an “advanced society capable of
sustaining its development and providing
a high standard of living for its people”.
But which people? Only 12 per cent of
the country’s population of three million
are Qatari. The Qataris are born on easy
street: free healthcare, electricity, water,
education. Zero tax. These are closely
guarded privileges. The emir, Sheikh
Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, can bestow
50 of these citizenships a year. If a Qatari
woman marries a non-Qatari man, their
children are not citizens. The migrant
workers have no path to citizenship.
The Qataris are unsurprisingly defen-
sive of their tournament and country. I
joined two brothers, Ahmed and Muham-
mad, both in their twenties, for mint tea
on Friday night. Do they believe the tour-
nament will be a success? “You are going
to see something that will take your breath
away, inshallah,” Muhammad said. What
do they make of the criticism? A long
moment of silence. “When the football
starts, it will astonish you,” Ahmed said.
They just don’t want to talk about it.
The other critical question they won’t
answer, of course, is will anyone be able
to drink? Qatar sparked panic for fans
when it made a U-turn on Thursday and
banned beer sales at the stadiums. I head
to the Irish Pub, secreted away at the top
of the Best Western hotel. It was like
walking into a Prohibition-era speakeasy.
Germans and Mexicans smoked and got
hammered together. American GIs from
the Al Udeid airbase sunk tequilas and
played air guitar to Bon Jovi. Filipina pros-
titutes were pawed by middle-aged men.
I settled down with Dan Jensen and a
group of Danes, who had secured their
own Carlsberg dispenser for the table and
were emptying it fast. How are they find-
ing things so far? “Not enough drink,”
Dan said. “Now we’ve found this place,
though.” He isn’t too worried about the
stadium beer ban. Like many with friends
in the city, he’s taken advantage of the
expat booze network and ordered 500
beers to his rented flat. “Now we just
need some tickets to the games,” he said.
In truth, for all the liberal pablum
they’ve put out about female empower-
ment and the greenest World Cup, for all
the murals dedicated to migrant workers,
the Qataris only half care what the West
thinks. What has become obvious after a
few days is that this World Cup isn’t for
“us”. It’s not about LGBT or ESG (Envi-
ronmental, Social and Governance) or
DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). It is
the first Arab World Cup and it will
run accordingly.
Camilla Long, page 33
GABRIEL BOUYS/JUSTIN SETTERFIELD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, PETER BYRNE/PA
Piers Morgan
Ronaldo doesn’t regret
a single word of our
blockbuster TV show
O
n April 15 this year, Cristiano
Ronaldo rang me to vent his
spleen about Manchester
United. His dream comeback
eight months earlier had
turned into a nightmare and
for an hour, he articulated the
problems he thought were
behind the club’s demise from perennial
champions under his father figure, Sir
Alex Ferguson, to abject mediocrity.
“I can’t just keep ignoring what’s
going on inside the club right now,” he
told me. “It’s so amateur. No defined
goal, no leadership, no organisation, just
a desert of ideas. The future is very dark
unless things change very fast.”
I asked him if he regretted going back
and he sighed: “Perhaps my heart spoke
louder than reason.”
Ronaldo was burning with passion,
anger and sadness, and I understood
why. Nobody in the history of sport
hates losing more than him, with the
possible exception of me when I play my
kids at Tiddlywinks.
That’s why he’s won five Ballons d’Or
(the highest individual honour in
football), five Uefa Champions Leagues,
and League titles in four countries. It’s
also why he has scored more goals than
anyone in history. And his frustration
came down to one theme: an almost
demented will to win that still spews
inside him like a raging volcano, which is
staggering for someone who is 37 and
has achieved so much in the game.
“If you want to speak publicly about
this, let me know,” I told him at the end
of the conversation. He vowed: “If the
situation continues, I will. The
supporters don’t deserve this — they
deserve to know the truth.”
The next day, Ronaldo scored a hat-
trick against Norwich in the Premier
League. “Very happy with this win,” he
posted on Instagram. “Individual
achievements are only worth it when
they help us reach our goals as a team,
and the 60th hat-trick in my career is so
much more important because it
brought us the 3 points.”
But within 48 hours, his joy was
supplanted by heartbreak when his
girlfriend Georgina lost one of their
twins in childbirth. Three days later
United appointed a new manager, Erik
ten Hag, a man who calls himself a
“severe” disciplinarian, and who would
lock horns with his superstar player.
The events of that week are pivotal to
understanding why Ronaldo gave me the
explosive interview that has made global
headlines for days, smashed all ratings
records for my TalkTV show Piers
Morgan Uncensored (even beating my
launch show interview with Donald
Trump) and has been watched 12 million
times on our YouTube channel.
Earlier this month he texted me:
“Hello my friend, where are you?”
“In London,” I replied, “just taping
links for some new murderer shows . . . ”
(Ronaldo first contacted me, out of the
blue, four years ago, because he loves
my crime documentaries). “You OK?”
“Yes. I want to do an interview with
you, at my house in Manchester. It’s time
I speak out.” I wasn’t surprised.
Ronaldo’s not the kind of guy to
silently endure what he perceives to be
the constant disrespect of United’s
senior executives and ten Hag to the
media, which he says has printed “95
per cent garbage” about him.
On that last point, as a former
newspaper editor, it has been fascinating
and dispiriting to observe the obsessive
daily click-baiting coverage of Ronaldo,
knowing the truth — because I am able to
ask him — behind the often false stories.
Not least when the papers suggested
he skipped pre-season training because
he was trying to find another club, when
in fact his three-month-old daughter was
in hospital for a week with bronchitis.
We became unlikely friends after I
interviewed him three years ago, and
chat regularly on WhatsApp about
everything from football, fast cars and
fine wine to family and fatherhood.
He can be hilarious and candid but he
is also very honest and direct, and from
A mural in Doha as the build-up to the World Cup continues; fans are showing my experience, much smarter than most
their backing for different teams, including Argentina and Croatia, bottom footballers. Yes, he has a massive ego,
3
but all my favourite sportsmen have had
that same chest-beating arrogant
swagger about them — from Muhammad
Ali and Usain Bolt to Tiger Woods,
Michael Jordan and Kevin Pietersen.
But all those men, like Cristiano, also
had an unbelievable work ethic that
drove them to be No 1. Now his time at
the club he loves is almost certainly over
— something he knew was a possibility
once he did the interview.
United, according to reports, may sue
him for breach of his £500,000-a-week
contract, but for Ronaldo, worth an
estimated $500 million, any punishment
will be a price worth paying for telling
the truth. Some have praised him for
talking to me, others have savagely
criticised him. But this kind of response
is nothing new for the man who has
more Instagram followers (497 million)
than anyone else, but whose cocky
persona attracts legions of haters too.
Last year, I sent him a personalised
pot of Marmite with my name on it as
part of a marketing pack for my book
Wake Up. “What is this?” he asked, “and
what do I do with it?”
“You eat it,” I said. “It’s very popular
in the UK but they put my name on it
because people either love it or hate it.”
“Ahahaha! Like me!” he replied.
Some of the responses have been
hypocritical. His former teammate Gary
Neville said Ronaldo should be sacked.
Yet, when Ronaldo first hinted in August
that he might go public, Neville tweeted:
TALK TV
Cristiano Ronaldo gave Piers
Morgan an explosive interview
“Why does the greatest player of all time
(in my opinion) have to wait to tell
Manchester United fans the truth? Stand
up now and speak. The club is in crisis
and it needs leaders to lead. He’s the
only one who can grab this situation by
the scruff of the neck!”
Contrary to ill-informed speculation,
none of the reaction to the interview has
remotely bothered Ronaldo, nor made
him regret a single word he told me.
“All good,” he texted me on Friday as
he arrived in Qatar for the World Cup.
“The future is great.”
At the heart of his decision to do the
interview lies respect, or rather, a lack of
it. Ronaldo believes he has been treated
shabbily and unfairly blamed for
United’s continued struggles. Given the
things he told me, I agree.
Last season, he scored 24 goals for
United including six in the Champions
League and 18 in the Premier League,
beating England’s top striker Harry Kane
with one more league goal, despite being
nine years older. Yet we’re supposed to
believe the greatest footballer to play the
game, whose fitness is extraordinary, is
suddenly finished on the big stage?
Nonsense. Ronaldo just needs a club
and a manager who do not treat him like
the dirt that accumulates on his boots
after he scores yet another hat-trick.
4 The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS
Terror police guard Iranians in suburbs Arms sent
MI5 has warned that
Tehran’s agents could
attack journalists working
here as part of an
intimidation campaign
Glen Keogh and Rosamund Urwin
Bomb-proof armoured vehicles and
armed police were deployed to the
London offices of an Iranian TV channel
yesterday as Tehran continued its
campaign of intimidation in Britain.
As England prepares to take on Iran in
their first World Cup match tomorrow,
Scotland Yard said the purpose of the
armed unit was to mitigate threats
“projected” by the Islamic Republic.
Officers have been stationed outside the
headquarters of the Farsi-language news
channel Iran International, in Chiswick,
west London, since Thursday.
The Met has written to businesses at
the office park regarding the police pres-
ence, saying that Iran International staff
“could be targeted at their place of
work”. The letter says the “nature of any
potential attack cannot be predicted but
possibilities include firearms, explosives
or bladed weapons”. At least two journal-
JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES to Ukraine
‘could be sold
to criminals’
Dipesh Gadher
Home Affairs Correspondent
Weapons supplied by the
West to help Ukraine fight
Russia could end up in the
hands of criminal gangs or
terrorists in Britain, the head
of the National Crime Agency
has warned.
Graeme Biggar said law-
enforcement officials across
Europe were on the lookout
for machineguns, pistols and
grenades being sold on in a
Armed police on ists have received “credible” death of the Iranian regime were ready to use potential threats by Iran to kidnap or kill potentially lethal form of
duty outside the threats owing to the channel’s coverage any means to “stop journalists covering UK-based individuals this year. “blowback” from the conflict.
west London of protests in Iran since the death in the story”. A source at the channel said it The regime has also been targeting Biggar, who leads the UK’s
offices of Iran September of Mahsa Amini, who was was “very concerning” that the police journalists at BBC Persian, a subsidiary of fight against serious and
International, a allegedly beaten by the country’s presence was increasing, which they the BBC World Service based in London. organised crime, said he had
Farsi-language “morality police” for wearing her head- thought “must be based on a specific The BBC has instructed a legal team and discussed the threat with
TV channel that scarf incorrectly. threat to us”. filed a complaint to the UN over the Ukraine’s police chief. “As
has reported on The executive editor, Aliasghar Ken McCallum, the director-general of harassment of its journalists in Britain with any conflict, when
protests in Iran Ramezanpoor, said last week that agents MI5, said that there had been at least ten and their families in Iran. weapons pour in there is a
risk of blowback,” he said. “At
the end of the conflict, there
are surplus weapons that get
into the hands of criminals or
terrorists.”
In his first interview since
being appointed director-
general of the NCA, Biggar:
Disclosed that intelligence
gathered by British agents
had blocked the sale of at
least eight superyachts, four
private jets and “numerous”
properties linked to Russian
kleptocrats.
Claimed auction houses
and public-relations
companies in London were
acting as “enablers” for the
transfer of corrupt money.
Vowed to go after the
kingpins or “controlling
minds” of the drugs and
human-trafficking trades by
taking the work of his
organisation “upstream”.
Accused tech giants,
including Google, of failing to
do enough to tackle online
child sex abuse and the
smuggling of migrants across
the Channel.
An Oxford-educated civil
servant, Biggar, 48, is the first
person to lead the NCA who is
not a former chief constable.
He was made director-general
in August after a controversial
recruitment process in which
Downing Street sought to
interfere to install Boris
Johnson’s preferred
candidate, Lord Hogan-
Howe, the discredited former
Metropolitan Police
commissioner.
As a former director of
national security at the Home
Office, Biggar helped shape
the response to the 2017
terror attacks and the
Salisbury poisonings the next
year. He joined the NCA in
2019 . Although his
organisation has a huge remit
— ranging from online fraud
to corruption and kidnapping
— a significant amount of his
time continues to be taken up
by Russia and the fallout from
its invasion of Ukraine.
A few weeks ago, he met
Ukraine’s national police
chief to discuss concerns
including the threat of
Boss removed over
boy’s mould death
Caroline Wheeler
Political Editor
Michael Gove has told
councils across England to
make an urgent assessment of
housing conditions after a
two-year-old boy died from
exposure to mould.
The levelling up secretary
has written to local
authorities demanding
action. It was “abhorrent that
anyone should have to live in
such conditions in Britain
today”, he said.
Last week, an inquest on
Awaab Ishak found he died in
December 2020 from a
respiratory condition caused
by mould in the one-bedroom
housing association flat
where he lived with his
parents, Faisal Abdullah and
Aisha Amin, in Rochdale,
Greater Manchester.
Gareth Swarbrick, chief
executive of Rochdale
Boroughwide Housing (RBH),
was yesterday removed from
his position with “immediate
effect”.
The housing association
said: “Our original instincts
were for Gareth to stay on to
see the organisation through
this difficult period and to
make the necessary changes,
but we all recognise that this
is no longer tenable.
firearms falling into the hands
of criminals and terrorists, as
was the case after the 1990s
Balkans conflicts. “To their
credit — despite the fact that
they are operating on the
front line and dealing with
war crimes and so on — they
are really focused on that
issue as well,” Biggar said.
“They are looking at what
weapons are in the country
and who has them.”
He said there was no
evidence yet of any weapons
being sold to criminals.
However, he added: “We are
working really closely with
Europol and with other
European countries to make
sure that we’re all on the
lookout for this.”
The NCA’s main response
to the conflict has been
through a newly created
“combating kleptocracy” cell,
which targets corrupt elites.
Biggar said the unit had
carried out 85 “disruptions”
— or actions — since February,
when Russia invaded. This
included the arrest of
There is a
risk of
lethal
blowback
Graham Bonham-Carter, a
London-based businessman
and second cousin of the
actress Helena Bonham
Carter, who is accused by the
US of helping Oleg Deripaska,
the Russian oligarch, to evade
US sanctions. Bonham-
Carter, 62, is alleged to have
run a private family office for
Deripaska. He denies any
wrongdoing.
Biggar believes such
entities are among “enablers”
or “facilitators” — including
lawyers, accountants and
estate agents — that handle
suspect Russian cash. Asked
to point to others, he said: “It
is auction houses who are
buying and selling art and
allowing that to happen
without being utterly clear
[about the identity of buyers
and sellers].” He also
mentioned PR firms and
security organisations.
Biggar also said more
resources needed to be
directed to the huge shift in
crime online. He said
indecent images of children
could be found via Google in
just “four clicks”. Social
media companies have also
been blamed for fuelling
illegal Channel crossings by
hosting adverts for people-
smuggling gangs.
@DipeshGadher
“The coroner noted that
RBH had made changes as a
result of the tragic death of
Awaab. Under new
leadership, RBH will continue
to embed these changes and
to continue to drive further
improvements to our homes
and to our communications
with tenants.”
A government source said
Swarbrick’s sacking was
welcome, but that the board
still had “very serious”
questions to answer,
including: “Why did they give
him their full backing after
the coroner’s report and as
recently as 24 hours ago?”
Housing authorities have a
duty to keep housing
conditions under review,
with a view to identifying any
action that may be needed.
Gove has also written to all
social housing providers in
England. He said: “I am
taking further action to stand
up for tenants. I am putting
housing providers on notice: I
will take whatever action is
required to improve
standards across the country
and ensure tenants’ voices
are heard.
“Everyone has the right to
feel safe in their homes, and
the death of a child like
Awaab Ishak must never be
allowed to happen again.”
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022 5

NEWS
INVESTIGATION

Victims of our broken NHS

V Waited 9 hours
for paramedics
David Morganti: bleeding on brain
V Fell waiting for
social care bed
Bob Conybeare: no care home place
V Ambulance that
never arrived
Winnie Barnes-Weekes: fractured hip
V Treated too late
after a stroke
Tony Reedman: no ambulance free

A coroner has chronicled deadly shortcomings in health and social care in one county — and he says it’s just the tip of the iceberg
SHAUN
LINTERN
Health Editor
When David Morganti’s case notes
landed on Andrew Cox’s desk this
autumn they told a devastating story —
but one which was depressingly familiar
to the senior coroner for Cornwall.
The 87-year-old RAF veteran had fallen
and hit his head in the bathroom of the
house he shared with his wife, Valerie, in
April. It took nine hours for paramedics
to reach their home near St Austell, Corn-
wall. As they waited, the bleeding on his
brain became gradually worse until he
lost consciousness. By the time he
reached hospital it was too late. An
expert neurosurgeon told Cox that had
he reached hospital faster, Morganti
might have survived.
The coroner said the effects of the inju-
ries he suffered were likely to have been
exacerbated “by a delay in the arrival of
an ambulance and his subsequent admis-
sion into hospital.”
It was the latest in a series of similar
deaths the coroner had encountered.
Winnie Barnes-Weeks, 90, died in
December 2021 after falling at her care
home and enduring a 19-hour wait for an
NHS ambulance that never came. Tony
Reedman, 54, died after a two-hour
ambulance delay meant treatment for his
stroke was too late.
Then there was the case of retired
geography teacher Bob Conybeare, 83,
who died in March 2022 following a fall in
hospital after waiting weeks for a care
home bed that couldn’t be found.
After Morganti’s inquest, Cox resolved
to carry out a wider investigation into
what appeared to be a broken system. He
has now sent his findings to Steve Bar-
clay, the health secretary, and demanded
he act to prevent more deaths.
The work of one local coroner could
have implications for the rest of the
country, which is suffering a similar col-
lapse in health and social care.
Cox interviewed senior NHS clinicians
and local council chiefs in the southwest
to piece together what was causing the
fatal delays. First, he spoke to the medical
director at the South Western Ambulance
Service NHS Foundation Trust, who told
him the “difficulties are not due to a
shortage of ambulances or an unantici-
pated surge in demand [but] the ambu-
lances are in the wrong place at the
wrong time”. The doctor added: “When
they are required for emergency
responses they are parked outside Royal
Cornwall Hospital with patients in the
back for extended periods. On occasions
this summer and autumn there have
been queues of over 20 ambulances out-
side the emergency department and
delays have been longer than a para-
medic’s shift.”
Cox, whose wife is a GP, turned to the
medical director at the Royal Cornwall
Hospital in Truro. At the time, Dr Allister
Grant had the equivalent of five wards of
patients who were medically ready to be
discharged but who had no care package.
The senior coroner then went to Ali-
son Bulman, the strategic director for
care and wellbeing at Cornwall council,
who told him one of the council’s main
care providers had closed three homes
because it did not have enough staff.
Cox has had enough. In his letter to
Barclay, he says: “This is but the latest in a
series of inquests conducted in the area
There were
queues of 20 or
more ambulances
outside A&E
Andrew Cox: warned of more deaths
where delays in the arrival of an ambu- his son said. “Most certainly I think he July waiting more than an hour in the that there are a number of inquests of a
lance and subsequent admission into
Royal Cornwall Hospital have caused or
would have been still with us had he got
the care he needed. He was mobile, he
back of an ambulance.
However, the problems identified by
similar nature to be heard.”
A spokesman for the Department of
contributed to a death.” He has issued the was able to care for himself. He was con- the Cornish coroner are being repeated Health and Social Care said: “Each of
health secretary with a prevention of fused, but he was in an acute setting in towns and cities across Britain, with these four deaths is a tragedy and our
future deaths report that warns of more which was inconsistent with his needs.” 4,000 patients a month suffering severe sympathies are with the families affected.
deaths unless action is taken. Barclay has Reedman was on holiday with his wife harm or death due to ambulance delays. We have received the prevention of
until January 10 to respond. in June 2021 when he suffered a stroke. It reflects a collapse in the care system, future deaths report and will be respond-
Morganti’s wife is in no doubt that a There were enough ambulances that day with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) ing to the coroner in due course. We have
broken health and care system killed her but none were available due to delays at warning that the lack of capacity in social prioritised health and social care in the
husband. She said: “They have enough A&E offloading patients. The coroner care was having “a devastating impact”. autumn statement, with an additional
ambulances but the fact is they can’t use said: “This delay in treatment was a The watchdog said 366 care homes had £6.6 billion available over the next two
them because there are no beds to put the direct consequence of ambulance delay.” closed between March 2021 and August years to tackle the backlog, speed up dis-
patients in, and David paid the price for Reedman’s wife, Jill, told an inquest: 2022. In some cases, the CQC said it knew charge and ensure patients are getting
that.” She and the families of other “Tony was a fighter. He should have had a of homes refusing to open empty beds the care they deserve quickly.”
victims in Cox’s report back his calls for chance. The ambulance delay meant he because there were not enough staff. Kate Shields, chief executive of Corn-
action from Barclay. lost that chance.” In the last year, the number of social wall’s NHS care board, offered her condo-
Patricia Duval, 52, is the daughter of Morganti, Barnes-Weeks, Conybeare care staff has fallen by 50,000, leaving 18 lences to the families, adding: “We have
Barnes-Weeks, who fell at her care home, and Reedman are but four deaths linked per cent of care beds empty in August. recently introduced new ways of working
in Hayle, in November 2021. Cox said that to a system under heavy pressure and Cox has told the health secretary there with the aim of reducing delays in
she died following an accident with the Cox tells Barclay that without interven- are “recurring themes”, including “long patients’ journeys from their admission
effect “exacerbated by a long delay in an tion there will be more. The southwest delays in ambulance attendance and/or through to discharge in both our acute
ambulance taking her to hospital”. region, including Cornwall, has seen the long delays in admission into the only and community services.”
Duval said: “She was in high spirits largest proportion of care home closures, acute hospital in the coroner’s area”. She added that there were plans to
that day because she had been given the with the loss of around 855 beds. It also He adds: “It is appropriate to record open new care facilities, including 750
all-clear by the chiropodist and she told had the worst ambulance delays outside both that these are only a selection of the supported accommodation units.
me she was looking forward to wearing A&E, with nearly a third of all patients in inquests of this nature already heard and @ShaunLintern
her nice shoes. She leant forward on the
bed to put them on and she slipped off
the bed, it was just an accident.”
Her mother suffered a fractured hip
and lay on the floor in pain and distress
for 19 hours waiting for an NHS ambu-
lance that never arrived. Desperate care
home staff eventually organised a private
ambulance with the help of a local GP.
“This was a woman who was very proud,”
Duval said, adding: “She had to go to the
toilet on the floor. We will all get to this
stage at some point in our lives and none
of us want to be left like my mum was.”
Richard Conybeare, 56, described the
social care system in Cornwall as broken
after his father, Bob, a former geography
teacher at the Humphry Davy grammar
school in Penzance, waited weeks to
leave hospital before suffering a fall that
killed him. The 83-year-old fell while out
shopping in January this year. He was
declared fit for discharge from hospital
ten days later but waited four weeks for a
care home bed.
Cox concluded he died as a result of
the falls but added that during the
inquest he heard evidence that in Febru-
ary there was an average of 120 patients
like Conybeare waiting to leave hospital.
Conybeare’s son said: “As a conse-
quence of being confused in hospital, my
father had a second fall and as a result of
head injuries he died three weeks later,”

My F1 dream would have hit

the skids without my family
Rosamund Urwin
Media Editor
For George Russell, winning
his first Formula One race felt
like a victory for his whole
family. Immediately after he
stepped off the podium at the
Brazilian Grand Prix last
Sunday, the Mercedes driver
called his father, mother,
girlfriend, brother and sister
on FaceTime — and they all
cried with joy.
The only sadness was that
he was alone in Sao Paulo.
“Everyone was a bit
disconnected because my
mum was with my girlfriend,
as she was moving house, my
father was with my brother
and his two children, and my
sister was with her husband,”
said Russell, 24, who made
his F1 race debut for the
Williams team in 2019. “But
we’ve all been on this journey
together: the sacrifice is not
just my sacrifice, it’s been
their sacrifice as well.
George Russell is Everyone was in tears.”
competing in the In a sport where the cost of
Abu Dhabi Grand competing is prohibitive,
Prix today most F1 drivers come from
rich families. But Russell,
who started karting aged 8,
comes from a more normal
background. His
grandparents, whose
surname was Else, ran a shop
in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire,
Else Discounts, with the
slogan “Who else, but Else?”
His father, Steve, owned his
own business, while his
mother, Alison, was a
hairdresser.
Russell’s parents, who live
in King’s Lynn, have been a
constant support. “For my
parents, there was the
financial sacrifice and the
time spent when I was
younger going up and down
the country racing,” he said.
“And the support that my
brother [Benjy] and sister
[Cara] gave me [was vital],
because my father was
spending almost everything
he earned on my racing, and
they never once complained
about the fact that their
brother — who’s ten years
younger than they are — was
having all the family money
spent on him, because they
believed the dream as well.”
A lack of money nearly led
to him quitting. He said: “If I
hadn’t been picked up in that
exact year by Mercedes [on
the junior driver programme
in 2017], that was my F1
dream over. We couldn’t
afford to continue.”
His post-race celebrations
in Sao Paulo were not “in the
rock-star fashion that a lot
would expect”. His main
celebrations will come after
the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
today, the season’s final race.
F1 is a mixed-sex sport, and
Russell wants to see female
drivers back on the grid. The
Netflix series Drive To Survive
had brought in female fans:
“In ten year’s time, we’ll see
that shift on the racetrack.”
6

NEWS
POLITICS

Sunak’s
conundrum

Tim Shipman
Chief Political Commentator

After the chaos of Trussonomics, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have calmed the markets. But Conservative Party
election strategists remain nervous that the pair’s accountant-like image won’t be enough to inspire voters in 2024

P
oliticians seeking wisdom in
economic matters tend to
favour the works of Adam
Smith or John Maynard Keynes,
but it was to Mark Twain that
Jeremy Hunt turned last week
when he and Rishi Sunak
unveiled plans to save the econ-
omy and the Conservative Party from
oblivion. When cabinet met on Thursday
morning, the chancellor quoted the 19th
century American novelist: “When in
doubt tell the truth. It will confound your
enemies and astound your friends.”
The autumn statement certainly
depressed them. Hunt outlined £55 bil-
lion worth of tax rises and spending cuts
central to understanding what Sunakism
and Sunakomics will look like. A No 10
source said: “Those two things give you a
pretty good indication of the priorities of
the next two years.”
They were “right there from the
get-go” in the first meeting between the
prime minister and chancellor when
Sunak took office last month. “Yes,
we’ve got a £55 billion problem which we
need to solve, but what are we doing on
top of that?” Sunak asked. He was
passionate about schools and he found
in Hunt a chancellor determined to
enact improvements to the NHS he had
devised as health secretary and then
chairman of the health select committee.
will have to explain which taxes will have
to rise to pay for it.
For its part, Labour went into Thurs-
day with a simple plan — demand that the
budget be judged on “fairness” and
whether there was a credible “plan for
growth”. In a measure of their growing
professionalism as a political operation,
Labour’s backroom staff set up a
WhatsApp group to feed live information
to Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor,
and her deputy, Pat McFadden, when
they are sitting in the chamber, advising
on which parts of her prepared speech to
cut. The Tories sought to shoot some of
these foxes, spending £11 billion to uprate
benefits in line with inflation, while hit-
distributional curve for income changes
showed the poorest doing best — the
opposite of Kwarteng’s mini-budget.
But when aides to Starmer and Reeves
convened afterwards to agree their attack
This is a lines, “it was the quickest discussion
we’ve ever had”, one of those present
platform on said. Hunt’s failure to scrap non-dom tax
status gave Labour an opening. “We were
which we always going to hammer them on that,” a
party source said. “It was also remark-
can build able that they did not even attempt to
have a plan for growth. Their approach is
pure managerialism. They didn’t even try
to get on the pitch when it comes to hope.
Where is the jam tomorrow?”
Rishi Sunak met President Friday’s newspaper front pages were
people to buy into us now,” an aide said.
“We are expecting to prove to people
over the next two years that we can
deliver on things that they want.
“By the summer of next year there are
things he wants to have sorted or the pub-
lic can see we are gripping and getting
sorted: small boats, the NHS backlogs,
how we are going to use the extra £2 bil-
lion in schools.”
In private, Tory pollsters hope for a
rerun of 1992’s victory, when the public,
unconvinced by Labour, felt the econ-
omy was on the turn and gave John Major
a slim majority. The party is banking on
inflation falling from next year.

which raise the tax burden to its highest
since the Second World War and
prompted the Office for Budget Responsi-
bility (OBR) to warn living standards will
fall by 7 per cent over the next two years,
“wiping out eight years of growth” and
returning family incomes to 2013 levels.
Thursday’s announcement shaped not
only fiscal and spending policy but also
lifted the veil on what Sunak intends to do
with the two years he has left before the
next election. Having dealt with the
macroeconomic numbers, the count-
down conundrum he faces is how to lift
Tory poll numbers. When he addressed
the cabinet in advance, he said: “It’s not
all going to be doom and gloom. Nor
should we allow it to be. These are the
necessary steps we have to take. This is a
platform on which we can build.”
In an effort not to spook the markets,
whose rejection of Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini
budget in September brought down the
Truss government, most of the bad news
was leaked in advance. But insiders were
delighted that the modicum of good news
— extra money for schools and the NHS —
were revelations in Hunt’s speech. “Very
few people knew about that and it didn’t
leak,” a source said. These decisions are
“We have to do the NHS as well,” he
told the PM.
Hunt presented a plan to give more
money to the social care sector to free up
beds in hospitals and for a workforce
review to recruit the staff the health
service needs. “It is a moral mission for
him,” a Hunt ally said. Steve Barclay, the
health secretary, will do broadcast inter-
views on Sunday outlining how he plans
to get more value for money.
The second key feature of the budget
that did not leak was the decision by Hunt
and Sunak to push most of the Whitehall
spending cuts to 2025, after the next gen-
eral election. While taxes will rise by
more than £7 billion over the next two
years, so will public spending, by £9.4 bil-
lion. There was a simple economic rea-
son for this: the chancellor judged that a
short-term boost to spending was needed
to get Britain out of recession as quickly
as possible. The OBR said the govern-
ment’s plan would reduce the depth of
the recession by a percentage point, sav-
ing 70,000 jobs.
But the political benefit is obvious. The
decision is a political landmine for
Labour, since if Sir Keir Starmer wants to
drastically raise spending after 2025 he
ting the best off with stealth tax rises on
income, capital gains, dividend pay-
ments and inheritance. That ensured the
Zelensky in Kyiv yesterday
to announce a £50 million
package of defence aid
highly negative, but Sunak’s team took
comfort from the fact that they all had s
different grievances and that no one issue
blew up to derail the whole package.
While some Tory MPs on the right regard
the budget as unconservative, they are
not yet mutinous. Beforehand, one some-
times problematic MP approached Hunt
and said: “I will vote for any tax rise or
spending cut if you protect the pensions
triple lock.” The chancellor did so.
Two focus groups conducted on
Thursday evening by Charlesbye, which
is run by Lee Cain, a former No 10
director of communications, showed that
the public was also fairly sanguine. One
participant said: “We needed definitive
action and we got that.”
Encouragingly for the Tories, voters
also seem willing to give Sunak the bene-
fit of the doubt, someone they see as an
“accountant” who is “good with money”
and the “right person” to sort out Brit-
ain’s problems.
The bad news for the Conservatives is
that the vast majority of people in the two
groups, who all voted Tory in 2019, did
not intend to do so again.
What does Sunak plan to do to change
that narrative? “We are not expecting
S
unak will make a speech at the CBI
tomorrow mapping out some of the
principles that will govern his pre-
miership. One feature will be an
emphasis on the need to boost
research, development and innovation.
Over the course of the next six weeks
Sunak hopes to announce “small wins”
on illegal immigration, “picking off indi-
vidual problems and sorting them out”,
with a set piece just before Christmas or
in the new year. “It’s not just small boats,
there are all sorts of problems
with the processing system.”
Those mean that even where Britain
has agreements to return migrants to
their country of origin, for example with
Iraq, few are sent back. At the moment,
responsibility for doing so is divided
between agencies. “There are too many
responsible parties, so no one does it,” a
senior official said. Ministers are working
on giving one agency the lead responsi-
bility.
Sunak is also quietly determined to
work at relationships abroad in order to
resolve clashes with the EU over the
Northern Ireland protocol and maintain
Britain’s support for Ukraine.
The prime minister flew yesterday to

Squeezed Tom Calver Data Editor
“Let us be frank about it:
most of our people have
never had it so good.” The
standards. We may be richer
than 70 years ago, but our
middle classes don’t feel it.
They lag their western
counterparts — and are about
(OBR) figures, households
face a 67 per cent increase in
the year to 2023-24.
Calculations by Labour
suggest that the total
from the Resolution
Foundation suggests. Part of
the cause may be
productivity, which has
stagnated since 2007.
in living standards than in any
recession on record.
The middle classes will
have less to spend, which is
already tipping us into
analysis by the Resolution
Foundation has found. There
are two main reasons.
One is the profound
changes to the tax system

middle year is 1957, and the usually

reserved Harold Macmillan is
celebrating consumerism.
“Go around the country,” the
to get poorer. Last week’s
autumn statement was
designed to shield the
poorest and oldest from the
increases amount to
£31 billion, or £4,000 extra
for every family with a
mortgage. House prices are
Countries have different
tax regimes, so a better
indicator of the prosperity of
the average worker is
recession. “It’s the middle
class that is the engine of
growth, not the top earners,”
says Zoe Irving, senior
caused by freezing and
lowering tax bands. Inflation
will push the number of
people in the higher-rate

classes have
Conservative prime minister
told a crowd at Bedford
Town’s football ground, “go
to the industrial towns, go to
the farms and you will see a
worst of the recession.
Workers in the middle will
bear the brunt once again.
The clearest example that
the “squeezed middle” is
expected to fall by 9 per cent
as a result. “Middle England, I
think, is set for quite a shock,”
said Paul Johnson, of the
Institute for Fiscal Studies .
disposable household
income. While the UK’s
richest are some of the
wealthiest in the world, our
middle earners are much
lecturer at York University.
“It’s the middle-income
group that does all the
consumption.” For Rachel
Reeves, the shadow
band of £50,270 from 6.1
million to 7.8 million, or 15
per cent of adults, by 2028.
Similarly, the number of
additional-rate taxpayers,

never had state of prosperity such as we

have never had in my
lifetime.”
By today’s standards
about to be squeezed further
can be seen through the
prism of mortgage
repayments. The average
The typical worker in
Britain is little better off than
one in Slovenia. How did our
middle class get squeezed,
poorer than in other wealthy
nations when adjusted for
purchasing power.
It is due to get worse. By
chancellor, this means
“family holidays cancelled,
savings depleted, hopes for
the future replaced by
who pay 45 per cent tax, will
reach a million now that the
threshold has been lowered
from £150,000 to £125,140.

it so bad
Macmillan’s Britain was poor:
families had less than a third
of the disposable cash they
have today. Yet after years of
postwar austerity, middle-
class lives were getting better.
Throughout the 1950s, cars,
disposable household income
for those with a mortgage was
£60,000 in 2021, compared
with £43,000 for those
owning their homes outright
and £38,000 for renters.
After a decade of low
and how poor could they get?
Britain has had periodic
recessions, but for 60
postwar years median
salaries ticked up by more
than 2 per cent a year above
inflation. Then the financial
2024, disposable income will
have fallen by 7 per cent, the
OBR says.Households will be
no richer than they were a
decade earlier, a worse drop
sleepless nights”. During the
pandemic, people saved
24 per cent of disposable
income. By next year we will
be saving nothing, the OBR
says. The typical household
will be spending more than is
Yet as a percentage of
income, being dragged into
the £50,270 bracket will be
much more painful,
calculations suggest.
Someone on £62,000 will
have been hit about twice as

TVs and vacuum cleaners
were bought for the first time
as real wages jumped nearly
30 per cent.
Today it is hard to imagine
a Conservative prime
minister boasting about living
interest rates, this year’s
surge in inflation, coupled
with Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-
budget, has seen mortgage
interest payments soar. Now,
according to the latest Office
for Budget Responsibility
crisis hit. As of September the
average UK salary before tax
is about £30,000, excluding
overtime and bonuses. Had
wages kept growing at their
pre-crisis pace, it would be
above £41,000 today, data
£60,000
Parents lose all child benefit
if either earns more than this
coming in.
For years politicians have
spoken about the “squeezed
middle”. Now the squeeze is
real. Autumn budget
measures will have a severe
impact on middle earners,
hard as someone on £124,000
by 2028.
Another factor is energy
support. Unlike this winter’s
package, next year’s has been
targeted at poorer
households. Those claiming
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022 PPN 7

ILLUSTRATION: TONY BELL

Charming yet unpredictable, polite yet

Kyiv to meet Volodymyr Zelensky. Arriv-
ing in the rain, the Ukrainian president
joked: “You’ve brought the weather with
you.” Sunak announced a £50 million
package of defence aid that comprises
125 anti-aircraft guns and technology to
counter deadly Iranian-supplied drones
which have been used to target civilians.
Earlier in the week, at the G20 summit
in Indonesia, Sunak helped lead criticism
of the Russians for their aggression, as
world leaders berated Sergei Lavrov,
Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister.
In an example of how Sunak has taken
a different approach to his predecessor,
there was also a “brief encounter” with Xi
Jinping, the Chinese president. Sunak
said it was “important we have a dia-
logue”. Truss, by contrast, took a far
more hawkish and hostile stance.
No 10 hopes the same polite but firm
approach will work with the EU. Aides
believe a deal can be secured with
Europe over the Northern Ireland proto-
col, without giving ground which will
enrage the ERG group of backbench
Brexit hardliners.
For all their legion of problems, this
government seems more united than its
two predecessors, at least at the top.
Hunt told cabinet: “I thought it was going
to be a nightmare having a prime minis-
ter who is a former chancellor. But actu-
ally it was very helpful because he did
know where the bombs were going to go
off and helped ensure they didn’t.”
Those seeking omens about whether
they have got it right will look to Mark
Twain with mixed feelings. The novelist
made millions in today’s money but went
bankrupt after bad investments. If that is
a parable for the Truss-Kwarteng mini-
budget, Hunt and Sunak’s allies could
point out that Twain then clawed his way
back to economic health and repaid all
his creditors.
If the prime minister can do that,
Sunak might have a chance of keeping his
job in 2024 — and that really would
astound both his friends and enemies.
Was the chancellor’s autumn
statement good news for the
economy?
sundaytimes.co.uk/poll
intimidating, and now accused of bullying,
the Jekyll-and-Hyde world of Dominic Raab
Harry Yorke, Gabriel Pogrund and
Caroline Wheeler
In April 2020, shortly after Boris Johnson
was taken to hospital with Covid,
officials in Downing Street first began to
take notice of Dominic Raab’s peculiar
management style.
With Johnson in intensive care, Raab,
then foreign secretary and de facto
deputy prime minister, had taken
command of a government in crisis.
Among the skeleton team of political
aides and civil servants still working out
of No 10, several say Raab’s
meticulousness and no-nonsense
approach chairing meetings during
Johnson’s absence resulted in one of the
most “effective fortnights” of the
pandemic.
But for others, who had heard
rumours from officials elsewhere in
Whitehall, confirmation that Raab was
indeed “weird, tricky and difficult”
came when an email headlined
“Working with the foreign secretary”
arrived. The note, circulated by Raab’s
officials to staff in the No 10 private
office, contained a cautionary and
extensive guide on how best to navigate
Raab’s “hilarious” — and “obsessive” —
standards.
“It included things like how he should
receive box notes,” one former official
recounted, referring to the papers that
are placed in ministerial red boxes for
clearance. Each note could be only two
pages long. He would measure the font
size to make sure you hadn’t made it
smaller to cram more on. Apparently he
would use a ruler if he thought someone
had crammed more into the document.
“He wouldn’t read anything with
footnotes or annexes. Some of it seemed
sensible, but also it was weird.”
While hardly nightmarish, the official
argued it was an unnecessary distraction
when every minute counted. Their
account chimes with those of several
others, who say that over that fortnight
they witnessed a man who was “highly
competent” but also “stressed”,
“inflexible” and “very demanding”.
COMPLICATED PICTURE
This picture, formed more than two
years ago, perhaps helps to explain why
Raab, back in government under Rishi
Sunak for a second stint as justice
secretary and deputy PM, now finds
himself fighting to save his career.
After four years at the top of
government, he has been hit with
allegations about his conduct towards
civil servants dating back to the start of
that time. Ten days ago The Guardian
revealed that Ministry of Justice (MoJ)
staff had been offered “respite or route
out” of the department after Raab’s
reappointment. The same report said
several accused their former boss of
presiding over a “culture of fear” and of
“demeaning” and “belittling” them.
Since then, Raab, 48, has faced
further allegations about his time as
Brexit secretary and foreign secretary.
On Tuesday Lord McDonald, the former
permanent secretary at the Foreign
Office, accused him of being “abrasive,
controlling” and “very curt” with staff.
Some were “scared to go into his office”.
By Wednesday there were two formal
complaints against Raab, about his time
foreign secretary and justice secretary.
Sunak opened an independent
investigation at Raab’s request. Raab has
since vowed to “thoroughly rebut and
refute” the allegations against him, while
sources close to him say he always
worked well with officials.
In private, his allies claim he is merely
a demanding boss, whose exacting
standards never crossed into bullying.
They claim he is the victim of a
co-ordinated attack by his rivals in the
Conservative Party and a civil service
“blob” emboldened by the recent
resignation of Sir Gavin Williamson.
Many officials briefing against him, they
contend, are people with “axes to grind”
who struggled to raise their game to the
level expected of them.
Some suspect that Johnson and Truss
loyalists, still smarting from their
defenestration, may have played a hand
in the recent briefings against both Raab
and Williamson, a reflection that a large
section of his party remains mutinous
despite Sunak’s best efforts.
However, more than a dozen officials,
ministers and political aides have
painted a more complicated picture — of
a “Jekyll and Hyde” character, as one put
it, who can be charming and polite, but
also unpredictable and intimidating in a
way that some could construe as
bullying.
While others have questioned the
timing of the disclosures, they reveal
how Raab has been confronted over and
over about his behaviour since he first
entered the cabinet in 2018 — and even
before as a junior minister.
Three permanent secretaries in the
departments he headed as Brexit,
foreign and justice secretary spoke to
him over his interactions with private
office staff. While allies reject these
claims and insist the exchanges were
“frank discussions” about the needs and
time pressures within the departments,
concerns about his behaviour were also
flagged to the Cabinet Office and,
according to one official, to Johnson and
Theresa May.
Perhaps most importantly for Sunak —
who has championed “integrity and
accountability” — the testimonies
suggest Raab’s relationship with officials
only continued to deteriorate as he has
moved from post to post. “I thought he
would have learnt,” one senior civil
servant noted. “Clearly not.”
ELECTED TO A SAFE SEAT
After reading law at Oxford and stints as
a lawyer in the City and the Foreign
Office, Raab was appointed as a political
aide to David Davis in 2006. Four years
later he was elected MP for Esher and
Walton, a safe Surrey seat.
After the 2015 election, he was
appointed by David Cameron as a junior
justice minister. After a promotion, he
was shuffled sideways by May to become
the housing minister. Here, Raab initially
earned a degree of goodwill for his
“decent” handling of a controversy in
which his diary secretary was caught
online selling sex via a sugar daddy
website.
This soon evaporated as he came into
conflict with members of his private
office, the team of civil servants
supporting ministers in their duties.
According to one former official, he
behaved in a manner that was at best
“very, very, very, very particular”— and
at worst “menacing”.
Officials, the source said, were
subjected to impossible demands,
infeasible deadlines and generally made
to feel inadequate. He was “pointlessly
controlling” and “very unkind”, a source
said. This alleged “monstering” was
deemed sufficiently serious that senior
civil servants addressed it with him
directly. They felt able to do so given he
was a junior member of the government
without cabinet rank. Raab, it is said,
was responsive.
That changed following his
elevation to the cabinet in
July 2018 as
Brexit secretary. Taking on one of the
most difficult roles in government from
his old boss Davis, Raab, a committed
Brexiteer, lasted four months before he
quit over May’s plans for a soft Brexit.
Despite his short tenure, tensions
with his new private office did not take
long to manifest. According to officials,
within six to seven weeks his displeasure
at the work being produced by some was
clear. “He put the fear of god into them,”
one said.
After the departure of at least one
official, and “disquiet” within the team
growing, another said Philip Rycroft, the
department’s permanent secretary,
raised concerns directly with Raab.
Rycroft also appointed a new principal
private secretary to head the private
Antonia Romeo, permanent office team, which was seen by some as
secretary in the Ministry of an attempt to shield them from Raab’s
Justice, offered Raab’s ire. Allies dispute this, arguing that
private office staff a transfer several of Raab’s discussions with
Rycroft were about “regular breaches”
of the civil service code during sensitive
negotiations.
Eight months later, with May forced
from office, Raab was promoted by
Johnson to foreign secretary. It was here
officials first began to complain of Raab’s
pedantry, most notably his refusal to
People accept submissions not formatted
exactly to his liking.
dreaded
going to BOXER AND BLACK BELT
His temper was particularly explosive on
briefings time-keeping: according to a source, he
would go “berserk” if his ministerial
chauffeur arrived even a few minutes
early to pick him up for a morning media
round or meeting. Sources close to Raab
reject this characterisation, insisting he
never lost his temper, raised his voice or
swore, and had “excellent relationships”
with drivers.
This level of specificity extended to
Raab’s daily routines. Already famous
for ordering the same chicken Caesar
and bacon baguette, superfruit pot and
vitamin volcano smoothie from Pret a
Manger, Raab, a karate black belt and
former Oxford University boxer, was
also fiercely protective of his daily gym
routine. It extended to overseas trips,
with Raab’s “rider” making clear that
A vein when booking accommodation, officials
needed to ensure it came with a gym —
would equipped with weights — to ensure he
was able to exercise for “1 hour 15
begin [minutes]” to “freshen up each day”.
The gym slot could “be as early as 6am.”
to pulse In meetings, observers recounted
how Raab would often snap at officials if
he received advice he did not like.
Several said they could tell when the
“red mist” was descending because a
vein on Raab’s forehead would begin to
pulse. “He was the most personally
unpopular foreign secretary in living
memory,” a diplomatic source added.
“He was notorious for reacting badly to
advice or analysis that he didn’t like or
want to hear and then trying to exclude
the officials responsible. All of which
created a climate of fear around him.”
A second said: “When senior people
were in the room Dom’s behaviour was,
at its best, strikingly tough. There was an
atmosphere of fear. People dreaded
going into briefings.”
Insiders say it was Raab’s
treatment of his private
office that prompted
McDonald to intervene.
He has since said that
despite his efforts to talk
to Raab he could not be
“made to see the impact”
of his behaviour.
One Whitehall official
who worked with Raab
challenged these
criticisms, noting that
his routine allowed
him to complete
more work than
many other
ministerial
colleagues. In
particular, they
argued that his
requirements around
paperwork were to address the
often poor standard of submissions
he received on entering the department,
to force officials to stop “waffling on”
and instead give succinct advice.
In the end, Raab’s downfall was not
brought about by internal grievances,
but his decision to stay on holiday
during the Afghanistan crisis in August
last year. He was demoted to justice
secretary. On entering the Ministry of
Justice, one of Raab’s first changes was
to request the principal private secretary
who had headed the private office of his
predecessor, Robert Buckland, be
replaced with someone more senior. The
change was seen by many as part of a
wider pattern in which Raab refused to
heed advice from more junior officials.
“He’s desperately hierarchical,” one
insider said. “He didn’t want to talk to
anyone further down the pecking order.
The main criticism that should be
levelled at him is because everything is
so hierarchical, decision making is
slowed down.”
In meetings, Raab’s approach
appeared much the same as in the
Foreign Office, with officials claiming
they observed him “blow up” at officials.
A “culture of fear”, a term used to
describe the atmosphere in his previous
departments, has been used repeatedly
in relation to his third.
In March, a group of mid-ranking
officials submitted an informal
complaint against Raab, in which they
accused him of being “abrupt”, “rude”
and leaving colleagues “in tears after
being on the receiving end of this
inappropriate behaviour”. They claimed
several had visited doctors because they
felt their mental and physical health was
deteriorating due to the pressure of
work. A number were also signed off.
It was not until September, after
Raab’s ousting from cabinet by Liz Truss,
that senior officials in the MoJ felt able to
act. Over the following weeks, a number
of staff thought to have been particularly
affected were offered “psychological
support” through the ministry’s human
resources department.
The return of Raab seven weeks later
appeared to trigger an internal crisis
which culminated in Antonia Romeo,
the permanent secretary, convening a
meeting of private office staff to offer
them a transfer. At least five are
understood to have gone, although
sources close to Raab claim three have
since returned and the others were
either temporary cover or had decided
to move on “naturally”. They also claim
he has always rated his private offices
highly and entrusted junior people to
help to drive the department.
Romeo, 48, is also understood to have
told Raab on his return he must treat
staff professionally. However, last
Wednesday, in response to claims from
the government that no formal
complaint had ever been submitted
against Raab, the March complaint was
resubmitted and formalised. A second
from the Foreign Office followed.
JUDGE AND JURY
This weekend, as Raab prepares for an
independent investigation, his allies
remain confident that the allegations
levelled against him fall far short of
bullying and will ultimately be dismissed.
“The fact is the civil service is going to
try to take out people they don’t like,”
one said. “There may have been an issue
with the general culture, but if you are
going to call someone a bully you have to
be able to demonstrate that.”
A second added: “Dominic sets the
high standards for himself and his teams
that the British people would expect of a
cabinet minister focused on delivering
for them. These allegations are ludicrous
and nothing more than complaints
about a demanding boss.”
Even if the investigation should find
against him, Raab’s fate will ultimately
rest with Sunak, who as prime minister
is required to act as judge, jury and
executioner on all matters relating to the
ministerial code. Whether he will
receive the same judgment in the court
of public opinion remains to be seen.
Rod Liddle, page 22

Graphic that shows the scale of Hunt’s debt mountain challenge

even a penny of Universal
Credit will receive £900;
those above the limit get
nothing. If you have young
children, the chances are
your income has already
been squeezed — especially if
you are a middle earner —
thanks to childcare costs and
child benefit thresholds that
have not changed in six years.
There will be political
consequences. Figures from
the British Election Study
show that 45 per cent of those
who consider themselves
middle class voted
Conservative in 2019, about
the same as the national
average. Far from being
resolute Tories, their vote is
up for grabs in 2024.
For most of the past
century, middle-class
contentment has been
predicated on people feeling
that things were getting
better. By the next time voters
head to the ballot boxes, that
optimism will be a distant
memory.
@TomHCalver.
Ed Conway
The single most important
chart about the autumn
statement wasn’t in the
autumn statement.
Given how many
important, not to mention
scary, charts there were in
the documents released by
the Treasury and the Office
for Budget Responsibility on
Thursday, this is saying
something.
You probably already saw
the one showing how we’re
facing the worst two years for
our disposable income in
recorded history. There was
the one showing we’re facing
a lost decade of growth, not
to mention the one where the
tax burden hits the highest
level since the Second World
War. All important and scary,
but not half as important or
scary as this one.
Why? Because what this
chart shows you is the sheer
quantity of UK government
debt (gilts, as these bonds are
typically called) that financial
markets are being asked to
absorb. And it’s a lot. In fact,
it’s more than in any
comparable period in history:
£335 billion pounds next
fiscal year alone. The
previous record for the
amount of gilts being spewed
out into the market was £166
billion at the tail end of the
financial crisis.
And you’ve probably
already glimpsed the red
flashing lights. The gilt
markets, where private
investors come to buy the
debt issued by the
government, are the bedrock
for our economy. Everything
from pensions to mortgages is
dependent on what happens
there. And you’ll perhaps
remember that these markets
BRITAIN’S £335 BILLION DEBT DISASTER are still recovering from a
heart attack.
Government Bank of England Net total
Or perhaps heartburn is a
better analogy, because one
£500bn
of the things freaking out
FORECAST bond market investors in the
400 Liz Truss interlude — besides
the question marks about her
300 credibility — was the prospect
of digesting vast quantities of
200 gilts as she splurged on tax
cuts. The reason this chart is
100 so scary is that while the
former issue is laid to rest,
0 the latter is certainly not.
In part this is because the
-100 autumn statement was
considerably less fiscally
-200 conservative than the
branding might have
-300 suggested. The government
plans to borrow hundreds of
billions of pounds in the
-400
coming years. Since it also
2002-03 2008-09 2014-15 2020-21 2026-27 needs to issue new bonds to
Source: Citi
replace the expiring ones (the
fiscal equivalent of refixing
your mortgage), the sums are
staggering: the total value of
bonds it is issuing next fiscal
year is £295 billion.
Now you’re probably
wondering: why is this
suddenly a problem? After
all, the government issued
astonishing quantities of
bonds to finance the furlough
scheme: £486 billion in 2020-
21. You can see the answer on
the chart: even as the
government was printing
bonds (the blue bar thrusting
upwards), the Bank of
England was buying bonds
(the orange bar dipping
downwards). The Bank’s
bond buying — quantitative
easing — nearly cancelled out
the spree. The yellow line,
the net figure that really
matters to an investor, was
low and stable.
Those orange bars are no
longer going down but up as
the Bank sells the gilts it
bought over the past decade
and a bit, adding to the tidal
wave of bonds. This chart
shows what happens when
the biggest monetary
experiment in history ends —
and coincides with an energy
crisis that has forced the
government to borrow to
keep everyone’s lights on.
A gilts trader sent me the
chart, produced by Ben
Nabarro, the chief economist
at the investment bank Citi.
“It’s jaw-dropping,” he said.
Everyone hopes markets
can absorb this debt. But
we’re heading into uncharted
territory. As investors think
twice about putting money
into the country, Britain is
asking them to buy more of
its debt than ever before.
Ed Conway is Economics
and Data Editor of Sky News
8 V2 The Sunday Times November 20, 2022

NEWS

Has Cop run out of gas? Only the lobbyists have a plan for what comes next
BEN
SPENCER
Sharm el-Sheikh
In the heat of Sharm
el-Sheikh, sandwiched
between the Sinai desert and
the Red Sea, the Cop27 talks
were taking their toll. John
Kerry, the US climate envoy,
needed a nap. In a shaded
area behind the delegation
offices, a cushion was
brought out. “He put the
cushion on a cardboard box,
laid down his head, and had a
until 4.30am. Last night,
more than 24 hours after the
summit was due to finish,
workmen had started
dismantling the conference
centre.Yet the negotiations
limped on, with key disputes
unresolved among the 195
nations present.
Divisions remained on
“loss and damage”— a
proposed funding system to
help vulnerable countries
cope with the impact on
climate change — and
whether just the West should
pay in or recently developed
nations such as China and
Saudi Arabia as well.
Delegates were still arguing
about whether all fossil fuels
closed in Glasgow, barely any
progress has been made.
Climate scientists say 1.5C is
the most that the world can
be allowed to warm
compared with pre-industrial
temperatures. Yet we are
already at 1.2C and, on
current levels of action, are
heading to 2.4C by the end of
the century.
Has the Cop process, the
bedrock of climate
diplomacy, run its course? It
produced the 2015 Paris
agreement, a historic success,
and the Glasgow climate pact
is also considered an
achievement. But is that the
best we can hope for? Has the
“conference of the parties”,
The conference, attended by
36,000 people, has been
hampered by logistical
problems. One fraught
discussion, where diplomats
were trying to make headway
on loss and damage, was
beset by mosquitoes.
The Egyptian presidency
was criticised for failing to
shepherd delegates towards a
consensus. Many critics
pointed to fossil fuel deals
done at the conference as a
hint of the hosts’ priorities.
Some 631 fossil fuel lobbyists
were in attendance. Egyptian
companies did at least seven
Activists at Sharm el-Sheikh call for nations to keep to gas and oil deals with
their target of holding the rise in global warming to 1.5C international giants,
including Shell and Total.
process is really not fit for
purpose,” he said. “But it’s
the only process we have. We
don’t have a global
government — we have nearly
200 countries represented in
the United Nations. It’s not
majority rule. It’s about
reaching consensus.”
A persuasive defence of the
Cop process is that it is the
only arena where climate-
vulnerable countries get a
seat at the table. “People in
Bangladesh are following day
by day what is happening
here at Cop,” Huq said.
“They care, they are
affected, and they have a
sophisticated understanding
of climate change and the
achieves is consensus on
global goals . . . It’s now about
how you get there.”
Early strides are being
made on green hydrogen,
green steel, green shipping
and green aviation. Climate
progress is being made out in
the real world, just not in the
negotiating rooms at Cop.
For some countries,
however, it is all too little, too
late. Vanuatu, a low-lying
island 1,000 miles east of
Australia, is taking its fight to
the International Court of
Justice, where it seeks a
judgment on the legal
obligation of the richest
nations to protect people
from climate change.

little sleep,” said an onlooker.
“Ten minutes later he was up
and away.”
That was Wednesday, with
several days of negotiation to
go. Kerry was not the only
one feeling the pace. Two
long weeks ago, the night
before official talks were due
to start, a bad-tempered
meeting to set the agenda ran
should be “phased down” or
whether it was just coal that
should be the focus of action.
It was not helped by the
fact that Kerry — always a key
deal maker at these talks —
tested positive for Covid on
Friday night and had to
conduct the final negotiations
by phone.
In the year since Cop26
2.4C
which “Cop” stands for, done But putting these issues negotiations.” Rennier Gadabu, the
its job? Is another model now Rise in global aside, is there a more But he admits Cop cannot climate minister of Nauru,
needed? temperatures by fundamental problem with do everything. This was also in the Pacific, said: “We
Admittedly this is not a the end of the these discussions? meant to be where the have placed our trust in
good year on which to judge century if current This was the 27th UN agreements made in Paris western experts, who have
the process. International measures are climate conference. Professor and Glasgow were enacted. pushed false solutions and
relations have been hit by the unchanged Saleemul Huq, director of the “This process can’t deliver urged us to compromise for
Russian invasion of Ukraine, International Centre for implementation,” Simon the good of the process. It’s
and the cost of living crisis Climate Change and Sharpe, the former deputy hard to conclude that this
meant ministers have had Development in Bangladesh, director of the UK Cop unit, strategy has been anything
one eye on domestic needs. has attended every one. “The said. “The only thing it really but a failure.”

From Mom-in-Chief to self-help

guru, Obama is conquering all
COLDWELL BANKER ; TASOS KATOPODIS/GETTY IMAGES

munications director at Penguin General, Hamlets, London’s poorest borough, in

The first lady‘s new memoir includes career
and parenting tips and will help her sell
out arenas around the world once again
Megan Agnew
Barack Obama walked onto a stage in
Washington in 2018 to an audience of
20,000 people who were going wild.
“This is like when Jay-Z comes out during
the Beyoncé concert,” he quipped. The
crowd hadn’t come to see him; they had
bought tickets to see his wife, Michelle.
The former president was simply her
plus one.
Such is the popularity of the former
first lady of the United States that she sold
out arenas of tens of thousands of people
across America and Europe on her first
book tour — unprecedented for an author
— and managed to get away with calling it
“An Intimate Conversation with Michelle
Obama”. Her new book, The Light We
Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times,
was received with similar fervour last
week. Its initial print run in the US and
Canada was 2.75 million copies.
There are billboards, immersive
events, workshops, podcasts and a ten-
stop theatre tour in the States. A UK book
tour has not yet been announced, but
Penguin will be running an all-day festival
at Waterstones Piccadilly next Sunday
“inspired” by the book, featuring
“immersive self-care activities”, beauty
treatments, coaching sessions and par-
enting advice drop-ins.
Obama, 58, has developed — and main-
tained — idol status. In a world of photo-
calls and press releases, fans believe she
excels at being “real”. Brought up on the
south side of Chicago and educated at
Princeton and Harvard, she is powerful
but familiar, a self-professed “hugger”,
lawyer, policymaker and “mom-in-
chief ”. She was the girl next door who
lived in the White House.
“If you do find someone who can put
into words the magic that is Michelle
Obama,” said her policy director, Kri-
shanti O’Mara Vignarajah, “then call me.”
Obama’s first memoir, Becoming, sold
nearly 17 million copies worldwide — out-
selling her husband’s book, A Promised
Land, as well as any personal account by
a previous first lady or modern president
— and was translated into 50 languages.
She packed out London’s O2 Arena in
2019 and a 30ft mural of her was painted
on the side of a building in Brixton, south
London. Her memoir was used in British
classrooms, with pupils taught her man-
tra: “When they go low, we go high.”
Fans have made T-shirts with slogans
such as “I just want to drink wine and pre-
tend Michelle Obama is president”, and
videos of her dancing have gone viral.
“She often describes herself as an ordi-
nary woman who went on an extraordi-
nary journey,” said Amelia Fairney, com-
Obama’s publisher. “She feels like one of
us, like she’s on your side.” Her books,
said Fairney, are like “being pulled into
one of her famous hugs and given some
great advice in your ear”.
Obama is one of Penguin’s bestselling
authors of all time, and Becoming was the
beneficiary of Penguin General’s biggest
marketing spend to date. The joint book
deal for Michelle and Barack Obama was
worth a reported $65 million.
The Light We Carry is another memoir,
but with an element of self-help, using
examples from her family and profes-
sional life as lessons to help readers
“work through fear, find strength in com-
munity and live with boldness”. There is
practical parenting, career and relation-
ship advice, alongside more abstract
encouragement to “acknowledge our
own light”. It paints her as easily spooked
and anxious.
She writes about hot flashes during
menopause, her daughters mixing terri-
ble martinis (“a little weak”) when she
visited their student digs, and knitting in
lockdown to help with “low-grade”
depression. “As a parent, you are always
fighting your own desperation not to fail
at the job,” she wrote. “Even now, my
husband, the former commander-in-
chief, can’t help but to text cautionary
news stories to our daughters.”
She also writes about the strange social
isolation that comes with political power.
One afternoon, the mother of one of
Sasha’s playdates ends up surrounded by
a heavily armed Secret Service team after
arriving to pick her daughter up from the
White House.
The first lady role can involve great
conflict and confusion because there is
no job description, said Allida Mae Black,
a historian, former adviser to Hillary Clin-
ton and author of The First Ladies of the
United States of America.
“Being the first lady of the United
States is a strange and strangely powerful
sort of non-job,” Obama writes. “It comes
with no salary, no supervisor, and no
employee handbook.”
Obama and her husband served
between 2009 and 2017 with two young
daughters, Malia and Sasha, now 24 and
21. The first lady has her own office and
her own policy areas, and she focused on
childhood obesity, veteran support, an
initiative to propel more young people
into college, and international girls’ edu-
cation through Let Girls Learn.
As part of the government initiative Let
Girls Learn, discontinued under Donald
Michelle Obama speaking on her book tour, where her denim suits have made Trump’s administration, Obama visited
headlines. Top left, a mural of the former first lady in Brixton, south London the Mulberry School for Girls in Tower
2015. Later that year she invited 20 Mul-
berry students to visit Washington and
spend the day with her in the White House.
“I’ve been at probably every powerful
table there is in the world,” Obama said in
a Netflix documentary, “and I’m coming
down from the mountaintop to tell every
young person that is poor and working-
class and has been told regardless of the
colour of your skin that you don’t belong:
‘Don’t listen to them.’ ”
She is the paternal great-great-grand-
daughter of Jim Robinson, born enslaved
in South Carolina, and has previously
acknowledged the strangeness of waking
up every morning “in a house that was
built by slaves”.
What was unique about the Obamas,
beyond their race and background, was
their youth: both were in their forties
when they reached the White House.
After the president’s term in office, she
wouldn’t be “riding off into the sunset”,
O’Mara Vignarajah said. Her policies
were built for longevity.
Many of them have been taken for-
ward by the Obama Foundation, their
non-profit organisation based in Chicago,
which had a total revenue of $161 million
(£135 million) in 2021, with donors includ-
ing Jeff Bezos and the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation. The family also
started a TV and podcast production
company, Higher Ground, which struck
multi-year production deals with Netflix
and Spotify.
Today the couple split their time
between a home in Washington DC (£6.8
million), five minutes from the White
house, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massa-
chusetts, looking out over the Atlantic
(£9.85 million). Their daughters live
together in California: Malia, having grad-
uated from Harvard, is working as a TV
scriptwriter in Hollywood, and Sasha is
studying at the University of Southern
California.
Part-way through her latest book tour,
Michelle Obama is making headlines for
wearing denim suits, her opinions on
Trump’s election victory (“it shook me
profoundly”), the “sparse” information
available for women around the meno-
pause and how she “detests” being asked
whether she would consider running for
president.
She came into the White House “with
her expectations low and then exceeded
them,” wrote the New York Times jour-
nalist Jodi Kantor in her book The
Obamas: A Mission, a Marriage. “[Barack]
had entered on top of the world, and had
been descending to earth ever since.”
@MeganAgnew

Holograms, apps and parkour — working for Matt Hancock was never dull
Jamie Njoku-Goodwin
The public’s relationship with
its elected representatives is a
strange thing. We know their
names and their faces, we
read about their successes
and (more often) their screw-
ups, but we rarely see the
actual person behind the
politician. They are
constantly on guard and they
can rarely say what they
really think.
As health secretary during
the pandemic, Matt Hancock
become one of the most
recognisable faces in public
life. As his special adviser for
almost three years, I had a
unique opportunity to see the
man behind the politician.
The first thing to say about
Matt is that he is relentlessly
positive, no matter how bad
the situation, and is
indiscriminately warm to
people in a way that often
doesn’t translate on TV.
Pre-pandemic, he had a
habit of hugging everyone, so
much so that it was difficult to
gauge whether this person
was a long-lost friend or
someone he had just met.
One of the nice things
about working for Matt was
that, as a former official at the
Bank of England and a former
political adviser himself, he
knew what it was like to do
our jobs. Every week he’d ask
his private office to
recommend someone in the
department who had done
good work, and he’d go to
their desk or do a handwritten
note to thank them.
He is also very forgiving. In
two and a half years working
for him, I was never shouted
at or blamed, even when I
probably deserved it.
During the pandemic one
of my colleagues accidentally
briefed against Matt to a
newspaper in an off-the-
record conversation, where
his words were twisted by a
hostile journalist and
reported as a “friend of Matt”,
saying he might have to
resign. Terrified he was about
to be fired, he fessed up to
Matt, who found the whole
thing hilarious and threw
open his door to tell the office.
Matt has an insane work
ethic. When he started as
health secretary he instituted
a pattern of working hospital
night shifts, so he could see
JAMES GOURLEY/ITV/SHUTTERSTOCK
exactly what it was like on the
front line. He would then
come directly into the office
for a full day of work, with an
almost self-flagellating pride.
After Matt recovered from
Covid, he gave blood. He
smiled at the nurse as she said
he should take it easy for the
next 48 hours, before bouncing
to Downing Street to deliver
the daily press conference. I
stood a few metres from him
as he addressed the nation,
terrified that he would pass
out live on TV. Journalists
tweeted that the pandemic
was clearly taking its toll as he
looked a little pale and
drained. We later found him
conked out in his office.
Matt has a terrible habit of
always saying “yes” to things
I’m A Celebrity’s indignities are publicity for Matt Hancock (and being very relaxed about
photographers being allowed
to film on his first go). His
attempts at parkour will live
long in the memory, and it
was a battle to stop him doing
karaoke at the Conservative
conference. He would always
be willing to go on TV or radio
to defend a policy. Some
people characterise it as
being “media hungry”,
but it goes much deeper
than that: he is someone
who is always trying to find
new ways to engage with
the public.
On my first day as his new
special adviser, I entered the
office to discover that he’d
launched his own app. A few
days later, I found myself
battling to stop him appearing
at conference as a hologram.
He was one of the first cabinet
ministers to properly
embrace TikTok, and a few
months ago he became the
first MP to join the metaverse.
He’s always been keen to try
new things. For him, the
jungle is just another iteration
of that. I know he was
conflicted about whether or
not to go on I’m A Celebrity . . .
Get Me Out Of Here! — but
the opportunity to engage
with 12 million people would
have been too hard to resist.
He’s a very competitive spirit,
but I don’t think he’s there to
win — he genuinely wants to
show what politicians are
really like.
Jamie Njoku-Goodwin was
special adviser to Matt
Hancock between February
2018 and October 2020
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS
East Coast rumble
as young royals vie
to be the worthiest
William and Kate hope to
win back fans on their US
trip this month — but it
will mean putting the
Sussexes in the shade
Roya Nikkhah Royal Editor
“We now have a US problem,” an exas-
perated senior courtier told me in the
aftermath of the Duke and Duchess of
Sussex’s excoriating interview with the
American talk show host Oprah Winfrey
last year.
After 90 minutes of prime-time royal
annihilation, watched by 49 million peo-
ple, the monarchy’s image was seriously
tarnished.
In ten days, a visit to the US by the
Prince and Princess of Wales, viewed in
royal circles as one of the most important
overseas trips for years, aims to get the
House of Windsor firmly back on the
front foot across the pond.
It comes just in the nick of time, with
Harry and Meghan, currently the loudest
royal voices in America, expected to steal
the headlines next month with their
Netflix show, billed by Meghan as a “his-
torical documentary” to “share” their
“love story”. Harry’s “intimate and heart-
felt” memoir Spare, promising “raw,
unflinching honesty”, is published on
January 10. The monarchy is flinching at
the prospect of both.
The couple’s engagements will cover
sport, green tech, vulnerable young
people, climate change and Kate’s inter-
est in the early years. They will attend the
second Earthshot Prize awards cere-
mony in Boston, which will be shown on
December 4 on the American public
broadcaster PBS, Multichoice in Africa
and the BBC.
The spotlight won’t stay on them for
long. Two days later, on December 6, it
will be back on the Sussexes as they
attend the Ripple of Hope gala in New
V2
CHRIS JACKSON/AP
Kate, with William, Harry and Meghan in September, has been advised
to wow America in the dress she wore to the premiere of No Time to Die
York to receive an award for their human-
itarian and philanthropic work.
King Charles moved last week to ele-
vate the Princess Royal and the Earl of
Wessex as counsellors of state, a role his
eldest son already holds, but William and
Kate remain the monarch’s highest-pro-
file asset on the global stage. Their three-
day trip to Boston, Massachusetts, from
November 30, is the first royal visit across
the pond since “that interview” with
Oprah, when Meghan claimed Kate made
her cry and Harry said of William: “The
relationship is space, at the moment.”
The young royals had been dubbed the
“Fab Four” because of their close bond.
The trip will be focused on William’s
annual Earthshot Prize, a decade-long
£10 million project awarding a £1 million
prize annually to green visionaries creat-
ing pioneering solutions to global envi-
ronmental problems. Inspired by Presi-
dent John F Kennedy’s Moonshot project,
this year’s awards will be held on Decem-
ber 2 in Boston, the heartland of Ken-
nedy’s legacy and an opportunity for the
royal family to align itself with America’s
most revered first family.
Those in royal circles know the US trip
is a big opportunity for William and Kate
to sprinkle the stardust many Americans
love and elevate the monarchy above
entertainment news, before another nar-
rative from the alternative Californian
royal court hits headlines again.
A source close to the couple said of
their first visit to the US in eight years:
“They are excited about being back on
American shores, and as their first over-
seas visit since the passing of the Queen,
they appreciate there will be a lot inter-
est, and they welcome that. This is a
huge moment for them as they assume
their new roles.
“When the prince launched
Earthshot, he was very ambi-
tious about the platform it
would achieve, and is really looking for-
ward to going out there and talking about
the urgent optimism around it.”
When it comes to the elephant in the
room — or on the West Coast — royal sour-
ces insist the couple “won’t be distracted
by what others are doing or other activi-
ties that are coming up”.
The largely positive reaction in the US
to Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview,
which drew support even from the White
House, highlighted the transatlantic
divide. The US was then largely pro Team
Sussex, but many in the UK were more
sceptical and there was more questioning
of the couple’s claim of racism within the
royal family, and of mental health strug-
gles being batted away by the institution.
Yet there are signs the US pendulum is
swinging. In Meghan’s interview with
The Cut magazine in August, she sug-
gested she and Harry were forced into
exile because “by existing, we were
upsetting the dynamic of the hierarchy”.
A New York Post front page carried an
image of a pouting Meghan on a mock-up
of a child’s beauty pageant outfit, with
the headline: “Toddler and Tiara.”
In The Washington Post, columnist
Alyssa Rosenberg wrote: “Meghan and
her husband Prince Harry fled one toxic
dynamic in the United Kingdom only to
land themselves in another here . . . the
only way for the Sussexes to build a
truly new life, and have a wider impact
on the causes they care about, is to stop
making themselves the centre of the
story.”
Dr Christine Harlen, a lecturer in
US politics and international political
economy at the University of Leeds,
who is from Massachusetts, says Will-
iam and Kate’s visit to her home state
is especially timely. “The Oprah
interview undoubtedly damaged the
image of the monarchy in the US, but
there is a lot of excitement about
this visit,” she said.
“Their support for and leader-
ship on the environment is seen as
a more progressive aspect of the
royal family. It appeals to the val-
ues of Americans who are left of
the political spectrum and to the
younger generations — people
who are more sensitive and sym-
pathetic to some of the con-
cerns raised by Harry and
Meghan with Oprah. So it
might help neutralise some of
the antagonism and interest
people who are a bit younger
than those who usually follow
the royals.”
That assessment will be
music to courtiers’ ears at
Kensington Palace, where
reaching younger audiences
is top of the agenda.
Last week Kate comforted
families displaced by the conflict
in Ukraine during a visit to the Reading
11
Ukrainian Community Centre, telling a
tearful mother who fled the country with
her three-year-old son: “I wish we could
do more.” The princess is also working
with Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska,
on how to support the mental health of
Ukrainians fleeing the war, after the pair
met at Buckingham Palace in September.
Harlen also thinks the US visit will help
rehabilitate the image of UK plc. “After
Liz Truss and that mini-budget, a lot of
people and media in the US were like
‘What is going on with Britain?’,” she
said. “It got a lot of negative attention. A
royal visit brings a positive message.”
William and Kate were received like
rock stars on their first official royal visit
to the US in 2011, when they visited Cali-
fornia as newlyweds, and were given
another rapturous reception during their
2014 tour to New York and Washington,
where William discussed fatherhood
with President Obama in the Oval Office.
But Tina Brown, the New York-based
former editor of Vanity Fair and the
author of The Palace Papers, thinks they
might need to turn the temperature up a
bit to re-captivate the US. “While Harry
and Meghan have captured the tabloid
imagination here, interest in William and
Kate is low boil,” she said. “I would like to
have seen them hit more cities than Bos-
ton, where sizzle factor is quiescent to
say the least. To win America, I would
recommend a White House dinner, with
Kate hitting the dance floor with [the
actor] Bradley Cooper, as Diana did with
[ John] Travolta, preferably in the dress
Kate wore to the James Bond opening.”
Aides are keen to emphasise the Bos-
ton visit is a “trip, not a tour” and “part of
their more modern approach to states-
manship”, which is about “going into the
heart of communities and promoting the
issues that are close to their hearts, not
just going to the White House”.
Queen Elizabeth’s death and the pitch-
perfect spectacle of the ensuing fortnight
fascinated many Americans and has low-
boil interest simmering once again,
according to Daisy Prince, the founder
and editor of The Digital Party newsletter
in the US.
“People here were riveted by it all,”
she said. “There’s a huge sense of admira-
tion for them, for going through that mar-
athon of grief without putting a foot
wrong. And there’s an extra dignity to
William and Kate’s new titles, which is
seen as a big promotion here, and people
take that seriously. Yes, they’ve had some
family troubles, but it all adds to their
relatability, it’s what makes them so
appealing and keeps everyone engaged.”
Boston is a city famous for its 18th-cen-
tury revolt against British rule, but Prince
believes the royal couple will go down a
storm. “Boston is a city that loves its his-
tory,” she said. “They’ll get a lot of atten-
tion while they’re here.”
@RoyaNikkhah
12

NEWS
EPA/@HORATIOGATES3

The author is turning

the page on August’s
near-fatal knife attack
with a new book and
new wife, and his
sense of humour intact

LIAM KELLY
AND
ELLIE AUSTIN

Although he was 3,500 miles away, Sir

Salman Rushdie was watching.
A camera set up in the Bodleian
Library in Oxford last weekend allowed
the author of The Satanic Verses to tune in
to see other acclaimed writers read his
work, including the first public reading of

Rushdie’s return
an extract from his new novel. Rushdie
was watching from New York three
months after the murder attempt that
cost him the sight in his left eye and use of
his left hand.
The moment was, according to the
novelist Ian McEwan, a “welcome back
into the culture of worldwide literature,
where he truly belongs”. It was McEwan
who read the passage from his long-time
friend’s forthcoming novel, Victory City.
Zadie Smith recited from Midnight’s
Children, which won the Booker
prize in 1981 and two subsequent
“Booker of the Bookers” prizes,
while Sir Philip Pullman opted for a
passage from Two Years Eight Months
and Twenty-Eight Nights.
For them it was not just a chance to
show solidarity with the 75-year-old
writer, who was stabbed in the US
because of a novel he wrote more
than three decades ago. “I think
there’s another function too,” said
McEwan, 74, “which is just to
remind us that Salman is not pri-
marily a victim: he’s primarily a
wonderful writer. Hearing his
work and . . . not just to see him as
some symbol of free speech, but as
a marvellous writer.”
One of Rushdie’s friends said
that despite the injuries he sus-
tained on stage at the event in
upstate New York, “his sense of
humour is still very much intact”.
McEwan said he had “exchanged
emails” with his fellow novelist and
added: “If [his sense of humour is]
intact, I should think everything else
is too.”
Rushdie is being cared for by his
fifth wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, an
American poet 32 years his junior, whom
he married in a small ceremony in the US
last summer. Griffiths, 44, is nursing
Rushdie back to health after his discharge
from hospital. “His new wife is very much
with him and has been providing a huge
amount of support,” said a friend.
A LIFE UNDER THREAT
Before Rushdie was attacked at
the Chautauqua Institution on
August 12, two minutes after
the start of an interview
about how America can be
a haven for persecuted
writers, he appeared to
have put the controversies of
the past behind him.
The publication of The
Satanic Verses in 1988 outraged
some hardline Muslims because
of its depiction of the prophet
Muhammad. Allegations of blas-
phemy led Iran’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a
fatwa, or edict, the following year
exhorting followers of Islam to
assassinate Rushdie, an Indian-
born Briton. The bounty on
Rushdie’s head reached $3 mil-
lion (£2.5 million) and has never
been rescinded. Iranian state TV
denied involvement in the August stab-
bing, but nevertheless celebrated it.
The fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding.
He travelled with heavy security: six
armed minders might accompany him to
large events. “They had guns you could
see them through their suits. They always
travelled with him,” said a senior literary
source. “Salman had a very good ability
to appear and suddenly disappear.”
In recent years, however, Rushdie had
tried to return to a normal life. He
became annoyed when asked about the
fatwa, telling one interviewer: “I really
resist the idea of being dragged back to
that period of time that you insist on
bringing up.” As time passed, security
eased, and in recent years the festivals
that booked Rushdie would only be
visited by a security guard the day before
his appearance to check the venue, with
“cursory” bag searches of guests. “He
worked hard for that,” said a friend.
Asked whether Rushdie was living an
ordinary life before the murder attempt,
his younger sister, Sameen, told The
Sunday Times: “He was, wasn’t he? It is
shocking, actually, really scandalous.”
SAFETY IN AMERICA
Rushdie moved to New York in 2000 after
Iran’s then president, Mohammad Khat-
ami, declared he no longer supported the
author’s killing. Friends say Rushdie felt
safe in America.
Erica Wagner, the former Times liter-
ary editor, who had a drink with Rushdie
about a week before the attack, said “the
question of living as normal life as possi-
ble as a famous person is really not such a
thing in New York city”.
“He was so relaxed . . . [it] was not a
topic that seemed to be in his conscious-
ness. He didn’t like to talk about it at all.”
Eager to live freely again, Rushdie
swiftly became something of a modern-
day Truman Capote, combining literary
celebrity with a dedication to the city’s
high-society social scene. After divorcing
his fourth wife, the model, writer and tel-
evision personality Padma Lakshmi, in
2007, he was romantically linked to a
string of high-profile younger women,
including the actresses Olivia Wilde and
Rosario Dawson.
“Anytime you see him, he is with two
or three beautiful women,” Graydon
Carter, Vanity Fair’s former editor-in-
chief and a friend of Rushdie, once said.
More recently, Rushdie lived freely in the
city, albeit at a slower pace. He went to
New York Yankees baseball games and
was a regular diner at some of the city’s
most famous restaurants, including The
Waverly Inn, a West Village landmark
Salman Rushdie, loved by celebrities and owned by Carter.
with his fifth wife Alongside his writing, Rushdie taught
Rachel Eliza journalism students at New York Univer-
Griffiths, right, sity, where he has been a distinguished
was airlifted to writer in residence since 2015.
hospital after he By 2017, Rushdie had felt removed
was attacked in enough from the danger of the fatwa to
New York state, make light of it in an episode of the HBO
above. Hadi sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry
Matar, left, has David, its creator and star, turns to Rush-
been charged. die for advice after discovering that Iran
Rushdie’s new wants him dead. “There are things that
novel will be you gain,” Rushdie said of the fatwa. “You
published in are a dangerous man. There are very
February beautiful women who like that.” He goes
on to describe “fatwa sex” as “the best
sex there is”.
A MOMENT OF TERROR
Any illusion that Rushdie could live freely
from now on was shattered on August 12
in Chautauqua.
Populated by about 4,000 people for
most of the year, the town comes alive
each summer when the institution, a
non-profit education centre set in a his-
toric, 750-acre gated community,
launches its nine-week summer lecture
series. It regularly hosts persecuted and
exiled writers.
As many as 2,000 people packed in to
hear Rushdie speak and, at 10.45am, he
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
settled into a yellow armchair with his
interviewer and without personal
security. A man dressed in black clothes
and a black mask rushed onto the stage
and appeared to begin beating Rushdie.
Some audience members initially
believed a stunt was taking place, aimed
at illustrating the threat faced by writers
who speak out on contentious subjects.
They quickly realised the truth — and that
Rushdie was being stabbed, not beaten.
Audience members wrestled the
assailant to the ground before a police-
man restrained him. The officer and a
member of the Chautauqua county
sheriff’s office had been present at
the request of the event’s organis-
ers.
The author was flown to hos-
pital and put on a ventilator. The
suspected assailant was arrested
and charged with second-degree
attempted murder and assault.
He pleaded not guilty. That after-
noon, police identified the
alleged attacker as Hadi Matar,
24, from New Jersey, who was
born in America to Lebanese
parents. Matar’s family came
from Yaroun, a village on the
Israeli-Lebanese border that is a
stronghold of Hezbollah, the Ira-
nian-backed militant group.
In the aftermath of the attack,
Matar’s mother, Silvana Fardos,
said in an interview that he had
changed following a month-
long visit to his divorced father in
Lebanon. Previously outgoing and
loving, Matar was suddenly a
“moody introvert” who locked him-
self in
the basement of the house that he
shared with his mother and 14-year-old
twin sisters.
Fardos, who has disowned her son,
also told MailOnline that Matar became
religious while in Lebanon. “One time he
argued with me, asking why I encouraged
him to get an education instead of focus-
ing on religion,” she said. “He was angry
that I didn’t introduce him to Islam from a
young age.” After the stabbing, police
revealed that social media accounts
believed to belong to Matar showed sym-
pathies for Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic
Revolutionary Guard.
During his first week in custody, Matar
gave an interview to the New York Post
from prison, where he is being held with-
out bail until his trial next year.
Dressed in a black-and-white prison
jumpsuit and a white mask, he denied
having any contact with Iran’s Revolu-
tionary Guard before the attack, claiming
he decided to attend Rushdie’s lecture
many months previously after seeing a
tweet about it. He expressed admiration
for the late Khomeini (“I think he’s a great
person”) and explained that while he had
read only a couple of pages of The Satanic
Verses, he had watched videos of Rushdie
on YouTube and found the author to be
“disingenuous”. Matar said he was “sur-
He’s able
prised” that Rushdie had survived.
NEW CHAPTER
to joke Since the attempt on Rushdie’s life, ques-
tions have been raised about his security
about it arrangements. “I was surprised that at
the American incident he was talking
with a about free speech and it had been widely
trailed. I wondered why they didn’t put
smile more security in place,” said the orga-
niser of a literary festival.
Attendees say they were prevented
from taking food and drink into the audi-
torium but there was no screening for
weapons. Since the stabbing, the institu-
tion has implemented “a number of dif-
ferent changes to security protocols —
some visible, some not”.
Rushdie’s friends and family have
closed ranks since the attack, with pre-
cious little information shared with the
outside world in order to protect him.
Rushdie has two sons: Zafar, 43, a pub-
lic relations consultant, and Milan, 23.
“We’re all being really careful about say-
ing anything,” said Sameen. “[He is]
slowly, slowly getting better, [he is] so
brave, so strong.”
Alan Yentob, former creative supremo
at the BBC, who was with Rushdie on the
day the fatwa was issued, said that
he spoke to him regularly. “He’s able to
joke about his condition with a smile
on his face,” he said. “I think partly he
does it to make people close to him think
he’s not sitting there, and a different Sal-
man.”
Victory City, Rushdie’s 13th novel, will
be published in February as planned. It
has elements of magical realism and tells
the story of a “blind poet miracle-worker
and prophetess” who dies aged 247 after
the rise and fall of a great city, Bisnaga, in
southern India. One friend of Rushdie’s
said it was his “best yet”.
In the first chapter, the narrator
describes himself as “neither a scholar
nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns,
and who offers this version for the simple
entertainment and possible edification of
today’s readers”.
Like Rushdie, Victory City’s narrator
has readers from all backgrounds. “The
old and the young, the educated and
the not so educated, those in search of
wisdom, those amused by folly, north-
erners and southerners, followers of
different gods and of no gods, the
broad-minded and the narrow-minded,
men and women and members of the
genders beyond and in between, scions
of the nobility and rank commoners,
good people and rogues, charlatans and
foreigners, humble sages and egotistical
fools.”
They will all hope the real-life Rushdie
is able to write again.
Psychedelic trips
lasting half an
hour set for NHS
Shaun Lintern Health Editor
Scientists are trialling a drug
that could cut psychedelic
trips from more than six
hours to less than 30
minutes, paving the way for
them to be used in NHS
treatments.
The biotech company
Small Pharma has just
finished the dosing stage of a
clinical trial involving up to
42 patients, being run by
Imperial College London. The
business has been given a
fast-track designation by the
UK medicines regulator.
Increasing numbers of
pharmaceutical companies
are developing drugs to give
patients a mind-altering
experience to help treat
depression or other mental
health problems.
While there is promising
evidence that it can help, one
of the biggest barriers to the
adoption of psychedelics for
treatment in the NHS is the
time it can take. In some
cases sessions can last for
between six and eight hours.
Unlike psychedelics such
as psilocybin, which is
derived from mushrooms,
the new compound,
dimethyltryptamine or DMT,
has a much shorter effect. It is
found naturally in the
Amazon jungle, where it is
used to brew a drink used in
shamanic rituals.
Alongside preparation and
talking therapy, a session
using DMT could be over in
about two hours. The
Medicines and Healthcare
products Regulatory Agency
(MHRA), along with NHS
England and the National
Institute for Health and Care
Research, are advising the
company to ensure regulators
are happy with the trial
process, which could mean a
decision to adopt the drug
and use it in the NHS is made
faster than normal.
Patients on the world-first
trial, who have moderate or
13
severe depression, receive an
intravenous dose of the
compound in treatment
rooms with music playing.
After their trip they have
therapy for an hour to discuss
their experience.
Dr David Erritzoe, chief
investigator on the trial and
clinical director of Imperial
College’s Centre for
Psychedelic Research, said he
was optimistic about its
progress. The trial is being
conducted as a blind study
with some patients receiving
a placebo.
Explaining how
psychedelics might help
people with depression, he
said: “Some people will have
a very profound, altered state
of consciousness experience,
even to the extent where we
might call it a mystical type
experience. These drugs
induce a high degree of
psychological flexibility and
also brain plasticity. It allows
for some remodelling and
breaking of very fixed rigid,
unhealthy patterns in your
thinking.”
Nina Kumani, Small
Pharma’s director of
innovation, said the results of
the trial would be announced
within months, with further
trials needed before the drug
could be adopted.
@ShaunLintern
Psychedelic drugs can help
the treatment of depression
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022 2GN 15

NEWS

Kim launches ‘beloved daughter’ onto world stage

KCNA/EPA

Intelligence agencies are The launch on Friday was the latest in

rushing to interpret the
first public appearance
by any of the North
Korean leader’s children
Philip Sherwell Asia Correspondent
At North Korea’s latest missile launch,
Kim Jong-un made public something the
world had never seen: one of his chil-
dren. Pictures released by state media
showed Kim hand in hand with a girl —
unnamed but identified as his “beloved
daughter” — with a ponytail, white puffy
jacket and red shoes.
In one image, father and daughter
walk past a missile on a launch vehicle. In
another, the two look out in profile as the
nuclear-capable Hwasong-17 missile —
North Korea’s longest-range weapon,
which is capable of hitting the American
mainland — streaks into the sky in the
background.
It is the first confirmed occasion when
any of Kim’s children — he is believed to
have three — have been shown in public.
Also pictured was his wife, Ri Sol-ju, in
apparently celebratory mood as the first
family watched the blast-off.
an unusually intense campaign of test
firings by the North Korean regime, amid
warnings from the South and the US that
Pyongyang may be preparing for a
nuclear test. The threatening intent was
clear as leaders from the Asia-Pacific
region, including Kamala Harris, the US
vice-president, and President Xi of
China, met at a regional economic sum-
mit in Bangkok.
With characteristic bravado, Kim
boasted that the launch proved that the
North could defeat American “imperial-
ists”. Now foreign intelligence services
are scrambling to interpret the new twist
provided by the family pictures.
Why did Kim choose to show his
daughter now, and why at a missile
launch?
There could be a message about dynas-
tic control — Kim, who is believed to be
aged 38, is the third generation of his clan
to rule the country since it was founded
by his grandfather in 1948. The decision
may also reflect state propaganda that
Kim is pursuing the country’s weapons
programme for future generations and
that he is the father of the nation as well
as his own family.
“The implication is that Kim is not a
warmonger but a normal dad who cares
about his kids like everyone else,” John
Delury, a professor at South Korea’s
Yonsei University, told Voice of America.
Social media was awash with jokes
about the world’s most depressing “take
your daughter to work” day.
Her appearance has raised questions
about succession planning, not least
because of persistent rumours about
Kim’s health triggered by his lengthy dis-
appearances from public view. He is over-
weight and a heavy smoker.
South Korean intelligence has previ-
ously told MPs and media that Kim is
believed to have three children — a son
born in 2010 and two younger daughters,
thought to be born in 2013 and 2017. They
have not been named or publicly identi-
fied previously.
The only earlier clue about Kim’s off-
spring came from the American former
basketball star Dennis Rodman, who
visited North Korea in 2013 at the invita-
tion of Kim. After his departure he
revealed that he had met Kim’s baby
daughter, who he said was called Ju-ae.
That detail prompted some analysts to
conclude that the girl in the pictures was
Ju-ae. But others thought she looked
older than the nine years that the child
Rodman met would now be. They also
questioned why an older son would not
be unveiled first in the extremely male-
jokes flooded social media about the pictures showing the world’s most depressing “take your daughter to work” day dominated world of North Korea.

Rail pension fund

refusing to fix
fire-risk flats
Harry Yorke and
Martina Lees
The Sharma family are angry
at railway bosses — not
because of the threat of more
train strikes, but because they
hold them responsible for
failing to fix their home.
Viv and his wife Julia live
on the top floor of the nine-
storey Cardinal Lofts tower
block in Ipswich with their
five-year-old son Nico.
On Tuesday night they
were told to evacuate because
of concerns over
“heightened” fire risks
identified after the Grenfell
Tower tragedy that killed 72
people in 2017. The Sharmas
and 14 other families have
been told they are not
allowed back.
Their block is owned by
Grey GR Limited Partnership,
a company ultimately owned
The unions’
pension
fund should
pay up
by the £37 billion railway
pension fund Railpen.
On the board of trustees of
the Railways Pensions Fund,
which oversees the work of
Railpen, sit representatives of
most of the main rail unions,
which until last year included
Mick Lynch, general
secretary of the RMT union.
For two years the residents
of Cardinal Lofts have been
demanding that Grey GR and
Railpen fix their homes.
Nothing has been done. Now
the government is ready to
fight the pension scheme
over its role in the cladding
scandal.
Michael Gove, the housing
secretary, is ordering
Railpen’s subsidiary to fix the
fire safety defects in Cardinal
Lofts and seven other sites in
Birmingham, Manchester,
Liverpool, Leeds,
Bournemouth and Ipswich,
or face court.
For the first time the
government is also taking
legal action under the
Building Safety Act. Gove’s
department is applying for a
court order against Grey GR
to fix problems at the 16-
storey Vista Tower in
Stevenage after it ignored a
21-day ultimatum. If the
company failed to act on a
court order it could be held in
contempt of court, meaning
potential fines and even
prosecutions for its directors.
Gove’s actions are a victory
for The Sunday Times, which
has been campaigning to
make companies that
profited from building flats
that pose a fire risk to cover
the costs of fixing them.
By the time he was sacked
in July, Gove had secured the
pledges of dozens of
developers that committed
them in principle to fixing
life-threatening defects.
Before he was reappointed as
housing secretary last month,
the industry appeared to
backtrack. More than five
years after Grenfell, only 6.3
per cent of 365,000 unsafe
flats in blocks taller than 11m
have been fixed. About
635,000 people are still in
dangerous homes,
government data shows.
Through Grey GR, Railpen
owns dozens of blocks where
fire safety defects have
trapped residents. Residents
of some of these properties
face bills of up to £400,000.
Viv Sharma, 56, said: “It’s
unbelievable how the unions
put everybody on strikes so
their workers can have pay
rises. Yet when they have to
pay out themselves as their
pension fund . . . they’re
failing to do that. People are
being thrown out on the
street because Railpen is not
complying with building
safety regulations.”
A Grey GR spokesman said:
“We are disappointed by the
government’s decision to
move forward with legal
proceedings.” The company,
he said, has started works at
Vista and has received
government requests for
remediation plans at its other
buildings, where “detailed
plans” are in progress.
The RMT said: “The union
is not responsible for any
decisions made by Railpen or
Grey GR. Railpen should take
every step they can to ensure
the residents on all of these
properties are treated safely
and ethically.” Mick Whelan,
of Aslef, said the union would
be raising the issue. The other
unions and Railpen were
approached for comment.

Viv Sharma with

his wife Julia and
their son Nico,
five. The family
were told their
tower block flat
was unsafe and
that they had to
leave
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS
FALKLANDS
ANNIVERSARY
Princess Anne travelled
more than 8,000 miles to
the Falkland Islands to lay a
wreath in the capital, Port
Stanley, marking the 40th
anniversary of the end of
the Falklands War.
The Princess Royal and
her husband, Sir Timothy
Laurence, are visiting the
islands for five days to
mark the victory over
Argentina in 1982. The 74-
day conflict killed 255
British military personnel
and three islanders.
Anne, who last visited
the Falklands in 2016, was
the hardest working
member of the royal family
last year with 387
engagements.
Farmers crack over egg shortage
As supermarkets pin the
crisis on avian flu, angry
producers say the reality
is retailers pay them too
little to keep their hens
Louise Eccles and Jack Clover
Shoppers paused in front of empty
shelves in the egg aisles last week, baffled
by what they saw. In some supermarkets,
not a single box was available.
Sainsbury’s, which pledged two years
ago to sell only free-range British eggs,
has imported Italian barn eggs — a mid-
way point between a free-range egg and
one produced in a cage — as an emer-
gency measure, while others supermar-
kets are rationing them.
Aldi and Lidl allowed customers only
three boxes each at the start of last week,
while Asda imposed a two-box limit. On
Thursday, Ocado introduced a two-box
limit and by Friday, Marks & Spencer had
done the same.
Farmers have predicted shortages will
last several months, including over the
Christmas period, in a country that con-
sumes 37 million British eggs every day.
The UK has the capacity to produce
42 million. How, then, are there not
enough eggs to feed the nation? Super-
markets have blamed the shortage on a
bad outbreak of avian flu. Farmers disa-
gree — strongly. “That is bollocks,” said
Jennifer Turnball, 42, a fifth-generation
farmer who has 32,000 free-range chick-
ens that produce up to 210,000 eggs a
week in Eden Valley, Cumbria. “It is not
due to avian influenza. It is because farm-
ers no longer have enough money to pay
for their chicken feed, the energy bills for
their sheds, to pay for the pullets [young
hens] and higher wages for staff and to
also take on the risk of avian influenza.
So, farmers have not restocked their
hens. It is as simple as that. Production
costs have soared and supermarkets
haven’t covered it, so farmers have
decided it is not worth it.”
The British Free Range Egg Producers
Association (BFREPA) says farmers are
losing 29p per dozen eggs they produce,
forcing many to stop buying pullets until
they are paid enough to cover their costs.
In April, the industry body wrote to
supermarkets to say they were “suffoca-
ting” egg producers with poor pay and
warned there would be an egg shortage
by Christmas. “They didn’t listen,”
Turnball said. She faces a loss this year.
Between January and November,
supermarket egg prices rose by 33p for a
box of 12 large free-range eggs to an aver-
age of £2.67. Over the same period, farm-
ers received a 18p rise for a dozen on aver-
age, according to the consultancy Adas.
DEARER BY THE DOZEN
Farmers sell to egg packers who sell them
Farmers are making a 29p loss
to supermarkets and take a cut.
Egg farmers say they need to be paid
another 29p per dozen to break even,
per 12 eggs at current prices
and 41p to make enough profit to reinvest
Total
in their business and make a profit. At the
moment, they typically receive £1.09 per
cost for dozen, but say they need about £1.38.
farmers to Price Farmers feel little satisfaction about
produce a paid to this “I-told-you-so” moment. Robert
dozen eggs farmers Gooch, chief executive of BFREPA, said:
Loss
£1.38p £1.09p 29p
“I am furious that retailers are hiding
behind bird flu for the shortages. There
were almost two million hens lost last
year to avian flu and yet we had no short-
How the costs are broken down ages. Farmers are not restocking [pullets]
to produce a dozen eggs at the end of their current flock because
Feed 75p
it’s just not viable. They’re losing so much
money doing it.”
Replacement young birds 19p
Retailers suggested that panic-buying
was partly behind the gaps on shelves,
Building and equipment 19p
however, and urged people to shop nor-
mally. Andrew Opie, at the British Retail
Labour 10p
Consortium (BRC), which represents UK
supermarkets, said: “While avian flu has
Other costs 6p
disrupted the supply of some egg ranges,
retailers are experts at managing supply
Electricity 5p
chains and are working hard to minimise
impact on customers.”
Marks & Spencer and Waitrose said
House cleandown 2p they had a good supply but customers
were buying more. Jake Pickering, senior
Veterinary and medication 1p agriculture manager at Waitrose. “Simply
Total adds up to £1.37 due to rounding put, we’ve got better availability of eggs
Source: ADAS for the British Free Range Egg Producers Association thanks to our long-term investment in
TWITTER/@ROYAL FAMILY
LAY YOUR OWN
One way to avoid egg shortages is to
house your own hens. Fresh Start for
Hens, which rehomes barn and
caged hens from commercial farms,
received 52,000 requests between
March and August 2020, fuelled by a
shortage of eggs in the pandemic.
Lucy Ray, 42, a photographer,
collected four hens from Sheffield
council’s Graves Park Animal Farm in
2019, in return for a donation. Each
hen produced up to six eggs a week
during the spring. She said: “The
eggs tasted better than any shop-
bought ones and the yolks were so
yellow and flavoursome.”
Chickens need a warm, dry and
well-ventilated shelter and an
outdoor run, the RSPCA says.
farmers.” M&S said it had “provided addi-
tional support, including for animal feed,
to help suppliers manage rising costs” for
its own-brand eggs.
Sainsbury’s said: “We are doing all we
can to support our packers and produc-
ers as they work with farmers. This sup-
port includes increasing the amount we
pay for the eggs we buy.”
@Louise_Eccles
17
Boxing in
Saudi ‘is
all about
the cash’
Liam Kelly
Arts Correspondent
The sports promoter Barry
Hearn has defended
organising boxing matches in
Saudi Arabia because it helps
clients such as Anthony
Joshua to “maximise their
financial returns”, and
accused critics of “hypocrisy”
because Britain sells arms to
the Gulf state.
Hearn, 74, promotes the
heavyweight, and has
organised two fights in Saudi
Arabia, most recently in
August against the Ukrainian
Oleksandr Usyk. That clash,
which Joshua, 33, lost in a
split points decision, had a
purse of $77 million
(£64.7 million) from its
sovereign wealth fund.
When asked on Desert
Island Discs, to be broadcast
today on BBC Radio 4,
whether he had any qualms ,
Hearn replied: “We are
representing our clients and
our job is to maximise their
financial returns. Take
Anthony Joshua in Saudi
Arabia as an example. That
means my client will earn
three times what he would
earn normally.”
The Saudi regime has been
accused of “sportswashing”
its reputation in recent years
by investing in boxing, golf,
football and wrestling. Critics
say such moves are part of an
effort to distract from its
human rights record. Other
Gulf states, including Qatar,
the World Cup host, have also
been accused of the practice.
Lauren Laverne, the
presenter, pressed Hearn on
how he justified dealing with
a repressive regime. “I
compartmentalise it,” he
said. “At the moment the
hypocrisy that’s involved
with, for example, Saudi
when our government [is]
selling them arms.”
Hearn started his career as
an accountant. He convinced
his bosses to buy high street
billiard halls in the 1970s and
moved into snooker full-time.
He has since become one of
the biggest names in sport,
promoting boxing and darts.
 The Sunday Times November 20, 2022 2GN 19

NEWS

Police joked about FLYING COLOURS

ANDREW HASSON

Savile and ‘sex

pests’ in the force
Fresh messages found on league. “Not long before he finished, he
had to deal with a woman making a com-
about men assaulting women at railway
stations to a serving officer, with the cap-
a dead officer’s phone plaint [about] a police motorcyclist giv- tion: “Seen [name of officer] recently?”
ing the bird sign when she pulled out. A retired officer saying of a female offi-
may trigger a national “Of course, it was treated with the cer: “I actually got her to lift her skirt in
inquiry into the toxic utmost of professionalism and assurance Cardiff once.”
the matter would be dealt with accord- Two retired officers exchanging a
culture at Gwent police ingly. Little did she know, he was the number of leaked nude images of the US
bloody biker! Lol what a star!” Jones was footballer Hope Solo.
David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman still a serving officer at the time of the Jones, 52, jumped to his death from the
alleged 2016 complaint. Prince of Wales Bridge spanning the Sev-
Veteran police officers joked about send- Gwent police sources say the com- ern in January 2020. His body was found
ing Jimmy Savile to rescue Thai school- plaint cannot be matched to official the same morning. He left a wife and A paraglider prepares to take to the skies in perfect conditions over Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs near Brighton
boys trapped in a cave and swapped nude records, but would form part of an inde- three daughters, whom he had subjected
pictures of a female footballer, a dead pendent inquiry by Wiltshire police. to domestic abuse. After his death, his
officer’s phone has revealed. Other messages include: eldest daughter, Emma, looked through
A Sunday Times investigation last
week revealed how messages found on
Ricky Jones’s iPhone exposed a toxic cul-
Jokes between a serving and retired
officer about Savile, the sexual predator
and BBC DJ who died in 2011, being sent
his iPhone to gain some insight into her
father’s cruelty — and exposed one of the
most toxic police cultures in the UK.
Men’s anti-violence White Ribbon
ture of corruption, racism, homophobia
in Gwent police force. The Welsh govern-
ment said it was considering the call for a
to rescue 12 schoolboys, trapped in caves
in Thailand in 2018. One was a picture of
Savile with the quote “12 Thai school boys
The Welsh government has no jurisdic-
tion over policing, which is the responsi-
bility of the UK Home Office. Home Office
Day marches into controversy
national inquiry. Nazir Afzal, a former need rescuing? You need . . .” sources said it had not contacted Gwent
chief crown prosecutor, offered to lead it, Videos sent by a serving officer of a police because it was a matter for the
saying the public’s confidence in the woman stripping and inserting objects force and Wiltshire. Rosamund Urwin campaign’s UK arm, said: born out of a feminist day of of high-profile court cases
police had been “rocked”. into herself as part of a “magic show”. Last week, Gwent’s chief constable, “White Ribbon Day enables protest in memory of three involving violence against
Other secrets held on the iPhone One former officer saying of Gwent Pam Kelly, called the messages “vile” and On December 6, 1989, Marc us to give focus to what must sisters, the political activists women in the UK.
include the claim that a Gwent police police: “When you look at the sex pests, not representative of the force. She has Lépine, who hated feminism, be said all year round: that we Patria, Maria Teresa and On Friday, Jordan
motorcyclist who stuck up a middle fin- drink drivers and wife beaters still sitting met Gwent’s police and crime commis- shot dead 14 female students need all men to know they Minerva Mirabal, who were McSweeney, 29, admitted
ger at a female driver in south Wales was cosy up there its wrong”. sioner, Jeff Cuthbert, and politicians from at the École Polytechnique in can bring about the change murdered in the Dominican murdering a law graduate,
allowed to investigate the complaint him- Officers saying a colleague carried a Cardiff Bay and Westminster. Montreal. needed to end violence Republic in 1960. Zara Aleena, 35, in east
self. “He [the motorcyclist officer] made “sex kit” in the boot of his car. Cuthbert claimed in an interview last A group of men created the against women.” “That was honouring London in the summer. Also
The Sunday Times November 13, 2022 11
me laugh,” Jones wrote to a former col- A retired officer sending a news article week that “I’ve got absolutely no doubt White Ribbon Day in Jess Phillips, the shadow women of colour, so we’ve on Friday, an inquest found
ILLUSTRATION: JULIAN OSBALDSTONE AND PETE BAKER that overall, the culture within Gwent is response, with the ribbon minister for domestic got a bunch of white that police failings had

e
The messages good.” He claimed most of the cases high- symbolising “the idea of men violence and safeguarding, Canadian men stealing the contributed to the deaths of
were
These are found on lighted were “historic in nature”. This is giving up their arms”. It is said: “I think the idea of it day, and erasing an event Raneem Oudeh, 22, and her
industrial
the
levels phone of
of abuse despite The Sunday Times’s exposure of now active in more than 60 being men standing up connected to Hispanic mother, Khaola Saleem, 49,
Ricky Jones, who a WhatsApp group of eight serving and countries, and will be marked against men’s violence women,” said Karen Ingala- who were murdered in 2018
killed himself in retired officers in which homophobic again on Friday. against women is having its Smith, the chief executive of by Oudeh’s abusive estranged
2020, leaving and racist messages were rife. The aim is to engage men moment since Sarah the domestic violence husband, Janbaz Tarin, 25.
behind a wife and A Home Office spokesman said: in the fight to end male Everard’s murder. Women charity, Nia. “It’s good to get A day earlier, Andrew
conduct towards them during the proc-
ess of gathering evidence for Jones’s
inquest.
Sharon claims she was told by an offi-

On one occasion as a probationer, she
was taken into a room by a sergeant, who
shut all the blinds. He asked her what she
did in her spare time, and she said she
was a musician. “You must like perform-
ing then . . . have you ever given a ser-
geant a blow job?” he asked her. She
refused and left the room. He later told
her: “Are you sure about that blow job?
Because I’ve got a van here, with a mat-
tress in the back.”
She said misogyny and sexual harass-
ment were rife in Gwent. “It goes through
the force, the boys think it’s all right to
slap your arse as you’re walking around,”
she said. “It’s the norm within that place,
‘Oh it’s just banter, it’s just having fun.’ ”
On one occasion, she said, male offi-
cers taped her phone to the ceiling, tell-
ing her: “We’re gonna watch your arse
when you climb on the table.”
She said: “They were just wholly inap-
propriate. They stuck loads of naked
women to the inside of my locker.”
In another case, ex-Gwent officer
Rachel, who The Sunday Times con-
tacted with the help of another officer,
said that women who spoke out against
senior officers were “dismissed to keep
them quiet”.
“It left me suicidal,” she said. “I was
pretty much bankrupt, I was left home-
less and sofa-surfing with my child. I lost
my car, I lost everything. It’s like an old
school boys’ club. They keep everything
in-house. It’s just quite toxic, and it’s a
small force, so they manage to hide
things really well.”
When she put in a formal complaint
about a colleague, she was told by a sen-
ior officer: “You’re an attractive woman,
you know that you can get what you
want, if you use that.”
DATA BREACHES
AND HOMOPHOBIA
Sensitive information
about misconduct and
corruption investiga-
tions was regularly
exchanged between
Jones and a number of
officers. In October 2017
an officer also shared
footage of an arrest, which
may be considered by the
force to be the improper dis-
closure of information and a
data security breach.
A Gwent traffic cop — Officer E —
sent Jones the dashcam footage of a
car chase, which ended in a driver stop-
ping the car, getting out the door and run-
ning down a dark street in Chepstow.
Two officers could be seen chasing after
him in uniform and hi-vis jacket, then the
officers appear to accidentally trip each
other up during the arrest of the suspect.
The location, date and time of the inci-
dent can be seen on the video. “FFS What
a pair of plonkers!! Chuckle brothers,”
Jones wrote about his former colleagues,
after receiving the video. By then, he had
retired from Gwent police force.
Officer E replied: “Haha I know, it’s
like You’ve Been Framed isn’t it!!”
Officer E also sends a number of
misogynistic messages about women. He
sends a screenshot of an online dating
application that reads: “Your application
to join our match-making service has
been rejected. You failed question 14.
‘What do you like most in a woman?’ ‘My
dick’ was not an acceptable answer.”
He also sends a photoshopped image
of Theresa May on the front bench of the
Commons carrying out a sex act on Philip
Hammond, and an image of a white man
and a white woman holding a black baby
with the caption: “You need to start ask-
ing questions, Dave.”
Jones was in a WhatsApp group made
up of eight serving and retired officers,
initially set up to organise a “lads’ trip” to
Europe.
Officers A, C and E were part of the
group. Chats feature homophobic and
racist “banter” between its members. At
one point Officer C mentioned having
problems with his WhatsApp.
Officer A responded: “Overloaded
your computer with gay porn did you
mate?”
Officer C wrote back: “I don’t know
why you keep sending it to me. I told you
I’m not into all that.”
Officer A then sent him a clip of Mr
Chow — an Asian character from the
movie The Hangover — waving at the
camera saying: “So long, gay boys.”
Officer C then posted an image of a
naked man bent over in a garden.
In the same group, officers call each
other “poofs” and “PC closet”. Another
group member used the word “slopes” to
describe Asian people.
THE SECRET LIFE OF
RICKY JONES
Jones’s funeral took place at St Cadoc’s
Church in Trevethin in February 2020.
“Being married to him was like being
Ricky Jones
served in Gwent
for 26 years
before his
suicide in 2020
trapped inside a living hell,” said his wife,
Sharon, 55, who worked as a ward nurse
in the NHS.
His father was Lewis Jones, once dep-
uty Labour leader of Torfaen council,
and his family had close ties to the politi-
cal establishment in southeast Wales.
The funeral was attended by Nick Thom-
as-Symonds , now the shadow secretary
of state for international trade; Lynne
Neagle, now the deputy minister for
mental health and wellbeing in the Welsh
parliament; and Pam Kelly, chief consta-
ble of Gwent police.
Jones knew where many of Gwent
police’s skeletons were buried, but it
wasn’t until his death that his own began
to emerge.
He met his future wife, Sharon, in the
Horse and Jockey pub in Pontypool in
1987, aged 19. As a young man, Jones had
a tendency to bully and control those
around him, his family said. He was once
found by the police near cliffs around
Cardiff, having had suicidal thoughts.
The pair married in 1992, and bought a
large detached house in a quiet village
tucked into the Welsh valleys. They had
three daughters.
But Jones’s mental state was deterio-
rating, making his need to control and
bully even worse, his family said. He
developed a disturbing obsession that he
was allergic to his middle child, who suf-
fered from eczema.
“He said to her that she couldn’t go
near him because he was allergic to her
hair and was concerned about her skin
particles in the air and on the furniture,”
Sharon said.
“He had an obsession with hygiene
and cleanliness, and the idea that me and
the children were somehow dirty.
“He said his children stank. He said
their breath was smelly and we were all
overweight. He once told one of my
daughters he was going to charge her per
slice of bread from the loaf.”
Sharon and the children would have to
vacuum the house from top to bottom
three times a day to keep him happy. He
would demand his children use only
“two pieces” of lavatory paper, and
when the children were younger he
would make them live in one room, to
keep the rest of the house clean.
Breaking those rules would mean
verbal abuse, but he was never physi-
cal. “Looking back, I think he probably
did have an OCD mental health prob-
lem,” said his eldest daughter Emma, 28.
Jones worked in police stations in
Abertillery town and Newport central, in
armed response and finally as a traffic
cop. He was a trained tutor constable, a
road death scene manager and anti-ter-
rorism search officer. The couple became
estranged — his wife slept on the sofa for
15 years while Jones had the bedroom.
But not once did she suspect him of
cheating.
“He used to say, ‘I’m an honourable
person, and you’re a bad person’,” she
said. “He would say that on a daily basis.
It was nasty and malicious, and after
many years I started to believe him. He
would get all dolled up in his aftershave
and say he was going out with his mates
in Cardiff. I believed him.”
But Emma’s detective work on her
father’s phone uncovered evidence of at
least two extramarital affairs and a num-
ber of flirtations.
One lasted eight years, ending six
months before his death, with Jones
threatening the woman, a mother of two.
“You see in times of negativity, many
men would do what they could to hurt in
search of vengeance!! As you know, I am
not like that,” he wrote in October 2019.
He made a list of items he had bought
her, saying he wanted them back, valuing
them at £9,000. This included a £50
steam iron, an £8 Cure CD, a £45 electric
neck massager and a £60 pair of welling-
ton boots.
Emma also found her father had been
secretly recording rows with her mother:
he had 365 arguments on his mobile
phone.
Emma noticed the recordings usually
started halfway through the argument.
“Looking back, I can see he would wind
mum up, leave the room, then come in
and start talking to her in a calm sort of
voice,” Emma said. “By then, mam was so
wound up and shouting. He was record-
ing it to make it sound as if mam was the
abuser. But it was the other way around.
He was clever like that.”
Also on the phone were dozens of pic-
tures Jones had taken of his youngest
daughter’s bedroom to show how dirty
she was. When she was 14 he would take
images of her used sanitary products and
send them to one of his secret girlfriends.
This still affects his daughter emotion-
ally, as his children were constantly
made to feel “dirty”.
Sharon believes the recordings and
the photographs were all part of a plan to
humiliate her. “His final words to me the
night he walked out of the house and
jumped off the bridge were, ‘I’m going to
publicly humiliate you’,” Sharon said.
“And you know what? That’s exactly what
he did.”
‘GROOMING THE POLICE’
Sharon last saw Jones on Sunday, January
5, 2020. At 3pm they had a row about tak-
ing down the Christmas decorations and
he walked out of the house.
Jones had made preparations. As a
police officer, he knew the inquest proc-
ess, and the family believe he made
efforts to distribute malicious evidence
about his wife around the community.
They believe he told their GP she had
“anger issues”, knowing the doctor
might be called as an inquest witness. He
emailed secret recordings of his rows
with Sharon to a relative.
He spread the word among colleagues
and neighbours that Sharon was an alco-
holic.
His daughters, aged 28, 26 and 18, say
this was completely false.
Jones, they say, was the abuser and an
arch-manipulator. This is backed up by
evidence on the phone. He joked with
friends about murdering Sharon with
“shovel hands”. He complained about
her not working enough shifts at the hos-
pital — largely because he needed £800
per month handouts from her to fund his
affairs.
Phone messages show how him calling
Sharon “a f***ing bitch” and “a drunken
witch” — portraying her as an evil mother
who had “brainwashed” their children.
Sharon considered going to the police
about the domestic abuse she suffered.
“But who do you go to? He was the police.
I felt like there was no one who would lis-
ten.”
There is evidence on the phone that
Jones had already made preparations for
a police complaint. “Going to the police
was an ordeal,” he messaged one friend
in 2018. “It had to be done to protect
myself, as I can assure you that the law
will always look initially on the side of the
female.”
Despite being retired, he told a friend
he would be able to access the internal
police systems to check if any family
members had complained about him. His
family describe this process as “groom-
ing the police”.
They have also made a complaint to
the Independent Office for Police Con-
duct (IOPC) about the police’s alleged
three daughters
cer she was going to be taken to a police
station under caution to provide a state-
ment for her husband’s inquest due to
“Police forces must root out officers and violence against women and have done all that they men to say that men’s Burfield, 51, was jailed for 32
whom he had
her supposed lack of co-operation. This
was despite never having been asked for
one, she said.
staff who do not meet acceptable stan- girls, and the charity has long possibly can to campaign on violence against women is a years for the murder of his
subjected to
The IOPC has referred the complaint
back to Gwent police, who in turn have
handed it to Wiltshire police. dards of behaviour.” linked its campaign with this for years. It’s time for problem, but I just think they ex-girlfriend Katie Kenyon,
domestic
HEARINGS HELD IN PRIVATE abuse
Last month two senior Gwent police offi-
Gwent police said: “It would not be sport. Domestic violence men to step up.” could have picked another 33. Burfield had claimed that
cers — Chief Superintendent Marc Bud-
den and Chief Inspector Paul Staniforth —
were sacked, and Chief Superintendent
appropriate to provide any further detail rises during football It is not without day, like December 6.” Sully he had accidentally killed
Mark Warrender retired before the out-
come of a disciplinary hearing.
The men were accused of having an
“inappropriate conversation” with a
around the scope of the inquiry led by tournaments, and the White controversy, however. It responded: “It’s really Kenyon when throwing an
more junior member of police staff, and
Warrender was accused of “inappropri-
ate touching”.
Wiltshire police. However, it will include Ribbon Campaign said that coincides with the UN important that it’s not about axe in the Forest of Bowland,
all material from the devices currently in this was a chance “to turn International Day for the men taking over, but about Lancashire, before burying
Despite the public interest in reporting
such a case, the hearing against the three
men was held in private.
Last year PC Paul Chadwick, 51, was
jailed for having inappropriate relation-
ships with two women he met during the
course of his duties. Gwent police’s most
their possession.” around this narrative”. Elimination of Violence men taking responsibility.” her body in a grave he had
recent inspection report by HMICFRS
found it “requires improvement” in the
way it treated its workforce and the pub-
@DavidCollinsST Anthea Sully, who runs the against Women, which was There have been a number dug the day before.
lic.
One female officer said the problem
was that “everyone knows everyone” in
southeast Wales.
In at least one case, a woman who was
pushed out of Gwent police after report-
ing senior officers won a payment from
the force, but was made to sign a non-dis-
closure agreement preventing her from
speaking out.
“Let me be abundantly clear, these
alleged incidents of misogyny, racism
and misconduct within Gwent police are
truly despicable and disgusting,” Natasha
Asghar, Senedd member for South Wales
East, said.
“Every appalling incident we hear of
causes irreparable damage to the public’s
trust and confidence in our police for-
ces.”
Who’ll they believe? TRUTH AT LAST
Me, with years of Jones’s family have made arrangements
to hand over his phone to Wiltshire
service, or you? police and have asked them to investigate
the messages found between Jones and
the serving and retired officers, as well as
Clarke Joslyn “threatened a how the family were treated by Gwent fol-
female officer with a knife” lowing his death.
The investigation will be handled by
the professional standards department.
Nazir Afzal, the former chief crown
prosecutor for the northwest of England,
has been supporting Jones’s family, and
has serious concerns about Gwent police.
“These are industrial levels of abuse,
racism and potential corruption,” he
said. “Given how this came to light by
complete chance, clearly this leaves us
with a terrible thought that this is preva-
lent everywhere. There needs to be a
public inquiry into police culture nation-
ally — it requires a wholesale root and
branch approach.”
For Sharon and her three daughters,
their view of the police has changed for
ever. They say the contents of Jones’s
phone have made them afraid of the
police. Sharon is concerned about the
many more women around the UK being
abused in a relationship by a police offi-
cer. “Where do these women go to be
heard?” she asked.
Last week, Pam Kelly, Gwent chief
We call it the boys’ constable, said that Wiltshire Police was
conducting an independent investiga-
club — it’s like a tion on behalf of Gwent police, which
mob mentality includes the content of a mobile phone
and a tablet.
“The content we have been made
aware of is abhorrent and any officers
identified by the investigation as having
breached either professional standards
or the criminal threshold will be held
accountable,” said Kelly. “The content
shared with us paints a picture of a toxic
culture which does not represent the
majority of our service.” She said in the
past three years the force had worked
hard to make sure that colleagues were
clear about the high standard of profes-
sional behaviour required.
“We have also made it clear that those
who do not uphold these standards have
no place in Gwent police — or in policing.”
She said the force was committed to pur-
suing those who “let us all down” and
was an “anti-racist service”. She pointed
to the recent dismissal of three senior
officers as evidence of the force’s com-
mitment to “hold accountable those who
let us all down.”
Wiltshire Police said it could not com-
Marriage to him was ment on what was an “ongoing” investi-
gation.
like being trapped The names of Ricky Jones’s family
members and female police officers
in a living hell have been changed
@DavidCollinsST
www.crowdjustice.com/case/victims-
challenge-gwent-police/
Editorial, page 24
20

NEWS INVESTIGATION

A slick ploy to keep

pumping Putin’s oil
Russian fuel has flowed into the UK despite the Ukraine war, but a loophole meant not a barrel was declared, writes Laith Al-Khalaf
As Vladimir Putin’s army bombarded Kwarteng on August 24 and repeated in a servative Party leader, said he aimed to countries. “This is how oil works all over and shipping analyst at the shipping jour- and also the global positioning sensors
Ukrainian soldiers trapped in the Azov- parliamentary debate. raise in the Commons the matter of how the world,” said Viktor Katona, senior nal Lloyd’s List, said: “Ship-to-ship trans- that give its location.
stal steelworks in May, the tanker Mari- However, HMRC data shows that Brit- Russian imports were recorded. crude analyst at Kpler, a commodities fers have become a really useful method Since March, Refinitiv data shows
ner III pulled out of the south Russian ish ports accepted more than £78 million “It is time this obvious loophole was analytics firm. “There’s no way to track it to obfuscate the destination and the ori- there have been 267 likely ship-to-ship
port of Tuapse carrying nearly 200,000 of Russian oil in June. These were shut down,” he said. “Who can tell how back once it’s already in the storage tank gin of the cargo. The Iranians started it transfers around the world involving Rus-
barrels of oil. reported as imports from the Nether- much oil has made its way into the mar- and has commingled.” [when they were under sanctions], the sian oil. About a third were in the waters
After five days at sea, the 170m (558ft) lands, Estonia, Poland or Belgium. A fur- ket, mislabelled and thus avoiding . . . Marine analysts say ship-to-ship trans- Venezuelans perfected it, the Russians off Kalamata. One took place off South-
ship stopped alongside a bigger tanker, ther £1.5 million of Russian oil arrived at sanctions [against Russia]? The govern- fers, which are used to help vessels that picked it up and ran with it.” wold, Suffolk. More may have taken place
the Greek-owned Marinoula, in the UK ports in July and was logged as ment should act to end these practices are too big to dock in ports to offload their Analysts Refinitiv monitors ship-to- but shipping experts say many vessels
waters off Kalamata, Greece. Over the imports from France, the Netherlands, once and for all.” cargo, are becoming more common since ship transfers by assessing the draught of may be turning off their global-position-
next 36 hours, the two vessels were con- Germany and Latvia. Oil shipped from one country is often the war in Ukraine began. a vessel — how low it sits in the water and ing trackers to avoid detection.
nected by large rubber pipes while the Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Con- blended and stored with oil from other Michelle Wiese Bockmann, energy therefore how much cargo it is carrying — The Marinoula’s route was arranged
Marinoula siphoned off some of the Mari-
ner’s cargo. After the ship-to-ship trans-
fer, the Marinoula sailed to the UK, where
it docked at Immingham in Lincolnshire
and, on June 6, offloaded about 250,000
barrels of oil.
Official records, however, declare that
the UK received no oil from Russia in June
or in July. The shipment was classified
and reported correctly under British
reporting protocols and there was no
breach of maritime rules.
The fuel was one of at least 39 cargos of
Russian oil, worth more than £200 mil-
lion, to have arrived at British ports since
the invasion of Ukraine but to have been
classified as imports from elsewhere.
Almost £80 million of this was in June and
July. In total, £778 million of Russian oil
has arrived at ten UK ports since March,
according to UK trade statistics.
One arrived last week. On Wednesday,
the 244m Delta Pioneer docked at
Immingham, carrying oil directly from
Russia. According to Refinitiv data ana-
lysed by Global Witness, a research
group, the vessel brought half a million
barrels of fuel to the port. It is not yet
known how the fuel will be classified.
Official records show that Russian oil
worth about £23 million that has arrived
at Immingham since March has been
recorded as imports from Germany, the
Netherlands and Belgium.
The Sunday Times has tracked four
vessels that have carried more than a mil-
lion barrels of Russian oil to Immingham.
Two of the cargos involved ship-to-
ship transfers, while a third brought Rus-

£778m of oil
has arrived at
ten UK ports
since March
sian oil from Rotterdam. At least 13 ship-
ments, including the Marinoula’s, arrived
in June and July.
The east London port of Thamesport
has received £130 million of oil from Rus-
sia since March. These were classified as
imports from Poland, Belgium and the
Netherlands.
On March 8, Boris Johnson, then the
prime minister, announced a plan to
phase out imports of Russian oil. The fol-
lowing day in a debate in the Commons,
Kwasi Kwarteng, then the business secre-
tary, said the UK “must end its depend-
ency on all Russian hydrocarbons”, add-
ing that the UK was joining allies in
halting the import of Russian oil.
“Our trade, financial and personal
sanctions are having an effect on the Rus-
sian economy,” Kwarteng said. “The Brit-
ish government has sent a clear message
to Putin’s regime and to those who sup-
port him in his war against Ukraine.”
The import of Russian oil to the UK is
legal until December 5, when all imports
will be barred. Until then, there is a repu-
tational risk to countries and companies
that are seen importing Russian oil.
However, maritime experts say the
way the UK registers imports, as well as
the increased use of ship-to-ship trans-
fers, will make it difficult for the UK to
sanction Russian oil.
When they pull into port, ships have to
provide the country of origin of their
cargo — in the case of oil, where it is
refined. Figures on oil imports are com-
piled by the Office for National Statistics
(ONS) and HM Revenue & Customs.
HMRC registers the value of a shipment,
the country from which it was dispatched
and its country of origin.
This information is collated by the
ONS. However, it is the country of dis-
patch that is used to measure the nation-
ality of an import, not the country where
it was produced. This means a cargo of
Chinese-made goods could be registered
as being from Germany if it were
imported to the UK by a German firm.
Eurostat, which produces trade statis-
tics for EU countries, instead classifies
imports according to country of origin.
The ONS reported that the UK
imported no oil from Russia in June. A
Commons research paper, used to brief
MPs, said there were no Russian oil
imports in June or July.
The same statistic was tweeted by
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
by the Singapore-based commodities
trading firm Trafigura, which said it had
been transparent about the country of
origin of the oil and was honouring a con-
tract agreed before the invasion of
Ukraine. A spokesman added: “Trafigura
complies with all applicable sanctions.”
The owners of the Marinoula, Eastern
Mediterranean Maritime, said it “fully
respects and complies with any sanctions
imposed by the European Union and the
United Kingdom” and is “committed in
assisting European energy importers in
their effort to safeguard energy suffi-
ciency and, in turn, lower energy prices
PPN
for the European consumers”. The
owner of Mariner III could not be reached
for comment.
A second tanker, the Elli, set off from
Novorossiysk as the first Russian bombs
hit Ukraine. On March 18, it undertook a
ship-to-ship transfer just off the north
coast of Morocco with a second ship, Ice
Point, which then travelled to Imming-
ham and discharged a quarter of a million
barrels of oil. Neither vessel’s owners
replied to requests for comment.
A third ship, the Minerva Sophia,
arrived in Immingham on July 12 carrying
sulphur-rich oil refined in Kirishi, north-
west Russia. Worth nearly £400,000, it
was assigned as imports from either Ger-
many or the Netherlands. It is not known
who imported the oil, but the cargo was
bought and sold in Rotterdam by Gunvor,
a giant commodity trading company.
Gunvor said it was not responsible for
reporting to the authorities. A spokes-
man added: “Gunvor is fully compliant
with applicable reporting requirements
and documentation for the products it
trades. Gunvor further fully adheres to all
applicable international economic sanc-
tions with respect to Russia.”
The owners of the Minerva did not
ILLUSTRATION: TONY BELL
respond to requests for comment. A Brit-
ish government spokesman said: “In light
of Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and
weaponisation of energy, the govern-
ment is taking steps to phase out Russian
oil by the end of the year, and imports of
Russian liquid natural gas as soon as pos-
sible thereafter. “
The spokesman for Associated British
Ports, which represents Immingham,
said it had done nothing that contra-
vened government sanctions.
The owners of Delta Pioneer, Delta
Tankers, did not respond to a request for
comment.
Calls for police to face
charges over ‘George
Floyd of Scotland’
Marcello Mega
There is “overwhelming
evidence” to justify criminal
charges against police after
the death in 2015 of a man
who has come to be known as
Scotland’s George Floyd, his
family’s solicitor said.
Sheku Bayoh, 31, a trainee
gas engineer who lived in
Kirkcaldy, Fife, and had two
young sons, died after being
restrained by officers five
years before the death of
Floyd in the US in similar
circumstances made
headlines and led to protests
worldwide. Within a year,
Floyd’s family had been
awarded compensation of
$27 million and a Minneapolis
police officer, Derek Chauvin,
convicted of his murder.
There has been neither
compensation nor a
conviction in the case of
Bayoh, who fled to Britain
from Sierra Leone in 1995 as
an unaccompanied child to
escape a civil war. His death
raised concerns about
possible institutional racism in
Scotland’s single police force.
Officers restrained Bayoh in
the street after receiving calls
about a man behaving
unusually. He was held face-
down by officers who used CS
spray, batons, leg and ankle
restraints and handcuffs.
Bayoh was pronounced
dead 90 minutes later. A
post-mortem examination
revealed facial injuries,
21
A second
tanker set off
just as bombs
hit Ukraine
bruises and a fractured rib.
Dorothy Bain KC, who
represented the family,
challenged the decision of
James Wolffe KC, then the
lord advocate, not to file
charges in connection with
Bayoh’s death. The family’s
solicitor, Aamer Anwar, said a
document responding to
Wolffe, on which he and Bain
had worked in 2019, backed
calls for Police Scotland to be
charged with corporate killing
and culpable homicide. It
also proposed charges of
assault and attempting to
pervert the course of justice.
Bain, who no longer
represents the family, having
become lord advocate last
year, will not make the
decision on criminal charges
when the public inquiry,
which started this year, ends.
Anwar said: “The solicitor-
general will make the calls,
but it is hard to see how she
can dismiss the conclusions
drawn by Scotland’s chief
prosecutor [Bain].”
Bayoh’s family were
stunned by unfounded
allegations, which they
suspect came from police,
that he had been violent,
possibly a drug dealer.
The Crown Office said:
“The evidence available
would not justify criminal
proceedings. The Crown has
reserved the right to prosecute
should evidence in support of
that become available.”
@stcello1
22
COMMENT
Rod Liddle
Raab throwing a tomato across a room
isn’t bullying. It wasn’t even tinned
I
was wondering if there was
anything I could possibly say to a
civil servant that wouldn’t be
classed by him, or her, as
“bullying”. I have no intention,
incidentally, of speaking to a civil
servant at any time, and if one tried
to engage me in conversation I
would probably just ignore them. But
then that, too, would no doubt be taken
as bullying.
I can see it now in the complaint filed
to the police: “Mr Liddle turned away
from the complainant and went to the
bar to order a double gin and tonic and
some pickled onion flavour Monster
Munch. The complainant alleges that
this was a terse and exclusionary act of
passive aggression, tantamount to
bullying. It left him, he says, in floods of
tears.”
Dominic Raab is the latest member of
the government to have discomfited the
precious souls who work in the civil
service. There are to be investigations of
his behaviour towards the fragile legions
of Jameses and Sarahs on those
vanishingly rare occasions they turn up
to the office to work.
What are these allegations, exactly? It
has been suggested that Mr Raab once
delved into his lunchtime salad and
threw a tomato across the room, in fury.
A tomato. You will remember the old
rhyme, “Tomatoes are juicy and don’t
hurt the skin/ But this one was carefully
packed in a tin.” Not so in the case of
Raab’s tomato. It sounds very much as if
it were a cherry tomato — possibly one
from the Marks & Spencer “piccolini
vine tomato” range. I hope the inquiry,
paid for by you and me, can establish
this fact.
But there is no suggestion Raab threw
it directly at anyone; merely that he
threw it across the room. If he had
pelted one of the Jameses or Sarahs with
a whole bunch of salad vegetables —
endive, rocket, tomato, cucumber,
perhaps a crouton — while shrieking,
“Take this, you snivelling, over-
remunerated wankpuffin!”, then I could
possibly see a case for a bullying
complaint. But no. He threw the tomato
angrily but wholly ineffectually.
It is also alleged — by Lord McDonald,
the former permanent under-secretary
at the Foreign Office — that Mr Raab
could be “abrupt” and “very curt with
people” and that the staff might have felt
“demeaned”. Same thing happened at
the Ministry of Justice, leaving staff
feeling “tearful”, apparently.
Goodness me, they seem to be terribly
vulnerable, these people, no? I wonder
how they would have coped with
working for Lavrentiy Beria. Or, indeed,
Alastair Campbell. It does seem to me
that bullying, like the Mars bar, the BBC
and pornography, ain’t what it used to
be. Bullying was once getting your head
kicked in. Now it is slightly
discombobulating the sensitivities of
liberally inclined former public school
Unless you
have just
been caught
snogging
a goat,
never, ever,
apologise
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
boys and girls by being a little short with
them. They have skins as thin as the
surface tension of water.
Qatar World Cup booze crackdown
We have been here before. Gavin
Williamson — a bit of a plank, I suspect —
is accused of saying one or two rather
nasty things to his colleague Wendy
Morton, and Priti Patel was accused of
bullying her staff, too. Patel’s mistake
was to apologise for upsetting these
people. Listen, Priti, and any other
government minister who finds
themselves in a similar hole: unless you
have just beaten your mother to death They drink,
with a curtain rod, or been caught
snogging a goat, never, ever, apologise.
it’s all over
Apologise and you’re dead in the water.
Unless you really mean it — but that’s
another matter.
My suspicion is that two factors are in
play here. One is a general disaffection
among the civil servants with the
present government, which may be
understandable but should not spill over
into obstructiveness, as many ministers
have suggested. The second is the
elevation of bullying to one of the great
crimes of our age by the endlessly
expanding regiments of HR monkeys,
who believe we should all be denuded of
our senses of irritation, annoyance,
impatience, ire and despair — ie, all the
stuff that makes us human.
Bullying, or its passive-aggressive
PHOTOBUBBLE: NICK NEWMAN
counterpart, anti-bullying, has become
an industry — and so, to show how
widespread and ghastly it is, the term
has been expanded and in the end
6 “Bugger this for a game of
soldiers” is a phrase you
labour shortage in this
country, and Jeremy Hunt I’m off to Fart, old”. It includes Shitterton in
Dorset, Spunk Creek in
debased. This always happens. It don’t hear very much these has just provided another
via Scratchy Minnesota and, the jewel of
happened with disabilities, for example. days. It was, perhaps, of its disincentive for people to my collection, stolen from
What began as a much-needed review of time — a shame, because I work for a living. Those
Bottom New York: Arlene Fuchs Katz
the way disabled people were treated in rather liked it. millions of hard-working Drive. Trouble is, the sign
the workplace ended with one disability I wonder, though, if it Brits are — or were — largely had already been nicked, so I
lobbying group insisting that one in made a brief comeback Conservative voters. A long and gruelling drive up drove back empty-handed —
three people were disabled. You expand last week among the The bond markets may to Aberdeenshire to steal the but ever vigilant.
the definition until it is no longer millions of hard-working have been OK with the sign from the village of Cock It is down to cretins like
recognisable. British people when they budget, but in its own Bridge. me that the town of Fucking
Still, I want to find out about that heard that welfare benefits way it was every bit as It will fit nicely into my in Austria recently decided
tomato, and I am delighted that my would — unlike their own damaging as anything prestigious collection to rename itself Fugging —
taxpayer’s money is dedicated to that incomes — be rising in line dreamt up by the Truss/ entitled “Place names that presumably in honour of
end. with inflation. We have a Kwarteng alliance. are funny if you are ten years Mohamed Al Fayed.
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS
Sturgeon’s
bid to scrap
juries in
rape trials
Lawyers warn that asking
judges to decide guilt — a
move to raise conviction
rates — puts the entire
justice system at risk
John Boothman and Jason Allardyce
Nicola Sturgeon is planning to abolish
juries in sexual offence trials despite sen-
ior lawyers warning that the move would
undermine Scotland’s legal system.
A Scottish government consultation
has suggested judges could decide guilt in
cases of rape and attempted rape, which
have low conviction rates compared with
other crimes. It followed a review by
Lady Dorrian, the lord justice clerk, into
how to improve victims’ experience of
the justice system.
The review drew on research into
mock trials to identify how juries weigh
up guilt and innocence in trials involving
sexual violence. It found some people
had “problematic” views about what con-
stituted rape and how “real” rape victims
would behave. Recent figures show that
in Scotland only 51 per cent of rape and
attempted rape trials resulted in a convic-
tion, compared with a 91 per cent overall
conviction rate.
But Tony Lenehan, president of the
Faculty of Advocates Criminal Bar Associ-
ation, said English research with jurors
that did not bear out those concerns, and
suggested the case for the “seismic”
change was being pushed by misguided
special interest groups.
Writing in The Sunday Times Scotland,
he added: “Allowing or even risking one
interested party to have sway over the
decision-makers robs this most impor-
tant of civic functions of public confi-
dence and of the essential transparency
of justice.”
The former Supreme Court judge Lord
Sumption accepted that the jury system
was flawed, arguing: “Juries do not have
to give reasons so there cannot be an
effective appeal. They are prejudiced, in
favour of the accused in minor cases, the
prosecution in serious ones.” Nonethe-
less, he said they should be defended
“because the public has confidence in
them”.
Last week Scotland’s top female law-
yer, Frances McMenamin KC, compared
the plan to Hitler’s courts, claiming it
could undermine democracy. Britain’s
justice system dates back to the 12th cen-
tury, when Henry II established a jury of
12 men to arbitrate in land disputes.
The Law Society of Scotland, repre-
senting solicitors, argues that sexual
offence cases, often with no witnesses,
can be difficult to convict, with juries pre-
sented with competing accounts that can
both appear plausible. It states: “If judges
replace juries in determining guilt, they
will face the same difficulties. There is no
obvious reason why judges should be
more prone to convict in identical cir-
cumstances.”
But the Rape Crisis Scotland chief
executive, Sandy Brindley, said there was
evidence that juries seemed reluctant to
convict in rape cases, even in the face of
significant evidence. She said: “We have
grave concerns that rape survivors are
systematically being denied access to jus-
tice — and guilty men regularly acquitted
— due to jury decision-making being
influenced by attitudes and belief in
myths about rape.”
A spokesman for the Scottish govern-
ment said it was “continuing to explore
these proposals”.
Attention to detail at the Shoe Lab can make designer shoes look as good as new. The team repairs up to 1,000 pairs a month
Repaired and resoled on the high street
Louise Eccles
Consumer Affairs Editor
About 20 pairs of scuffed
Christian Louboutin red-
soled heels are lined up
behind Luke Goodyear at the
repair shop he owns with two
friends. The stilettos and
brogues will be hand-painted,
reheeled, polished and
restored to “box fresh”
condition.
“Demand is massive,”
Goodyear, 33, said at his
“modernised cobbler”, the
Shoe Lab. “Until three years
ago we repaired 80 pairs a
month. Now we are a team of
nine repairing up to 1,000
pairs a month.” From Boston,
Lincolnshire, the Shoe Lab
can match the colour of any
shoes and repair almost any
detail on designer trainers,
boots or shoes.
Their success is
emblematic of a wider revival
of repair and restoration and
a backlash against throwaway
fast fashion. Zara has become
the latest high street shop to
offer repairs, from new
buttons (£3) to zips (£15).
Bottega Veneta said it would
offer free lifetime repairs on
its bags.
Retailers want to be viewed
as more sustainable and
responsible, and customers
are seeking to extend the life
of their clothes for cost as
well as environmental
reasons.
Five years ago Goodyear
teamed up with Kye Overton,
31, and Overton’s father
Darren, 56, to clean trainers
for friends and family as a
sideline to their jobs in food
management and
recruitment.
As well as their website,
the Shoe Lab’s services are
offered in the luxury retailer
Flannels’ chain of 50 mini
department stores. Repairs
range from cleaning (from
£35) to a revamp (£150).
Leading brands are also
23
IAN HODGSON/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
increasingly offering in-store
or postal repair services on
their goods. Paula Ampuero,
head of sustainability at Zara,
said: “Customers are
demanding these services.”
They can take garments
bought from the Spanish
fashion chain to any UK
shop for repair or post them,
using a smartphone app.
Prices include £8 for
“debobbling” or £10 for fixing
small tears.
Barbour offers services
including a £35 jacket rewax,
a new collar for £25 or a large
patch repair for £35. Its
rewaxing “roadshow” is
touring stores.
Uniqlo, the Japanese
fashion brand, offers a repair
service at its Regent Street
and Battersea power station
shops in London. This
includes traditional Japanese
sashiko repairs, handsewn
using contrasting thread on
the outside of a garment,
from £10.
Alessandro Dudech, chief
operating officer at Uniqlo
Europe, said the repair
service would help to ensure
that its clothing “outlasts
transitory fashion trends”.
Selfridges has a repairs
concierge to whom customers
can bring anything, including
broken jewellery and
technological devices. The
store arranges for the work to
be done by one of its partners:
28,000 repairs were
undertaken last year.
The Restory, based at
several Selfridges stores and
online, will tackle tasks such
as a replacement buckle on a
Chanel handbag or dyeing a
pair of Jimmy Choo suede
heels in a new shade.
Selfridges’ Sneakers ER
concession, which cleans and
repairs trainers, was so
popular in London that one
has opened at Manchester
Trafford and another is
planned for its Birmingham
Before Bullring store next year.
The King, who hates waste,
has long advocated repairing
garments. His much-mended
shoes are maintained by
John Lobb, a shoemaker
founded in 1866. One pair is
made of Russian reindeer
leather salvaged from a 200-
year-old shipwreck in
After Plymouth Sound.
@Louise_Eccles
WORLD NEWS
24

WORLD NEWS

Yuriy Kerpatenko
LOUISE had turned down
requests to
CALLAGHAN perform after his
home city of
Kherson was
occupied
Kherson, Ukraine
Everything unravelled for Yuriy Kerpat-
enko after the Russians and their collabo-
rators threw him a birthday party.
The invaders occupying his home city
of Kherson in southern Ukraine had
repeatedly asked the volatile conductor if
he would return to work and perform for
them under the Russian flag. He had
already said no.
At the party at the Kherson Philhar-
monic Theatre on September 9 they
asked again. He refused. Three weeks
later Kerpatenko, 46, was dead: shot by a
team of six men from the Russian secu-
rity services on his doorstep.
“He said they had come and tried to
recruit him’,” said Anatoly, 53, the chief
technician of the Mykola Kulish theatre,
who worked with Kerpatenko for
many years and last saw him a few days
before his death on September 28.
“He has a very hot temper, he’s emo-
tional, very emotional. If he’d said ‘no’
one time, he wouldn’t repeat it for a sec-
ond time.”
After his death, it was reported that
Kerpatenko had been shot for refusing to
take part in a concert put on by the occu-
piers. Local prosecutors said he had been
targeted for refusing to co-operate with
the Russians.
Now, for the first time, the true story of
his murder can be told: one that is
murkier, more complicated and tragic
than had at first been understood.
During interviews in Kherson last
week, half a dozen of his former col-
leagues, as well as police, prosecutors
and neighbours, described a man with a
brilliant, tortured mind who continued
to criticise the occupiers and post pro-
Ukrainian and anti-Russian content on

Martyred for his music

his Facebook page even as people across
the city were being arrested and tortured
for far less.
“He could play anything: accordion,
all the folk instruments,” said Lida, 69, a
former colleague, as we sat in the cold,
dark confines of the theatre, where
Kerpatenko worked until 2014. “He was
very creative.”
In the gloom, I could just make out the
orchestra pit, its chairs covered in dusty
white sheets and the stage cluttered with
broken props and bottles of spirits —
vodka, whisky and Baileys cream liqueur
— left by the Russians. Near by, the
whistle and crash of a shell, then another,
signalled incoming fire.
When the Russians took Kherson in
March, the city’s tight-knit artistic com-
munity faced a choice: co-operate with
the occupying authorities to produce
propaganda that justified their rule, or
stop working.
Like Soviet-era composers, actors and
musicians before them, they were
divided. Some welcomed the occupiers,
who brought in singers from Russia to
supplement their ranks. A few agreed
because they needed the money. Others
refused point blank.
“They tried to give the impression that
there was a normal civilian life here, that
there were celebrations, that the city
keeps going on as normal,” said Olha
Uvarova, 40, a violinist who declined to
play for the Russians.
“They invited us to work with them.
Their favourite argument was that we
had to decide quickly or all the best
positions would be gone . . . We weren’t
forced at all, they just tried to convince
us, saying that Russia is here for ever, you
have to take the best positions.”
Their choice was important to the
occupying authorities. The Russian state,
like its Soviet predecessor, strives for
control over the arts — to shape culture
while superficially supporting creative
freedom. During the Soviet period some
classical musicians embraced the limits
set by the totalitarian authorities while
others, such as the composers Dmitri
Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, tried
to assert their self-expression and were
A Ukrainian conductor who refused to perform for the Russians was shot dead after criticising the occupation
The Kherson philharmonic,
where Kerpatenko worked,
above; Russian men in
uniform came to his flat and
shortly afterwards he lay
dead outside
left navigating a perilous path between
acclaim and being shunned, jailed or
killed.
After the Russians came to Kherson, a
number of musicians and actors tried to
politely decline the offers to collaborate
with the occupiers, in a way that didn’t
antagonise them.
Kerpatenko, though, was never one
for diplomacy. He had worked at the
theatre for ten years until 2014, when he
left after falling out with his colleagues
and joined the Kherson regional
philharmonic, a two-storey 19th-century
building with a white façade just around
the corner. There, he also led the popular
Gilea chamber ensemble, composed of
the city’s best musicians. They would
play across the city: jazz and swing as well
as classical music. Kerpatenko would
stand on his podium, dressed in a black
coat and tails, directing the music with
his body.
Born in Kherson, he had studied at the
renowned conservatory in Kyiv, where
he also perfected his skills on the
accordion. He dreamt, said one former
colleague, of rising up through the ranks
to conduct at the Mariinsky theatre, one
of the greatest in Russia, built in St Peters-
burg under the reign of Tsar Alexander II.
In 2011 his dreams were shattered
when his wife, Lena Moseychuk, a
violinist from Kherson, died of cancer.
Kerpatenko was devastated. After that,
colleagues said, he began to drink
heavily, and became more belligerent
and demanding.
Yet, for all his faults, they remember
his genius. “He was so talented,” said
Uvarova. “He really was.”
After his death, tributes came from
across the Ukrainian arts world, where
his work was widely respected.
Yet for the last months of his life,
Kerpatenko — isolated and furious — sank
into a poisonous spiral. The strain of the
occupation, and of not being able to
create, hung heavy on him, driving him
to ever more destructive behaviour.
Regular programming at the theatre
and the philharmonic was on hold. The
Russians had appointed new directors
who arranged concerts, awards ceremo-
nies and children’s musical and drama
events on an ad hoc basis.
At home in his small, Soviet-era apart-
ment with his partner, Marina Atsehovska,
and their cat, Kerpatenko stewed. Out-
side, the occupiers cracked down on
dissent. Soon those who expressed
pro-Ukrainian views, or who were
veterans of the army or the police, were
being routinely rounded up and “disap-
peared” — tortured, interrogated or some-
times killed in basements and makeshift
holding facilities across the city.
It didn’t stop Kerpatenko. He was not a
fervent Ukrainian patriot. Rather, his
colleagues said, his political views tended
towards nostalgia for a lost imperial
Russian past, a time of great poetry,
literature and towering composers like
Pyotr Tchaikovsky whom he admired so
much. He despised modern Russia,
which he saw as the offspring of the
repressive USSR, and believed that
Ukraine was the best option available.
“Glory to Ukraine! I love our Kherson,”
he wrote on May 18.
A week later, around the time it
became difficult to access the internet in
Kherson, he stopped posting.
By September, he was in a bad way. He
and Atsehovska were both drinking
heavily and becoming progressively
more reckless in showing their hatred of
the occupiers. “From his birthday
onwards they went on a binge,” said one
of his upstairs neighbours.
On September 27 the occupiers held
the final day of a sham referendum in
Kherson on whether the region should
become part of Russia. There was only
ever going to be one result. Kerpatenko
and Atsehovska went out drunk and were
seen “hitting the ballot boxes”, said one
of their neighbours.
At just after seven o’clock the next
morning, six Russian men in uniform
barged up the three flights of stairs to Ker-
patenko’s flat. They banged on the grey
metal door, shouting for him to open up.
Across the hallway his neighbour Raia,
75, heard a loud noise. She opened the
door and saw the men in uniform. “They
told me to get back in the house and they
wouldn’t touch me,” she said.
Raia shut the door. Then she heard two
shots, followed by a burst of automatic
gunfire. When she came back into the
corridor, she saw Kerpatenko lying
crumpled on the cold concrete floor
outside his flat. There was “something in
his hand”, she said. “And a man looked
out of the room, I don’t know who he
was . . . and he said ‘Grandma, get back to
your apartment’. I asked, ‘What is that in
his hand, a gun?’ He said, ‘Yes, a
machinegun’.”
Liudmila, 64, an upstairs neighbour,
said the men who shot Kerpatenko were
from the FSB, the main Russian successor
agency to the KGB. Outside were Russian
soldiers, aiming their rifles at the upper
windows of the apartment block, and a
police car. There were about 20 Russians
altogether, some in uniform and some in
civilian clothes.
She asked the FSB officer who he was.
He replied: “Let’s say we’re just opera-
tives.”
Atsehovska had also been shot in the
altercation and was taken to hospital on a
stretcher. The conductor’s corpse was
not removed until noon.
One neighbour said that when she saw
Kerpatenko’s body that morning, he was
cradling a Kalashnikov in one hand.
None of the people we interviewed
believed that Kerpatenko owned an
assault rifle. Several of his neighbours
and former colleagues said that they
thought it was more likely that the
Russians had planted the gun on him
after killing him.
The conductor’s former colleagues
and neighbours do not think that he was
killed directly because he told the
Russian occupiers that he would not
perform with the orchestra. Nobody else
we spoke to who made the same decision
had even been threatened.
Rather, they believe that Kerpatenko’s
public pro-Ukrainian position, his anger
at the occupiers and his belligerence,
along with his refusal to perform, led to
the raid on his house and to his death.
Today, as Kherson slowly revives after
eight months of occupation, the
philharmonic is closed, its wooden doors
locked, with no conductor at the helm.
Atsehovska lives alone in the apart-
ment with the cat. She doesn’t know
where Kerpatenko’s corpse is.
@LouiseElisabet
Additional reporting: Viktoria Sybir,
Oleg Kozhedub

Mark Galeotti
A missile lands in Poland and the western alliance fractures

I
t is a mark of a growing polarisation
of opinion in the West that when a
Ukrainian S-300 air defence missile
accidentally crashed into the Polish
village of Przewodow last week,
killing two farm workers, some used
this to press for more assistance to
Ukraine, others to try to make the
case for talks.
Just before, President Zelensky of
Ukraine had presented a ten-point peace
plan to the G20 summit in Bali. The
Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov,
called it “unrealistic and inadequate”.
On the surface, there is no room for
movement, but that has not deterred
some in the West who regard this as a
favourable moment for compromise.
They argue that, as the Polish incident
showed, the danger of unintended
escalation increases as the war drags on.
Initial reports that the missile was
Russian were interpreted in some
quarters as proof that the Kremlin had
attacked a Nato country. They also
contend that Kyiv should capitalise on its
success, after a string of victories, most
recently liberating the city of Kherson.
On Wednesday General Mark Milley,
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff,
said: “You want to negotiate at a time
when you’re at your strength, and your
opponent is at weakness.”
At the G20 summit President Macron
of France encouraged dialogue, saying:
“At some point in time, we also need to
work in favour of negotiations.” There is
no such consensus, though. Vladimir
Putin still seems to believe Zelensky is
little more than a puppet of Washington,
and that any real talks will be with the US.
MIXED SIGNALS
A particular problem is that the Russians
appear to be misreading signals from
Washington as potentially offering them
grounds for optimism. A week earlier,
while claiming that each side had
suffered perhaps 100,000 dead and
wounded, Milley said that “when there’s
an opportunity to negotiate, when peace
can be achieved, seize it”. Although the
White House and State Department
disavowed any notion that this
represented a shift in policy, the Kremlin
may be in a mood to grasp at straws.
There are some signs of impatience with
Kyiv — compounded by Zelensky’s
refusal to acknowledge that the errant
missile was Ukrainian — and concern
about how long and expensive the
commitment to the war (and eventual
reconstruction) may be. The US has
already committed $60 billion
(£50.4 billion) in support.
PROXY TALKS FOR PROXY WARS
With William Burns, the CIA director,
meeting Sergey Naryshkin, the Russian
foreign intelligence service chief, in
Ankara last Monday, officially only to
talk about nuclear security and prisoner
exchanges, and Jake Sullivan, the
national security adviser, in contact with
his opposite number, Nikolai Patrushev,
there seems to have been a resumption
of connections. In part this has been to
de-escalate tensions, but Moscow seems
to hope that it can build a framework for
at least talks about talks. With the US
sticking to its “nothing about Ukraine
without Ukraine” line, any talks would
have to be brokered or convened by a
third party. Recep Tayyip Erdogan of
Turkey is pushing hard for a key role.
RELUCTANT KYIV
Kyiv is both alarmed by and hostile to
what it feels is growing western pressure
to cut a deal at its own expense.
Militarily it is on a roll and it fears that
Moscow seems to
hope it can build a
framework for
talks about talks
the price for any talks would be a
ceasefire that gives Russia a chance to
regroup and rearm. Zelensky still must
consider his relationship with Ukrainian
ultra-nationalists, many of whom
remain, despite everything, suspicious
of him. Kyiv is also well aware that talks
could reduce the pressure for continued
military assistance. One Ukrainian
diplomat told me: “We know there are
European countries who would grab any
opportunity to scale back their
commitment to us with both hands. Why
would we give them an excuse?”
WESTERN WOBBLES
There seem to be signs of diverging
dynamics across Europe and across the
Atlantic. A survey of Americans by the
Chicago Council on Global Affairs found
more than 70 per cent of respondents
backing Ukraine, with 58 per cent willing
to accept this even if households had to
pay higher prices. With the White House
having weathered the midterm elections
better than expected, there is unlikely to
be much pressure for a change in policy.
Conversely, a YouGov poll in September
found opinion in Britain split between
those who want the government to
maintain support for Ukraine, even if it
means doing less to help Britons with
the cost of living crisis (37 per cent) and
those who want the government to do
more to help Britons “even if it means
withdrawing some or all support for
Ukraine and making a Russian victory
more likely” (38 per cent).
NO ENDGAME IN SIGHT
The West’s mantra that the war ends
when Ukraine says it does is a partial
truth, adopted to avoid the question of
how to make peace. Neither combatant
is ready to quit. Putin is gambling on
dragging out the war to multiply the
costs and risks for the West and outlast
its will to support Ukraine. Kyiv is
anticipating further victories. From
Zelensky’s point of view, there will be
time for talks some day — but only when
Putin is more desperate.
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022 25

Facing new laws, Nestlé offers £1bn to keep children out of chocolate trade
NESTLE

Richard Assheton
Tafissou, Ivory Coast
Perched on the shoulder of a
slim tree trunk was a yellow
cocoa pod. The farmer
squeezed it.
“If the yield hadn’t gone up
we would have cried,” said
Tanoh Koaedio, 45, taking
stock of a year when fuel and
fertiliser costs have soared
while the price of cocoa has
dropped. “But because it has,
it’s OK.”
As a cocoa farmer in Ivory
Coast he is among the poorest
group of workers in the
world: for every chocolate
bar costing £1 in a British
supermarket, the farmer gets
about 6p. Very often those
margins compel farmers to
force their sons and
daughters to toil alongside
them as free labour.
Some 1.5 million children
are believed to work in cocoa
fields in Ivory Coast and its
neighbour Ghana, which
together produce 60 per cent
of the world’s cocoa.
Koaedio has six children to
look after but he also has an
unlikely saviour: Nestlé, the
Swiss food giant that is still
boycotted by several British
local authorities and student
unions over its promotion of
baby formula in the
developing world.
More than two decades ago
Nestlé and rival confectioners
pledged to eradicate child
labour from the $100 billion
chocolate industry. They
failed abysmally. Now, facing
a raft of regulations and rising
public awareness, Nestlé,
Mars and the Cadbury owner
Mondelez International are
among the chocolate
producers competing to clean
up their supply chains and
announcing investments
worth billions of dollars.
“Twenty years ago a lot of
businesses were [into]
window dressing,” said Jaap
Voeten, a senior adviser at
KIT Royal Tropical Institute, a
non-profit organisation.
“These days companies are
much more scrutinised by
NGOs and on social media.
You cannot get away with a
story that doesn’t hold.”
Nestlé can claim the most
striking story. It has begun to
directly pay farmers in return
for keeping children off their
Farmers are being paid to keep children off the fields fields. Having introduced the
scheme in January for 10,000
farming families in Ivory
Coast, the company intends
to extend it to all 160,000 of
its workers’ families
worldwide by 2030 at a cost
of £1 billion.
Nestlé pays farmers up to
$500 a year if they send their
children to school and adopt
other sustainable practices,
potentially doubling their
income. It said it would
release the first products
produced solely from the
scheme, a range of KitKats,
next year.
Looming over the industry
is the question of whether
chocolate makers should pay
more for their cocoa. The
global price has declined for
decades and even if farmers
double their incomes with
Nestlé’s scheme, most will
remain below the World
Bank’s extreme poverty line.
Antonie Fountain,
managing director of the
Voice Network, an umbrella
group of campaigners who
support cocoa farmers, said
anti-child labour schemes
“cannot be a substitute for
just paying a higher price for
cocoa”.

‘I love President Trump, but

maybe it is time for a change’
Support for the ex-president is finally falling in states exhausted by his antics, while polished Ron DeSantis is the new alternative
Alistair Dawber Monterey, Virginia
Petrol cost $3.69 a gallon last week at the
Exxon filling station in Monterey, a small
town in western Virginia, and Ryan Skel-
ton, a farmer, was seething about it.
“How did that happen?” he asked,
after spending more than $150 filling up
his Ford pickup truck. “In two years this
country has gone to shit. Look at the price
of the f***ing gas, man. The sooner we get
that old man out of the White House, the
better.”
Skelton was talking about President
Biden, but asked if he wanted the return
of another old man, Donald Trump, he
was unsure.
“Look, I love President Trump,” Skel-
ton said. “He was great for our country
and the economy was so much better
than it is now, but perhaps it is time for a
change. I don’t know — if there was an
election tomorrow, I’d vote Trump, but
we’ve got two years to work it out. As long
as America is still here in two years.”
If Trump, 76, cannot guarantee Skel-
ton’s vote in a place like Monterey, he is in
real trouble.
Last Tuesday, Trump stood in front of
a bank of stars-and-stripes flags in the
ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home
and private members’ club, and
announced that he was running for presi-
dent in 2024. So far he is the only candi-
date to have officially declared, but the
poor results of his favoured candidates in
the midterm elections the previous week
have encouraged potential rivals to
believe that his hold on Republican vot-
ers is slipping.
Monterey, which sits along the snow-
dusted ridge of Shenandoah Mountain,
is the seat of Highland County, one of
the most staunchly Republican areas in
the whole country.
The county hasn’t backed a Democrat
for president since 1932. Two years ago,
more than 70 per cent of residents voted
for Trump, and there are still signs sup-
porting his 2020 presidential run in peo-
ple’s windows. On the outskirts of town
a Confederate flag flutters in a field.
So whoever the Republicans choose
for 2024, Highland County is voting for
them. The question is whether Trump
will make it that far.
“I’m a Republican, and I will always
vote Republican,” said Betty Wagner,
who was out for a bracing walk.
I never “I’ve never really liked Trump that
much. Everything is always chaos around
really him. The recent results show that not
everyone in the Republicans like him
liked either. I hope we get someone else to
choose next time.”
him She was not convinced, however, by
the other most strongly touted con-
tender: Ron DeSantis, the Florida gover-
nor who cruised to re-election by almost
20 per cent in a state that Trump won by
just over 3 per cent in 2020.
At 44, DeSantis is at least a generation
younger than Trump and has turned
Florida from a swing state into reliable
Republican territory.
“He’s OK, but let’s see who else comes
forward,” says Wagner. “I wouldn’t say it
too loudly around here. As long as it is not
Trump again, I don’t really mind.”
DeSantis is not expected to join
the race until May. Other potential
contenders, such as Mike Pence, the
former vice-president, are also expected
to wait before throwing their hats into
the ring.
Trump faces legal challenges too. His
conduct is being investigated by various
bodies and on Friday, Merrick Garland,
the attorney-general, appointed a special
counsel to look at the former president’s
behaviour during last year’s January 6
riots and the keeping of confidential gov-
ernment documents at his Florida home.
Jack Smith, a former war crimes prose-
cutor, will set out his reasons for recom-
mending any charges against Trump if he
finds sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
Were that to happen, the calls for an alter-
native to Trump in 2024 are likely to grow
louder in moderate Republican circles.
Until the midterms, Trump liked to
boast that most polls gave him a lead over
DeSantis of 20 points or so. All that has
now changed. But a YouGov survey of
Republicans for The Economist this week
has DeSantis seven points clear of the
former president. A poll in Iowa, one of
the earliest states to pick a nominee and
therefore crucial to a campaign’s
momentum, put DeSantis 11 points clear
of Trump. A similar poll in August had the
Florida governor behind by 15 points.
Trump had already taken to calling his
rival “Ron DeSanctimonious”, but the
tone has now changed. In his speech on
Tuesday, Trump did not mention DeSan-
tis at all.
The party is choosing sides anyway. A
number of Republican big hitters, such as
the former vice-presidential candidate
Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, the former gov-
ernor of New Jersey, and Larry Hogan,
the governor of Maryland, have already
launched bitter attacks on Trump. Much
of the conservative media, including the
Wall Street Journal and the New York
Post, both part of News Corp, the ulti-
mate owner of The Sunday Times, has
become more hostile to him.
Sam Nunberg, a Trump adviser during
his 2016 campaign, said “the majority of
the country despises Trump . . . and the
majority of the Republican Party is mov-
ing on”.
For the first time since Trump finished
second to Ted Cruz in Iowa at the start of
the 2016 Republican primary contest, the
business tycoon turned politician is an
underdog in his own party.
DeSantis, an Iraq war veteran who
attended Yale and Harvard Law School, is
widely seen as a more polished operator
with potentially broader appeal than the
embittered Trump of 2022. In The Wash-
ington Post, the conservative writer Jim
Geraghty argued that he has “the policy
goals of a traditional conservative Repub-
lican, not the cobbled-together agenda
that typified the Trump years”.
But it is far too early to write off the
former president, who has a history of
confounding expectations and a proven
appetite for brutal primary campaigning.
DeSantis is untested on foreign policy
and has not been subjected to anything
like the level of nationwide scrutiny that
Trump has lived with for years.
Among Trump’s loyal voters, many of
whom wrongly believe he was cheated
out of a second term in the White House,
he retains strong support.
Let’s see “I was very relieved when Trump
announced he was running again; God,
who else we need him back,” said Brandon Camp-
bell, a Monterey resident. “I was sur-
comes prised by the midterms, but then again,
the bigger issue is the reliability of our
forward voting system. DeSantis seems like a good
guy, but he’s not Trump, and that’s who
we need right now.”

Dancing Donald adds Les Mis to his high-camp playlist

Josh Glancy
He has used Pavarotti, Sinatra
and Elvis as soundtracks over
the years, but fans of Les
Misérables might have hoped
Donald Trump would leave
their beloved musical alone.
Alas not.
As Trump launched his
latest run for the presidency
to the stirring chords of Do
You Hear the People Sing?,
several of the misérables in
my life texted me to express
their distress: “Anything but
this.”
Yet as the spotlight on him
begins to dim after his
handpicked candidates’ poor
performance in the
midterms, it is perhaps no
surprise Trump has added
the best musical of all time to
the long, campy playlist that
accompanies his rallies.
All aspiring presidents
have signature songs: Joe
Biden often used We Take
Care of Our Own by Bruce
Springsteen. But none has
merged entertainment and
politics into a dizzying opera
buffa like Trump.
His shows have always
been rooted in a kind of high-
camp vaudeville, which is
why The Spectator’s US
edition crowned Trump “the
first gay president”. This,
after all, is the man whose
staff used to complain about
how loudly he would blast
Elton John’s Tiny Dancer on
the campaign aircraft. Trump
turned once starchy
Republican rallies into panto
singalongs, leading
performances of the Village
People’s YMCA and delighting
the Maga-heads with his dad
dance to Macho Man.
“I’ve always had a high
aptitude for music,” he once
explained with typical
modesty. “You know what
gets ’em rocking? YMCA, the
gay national anthem.”
The theatre of these
performances is brash but
undeniable. Some of my most
powerful memories of
covering Trump as a reporter
are listening to God Bless the
USA, a track from 1984 by the
country singer Lee
Greenwood, as he roared Air
Force One across the swing
states in 2020, hopping
Donald Trump’s frantically from one
dad-dancing goes provincial stadium to the next
down well with the like a stand-up comedian
Republican faithful with an alimony bill to pay.
Billy Joel (Piano Man) and
Dolly Parton (Jolene) are
among the grand old names
of pop who feature regularly
on the Trump playlist, which
is carefully curated by the
man who has boasted of his
prowess on the decks at Mar-
a-Lago parties.
Know Sinatra is naturally
sometimes on there too — say
what what you like about Trump,
but he absolutely does it his
gets ’em way. In fact he loves anything
redolent of old New York, the
rocking? Broadway show tunes, the
jazz-hands glamour, the
YMCA golden age when, in his
imagination at least, busty
blonde molls simpered in
their minks while men
exchanged locker-room talk
and did whatever the hell
they liked.
The Rolling Stones (You
Can’t Always Get What You
Want) are among those who
have begged Trump not to
use their songs; Neil Young
(Rockin’ in the Free World)
threatened to sue. After
Trump’s announcement in
Florida on Tuesday, the
family of the late soul singer
Isaac Hayes said they were
exploring legal options to
stop him using Hayes’ song
Hold On, I’m Comin’.
DJ Donny T’s choice of Do
You Hear the People Sing? is a
reasonable one: the sound of
angry men at the barricades
has been the leitmotif of the
Trump era. But there are
other Les Mis ballads he might
have used: Castle on a Cloud
sounds like a fairly archetypal
Trump Organisation property
pitch, and One Day More
tallies nicely with Trump’s
vainglorious quest to defy the
clock. But surely the
Trumpiest song of all in
Claude-Michel Schönberg’s
opus is Master of the House, a
bawdy number about a
corrupt, thieving landlord.
“Master of the house, keeper
of the zoo / Ready to relieve
’em of a sou or two.”
Exactement.
If Trump were naming this
playlist on Spotify,
“Nostalgia” would be the
obvious choice. He loves to
hark back to a better time, to
play on his supporters’ sense
that the America they adore is
somehow being taken away
from them, and only he has
the strength to bring it back.
Yet on Tuesday, as he
promised once more to
“make America glorious and
great again”, the soundtrack
came over more than a little
fatigued. We’ve all made the
mistake of listening to a
favourite song too many
times, until the melody
begins to wear thin and the
emotions it once stirred
become faint.
It may be that even some of
those who once enjoyed the
Trump show are growing
bored with the same old
tunes.
26 The Sunday Times November 20, 2022

WORLD NEWS

Matadors tremble as France Meloni’s

power
suits split
takes bullfighting by the horns stylistas
Peter Conradi
Since Giorgia Meloni became
Fans of the bloodsport are determined to prevent a ban on a tradition they say is key to their regional identity the first woman to lead Italy
last month, political
observers have been left

PETER
CONRADI
Europe Editor
The first clash between man and beast in
the small southern French town of
Vauvert had reached its bloody climax in
front of 1,500 cheering spectators. The
matador tossed the bull’s ear into the
crowd, where an elegant blonde woman
caught it and smiled proudly.
Karine Dupeyron, who works in the
fashion business and was sitting with her
family, including her young grandchild-
ren, laid the large black, furry object on
the concrete step next to her. “You have
to dry it with coarse salt,” she said. “It’s a
trophy, like a cup you might win.”
She has been a frequent bullfight
attendee for decades. “It’s a ballet involv-
ing the bullfighter and the bull,” she said.
“If it’s done well and the sword is put in
properly, the animal doesn’t have the
time to suffer because it all happens very
quickly.”
The severing of the bull’s ears — and
even tail, if the bout is deemed to have
been particularly impressive — is among a
series of choreographed rituals that
accompany the corrida, which arrived in
southern France in the mid-19th century
from Spain and has long since drawn
locals and tourists alike.
But contests such as this one that draw
millions of spectators to some 200 bull-
fights a year in places such as Nîmes,
Arles and Béziers could soon be con-
signed to history if Aymeric Caron, a
radio and television journalist turned
far-left MP, gets his way.
The French parliament is due on
Thursday to consider a draft law pro-
posed by Caron that would deliver the
coup de grâce to bullfighting. It is allowed
only in three regions in the south — Nou-
velle-Aquitaine, Occitanie and Provence-
Alpes-Côte d’Azur — where it is consid-
ered an “uninterrupted local tradition”.
The bill would also ban cockfighting,
which is permitted in parts of the north
and the country’s overseas territories
under the same exemption to animal cru-
elty laws.
“I think the majority of French
people share the opinion that bull-
fights are immoral, a spectacle
that no longer has a place in the
21st century,” Caron, 50,
declared this year.
Yesterday there were pro-
tests against the proposed
ban in a dozen towns in
southern France and a
smaller demonstration
against bullfighting in
Paris.
It will be the first
time there has been a
parliamentary vote on the
subject. Unlike in Spain, where bullfight-
ing has been a deeply political issue since
it was championed by General Franco as
part of national cultural identity, it has
continued in southern France, barely
noticed by people in the rest of the coun-
try bar a few animals rights campaigners.
The result is difficult to predict: after a
heated debate last week during which
Caron denounced the “barbarism” of
bullfighting, the parliament’s law com-
mission gave his proposal the thumbs-
down. But the chamber as a whole may
back him, with MPs from President
Macron’s Renaissance party and several
of its rivals given a free vote.
The issue has become a talking point
thanks to a high-profile campaign led by
Caron, who argues that animals essen-
tially have the same rights as humans.
The passions raised are reminiscent of
those that accompanied the campaign to
abolish foxhunting in Britain almost two
decades ago. A poster produced by
France’s Society for the Protection of Ani-
mals shows a matador about to impale a
dog with the caption: “If it were a dog
would you accept it being killed ‘in the
name of tradition’?”
Passers-by in Nîmes, meanwhile, were
surprised last week to see Marie Cornil-
lon, an actress, posing almost naked and
made up as a bull in front of the city’s
Roman amphitheatre, carrying a banner
proclaiming “Let’s ban the corrida”. The
2,000-year-old arena hosts the annual
Whitsun Féria that draws two million
people to five days of bull-based events.
While one poll early this year showed
Killing a
bull in
the ring is
a mark of
respect
77 per cent of French would support a
ban, almost exactly the reverse is true in
the south where boys — and occasionally
girls — dream of becoming matadors
rather than footballers and bullfighting is
a multimillion-pound business important
to tourism and agriculture.
Animals destined for the ring are bred
carefully and roam freely: each has an
average of 2½ acres. They live until they
are five or six, unlike beef and dairy cat-
tle, which have much more confined spa-
ces and are slaughtered much younger.
The best can sell for thousands of pounds
to corrida promoters. Such a form of agri-
culture would be unviable if bullfighting
were banned, according to Benjamin
Cuillé, a farmer and one of the leaders of
the campaign against the proposed law.
Cuillé’s family keep 300 bulls at two
farms that together cover 2,000 acres:
one in the Camargue region, where bulls
are bred for the corrida, and another,
near Nîmes, where they rear a different
species destined to take part in Course
Camarguaise, a related sport in which
men compete to pull ribbons from their
horns, without hurting the animals.
“Monsieur Caron has never been
down here and never visited a farm. He
wants to ban something he has only
ever seen in photographs,” Cuillé said
as we sat in his living room, its walls
decorated with bulls’ heads and other
taurine memorabilia. “And they won’t
stop at bullfighting. After that it will be
hunting, fishing and horse riding,
anything that involves animals. They
could even prevent you keeping a dog
or a cat. That is the logic behind their
philosophy.”
A ban would come as a blow to pupils
at the school for aspiring toreros that
Christian Lesur, 75, a former matador,
has been running since 1983 when he
hung up his red cape. Every Wednesday
and Saturday afternoon they gather in a
small arena on the outskirts of Nîmes, to
hone their skills. At present he has 19
signed up. Starting as young as eight, they
begin by “fighting” plastic bulls
on wheels before graduating to
the real thing. “At ten you can
put them in front of a calf,” said
Lesur. Only a few will go on to
have the skill and courage to
take on a fully grown five-year-
old bull, which can weigh 500-
600kg. A torero is like someone stand-
ing on a railway track and rather
than getting out of the way of
the train, “derails it”, he
laughed.
Like a singer or dancer, a
matador must “discover his personal-
ity and learn how to get it across”,
Lesur believes. Competition is
intense: of his 1,000 or so pupils
in four decades, just 21 have
gone on to become profes-
sional. Among them is
Tomas Ubeda, 24, who
took part in last Sunday’s festi-
val in Vercourt.
The sport, which arrived
from Spain in the mid-19th
century, draws millions to
stadiums in Nîmes, Arles
and elsewhere
ALAMY
guessing whether her right-
wing coalition will hold
together long enough to put
their plan to transform the
nation into action.
Many in the fashion-mad
country have a simpler
question, however: what is
behind their new prime
minister’s own dramatic
makeover?
The hard-right politician
hit the campaign trail this
summer for her Brothers of
Italy party sporting white or
pastel sleeveless tops
accessorised with big
earrings and chunky ethnic
bracelets. But since coming to
power she has cut a more
sober figure in dark blue
Armani suits, her long blonde
bob smoother. Only faint
echoes remain of her more
casual image, such as
oversized sunglasses and the
bangles in the green, white
and red of the Italian flag that
she wore at last week’s G20
summit in Bali.
Meloni has a complicated
relationship with one of
Italy’s most high-profile
industries.
The arrival of a female
prime minister might have
been welcomed by a
domestic fashion scene full of
designer brands such as
Versace, Prada and Dolce &
Gabbana. But many of its
leading figures used Milan
Fashion Week, just before the
election on September 25, to
urge voters to reject her party
because of its hardline stance
on immigration and
opposition to gay marriage
and adoption.
“Vote to protect rights
already acquired, thinking
about progress and with an
eye on the future,” posted
Donatella Versace, artistic
director of the fashion house
that her late brother Gianni
founded. “Never look back.”
Since Meloni’s victory
Armani has made no attempt
Mingling with aficionados that evening to cash in on Meloni’s
in Le Cartel, a local brasserie, Ubeda said preference for its clothes by
he hoped the draft law would be voted posting pictures on its
down. “This is all about globalisation and Instagram feed, as it does
standardising everything, but every with other high-profile fans.
region has its own culture and customs It has also let it be known that
which can shock people who don’t know the prime minister simply
them,” he said. “I understand people walked into one of its shops
who say it is wrong to kill animals for and made her purchases like
pleasure, but, paradoxically, I love these any other customer.
bulls more than anything in the world. To “I have seen Giorgia
kill them in the ring is to respect them Meloni’s look change a lot
and their wild nature. Anything so they from the election campaign
do not die like cattle in an abattoir.” to when she became prime
@Peter_Conradi minister,” Monica Guerzoni, a
political writer for Corriere
della Sera, said.
“It is all part of the culture

Police braced for Imran supporters

of the right, of anti-
feminism,” she added. “When
they are in power or close to
power, they need to show

closing in on capital after 240-mile walk
Charlie Faulkner Islamabad
A large crowd is bearing
down on Islamabad and it will
take more than the threat of
violence to deter them from
demanding fresh elections on
behalf of their wounded hero,
Imran Khan.
After the cricket captain
turned politician was ousted
as prime minister in April he
took his populist message to
the country, mobilising
supporters with a protest
march in May and now the
Long March: a 240-mile
procession from Lahore to
the capital to dramatise his
claims to national leadership.
While leading the march
two weeks ago he was shot
three times in the leg in what
he has said was an
assassination attempt
organised by the
government. He is
recuperating at home in
Lahore while his devoted
followers remain on the road,
joined along the way by new
converts to his message.
“I have never been
involved in politics or a
supporter of a particular
political party but when I see
Imran Khan giving his life for
us, it inspires me to take a
stand,” said Ahmed Rashid, a
labourer who brought his
family to a rally in the Jhelum
district of Punjab province on
Thursday.
The father of four, 40, was
standing with his three young
sons amid a sea of green,
white and red flags, the
colours of the Tehreek-e-Insaf
(PTI) party, which Khan
founded in 1996. His wife and
Women join a rally in Jhelum. One said the shooting of Khan had solidified support for him
daughter were among the
women at the front. “Imran
Khan has come out for us, for
the people of Pakistan,” he
said. “He has been injured by
bullets because of us so that’s
why we’re supporting him.”
Khan, 70, was giving a
speech from a lorry at a rally
in Wazirabad when a man
opened fire on the convoy.
One of Khan’s supporters was
killed. The gunman was
arrested and later said that he
was motivated by Khan
hurting his religious
sentiments. To fend off
accusations that the attack
was staged Khan last week
released a video with chunks
of the plaster cast on his leg
removed to reveal the bullet
wounds.
For many Pakistanis he
represents change from a
political system entrenched
in corruption and nepotism.
Yet, Khan was pushed aside
earlier this year after nearly
four years as prime minister,
following a vote of confidence
amid public frustrations over
soaring inflation, rising
deficits and a failure to fulfil
his promise to crush endemic
corruption.
Since then he has been hit
with terrorism charges (now
dropped) and disqualified
from holding office for
allegedly mishandling gifts
from world leaders (he denies
the claim and says that the
ban is unconstitutional).
Khan has also become a
fierce critic of the military,
CHARLIE FAULKNER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
which plays a pivotal but
ambiguous role in Pakistan’s
politics. Having previously
enjoyed the army’s support,
he has attacked the
institution in regular live
streamed appearances that
command huge audiences
around the country.
About 3,000 people joined
the rally in Jhelum. Some 50
were female despite Khan
provoking uproar a year ago
with misogynistic remarks
apparently blaming women
who wear “very few clothes”
for a rise in sexual violence
because “men are not
robots”.
Sherbano, a 36-year-old
housewife, said that Khan
being shot had solidified her
support for him. She joined
they are strong like a man.”
Others, however, point out
that no one scrutinised her
male predecessors in this
way. “It’s like you wouldn’t
the march at the end of last wear a miniskirt to go to a
month and intends to stay church,” said a senior figure
with it until it finishes in at one fashion house. “Meloni
Islamabad. “The reason we knows that she needs to dress
support him is because he’s in a certain way when she
out for the country not for goes to parliament. It’s like a
himself, and he took bullets uniform.”
for us. His struggle is for the
people of Pakistan and he’s Giorgia Meloni rings in her
an honest leader,” said the premiership in a sober suit
mother of four.
About 70 miles away, in
Faizabad, a strategically
important district in the
southeast of Islamabad,
security forces were
preparing for clashes when
the marchers reach the
capital. They are expected to
get there before the end of
the month. The security
forces are determined to
deny the marchers entry to
the heart of Islamabad.
Khan told his supporters
yesterday that he would
rejoin them in Rawalpindi,
adjacent to the capital, on
Saturday. Since being shot he
has made public appearances
only via live video link.
“Our primary aim is that
there is not a single casualty
to the mob,” said Sohail Zafar
Chatta, deputy inspector
general of the capital’s police,
referring to the march’s
participants.
However, security forces
are being equipped with tear
gas, rubber bullets and water
cannons to ensure the rally
does not enter the city and
cause disruption.
“We have to consider the
worst-case scenario.
Terrorists could target the
mob or the police. We are
trying to protect the mob as
well as ourselves.”
NEWS REVIEW
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS REVIEW
I
was expecting to hear more about
Hunter Biden’s laptop after the
midterm elections. But I wasn’t
expecting it quite this fast. On
Thursday, a day after the Republi-
can Party scraped a narrow major-
ity in the House of Representatives,
the Republican congressman James
Comer said he would lead an inves-
tigation into the overseas business
activities of President Biden’s son. But he
made clear the real target of his inquiry.
“This is an investigation of Joe Biden,”
he said, adding that as incoming chair-
man of the powerful House oversight
committee, his panel would evaluate
whether “he is a president who is com-
promised or swayed by foreign dollars
or influence”. He mentioned that the
evidence reviewed included “Hunter
Biden’s laptop”.
On the right of the hyper-polarised US
media ecosystem, the laptop has been a
fevered topic of discussion for years, with
claims that the story proves the Biden
family is protected from scrutiny by a
constellation of powerful forces, includ-
ing the establishment media, big tech,
the FBI and the CIA. In the mainstream
media, however, the story has caused
barely a ripple.
The first time I heard about this laptop
was in November 2020. I was at a “Stop
the Steal” rally in Atlanta, Georgia, a
week after the presidential election. Con-
spiracy theories were spreading across
the US about a “deep-state” plot to oust
Donald Trump from the White House.
I got talking to two women holding up
signs emblazoned with the letter Q. They
were devotees of the QAnon conspiracy
theory, which held that Trump was fight-
ing a deep-state cabal of satanic paedo-
philes. “How much do you know about
what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop?” one
asked. I was dimly aware of what
sounded like a far-fetched tale about Joe
Biden’s son leaving his laptop in a repair
shop; what was on it was said to reveal
the extent of the Biden family’s “crimes”.
I remember thinking: I don’t have the
bandwidth to deal with another conspir-
acy theory.
And so I ignored it. But nearly two
years later, I met a man who told me the
story of the laptop. And even though he
seemed like an unreliable source, the
story he told appeared credible enough
to check out.
I met Vish Burra in September at Nat-
Con, a conference for nationalists and
conservatives, in Miami. Burra is from
Staten Island, New York, the child of
Indian immigrants. He describes himself
as a “Maga jihadist”, an information war-
rior in Trump’s “Make America great
again” movement.
Burra said it was he who had provided
the House oversight committee with
copies of the laptop’s hard drive, as well
as distributing it to dozens of journalists.
But how had he got hold of it in the first
place?
It appears that Hunter did indeed drop
a damaged computer, an Apple MacBook
Pro, at a repair shop in Wilmington, Dela-
ware, in April 2019. At the time, he was
going through a breakdown. He was
struggling with drug addiction in the
aftermath of the death of his brother,
Beau, his marriage had imploded and his
life was falling apart.
Hunter never retrieved the laptop.
And the shop’s owner, a Trump sup-
porter by the name of John Paul Mac
Isaac, looked at the contents and thought
it was political dynamite. He contacted
the FBI, which took custody of the laptop.
But Mac Isaac kept two copies of its hard
drive. And as the presidential election
approached, he sent a copy to Rudy Giuli-
ani, Trump’s lawyer. Giuliani in turn
handed it to Steve Bannon, Trump’s
former campaign manager and senior
adviser.
Burra was working for Bannon’s pod-
cast War Room. Burra told me Bannon
wanted to “weaponise” the information
on the drive, but he wasn’t good with
technology. So he gave the drive to Burra.
In the weeks before the 2020 election,
Burra worked with Bannon and Giuliani,
poring over the drive’s contents. Burra
told me the first place he looked was the
pictures. It was “good stuff”, he said, “a
lot of self-made porn, pictures of
[Hunter] naked with girls having sex”.
But they weren’t after embarrassing
pictures of Hunter — they wanted dirt on
his father. So they went through the
emails. They did a search for Burisma, a
Ukrainian gas company whose board
Hunter had joined in 2014, while his
father was vice-president. Joe Biden had
always maintained there was a firewall
between his public duties and his son’s
business affairs. But an email on the lap-
top appeared to suggest otherwise.
In a messaged dated April 17, 2015,
Vadym Pozharsky, an adviser to the
board of Burisma, wrote: “Dear Hunter,
thank you for inviting me to DC and giv-
ing an opportunity to meet your father
and spent some time together.”
An earlier email on the laptop — dated
May 12, 2014 — appeared to show Pozhar-
skyi appealing to Hunter to “use your
influence” to help shield the company
from “politically motivated actions”.
The UK’s Serious Fraud Office had
begun investigating Burisma’s owner, the
Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky,
that year. The inquiry collapsed in 2015,
and neither the company nor Zlochevsky
was convicted of wrongdoing.
But the emails suggested there wasn’t
a firewall between Joe Biden and his son’s
business dealings after all. Joe Biden had
been in charge of Ukraine policy for the
US administration. There was a clear
potential for conflict of interest.
Burra and his colleagues had found
their story; now they needed to get it into
the media. They approached Fox News,
which was supportive of Trump but
turned it down. When Burra took the
story to a contact at the New York Post, it
2GN
ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWEN
Emboldened Republicans are ready to make hay from the failure by
the FBI and US media to take seriously possible compromising material
on a computer owned by the president’s son, writes Gabriel Gatehouse
I’VE SEEN WHAT WAS ON
HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP W
WHO MADE SURE AMERICA
COULDN’T SEE IT TOO?
too was sceptical. It wasn’t until Miranda
Devine, a veteran columnist, took a look
that things began to change.
“You sort of have a gut feeling whether
a story is hocus-pocus or could be genu-
ine,” she told me. “And to me it just felt
real. Once you see [the drive], it so obvi-
ously belongs to Hunter Biden.”
O
n October 14, 2020, less than three
weeks before the presidential elec-
tion, the New York Post published
its bombshell under the front-page
headline: “Biden secret emails”.
Immediately, Burra thought some-
thing was wrong. He couldn’t understand
why there wasn’t more reaction to the
story on TV and social media. Then he
got a message from a friend, saying they
had tried to share the New York Post’s
story on Facebook and Twitter, but the
messages wouldn’t go through.
It was true. Facebook announced
it was “reducing distribution” of
the story while it was fact-checked.
Above, an email found Twitter blocked users from shar-
on Hunter Biden’s laptop ing the story, saying it breached
sent by an adviser to the rules on hacked material.
board of Burisma, the Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s
company set up by chief executive, later revealed
Mykola Zlochevsky, that the company had been
right. Vish Burra, below, approached by the FBI, telling it
handed the emails to to be on the lookout for a
the New York Post “dump” of Russian propa-
ganda similar to the incident in
2016, when WikiLeaks had
published hacked emails
from Hillary Clinton’s cam-
paign.
Five days later, on Octo-
ber 19, 2020, more than 50
former CIA officers and
other retired spies
signed a public letter
saying the laptop
story had “all the clas-
sic earmarks of a Russian information
operation”. Burra couldn’t believe it:
“How scary is it that these folks actively
co-ordinated to bury the story on so
many different levels all the way to the
intelligence agencies in our govern-
ment?” He believed he was witnessing a
cover-up to protect Joe Biden’s electoral
chances.
In the run-up to the election, the New
York Post continued to publish stories
based on documents it had found on the
laptop. They included an email discuss-
ing a joint venture with a Chinese energy
company with ties to the Chinese Com-
munist Party. In the email, one of
Hunter’s business partners lays out the
proposed division of shares in the com-
pany. It includes the phrase: “10 held by
H for the big guy?” The implication was
clear: “H” stood for Hunter and “the big
guy” was a reference to his father.
The Biden campaign dismissed the
stories as “conspiracy theories” and said
Giuliani was relying on “actors tied to
Russian intelligence”. In the few weeks
before the election, the story in the
media was not about potential conflicts
of interest or hints of corruption sur-
rounding the Democratic candidate. It
was about Russian disinformation.
But there was a big problem with that
narrative: two years on, no evidence of
Russian disinformation has emerged. In
March, The New York Times, The Wash-
ington Post and others revealed that they
had authenticated thousands of emails
on the laptop and confirmed others
through sources and publicly available
documents.
And yet the reaction from the estab-
lishment media has been muted, a collec-
tive shrug of the shoulders. No smoking
gun. What was the laptop story: scandal
of the century, or an overhyped political
hit? I had to look for myself.
27
The money
Hunter made from
his overseas
business deals ran
into the millions
So it was that I found myself, one warm
September evening this year, following
Burra up the stairs to the third floor of an
old Manhattan block and the home of the
New York Young Republican Club. A cen-
tury ago the building had housed a
brothel that had caught fire, Burra told
me, with perhaps a touch too much rel-
ish. The “ladies of the night”, he said,
were forced to jump to the street below.
But I wasn’t here for a history lesson. I
was here to pick up a copy of the hard
drive that was supposed to be a clone of
the one in Hunter’s laptop.
When I opened it, it was clear the drive
had been altered. On the desktop was a
folder entitled “salacious pics package”,
which contained the photos of Hunter
taking drugs and having sex with prosti-
tutes. Another folder was entitled “big
guy file”, with messages containing the
phrase “big guy”.
Burra acknowledged he had created
these folders in 2020 when he was first
combing through the hard drive. He
hadn’t moved any files, he said, just
placed copies on the desktop for easy ref-
erence. But aside from the new folders,
just as Devine had said, when you open
the drive, it does not look like a fake. In
the photo library are thousands of pic-
tures, snaps of the Bidens on holiday or at
family get-togethers. The email inbox is
full of the usual mundane messages:
Facebook friend suggestions, offers from
an upscale furniture shop.
I checked for the key emails about
Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine
and China that the New York Post had
used in its reporting. They were there in
the inbox. So were financial records
detailing money he made from his over-
seas business ventures, running into the
millions of dollars. It is clear from the lap-
top that Hunter was leveraging his family
name and his father’s position to make
money.
There are also suggestions, in text mes-
sages with family members, that Hunter
felt pressure to make money for the fam-
ily. But there is no indication that pres-
sure came from his father. And there is no
evidence on the laptop that Joe Biden
benefited from any of his son’s busi-
nesses, or that he used his position to
help further those interests. There is no
smoking gun.
hat does it all add up to? The lap-
top is a fascinating insight into
how money is made at the top, at
the intersection of politics and
business. Many American voters
might find what it reveals distasteful. If
the laptop had received blanket media
coverage in the run-up to the 2020 elec-
tion, could it have made a difference to
the result? It’s possible. Joe Biden won by
a tight margin — just 43,000 votes in three
states.
And that, perhaps, is the most damag-
ing aspect of the whole saga: the suspi-
cion, not without foundation, that
actions by the establishment media, big
tech, the FBI and retired members of the
intelligence agencies combined to dimin-
ish a story of legitimate public interest in
the weeks running up to an election.
John Sipher, one of the ex-CIA officers
who signed the letter suggesting the lap-
top was Russian disinformation, told me
he acknowledged that the timing of the
intervention could “suggest that this was
somehow co-ordinated to protect Presi-
The Republicans dent Biden.”
have said they But he maintains he and his colleagues
will investigate were simply sounding a non-partisan
Hunter Biden and warning based on recent history and
his father Joe, top their own experience of working to
thwart Russian spies.
It’s a complicated picture. There were
legitimate reasons to worry that the
laptop might be Russian disinformation.
Not least the source of the information:
Giuliani, Bannon and Burra. Bannon
once said about American politics: “Dem-
ocrats don’t matter. The real opposition
is the media. And the way to deal with
them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Burra laughed when I mentioned the
comment. “It’s a brilliant tactic,” he said.
“Flooding the zone with shit is the game,
baby. And we are here for it.”
And so many of us ignored the story of
Hunter Biden’s laptop when it mattered
most.
Therein, perhaps, lies its real signifi-
cance: not in the material on the laptop
itself, but in the way the establishment
shrugged it off.
Trump supporters compare that with
the obsessive attention lavished on
the question of Donald Trump’s links to
Russia, from the outlandish claims in
the Steele dossier (almost all still
unproven) to the Mueller inquiry and the
investigations by the FBI and the Justice
Department into some of Trump’s
associates.
A new narrative is taking shape: that
Trump’s enemies are using the instru-
ments of the state to subvert democracy.
It’s another conspiracy theory, of course.
But it is made more potent by the grain of
truth at its heart.
The latest episode of Gabriel Gatehouse’s
series The Coming Storm is broadcast on
BBC Radio 4 today at 1.30pm, and
available on BBC Sounds.
28
NEWS REVIEW
Dr Mew’s ideas
were the cat’s
whiskers for
my aching jaw
A British dentist faces a misconduct
hearing over his controversial
techniques — but they saved
Matt Munday from a life of pain
T
o the uninitiated, the
phenomenon of
“mewing” can appear
bonkers even by the
standards of TikTok. For
starters, it has nothing to do
with cats. Rather, it is a DIY
method of altering your
jawline and changing the
shape of your face through a
few simple exercises.
Mewing’s popularity is
staggering. Nearly 1.7 billion
videos have been watched on
TikTok, largely thanks to US
incels — men who are
“involuntarily celibate”, and
bitter and misogynistic as a
result. The platform is awash
with chiselled influencers
claiming the technique has
enhanced their jawline and
thus increased their appeal
to the opposite sex. (Women
do mew too.)
Bizarrely, the craze is
named after a 94-year-old
retired British dentist. John
Mew is the pioneer of
orthotropics, a method of
straightening crooked teeth
that entails wearing a “palatal
expander”, called a Biobloc.
This fits in the mouth to
widen and bring forward the
upper jaw (maxilla) to enable
the bottom jaw (mandible) to
fit into its optimum position,
creating space for each tooth.
But his theory is about much
more than aesthetics: he
believes the jaw has a huge
influence on health, affecting
posture, the way we breathe
and much else.
After his retirement, John
Mew’s son Mike, now 53, took
on the job of promoting the
philosophy — but he is facing
a misconduct hearing at the
General Dental Council
(GDC). Charges have been
brought regarding two
children he treated, with the
GDC, alleging there is “no
adequate objective evidence”
to support orthotropics.
The tribunal continues
tomorrow but is unlikely to
conclude until next year.
Mike Mew will argue that
objective evidence does exist.
While I can’t comment on
the specific cases in the
tribunal, my own experience
suggests the Mews are onto
something. I grew up with
jaw ache on the left side of my
face. It came and went, but by
my mid-twenties it felt as if a
nerve near my left ear was
permanently inflamed.
Opening my mouth was not a
straightforward movement. I
had to do it gingerly because
the left side of my jaws felt
unhinged. Sometimes my jaw
dislocated: at mealtimes,
biting into apples, in my
sleep, on dancefloors. It felt
like being punched by Tyson
Fury every time.
I consulted dentists and
orthodontists. A couple made
plastic mouthguards for me
to wear at night, which did
not help. One referred me to
the department for oral and
maxillofacial surgery at Guy’s
Hospital in London, where a
consultant told me I’d have to
live with my symptoms as
nothing could be done.
By 2002 I was in a bad way.
Then I came across an article
about a dentist who had
appeared with John Mew in
1999 in a Channel 4
Dispatches documentary
about jaw pain. I tracked him
down to his practice, at which
he offers regular dentistry
and also private treatment for
jaw pain using comparable
methods to the Mews.
At my first appointment I
was x-rayed and observed
THE MEWING PHILOSOPHY
1 3
4 from now on (implying they
2 5
6 the subject, saying most
Good jaw
1 Good definition of cheekbones
2 Square jaw, wide face
3 Alert eyes
4 Straight nose
5 Nose breather
6 Straight chin
opening and closing my jaws.
And then, at last, a diagnosis:
temporomandibular
disorder. The
temporomandibular joint
(TMJ) is where the lower jaw
meets the skull. The dentist
explained my upper jaw was
too narrow, my lower didn’t
fit into it when I closed my
mouth and had, over time,
retracted at a slight angle.
This was putting pressure on
the nerves behind my left TMJ
and displacing a tiny disc
whenever I closed my mouth.
The dentist I saw practises
dentofacial orthopedics
(similar to orthotropics but
with different appliances and
methodology). I signed up to
be treated by him: a total cost
of £3,400 for a programme
lasting two and a half years.
For 24 hours a day over
several months, I had to wear
an orthopedic appliance
fitted over the teeth in my
upper jaw. Every week I had
to tighten a screw that
incrementally widened it,
causing the nerves to scream
silently before yielding a day
or two later as my maxilla
slowly widened. Eventually
my mandible did move
forward. Then I wore braces
to straighten my teeth. Sexy.
My jaw stopped dislocating
almost overnight. The daily
pain and discomfort eased
gradually. Eating became a
Mike Mew argues there is
evidence his methods work
pleasurable experience
again. And something
unexpected happened too.
I had also suffered from
repetitive strain injury (RSI)
in my twenties and early
thirties — my right wrist
would become sore every 4-6
weeks and I would lose
strength in my right arm to
the point where I could not
even hold a cup of tea.
As my treatment
progressed, the RSI
disappeared. My dentist had
suggested it might, as he
believed it to be caused by
tight muscles in my jaw that
then affected muscles in my
neck, arm and wrist.
I still see the same dentist
and wear a mouthguard at
night to keep my teeth in
position. I have never mewed
and arguments rage about the
exercises’ effectiveness,
particularly on adults. What I
do know is that my treatment
has been life-changing.
I am not an incel and am
uncomfortable with
extremists colonising the
narrative, because they risk
turning a possible important
medical advance into a freak
show. I believe that whatever
the outcome of Mike Mew’s
tribunal, however bonkers
this all looks on TikTok, these
wider issues about dental
health deserve far more
scrutiny and far less mockery.
Even if some find mewing
hard to swallow.
Bad jaw
1 Poor definition of cheekbones
2 Set-back jaw, narrow face
3 Tired eyes
4 Crooked nose
5 Mouth breather
6 Receding chin
How Jeff can
give away his
billions: take
a leaf from
his ex’s book
MacKenzie Scott, the former Mrs Bezos, has
revolutionised philanthropy, donating $14 billion
with no strings attached. Rosie Kinchen reports
S
corned women are known
for their fury, but for
MacKenzie Scott, altruism is
turning out to be a far more
effective form of revenge.
When Scott’s marriage to the
Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos,
imploded with revelations
about his infidelity three
years ago, their split became
one of the most expensive in history.
Scott walked away from the 25-year
marriage with $38 billion, only to choose
the high road by marrying a teacher and
embarking on a philanthropic spending
spree. All of which made her notoriously
tax-shy ex look, well, bad.
Last week Bezos appeared to concede
defeat. Having been remarkable until
now for his lack of interest in philan-
thropy, he announced in an interview
with CNN that he would be giving away
the vast majority of his $124 billion for-
tune during his lifetime, starting with a
$100 million donation to the country
singer and philanthropist Dolly Parton.
“The hard part is figuring out how to do it
in a levered way,” Bezos admitted. Here
too, it may be that Scott, 52, can teach
him a thing or two.
Not only has his ex given away an
extraordinary amount of money, but she
has done so in record time, turning the
accepted model of philanthropy on its
head. Since July 2020 when she started
making donations, she has unburdened
herself of $14 billion with almost no fuss.
For comparison, the Gates Foundation
gave away $6.7 billion last year. Last week
a report by the Centre for Effective Phi-
lanthropy (CEP) tried to uncover the
impact Scott’s donations have had.
Researchers surveyed 277 of more than
700 recipients of Scott’s donations and
interviewed 40 more.
Some of Scott’s mega-donations have
hit their recipients almost totally by sur-
prise. One beneficiary had to google Scott
to find out who she was while Scott’s rep-
resentative was on the phone. Another
thought it was a scam. But the most
surprising thing of all was the conditions
that came with the gifts: there were none.
Lysa Ratliff is the chief executive of
Kaboom!, a charity that builds play areas
in deprived areas in America. In Septem-
ber last year she got a call from Bridge-
span, a consultancy group Scott works
with. It said it had an anonymous donor
who was interested in helping. “They
asked us a lot of questions around our
financials [accounts], around our vision
for the future, around our ability to sus-
tain our organisation beyond one gift,”
When does a bulldog
boss become a bully?
There’s a fine line between demanding
and demeaning, says Julia Hobsbawm
— and a ‘pass-agg’ manager can be
much worse than a sweary shouter
I
f you thought your boss To be clear, leaders who
was bad, you might want are obnoxious to employees
to compare notes: there are weak, not strong: passing
appears to be a lot of down pressure is neither fair
competition. nor generally productive.
First, Dominic Raab, the And yet, while leading with
deputy prime minister, has charm and grace is an
ordered an inquiry into infinitely better look than not
himself after civil servants doing so, there is a risk of
made two formal complaints losing sight of the difference
of bullying against him. His between genuine bullying
allies claim he is demanding and what might simply be
rather than demeaning — a providing feedback in robust
bulldog rather than a bully. and uncompromising terms.
Then Elon Musk wrote to
staff at Twitter saying they
had to be “extremely
hardcore” about their work
weren’t already). Lord Sugar
has long been wading in on
workers are “lazy gits”.
The list of big bosses who
have been disparaging of or
disobliging to their staff is
well documented —
there has been a more
than 40 per cent rise in
tribunals for
workplace bullying
and harassment in
the past year.
MacKenzie Scott was
paid $38 billion in her
divorce settlement from
Jeff Bezos, above right
Legally, under the Equality
Act 2010, harassment is
unlawful, although bullying
itself is not. And yet the two
are often conflated: official
government literature says
“bullying and harassment is
behaviour which makes
someone feel intimidated or
offended”.
This is the grey area. One
person’s charismatic,
stubborn, tenacious boss who
motivates people and fires
them up to get stuff done is
another person’s bully. Being
“offended” can be subjective.
This subjectivity appears
to be marked by a sharp
generational divide, with
older leaders on the one side
and millennials and Gen Z
workers, born from the 1980s
onwards, who place work-life
balance and mental health
higher on the agenda, on the
other.
The term “psychological
safety” in the workplace was
coined by Amy Edmondson, a
professor at Harvard Business
School, in 1999. Yet toxic
workplaces are not always
about shouting and
swearing. Passive
aggression can be
worse. The “pass-agg”
boss who undermines
or excludes can often
be worse for stress.
Ratliff recalls. Two months later she was
told that Scott was giving them $14 mil-
lion for the charity to do whatever it
thought was important. “I’m not a big
crier but I burst into tears on the phone,”
she says.
Since the American steel tycoon
Andrew Carnegie began distributing his
wealth to charitable causes in the 19th
century, philanthropic giving has, for the
most part, taken on a paternalistic, top-
down approach. “There was an idea that
donors who had accumulated success
and money from business were better
placed than the recipients to know how
to guide the use of resources,” says
Charles Keidan, the executive editor of
Alliance, a magazine that covers philan-
thropy. This is the ethos that underpins
professional foundations such as Bloom-
berg Philanthropies and the Bill and Mel-
inda Gates foundation, which have head
offices, staff and strict policies about who
is eligible for funding and how those
donations should be spent.
That style of giving was beginning to
lose its lustre before Scott came along,
Keidan says. Questions have been asked
about the undue influence wielded by a
small group of wealthy people when it
comes to political agendas and public
spending, while Gates’s meetings with
the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein means
“the gloss has fallen off him in recent
years”, Keidan says.
Meanwhile, the Effective Altruism
movement, a trendy disruptor whose
adherents believe in
making maximum
profit to do maxi-
mum social good, has
been dealt a blow by
the downfall of the crypto billion-
aire Sam Bankman-Fried, one of
its chief evangelists.
From the start Scott has set
out to do things differently.
She has no head office, no website and no
staff, relying on “a team of advisers”
instead. She doesn’t give inter-
views, instead posting occa-
sional blogs on Medium,
often including poetry
and inspirational quotes.
“We’re all sort of left interpreting
them like it’s a piece of literature, try-
ing to read the tea leaves,” says Phil
Buchanan, CEP’s president.
A picture has started to
emerge. Scott is interested in
historic injustice and
believes that people with
experience of it are best
placed to make an impact. “Many of
the US organisations have missions
that relate to equity, whether that is
in terms of racial equality or equal-
ity for LGBTQ-plus people, or gen-
der equality,” Buchanan says.
These are areas where leaders
have traditionally found it harder
to raise funds because of the diffi-
culty with proving their impact.
She also disproportionately gives to
groups led by women and ethnic
minorities, which, again, are shown
repeatedly to be disadvantaged
when it comes to raising funds.
Recipients of her money include
Interfaith America, which promotes
religious diversity, Black Girls Code,
which promotes tech skills among
African-American girls, One Fair
Wage, which is lobbying for the intro-
duction of a living wage in the service
sector and The Trevor Project, which
supports LGBT young people.
Forty-four per cent of respondents
to CEP’s survey had had an interview
with Scott’s advisers, 28 per cent had
provided financial documents, 47 per
cent had done nothing at all. The first
thing that Scott’s adviser said to Ratliff
was “we want you to know that we
believe in you”.
That, she says, was central to Scott’s
“philosophy of giving.” The only
expectation, a three-page letter to the
donor for the three years following
receipt of the gift, has been waived
this year. “It’s kind of radical, the
When he was business
secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg
left “sorry to miss you” notes
on the desks of civil servants
who were working remotely.
That has already become a
management case study of
how not to treat your team.
The WFH revolution has
complicated matters. Not
only are the kind of bosses
who insist on presenteeism at
all costs more likely to get
tetchy when they can’t see
their employees, but
communication gets harder.
An increasing amount of
hostility is inferred and
offence taken with the use of
an emoji, and in many
companies, the language and
tone of voice used on internal
Slack channels has become a
legal minefield.
One of the principal
reasons to go back into
offices, at least some of the
time, is social: to gather and
gossip can be just as vital as
the work. Most importantly,
you can have healthy Dominic Raab,
arguments face to face, rather left, has been
than allow resentment to accused by civil
build up. As teleconferencing servants of
goes up a gear, hybrid bullying. Twitter
working is the future, but boss Elon Musk,
humans need to vent their top, and Lord
feelings freely. That is how Sugar believe
problems get sorted out. employees don’t
Whichever way we grasp work hard
the nettle of negative enough
workplace behaviour, one
thing is clear: it goes way
beyond the boss. Junior
colleagues can bully other
junior colleagues. And while
leaders set the culture, there
are often enablers behind
every boss behaving badly,
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
The most
surprising thing
of all was the
conditions that
came with her
gifts: none
embodiment of what some refer to as
trust-based philanthropy,” Buchanan
says.
Not everyone is happy about it. Ques-
tions have been raised about the lack of
transparency, whether the organisations
can handle donations of such a size and
whether it might have a negative impact
on other kinds of fundraising, damaging
them in the long run. There has also been
criticism of Scott herself, with some dis-
missing her approach as gesture politics
without any serious thought about what
she wants to achieve. “They might not
say it on the record,” Buchanan says, “but
we hear it all the time.”
CEP’s research is trying to assess how
much of this turns out to be true. Last
week’s report, the first of three, some-
what unsurprisingly found that the recip-
ients had found Scott’s approach to be an
overwhelmingly positive experience.
Most have decided how to allocate funds
and are expanding their charitable activi-
ties but are also shoring up their own
financial positions. “There were a num-
ber of organisations that used this money
to either set up reserves or even to create
an endowment. But more generally, even
those who did not do that described this
sense of not having to live hand to mouth
daily, of being able to use this money in
the ways that they see fit,” Buchanan
says. None reported a negative impact on
their fundraising activity, with some say-
ing it had had a positive impact.
For Kaboom! the impact has been
enormous, Ratliff says. In the past it had
to “find a balance between what we know
is the path to solving the problem, with
the priorities of our funders who may be
focused on a particular area”. The only
anxiety is what it will do when the money
runs out, as she knows it will.
Today there are five times more bil-
lionaires than there were 25 years ago,
and, says Keidan. “There’s growing
polarisation of wealth, with more people
being poor and with a small kind of
superstructure at the top that are so rich,
they can live off their investments. That is
a recipe for an unhealthy society.”
That is why a small but vocal group of
millionaires both here and in the US are
starting to come around to an even more
radical idea: paying lots of tax. “I think
the most enlightened and progressive
mouthpieces are realising that actually
they need to demonstrate both through
their philanthropy but also their taxation
that they are a part of society and not
apart from it,” Keidan says. Bezos may
discover that the best way of giving back
is simply to pay tax.
those the Harvard academic
Barbara Kellerman calls “the
followers”: people who
tolerate or cover up toxic
behaviour. The HR
department is often a key
culprit here. In Australia
recently, an HR manager was
found under the Fair Work
Act to have colluded in the
intimidation and unfair
dismissal of an employee who
challenged racism at a pizza
company called Bervar.
Neither is toxic culture
going to be stamped out by
the common board practice
of “self-evaluation”, which
translates as “putting the fox
in charge of the henhouse”.
Travis Kalanick, the founder
of Uber, presided over just
such a step-up before he
stepped down as chief
executive of the company in
2017 after many accusations
of toxic behaviour.
The world of work is only
going to get more fraught as
the cost-of-living crisis bites.
Employees might feel under
pressure to put up with more
if they feel their job is on the
line. The pressure will be on
everyone to behave and keep
a cool head. But work will
need to go on, which means it
isn’t just bosses who need to
lie down on the shrink’s
couch and examine their
feelings and behaviour. It
applies to all of us.
Julia Hobsbawm is the author
of The Nowhere Office:
Reinventing Work and the
Workplace of the Future (Basic
Books) and presents The
Nowhere Office podcast
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS REVIEW
The much-mocked belief
that the stars control our
destiny has found a
credulous new audience,
writes Katie Gatens
T
hey were the mystical super-
stars of the 1980s and 1990s,
influencing the lives of mil-
lions on breakfast television
and writing columns in
almost every newspaper and
women’s magazine in the
country. Diana, Princess of
Wales had one on speed dial
and Nancy Reagan employed
one at the White House. Now — and who
would have seen this coming? — astrolo-
gers are back in fashion, reimagined for a
new audience.
Whereas 40 years ago it was all about
premium phone lines, these days apps
offer a younger generation on-demand
horoscopes on their phones. The “mysti-
cal services” industry is estimated to be
worth $2.2 billion a year. On Instagram,
accounts such as @notallgeminis and
@affirmations post memes based on the
zodiac, and TikTok has catapulted astro-
influencers to fame. Last year, #Astrology
TikTok was the fourth-biggest commu-
nity on the platform, and in 2020, Google
searches for “astrology” and “birth
chart” hit a five-year high.
Cementing astrology’s position back in
the mainstream, Written in the Stars, the
UK’s first astrology dating show, starts
next week on Discovery+. Set in a Greek
villa, the mashup of Love Island and
Married at First Sight follows the love
lives of 12 single Britons — one for every
sign of the zodiac — who have been
matched into pairs. Three astrologers
offer commentary from a distance as
each of the contestants struts into the
villa. “That’s her Mercury in Aquarius,”
says one. Another agrees: “Oh my God,
textbook.” It’s terrific fun — and could
convert a new cohort of non-believers.
In our data-led age, where more is
known about the universe and human
behaviour than ever before, does our
obsession with fortune-telling mean
we’ve all lost the plot?
Astrology — the belief that human
behaviour is influenced by the move-
ment of the planets and stars — has always
been a hit with the masses but unpopular
among the intellectual elite, says Nick
Campion, professor of cosmology and
culture at University of Wales Trinity
Saint David, who teaches the UK’s only
university course on the subject. He
argues that spikes in the popularity of
astrology are linked to technological
innovations. “In the early 20th century,
the 12-paragraph horoscope column was
introduced and suddenly newspapers
and magazines all had them,” he says.
Jonathan Cainer became one of the
first A-list astrologers when he started
writing the horoscope page for the Today
newspaper in 1986, later moving to the
Daily Mail. Also in the 1980s came the
development of premium telephone
lines. “Now teenagers get a complete
birth chart, calculated predictions online
— and there’s social media stars as well,”
says Campion.
The 1980s were the golden age for the
cosmically inclined. Russell Grant, now
71, became the astrologer in residence on
the BBC’s Breakfast Time and then TV-am.
He made it accessible for everyone — a
world away from the occult and new age
scene of the 1960s. “His talent was mak-
ing it normal,” says Campion. “He was
talking to the mums and grannies.”
Another of the star fortune-tellers was
Margaret Anne Lake — otherwise known
as Mystic Meg, a clean-living, vegan teeto-
taller. Unlike the subtle style of Cainer,
who died in 2016, Meg went big on the
theatrics. In 1994, she appeared on
screens, with black bob and pale skin, on
the BBC’s Saturday night National Lottery
draw, delivering her 45-second predic-
tions in a purple cloud of billowing
Britpop’s
big four are
back. But
who’s best?
Blur, Pulp, Oasis or Suede — we
all have our own No 1, but what
does the data say, ask Jonathan
Dean and Athena Chrysanthou
GLOBAL UK UK NO 1 UK NO 1 BRIT
ALBUM SALES ALBUM SALES SINGLES ALBUMS AWARDS
OASIS 44,538,660 16,100,000
BLUR 6,953,489 4,400,000
PULP 10,000,000 1,560,000
SUEDE 1,075,981 760,000
Astrology’s
star is rising
N
Did you see
the signs?
The astrology dating show Written in the Stars comes to our screens next week, 28 years
after the theatrics of Mystic Meg, top, made their debut on the BBC’s National Lottery
B
ritpop is back, if it ever
went away. Thirty years
after Blur, Oasis, Suede
and Pulp soundtracked
a nation about to be
swept up by Euro 96, Tony
Blair and Cool Britannia, the
songs that playlisted the half
decade from 1992 to 1997 are,
once again, dominating
headlines and you and your
best mate’s Spotify streams.
Did you get your tickets for
next summer’s Blur and Pulp
gigs? Suede are touring, and
Noel and Liam Gallagher are
headlining festivals to,
essentially, play Oasis. The
nation’s last great unifying
musical era is impossible to
resist. Even one of the bit
players is back, as the
Lightning Seeds redo Three
Lions for the World Cup.
So forgive people of a
8 8 6 2 nominations
2 6 5 2 nominations
0 2 0 (4 nominations)
0 3 0 (6 nominations)
WARNER BROS/ DISCOVERY, INC
certain middle age for
spending more than £200 to
see Blur and Pulp in the space
of a week in July, where they
will probably awkwardly
bump into several exes.
It was a question then and
remains one now. Who is
best? Who has aged the best,
and who can claim to have
won the battle of Britpop?
Because it always was a war. A
hyper-competitive slag-off of
petulance and arrogance that
reached its peak in 1995 when
Roll with It by Oasis came
second to Blur’s Country
House in the singles charts,
and Noel said that he wished
Damon Albarn would “catch
Aids”. Neither track was near
the bands’ best, but the story
was on the evening news. It
was a weird time. If Oasis lost
that chart battle, they have
MERCURY PRIZE BIGGEST
AWARDS EVER GIG
125,000 Knebworth 1996
55,000 Hyde Park 2009
1 50,000 Hyde Park 2011
1 10,000 London O2 2010
smoke. “The power of the pendulum is
spelling out Cathy and Pat as winning
names,” she cooed into a crystal ball.
“Insurance workers, bin men and a den-
tist will be celebrating too.” At the height
of her fame, she commanded a salary of
£200,000 a year. Now, aged 80, she still
writes daily horoscopes in The Sun.
Meg left the lottery in 2000 as interest
in the cosmos began to dwindle with the
advent of the internet.
Someone who had a front row seat to
the ascending and descending fortunes
of astrologers is 38-year-old Oscar Cainer,
nephew of Jonathan. Oscar has taken
over the family business, and is now the
Daily Mail’s astrologer. “I would fall
asleep as a young child while my dad
helped my uncle record his phone line
messages: ‘Sagittarius: three, two, one,
welcome to your week’,” recalls Cainer. “I
remember watching my uncle on TV all
the time and he’d take me out and point
out constellations in the night sky.”
Cainer Horoscopes, based online,
employs a team to deal with demand
from around the world. There are still the
bread-and-butter premium phone lines
(costing 80p per minute), plus a ‘‘5-Star’
subscription for £5.95 a month that gives
you weekly readings, “Love Sign” read-
ings and personal “Astro-Alerts”.
Cainer admits there is still a stigma in
telling friends what he does for a living. “I
once had someone say to me, ‘Astrology
— that’s a load of bollocks, isn’t it?’ I was
like, ‘Mate, you work in music PR’.”
In 2015, 8 per cent of UK adults said
they believed in astrology, but two years
later that had doubled. One theory for its
renewed popularity is the attitude of mil-
lennials and Generation Z towards men-
tal health and a tendency for self-reflec-
tion. Or, as older generations might
argue, typical “snowflake” behaviour.
Colin Bedell is a smooth-talking astrol-
ogist from Long Island, New York, and
one of the experts on Written in the Stars.
He thinks people turn to astrology partly
because they’re looking for a spiritual
practice that doesn’t have the historical
baggage of other religions.
“Astrology has been regularly divorced
and separated from academia and reli-
gious spaces,” he says. “It’s a refugee sci-
ence, but its underlying ethos is accept-
ance and understanding and expression
for all — I think people want that.”
ow venture capitalists are also see-
ing the light — and the money-mak-
ing potential. “I thought there
might be an opportunity to build a
brand and a product in the space
that really spoke to Gen Z and millennial
consumers,” says Ross Clark, the founder
of Sanctuary, one the biggest US astrol-
ogy apps, which he set up in May 2019. He
is not an astrologer, but saw a gap in the
market while working on business strat-
egy for the publisher Condé Nast.
For $14.99 a month, Sanctuary pro-
vides on-demand access to 100 “read-
ers”. One daily horoscope reads: “Hold
onto your hat, Capricorn! Today Uranus
is activated by Venus and things are about
to shake up in a major way!” The app has
had $6.5 million of investment.
Whether or not you’re on board with
the woo-woo, the bottom line speaks for
itself. Last year the Co-Star app secured
$15 million of funding; it is estimated to
have been downloaded by a quarter of
women in the US aged 18 to 25. Banu
Guler, founder and chief executive, told
The New York Times: “I get that you’re
not into astrology . . . but if you had access
to a twentysomething or teenager who is
a girl, that’s who you need to talk to.”
Should we be letting the stars dictate
our love lives? Bedell has some reassur-
ing news: no two star signs are impossible
to match. “I will never make a couple feel
invalidated or that they’re doomed,” he
says. “I’m a Gemini, but my moon is in
Capricorn and my Mars is in Cancer — my
rising sign is Leo. All of them speak to a
different level of energy with other
zodiac signs.”
Editorial, page 30
won the war, commercially debut album Suede in 1993.
speaking at least. Our data Critical success, however,
has them topping nearly all is down to taste. Which
categories, from album sales means many will disagree
and number ones to Brit
awards and monthly Spotify
listeners. With 125,000 fans a
when I say Britpop’s real
champion is Albarn — a
polymath whose Gorillaz
night attending two shows at outstrip Oasis on Spotify,
Knebworth in 1996, they while their creator finds time
dwarf their old rivals live too. to dabble in opera. His
Blur come second in most observations about Britain in
categories, but Pulp deserve a
special nod. Jarvis Cocker’s
band never won a Brit
This Is a Low, The Universal
and most of Modern Life Is
Rubbish have not aged at all.
(though he deserved one for They just got sadder.
thrusting his bum at Michael
Jackson) and boast far fewer
And before anyone says
Radiohead are better than the
streams and sales, but can lot, they were too miserable
still play to 50,000 people to be Britpop, even if they
standing in a field. They won sold 21 million albums. And
the Mercury music prize this is fun, isn’t it? Arguing
though, for Different Class, in like we did when it was CDs
1996 — beating Oasis’s (What’s and Adidas Gazelles. A
the Story) Morning Glory? that simpler time. No wonder we
year. Suede won for their pay £100 a ticket to revisit it.
MONTHLY SPOTIFY AVERAGE NME
LISTENERS ALBUM RATING
16.3m 7.42
8.4m 6.75
2.3m 7.40
696.9k 7.22
Janusz Domagala and Nigel are well known in Brighton
I was baking
for Poland —
and all gay
chubby people
Janusz Domagala had more to
prove on TV’s Bake Off than his
bread, he tells Laura Pullman
S
yabira Yusoff may have
lifted the trophy on The
Great British Bake Off
last week but Janusz
Domagala was the
unofficial winner as the fans’
favourite with his zebra-print
heels, his mischievous grin,
his sausage dog, Nigel. In
episode one, the 34-year-old
Brighton-based, Polish-born
baker melted the nation’s
hearts by constructing a cake
resembling the “very sad
block of flats” where he grew
up in Sosnowiec, an
industrial city in southern
Poland.
“I could always tell where
my mum was because it was
the only balcony where you
could actually see flowers,”
he said, before producing the
winning showstopper and
becoming star baker in cake
week. On camera, he
gleefully announced that he
was “the star caker in bake
week”.
When the class of series 13
first entered the tent in the
estate grounds of Welford
Park in Berkshire, Domagala
cried. “I think the realisation
came that I’m going be
representing all the Polish
people so maybe this is a time
to change the stigma of the
Polish person,” he says when
we meet in a London deli.
“Being gay and chubby —
that’s another thing that I’d
be representing.”
Domagala, who moved to
the UK ten years ago and
works for a digital company,
impressed with his Nigel-
inspired sausage dog pie
showstopper, vanilla latte
floating islands and
Neapolitan custard gateau
with his signature icing “drip”
running down the sides. Cue
devastation when he came
unstuck in the patisserie
semi-final; “now the joy is
gone” tweeted one fan.
Of the judging duo, it was
Prue Leith rather than Paul
Hollywood whom he was
keen to wow. “This might be
an unpopular opinion, but I
was always trying to impress
Prue more,” says Domagala.
“She is a figure I really look
up to.”
Leith, 82, famously enjoys
boozy bakes and Domagala
won her over with his first
offering of pistachio and
cherry vodka wuzetka (a
Polish sponge and cream pie).
“You’ve done your
homework,” said Hollywood.
Domagala says, defensively:
“I only used alcohol three
times out of 27 bakes. That’s
not that many. I think
Sandro [who reached the
final] was trying to get her
more drunk.”
He seems genuinely
delighted that Yusoff, a kooky
Malaysian-born scientist, was
crowned the winner: “She is a
mad scientist with her
flavours.” Besides Domagala
didn’t leave with nothing — he
pinched nine whisks: “I need
to say that those whisks are
different sizes!”
He recalls practising his
Bake Off creations at home
from 7am to midnight on
weekends and dismisses
criticism that there was too
much cooking and too little
baking in this year’s
competition.
“In every Bake Off series,
there was always a cooking
challenge,” he says. “Looking
at this the other way, when
you watch MasterChef, there
is always a baking challenge
as well.”
Now Domagala hopes to
bring Polish baking, such as
the criminally underrated
poppyseed cake, to a wider
British audience and he is
relishing his new-found fame.
Even Nigel is recognised in
29
PETER TARRY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
the streets: “I live next to a
school and sometimes when
I’m walking Nigel and parents
are collecting their kids, the
kids actually say, ‘Oh, there’s
Janusz and Nigel.’”
Not since last year’s semi-
finalist Jürgen Krauss
introduced viewers to his
rabbit, Humphrey, has a Bake
Off pet found such favour.
“Prue called me Jürgen so
many times,” says Domagala:
once his showstopper judging
section had to be filmed all
over again as a result.
Growing up with his sister,
Urszula, and parents — his
father, Jan, was a carpenter;
his mother, Alicja, worked in
the steel industry — Domagala
had a happy but modest
childhood. “At the beginning
of democracy in Poland,
everyone was basically really
poor,” he says.
Each weekend his mother
would bake something: apple
pie, cheesecake or sponge
with coffee cream. “When
she bakes she bakes for her
family and so of course she
bakes with love,” he says.
His mother and sister are
helping the Ukrainian war
effort and he shudders
talking about the missile that
killed two civilians when it
landed in Przewodów,
eastern Poland, two days
before we meet.
“I was really worried
because that’s how the
Second World War started by
Poland being invaded. I was
thinking, ‘Is this happening
now?’,” he says. “The war
should never have started
but the world we live in is
just mad.”
In the tent Domagala wore
a different coloured T-shirt
each episode to symbolise the
LGBT rainbow flag and is
particularly proud of the
Brighton Pride-themed
krokan (a Swedish pastry) he
made in the semi-final.
His family were always
very supportive of his
sexuality, he says, “but being
openly gay in Poland is a
completely different story;
you wouldn’t be as openly
gay as you are here”.
At university in Poland,
Domagala carried on his
mother’s weekend cake
tradition, focusing on budget-
friendly treats such as
chocolate cake made with
cocoa powder and coffee. “I
actually made it on Bake Off
and Prue said it was utterly
delicious,” he says, proudly.
It was only after he moved
to the UK and was given a
KitchenAid mixer (“the best
Christmas gift I’ve ever
received”) by his British
boyfriend Simon, a nurse,
that he raised his baking
ambitions.
Did he pile on pounds
during Bake Off? “I put on
weight by just looking at
cake,” he says. “There were
so many good bakes that you
cannot stop yourself from
trying all of them. It’s not just
one mouthful, you will
usually have a slice so in week
one you’re going to try 12
cakes.”
The reaction from the
Polish community since
appearing on the show has
tickled him pink. “Every
single person says to me that
they are really happy that it
was actually me who
represented them,” he says.
“Which basically when I
walked into the tent that was
the goal so in my heart I’ve
actually won the
competition.”
Finally, what does he make
of the deli’s coffee and walnut
cake, punchily priced at
£6.95 a slice? “It’s nice but
not £7 nice,” he says — quite
the Polish Paul Hollywood.
30
COMMENT
ESTABLISHED 1822
There can be no progress on
the NHS until we fix social care
T S
oday we reveal a dossier of cases
handed to Steve Barclay, the
health secretary, by Andrew
Cox, the senior coroner for
Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. He
describes the circumstances
surrounding the deaths of four
people in the area, starting with
87-year-old David Morganti, who suffered
a fall, hit his head and had to wait nine
hours for an ambulance. The cases “have
recurring themes”, Cox writes, “being
long delays in ambulance attendance and/
or long delays in admission into the only
acute hospital” in that part of the world,
the Royal Cornwall.
Cox’s stories are representative of the
broader NHS picture in England and
Wales. Last month the average ambulance
response time for life-threatening inci-
dents was almost ten minutes, the longest
on record. The seven-minute target was
last met in April last year. Nearly 44,000
people endured 12-hour waits in A&E last
month, up from just 1,258 in October
2020. Emergency departments are often
overcrowded, with ambulances queueing
outside and unable to offload patients.
The NHS’s funding problems are well
known, although in last week’s autumn
statement Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor,
promised to increase its budget by
£3.3 billion in each of the next two years.
He reported that its chief executive for
England, Amanda Pritchard, had said this
“should provide sufficient funding for the
NHS to fulfil its key priorities”.
But a big part of the picture is the dire
state of social care. In many cases hospi-
tals have become improvised care homes
because there are no community care
packages available. More than half a mil-
lion adults are waiting and about a million
people a year have their requests
rejected, usually because councils lack
the money. Every day, 13,600 hospital
beds in England — about 10 per cent of the
total — are taken by patients who have no
medical need to be there. Dysfunction in
social care is exacerbating strain on the
already stretched health service.
Again, Hunt claimed to have increased
funding for social care in the autumn
statement, saying that savings and more
flexibility on setting council tax would
add £2.8 billion next year and £4.7 billion
the following year. Yet on the most sub-
stantial issue — the economist Sir Andrew
If it seems too good to be true,
it usually is. Will we ever learn?
Writing in the wake of the South Sea Com-
pany bubble and the Dutch tulip mania,
Walter Bagehot, then editor of The Econo-
mist, said: “All people are most credulous
when they are most happy; and when
much money has just been made, when
some people are really making it, when
most people think they are making it,
there is a happy opportunity for ingenious
mendacity.”
That was in 1873. How little human
nature changes. Last week brought the
end of the first big scandal to emerge from
the 21st-century tech bubble, with the jail-
ing of the Theranos blood-testing fraud-
ster Elizabeth Holmes for 11 years. We also
saw the beginning of another. Sam
Bankman-Fried looks certain to enter the
hall of infamy for the collapse of the
cryptocurrency exchange FTX, once val-
ued at $32 billion. Its unravelling has left
even the most hardened insolvency pro-
fessionals slack-jawed.
From overhyped start-ups such as
WeWork to digital currencies such as bit-
Horoscope hogwash
In uncertain times, we all crave a little
reassurance. So perhaps it’s no surprise
that astrology is back in fashion, with a
whole new audience flocking to online
star-sign gurus.
There are arguments both for and
against astrology. On the one hand, it is
ridiculous claptrap with no credible
evidence. On the other, given the chaos of
the past year, it seems that credible
evidence is no longer much help in pre-
dicting the future.
Dilnot’s reforms, which have their roots in
a 2010 commission and include capping
the lifetime cost of social care at £86,000
per person — the government once again
kicked the can down the road.
In his first speech as prime minister, in
July 2019, Boris Johnson vowed on the
steps of Downing Street to “fix the crisis in
social care once and for all”. This involved
adopting Dilnot’s proposals, which also
include raising the assets someone can
have and be eligible for state funding from
£23,250 to £100,000. The Dilnot meas-
ures are designed to socialise the cost of
care and bring it closer into line with an
NHS-style model.
As chancellor, Rishi Sunak was appar-
ently cool on the idea. He forced Johnson
to pay for it with a special health and social
care levy, later scrapped by Liz Truss. The
removal of the hypothecated tax took
away one plank of support under social
care reform; last week Hunt knocked
away another when he said that Dilnot’s
introduction would be delayed from
October next year to October 2025 — that
is, after the next general election. He
claimed councils were not ready to imple-
ment it, but sceptics sensed the beginning
of a slow death for the policy. Dilnot said
he was “astonished, puzzled and deeply
disappointed” by the decision.
The sector faces other problems. The
work is physically hard and emotionally
draining. It is priced at the minimum
wage, paying an average of £9.50 an hour
— staff could usually earn more stacking
supermarket or warehouse shelves. More
than 10 per cent of care jobs are unfilled, a
total of 165,000 vacancies, with London
and the southeast, where living costs are
highest, unsurprisingly hardest hit. Care
home ownership is fragmented, with a
patchwork of private-sector and local
authority operators.
Like many of the things Johnson said he
would fix, social care is hideously compli-
cated and expensive. But fixing the NHS
without addressing it will be impossible.
Hunt, who is after all a former health sec-
retary, must know this. He should make
sure the government continues to work
towards the Dilnot reforms.
Even that will have to be the start, not
the end point, of a programme to over-
haul the way we look after our most
vulnerable and in turn alleviate pressure
on the NHS.
coin, the signs of an epic bubble fuelled by
low interest rates and quantitative easing
have been clear for years. It was super-
charged by lockdowns, which left millions
at home with spare money to use for
speculating.
With only a few weeks’ hindsight, it
seems preposterous that Bankman-Fried,
a bouffant-haired 30-year-old, could rub
shoulders with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton
and raise funds from blue-chip investors.
Bankruptcy filings have revealed an
absence of internal controls, with few
board meetings and expense claims
approved or rejected with emojis.
Yet raise money he did. When things
are soaring in the right direction, the lure
of the crowd can prove irresistible. The
reckoning is now taking place. Another
sage financial thinker, Warren Buffett,
remarked that when the tide goes out, you
discover who’s been swimming naked.
The wave of cheap money is receding, and
Theranos and FTX will be far from the
only bathers beached without their togs.
And at least the prognostications of
Mystic Meg (Leo) and her ilk tend to be a
little less gloomy than those of the
po-faced empiricists.
We confidently predict that the star-
gazers have a bright future. Who knows,
perhaps Meg will soon receive a surprise
call from Jeremy Hunt (Scorpio) asking for
her advice about putting the national debt
on the 3.25 at Kempton. A surprise to the
rest of us, that is. Meg probably knew it
was coming already.
Dominic Lawson
Sunak has vote-winner
written all over his face
Good looks can be crucial in those popularity contests we call elections
omething was missing from the
encomia marking the 100th
anniversary of the birth of Kurt
Vonnegut nine days ago. There was
no reference to his characteristically
dystopian work Harrison Bergeron.
Given that the late American
novelist’s own country is riven by the
debate over discrimination based on race, this
short story published in 1961 is strangely
topical. It describes a society that has taken
concerns about fairness to their logical
conclusion: the 211th, 212th and 213th
amendments to the US constitution mandate
that no American shall be made to feel inferior
to another.
Vonnegut creates the terrifying character
Diana Moon Glampers, who is the US
handicapper-general. Her task is to decide the
various impediments that must be imposed on
the most “unfairly” intelligent or beautiful to
comply with the notion of equality in the
constitution.
A year before Harrison Bergeron was
published, the English novelist LP Hartley
produced a novel with a similar theme. His
book was called Facial Justice. It describes a
society in which, while everything has been
attempted to erase inequality, envy remains
“the sole cause of social friction”. To deal with
this, an institution called the Equalisation
(Faces) Centre is created. Its surgeons use
scalpels to deal with the resentment felt
towards individuals thought to have been
unfairly rewarded by genetic good fortune.
In the real world, however, the good-looking
are not resented. Quite the contrary: virtues
are attributed to them in a way they are not to
those less favoured in the biological lottery.
This is sometimes known as “pretty privilege”.
It begins early in life. A research paper written
half a century ago, entitled “The Effect of
Physical Attractiveness on Teacher
Expectations”, appeared to demonstrate that a
pupil’s physical appearance was strongly
linked to how intelligent the teachers perceived
the child to be. This may be a self-fulfilling
positive prejudice: if teachers are more
favourably disposed to a child, the pupil’s self-
confidence will be boosted, which in turn leads
to genuinely higher achievement.
A recent twist has lent further support to
this point. During the Covid-19 lockdowns,
teaching — and assessments — went online. Last
month some research was published by Lund
University, derived from several groups of
Swedish students, which seemed to show that,
while the more attractive ones had some
grading advantage when courses had been
India Knight
It takes courage to face
death with a tea party
I’m in awe of the woman who treated friends and family to a farewell bash
W
ould you throw a massive party if
you knew you were dying? The
instinct is either to retreat or to
“fight”, even when the fight is
doomed. What is unusual, and
unusually brave, is going gentle
into that good night, accepting
the dying of the light, no raging
required. Throw yourself a party. Invite all
your friends. Tell them you love them, and
listen to them telling you why they love you.
See everyone you want to see, all in one place,
for one last time. Have a blast, and then draw
the curtain. Die happy.
It takes tremendous courage for the dying to
even contemplate such a thing. Death is quiet,
modest, solemn. Mourners creep along to a
deathbed and whisper in a sepulchral voice.
And yet you go to a funeral and immediately
think, “I wish X were here to see these flowers,
hear this music and watch their grandchildren
say these wonderful things.” Why not say the
wonderful things and play the beautiful music
while they’re still in this world? That is what
Christina Strutt, the 67-year-old co-founder of
the fashion and lifestyle brand Cabbages &
Roses, did recently. She is dying, quite fast, of
small-cell lung cancer that has migrated to her
lymph nodes, spine and heart. It was
diagnosed on October 4 and she may not make
it to Christmas (she is opening her presents on
December 1 to be on the safe side).
Having established that chemotherapy
would buy her only a few short and
uncomfortable months, she turned it down.
She felt, she says, “elated. Because I had the
time to plan. I could live the rest of my life in
full.” She put her affairs in order and then set
about organising her This Glorious Life tea
party, a kind of living memorial service for 300
guests, but jollier. I know someone who was at
it, and there was, she said, a “definite if
undeclared level of apprehension” before
Christina arrived, partly because the whole
thing seemed so unusual and un-English and
partly because not everyone knew each other:
taught face to face, when the courses were
taught online this factor disappeared. Perhaps
not surprisingly, this loss of the “beauty
premium” was only statistically significant for
female students: the men’s results seemed
unaffected by the move online.
The relationship works both ways, as can be
seen in the assessments students give their
lecturers. When I raised this with a university
lecturer friend, far from favoured in the looks
department, he emailed back: “Tell me about
it! We know that lecturers who are good-
looking get better evaluations. I always say to
my students, ‘Ha, look at me. Now look at those
evaluations. I must be a really good lecturer.’
Which makes them laugh.”
Beyond education, “pretty privilege” has
long been known to disfigure, so to speak, the
employment market. One study claimed that
discrimination on the basis of physical
attractiveness was even more widespread than
that based on race, as evidenced by the
callback rate for job interviews. Both factors
amount to an argument for conducting all such
encounters behind some sort of screen, at least
if the aim is the most objective assessment of
candidates’ merits. But there are lots of jobs
that involve face-to-face encounters with
customers, and then it may be logical for the
employer to discriminate in favour of the most
physically attractive candidates.
Which brings us to the vitally important
trade known as politics. How does this
phenomenon influence our votes? In 2017 a
study for IZA World of Labor was published:
“How Do Candidates’ Looks Affect Their
Election Chances?”. Using a panel to assess the
pulchritude of political candidates in Finland,
and setting those results against the outcomes
of local elections — in which the policies and
personalities were not well known to the voters
— the paper concluded there was a definite
advantage in being good-looking. It also
observed: “Voters may favour good-looking
candidates because they expect them to be
more competent or persuasive, but it can also
Penny Mordaunt
almost became PM
because of her looks
the hostess had asked people from every era of
her life, going way back. “Richard E Grant was
there, and everyone was studiously avoiding
staring at him,” my friend said.
But then Christina arrived and “a huge cheer
went up”. There were speeches that moved
everyone to tears, goodbye letters read out by
her friends, an exquisitely proper tea, a
chocolate fountain, red and black Jelly Babies
(Christina’s favourites) and champagne. Within
moments, my friend said, “that sense of
apprehension just lifted and we all realised
together that it was a genius, a miraculously
wonderful, idea”. Christina had grandchildren
on her knee, a glass of champagne in one hand
and a bottle of morphine in the other. Later
there were songs and fireworks. “It was of
course unbearably sad — do mention the
incredible courage of her daughter Kate — but
also utterly joyous,” my friend said. “I felt
ecstatic with love and admiration. And I
wondered: would I have the courage to do it?”
Christina has designed a wicker basket that
will hold her ashes, to be planted with bulbs
and seeds so that she is forever in flower. Her
family has already planted hundreds of bulbs
in the churchyard. She wrote a letter to her
Cabbages & Roses customers: “A swiftly
spreading silly cancer has invited itself into my
life and within a matter of weeks has made
itself at home . . . occasional discomfort soon
mended with the genius of modern medicine
and my beautiful, delicious life continues,
My goodness, isn’t it
time we rethought
how we do death?
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
be that voters simply enjoy laying their eyes on
beautiful politicians.”
This is surely the case with our youthful PM,
Rishi Sunak, whose beauty is a bigger asset
than his wealth. When he came to great
prominence in the early days of the Covid
pandemic, I was struck by how even people
who were far from Conservative reacted
positively to him. For example, the Guardian
columnist Hannah Jane Parkinson (who
happens to be gay) tweeted alongside some
pictures of Sunak: “For the avoidance of doubt
this is *not* political approval but, sorry, he’s
clearly fit. Will be taking zero (0) questions.”
“Dishy Rishi” genuinely has the attributes of
competence and decency, so his beauty is not a
false indicator of such merits. Compare and
contrast, though, with the serial failed
candidate for the top job Michael Gove. He too
is ferociously intelligent, has gripped all his
cabinet jobs in a way no other Conservative has
managed and is his party’s most accomplished
orator. But his appearance seems to make him
unchoosable as a party leader (doubtless to the
disappointment of cartoonists).
In an earlier era, Robin Cook, another
formidable politician, whose resignation
speech at the outset of the Iraq war was the
pinnacle of principle (as well as prophetic),
accepted that his resemblance to a garden
gnome would defeat his ambitions: he
confessed to the broadcaster John Humphrys
that he was “too ugly” to be PM.
Now back to the present, and the
remarkable fact that Penny Mordaunt came
very close to becoming prime minister, gaining
the support of more than 100 Conservative
MPs in the ballot to succeed Boris Johnson,
even though her record in office was pitiable
and she often appeared not to understand the
meaning of the words that came out of her own
mouth. But she looked magnificent in full flow,
and this alone persuaded a lot of her colleagues
that she was prime ministerial material. Yes, I
know the party membership eventually chose
Liz Truss, but they would have gone for
Mordaunt, given the chance.
So, despite the witticism that “politics is
show business for ugly people”, the truth is
that the physically unattractive politician is one
who has the odds stacked against her (or,
indeed, him).
That doesn’t mean Rishi Sunak has an unfair
advantage in his head-to-head contest with the
bland-looking Keir Starmer. Though, in the
present political state of play, I imagine the PM
will be grateful for any favourable impression,
even if it’s only skin-deep.
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk
albeit at a slightly slower pace . . . I know
where I am going, and I know how it will
happen and my soul is at peace, my head is
already in heaven and I am completely
surrounded by my most beautiful family and a
million friends.”
Her biggest fear, she has said, is not of death
(“maybe because I’m Catholic?”) but of staying
alive, a blackly hilarious faux pas now that
everyone has gone to the faff of trudging to
Wiltshire to say goodbye. “That would be so
embarrassing. I’d have to go somewhere and
hide.” She plans to die in her bed at home, with
her sisters, husband, children and
grandchildren by her side. The local hospice is
primed to help with “the bedraggled pieces at
the messy end”.
I am filled with admiration for Christina
Strutt. Of course her approach is highly specific
— courage aside, you can’t have a party if you
aren’t compos mentis, or if you are in agonising
pain or, more to the point, frightened, which
most people are. But, my goodness, isn’t it time
we rethought how we do death? I was
fascinated to read a recent review of a book
called What Remains? by Rupert Callender,
who calls himself a punk undertaker. His
mother’s funeral involved a degree of
religiosity even though she wasn’t religious,
with undertakers that were “dandruffy old
men” performing “faux-Victorian pomp” so
ludicrously that he and his sister got the
giggles: “Who were these strangers,” he writes,
“looking more upset than me?”
The British funeral industry, Callender says,
is priggish and infantilising, so he set about
doing things differently: a ceremony on the
beach, an old man carried into the woods he’d
planted, a coffin taken to the pub or mourners
sitting around a campfire late into the night.
Callender says funerals aren’t for the dead
person but for the grievers, something
Christina echoes: “I told Kate and Edward [her
children] they can do whatever they like with
the funeral, as I will be ash.” Yes, but what ash.
Long may she bloom.
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
COMMENT
Matthew Syed
Down the Tory rabbit hole, we’re
led to believe impossible things
MPs cheer one economic plan — and then its opposite. No wonder we’re paying a ‘moron premium’
C
an I be honest? I am struggling
to get my head round the
events of recent weeks. Jeremy
Hunt trashed everything that
Kwasi Kwarteng advocated
when the latter offered us his
mini-budget less than two
short months ago. Hunt didn’t
merely repeal his policies and censure
his long-term plans, but also eviscerated
almost every jot and tittle of his remarks.
But that isn’t the only reversal we
have seen. Kwarteng had already taken
down a great deal of what Boris Johnson
stood for on economics. He cancelled
the rise in corporation tax, reversed the
increase in national insurance and blew
a hole in the wider approach to
macroeconomics.
He didn’t do so apologetically or
stealthily, by the way. No, like Hunt, he
did so explicitly, almost gleefully.
And yet here’s the thing that whacks
one between the eyes: Tory
backbenchers cheered wildly through all
these different, flatly contradictory
statements. They waved their order
papers, stamped their feet and seemed
delighted with it all. You might retort
that this is merely a case of MPs showing
loyalty to whoever is in charge. But I
invite you to watch the television
pictures side by side (if you can bear to).
Listen to the guttural cries of “Hear,
hear!” and “Yes!”. These people look
less like democratic representatives and
more like children or puppies. Some
were apparently proclaiming their glee
in how Hunt’s statement had
“wrongfooted” Labour. Did they not
have the self-awareness to see it had
wrongfooted them too?
Aristotle argued that the basic
criterion of rationality is non-
contradiction, or what we might call
intellectual consistency. I honestly can’t
help wondering if many of our MPs —
and, indeed, ministers — fail this test.
NEWMAN’S
WEEK
The security minister Tom Tugendhat,
who praised Liz Truss’s policies — “Liz’s
plan for the economy is founded on true
Conservative principles of low tax, a
lean state and bold supply-side reform”
— is now vocally supporting a cabinet
that despises those policies. The same
can be said for the foreign secretary,
James Cleverly (“the mini-budget is
incredibly well thought through”), and
his cabinet colleagues Penny Mordaunt,
Suella Braverman, Ben Wallace and
Chris Heaton-Harris. The problem is not
that there are different views within the
government, a phenomenon familiar to
all democracies. The problem is that
there are different views within
individual ministers.
Again, you might retort that this is
merely straightforward hypocrisy and
ambition. After all, Tugendhat found
Truss’s policies impressive only once she
had raced to an uncatchable lead over
Sunak in the leadership election. But I
have also noticed ministers supporting a
policy one week and then seeming
dumbfounded when accused of a U-turn
the following week, not realising they
had made one. Think of Cleverly on the
Today programme under pressure from
Mishal Husain — “Did you have doubts
about it [the mini-budget] at the time?” —
or Sir Graham Brady, the voice of the
backbenchers, who was shocked to be
reminded he had once eulogised it: “The
new government’s determination to
move away from the highest tax burden
in 70 years in a drive for economic
growth is welcome,” he said.
George Orwell used the term
doublethink to denote the capacity to
believe two contradictory things at once.
Lewis Carroll alluded to this
phenomenon too: the White Queen
claims to have believed six impossible
things before breakfast. The Tory party
seems to believe a multitude of
impossible things simultaneously:
clusterthink? Isn’t that why there is an
Alice in Wonderland feel to this period,
as if the nation is living in the rabbit hole
of someone else’s fantasies? It is
certainly why the Tory government
remains fundamentally unstable and it is
not impossible Sunak will be challenged
before we get to the next election.
But why is this happening? Let me
suggest that one factor is the contempt
for expertise that filtered into the Tory
ranks during the 2016 EU referendum. I
remember during that campaign
someone using the phrase “Ah, but
you’re an expert” not as a compliment
but as an insult. Kwarteng, if anything,
took this to a new level, trashing
Treasury orthodoxy, sacking its
permanent secretary and giving a fiscal
statement without the oversight of the
Office for Budget Responsibility.
That’s why the markets reacted so
badly to his statement in September. It
had little to do with the UK’s level of
debt, which was the second-lowest in
the G7, a point made by Kwarteng when
he got to his feet. No, they were reacting
to a nation that seemed to have become
unmoored from reason. Indeed, a
phrase started circulating in financial
institutions to account for the additional
amount we were having to pay to service
our debt: “the moron premium”.
Admittedly, that is not a very pleasant
phrase. But the premium itself was not
the contemptuous invention of any one
person but a market price reflecting the
The problem collective judgment of millions. Isn’t that
what happens when a government is all
is that there over the place, contradicting itself
without realising it, jumping the rails the
are different whole time? Isn’t that why it is mistaken
to assume all our problems are due to
views within external factors like the energy shock?
As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal
the same Studies noted on Friday, we are more
vulnerable to these headwinds because
ministers of “own goals” scored right here.
But — to come to my diagnosis — isn’t
this what we might expect to happen
when a governing party becomes
detached from expertise? Isn’t this what
happens when knowledge is considered
suspect? Isn’t it what happens when a
party vests its faith in people like Jacob
Rees-Mogg (admittedly no longer in the
cabinet), a man so detached from
empirical reality that he is now arguing
we should ditch Bank of England
independence, despite voluminous
evidence showing that central bank
control over interest rates — even taking
into account occasional errors in policy
— is significantly better than the
alternative?
I am not saying expertise is faultless.
We know from the pandemic that
experts can disagree and that the expert
consensus is not always reliable.
Expertise, we might say, is valuable but
never sacrosanct. That is why
representative democracies tend to
work in two distinct conditions. The first
is when low-quality politicians are
humble enough to plug the gaps in their
knowledge by listening to experts, who
typically know more. The second — and
much the more benign — is when high-
quality politicians are capable of
probing and challenging the expert
consensus, permitting a creative
synthesis that transcends the
capabilities of both.
I can’t help thinking that what we
have had from the Tories is the worst of
all worlds: low-quality politicians
deriding expertise and thereby taking
the nation from crisis to contradictory
crisis. That is why we have endured the
gravest economic mismanagement since
the overreach of the postwar consensus
in the 1970s, perhaps since the Second
World War. And here’s the thing we
should never forget: a critical mass of
Tory MPs cheered it all.
@MatthewSyed
31
Susannah
Butter
Britain is a
nation of tote
hoarders.
It’s totes time
for a cull
S
ixty-seven — that’s how many I
have. They’re shoved in a
cupboard, and the last time I
went to get one they came
tumbling out all over the floor.
No one needs 67 canvas tote
bags, let alone their
embarrassing slogans (for the
record, I didn’t buy the one that says
“Cumbria not Umbria”).
The Japanese tidying guru Marie
Kondo, back with a new book touting
her old idea of jettisoning all possessions
that don’t “spark joy”, would be
unimpressed. Totes don’t even work that
well as bags. A friend who works in
fashion tells me they’re “not real bags,
they’re for overspill from your
handbag”. She has a point — the straps
dig into your shoulders and the thing
you need most always sinks to the
bottom. Think of someone you see as
chic and sorted — James Bond or Kate
Moss, say — there’s a reason why neither
of them have ever been seen with a tote.
Yet they are inescapable, because
what started as a well-meaning
alternative to plastic bags has become
another shorthand to express yourself,
and one that brands have latched on to
as an easy way to advertise while
seeming eco-friendly. A friend admits to
using his “The future is female” tote to
attract women (he is currently single).
Members of the literary tote tribe, one
of the leading ones, carry those “Books
are my bag” ones, or the Daunt
bookshops’ variety (we get it, you have
views about the Booker prize, support
independent shops and we can’t wait for
your novel). For the music tribe,
Glastonbury totes dominate (never mind
that if you were doing the festival right,
it’s unlikely you’d be organised enough
to have kept the bag). Then there are the
drinks tribes — “Keep calm and drink
prosecco”, “I like cooking with wine,
sometimes I even put it in the food” and
“I don’t know the question but gin is the
answer #ladypetrol”.
I have seen all of these in the wild. If
I’ve accidentally left the house with an
unfortunate slogan in tow, I’ve turned it
inside out so no one can see. Outdoor
swimmers are partial to a tote too, and
my local pool has wised up to it, selling
I have 67 shoved
in a cupboard. A
friend suggests
burning them
for warmth
one for £15 in case you hadn’t made it
clear to anyone who’ll listen that you
“feel much better for a cold-water dip”.
A poll of friends shows that while my
collection is admittedly large, I am not
alone. Say the average person has about
ten totes and uses three, it feels like a
waste, especially when the whole reason
we use them is that they were supposed
to save the planet. The phenomenon
started in the sunlit days of 2015, when
we realised plastic bags were bad for the
environment and war was waged on
them with a 5p charge (now 30p at Asda,
with a call for a boycott because it’s too
expensive).
But the alternative is not without
environmental consequences. An
organic cotton tote needs to be used
20,000 times to offset its impact on the
planet because of the energy and water
needed to produce it, according to a
Danish study. That’s the equivalent of
using just one tote bag every day for 54
years. How am I going to do that with 67
of them? Other research suggests you
would have to use a cotton bag 131 times
for it to be better than a plastic one. With
so many totes in circulation, there is no
need for companies to keep producing
them: they will have to find other ways
to advertise. I still have some inherited
from ex-boyfriends — when bags outlast
your relationship it’s a red flag.
The most famous exponent of this
trend I can think of is Dominic
Cummings, who tapped into tote
tribalism with a Vote Leave one (as if
anyone was unclear what he really
thought), which he alternated with one
from Persephone, a bookshop that
celebrates forgotten female authors. The
shop was “devastated” he chose its bag.
What is the alternative? There was a
TikTok trend featuring members of
Gen Z using shopping trolleys but that’s
the type of thing that you can only get
away with if you are under 27. Is the
answer to streamline how much stuff we
cart around? A friend suggests burning
my totes to stay warm. Tempting. Either
way, I’m determined to have a cull. If
anyone wants 67 tote bags, let me know.
Susannah Butter is acting deputy editor
of Culture
32 The Sunday Times November 20, 2022

COMMENT

Robert Colvile
Tory nimbys want to scrap housing targets.
It is selfish and wicked and must be stopped

W
hen you need to plug a
£55 billion hole in the
public finances, you don’t
tend to make many
friends. Despite the
negative headlines,
Jeremy Hunt did the best
job he could last week of
sharing and deferring the pain. It was
bad. It could have been worse.
But there was one telltale exception.
Amid all the freezing and slicing, one
group alone got an extra handout, no
questions asked: Britain’s pensioners.
Whether you were a billionaire or
former binman, there was an extra £300
to help with your bills — on top of a
10 per cent increase in the state pension,
thanks to the triple lock. And when it
came to spending, the focus was again
on the elderly: the NHS and social care
were the only public services apart from
schools to get a significant chunk of cash.
You can understand why the NHS
might need a bit more. But when it
comes to the handouts, it’s a different
story. Because pensioners aren’t poor.
By any measure, they are the best-off in
our society. That’s not surprising. If
you’ve been working and saving for
decades, you tend to end up with more
assets. Those in their early sixties are on
average nine times wealthier than those
in their early thirties. Not least because
three quarters of pensioners own their
homes mortgage-free, and house prices
in recent decades have shot up faster
than a frisky jackrabbit.
But it’s not just about wealth. With no
rent or mortgage to pay, many
pensioners have higher disposable
incomes than their working-age
counterparts. Likewise, they are less
likely to be in poverty. Yes, there are
many poor OAPs. But, as a group, those
over 65 are arguably the least likely to
need extra handouts. Yet for some
reason they keep getting more of them.
And, to pay for that, younger
generations are squeezed and squeezed.
Just look at the marginal tax rates on
graduates paying off their student loans.
It’s tempting to blame this on the Tory
party rewarding its core vote. But
pandering to pensioners is popular with
everyone. Polls show rock-solid support
for the triple lock, even though it is
economically indefensible. And a recent
survey for The Economist found a huge
majority of both old and young favoured
spending more on health and pensions
rather than infrastructure and science,
even though the growth generated by
the latter is the only way to actually pay
for the former.
By contrast, we appear to view the
fact that it’s harder than ever for young
people to afford a home as just one of
those things. Blocking housing is seen by
many (including many MPs) as a cause
for celebration rather than a crime
against the future. And there was barely
a flicker of outrage as wealthy, elderly
buy-to-let landlords exploited a
sympathetic tax regime and rock-bottom
interest rates to corner the housing
market.
Now, this isn’t a new complaint. I’ve
got on my hobby horse about this many
times before. So why get back in the
saddle?
Well, there are two big reasons. The
first is that it really, really matters —
more, perhaps, than anything else in
politics. But the second is that a high-
profile group of Tory MPs is attempting
to make the imbalance between
generations unimaginably worse.
On Wednesday the Levelling Up and
Regeneration Bill returns to the House of
Commons. It contains a set of
amendments proposed by Theresa
Villiers, a former environment secretary,
with the support of Iain Duncan Smith,
Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John
Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns
and others. The effect will be to
eviscerate the planning system as we
know it by making all housing targets set
The changes to
the levelling-up
bill destroy the
system and erect
nothing in its place
by Whitehall purely advisory and
removing the existing presumption in
favour of development — in other words,
scrapping the two core policies that tell
councils they have to build, and punish
them for not doing so.
Those MPs will talk about how these
proposals hand power back to
communities, remove “Stalinist top-
down targets”, halt the destruction of
the countryside and all the rest of it. But
that is pure flim-flam. Their actual effect
would be to enshrine nimbyism as the
governing principle of British society —
to snap the levers that force councils to
build, and leave every proposed
development at the mercy of the
propertied and privileged.
Yes, there is a case for greater local
control of housebuilding. Michael Gove
has made it repeatedly. The bill includes
many good ideas to that end, not least
“street votes”, which would allow
communities to agree rules on
extensions and development.
But the Villiers amendments destroy
the existing system without erecting
anything in its place. The think tank I
run, the Centre for Policy Studies,
recently suggested that under normal
circumstances such proposals could cut
the number of homes being built by 20
to 40 per cent. But these are not normal
circumstances. The housing industry is
already reeling from recession and
interest rate rises. Already some are
suggesting that the number of houses
being built will fall by more than half
next year. The Villiers plan would make
the fall that much steeper, and any
recovery far harder.
This may not matter to those who
already own. Indeed, they may welcome
the disappearance of the diggers. But it
matters a very great deal to their
children and grandchildren.
These amendments take the biggest
divide in our society and prise it wide
open. They make the recession — and
the accompanying austerity — far worse,
given the contribution made by
construction to GDP. They cost
thousands of people their jobs. They
prevent the building of affordable
housing, which is funded by levies on
private developments. They entrench
the dominance of the large
housebuilders. They are selfish. They
are short-sighted. And they must be
stopped.
Villiers has made clear she is not
budging. Indeed, she is notorious for her
obstinacy. But I implore any MPs
tempted to support her to understand
the full consequences. If you back these
wicked proposals, you are spitting in
the face of a generation — not to
mention removing any prospect of its
members ever becoming homeowners
and voting Tory.
If you live in the constituency of one
of the signatories, or an MP who is
wavering on this, please, write to them.
Explain politely how hard it is to rent.
How difficult it is to get on the property
ladder. How you or your loved ones
couldn’t find a good home near where
you grew up, or wanted to work. Ask
them, beg them, to think again. It’s not
too late to restore the balance between
generations. But pretty soon it could be.
@RColvile

LETTERS The Sunday Times,

1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
BIRTHDAYS POINTS

TO THE EDITOR ALAMY

Email: letters@
sunday-times.co.uk
Joe Biden, US president, 80
Gareth Chilcott, rugby
player, 66
Bo Derek, actress, 66
Rich at last
I have just received a letter
informing me that, as I
will soon reach my 80th
Climate Change actually
forecasts slowing winds for
the coming decades. It is
typical that climate change

Celebrity cruelty
Space time
Someone leaving just as I
enter a packed car park; the
dogs careering through a pile
Orlando Figes, historian, 63 birthday, my pension will be alarmists, like religious
Future, rapper, 39 raised by 25p. It arrived by believers, have no doubts
Andrea Riseborough, second-class post, costing about such matters; real
actress, 41 68p. I suspect the scientists, though, are

shames us all of leaves I have just swept up,

with their tails wagging; my
daffodils already peeping up
through the soil.
Kimberley Walsh, singer, 41 administration costs exceed
the benefit distributed.
Maggie Thomson, Isleworth
perpetually uncertain.
Chris Rayner, Guildford

The unerring Matthew Syed is
right about the theatre of
cruelty that is reality TV (“I’m
sorry, but humiliating Matt
Hancock is not just harmless
fun”, Comment, last week).
With their smirking fakery,
Ant and Dec may try to
convince us that I’m a
Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of
Here is just light
entertainment. No: it is a
modern equivalent of bear-
baiting, where desperation
for fame is juxtaposed with
voyeurism and audiences
bay for blood. Like Syed, I
hope that opinion will
shift, the cruelty will be
recognised and the
programme will be axed.
Janice Ketley
Englefield Green, Surrey
Blame game
Syed exposes I’m a Celebrity
for what it is: an expression of
a nasty, blame-oriented and
exploitative popular culture
that, like Othello’s jealousy,
mocks the meat it feeds on.
Richard Rigby
Bury St Edmunds
implies that he admitted his
transgressions of his own
volition. In fact he was
caught out breaking his own
Covid rules — and only then,
when he had no choice, did
he own up.
Pat Rowles, London SW16
Beastly from the East
In the 1980s Clive James used
to show clips from a Japanese
programme called
Endurance, in which
members of the public were
subjected to horrendous
challenges. It was amusing
precisely because we all
thought, “It could never
happen here.”
Well, it has.
James McConnon
Greenhithe, Kent
Viewers’ choice
We can denounce the
presenters, the producers
and the contestants, but the
true shame is that we, the
viewing public, watch it. Is
this really who we want to be?
Robert G B Jones, London N1
Dogs and autumn leaves — an unbeatable combination
Joys that make
life worth living
Charlotte Ivers asks what
small things make us happy
(Comment, last week). When
my life went into meltdown, a
good friend suggested I write
down ten of these. Among
them was sleeping in sheets
that had been washed, dried
on the line and put back on
my bed without the need of
folding; the smell of newly
mown grass; and the sight of
my lurcher running at full
stretch just because she
Hounded out by
could. I got to No 9 before
anything cost a bean.
Nine, since you ask, was a
glass of champagne. Ten was
another one. But in these
hard times I’d settle for cava.
Jackie Ellis, Carlisle
Dad’s-eye view
I love the view from the
driver’s window when I get
home. I look through the
small side window into the
kitchen and watch the rest of
the family just getting on with
their evening. It reminds me
why I do it.
Philip Mantle, Solihull
and asked, as the only woman
on the course, how things
Kim Adams, Walsall
Winter wings
Brent geese in the field
behind my house this winter,
feeding on the winter wheat.
The sound when they take
flight and go back to the
marshes as the tide turns
is wonderful.
Andrew Buckley, Ipswich
Bridge of sighs
The view of Tower Bridge
from Blackfriars Bridge
at night.
Karen Cook, Bedford
Starring column
Like Ivers, I am a millennial
woman (albeit ever so slightly
older). One of my tiny
joys in this present hellscape
is sitting on a Sunday
morning, with a cup of tea,
feeling extremely seen by
her column, every week
without fail.
Áine Clare O’Brien, Glasgow
had relationships with
victims of abuse.
Joe Biden is 80 today
ANNIVERSARIES
1992 Fire at Windsor Castle
destroys 115 rooms
1995 Diana, Princess of
Wales describes her
marriage as “a bit crowded”
in BBC Panorama interview
2000 Judith Keppel is first
person to win £1m on Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Blame Brexit for
the fiscal hole
Despite her failure, Liz Truss
did correctly identify the
biggest problem we face: a
lack of economic growth.
Ordinary-looking heroes
In her review of SAS Rogue
Heroes, Camilla Long
complained that none of the
cast looked like “sociopathic
killing machines” (Culture,
November 6). During the
Iranian embassy siege I met
several SAS members. Most of
them were Mr Average in
appearance and demeanour.
They dispatched five of the
six terrorists.
Joe Cowley, Belvedere, London
Blow slow
Tim Lyons asserts that
increased wind speeds will
“undoubtedly ensue” with
the rise in greenhouse gases
(Letters, last week). But the
data is ambiguous, and the
Intergovernmental Panel on
essential public services. And
by far the largest windfall
profits we have seen are the
increases in house prices
this century.
Peter Anderson
Towcester, Northamptonshire
Peer pressure
It is outrageous that Rosie
Cooper, or any other MP,
thinks she can bargain her
way into a peerage (“Labour
MP in peerage standoff ”,
News, last week). It is easy to
see now why she voted
against a fully elected House
of Lords.
Alistair Nicoll, Sheffield
Conspiracy code
Jeremy Clarkson hit the
button when he said of social
media, “I’m being led around
by an algorithm and shown
only what it wants me to see”
(News Review, last week).
Over the past three years I
have watched someone I
know being led up a trail that
started with Covid being
innocuous and an excuse for
governments to curtail civil
rights, went via vaccine
conspiracies and ended in his
becoming a dedicated flat-
earther. He now thinks
everything in the mainstream
media is a lie, as is all
scientific discovery over the
past 500 years. It is
frightening what algorithms

Eat that, Matt

Syed criticises the treatment
of Hancock on the show but
he fails to realise that
opportunities for ordinary
people to hold our leaders to
account, at the click of a
button, happen so rarely that
they must be grasped with
both hands.
Voting for Hancock to eat
animal penises or vaginas is
not bullying: it is the closest
we will come to watching him
eat humble pie.
Tod O’Brien, York
Give him a chance
Hancock is coming across
as a decent and genuine man,
yet people still condemn him.
It is this rush to condemn
that is the real problem
with the programme, not
Hancock himself.
Christian Williams, Barry
Under duress
Hancock’s defence for his
past, expressed on the show,
is the glib, airy claim: “I
messed up and I fessed up.”
This sticks in my craw. It
Ultimate indignity
Why don’t the overpaid,
smirking Ant and Dec try
some of the stunts they put
the contestants through?
And, more importantly, how
can they show such a
complete disregard for
the animals they think it is
funny for the participants to
eat? Slaughtered animals
deserve some dignity in
death, not this parade of their
butchered genitalia as some
sort of entertainment.
June Purvis, Portsmouth
Whipping boy
I hold no brief for Hancock. I
think it was right that he lost
the Conservative Party whip
because he’s not at work in
parliament while the show is
being filmed in Australia.
However, I can’t reconcile
that with the fact that Boris
Johnson was away on holiday
for the first ten days or so of
the current session but did
not lose the whip. Another
case of the rules not applying
to Johnson?
John Cutland
Wilton, Wiltshire
vile, sexist police
I am not surprised by your
investigation of sexual
harassment by Gwent police
officers (News, last week).
Forty-four years ago I joined
Gwent as a naive 18-year-old. I
left ten months later,
frightened and disillusioned.
During my training I was
the only woman. We were
described as “a fine body of
men — and Sue, who’s just a
fine body”. I was stationed in
the Welsh Valleys along with
any male who’d caused
concern in Newport, such as
an officer who had been
reported for looking in
bathroom windows while on
duty. My training sergeant
advised me not to become the
“station bike”: I think he
believed he was being kind.
Women were expected to
wear a tight pencil skirt. This
was impossible to march in,
and I was berated for not
keeping up. After passing out
I was interviewed by senior
officers — who sat at a
semicircular table while I was
made to stand in the centre —
might be improved. I said the
uniform put me at a
disadvantage. I was asked to
turn 360 degrees, twice: all
the officers leered and one
said: “It looks great to me.”
The assistant chief
constable told me I wouldn’t
last two years and it was
probably a waste of money
training me. I was determined
to prove him wrong but I was
terrified of staying. After
leaving, I was presented with
a bill for my uniform.
It is so disappointing to see
that nothing has changed.
Sue Riley, Abergavenny
Trust destroyed
The offences you expose in
Gwent police — homophobia,
racism, sexism, violence
against women — have also
been seen repeatedly within
the Met. These illustrations of
entitlement and
hypermasculine attitudes are
likely to be found in others
too. My research into three
police areas also found some
policemen (but not
policewomen) who abused
their position of power and
These offences harm the
reputation of all good officers.
Without an independent
inquiry, emerging cases will
continue to erode remaining
public trust and the
legitimacy of policing.
Emma Cunningham
Senior lecturer in criminology
University of East London
Criminal negligence
I agree with Josh Glancy that
the police have stopped
detecting crime (Comment,
last week). On October 13 at
4pm my iPad and other items
were stolen at Heathrow.
That evening my son-in-law
tracked the iPad to an address
in Surrey. The next day I went
to my local police station and
asked if officers could enter
the property and retrieve the
items. I was told there was
insufficient evidence: instead
I was issued with a crime
number and told I would
probably receive a message
saying “case closed”.
Five weeks have passed. I
have heard nothing. I have
bought a replacement iPad.
Linda Bird, London SE21
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt
seem untroubled by this
(News, last week).
It didn’t have to be this
way. A quick calculation
shows that the “fiscal hole”
would have been almost
covered by tax from the 5 per
cent of GDP that has been lost
because of Brexit. Instead we
are to get a triple whammy of
public spending cuts, tax
rises and high interest rates,
which will further shrink the
economy and, in the long
run, prove just as damaging
as Truss’s approach.
This is just another
example of the fairytale
economics we have been
hearing ever since 2016. What
is needed to provide growth
is an arrangement that
restores our access to the EU
single market. The sooner
those in power accept this,
the better.
Adrian Cosker, Hitchin
Homeowners’ windfall
To balance the public
finances, taxes on windfall
profits are much more
acceptable than cuts in
Membership fee
Dominic Lawson was right to
call for an end to non-dom
tax status (Comment, last
week). However, we should
go further and require all UK
citizens to pay UK taxes,
wherever they choose to live.
As with the American
system, taxes paid by UK
citizens in their country of
residence would be
deductible from their UK
tax liability. Such a policy
might be politically risky
because of the influence of
wealthy UK tax exiles, but it
would be both fair and
economically prudent.
Robert Saunders
Balcombe, West Sussex
Non sequitur
There is something perverse
about pushing out non-doms
— a sector of society that
already provides £8 billion
a year in tax revenues —
while doing little to stem
the flow of 40,000 migrants
that constitute a big net cost
to the Treasury.
John Hall
Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France
can do.
Gail Richman, Harwich, Essex
Letters should arrive by
midday on Thursday and
include the full address and a
phone number. We may edit
letters, which must be exclusive
to The Sunday Times
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JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE Your comments from

Apologies to anyone who has
recently been afflicted with a
wobbly lip courtesy of the
John Lewis ad — we may be
about to set you off again.
mable hastings responded
to our piece on the “doorstep
moment” when a child
arrives: “We fostered a young
man of 15 for a year. Almost
20 years later he looked us up
to introduce us to his wife and
toddler. He was the props
man for a theatre company
and told us he had been
inspired by being dragged to
my husband’s rehearsals. It
was one of the most gratifying
moments of our lives.”
Jatinder Dhillon said he and
his wife “were in awe of our
kids’ foster carers. They still
play a part in their lives after
15 years. We are now foster
carers too, and I dread the
day our three little ones leave
us after a year.” Easy Tiger
saluted “the amazing foster
parents who loved and
nurtured our daughter. We
can never repay them.”
Our interview with the new
editor of Wordle was a
predictably hot topic. Do you
know anyone who’s had a
hole in one? Well, Bluebell
Lady did with MONEY, and
Helen Grant said UNITE “is
my go-to starting word.
Amazed when every letter
turned green on Thursday.
What are the chances?”
Thediaryoctopus added:
“Did anyone notice that was
the day of the Tube strike?
Had a good chuckle at that
one.” For Number Six
Wordle “is the first thing I do
each morning after making
the tea and confirming that
nuclear war hasn’t started”.
tim smith was not alone in
falling foul of PARER: “I was
livid.” Peter The Goblin
shared a tip: “When you get
thesundaytimes.co.uk
to four correct letters with
multiple solutions, waste a
turn using as many of C, G, L,
P, V, Y and R as you can.” You
could almost hear the steam
coming out of ears. Scoota
spluttered: “Have you not
discovered Hard mode? That
is not allowed.” And you
thought it was just a bit of fun.
Rob Nash
READERS’ POLL
Last week we asked:
Should Joe Biden run again for president in 2024?
YES NO
8% From a poll of 12,337 Times and Sunday Times readers92%
This week’s question: Was the chancellor’s autumn
statement good news for the economy?
Have your say at sundaytimes.co.uk/poll
The Sunday Times November 20, 2022 33

COMMENT

Camilla Long
Don’t kick Qatar — aim your boot at Fifa for
sending fans to this dry, dreary hellhole

T
he excuse for this year’s World
Cup tournament is simple. It is:
so what if the tiny emirate of
Qatar is a medieval quasi-
hermit kingdom where alcohol
is banned and gay people are
jailed and women can’t leave?
What better sport than the king
of sports — futebol — to bring people
together and “change minds”?
Change minds. Hmmm. It is the
excuse used by everyone — Harry Kane,
Gareth Southgate and every pomaded
PR lickspittle shilling for this now
supremely vain, airless sport. It is what
football now believes it is for:
“interacting with stakeholders” and
building “sustainable tournaments”.
Where once enjoying the sport was
solely a pagan activity — built around
fighting and boozing — it now sees itself
as a pure, fully proselytising Christian
entity. Be kind, kick racism out, sign up
five-year-olds from Peckham as if they
were choirboys, fly to Doha on your “gay
pride” jet. It is: do this, do that, believe
this, feel that, spread the message. It
puts the big egos first and the fans last.
It’s why Southgate and Kane feel like
controlling vicars.
I have long been interested to see how
well this particular flavour of extreme
religious authoritarianism would go
down with another: that of the Muslim
state of Qatar, a place where alcohol is
not the sacrament, taken ritually with
every game, but haram; where any level
of public exposure, including Brazilian
fans’ bikinis, is frowned upon; where
vulgar chants or rude signs are unlikely
to be tolerated; where they do not like,
generally, being told what to do or being
preached at, especially by Christians,
and especially by Christians from
societies that believe, at least in some
quarters, that there are 97 genders.
The answer is: er, not very well. On
Friday, with just two days to go, we
learnt that beer would be banned from
the stadiums. It will be allowed in the
VIP boxes and at separate fans’
enclosures — ie places ordinary Qataris
could avoid. This raised the price of a
beer inside the stadium from £12 to
about £19,000, which is what it costs to
hire a suite, and pretty much says
everything you need to know about
Qatar and its World Cup.
Fifa suggested the Qatari authorities
had indeed changed their minds — but
not in the wondrous futebol sense. I’m
not even going into the hilarious
mendacity of any of this: there is simply
no way they wouldn’t have prepared for
this. Either Fifa knew it was a problem
and decided to release things last-
minute and pretend it was a cock-up, or
the Qataris genuinely hadn’t thought
booze would be a sticking point. Which
would make the cultural chasm between
us unfathomable.
This World Cup was never going to
work, never could work — and no one,
actually, ever wanted it to work, except
people like David “Spice Market”
Beckham and the grotesque Sepp
Blatter. It is a house of sand built on too
much money — a mirage — and it is
sickening for many reasons: not only the
Qataris’ corruption and greed but our
corruption and greed as well.
Our desperation, for example, to sign
up to this farce; to send our players; to
go along with it all even though it tainted
anyone who remotely found themselves
involved with it. This includes the now
gibbering head of Fifa, Gianni Infantino,
who, in a rambling 57-minute flameout
of a sub-Marxist speech yesterday
argued that, actually, Qataris weren’t the
oppressors — we were. “Today, I feel gay.
Today, I feel disabled,” he mooed. As
they say on reality television: “I’m
done.”
It is men like Infantino who have
enabled Beckham and Gary Neville, who
has been working for the regime for a
while now, filming endless PR videos.
“Gary Neville in Qatar” is a bizarre
offering: a vague tourist infomercial
dressed up as a serious investigation into
human rights. In his hands Qatar is no
vacant hellhole but a promised land of
light falconry and progressive politics —
a place where workers are no longer
beaten or killed, for example; just not
paid what they’re owed.
It raised a number of red flags for the
viewer, such as the prissy “tent villages”
Neville punted to the viewers as the fans’
luxury accommodation. I simply could
not see a drunk Geordie fan rolling
around those lush Sex and the City ecru
interiors. This isn’t a football
tournament, I thought; it’s a £20,000
Gwyneth Paltrow wellness convention —
SUHAIB SALEM/REUTERS
A young falconer in Doha. At least Qatar is honest about what it is — Fifa pretends it is the finest destination in the world
with the exception that if you happen to
mention the word “vagina” you could
get 100 lashes.
It is tempting to blame the Qataris for
most of this, but at least Qatar is honest
about what it is: a strict society that will
ban drinking in public. Fifa, by contrast,
isn’t. It will pretend Qatar is the finest
destination in the world for fans, while
arranging a fan experience that is hot,
tiring and mirthless — and not even that
Qatari. Why go to the PR bother of
having a Middle Eastern tournament
when it could, really, have been held in
Florida or Poland? Most of what fans are
going to “experience” in the barren
desert state sounds about as inspiring as
having your private parts sandpapered
by an angry goblin.
Footballers like Kane and Southgate
will fill the airwaves with their promises
In Gary Neville’s they’ll talk about the human rights, but,
again, this is mindless tokenism from
videos it’s a land two men who simply cannot care that
much about gay people or women, or
of progress and they wouldn’t have gone — or they’d be
in economy with Peter Tatchell. It suits
light falconry them not to point out the real culprits —
their grasping bosses — by deflecting
their disgust instead on to the relatively
speaking pleasant and benign former
slave state of Qatar.
Why trust a slob
who tells you he’s
a billionaire?
Trust your eyes
They say billionaires are always
scruffy, tramp-like and awkward —
any number of Gettys, Gateses,
Rockefellers and Pritzkers will prove
this.
But it turns out — shockingly —
that all scruffy people aren’t
billionaires, as the depressed
investors in Sam Bankman-Fried’s
FTX are now sorely finding out.
Last week, the value fell out of
SBF’s shonky $32 billion crypto
currency exchange, taking billions of
investments with it. No one
knows where the money has
gone — it might have gone on
property, to charities, to the
Democratic Party. Some of it may
never be found.
What I want to know is why people
felt their money was safe with this
cargo-shorted slob who lived in a
mansion in the Bahamas filled with
beanbags? I know you shouldn’t
judge by appearances but, actually,
you should. One look at him giving
speeches with Bill Clinton or Tony
Blair and you wouldn’t even give him
a job cleaning the bogs at Twitter, let
alone your millions.
You wouldn’t listen to his
hogwashy patter, why he was so
caring, giving, gracious and virtuous
— a big part of his sell was his
“lifelong commitment to helping
others”. It is so 2022 — a fake crypto
bro promoting himself on being a
vegan who sleeps four hours a night.
SBF gave talks with the model
Gisele Bündchen, an investor who
was appointed his “environment and
social initiatives adviser”, on their
“philanthropy”.
It turns out his idea of “giving
back” is actually taking celebrities’
money and giving it back to other
people.
Sometimes the weird loser gamer
is just that.

Terri White
Labour’s deputy leader,
Angela Rayner, faced off
against the deputy PM,
Dominic Raab, at prime
minister’s questions last

Week ending week. I’ll admit it gave me

nothing short of a thrill to
hear the Stockport-raised
politician’s voice bouncing
off the walls (and benches)
of the House of Commons.
The hard vowels! When
she drops her “t”s! Rayner
has received plenty of stick
for her accent, and indeed
after PMQs one newspaper
described going toe to toe

You can take my feed, Elon, but
you’ll never take my memories
I opened Twitter on Friday
morning to a timeline full of
goodbyes and swansongs.
Word overnight was that Elon
Musk’s ultimatum to staff —
sign here to go “hardcore”, or
go home — had led to
hundreds of resignations, on
top of the numerous firings.
Twitter was about to go
down! Any minute!
So, just in case, by the time
you read this, it has in fact
gone to the great social media
graveyard in the sky ( joining
MySpace, Friendster and
Vine), here are the ten
things I learnt during my
time on Twitter (RIP. Maybe).
1 Keep the political
arguments with Uncle Johnny
for the dinner table.
Preferably at Christmas.
2 Never tweet after midnight.
3 More than two tweets a
week about your child is
officially smug.
4 Don’t follow your boss,
your employee or your
boyfriend’s mum — they’re
painful unfollows when
things go south.
5 Don’t post a picture of your
tea. This isn’t Instagram,
babe.
6 Don’t tweet some version of
“I’d like to speak to the
f***ing manager” because
your telly’s gone down.
7 Adorable memes in the first
three months of a
relationship (or, well, ever)
are a mistake.
8 Promote your work without
apology (women, I’m talking
to you).
9 Always check you’re not
just tweeting the name you
think you’re searching (hello
me and Liam Neeson circa
2019 — and, of course, Ed
Balls).
10 Never. Ever. Expect.
Nuance.
with her as “like going on
the Tube in full evening
regalia and encountering a
carriage of boozed-up
football hooligans”.
It’s not surprising, given
she is slated pretty much
every time she speaks
publicly. A recent study also
found accents from
industrial cities most linked
with the working class were
least liked.
Unless, I’d argue, you’re
from the working class.
Then, her voice cuts
through the braying like a
knife through butter. There
is a power in seeing
someone like us rubbing
shoulders with those who
probably, deep down, think
we are just boozed-up
football hooligans too.

Now it’s too late to tell my NEWMAN’S Four light

friend: I share your pain
On Monday I gave a eulogy
for my friend Lou. It wasn’t
what I’d been expecting to
do last Monday, or any
Monday. Nineteen years:
that’s how long I’d known
Lou before the message
came to say she’d had her
second heart attack in two
years, both caused by her
alcohol addiction.
I remember the first time
someone said to me, “Lou’s
an alcoholic.” I shook my
head in response, my body
rejecting what my brain
couldn’t understand.
Lou, you see, had been a
ball of joy, an electric shock
of a woman whose company
left you feeling alert, excited
and, well, alive.
The five pages I filled with
words for her weren’t
VIEW years away ...
enough. There is so much My life has changed a fair bit
more I wish I’d said and over the past few years, but
done. I wish I hadn’t last weekend I stayed in
pretended to believe her Hackney, just round the
when she said she was corner from my old flat. I
sober; I wish I’d posted that visited the late-night bars I
letter telling her that I knew used to meet dates in; the
she was in pain and I wanted Domino’s Pizza where I had a
to help; I wish I’d called her stand-up row about a garlic
number more and not been dip; the bookshop where I
afraid of who she might be fancied the sullen, bearded
when she answered; I wish man behind the counter.
I’d told her about my own I was essentially the Ghost
sunken months of drinking of Christmas Future. But I
vodka from water bottles; I didn’t warn 2018 Terri of a
wish I’d told her she was lonely, empty death. I
funny and hot and clever warned her that one day
and caring. she’d wake up to find her
But I couldn’t. So instead house in Saddleworth
I stood in the church and overrun by her new family,
spoke her name aloud. And she’d have no time to read
even though she couldn’t books and — worst of all —
hear, I said it anyway, one there’d be no Domino’s in
last time. “I love you, Lou.” delivery distance.
 34 The Sunday Times November 20, 2022

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1 Award won by Georg Solti 31 times and Beyoncé 28 times (6) 1 George and Weedon ____ wrote The Diary of a Nobody (9)
4 A swan and a wren were named after this wood engraver (6,6) 2 “Driver” and “conductor” are ____ nouns (5)
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25
27
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The Sunday Times November 20, 2022
NEWS REVIEW
Jeremy
Clarkson
My market
speculation paid
off: not buying
cryptocurrency
TEASER 3139
Andrew Skidmore
Checkmate
Our chess club is divided into
sections, with each section
having the same number of
players. The two oldest
CHESS David Howell
The Meltwater Champions
Chess Tour Final featured a
late contender for the game of
the year.
White: Jan-Krzsztof Duda
Black: Anish Giri
Meltwater Champions Chess
Tour Final, chess24.com 2022
Ragozin Defence
1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nf3 d5 4
Nc3 Bb4 5 cxd5 exd5 6 Bg5
Nbd7 7 Rc1 h6 8 Bh4 g5 9 Bg3
Ne4 10 Qb3 Bxc3+ 11 bxc3
Nb6 12 e3 h5 13 c4 h4 14 Be5
f6 The white bishop has been
trapped behind enemy lines,
but the complications are only
just beginning. 15 cxd5! White
obtains fantastic compensation
for the sacrificed piece. 15…
fxe5 16 Bb5+ Kf8 16…Bd7 is
safer, preserving castling rights
and hoping to exchange pieces.
17 Nxe5 Kg7 17…Qxd5 was
necessary, even if Black must
return material after 18 Ng6+. 18
Bd3 Nd6 19 0-0 g4 20 f4 Rf8 21
e4 g3 22 f5 The white pawn mass
threatens to engulf the black
position. 22…Qg5 23 Rxc7+
Kg8 24 Bb1 Qd2 25 Qf3 Bxf5
26 exf5 Qxd4+ 27 Kh1 Rac8
White has built up an
overwhelming advantage. A
Send your solution (first move only), to Sunday Times Spot the Move 1350,
The Sunday Times, PO Box 29, Colchester, Essex CO2 8GZ, or email to
puzzle.entries@sunday-times.co.uk. The first correct answer drawn after next
Saturday wins a £20 Waterstones voucher. Open to 18+ UK & ROI residents only.
LAST WEEK’S SOLUTIONS
SUDOKU WARM-UP
SUDOKU 1509
KILLER SUDOKU
1 3 3 5 7 8 8 9 12 14 15 17 18 18 45 55
Winners Crossword 5031 P Heyes, Wells, Somerset, B Donaldson, Burntisland, Fife, N Ellen, Canterbury, Kent, G Sutherland, Tillyrie, Perth and Kinross Mephisto 3244 K
Wagner, Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, C Borthwick, South Creake, Norfolk, S Chillingworth, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, P Crossley, London SW16, J Little, Halifax, West
Yorkshire Teaser 3136 J Martis, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, G Walker, London W1 Chess 1347 G Anthony, Forest Row, East Sussex Sudoku 1507 R Buque, Worthing, West Sussex
35
TRUSTNODES
reckoned that, around the world, nation stolen credit cards. But if one of them
states owe £300 trillion. That’s three came to my farm shop and offered to pay
hundred million million pounds. for half a dozen eggs using money that a
But to whom exactly do we owe it? A man in a T-shirt in America said they
bank? A building society? A man in had, I’d show them the door.
Switzerland with Eurotrash shoes and a
hairless Slavic girlfriend? Admit it: you
don’t know.
I definitely don’t know. Nor do I know
what would happen if the bank or the
I’ve been saying for ten years that
cryptocurrency cannot work, and last
week I was granted an opportunity to
pull my special told-you-so face because
Mr Bankman-Fried — that cannot be his
building society or the Eurotrash fella real name, surely — ran into some
decided they’d like their money back. financial difficulties. He went to bed one
Because our present debt in Britain is night with $32 billion to his name and
equivalent to 99.6 per cent of our woke up the next morning with
gross domestic product. Obviously, absolutely nothing at all. I can’t imagine
being normal, I don’t know what the wrong ’uns who used his invented
gross domestic product is, but 99.6 per money to do business will be terribly
cent of whatever it is sounds worrying. pleased about this. Or the whales.
Would we have to sell the Elgin marbles I think, and this opinion is based on
at a sort of international car boot nothing but the direction of the wind
sale? Probably. and the shape of the veins in the Danish
I don’t even understand money at a blue I had for lunch, that the problem we
basic level. Every so often I meet have is simple. Money’s too easy to find
someone at my bank to talk about my Sam Bankman-Fried, whose banks and government. This made it if you know where to look, but the
savings, and for an hour I literally have crypto company has collapsed, very popular with people who believe systems that control it are far too
no clue what they’re saying. I don’t with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton themselves to be free spirits. The sort of complicated.
know what a gilt is, or a bond, or an in the Bahamas in May people who have mad hair and say You have people now who start a
emerging market. So I daydream until they’ll give all the cash they make to business with only one goal. To sell it as
I’m told how much I’ve lost in the past whales. One such chap is Sam Bankman- soon as possible for 12 times its turnover
E
six months — which I do understand — Fried, a 30-year-old American liberal so they can invest this invented fortune
ver since last week’s and then I’m asked what strategy I’d like enterprise has just failed and, as a result, who liked to appear at forums in his in a scheme that someone else has
Conservative chancellor finished to employ going forwards. And I never a multibillion lump of invented money shorts and T-shirt with Bill Clinton and invented so they too can sell their
his statement about how he know what the answer is. Thursday? has simply vanished. I find this puzzling, Tony Blair, and who conducted meetings business for 12 times more than it’s
would be taking from the rich Macaroni cheese? About 40? because how can something that never with investors while playing weird video earning. It’s all nonsense, and soon we
and giving to the poor, people I don’t even understand mortgages. was disappear? games. He obviously thought this made need to go back to the days when an
have been arguing about I’m told that when you borrow Being an inquisitive sort of soul, I was him look like a cool and interesting honest man called something like Jack
whether the measures are £200,000 to buy a house, the bank intrigued when digital e-money first multitasking genius. Smethurst started an honest coal
necessary, or a bit conjures the money out of thin air. So in became a thing. So I spent many hours And it worked, because lots of delivery business so that he could take a
communistical. And I’ve found the my mind that means you become a wage listening to techno kids with excited eyes pronoun scholars who admire people in wage, safe in the knowledge that one day
whole discussion hilarious because no slave for the rest of your life so that the explaining what it was and why it was a shorts who say they like whales as much he could pass it on to his son.
one knows what they are talking about. bank can earn interest on something good thing and how it would become the as they hate the establishment decided You don’t get that any more. There is
According to government figures, that never existed. future. And I decided after a while that to give him their money. And in no HSBC and Son. No Tesla and Son. No
Britain’s debt is £2.36 trillion, But at least it doesn’t lose out cryptocurrency was even less exchange he gave them what appears to Meta and Son. And there should be,
which sounds an enormous completely if you decide one day to fathomable than actual currency to be absolutely nothing at all. because then we’d all be living in a world
amount of money. If I owed become a hippy and live on a beach in ordinary people like me. Sure, there was something on a we understood. A world where the only
that much, I certainly wouldn’t Bali, because it will then own your It was invented, so far as I can tell, as a computer that said they had something, thing that really mattered in the
be able to sleep very well. house. All of which brings me on to the new economy that would be and they were told they could use this on chancellor’s budget was how much he’d
And it’s not just us. It’s news that a large cryptocurrency untarnished by the capitalist bastards in the dark web to buy drugs and guns and slapped on booze and fags.
members will soon be retiring
from playing and we will
change the number of
This will result in there being
a grand total of 63 fewer
matches per year if each
Send your solution to: The Sunday
Times Teaser 3139, PO Box 29,
Colchester, Essex CO2 8GZ or email WEATHER
AROUND THE WORLD TODAY’S WEATHER
puzzle.entries@sunday-times.co.uk.
sections. The number of member plays all the other The first two correct solutions opened
sections will change by one members of their section after next Saturday each win a £20
Waterstones voucher. Open to 18+ UK &
and so will the number of once per year. ROI residents only.
Amsterdam 2C sh London 11C sh
players in each section, but How many players are in
Athens 21 f Los Angeles 24 s
all the sections will still have each section at the
Auckland 21 th Madrid 10 f
the same number of players. moment?
Bangkok 31 th Mexico City 19 sh
Barcelona 15 f Miami 26 r
Beijing 11 c Moscow -1 sl 13
5
Belgrade 10 r Nairobi 24 th
BRIDGE Sally Brock Berlin
Bogota
1 sl
19 th
New Delhi
New Orleans
28 s
13 f
rough
West North East South Boston 4 s New York 3 f
simple exchange of rooks is The last day of the world
1 ♥ 2♠ Brussels 8 sh Oslo 0 sh
now sufficient for victory, but mixed pairs final started with 6
4♥
Pass 6♥ All Pass Budapest 7 f Panama 28 th 30
Duda had spotted a spectacular a bang:
Buenos Aires 32 sh Paris 9 sh
finish. 28 Rg7+! Wonderful moderate
Cairo 27 s Prague 1 f
calculation. White initiates a Love All, Dealer North After the first board, I
Calgary 1 s Rio de Janeiro 26 s
forced mate-in-11 sequence! found that I couldn’t resist
♠ K 9 7 3 Cape Town 22 s Rome 15 th
28…Kxg7 29 f6+ Kh6 The jumping to the slam on the 7
♥ A 9 Caracas 24 th San Francisco 15 f
black king is lured out into the ♦ 10 9 8 6 5 second! I thought that if
Casablanca 21 s Santiago 29 s
open. 29…Kg8 would fail to 30 ♣ 76 partner was minimum then
Chicago -2 f Seoul 16 f
Bh7+! Kh8 (30…Kxh7 31 Qh5+) ♠ 4 N ♠ A 8 5 2 he would probably have a
♥ K6 ♥ Q J 10 7 Dubai 28 s Seychelles 28 th
31 Ng6+ Kxh7 32 Qh5+ Kg8 33 singleton spade, as indeed he
♦ A K Q 4 3 W E 543 Dublin 9 sh Singapore 29 th 10
Ne7 mate. 30 Ng4+ Kg5 31 Qf5+! did. In practice South led a
♣ A 10 9 5 4 S ♦ – Geneva 9 sh Stockholm 1 sl 10
The checks continue. 31…Nxf5 ♣ K3 spade so there was no
♠ Q J 10 6 Gibraltar 19 s Sydney 27 sh
32 Rxf5+ Kg6 Allowing 32… problem, but suppose he
Kxg4 33 h3 mate would have ♥ 8 2 leads a trump. I win in hand Guatemala 23 sh Tel Aviv 27 s
♦ J 7 2 Helsinki -0 sl Tenerife 18 sh
been more in the spirit of the ♣ QJ82 and play a diamond. First,
game. 33 Re5+ Black resigns suppose South plays the Hong Kong 24 f Tokyo 15 sh 29 11
Istanbul 20 f Toronto -2 sl
Giri, who was also the victim of ten: I play the queen and rough
Jersey 12 sh Trinidad 29 th 11
a brilliancy by Mamedyarov in At our table the bidding was: North the ace, now a
Johannesburg 30 f Tunis 20 f
October, had understandably second trump won in
West North East South La Paz 19 sh Venice 13 f 29 rough
seen enough. Black’s dummy, ruff a diamond
Pass 4♥ Pass Lagos 30 th Vienna 7 f
resignation is a pity, however, 4NT Pass 5♣ Pass
dropping the king, ace of
Lima 21 f Warsaw 0 s
and robs the history books of a 6♥ All Pass spades, ruff a spade and run UK and Ireland forecast
Lisbon 19 sh Washington DC 2 s
memorable king hunt. After the diamond nine. Now A band of rain will move eastwards through the morning,
33…Kf7 (33…Rc2 only delays South led the queen of suppose South plays the Key c=cloud, dr=drizzle, ds=dust storm, f=fair, fg=fog, g=gales, h=hail, clearing much of Britain around midday. Scattered showers
m=mist, r=rain, sh=showers, sl=sleet, sn=snow, s=sun, th=thunder, w=windy
the inevitable) 34 Re7+ Kg8 35 spades. I won the ace, ruffed a diamond king: I play low and will follow, heaviest across central Britain and Wales by early
Nh6+ Kh8 36 Rh7 is checkmate. spade, discarded two spades he plays a club (best), I win, afternoon. Some showers may produce sleet and snow over
Spot the Move 1350: on dummy’s diamonds and play a heart to dummy, play higher ground in Scotland. Showers will be more isolated
White to play. conceded a trick to the ace of
hearts. Most pairs bid the
the queen of diamonds,
covered by the ace and
EUROPE across Ireland by late afternoon. Light to moderate south to
southwesterly winds for most, perhaps fresh in places
slam and we scored 29 MPs ruffed, South playing the
out of 52.
The very next board:
ten, and the rest of the play
is as above. This time we -1
REGIONAL FORECASTS
London, SE England
scored 50 MPs out of 52.
Persistent rain then sunny spells. Light to moderate westerly
NS vulnerable, Dealer East
winds. Max 11C. Tonight, dry with patchy fog. Min 1C
This week’s problem 0 -2 Midlands, E England
♠ 10
♥ Q 10 Largely dry with showers later. Light to moderate westerly
♠ A 2 N ♠ K 8 4 3
♦ A J 6 4 2 ♥ J3 ♥ A 5 4 8 winds. Max 10C. Tonight, dry with clear spells. Min 0C
♣ 96532 ♦ A K J 8 7 6 4 W E ♦ Q 2 6 Channel Is, SW and Cent S England, S Wales
Erigaisi-Mamedyarov, ♠ 6 ♠ A Q 9 3 ♣ 10 2 S ♣ AQ54 12
N 11
Sunny spells and scattered showers. Light to moderate
chess24.com 2022. Which ♥ K983 ♥ A J 6 5 4 2 westerly winds. Max 11C. Tonight, scattered showers. Min 1C
♦ Q 9 8 7 3 W E ♦ 5 West North East South 12 24
precise and aesthetically 9 19
♣ J84 S ♣ AK 3 ♥ 3NT Pass N Wales, NW England, Isle of Man
pleasing move immediately 6♦ 17
All Pass Scattered showers and sunny intervals. Light to moderate
ends Black’s resistance? ♠ K J 8 7 5 4 2 17
♥ 7 11 westerly winds. Max 10C. Tonight, dry and cloudy. Min 0C
♦ K 10 Cent N and NE England
♣ Q 10 7 North leads the king of
Heavy showers and sunny periods. Light to moderate westerly
hearts. Plan the play.
¬ Largely dry with the ¬ Showery and frosty winds. Max 9C. Tonight, largely dry with mist and fog. Min -1C
Solution next week.
odd isolated shower across through much of the day Scotland
France, Spain, Portugal and across Germany, the Low Scattered showers and bright intervals. Light to moderate
southwesterly winds. Max 6C. Tonight, patchy frost. Min -2C
GENERAL KNOWLEDGE JUMBO CROSSWORD 344
Across: 1 Assist, 4 Shadow Of A Doubt, 13 Akira Kurosawa, 14 Escobar, 15 Asmodeus,
16 Port-au-Prince, 18 Tommy Atkins, 19 Evermore, 21 Tatters, 22 Denmark Strait, 24 Norah Jones,
the Balearics through the
afternoon
Countries and the Alps
¬ Widespread frost and N Ireland, Republic of Ireland
¬ Bright spells and scattered heavy snow across the Baltic Sunny spells and heavy showers. Light to moderate west to
26 Fettuccine, 29 Sharron Davies, 31 Traipse, 33 Nose ring, 35 Shadowlands, 36 Picking a lock,
CODEWORD 37 On stream, 40 Regatta, 41 Small potatoes, 42 Charlie’s Angels, 43 Saxony showers across Italy, Sicily, states, Ukraine, Poland and southwesterly winds. Max 10C. Tonight, persistent rain. Min 1C
Down: 1 Asana, 2 Seismometer, 3 Stand by Me, 5 Hook, 6 Dragonsong, 7 What the Papers Say, Malta, Sardinia and Corsica, the Czech Republic
THE WEEK AHEAD
8 Flexure, 9 Dichromatic, 10 Urban area, 11 Tiree, 12 Augustus John, 17 Linda Evangelista, 18 Titaness,
20 St Helens, 23 Kate Thornton, 25 Horse pistol, 27 Il Penseroso, 28 Ailsa Craig, 30 Aconcagua, heaviest in southern regions ¬ Patchy mist and fog
32 All’ ottava, 34 Ingrate, 36 Perec, 38 Misty, 39 El Al ¬ Unsettled with heavy lingering with frost and
scattered showers across the snow through the day across
MEPHISTO 3246 Balkans, Turkey and Greece Scandinavia
Across: 1 Wrasse, 6 Beret, 10 Halt, 11 Epicene, 12 Order around, 13 Obeli, 14 Nemned, 16 Matai, 20 19 19
17 Seméed, 19 Transistors, 22 Pad-nag, 25 Aches, 27 Presto, 28 Imago, 29 Paper-sailor, 30 Entrain,
31 Nong, 32 Ryots, 33 Stonne Down: 1 Whoops, 2 Alderman, 3 Stelae, 4 Serif, 5 Epanadiplosis, 6 7 7
SUN, STREET LIGHTS & MOON
6 Biremes, 7 Ecomap, 8 Enneagram, 9 Teddies, 15 Pericrany, 18 Gonfalon, 19 Trapper, 20 Sastras,
21 Desert, 23 Domino, 24 George, 26 Riant
8 9 8 9 9 10
KENKEN CROSSWORD 5033 Sun Sun sets/ Lights Moon Moon
Across: 1 Cigarette paper, 10 Excused, 11 Idiotic, 12 Friar Tuck, 13 Robin, 14 Treble, 15 Indigent, 10 9 10
rises lights on off rises sets
18 Odonates, 20 See you, 23 Ashes, 25 Desert rat, 26 Oil well, 27 Oregano, 28 From time to time
Down: 2 Incline, 3 Australia, 4 Ends up, 5 Thinking, 6 Prior, 7 Potable, 8 Reconstruction, Aberdeen 08:01 15:46 08:03 02:53 14:46 24 26 29
9 Beef stroganoff, 16 In earnest, 17 Pendulum, 19 Othello, 21 Yardarm, 22 Assort, 24 Spent
Belfast 08:03 16:15 08:05 03:09 15:03
Monday Tuesday Wednesday
Birmingham 07:38 16:08 07:39 02:51 14:49
SPOT THE MOVE 1349 CONCISE CROSSWORD 1808 Unsettled with Bright spells and Cloudy with a
Bristol 07:36 16:15 07:38 02:54 14:52
1 Rxe7! wins: 1…Rxe7 2 d6 with a fork. If Across: 4 Spa, 7 Solitude, 8 Souk, 9 Throng, 10 Frigid, persistent rain and scattered showers band of heavy rain
11 Brazilian wax, 13 No fixed abode, 16 Hamper, Cardiff 07:39 16:17 07:40 02:57 14:55
2…Qxc3 3 Qxc3 Bxc3 4 dxe7 White’s bright spells. for most. moving eastwards.
e-pawn will decide the game 18 Trudge, 20 Scar, 21 Severity, 22 Tip Cork 08:02 16:36 08:03 03:19 15:16
Down: 1 Cosh, 2 Kia ora, 3 Quagmire, 4 Serf, 5 Assign, Max 10C Max 9C Max 10C
Dublin 07:59 16:21 08:01 03:10 15:06
TEASER 3138 1901, 1907, 1931, 1949, 6 Jubilate, 11 Buoyancy, 12 Inactive, 14 Impart,
1979, 1993, 1997 and 1999 15 Oeuvre, 17 Rasp, 19 Guts Glasgow 08:03 16:02 08:05 03:02 14:56
London 07:27 16:05 07:28 02:44 14:42
TETONOR Manchester 07:43 16:05 07:45 02:53 14:49
30 25 17
TODAY’S SOLUTIONS 9 9 9
15 54 15 58 Newcastle 07:48 15:55 07:49 02:50 14:46
SUKO CELL BLOCKS POLYGON Norwich 07:25 15:54 07:27 02:38 14:36
7 + 8 3 x 18 1 x 15 55 + 3
alum, amount, amulet, annul, annulet, Plymouth 07:38 16:25 07:40 03:01 14:59 12 11 10 11 11 10
165 22 153 21 aunt, auto, lomentum, lout, luma,
lumen, lumme, lunate, lune, lute, maul,
NIGHT SKY
55 x 3 14 + 8 9 x 17 3 + 18 12 12 11
menu, monument, monumental, moue, Jupiter blazes in the S at 8pm tonight as the
26 216 30 56 moult, mount, mule, muleta, muon, fainter Saturn stands half as high in the SW. 31 33 15
9 + 17 18 x 12 18 + 12 8 x 7 mute, neum, noumenal, noun, nounal,
numen, oleum, omentum, tolu, Above Jupiter is the large Square of Pegasus,
225 16 112 50 tonneau, tule, tuna, tune, tunnel, ulema, whose top-left star, Alpheratz, belongs to Thursday Friday Saturday
5 x 45 15 + 1 14 x 8 5 + 45 ulna, umma, unman, unmet, unto Andromeda, stretching to its left. Mars, bright Persistent rain for Sunny spells and Drier in the south
in the E this evening, lies between the horns of most, heaviest in heavy scattered and west, showers
in the north.
Taurus the Bull and to the N of Orion as it climbs the west. showers.
to pass high in the S at 1.30am. Alan Pickup Max 12C Max 12C Max 11C