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4 may 2019 [ £4.75 www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

Last
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Will Nigel Farage sink the Tories?
By James Forsyth

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How to lose elections
W
hen a political party is in trou-
ble, we see infighting and botched
attempts to depose the leader.
When a party implodes, something differ-
ent happens: it loses the ability to defend or
explain itself. An imploding party can and will
lose any argument, no matter how strong its
track record. The Tories entered this terminal
stage under John Major after the disastrous
local elections of 1995, which were followed
by their landslide defeat of 1997. It looks very
much like they might be entering it again.
When John Major left, the economy was
in such good shape that it took a typically
overspending, over-regulating Labour gov-
ernment a whole decade to ruin it. Wages
were at an all-time high, as was disposable
income — and yet the Tories were still wiped
out. Why? Because they came across as a
feuding, disgraceful shambles; a sorry pan-
tomime, which voters wished to bring to an
end. Tories are yet again obsessed with their
own party, more interested in settling scores
than in governing or defeating Labour. They
seem unable to work out what they got right,
let alone where they are going wrong.
University reform, for example, has been
a progressive success. It never made sense
for the government to subsidise wealthy stu-
dents — for as long as the huge subsidies
existed, student numbers had to be capped.
The fee was expanded to £9,000 and the
cap removed. The result: vast expansion,
more offers, and more students from poor
backgrounds going to university than ever
before. Graduates who don’t go on to earn
much will never be asked to repay the whole
fee. Yet all it took was an attack by Jeremy
Corbyn for the Tories to put the entire policy
under ‘review’.
On the environment, they also had suc-
cess: coal-burning in power stations is at the
point of being consigned to history. Britain
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
has cut emissions faster than any G20 coun-
try since 1990 — carbon emissions have fallen
to their lowest level since in Victorian times.
The Tories had managed to strike a sensible
balance between environmental protection
and the need for affordable energy — and
yet they end up repeating the soundbites
of anti-capitalist protesters. The 16-year-old
Greta Thunberg makes headlines because
she has what ministers lack: self-confidence.
The Labour party this week produced a
The Tories seem unable to work
out what they got right, let alone
where they are going wrong
video suggesting that extra welfare makes
the economy grow. It was well-produced but
it made old and easily disproven arguments.
Why can’t the Tories communicate the suc-
cess of their own employment policies?
Jobs have been created at a faster rate than
at any time in our economic history, wages
are growing at the fastest rate in ten years,
and a labour shortage has taken power from
employers and given it to workers. When
Tony Blair came to power, 20 per cent of
children were in jobless households. Labour
left this at a still shocking 18 per cent. Tory
reforms have further reduced this to 12 per
cent. This is what progressive government
looks like.
School reform has paid dividends, yet
since Michael Gove left the education brief
the Tories have been unable to recognise,
let alone highlight, their success. Most sec-
ondary schools have successfully applied to
become self-governing academies. Stand-
ards are soaring: since Labour left office,
the proportion of children in schools rated
‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ has risen from 66 per
cent to 85 per cent. This is the surest way to
promote opportunity and social mobility.
Bad schools, which inflict damage on their
communities, are rarer.
As for social justice, the best-paid 1 per
cent are now paying a record 28 per cent of
all income tax. That is an achievement which
ought to warm the heart of any redistribu-
tionist — yet the Tories are silent. When
Sir Roger Scruton was accused of thought
crime, he was sacked within hours. The Tory
assumption was that if it came to a fight, they
should cave in as soon as possible. It’s not
that government ministers are huddled in
their bunker. It’s worse. Mentally they are
already on trial, pleading leniency in the
kangaroo court of their enemy.
Where is the fight? The party is supposed
to have been fighting local elections this
week, yet its senior figures can barely bring
themselves to show their faces. There has
been very little visible campaign. No won-
der many of the party’s own councillors have
all but given up and are threatening to vote
for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party.
In 1997, John Major lost to a competent
and moderate opposition at least. Theresa
May is in danger of suffering an equally calam-
itous defeat to what would be the most left-
wing government in British political history
— led by a figure so shambolic that he makes
Michael Foot look a statesman. There is still
time to avoid that defeat, but it will require
a total transformation in the Conservatives’
approach — and of leadership. With every
day that Theresa May stays on, the Tories
become more closely associated in voters’
minds with incompetence, chaos and defeat.
As Sir John found out, such impressions, once
formed, take a long time to reverse. It takes
a truly incompetent party to create such a
disaster from a backdrop of such success. If
the Tories cannot replace Theresa May with
a better leader, they will deserve what’s com-
ing — even if the country does not.
3
 Murderous nature, p24 Moby’s pals, p23

Horsing around, p40

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 10 Nigel’s revenge BOOKS
6 Portrait of the Week Could the Brexit party sink the Tories? 28 Philip Hensher
James Forsyth She-Merchants, Buccaneers and
9 Diary An unexpected turn Gentlewomen, by Katie Hickman
Annunziata Rees-Mogg 11 Richard Brown
‘My 60s’: a poem 30 Adam Nicolson
13 Rod Liddle Underland, by Robert Macfarlane
Yet more derangement around rape 12 Straight talk
I’m fed up of fake lesbians 31 Bryan Karetnyk
17 Ancient and modern Julie Bindel Days in the Caucasus, by Banine
Rebuilding Artemis’s temple
14 Split personality 32 Stephen Bayley
19 Mary Wakefield Don’t blame An interview with Andrew Adonis on Isokon and the Bauhaus
Chris Packham for the shooting ban Lynn Barber 33 A.N. Wilson
23 Barometer Fracking tremors, bank 17 You can get the staff The Professor and the Parson,
holidays and the cost of a penny We all have servants now by Adam Sisman
24 James Delingpole Nature is Harry Mount 34 Mia Levitin
brutal as well as beautiful 18 Bitter pill Liar, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
25 Letters Watery spirits, the Scruton Drugs lie behind almost every Fiona Sampson
affair and in defence of committees case I’ve worked on Orphans of Empire, by Helen Berry
26 Any other business Chris Daw QC 36 Carey Schofield
The Bank’s search for a female 20 A deadly romance Some Kids I Taught and What They
governor is a good thing Children are growing up with Taught Me, by Kate Clanchy
Martin Vander Weyer ‘heroic’ stories of the Troubles Michael Sobol, translated
Jenny McCartney by Jade Cuttle
23 The ideal brunch ‘Przedwiosnie (Early Spring)’:
Charles Moore is away. a poem
Vegan croissants with Leo DiCaprio
and Jane Goodall 37 Frances Wilson
Moby Solitude & Company,
by Silvana Paternostro
38 James Robins
The Thirty-Year Genocide,
by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Evans, Phil Disley, Bernie, Kipper Williams, Russell, Percival, Colin Wheeler, Grizelda, RGJ, Guy Venables
www.spectator.co.uk Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: letters@spectator.co.uk
(for publication); advertising@spectator.co.uk (advertising); Advertising enquiries: 020 7961 0222 Subscription and delivery queries Spectator Subscriptions Dept., 17
Perrymount Rd, Haywards Heath RH16 3DH; Tel: 0330 3330 050; Email: customerhelp@subscriptions.spectator.co.uk; Rates for a basic annual subscription in the UK: £111;
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Newsagent queries Spectator Circulation Dept, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: dstam@spectator.co.uk;
Distributor Marketforce, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP. Tel. 0203 787 9001. www.marketforce.co.uk Vol 340; no 9949 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952
The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson

4 the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

 Sushi servants, p17

Fresh-air fiend, p48

The orphans of Empire, p34

LIFE
39 Leyla Sanai LIFE I toured with David Bowie,
The Ginger Child, by Patrick Flanery 55 High life Taki played ‘Walk on the Wild Side’
Louis Amis Low life Jeremy Clarke
with Lou Reed, traded emails
Only Americans Burn in Hell, 56 Real life Melissa Kite
by Jarett Kobek
with Leonard Cohen, and once
57 Wild life Aidan Hartley had Christmas with David Lynch.
Bridge Susanna Gross Yes, I’m name-dropping, but
ARTS honestly, wouldn’t you?
40 Laura Freeman AND FINALLY . . . Moby, p23
The joy of jousting 50 Notes on…
42 The listener The Isles of Scilly Real lesbians commit to the role.
Peter Doherty & the Puta Madres Joanna Rossiter
There is no running back into
Rod Liddle 58 Chess Raymond Keene
Radio
the arms of Nigel for us.
Competition Julie Bindel, p12
The Fifth Floor; The Reunion Lucy Vickery
Kate Chisholm
59 Crossword Pabulum Actually I do tweet about
44 Television
When I Grow Up; Planet Child 60 No sacred cows other things besides Brexit –
James Walton Toby Young I often tweet about the seasons
Music Battle for Britain in St James’s Park.
Michael Heath
Billy Budd; Man of La Mancha Andrew Adonis, p14
Alexandra Coghlan 61 Sport Roger Alton
47 Cinema Your problems solved
Tolkien Mary Killen
Deborah Ross 62 Food Tanya Gold
48 Theatre Mind your language
All My Sons; Three Sisters; Hell Yes Dot Wordsworth
I’m Tough Enough
Lloyd Evans
Exhibitions
Henry Moore at Houghton Hall
Martin Gayford

CONTRIBUTORS UPCOMING EVENTS

Bryan Karetnyk is an editor and
translator of Russian literature. He
writes about the French-Azerbaijani
writer Banine on p31.
Fiona Sampson, who writes about
the history of the Foundling Hospital
on p34, is a poet and critic whose latest
book is In Search of Mary Shelley:
The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein.
%CRGX5EJOĂGĚF, who reviews
the poet and teacher Kate Clanchy’s
memoir on p36, is a journalist, expert
on military history and the principal of
a school in north-west Pakistan.
Spectator readers are invited to join
us for evenings with Roger Scruton
(7 May), Michael Gove (5 June)
and Henry Blofeld (19 June). To
book tickets, call 020 7961 0025 or go
to www.spectator.co.uk/events.

the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

 Home
O f those who voted Conservative in
2017, 53 per cent intend to vote for
the Brexit party in the EU elections on 23
May, according to a YouGov poll. Brandon
Lewis, the Conservative party chairman,
said: ‘As a government, our first priority
is not to have to fight the EU elections,’
adding that there was still time to cancel
them if parliament approved the Brexit
withdrawal agreement reached by Theresa
May, the Prime Minister. Labour’s National
Executive Committee agreed party policy
should be to hold a referendum (with
a question yet to be decided) if it could
not get changes to the government’s deal
or precipitate a general election. The
Conservatives said they always expected
to do badly in this week’s local elections.
Natural England, the conservation
authority, suddenly revoked three general
licences for controlling wild birds after a
legal challenge by the campaigning group
Wild Justice, co-founded by the BBC’s Chris
Packham. Police reopened investigations
into 450 patients who died after being given
opiate drugs at Gosport War Memorial
Hospital between 1989 and 2000.
C abinet ministers were told to hand
over their mobile phones as part of
an inquiry by Sir Mark Sedwill into a leak
from a meeting of the National Security
Council that revealed opposition to the
Prime Minister’s determination to consider
a role for the Chinese company Huawei in
the development of 5G communications.
America would have to re-evaluate
intelligence sharing with any country that
6 the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
took the ‘unacceptable risk’ of allowing
Huawei any such role, according to Rob
Strayer, of the US State Department. Police
in England and Wales began to use forms
giving consent for the investigation of
the mobile phones of those complaining
of some serious offences, including rape.
Figures showed there were 732 murders or
manslaughters in England and Wales last
year, the most since the 765 in 2007.
D amian Green, in a report for the
Centre for Policy Studies, proposed
that social care should be like the state
pension, with a flat-rate ‘universal care
entitlement’ funded by taxes (with perhaps
a 1 per cent addition to National Insurance
for the over-50s), which patients could
supplement from their own funds. Four
Seasons Health Care, with 17,000 residents
and patients, went into administration.
Debenhams announced the 22 stores it is
closing, which include those at Canterbury,
Guildford and Southport. Sainsbury’s
nudged back ahead of Asda as Britain’s
second biggest grocery chain with 15.4 per
cent of sales over 15.2 per cent; the merger
of the two had been disallowed days earlier
by the Competition and Markets Authority.
Abroad
S ri Lanka made illegal the wearing
of face-coverings, in response to the
bombings on Easter Day now thought to
have killed about 250. Mass was cancelled
last Sunday as a precaution, but people
gathered to pray outside St Anthony’s
Shrine in Colombo, where 50 had died. The
government said that three men cornered in
a terror group safe house set off explosives
which killed themselves, three women and
six children; three other men were shot
dead. Islamic State released a video of its
leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had
not been seen in public since 2014. Iranian
state television took off the air Be a Winner
(which offers prizes of a billion rials, about
£18,000) after a fatwah against such shows
was imposed by Grand Ayatollah Naser
Makarem-Shirazi. The Indian army tweeted
photographs of yeti footprints in the snow.
T here was violence in Venezuela as the
opposition leader Juan Guaidó tried
to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.
Emperor Akihito of Japan, 85, abdicated in
favour of his son Naruhito, 59. Kim Jong-
un, the ruler of North Korea, travelled by
armoured train to Vladivostok, where he
had a meeting with President Vladimir Putin
of Russia on Russky Island. Norwegian
fishermen released a beluga whale from
the harness it was wearing, which bore the
words: ‘Equipment of St Petersburg.’
G ermany’s two biggest banks, Deutsche
Bank and Commerzbank, dropped
their plans to merge. Rod Rosenstein
resigned as the US deputy attorney general;
he had overseen the special counsel inquiry
into Russian involvement in President
Donald Trump’s campaign. President
Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines said he
would go to war with Canada unless it took
back 2,450 tons of plastic waste illegally
shipped out in 2013 and 2014. French
courts have imposed 447 fines for ‘outrages
sexistes’ since a law was passed in August
against the harassment of women. CSH
 A mission for safer, smarter cycling
The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the
Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer,
are open for entries at www.spectator.co.uk/
disruptor. The Awards salute innovative,
high-growth businesses from every part of
the UK that are disrupting their marketplaces
in terms of price, choice and accessibility and
have the potential to achieve national and
international success.
Meanwhile, here’s the fourth of our series
of inspirational personal stories about the
entrepreneurs behind the winners of our
2018 Awards. Martin Vander Weyer talks to
Irene and Philip McAleese, whose company
Limeforge makes the See.Sense range of
smart bike lights and was our regional
finalist for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
E
ntrepreneurship is a second career for
Irene and Philip McAleese. It’s also a
mission, Irene told me: ‘We wouldn’t
be doing it if it didn’t give us the chance
to do something good for health, through
cycling, and the environment.’
Born in Australia, she used to be a man-
agement consultant with Accenture in
London; Philip, who hails from Northern
Ireland, was ‘an IT guy’ with a major com-
mercial bank. In 2008, they moved to Sin-
gapore where Philip took up cycling ‘to get
some exercise into my daily life’ but found
the hellbent local driving style something
of a hazard. So he set himself to designing
a rear bike light that would give a degree of
protection, by shining brighter if it sensed
www.spectator.co.uk/disruptor
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Martin Vander Weyer
danger. A global online cyclists’ forum pro-
vided a flood of other ideas and the award-
winning See.Sense concept — in which
digitally connected lights gather and share
data on road conditions — was born.
In 2013, as they both approached 40, the
couple decided to make the break, return
to the UK and ‘scratch the itch’ to launch
their own business, as Philip puts it. As a
base they chose Newtownards near Belfast,
to be close to Philip’s family and to take
advantage of the country’s relative afford-
ability while they lived off their savings in
the start-up phase. Importantly, the prov-
ince also offered a ‘vibrant start-up scene’,
which included expert advice on manufac-
turing technology as well as access to grants
and equity funding. As it happens I first
heard the couple talk passionately about
the development of See.Sense when I vis-
ited the Belfast Science Park, in the city’s
regenerated ‘Titanic Quarter’, in 2015, so
it was a pleasure to rediscover them as an
entrant for our Disruptor Awards.
They’ve gone from strength to strength,
achieving rapid revenue growth, piloting
‘smart cities’ projects in Manchester and
Dublin, discussing partnerships in the US,
and winning other recognition such as the
BT Connected Cities Award. High praise
for the McAleeses comes from Miranda
Sharp, innovation director at Ordnance
Survey and a keen cyclist herself, who is one
of their mentors: ‘Philip is a great engineer
and Irene is a great communicator. I admire
their inclusive approach, their concern for
the benefit of all cyclists.’
But is it difficult, with two young chil-
dren, to run a husband-and-wife venture
that requires such intense commitment?
‘It’s true we put in long hours,’ says Irene,
‘but because we’re close to home and work
in a flexible way, we see more of the kids
that we might have done in our previous
careers.’ And what if a buyer approaches
them with the right price for the business?
‘It’s really not what we’re looking for. We
just want to see how high we can go by our-
selves. It’s so exciting for us, doing what we
enjoy and making a positive impact… But
of course we’d think about an offer, if we
were sure our vision wouldn’t be lost.’ And
would they then turn into serial entrepre-
neurs and do it all over again, if the chance
arose? ‘No,’ is Irene’s last word. ‘If I ever
stop doing See.Sense, I think I’d like to
become a lady who lunches.’
The closing date for entries to the Awards
is Friday 7 June 2019.
7
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S ometimes life takes an unexpected
turn. So it was for me a few weeks
ago when, driving up the A1 on my way
home to Lincolnshire, I saw some graffiti
that made me think. The words sprayed
on to a bridge support were as simple
as they were powerful: ‘DON’T VOTE.
ACT.’ It scared me that some people
were so disillusioned they felt they had
to take things into their own hands. But
then again, if acting means standing for
election, would it be such a bad thing?
I tried it before, most recently as a Tory
candidate in the general election of
2010. I can’t say I loved the experience.
David Cameron casually announced to
a room of a hundred or more people
that, as party leader, he was in control
of candidates’ names and was changing
mine from Annunziata to (presumably
more on-brand) Nancy. I ignored him,
but he appeared quite serious. The
tragedy is that he was not serious about
following up the result of the referendum
he proposed, and neither is Theresa May.
Which is why I’ve decided to stand for
the Brexit party in the coming European
parliamentary elections.
B ut it wasn’t just a few scrawled words
that made me throw my life into
chaos and decide to run. It was seeing
my friends in the Conservative party
cutting up their membership cards,
watching Labour members tearing up
local election ballot papers — and all
over the utter betrayal of Brexit. It was a
tough decision: I’ve been a Conservative
party member, activist and candidate for
35 years but decided I could not stand by
as Theresa May destroyed my old party.
The question was, what could I possibly
do to wake her — and her last remaining
supporters — up? The inability to deliver
Brexit is eating away at our historic
democracy, so the only answer was to
offer my support to the one serious party
which believes in delivering a clean
Brexit as quickly as possible: the Brexit
party. And so it begins.
I t’s nearly ten years since I gave
a speech, so I was a little rusty in
Coventry when I was with Nigel Farage
for the party’s launch. So I just spoke: no
script, just passion and a heartfelt plea.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Annunziata Rees-Mogg
I then tried to drive home, using my mobile
phone as a satnav, but had forgotten to turn
off the Twitter notifications, which kept
blipping on the screen, obscuring directions.
I ended up with 5,000 more followers, but
lost in the back streets of Coventry. By the
time I arrived home, two interviews had
been set up for the next morning and my
Twitter count was still rising.
T he abuse on social media is in a
different league to that which I
experienced a decade ago. I’ve been called
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‘Jacob Rees-Mogg in drag’ which I
imagine was intended as the worst
imaginable insult. But so far, I haven’t
had serious abuse. You need a pretty
thick skin in this business: just ask my
brother. Nanny, a second mother to us
both, now works for him in London so
I can’t call on her when I’m away as
much as I’d like. She looked after my
13-month-old daughter for me while I
was on the campaign trail, but most of
the time I’m having to learn how to be a
mum/campaigner — even if that means
doing interviews with my beloved on my
lap. She’s teething. Either that, or she
can’t take any more of the Tory failure
over Brexit.
P art of the absurdity of the European
parliament is the size of its ‘regions’.
Driving around the East Midlands I end
up listening to Radio 4 — which repeats
itself endlessly, uses swear words freely
at any time of day and has a programme
dedicated to women (which I find
archaically sexist). Occasionally it has
some interesting shows. Its Westminster
Hour on Sunday claimed that an analysis
of voters in the referendum showed
they were more likely to vote Leave if
they felt English — and more likely to
vote Remain if they felt British. It seems
slightly implausible, given that Wales
voted to Leave and more people voted
to Leave in Scotland than voted for the
SNP at the last election. I’ve decided
that polls — and most analysis — are
more interesting than reliable.
A t a Skegness supermarket with
my eight-year-old-daughter, a
lady stopped me and asked if I was
Jacob’s sister. I fessed up. A beam broke
out across her face. ‘Thank goodness
someone finally has stood up for Brexit,’
she said. Like so many others, she felt
abandoned by the main parties and said
she was grateful that she now had a party
she could vote for.
N igel Farage has not asked me to
change my name: that’s not really
his style. He’s a character, but one with
a sharp and able mind. Who else could
achieve so much, in so few weeks? And
where will it stop? I suppose we’re all
about to find out.
9

The threat from Farage’s Brexit party is growing
S
omething’s been missing from
Westminster these past few days.
Normally, in an election week,
there is a buzz about the place. Politi-
cians feast off their encounters with the
voters, coming back from the campaign
trail with new theories about what the
public really want. But this time, few
MPs from any party seem keen to talk
about this week’s local elections —
or the impact they are likely to have
on Brexit, Theresa May’s tenure in
No. 10 and the future of British politics
in general. This is because they know
that the European elections, which are
just three weeks away, will have a huge
influence on all of these questions.
The European elections are the vote that
was never meant to happen. When the coun-
try woke up on 24 June 2016 to the news that
the United Kingdom had voted to leave the
EU, few would have imagined that almost
three years later they would have been vot-
ing to send another cohort of MEPs to the
European parliament for a term that ends in
2024. That these elections are taking place at
all is a testament to the failure of the govern-
ing class to deliver on the referendum result.
For once, Nigel Farage does not need to
exaggerate the failure of the governing elite
— which is why his Brexit party went from
launching to leading in the polls in less than a
week. It remains top of the European parlia-
ment polls with an ever-strengthening lead.
MPs look on, stunned, not sure what to make
of this, where it will stop or what it will mean.
No one knows whether the voters defecting
to the Brexit party will ever come back.
Rumours are circulating that Farage’s
aim is to destroy the leader he fears most:
Boris Johnson. This is more doable than
it might sound. The former foreign secre-
tary holds a 5,000 majority in Uxbridge —
respectable, but not a lifetime guarantee,
given the volatility of contemporary politics
and London’s drift away from the Tories.
Word is that Farage is considering standing
against Boris in the next general election.
He’d lose. But he might take Johnson down
with him by splitting the Leave vote in the
seat, letting Labour in through the middle.
10
Nigel’s revenge
JAMES FORSYTH
This would be an entirely destructive act by
Farage. But that this idea is being discussed
in his circle shows how serious they are
about taking out the Tories.
The Brexit party is outmanoeuvring
everyone on the Leave side of the debate.
Before this contest began, many — includ-
ing me — thought the Ukip brand would
make it hard for the Brexit party to break
through quickly. But in just a few weeks, Far-
Rumours are circulating that
Farage’s aim is to destroy the leader
he fears the most: Boris Johnson
age has successfully confined his old party to
the margins of British politics, making it pay
the price for its flirtation with Tommy Rob-
inson’s street thuggery and the darker cor-
ners of the internet. And it is not just Ukip
that Farage is threatening. He is also visibly
draining the Tory vote. The situation is so bad
for May that two in five of her councillors are
planning to vote for Farage’s new party.
Perhaps most remarkable is the way
in which Farage has outstripped (and out-
classed) the pro-Remain parties. Before this
campaign started, many thought it would
turn into a contest between the two ends of
the Brexit debate, leaving the established
parties stuck in the middle. But Change UK,
the pro-second referendum vehicle set up by
Chuka Umunna and fronted by Heidi Allen,
appears to be in meltdown. It can’t
agree on its logo or its name (calling
itself ‘Change UK — The Independent
Group’) and some of its activists have
written in complaining about a basic
lack of campaigning materials. The
party lacks Farage’s knowledge of how
to gain traction as an insurgent force.
More remarkably, it is also a less
professional outfit. It is Change UK,
not the Brexit party, that has had to
drop candidates because of statements
they have made on social media. The
uncertainty over its name and leader
seems to reflect similar confusion over
its aims, policies and direction. The
success of its February launch is a dis-
tant memory now. Back then, it looked like
Change UK might block Corbyn’s path to
No. 10. But it now seems to be a danger only
to itself.
Meanwhile, Farage is clocking up suc-
cesses. A few weeks ago, a second referen-
dum looked more likely — it was seen to be
the only way of breaking the parliamentary
gridlock. But the growth of the Brexit party
has revealed the extent to which Westmin-
ster has underestimated not just the anger
out there, but the number of Brexiteers. MPs
are becoming more wary of the idea of ask-
ing the people what they want, for fear that
they’ll give the ‘wrong’ answer again.
Farage’s success has also underlined the
risks to Labour in backing a second refer-
endum (something its MPs want but its
leadership does not). A Farage victory in
the European elections would make EU
leaders more sceptical about whether it is
worth spending time trying to engineer a
second referendum.
Meanwhile, the Faragists are showing
none of the crankiness that narrowed Ukip’s
appeal. And the man himself, who is stand-
ing as an MEP in the south-east, is on best
behaviour. He’s armed with a simple mes-
sage: the need to respect the referendum
result. You told the MPs what to do, he says,
and they haven’t done it. So send them a
message they’ll understand.
Farage has realised that while SW1
thinks that the European issue has become
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
more complicated since the referendum, for My 60s
vast swaths of the electorate the Brexit ques-
tion has become simpler: it is now a question
about where power resides in this country. Meeting my mum for the first time in Bow.
He is also tapping into the suspicion
that many MPs are out to stop Brexit
altogether. We have already seen 191 of
Girls in tank-tops and flares, bewildering.
them vote to revoke Article 50 without any Girls in mini-skirts and blouses, girls in
kind of public consultation to stop no deal; School uniforms with berets, just girls.
280 voted for a second referendum despite
the government having promised that the
Didn’t know who she was. I wanted to go home.
first one would be final.
Politicians such as Yvette Cooper say The 70s were death, my mum and ma da. She
that they respect the referendum result
but that this country mustn’t leave the EU
Was green from liver cancer and he was
without a deal. But then they vote against Curled up in a cot. Sex, girls, tossing off.
the Brexit deal. If you won’t let the country The roots cannot now be disentangled.
leave without a deal and you won’t vote for
the deal, then — whatever you say — you
are effectively stopping Britain from leav- He visited her once before she died.
ing the EU. In them, now, my unimaginable 60s
Have arrived, tout suite, and they’re gleefully
B eyond this lies a broader sense that the
governing class has sought to dilute
the referendum verdict at every opportu-
Putting – steel toe-cap DMs – the boot in.

nity. Rather than approaching Brexit as an

opportunity to be seized, it has been treat-
ed as a damage limitation exercise. The lack
of enthusiasm for this project in Whitehall
has been palpable — and has underlined a
sense of an unresponsive democracy and an
intransigent elite. Farage is capitalising on
20 years of cynicism about politics that goes
back to the Iraq war, the financial crash and
the expenses scandal.
Now, to be sure, the argument isn’t as
simple as Farage suggests it is. He himself is
opposed to the very withdrawal agreement
that would take Britain out of the EU. But
parliament’s failure to deliver Brexit has
given him his opening, and he’s determined
to use it. So where will it end?
Some hope that Farage’s storm will blow
out as quickly as it blew in. Ukip won the
2014 European elections, they say, with the
Tories coming in third — yet David Camer-
on went on to win an outright majority the
next year, proving (say the Tory optimists)
that the European elections are a meaning-
less protest vote. But there is a crucial dif-
ference between now and 2014: the Tories
hadn’t failed to deliver Brexit then. Camer-
on offered a referendum, and it made sense
for those serious about Brexit to vote Tory.
It makes less sense now. The plummeting
Tory poll rating suggests that there is little
electoral future for the party unless it gets
Britain out of the EU. This is the sine qua
non of any Tory recovery.
If the Tories cannot do this, then we are
— in the words of one minister — ‘in Cana-
dian territory’. This is a reference to the fate
of the Canadian Progressive Conservative
party, which in 1993 went from being the
governing party to holding just two out of
295 seats. The party never recovered from
this blow. Ten years later, it had to merge —
on unfavourable terms — with other parties
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
of the right. Some Tories fear that if they can-
not deliver Brexit, they face a similar fate.
One minister, whose constituency is safer
than most Tory ones, remarked to me this
week: ‘For the first time, I think I might lose
my seat.’ This minister’s fear is that not get-
ting Brexit done creates not just a massive
trust problem for the Tories but a competen-
cy issue too. A party might just about be able
to get away with being cruel but competent.
If it loses competence, not much remains.
The plummeting Tory poll rating
suggests little future for the party
unless it gets Britain out of the EU
Most worrying for the Tories is the sense
of fatalism. Sometimes parties don’t do the
thing that might save them, hoping instead
that something will turn up. The Tories are
now in danger of doing this. Theresa May is
being left in place not because the cabinet
and her MPs have confidence in her to find
a way to deliver Brexit, but because they are
not sure who — or what — else they do have
confidence in.
The other worry for the Tories is that the
old dog Farage has learned new tricks. Many
assumed that the Brexit party would just
be a return to pre-referendum Ukip. But it
is a slicker, more professional outfit than
Ukip ever was. Many of its candidates,
with their non-party-political backgrounds,
would have looked quite at home on David
Cameron’s A-list.
The candidates also come from left
and right — an effort to build a far broad-
er base of support than Ukip ever did. By
—Richard Brown
having only one policy — ‘delivering the
referendum result’ — Farage is able to
claim that ‘this isn’t about left or right, but
right and wrong’.
There is only one possible upside to this
for the Tories. Farage talks a lot about how
he wants to win Leave voters in tradition-
ally Labour areas. If he succeeds, then some
Labour MPs will start to fear for their own
jobs and ask how to get rid of Farage and
the Brexit party. There is only one answer:
by voting through Brexit. Failure to do so
would mean a general election fought with
Brexit party candidates standing across the
country. The results would be thoroughly
unpredictable; remember how Ukip’s strong
performance in 2015 was one of the things
that cost Ed Balls his seat.
But getting Brexit through will also mean
the Tories passing a withdrawal agreement.
A new leader wishing to leave without
one would be up against parliamentary
opposition so stiff that they might need a
general election to get their way. But the
Brexit party would be in that contest and
wouldn’t spare the Tories. You can almost
hear Farage on the stump, reminding voters
of the old adage: ‘Fool me once, shame on
you; fool me twice, shame on me.’
If the Tories go to the country without
having passed a Brexit deal, then they would
be taking a huge risk. It is worth remember-
ing that before the 1993 election, the Cana-
dian Conservatives changed prime minister,
bringing in a new leader who was lauded as
a breath of fresh air. But that didn’t save
them from obliteration. It would take a very
bold Tory to think the party stands no risk of
suffering the same fate.
11

I’m sick of women claiming to be lesbians
L
esbian tourism has long been a thing
— women who once kissed a girl try-
ing to appear more interesting while
living a heterosexual life. Anne Heche,
Madonna, Britney Spears and Ariana
Grande have used lesbian/bisexual hints to
titillate fans and sell more records.
But nothing riles me like the Miley Cyrus
approach which is to be heterosexual, mar-
ried to a man, but claiming to be ‘queer’ and
edgy. In a recent interview about her mar-
riage to Liam Hemsworth, she said: ‘We’re
redefining, to be fucking frank, what it looks
like for someone that’s a queer person like
myself to be in a hetero relationship.’
What a load of pretentious baloney.
Cyrus is as heterosexual as the next woman.
Labelling herself ‘queer’ is as convincing as
me deciding my dog is a goldfish. While I
get the envy that many women feel towards
those of us that shop around the corner, it
is a bit low to want the attention for being
‘special’ while being boringly straight.
My mate Julie Burchill has the right
attitude. Although she once indulged in a
well-publicised affair with a woman, she
told me that definitely did not make her gay.
‘It’s like going to Iceland,’ she said. ‘Once
you’ve been, why on earth would you want
to go again?’
I am not a big fan of identity politics, but
I do think we should pay respect to those
who pave the way for others to live their
lives free from bigotry and discrimination.
In coming out as a lesbian when I did in
1977, I faced hardship, violence and preju-
dice. It was no fun growing up a lezzer in a
working-class housing estate in the north-
east of England, where the expectation was
to marry a local lad and have a brace of kids.
Going on TV in 1981 to talk about lesbian
pride and liberation led to me losing my job,
getting sexually assaulted in the street, and
generally being treated like a freak by those
that recognised me. I was told by a hetero-
sexual woman who I considered a friend
at the time that she would rather I did not
babysit her daughter.
When I met feminists who were also
lesbians, I noticed they used the ‘L’ word
very proudly. Women who declared them-
12
Straight talk
JULIE BINDEL
selves to be ‘gay’ were cop-outs as far as we
were concerned. After a time, particularly in
response to the horrendous bigotry faced by
gay men during the Aids crisis, we became
‘lesbian and gay’ in solidarity.
In the 1990s, all hell broke loose when
post-modernism came to universities, and
the group Outrage, founded by Peter Tatch-
ell and his cronies, reclaimed the word
‘queer’. This, I reckon, was the moment when
actual gay and lesbian identities became a
free-for-all, resulting in any straight dude
who rejected sex in the missionary position
being able to claim a ‘sexual outlaw’ status.
Over the years, a fair number of hetero-
sexual women have told me ‘If only I could
Miley Cyrus labelling herself
‘queer’ is as convincing as me
deciding my dog is a goldfish
fancy women, my life would be much easier’,
as though nothing bad ever happens to us
because we don’t have to scrub dirty boxers
and put up with mediocre sex.
I recall one such moment. I had met my
lezzer friend Bridget in a pub after work, and
we were deep in conversation when the inev-
itable happened. ‘What are two beautiful
ladies doing in here on their own?’ slurred
Barry, pint in hand and attempting to sit
beside us. I pointed out we were not ‘on our
own’ on account that we were together, and
politely asked him to leave us alone. Soon,
‘It’s your outfit for meeting
Mr Trump, Ma’am.’
we went from ‘beautiful ladies’ to ‘carpet-
munching ugly dykes’. I pointed out that
if he was the alternative, did he blame us?
Every woman in that bar burst out laugh-
ing, with several telling me how they wished
they could give up men and live happily
ever after. One asked me: ‘Are you a lesbian
because you never found the right man?’ I
replied that if finding the right man was a
prerequisite of heterosexuality, we would
soon be extinct.
Hearing straight, woke young women
who have had a drunken fumble with
another woman at a party describe them-
selves as ‘lesbian’ or ‘gender queer’ insults
me. Their motivation may be a desire to get
themselves on one of the many lists of top
100 in the LGBTQQIA+ world, or perhaps
because they will appear more interesting.
What I do know is that such women almost
always end up married to men and having
kids, and living a conventional life. Occa-
sionally they will dye their fringe orange, put
on a slogan T-shirt, and join a rainbow coali-
tion march in Brighton. But what they won’t
do is suffer for their sexuality.
Then there is the latest craze of men
deciding they are lesbians, because they
claim to be women, such as Alex Drummond,
who has retained not only his bushy beard
but also his meat and two veg.
Real lesbians commit to the role. There
is no running back into the arms of Nigel
for us. If the fake lesbians want an authen-
tic experience, perhaps they could per-
suade their parents to reject them, or have
their female friends shy away from a hug as
though they are being perved upon?
It is no fun being beaten up in the street
for being lesbian or gay. But it is an amazing
feeling to know that you have fought for the
liberation of younger lesbians who, in the
main, won’t ever face the horrors that my
friends and I did when we came out. It is an
insult to have all and sundry on a list that
used to be about same-sex attracted peo-
ple who formed an alliance in order to fight
prejudice and bigotry. To all you attention-
seeking narcissists desperate to be included:
you are all special, but you are very probably
as straight as a die. Get over it.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Yet more derangement around rape
I
t is more than three years since the
town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, decid-
ed to ditch its motto ‘Land of Rape and
Honey’. That was how the prairie outpost
had been known for 60 years, a consequence
of the large amounts of canola produced in
the region and the fact that they have lots of
bees. But the town authorities now thought
the slogan had a certain ominous, menacing
air to it, so they replaced it with ‘Tisdale —
Opportunity Grows Here’, which is entirely
lacking in threat, interest and anything else
you care to mention.
A year later the supermarket store Aldi
was forced to change the name of a paint it
was promoting from ‘Rape yellow’ to some-
thing else — probably ‘Bright yellow’, I don’t
know. Sexual abuse campaigners had been
outraged, you see, and apparently unable to
accept that a word can have two meanings.
You can tell when an issue has been dan-
gerously politicised by the screeching that
arises whenever its name is mentioned,
when people think they have ownership of
the word and thus the narrative and you are
not allowed to mention it any more, not even
if you are referring to a noisome brassica
related to the turnip, or rapum as it is known
in Latin. When that happens, all sorts of
derangements occur and the more deranged
you are in kowtowing to the new frenzy, the
better you’ll be liked by the campaigners.
That has certainly happened to the crime
of rape which long ago joined the copious
list of stuff you must never, ever make jokes
about. The derangement began in the 1990s,
predicated on the perhaps correct belief of
feminist campaigners that the police were
too often dismissive of female claims of rape
and that there were both too few prosecu-
tions and too few convictions. So something
must be done.
The derangement gathered pace. Now we
were quickly enjoined to believe something
patently untrue — that all kinds of rape were
of equal anguish to the victim, regardless of
whether or not additional violence had been
employed by the attacker. Following on from
this came denunciations of people who said
that rape was slightly less likely to occur
if women were mindful of what they were
wearing, where they were walking (alone)
and at what time. These were not, incidental-
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
ROD LIDDLE
ly, people who said that rape was somehow
more justified if a woman was wandering
alone in a short skirt late at night, which of
course it isn’t. Just people who pointed out
that this is not a perfect world and that com-
mon sense can sometimes be used to obviate
danger. That’s deranged, I reckon.
But the derangement was far from fin-
ished. Now the police were instructed
always to believe a woman when she made
an accusation of rape, their discretion and
common sense plainly being rooted in sex-
ism. Somehow this transformed itself into an
injunction always to prosecute, even when
the police were aware that no rape had
Campaigners are in effect saying
that there is no requirement for a
woman to back up her rape claim
taken place, even when police had direct
evidence that no rape had occurred, evi-
dence which they failed to disclose because
the pressure was on to get those convictions.
Deranged.
Then came the business with alcohol.
Being drunk while committing a crime is
never a mitigating factor, the courts are
clear about that. But now a woman who had
too much to drink and consented to sexual
intercourse was to be considered a rape vic-
tim — a bizarre case of double standards, of
effectively doublethink. And worrying for
me, too, because I don’t think I’ve ever had
sexual intercourse with a woman who was
sober. Oh, maybe once, and it was all a bit
grim. But — if the man’s drunk — no mitiga-
tion. If the woman’s drunk — rape. Utterly,
utterly deranged.
The degree to which we have been cap-
tured by this derangement was evident in
an ITV drama series I’ve mentioned here
before, Liar, where viewers had to choose
who was telling the truth in a case of rape,
the man or the woman — but they revealed
the answer very early on, having accepted
that it was quite impossible to portray the
woman as being untruthful. To do so would
be ‘irresponsible’. The whole point of the
series nullified because women are incapa-
ble of lying.
When we reach that level of derange-
ment, it’s time to start really worrying. It is
quite literally a totalitarian mindset: one is
not permitted to see beyond it.
And the latest development? The police
have suggested that they might need to
sequester the mobile phones of women
who make accusations of rape, so they can
see what they’ve been saying. This is a gro-
tesque invasion of privacy, according to the
campaigners. Another violation, almost as
bad as the rape itself! Totally unacceptable!
It will stop women coming forward! Well,
maybe it will stop women coming forward if
they have just texted the alleged perpetrator
the day after an alleged rape with the words:
‘OMG top shag Bob! C U tonite by the bins
at the back of Tescos LOL xxxx’.
A quick look at that mobile phone might
prove the difference between a ten-year
prison sentence for an innocent man and a
verdict of not guilty. But that is seemingly of
no import whatsoever to the campaigners. In
effect, they are saying that the woman must
always be believed and that there is no real
requirement on her behalf to provide evi-
dence to back up her claim. And she can do
all this in total anonymity, because uniquely
for rape cases, that is what the courts insist
on, even when the verdict is not guilty.
I have the horrible feeling that under
the welter of complaint the police may well
renege on this notion of, you know, gathering
evidence. And we will continue to be trapped
inside this berserk narrative in which men
are always guilty, regardless of whether or
not they are guilty. And as a consequence
more and more injustices will be done.
13
 Split personality
There are two sides to Andrew Adonis
T
he news over Easter that
Lord Adonis, the counter-
weight to nominative deter-
minism, was standing as a Labour
Remain MEP was greeted with
a fair degree of scepticism. Many
commented that it would be a nov-
elty for him to stand for anything
— in his early twenties he became
an SDP councillor in Oxford, but
that’s the last time he was elected
to anything. His career has been
based entirely on patronage, main-
ly from Tony Blair, who plucked
him from journalism (he worked
for the Financial Times and then
the Observer) to run his policy
unit, and then made him a peer so
that he could become minister for
education. (Adonis is still good
friends with Blair, and says: ‘He’s
unchanged. He is God’s gift to charisma and
dynamism.’) He stayed on as transport min-
ister under Gordon Brown but assumed his
political career was over when Labour was
defeated in 2010. But then — ta da! — Brex-
it came along and he threw himself into cam-
paigning against it. So far, his weapons have
been tweets and speeches, but now he is
actually standing for election for the south-
west and Gibraltar, and it will be interest-
ing to see how he fares. He spent the Easter
weekend travelling all over the south-west,
from Plymouth to Penzance, tweeting photo-
graphs of railway stations along the way.
I hope he doesn’t forget Gibraltar.
We met just before he set off, at the House
of Lords HQ at 1 Millbank. He was tail-wag-
gingly eager, and immediately gave me a
signed copy of his latest book, Saving Britain
(written with Will Hutton), and showed me
round his office. It is dominated by a huge
blown-up photograph of Gladstone (‘My
hero — he comes with me everywhere’) and
a lot of photographs of himself in academic
dress collecting various honorary degrees
(his original degree was an Oxford first, in
history) and one of him launching Crossrail
with Boris. There is a school photo with him
sitting cross-legged in the front row. No pho-
14
LYNN BARBER
tographs of his children that I can see, but
one of Bishop Geoffrey Rowell, who was
chaplain of Keble when he was a student
‘and a very great mentor’. On one wall there
is a huge map of Europe — ‘But without
Cyprus!’ he laments (his father is Cypriot)
— and the opposite wall has a map of Brit-
ish railways before the Beeching cuts. He is
seriously potty about railways. His tie shows
a map of the London Underground. ‘What’s
your station?’ he asks. Highgate. ‘Let me
Non-Twitter Adonis is friendly,
affable, cerebral; Twitter Adonis
is a crazed anti-Brexit hysteric
see,’ he says, searching for Highgate which
doesn’t seem to be there. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll
hunt it out afterwards and send you a photo,’
he assures me.
His interest in railways dates back to
childhood. Most 11-year-old boys want to
be engine drivers; he wanted to be chair
of British Rail. While he was at Kingham
Hill School in the Cotswolds, British Rail
announced that it planned to close Kingham
station because it was underused. Adonis
got a gang of his schoolmates to stand on
the platform every day and record
the number of passengers getting
on and off. They sent the results to
British Rail, and Kingham station
was saved. We can all thank him for
that, and for helping to restore Pad-
dington station when he was trans-
port minister, but perhaps not so
much for HS2. Yet he regards that
— along with the introduction of
academy schools — as one of his
two greatest political achievements.
He once said: ‘I have three children.
A son, a daughter, and HS2.’
Eventually, when we are settled
in the spookily empty canteen (the
whole building is deserted; he says
very few peers ever use it), I raise
the question many of his friends
have been asking — has he gone
mad? Or, more specifically, mad on
Twitter. He told our editor, Fraser Nelson,
that he has two personalities, and that non-
Twitter Adonis cannot be held responsible
for what Twitter Adonis says, and there does
seem to be some truth in that. Non-Twitter
Adonis is friendly, affable, cerebral; Twitter
Adonis is a crazed anti-Brexit hysteric who
recently tweeted a photo of Theresa May
on her walking holiday with the comment
‘The most terrifying sight in British politics
since Chamberlain got in a plane.’ This is
not the first time he has compared Brexit to
appeasing the Nazis. He has also compared
it to the Spanish inquisition. He fell out with
his old friend Nick Cohen when he started
calling the BBC the Brexit Broadcasting
Corporation, and claimed that ‘Brexit and
Farage are largely the creation of the BBC.’
Cohen was forced to conclude that Adonis
would ‘soon stake a claim to be the greatest
berk in the peerage’.
So — is it true that Twitter has somehow
unleashed his inner pitbull? ‘No, I wouldn’t
say that. I’m learning, is the answer. To do
politics now, you have to do social media. I
thought I’d left politics when Labour lost the
2010 election and I went off and ran a think-
tank for two years and founded the Nation-
al Infrastructure Commission. It was only
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
because of Brexit that I came back. And I
had to learn rapidly how to do politics in the
2010s and it soon became clear to me that
you had to be ever-present on social media.
And there’s no point in being ever-present
unless you express views.
‘Actually I do tweet about other things
besides Brexit — I often tweet about the
seasons in St James’s Park — but that isn’t
enough to engage my followers. They want
to know what I think about the big issues.’
He has 110,300 followers, which he
claims is more than any other peer — I don’t
like to break it to him that Lord Sugar has
5.3 million. He works really hard at his
tweeting, putting out three or four tweets
first thing in the morning, and then another
30 or 40 throughout the day, which his office
staff copy on to Instagram. He says his main
problem is getting his thoughts down to
280 characters. ‘What is clear to me is that
social media is a skill and you have to keep
working at it. But it hasn’t taken over my life.
I think I use it, it doesn’t use me.’ Does he
ever tweet when drunk? ‘I’m never drunk. I
do drink but never more than a glass or two
of wine a day if that.’
What does he do when home alone in the
evenings? (He divorced four years ago, and
his children are both at Oxford.) ‘I’m very
rarely at home, because I’m doing my Brexit
tour, attending four or five public meetings
a week.’ When he is at home, he reads history
books. He has written loads of books about
politics but nothing about himself. Would he
ever write an autobiography? ‘Maybe when
I’m 80!’ he laughs. ‘I’m much, much more
interested in doing things than talking about
myself. I regard myself as a very boring sub-
ject.’ Oh sigh. Why do these political wonks
never understand that the only possible way
of engaging with the young and (dare I risk
saying this?) women is by revealing some-
thing about themselves? Otherwise they just
sound like a school debating society.
And Adonis’s background is actually
exceptionally interesting. He is, as he rightly
boasts, a model of social mobility. His father
came to England from Cyprus in 1959 and
worked first as a waiter and then a post-
man. He married an Englishwoman, Jose-
phine Leadbeater, and had son Andrew
— called Andreas in those days — and
daughter Michelle. But she disappeared
when the children were toddlers and they
never saw her again. The Mail tracked her
down in 2005 and she said she had been
forced to leave the family after she met
another man and she thought the chil-
dren were young enough to forget her. ‘Of
course I used to think about them [the chil-
dren] but after a while you have to move
on, don’t you?’
Adonis spent seven years in a children’s
home run by Camden Council. Of the 25
children there, more, he says, ended up in
prison than in university, and four have
already died. But he was saved by an excep-
tionally astute social worker who spotted
that he was bright and eventually persuad-
ed Camden Council to send him to board-
ing school, Kingham Hill, which got him
to Oxford. He had some family life with
his father in the holidays, but essentially
he was raised in institutions. But he does
not regret it. ‘I regard it in a curious way as
a kind of privilege to have had that back-
ground, because it gave me an enormous
amount of resilience and ambition. I know
how to survive in very, very difficult cir-
cumstances — which is my life story really.’

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Michael Gove
in conversation with

Fraser Nelson
Wednesday 5 June 2019, 7 p.m.
Emmanuel Centre, Westminster, London

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the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 15

See the film at polroger.co.uk
 You can get the staff
We all have servants now
HARRY MOUNT
Montego Bay, Jamaica
W
hen the Kennedy clan were chil-
dren, JFK and his siblings would
tear off their clothes before leap-
ing from the pier at Hyannis Port, Massa-
chusetts — safe in the knowledge their serv-
ants would pick up their discarded clothes.
That used to strike me as the ultimate
in entitlement before I ended up here in a
hotel in Jamaica. I’m being waited on hand
and foot in a way that wouldn’t have dis-
graced the Kennedys — or a 19th-century
duke. Someone’s just rung to ask when
would be a good time to fill my fridge with
beer. A driver is waiting to take me on a tour
of Montego Bay. When a friend, also staying
here, forgot her diary, her butler brought it
from her room to our breakfast table.
I thought this level of service was con-
fined to holiday resorts and then I suddenly
realised that I, like much of the British popu-
lation, am now dependent on a new boom in
servants. My credit card bill is largely filled
with payments to servants: to the Amazon
deliveryman who delivered a lawnmower to
my office last week; to the Uber driver who
drove me and my lawnmower back home; to
the Deliveroo courier who brought my sushi
in the evening.
Paradoxically, modern technology has
taken us back to the 1950s, when the butch-
er, baker and candlestick-maker delivered
straight to your door. I haven’t done a big
supermarket shop inside a shop for sever-
al years, now that I depend on a series of
charming Tesco servants to deliver it for me.
Of course, they’re not called servants any
more. I can’t think of anyone — even those
with full-time staff — who use the word
‘servant’ any more. ‘Daily’, ‘cleaning lady’,
‘the charming man who helps me out with
the garden’… They’re all euphemisms for
the verboten ‘s’ word — ‘servant’ still carries
connotations of its Latin derivation: ‘servus’,
meaning ‘slave’.
The new servants — from Uber, Amazon,
Tesco etc — are fundamentally different to
their Downton Abbey ancestors. Rather than
working for one person, they divide up their
time between thousands of different contrac-
tors like me and anyone else with an Uber
app. But for a moment, that Uber driver
was my temporary chauffeur; the Deliv-
eroo courier my temporary cook. Because
these temporary servants aren’t in full-time
employment for an individual, however, the
old-fashioned, servile quality of being a serv-
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
ant — and the deference that went with it —
has disappeared, thank God.
Of course, there are problems with
some parts of the new servant economy, or
the gig economy, to give it its hipper name:
low wages, and often no pensions or holi-
day pay. But they are still jobs all the same
— part of the reason why employment, it’s
just been announced, is at its highest since
1971. In January, there were 32.7 million
people employed in the UK — a 76 per cent
employment rate.
And in less class-obsessed countries than
Britain, there is a great pride in service jobs.
At Sandals, my Jamaican hotel, job vacan-
cies are massively oversubscribed; the chain
is the biggest employer in the Caribbean.
The collapse in British servant numbers
came with the second world war, with the
slaughter of so many and — after a huge hike
in tax — the inability to pay staff. In 1851,
there were 115,000 women between 15 and
20 in London and its suburbs; 40,000 of them
were in domestic service. Between 1911 and
1921, the number of servants in London’s
commuter belt halved. As the number of in-
house servants fell, so did the average house-
hold size. In 1842, there were an average of
5.8 people in each British home; that’s now
down to 1.9 people.
Millions of people were freed from
domestic service after the war. And a rich
handful found themselves with new chores
on their hands. Roger Mortimer (1909-91),
the racing correspondent and author of Dear
Lupin, described how he ‘was brought up
with seven or more indoor servants, includ-
ing a butler and a footman. Now, at 76, I do
the grate, fill the log baskets, clean my shoes,
make my bed, cook and wash up my break-
fast, wash my car, do endless weeding fatigues
in the garden, dig up huge piles of ground
elder, join huge queues at the surgery.’ Noth-
ing that TaskRabbit — the website which
finds you gardeners, handymen, cleaners and
deliverymen — couldn’t sort out nowadays.
Servants have been effectively out-
sourced and democratised. No longer are
they tied to an eternal life of drudgery with a
single employer. Instead, they dip in and out
of service as circumstances dictate, and need
never share a roof with the people paying for
that service. And no longer is it a small elite
who depend on their own dedicated servant
class. These days, anyone can summon their
own temporary servant at the tap of a screen,
for the price of a takeaway pizza.
ANCIENT AND MODERN
Rebuilding Artemis’s temple
As soon as the
blaze that nearly brought down Notre
Dame was extinguished, two questions
were asked: how did it catch fire? And
how will it be rebuilt? So too with a
famous Greek temple.
In 560 bc in Ephesus on the west
coast of modern Turkey was built a
massive temple to Artemis (Roman
Diana), the largest building we know
of from the Greek world and the first
to be constructed out of marble. It was
sponsored by Croesus, king of Lydia, a
man so rich you could commit suicide
by jumping off his wallet. But it was
intentionally burned down in 356 bc by
a man called Herostratus, who set fire to
the wooden roof supports. That brought
down the roof, as in Notre Dame, and
everything else with it. His motive?
Because he wanted to become ‘famous’.
How very 21st-century of him.
Greeks incidentally wondered why
the god did not protect it, and decided
it was because Artemis was away
attending the birth of the Macedonian
Alexander the Great. We await the
official report on the Notre Dame fire,
which the French are convinced was
due to an electrical fault. Any views,
Archbishop Aupetit?
The Ephesians began to rebuild the
temple on the same colossal scale as its
predecessor — the stylobate measured
170 by 377 feet, three times bigger
than the Parthenon, so huge it needed
two row of pillars round each side, and
three rows at the front, 58 feet tall: Ionic
pillars, slim and elegant, 127 in all; and
magnificent sculptural decoration.
In 334 bc, Alexander — who else?
— was passing en route to taking
revenge on the Persians, and offered to
sponsor the complete reconstruction.
That would show them who was boss.
This landed the Ephesian town council
with a problem: they had absolutely
no intention of being obliged to this
Macedonian oik, but how could they
put off such a powerful figure? Easy:
they told him piously that it was
improper for one god to make an
offering to another. They knew their
man: how on earth could he resist such
grotesque flattery?
It is still not too late for an
Englishman to do an Alexander over
Notre Dame, if only for the pleasure of
watching Macron’s reaction.
— Peter Jones
17

There’s one thing that lies behind almost every case I’ve worked on
I
have been a defence lawyer for more
than 25 years. I have defended clients
charged with almost every crime there is. I
have argued against convictions for robbery,
rape, sexual assault, murder, manslaughter,
copyright theft, perverting the course of
justice, perjury, serious fraud, international
illegal fishing, money laundering, causing
death by dangerous driving, grievous bod-
ily harm, blackmail… and the list goes on.
Of all the crimes and misdemeanours
I have seen, all the improbable tales and
shocking lies in the witness box, what sticks
with me most about the criminal justice sys-
tem is the utter simplicity of the one thing
that lies behind almost all of it. People want
to take drugs and nothing will stop them.
Some people take lots of drugs all the time,
others take a few drugs some of the time,
and of course some never take any at all
(or at least will not admit it), or just stick to
drugs which are legal.
They say that you are never more than a
few feet from the nearest rat. You are equal-
ly close to the nearest dealer, whether you
are a banker, living on the streets, or walk-
ing the halls of Westminster between Brexit
votes. This is no surprise given the bounti-
ful supply. Skunk cannabis is now grown
in converted buildings all around Britain.
Crops are harvested and rotated to maxim-
ise yield. It is so easy to find and so cheap to
buy, it may as well be in vending machines
in pub toilets.
Cocaine is concealed in ever more ingen-
ious ways, to make the sea voyage from
South America to the ports of Europe, or the
air voyage in the stomachs of mules. At the
end, it will be delivered in convenient small
packages, to home, office or party. Heroin
arrives from Afghanistan, via Turkey, using
the same dazzling array of concealment
techniques. Ever purer, it has become more
addictive and more deadly. Synthetic drugs
such as MDMA now come in high-strength
powders rather than old-fashioned pills (it’s
not the 1990s). Newer concoctions, such as
spice, create zombies, both on our streets
and in our prisons.
Think about that for a minute. Pris-
oners can get drugs. In prison. The most
secure places in the country cannot control
what comes into them; they cannot prevent
inmates from getting hold of illegal, mind-
18
A bitter pill
CHRIS DAW QC
altering substances. People often enter pris-
on having never or barely touched drugs in
their lives, and emerge with a mission to find
a dealer on the outside, maybe find a way to
smuggle some back in again.
The profit from drugs fuels the under-
world of organised crime. It encourages peo-
ple to take unimaginable risks, even though
they have everything to lose. The young
woman who uses a Stanley knife to careful-
ly insert spice into her baby’s nappy so she
can smuggle it into prison, just to satisfy her
incarcerated boyfriend’s habit. The lawyer
who takes advantage of lax security to get a
Sentences get longer, prisons get
fuller, but packages of powder still
arrive with unstoppable efficiency
gram of coke into the court building, to see
her through the day.
Prohibition is the only reason that there
is any money to be made from drugs. At the
beginning of the supply chain, drugs are
cheap. Really cheap. A kilo of pure cocaine
or heroin, at the markets close to the source,
runs at just a couple of thousand dollars.
But by the time that same kilo has followed
the long supply chain, filling the pockets of
every link along the way, onwards into the
veins, lungs and nostrils of Europeans and
Americans, cut to minimal purity, it is worth
many dozens of times more.
One of my more sophisticated clients,
who imported about £10 million worth of
cocaine a month, told me the drugs business
‘Miss! I don’t listen to the science.’
is not about drugs at all. It is about logistics
and transport — getting the drugs to market.
‘If the government wanted to put me out of
business,’ he said, ‘all they would need to do
is scrap the Misuse of Drugs Act and license
the supply of all drugs. I could never com-
pete. And let’s get real, they would have the
best gear for half the price.’
In the end, he was locked away for a
very long time, but you can be sure that did
not mean a moment’s interruption to the
relentless supply chain, or the death and
the misery. I have seen first-hand the pain
of street drugs. One young woman I defend-
ed found herself at the scene of a murder,
committed by her own brother, a small-
time dealer, over the theft of a few hundred
pounds by one of his gang. She was charged
with the murder herself — ‘joint enterprise’
— and separated from her two young kids,
locked away in a women’s prison, until final-
ly she heard the words ‘not guilty’ from the
foreman of the jury.
Another client was shot nine times, and
spent more than a decade in jail, before
miraculously escaping ‘the street’, as so few
do. He now fights a relentless — but often
losing — battle to mentor teenagers, telling
them of the horrors he has seen. The lure of
cash, watches and cars is too much for most
and his own nephew was recently stabbed to
death by gangsters, in their ruthless pursuit
of territory and profit.
To most professionals like me, with long
and direct experience of the world of drugs
and crime, there is nothing more baffling
than the continuing attempt to use laws to
prevent people taking drugs. Drug laws are
made, arrests continue, sentences get long-
er, prisons get fuller, more young people are
shot and stabbed, but the neat packages of
white and brown powder still arrive with
unstoppable efficiency.
The single most rational, brave and
kind decision, for all those suffering from
drug-related crime, which is all of us, would
be to legalise the lot. As a happy but inci-
dental benefit, this would rid the world of
one of the most unpopular groups of all —
defence lawyers.
Chris Daw QC is a barrister who specialises
in serious crime, fraud, business regulation
and professional discipline.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Don’t blame Chris Packham for the shooting ban
L
ast week, on the first day of the gov-
ernment’s ban on farmers shooting
pest birds, I walked across St James’s
Park and came across a pigeon murdered by
a crow. It was on its back, wings spread, with
a nasty hole torn in its chest. It looked like
a botch job by an amateur heart surgeon, or
an allegory for the whole messy, sorry affair.
The ban — a sudden revoking of the old
general licences to shoot — was announced
right in the middle of the crop-sowing season
by Natural England, a semi-autonomous off-
shoot of Defra. It consulted no one and gave
baffled farmers just a few days’ notice, insist-
ing that this was the only possible course
of action after lobbying group Wild Justice
claimed the licences were illegal.
Wild Justice was founded by the punky
little TV presenter Chris Packham and now
the countryside has risen up in revolt against
him. The online air is thick with petitions
and counter-petitions. There’s one demand-
ing that the revoking be revoked; another
insisting Packham’s sacked from the BBC
for not being ‘impartial’. Someone’s been
hanging dead crows on Packham’s garden
gate — though whose side they’re actual-
ly on is anyone’s guess. And there’s now a
trend for sending him photos of newborn
lambs savaged by crows.
Well, we all know it happens. As James
Delingpole points out on p24, nature is grue-
some. Like him, I’ve seen a lamb with bleed-
ing holes where its eyes once were and a
crow standing thoughtfully on its head. In
County Durham one spring I saw a pair of
crows murdering a pigeon. One stood on the
poor pigeon’s wings, pinning it to the ground
while the other pecked a hole in its chest.
That’s why I’m so sure I know how the park
pigeon met its end. But what’s the point in
trying to re-educate Packham and the Wild
Justice gang? What can anyone possibly
hope to gain by sending him photos of crow-
blind lambs? Chris is a vegan and a re-wilder,
for heaven’s sake. He’s not interested in
ensuring that the farming industry is humane
and productive — he wants an end to it.
Intensive farming is the arch-enemy of
eco-warriors. It’s pushing us towards an ‘eco-
logical apocalypse’, they say. Packham’s plan
for ending the suffering of lambs would be
to stop breeding them altogether. The idea
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
MARY WAKEFIELD
for the Wild Justice petition against the gen-
eral licence came last year, said Packham,
after he met a man casually shooting pigeon
in a wood. If he was interested in a utilitari-
an calculation of animal rights, he’d be all for
people bagging pigeon for the pot — it must
be the most ethical source of meat there is:
happy birds, raised free, killed cleanly.
But what worries Packham and his
friends isn’t animal suffering so much as man
feeling entitled to inflict it. Let nature take
care of itself, they say; man shouldn’t con-
The countryside has risen up in
revolt, and the online air is thick
with petitions and counter-petitions
trol or cull. Instead, let’s reintroduce bears,
wolves and lynx. It’s not clear how Chris will
cope when a wolf gobbles his pet poodle, nor
am I sure what Wild Justice thinks man is, if
not an animal. But then that’s the paradox
at the heart of eco-fundamentalism: man
mustn’t behave like a beast, but he mustn’t
assume he’s any better than one either.
W ild Justice’s actions are understand-
able, given what it believes, and they
should have been predictable too. What’s
not at all understandable is the behaviour
of Natural England, an organisation set up
to help the countryside, presided over by a
Conservative government.
Natural England knew in early March
that Packham and his pals were planning
to call for a judicial review of the licence
to shoot pests, and it understood the chaos
a sudden withdrawal of the licence would
cause, so why didn’t it consult, or ask for legal
help? God knows there’s enough money
swilling about in shooting circles.
Natural England did write to a few of the
countryside crews — the British Associa-
tion of Shooting and Conservation and the
National Farmers’ Union — but as BASC
has exposed, that was only to reassure them
that Wild Justice posed no threat. The letter
to BASC from NE read: ‘We are of the view
that general licences are a legitimate regula-
tory tool… while a decision is to be taken
regarding the options for review [planned
for this summer], the three contested gen-
eral licences remain in place.’
Only they didn’t. And come 25 April the
licences were gone.
Natural England is committed, it says, to
working in an open and collaborative way
with farmers — so why has there been no
consulting on any interim measures? The
new provisional licence that’s supposed
to tide farmers over until the season ends
isn’t fit for purpose, says BASC, and I can
vouch for the fact that it’s almost impossi-
ble to apply for. I had a go, but after down-
loading Adobe Flash Player, at the website’s
request, for the fifteenth time, I gave up.
None of this is Chris Packham’s fault
because none of this is even what he had in
mind. The Wild Justice petition requests the
general licences are reviewed and amend-
ed not this year, but in time for next spring.
Packham says they never wanted a sudden
ban. Nor was one necessary, if Scottish Natu-
ral Heritage is anything to go by. SNH — the
equivalent of NE, but in Scotland — has the
same type of licences with the same difficul-
ties under EU law, and yet no plans for any
immediate change without consultation.
Some sense foul play — Natural England
is itself a hotbed of eco-maniacs, they say,
deliberately out to thwart farmers.
Much more likely, it’s simply under-
staffed and overwhelmed. In the past ten
years, Natural England has had its budget
and its staff numbers nearly halved. In Jan-
uary, before the general licence row even
emerged, staff were said to be demoralised
and quite unable to cope. In the end, the
whole shooting party is under Defra’s con-
trol, and it’s to Defra that the poor frustrated
farmers should complain.
19
 A deadly romance
Children are growing up with ‘heroic’ stories of the Troubles
A message of condolence for murdered journalist Lyra McKee on Free Derry Corner
F
or those of us who grew up in North-
ern Ireland during the Troubles, there
is a pungent but negative sense of time
travel around New IRA statements. The New
IRA spokesman is a ‘T. O’Neill’ — which, you
might notice, is just a consonant and some
bad blood away from the old Provisional
IRA spokesman ‘P. O’Neill’ — and his sono-
rous words, like those of his predecessor, are
carefully crafted to mask a sad, nasty reality.
The most recent one, in the aftermath of
the New IRA murder of the journalist Lyra
McKee, offered an ‘apology’ which stated that
‘in the course of attacking the enemy Lyra
McKee was tragically killed while standing
beside enemy forces’. As a fresh precaution,
it said, ‘we have instructed our volunteers to
take the utmost care in future when engag-
ing the enemy’ (translation: when trying to
murder police officers, remember not to fire
wildly into a crowd of bystanders).
It was, to use the modern phrase, a case of
‘Sorry, not sorry.’ Not sorry for rioting, bring-
ing guns back on to Derry streets or shooting
at police. Sorry for itself, however, that as a
result of killing a young, widely loved female
journalist (rather than, say, a PSNI officer),
the New IRA’s PR wing, Saoradh, is currently
20
JENNY MC CARTNEY
having a tougher time of it than usual. It is
safe to say that when the organisation first
egged on rioting in Derry’s Creggan estate,
it did not imagine that the outcome would be
a small group of courageous, angry women
— friends of Lyra’s — stamping accusatory
handprints in red paint on the front of the
dissidents’ Derry headquarters before the
To support ‘armed struggle’ at the time
was often unpopular, but to glorify it
later has been very popular indeed
world’s cameras while the baseball-capped
representatives of the current ‘armed strug-
gle’ looked on sullenly.
The gunman’s preferred outcomes would
have been, singly or in combination: to mur-
der or injure a police officer; to showcase the
presence of serious firepower within New
IRA ranks; or perhaps to draw some response
from the police which could then be exploited
for political gain. At certain key points in its
history, the republican movement has been
powerfully energised by death, the psychol-
ogy of which the British have often been slow
JOE BOLAND/PA WIRE/PA IMAGES
to understand. The killing of 14 unarmed
civilians in Derry in 1972 on Bloody Sunday
by members of the Parachute Regiment, for
example, famously acted as a ‘recruiting ser-
geant’ for the IRA. The 1981 hunger strikes,
in which ten IRA prisoners starved them-
selves to death demanding political status,
radicalised Irish nationalism and ushered
in major electoral wins for Sinn Fein. The
death of Lyra McKee, however, signalled a
very different moment: it united the many
opponents of a resurgent republican para-
militarism in decisive condemnation. When
roughly 150 members of Saoradh paraded
down O’Connell Street the following Satur-
day, they were met with widespread denunci-
ation. Many male Irish tweeters, in particular,
felt ridicule was the best revenge, gleefully
noting that numerous paraders, in sunglasses
and clinging green tops, were in poor shape
for the crack troops of an ‘undefeated army’
— until Dr Mary McAuliffe, a historian and
gender studies lecturer at University College
Dublin, stepped in to request that ‘all body
shaming of Saoradh’ should stop, since this
approach was ‘a major tactic of the alt-right’.
Bloke Ireland subsequently clashed with
Woke Ireland in a radio show debate: Is It
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Okay to Body Shame Dissident Republicans?
While such matters might be diverting to
commentators, however, the truth is that any
variety of shaming is irrelevant to the New
IRA. They genuinely don’t care if everyone
thinks they’re fat, evil or both. They regard
themselves as not the ‘new’ but the essen-
tial IRA, true keepers of the Irish republi-
can flame, and they know that violence — if
produced in sufficient quantities — sooner or
later gets you taken seriously. You don’t need
to be very fit to rig up a car bomb or shoot
someone dead. In a clandestine interview
with the Sunday Times last week, New IRA
representatives described themselves, as the
Provisional IRA once did, as anti-imperialist,
socialist and committed to violence. Their
campaign isn’t about Brexit or the political
vacuum in Northern Ireland — although
those factors might assist recruitment — but
the long-held goal of Irish unity.
One quote struck me in particular: ‘We
are not interested in being popular. Republi-
canism has always been a small core of peo-
ple… to support armed struggle was never
popular. In 1916, 1,200 people took part in
the Easter Rising. The remnants of those who
survived were spat at as they were led away.’
The speaker doesn’t complete the observa-
tion, however — which is that, after the Brit-
ish executed the leaders of the Rising, those
same men posthumously acquired a power-
ful mythic status. To support ‘armed strug-
gle’ in the moment was frequently unpopular,
but to glorify it in retrospect has often been
very popular indeed. For the moment that
Irish republican violence ceases in reality
— and the images of victims and their dev-
astated relatives fade from public view — it
is often mythologised in memory, creating
fertile ground for the later regeneration of
the ‘struggle’.
T he New IRA is aware that what the
Provisional IRA did in its long heyday
far outstrips — in brutality and sectarian-
ism — anything that the New IRA has so
far achieved. In 1981, for example, the IRA
deliberately shot dead another 29-year-old
woman in Derry, Joanne Mathers, for the per-
ceived offence of collecting census forms in
the city. In 1990 it abducted Patsy Gillespie,
a Catholic father of five and a cook at a Brit-
ish army base, and chained him to the seat of
a van full of explosives. He was then forced
to drive into a British army checkpoint,
killing himself and five soldiers. The archi-
tect of these actions — which drew scorch-
ing condemnation at the time — was Martin
McGuinness, who went on to become deputy
first minister of Northern Ireland. Thousands
lined the streets for his funeral. Bill Clinton
jetted in to give an oration.
There must, of course, be some place in
politics for change and redemption — and
those who came to praise McGuinness fre-
quently made a showy moral distinction
between Early McGuinness, who did very
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
wrong things, and Late McGuinness, who
participated in democratic politics and was
both astute and agreeable. This is not a dis-
tinction that McGuinness himself chose
to make. The party line, echoed by Gerry
Adams and upheld by the current Sinn Fein
leadership, was that individual deaths were
regrettable but the IRA campaign was justi-
fied. The inscription on Martin McGuinness’s
headstone — Óglaigh na hÉireann — made
it very clear that he was proudly an IRA man
first and foremost.
In republican terms, Sinn Fein can only jus-
tify the cessation of the IRA campaign, short
of Irish unity, by retrospectively suggesting
that its main purpose was the furtherance of
civil rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland
— an argument to which the dissident repub-
lican Kevin Hannaway, a cousin of Gerry
Adams, responded: ‘If they were out for an
Any variety of shaming is irrelevant
to the New IRA. They don’t care if
everyone thinks they’re fat, evil or both
Irish Republic, they failed. If they were out
for civil rights, they got it in 1973. So what the
fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?’
The Good Friday Agreement sought
to democratise paramilitaries, and in some
ways it did. Yet a swift look around Northern
Ireland suggests that, long-term, it has also
helped to paramilitarise democracy. A couple
of April stories from its local news: Martina
Anderson, a Sinn Fein MEP, defiantly tweet-
ed that although a controversially named
play park had been sold off by the council
‘Raymond McCreesh Park it will remain’.
McCreesh was an IRA hunger striker who
was also implicated in the 1976 Kingsmill
massacre of ten Protestant workmen. On
the unionist side, a DUP Belfast council can-
didate, David McKee, was recently photo-
graphed sporting a UDA badge at a UDA
benefit night, in front of a UDA flag. The
UDA/UFF was responsible for more than
400 Troubles deaths, most often of Catholic
civilians selected at random. So far, the party
has not moved to eject him. The PSNI report
that the UDA remains active in criminality.
Over in the US, leading politicians have
neglected to make the distinction between
Early and Late McGuinness that many Brit-
ish politicians once found so crucial. In fact,
they enthusiastically embrace Early McGuin-
ness: the city of San Francisco recently gave
him a posthumous award, signed off by the
mayor, London Breed, which specifically
praised ‘Martin’s courageous service in the
military’. It echoed the scene in New York in
March 2018, when the mayor Bill de Blasio
gushingly awarded the freedom of the city to
the ‘statesman’ Gerry Adams, in the course
of which he renamed St Patrick’s Day in
the city of New York: ‘Gerry Adams Day’.
Near to Adams, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar
smiled and clapped. It was a terrible and sym-
bolic moment — the relegation of Ireland’s
patron saint to a place below its best-known
modern exponent of paramilitarism — and I
could not have imagined Mr Varadkar’s Fine
Gael predecessors, Garret FitzGerald, John
Bruton or even Enda Kenny participating in
quite such circumstances. But those politi-
cians had a greater visceral sense of the dan-
gers of Northern paramilitarism, a profound
wariness still shared by many Irish people.
I do wonder, however, just what a disaffect-
ed youth in Derry’s Creggan estate might
make of such a scene, knowing that the
lauded Adams once orchestrated the same
violence for which the New IRA is reviled
now. Both Catholic and Protestant children
— particularly in working-class republican
and loyalist areas — are too often growing
up nourished on stories of the Troubles as a
heroic struggle rather than a squalid sectar-
ian conflict. But if the murder of Lyra McKee
is not simply to be another dark moment in
an ongoing cycle of violence, condemna-
tion and myth-making, Ireland — North and
South — will need to own the full picture
of its past. To her great credit, that is what
McKee always sought.
There’s a 1999 book called Lost Lives,
in which five Northern Ireland journalists
painstakingly recorded every Troubles death
and its grim circumstances. It is not parti-
san, merely heartbreakingly factual, tak-
ing in those who died as a result of actions
by republicans, loyalists, police and also the
British army. The book is out of print now —
I see that even a second-hand copy on Ama-
zon starts at £88 — but it should be reprinted,
updated, and distributed to all Northern Ire-
land schools. In the thick of the Irish civil war,
W.B. Yeats wrote: ‘We had fed the heart on
fantasies/ The heart’s grown brutal from the
fare/ More substance in our enmities/ Than in
our love.’ He could have been writing about
Northern Ireland today. Romance kills. It’s
time to stop feeding on fantasies.
21
 The ideal brunch
Vegan croissants with Leo DiCaprio and Jane Goodall
MOBY
L
os Angeles has its shortcomings. Some
are shared with almost all big cities
(traffic, more traffic), while others
are unique to this weird desert city (rattle-
snakes on hiking trails, winters that are too
sunny and warm). But despite its shortcom-
ings, LA is also the place where the sublime
can easily and surprisingly wrap itself in the
clothing of the utterly banal.
A few weeks ago, I woke up on a Sun-
day morning, went for a hike (dodging a few
sleepy rattlesnakes), did some tai chi in the
sun (please keep in mind that since moving
to LA, I’ve become a perfect little LA cliché;
a sober middle-aged vegan who alternates
between yoga and tai chi), and took a look
at my phone.
I had the usual texts from sober friends —
‘Going to AA, want to come?’ — and non-
sober friends — ‘I’m so hungover, please kill
me’. There was also one from Leo DiCaprio.
I’d recently sold a house to Leo’s parents,
and had in the process become friends with
Leo. (As an aside, before selling the house to
Leo’s parents, there was a brief bidding war
between his family and Morrissey. In Los
Angeles, bidding wars on houses take place
between bold-face vegans.)
The text I received from Leo said sim-
ply: ‘Having brunch with Jane Goodall, do
you want to join us?’ This was, to use caps,
A BIG MOMENT.
Growing up, I assumed I’d spend my
life teaching philosophy to bored commu-
nity college students while making music
in my spare time. I never thought I’d have
a record deal, or get the chance to meet,
and even work with, some of my heroes. I
toured with David Bowie, played ‘Walk
on the Wild Side’ with Lou Reed, traded
emails with Leonard Cohen, and once had
Christmas with David Lynch. Yes, I’m name-
dropping, but honestly, wouldn’t you?
This text was in its own category. Brunch
with Jane Goodall. Jane, the most perfect
woman: beautiful, erudite, vegan, and fluent
in gorilla. She was in LA and I was going
to have brunch with her. I responded to the
text: ‘Sounds good, see you later.’ I’ve found
that when communicating with heroes, it’s
best to pretend that you’re friendly equals.
This was always challenging with David
Bowie, as he was, obviously, an alien god.
I showered, put on an old punk-rock
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
T-shirt, and drove in my electric car to Leo’s
house. It was winter, 72 degrees, cloudless,
and I put on a Spotify playlist of classic rock
songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It almost felt like Spotify was algorithmi-
cally following me (I mean, it probably
was). Joni Mitchell was shuffled through the
speakers as I turned on to Laurel Canyon,
and Harry Nilsson began to play as I turned
on to the Sunset Strip. I pulled up to Leo’s
house, parked next to a few other electric
cars, and went inside, marvelling at his col-
lection of fossils and dinosaur heads.
We had brunch. Or, to make it more about
myself, I had brunch. With Jane Goodall. I’m
not usually star-struck. OK, I am. But this
was different. Sitting next to Jane Goodall
Jane is the most perfect
woman: beautiful, erudite,
vegan, and fluent in gorilla
and talking about climate change and the
need to stop the practice of using animals
for food made me almost catatonic with star-
struckedness. I like to think that I spoke in
complete, possibly even coherent, sentences.
But I might have just drooled and mumbled.
After brunch, we went for a little walk,
and Jane took our hands as we looked at the
plants for pollinators that Leo had recently
planted. We took a picture. We talked more.
I possibly drooled and mumbled more. And
then I got back into my electric car, and
it was done.
Spotify must have known something
momentous had just happened, for as I
turned out of Leo’s driveway, Cat Stevens’s
‘Morning Has Broken’ came through my
speakers. This is the song that my mom had
played at her funeral. Or so I was told. I was
hungover and passed out, and so I missed
my mom’s funeral (and people wonder why
I eventually decided to get sober).
My mom was just as much a fan of Jane
Goodall as I was. And am. Maybe she was
there as Leo, Jane and I ate vegan croissants,
and as we talked about how much bees love
rosemary flowers. I’m not sure, but I like to
think she was incorporeally smiling next to
me as we drove away listening to Cat Stevens.
Moby is a musician, animal rights activist
and the author of Then It Fell Apart.
BAROMETER
Great shakes
Shale gas commissioner Natascha Engel
resigned in protest at what she called
‘absurd’ restrictions on fracking — in
particular rules which state that fracking
operations must cease. Has anyone ever
been harmed by a tremor at magnitude 0.5?
— The Richter scale was devised by
seismologist Charles F. Richter in 1935. It is
a logarithmic scale, each ascending number
marking an increase of approximately
31 times the amount of released energy.
— The largest recorded earthquake, in
Chile in 1960, measured 9.5. A tremor less
than 4.0 is unlikely to cause damage and
one of 2.0 or below unlikely even to be felt.
— A tremor of 1.0 releases less than one
30th of the energy of the lightest tremor
detectable by humans, and there are several
million such tremors a year. There were six
in Britain in April, none related to fracking.
Counting the pennies
Philip Hammond decided the government
would not, after all, withdraw penny and
2p coins. How much, at today’s prices, was
a penny worth at stages of its development
(using the Retail Prices Index)?
1971: new penny introduced, along with
decimalisation of the currency 13.8p
1982: words ‘new penny’ were quietly
replaced with ‘one penny’ 3.5p
1984: halfpenny was withdrawn, penny
becomes smallest denomination coin 3.1p
1992: penny made from copper-plated
steel rather than bronze 2p
1998: new portrait of Queen added 1.7p
Social costs
Former cabinet minister Damian Green
proposed that the over-50s be made to pay
an extra £300 a year in National Insurance
contributions to fund social care. How
much does this currently cost?
— In 2017/18, local authorities in England
spent £17.9 billion on adult social care, a
real-terms rise of 0.4 per cent on 2016/17.
Of this, £14 billion was spent on long-
term care.
— 857,770 adults received funding
towards social care: 565,385 (66 per cent)
were over 65 and 292,380 under 65.
— By contrast, the NHS budget for 2017/18
was £124 billion.
Out of office
Jeremy Corbyn proposed four extra bank
holidays. How do British workers fare for
bank holidays alongside other G20 countries?
UK 8
Germany 9
US, Canada, Mexico 10
France, Italy, China 11
India, Hong Kong 17
23

Nature’s real enemy: squeamish greenies
T
his is the time of year when the Eng-
lish countryside reaches peak incred-
ible: when we rural folk mentally
pinch ourselves in disbelief at our extraor-
dinary good fortune in inhabiting the most
beautiful landscape on earth.
On every walk you see something to
delight the eye and lift the spirits. First the
blackthorn exploding in the hedgerows like
cascading white fireworks; then the ramsons
pushing their lance-shaped leaves through
the floor of the dingle, pleading with
you to turn them into wild garlic pesto;
then the lambs — so wobbly, white and
cute when newborn — which turn surpris-
ingly quickly into boisterous adolescents
gambolling and head-butting and racing
one another in circles; then the bluebells,
a strange and precious wonder because
where else anywhere in nature do you
encounter that amazing anomalous blue in
such profligate quantities?
I was thinking about this at the week-
end as the Fawn, the hound and I wandered
through our bluebell wood, me trying and
failing to capture the magnificence on my
iPhone camera, which you never can, unfor-
tunately, not least because you don’t get that
honeyed scent or the murmuring of innu-
merable bees. ‘If you saw this in a “Wildflow-
ers of the World” book you’d happily travel
ten thousand miles to see it, wouldn’t you?’
I said. ‘Yet here it is right on our doorstep.’
But another thing you notice amid all
this rising sap, fecundity and joy is how
much savagery and death there is lurking
underneath.
Quite often I’ll find one of those lambs
with its eyes pecked out by crows, or torn
into pieces by a fox; or the dog will murder
a cute baby bunny — or on one occasion a
baby badger — pitiably squealing in terror;
or I’ll accidentally mow down one of the
cock pheasants which strut stupidly around
the lanes as they suicidally court the females
hovering near the verge.
It never stops being upsetting — ‘Poor
phezzy. So sorry about that coitus interrup-
tus!’ — but you do get acclimatised to it.
Nature, you appreciate once you’ve lived
close enough to it for long enough, really is
24
JAMES DELINGPOLE
red in tooth and claw; and the horror is often
inseparable from the beauty.
Take the cuckoo, whose most recognisa-
ble of all songs traditionally we first hear on
St Tiburtius’ Day — 14 April — and which
fills us with joy because it means spring has
sprung. But do children still get taught what
a complete bastard the creature is: the ruth-
less parasite responsible for giving us the
insult ‘cuckold’ and the pejorative ‘cuckoo
in the nest’?
First, the female lays her egg in the nest
of a species with similar-looking eggs — a
meadow pipit, a dunnock or a reed warbler.
When unsentimental humans go round
bumping off the predators, vulnerable
species stand a much better chance
Then, after the host mother has done all the
hard work, keeping her brood parasite’s egg
nice and warm, the fledgling cuckoo rewards
her by hatching earlier, growing faster
and chucking all its nest mates to their
deaths. Job done, and far fatter than it would
have been if its hapless surrogate mum
hadn’t had her kids massacred, the cuckoo
flies off on its amazing migration all the way
to southern Africa.
Let me tell you where I didn’t get this
information: the RSPB website. The Royal
Society for the Prevention of Birds (as it
ought to be called, what with its unhealth-
ily cosy relationship with the wind industry),
has fallen into the hands of green ideologues.
The first thing these miserable doomsters
want to tell you about the cuckoo isn’t what
an endearingly devious tosser of a parasite it
is, but where it stands on the endangered list
(red), and the fact that it’s ‘protected by the
Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981’. Sure,
a bit further down, you get a cursory sum-
mary of its appearance and behaviour, plus
another mention of its ‘recent population
decline’. But it’s hardly the kind of write-up
calculated to set the burgeoning young nat-
uralist on a lifetime’s journey of discovery.
Rather it makes you want to slit your wrists.
And maybe that’s the intention. Scratch
any greenie and what you’ll invariably find
underneath is just another whiny, misan-
thropic, anti-capitalist Malthusian who sees
the natural world less as a source of joy and
wonder than as an excuse to remind humans
what a terrible, destructive blight on the
planet we all are.
This completely distorts their under-
standing of environmental issues. On the one
hand, it causes them to sentimentalise the
natural world as some kind of prelapsarian
idyll which would flourish in perfect balance
were it not for man’s malign intervention; on
the other, it causes them to ignore the fact
that man too is very much a part of the eco-
system and that his role within it is often at
least as beneficial as it is detrimental.
Managed landscapes often do far better
than those that are left to run wild. Studies
have shown, for example, that there is great-
er biodiversity on estates patrolled by game-
keepers than on reserves run by the RSPB.
Why? Well, it ought to be obvious. When
you’ve got unsentimental humans going
round bumping off the predators — be they
crows or rats or whatever — your more vul-
nerable species are going to stand a much
better chance than they would under a
regime of greenies operating their squeam-
ish ‘live and let live’ policy.
Not so long ago, everyone understood
this — including children back in the days
when biology classes had more to do with
lazy afternoons looking for gall wasps and
counting earthworms than they did with
brainwashing about ‘global warming’. Now,
outside the country, almost no one does.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

The last straw
Sir: In his vindication of Sir Roger Scruton,
Douglas Murray quite rightly refers
to the affair as ‘a biopsy of a society’
(‘The Scruton tapes’, 27 April). It was
also a biopsy of the Conservative party
in particular, and a dispiriting one at that.
It is notable that while a good slice of
the conservative commentariat came to
Scruton’s defence, Conservative MPs were
conspicuously silent, except for those who
rushed to excoriate Scruton. This response
was indicative of the gap between the
party in the country and the Parliamentary
Conservative Party, which has seen an
attenuation of the conservative instinct
and — as has been argued in these pages —
seems bereft of ideas or vision.
It was also the last straw for me
personally. I have cut up my party
membership card and cancelled my direct
debit. It was particularly galling to see the
likes of Johnny Mercer and Tom Tugendhat
join in with the mob: hitherto I had high
hopes of the new generation of military
MPs. I understand that moral courage
is much emphasised at Sandhurst, but
evidently Mercer and Tugendhat were not
very attentive students. If moral cowardice
is to be as much a hallmark of the next
generation of Conservative ministers as it
is of the current cohort, there is no point in
voting Conservative again.
Karl Williams
London E14
Reinstate Sir Roger
Sir: This morning I heard Roger Scruton
being interviewed on Radio 4. Justin Webb
adopted the familiar tactic of selective
quoting in order to traduce Sir Roger, but
the great man was able to bring context to
the quote and dismiss it. The Conservative
party can’t agree on much at the moment,
but we should agree to reinstate him
immediately. He deserves no less, and
the Building Better, Building Beautiful
commission still needs him.
Eddie Hughes MP
London SW1
Get on board
Sir: I found Mark Mason’s comments about
committees and the people who serve on
them unwarranted (‘Off the agenda’, 27
April). I have sat on a variety of committees,
each of which, with various degrees of
efficiency, has achieved a great deal, whether
in support of our local museum, raising
funds for rough sleepers or protecting
historic buildings. I have not encountered
the sort of vain, confrontational hi-viz-
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
LETTERS
jacket-wearing stereotype that he lambasts.
Perhaps I could arrange for him to join one
so he can find out for himself?
David Fletcher
Bedford, Bedfordshire
Watery spirits
Sir: Bruce Anderson is wrong on one
point and misleading on another (Drink,
27 April). ‘The Royal Navy — when there
was one…’, he writes. Well, there still is.
Operating HMS Queen Elizabeth, a huge
new carrier, and maintaining the nation’s
deterrent in nuclear-powered submarines
for a start. He also writes that the Navy
‘used grog … to maintain morale’. Grog
was conceived by Admiral Vernon in 1740
(he was known as Old Grogram, after his
grosgrain cloak). It was a formulation of
one part rum to two parts water, provided
to junior ratings. The mix meant it could not
be illegally stored without going off, but it
was not greeted with enthusiasm, and did
little to maintain morale. Senior ratings
(petty officers and above) still got (and get)
their 1/8th of a pint of rum a day neat. On
high days and holidays, at the commanding
officer’s discretion, grog could and can be
replaced by ‘one and one’, greatly preferred
by the sailors.
Patrick Middleton
Chilmark, Wiltshire
Taking a pew
Sir: Julie Burchill is not alone in going
to church as a ‘gesture of solidarity and
defiance’ (‘Keeping the faith’, 27 April).
At Easter, in a small Dartmoor community,
the vicar reminded us we were gathered
in a building that had held these annual
celebrations for over a thousand years. I for
one will not be the link in the chain to fail.
As for the next generation, I pass on what
a wise prebendary once told me: ‘Come
to church, there’s bound to be one other
person there that believes the same as you.
But not more.’ Solidarity, on the other hand,
runs throughout our congregation.
Nick Allison
Okehampton, Devon
Notre Dame’s restoration
Sir: Jonathan Meades (‘What next for
Notre Dame?’, 27 April) proposes as a
model for the cathedral’s reconstruction
the Virlogeux/Foster Millau Viaduct, a
bleak piece of engineering swank. Has he
forgotten that, like some of the Victorian
‘architects of genius’ he admires, Viollet-le-
Duc, who restored Notre Dame in the 1840s,
had an understanding of the team mentality
which had prevailed among his medieval
forbears, and employed figurative artists
in sculpture and stained glass to create a
rich allusive texture? Viollet counted on
the sculptor Geoffroy-Dechaume and the
carvers of the famous monsters, just as
William Burges counted on Fucigna and
Nicoll for his detail. I was relieved to see
film of some of Geoffroy-Dechaume’s
figures being lifted off before the fire,
because restorers will be hard put to find
sculptors with the necessary skills now.
Philip Ward-Jackson
London E5
I knew that!
Sir: Dominic Lawson (Letters, 27 April)
wonders whether The Spectator’s literary
editor was unaware that a line he quoted
from Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘The Latest
Decalogue’ was satirical. As that literary
editor, I’m keen to protest: I am aware.
I quoted it not because I thought it supplied
a knockdown argument in favour of
euthanasia, but because I thought it was
funny and might annoy high-minded people
such as Mr Lawson.
Sam Leith
London SW1
25
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
The Bank’s search for a female
governor is a good thing
I Good on yer, Ross
f you’re a bloke in a suit who’d like to
apply for the governorship of the Bank
of England (deadline 5 June), I suggest
you browse the website of Sapphire Part-
ners, the headhunters appointed by Philip
Hammond to conduct the search. Run by
ex-JP Morgan banker Kate Grussing with
an all-female team plus Cherie Booth and
Lady (Barbara) Judge on its board, the firm
declares: ‘We are trailblazers [as] advocat-
ed for women in business.’ You’ll proba-
bly already have read the job spec on the
Cabinet Office website, which refers to can-
didates as ‘she/he’. None of which means a
man can’t win; the Chancellor himself, in a
recent select committee appearance, made
more of the need for a governor with cred-
ibility on the international central bank-
ing circuit than of the gender issue. But you
can be pretty sure he has asked Sapphire to
come up with a shortlist that’s at least 50-50.
And — let me add, before I’m accused of
a thought crime — that’s a good thing: not
only because the Bank has fallen behind
the zeitgeist in largely failing to appoint or
retain women in its top ranks throughout
Mark Carney’s governorship but also, as
this column has argued ever since the 2008
crisis, because women often make better
senior bankers than men, being less prone
to machismo. So I’d say Ladbrokes has mis-
priced the female favourite, Santander UK
chairman Baroness Vadera (first tipped here
a year ago) at 8-1, compared with 2-1 for the
leading man, Andrew Bailey of the Finan-
cial Conduct Authority, and 5-1 for former
governor Reserve Bank of India governor
Raghuram Rajan.
But there will be plenty more runners
declared or dreamed up between now and
Hammond’s decision in October. Among
the outsiders, I’m tempted by 33-1 on Chris-
tine Lagarde of the IMF; and on the assump-
tion, without being indiscreet, that ageism is
these days as unacceptable as sexism, I’m up
for a flutter on a respected veteran regula-
tor who’s about to replace a bloke in a suit
on the Bank’s Financial Policy Committee:
Dame Colette Bowe.
26
There’s also a non-bloke in the frame to
succeed Ross McEwan as chief executive
of RBS. She is Alison Rose, the bank’s head
of commercial and private banking and the
daughter of an army officer, and she has
what I regard as the wholly admirable qual-
ification of having spent her entire career
within the RBS group, having started as a
graduate trainee at NatWest. She’s also, in
my observation, a sensible, unspun execu-
tive who has done much to champion her
bank’s support for entrepreneurs: so I hope
she gets the top job.
As for the New Zealander McEwan, who
told last week’s RBS shareholder meeting
that he plans to leave within 12 months, he
can take credit for wrestling a bailed-out,
discredited and demoralised organisation
back to making profits, paying dividends and
talking about the future, even if he could
not return it to private sector ownership or
remove the stain of its past mistreatment of
small-business customers. When I last saw
him at an RBS bash, I expected to find him
tight-lipped after five years of flak: but he
was fun, frank and — in a very Kiwi way —
happy to stand by the bar twisting the caps
off beer bottles for his guests. When he final-
ly leaves these shores, he’ll deserve a chorus
of ‘Good on yer, mate.’
Poverty breeds conflict
‘On the principle that prosperity fertilises
peace,’ I wrote when the Iran nuclear deal
was signed in Vienna in July 2015, ‘the re-
entry of a militarily defused Iran into the
legitimate international oil market, and
the unfreezing of its financial assets, must
be positive.’ My opinion was based on past
studies of the efficacy of sanctions and eco-
nomic incentives in conflict resolution, on
which I’ve occasionally lectured as far afield
as the Nato Defence College in Rome —
and was encouraged, as recently as Feb-
ruary this year, by quarterly reports from
the International Atomic Energy Author-
ity that Iran was remaining in compliance
with limits set by the treaty on its holdings
of enriched uranium.
Whether Iran also remains ‘the world’s
leading state sponsor of terrorism’ and con-
tinues to use ‘a network of proxy groups to
conduct terrorist acts on Iran’s behalf’ — as
a US State Department ‘fact sheet’ put it in
January — is of course the other side of this
argument. But it’s hard to see anything posi-
tive in the news that sanctions reimposed by
Donald Trump following his repudiation last
year of the so-called Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action — to which the UK, China,
France, Russia, Germany and the EU were
signatories alongside Barack Obama’s sec-
retary of state John Kerry — have succeed-
ed in all but crippling the Iranian economy.
According to an IMF report this week,
inflation there has reached 37 per cent amid
a deepening recession driven by a collapse
of oil exports, lately exacerbated by a US
refusal to extend waivers that allowed con-
tinuing trade with partners including India,
China and Turkey. All of which represents
a kind of victory for Trump’s ultra-hawk
national security adviser John Bolton, while
some watchers see it strengthening the hand
of Vladimir Putin in the Middle East’s Great
Game as it destabilises the regime of prag-
matist President Rouhani and gives suc-
cour to Iranian hard-liners who opposed
the JCPOA in the first place. On the prin-
ciple that poverty fertilises conflict, Trump
is making Iran more dangerous than ever.
No joke
‘Knock, knock!’ ‘Who’s there? ‘Huawei.’
‘Huawei who?’ ‘Who-are-we kidding, Mrs
May, we really don’t need to knock at Down-
ing Street’s front door with a bouquet of
roses when we’ve already got a back door to
your switchboard. But we wanted to thank
you for overruling your own cabinet minis-
ters in that National Security Council meet-
ing which we so enjoyed listening to, and
giving us the green light to build part of the
UK’s 5G network.’ Boom boom.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Joust with exploding Carey Schofield describes
shields from Maximilian I’s how poetry rescued an ailing
Book of Tournaments
Laura Freeman — p40 Oxford comprehensive
A.N. Wilson wonders how
many fraudsters are at
large in our colleges and
churches
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Fiona Sampson discovers
that only a third of London’s
foundlings reached adulthood
Martin Gayford admits
that he likes his Henry
Moores big, abstract and
roaming wild
© KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM, VIENNA
James Walton learns that
you’re never too young to
become a TV hate figure
Deborah Ross struggles to
finish her review of Tolkien
without it fading from
memory
27
BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
Women of the Raj
Though often cruelly caricatured, the British memsahib
became a significant face of imperial rule, says Philip Hensher
She-Merchants, Buccaneers
& Gentlewomen: British
Women in India
by Katie Hickman
Virago, £20, pp. 390
Despite efforts to prevent them, British
women formed a part of the Indian empire
almost from the start. Although the East
India Company warned them off, citing dif-
ficulties of climate, disease, morality, reli-
gion and culture, a few managed to travel
there all the same. By the late 18th century
their numbers had increased considerably,
making women some of the most interest-
ing witnesses to the British Raj.
In this way, the white Christian woman
became a significant face of imperial rule.
E.M. Forster gives us an atrocious
memsahib whose only verbs in
Indian were imperatives
She would usually be caricatured as one
who, having failed to find a husband in Lon-
don, cast her lot in with the ‘fishing fleet’
in Bombay; or portrayed (by E.M. For-
ster, for example) as the atrocious mem-
sahib who could speak to Indian women
in their own language, but whose only
verbs were imperatives. Such women were
a vulnerable presence. What were they
doing there, and what are we to make of
their behaviour?
Katie Hickman’s book about Brit-
ish women in India is a breathless, quite
interesting, account, with two large, obvi-
ous gaps in its narrative. It doesn’t exam-
ine how Indian observers viewed these
new arrivals; no non-English sources are
quoted, though Indians were extremely
curious about Europeans. Nor is Hickman
interested in the ways Indian culture itself
wanted to advance the status of women.
She writes about women in relation to the
28
GETTYIMAGES
1857 mutiny but makes no reference to
the iconic status of the freedom-fighting
Rani of Jhansi. Bengal, too, was not much
behind Britain in pushing the education of
women from the late 19th century onwards,
and that great feminist classic, Sultana’s
Dream, about a world beneficially run by
women, was published (in Bengali) in 1905.
It seems odd to write about women in Brit-
ish India without any mention of the expe-
rience and heroism of Indian women.
Still, there are plenty of enjoyable life
stories here. The first British woman we
know of in India was the wife of James I’s
ambassador to Jahangir’s court in 1613,
but in subsequent decades the East India
Company explicitly forbade the presence
of women. When the regulations were
changed in 1668, the company clearly had
in mind the duty of women to tempt bach-
elors away from nautch dancing girls.
Women in the great imperial capitals of
Madras, Calcutta and Bombay were, by the
end of the 18th century, largely defined by The question of how ‘ladylike’ some-
their opportunism and lack of clear social one was became rather academic in India.
status back in Europe. This was even true When the wives of the grandest mahara-
of Warren Hastings’s wife Marian, the ex- jahs deigned to display themselves, their
wife of a dubious German count (they splendour was much greater than even
amiably divorced after she set up with the most magnificent European royal-
Hastings in Calcutta). Though she ended ties. (Many of Britain’s Crown jewels
life as a millionaire’s widow, dripping with today, including the Koh-i-Noor, were
jewels, it seems unlikely that she could acquired from Indians.) In this world, all
have ascended to anything like that posi- sorts of optimistic people, including ambi-
tion had she stayed at home. An emerald tious women, turned up in India hoping
seal of hers engraved ‘the one who has the to make money. Mildred Archer’s study
magnificence of Bilqis’ was sold last Octo- of Georgian painters in India (not quot-
ber at Bonhams for £181,000. ed by Hickman) points to a number of
There were many others who took their often unsuccessful London artists, includ-
chances. William Hickey’s mistress, a Lon- ing women, who, from the 1770s, boarded
don prostitute, was accepted everywhere in the boat to Calcutta and made a fortune.
Calcutta. Although this could be achieved Of course, gifted painters also made the
in London, as Edward VII’s friend ‘Skittles’ journey, such as Tilly Kettle and Zoffany,
(Catherine Walters) was to show, it was whose ‘Last Supper’ is, Hickman strangely
a great deal easier in Calcutta before the tells us, ‘said to be still in St John’s Church,
telegraph could supply inconvenient infor- Calcutta’. It is one of the cherished treas-
mation from home. ures of Kolkata (as it is called these days);
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

the church warden, if you visit, is very
proud of it.
As the 19th century progressed, social
structures began to harden and align with
London rules. The Indian Warrant of Prec-
edence dictated the status of everyone,
from the viceroy down. Emily Eden, the
sister of Lord Auckland, governor gener-
al in the 1830s, and the author of the best-
selling memoir Up the Country, complains
a good deal about the pushy behaviour
of vulgarians who seemed to think that
the rules of English caste did not apply in
India. The insight of David Cannadine in
Ornamentalism (not referred to by Hick-
man) that class distinctions were much less
permeable than racial ones — allowing, for
instance, easier friendships between vice-
roy and maharajah than between viceroy
and subaltern — is never more true than
among the women.
Whether English women understood,
or had any interest in, questions of real
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
caste is a moot point. It is rather touching
to read about the bafflement of an English
woman in the 1790s when an Indian serv-
ant of a particular status refused to move
her furniture: she had clearly never attend-
ed to those intricate cultural rules, even in
the most general terms. But some Eng-
It was clearly considered the duty of
English women to tempt bachelors
away from nautch girls
lish women did show an interest in Indian
culture. Fanny Parkes, the subject of such
snobbish amusement to Emily Eden, rhap-
sodised about ‘the ruins of Delhi’ and even
learnt to play the sitar, ‘which I could not
persuade [English friends] to admire’.
What women could do, and who they
could see, were questions they themselves
often found worth pondering. Hickman
might have investigated a little more the
European ladies in India
in the late 17th century
women whose experiences were worth
recording. I was surprised to find she
makes no mention of Florentia, Lady Sale,
whose appalling sufferings during the first
Afghan War sent such shockwaves through
British India, and are well documented.
Indeed, there were many famous English
women in India who don’t seem to have
crossed Hickman’s path; the most celebrat-
ed epitaph of a young woman in English
verse, Landor’s stanzas for Rose Aylmer,
may still be read in that most heartbreak-
ing of cemeteries, South Park Street in Kol-
kata — but not in this book.
To view the Raj through the experi-
ence of women is an interesting exercise,
and She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentle-
women addresses its subject with a good
deal of enthusiasm. Another couple of
years’ work, including research in the
Kolkata archives and conversations with
Indian scholars of the subject, would have
produced something memorable.
29
BOOKS & ARTS

Dispatches from the

underworld
Adam Nicolson
Underland: A Deep Time Journey
by Robert Macfarlane
Hamish Hamilton, £20, pp. 470

Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in

1756, first made the distinction between
beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke
was about continuity and connectedness.
‘Vegetables,’ he says, in one of the great
pre-Romantic sentences, ‘are not sublime.’
Vegetables are beautiful because they are
constant and continuous, and because beau-
ty is the quality of perfect continuity: ‘The
sense of being swiftly drawn in an easy
coach on a smooth turf with gradual ascents
and declivities is a better idea of the beauti-
ful than anything.’
The sublime is the opposite, needing
deep distances, withdrawals and chasms —
the Abgrund, in the resonantly expressive
German word for ‘an abyss’. And where can
you find the Abgrund, that hollow of oth-
erness, on an average English day? Burke’s
answer is in the gaps between the strokes
of a single, slowly ringing bell, that chasm
of a pause as you wait for the next stroke,
each gap a hole opened in the texture of
the world, a repeated view into silence,
as if it occupied a floor below the one on
which we stand.
The sublime, this potent otherness,
depends on privations: ‘All general pri- where its true self can be found. The skin is a lightless planet’; the narrow gaps to this
vations are great,’ Burke wrote: ‘Vacuity, a deceit; the inward is the real. otherworld, the sinkholes and swallets,
Darkness, Solitude and Silence.’ These pri- In that way a huge metaphysical engine the wriggle-only corridors to revelation.
vations are not great in themselves, but are is at work behind the journeys Macfar- Immersion is the method, so that effort —
great because they withdraw, and, in the lane undertakes. His previous books — sweat and fear, the presence of the human
gaps they open, a sense of the unaddress- on climbing, walking, being in remote body in the world — becomes the vehicle
ably immense floods in around them. The places — have always been up in the air; of meaning and understanding. Actually
sublime requires the world to diminish as a sequence of the high and the wide. This going down and in — not simply knowing
you watch, and for that diminution to leave one deals with the deep: the dangerous but being there, being in and under — is
you not with something less but something caves of the Mendips; the strange, half- the contorted path to revelation.
immeasurably more. liquid corridors of a giant mine in York- For all its astonishingly vivid and real-
This is Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful ised sense of adventure, the question-
dark subject in the most powerful book he There are dunes 1,000 ft below ing mind is never absent. Death inhabits
has yet written: an exploration of the under- ground which seem like the sands of these hollows, deliberate or inadvertent,
geography of the world, the places where in sought or challenged, occupying a world
culture after culture, age after age, people
‘a windless desert on a lightless planet’ beyond the one in which language is ade-
have chosen to hide what is precious, to quate. Death can seem to be, here as in the
dig for what is valuable, to put away what shire extending under the North Sea; mountains, the enlivener of life, but it also
might be harmful, including the dead. It is the Parisian catacombs; the riddled karst often reduces Macfarlane and his many
a province as resonant as Burke’s lingering mountains and hidden rivers of northern co-courters of the dark to silence or to
bells, animated by the long western preoc- Italy and Slovenia; Bronze Age caves in a state where they are made to feel incapa-
cupation, from the Greeks onwards, with the Lofoten Islands in Norway; Green- ble of expressing what these places are or
the relationship between what appears on land’s glaciers and the deepest of nuclear what it is to be there. Underland is in that
the surface and what lies behind it, the ever- waste storage facilities in Finland. way a journey into the immeasurable.
present sense, in Homer, Plato, Luther and The book hums and sings between its For long stretches, Macfarlane is the
Heidegger, that what is hidden is in some polarities. The physical is immensely physi- careful reporter. He sends well made and
ways more real and more substantial than cal here: caverns so deep and so huge that tightly organised dispatches from the under-
anything more easily to hand. The assump- they have their own weather systems; mists world, filled with diverting facts. He gives
tion is coded in our very language: the ‘under- and fog rivers in the dark; dunes 1,000ft a firm material foundation to the book, so
lying’, the ‘innermost’, the ‘fundamental’, below ground which seem to Macfarlane that you get to understand the workings
the ‘heart’ of something will always be like the sands of ‘a windless desert on of a mine or a river system, the nature of
30 the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 Formations of
stalactites and
stalagmites
in a cave in
Slovenia
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
geological salt or the preoccupations of a
scientist looking for dark matter deep in the
protective folds of the earth. But the telling
never dries. Every one of these adventures in
the dark has, at points, the atmosphere of a
dream, often filled with intense anxiety, lost-
ness, unlikely connections and disconnec-
tions, sudden appearances, sudden gaps.
Underland has been more than six years
in the writing, and you can tell. It is care-
fully considered, so that physically, emo-
tionally, intellectually, Macfarlane entirely
fills the dark and rocky spaces in which the
book dwells: the ambition is huge, aiming no
less than to establish another dimension in
which to encounter existence, but it is also
honest in its failings and uncertainties. It isn’t
caught up in its own language, as you might
fear, but it’s often capable of concentrat-
ed lyric moments — ‘a scarf of radar green
flutters in the sky’, he says of the northern
lights in Greenland. It probes the invisible
as the place of the imagination, marshalling
the mysterious, coolly roaming over a huge-
ly wide, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary
set of understandings and resources. This
is as deep as topography gets, a materialis-
ing of the immaterial. It would be difficult
to imagine a richer or more stirring
response to the strange landscapes hidden
beneath us.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
It is not as if Macfarlane feels sour
about the light. He loves the world, and
loves being in it. For all the seductive tran-
scendence of the alluring hollow, there is
no misanthropy here. He returns again
and again at the end of each journey to
the upper world to find it filled with the
epiphanies of normality, marvellous after
the deprivations and reductions below. His
young son is the touchstone of that love of
being — in some ways the recurring, slight
presence at the heart of the book.
A sense of the ecological crisis is always
present, and Macfarlane’s anxiety over it
deepens as the book proceeds. He never
quite says this, but an implication hangs
over his final emergence and ‘surfacing’.
The dark is revelatory. Understanding
comes from depths. One of the functions
of the sublime is to reveal the consola-
tions of the beautiful. But in this moment
of crisis, the beautiful is under threat.
The Anthropocene looks now like a
giant act of deprivation, a giant hollow-
ing, a giant removal of the valuable and
the sustaining so that the underland may
in its way be premonitory of the future.
Are these haunted and threatening plac-
es a pre-visioning of the diminished and
darkened world in which ‘species lone-
liness’ becomes the dominant sensa-
tion that awaits us? Is the future a cave?
Is the void now pushing up into the surface
of the actual?
Looking back on Baku
Bryan Karetnyk
Days in the Caucasus
by Banine, translated from the French by
Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
Pushkin Press, £16.99, pp. 288,
The discovery of oil in Baku brought
Ummulbanu Asadullayeva’s family respect
if not respectability. Peasant-born, her
grandparents ranked by the time of her
birth among the richest in the Russian
empire, thanks to the abundance of black
gold unearthed on their doorstep. Yet
while oil barony went hand in hand with
fantastic wealth and political prestige, the
changes it wrought privately, such as they
were, did little to convert her family into
paragons of refinement and cultivation.
Luckily for us, the result makes for some
very fine reading.
Published in Paris in 1945, after Asa-
dullayeva had fled Azerbaijan and com-
pleted her émigrée transfiguration into
the successful French writer ‘Banine’,
Days in the Caucasus is a romantic and
gloriously comic account of a heady and
turbulent youth spent on the shores of
the Caspian. Spanning the last days of the
Russian empire and the establishment of
Soviet power in the Caucasus, Banine’s
autobiography captures a rarefied world on
the brink of extinction. Teetering between
stagnating tradition and rapid moderni-
sation, between stringent Islam and pro-
gressive secularism, between the excesses
of empire and a new socialist order, it was,
in her own words, a world in which ‘free-
dom was gaining precedence over the veil,
education over fanaticism’.
And yet, old habits die hard. From the
nursery Banine found herself in the midst
of a cultural tug-of-war, her childhood
dominated by the imposing figures of her
imperious, devout Muslim grandmother
and her beloved, flaxen-haired German
governess, each of whom battled for influ-
ence over the child — one raining prohi-
bitions and foul-mouthed curses down on
Banine was married at 15
and disgusted by her witless
suitor 20 years her senior
her, the other treating her to exotic deli-
cacies (cream tarts) and illicit trips to the
Women’s Union. And all this with a droll
chorus of grasping uncles, bickering, chain-
smoking, moustachioed aunts who applied
themselves with more zeal to the card table
than to devotion, and a pair of mischievous,
lascivious cousins, whose antics far sur-
passed what one would dare to imagine of
such tender years.
The memoir’s languid first half gives way
to a much pacier second. Having become
a multimillionaire after the death of her
grandfather, Banine awoke at dawn a few
days later to hear the Internationale being
sung in the street. Alongside an unlikely
dalliance with socialism — most conspicu-
ously in the form of a dashing commissar
— two life-changing races began: the first
to arrange her marriage, the other to obtain
a passport and flee to Europe. While the for-
mer spelt misery and heartache for the child
(she was married at 15 and ‘disgusted’ by her
witless suitor, 20 years her senior), the latter
ultimately offered freedom from that mari-
tal prison.
What commends Days in the Cauca-
sus, quite aside from its rakish narrative,
is Banine’s exquisite, prose and unremit-
ting eye for comic absurdity even amid
the profoundest personal tragedy. After
experiencing such drastic loss one could
be forgiven for rose-tinting the past; but
Banine resists sentimentality wholesale —
and the result is all the more striking for it.
More than that, she contends that adver-
sity itself can be the very source of joie de
vivre. Momentarily considering whether
she regretted her mistreatment by fortune,
she concludes: ‘Not at all: I abhor that state
of innocence precisely because it is ignorant
of the real world in all its magnificence, horror
and divinity.’
31
 BOOKS & ARTS
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
An idea made concrete
Stephen Bayley
Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain
by Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund
Batsford, £25, pp. 240
Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art
and Design in Britain and America
by Alan Powers
Thames & Hudson, £24.95, pp. 280
Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art
school of all time or the malignant source
of an uglifying industrial culture which has
defiled our cities? Two books look at its
influence abroad after 1933 when the Nazis
put the jackboot in.
The Bauhaus was nothing if not mod-
ern — even if ‘modern’ is now a histori-
cal style label and the Bauhauslers were
as trapped in their historical circum-
stances as we are in our own. This was
noticed and ridiculed by Tom Wolfe in his
1981 squib, From Bauhaus to Our House,
a book as bristling with cheerful spite as with
clever wordplay.
Although not quite so simple, the Bau-
haus was dedicated to the idea that the pros-
pects for all mankind could be determined
by engineering and metaphors of engineer-
ing. And its genius was Walter Gropius, not
a Bolshevik firebrand but an officer-class
32
Prussian so austere that a member of his
staff, the painter Paul Klee, called him the
Silver Prince.
One reason the Bauhaus became so
influential was Gropius’s clever branding:
something arising from a total commitment
to his project. ‘Bauhaus’ was a new coin-
age, but evoked the Bauhutte, or guilds, of
the Middle Ages which Gropius idealised.
It was certainly easier to export phonically
than Gieblichenstein Kunsthochschule, a rival
art school in Halle.
Another reason is that Gropius sur-
rounded himself with talent: for example,
he hired Kandinsky to teach art in provin-
Before he fetishised crumpets
and Metroland, John Betjeman
was a Bauhaus enthusiast
cial Saxony-Anhalt. Imagine getting Ron-
aldo to play for the pub team. And with
great branding insight, Gropius published
the Bauhausbucher, holy writ of mod-
ernism, laying down the law on abstract
painting, Existenzminimum design and non-
representational film as an art form.
Gropius himself left Germany in 1934,
but first appeared in England in 1928, light-
ly disguised as Evelyn Waugh’s Profes-
sor Silenus in Decline and Fall. Silenus’s
architectural masterpiece is a Hungarian
chewing-gum factory, a line which inspired
The Isokon
building in
Hampstead,
designed by
Wells Coates
and influenced
by the Bauhaus
Wolfe to write in his best ho-ho mode: ‘Every
child goes to school in a building that looks
like a duplicating machine replacement parts
wholesale distribution centre.’
There’s really no gainsaying that the
Bauhaus attracts odium from the pediment-
and-swag brigade, led by Prince Charles on
his feudally caparisoned retro warhorse.
So it is a delicious irony that Camilla’s
grandfather was Philip Morton Shand,
an epicure and modernist booster who
introduced Gropius to London and trans-
lated his The New Architecture and the Bau-
haus. Before he fetishised crumpets and
Metroland, John Betjeman was a Bauhaus
enthusiast too. However, Anthony Blunt
warned that Bauhaus architecture was
not ‘homey’.
But even as Gropius arrived at Victo-
ria station, Bauhaus design had a presence
in Britain. In 1931 Jack Pritchard and Wells
Coates, the former a plywood-salesman-
turned-furniture-entrepreneur, the latter
a raffishly attractive Anglo-Canadian archi-
tect who was writing a PhD thesis on ‘The
Gases of the Diesel Engine’, visited Gropi-
us’s Bauhaus building in Dessau. Inspired,
they came home and built the remarkable
Isokon flats in Hampstead.
This, described uncharitably as a ‘human
nest’ while looking like an ocean liner,
became a home for Gropius and a colo-
ny of champagne socialists — as well as
Agatha Christie. Philip Harben, later
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
a pioneer telly chef, cooked in the Iso-
bar; fine wines and Havana cigars were
available to all the communards. Mean-
while, the concrete was structurally expres-
sive — and, importantly, because this was
a branding exercise for Isokon, photo-
graphed extremely well, even if the stain of
water intrusion was a problem from
the beginning.
Alan Powers is an architectural writer
with a revisionist agenda. Thus he describes
the Bauhaus émigrés as ‘unproductive and
insignificant’ during their time in London.
‘Goes West’ in his title is a double entendre.
True, Gropius was restless and homesick,
building very little of true note, but sure-
ly Betjeman and Gropius’s chief operating
officer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, collaborating
on a picture book about Oxford was a pro-
ductive, significant and unanticipated com-
ing together of cultures.
Powers’s argument is an interesting one.
It is not, he says, that the Bauhaus visitors
during their brief stay spread a foul doc-
trine like a plague; rather, that in England
they learnt a more conciliatory approach to
architecture which was helpful in establish-
ing careers in America, whither they all fled
as soon as they possibly could.
If this is true, then it was not obviously
a good thing. Gropius’s American build-
ings, including his home in Lincoln, Con-
necticut, which he inhabited while teaching
at Yale, and the Pan Am building in New
York, are not distinguished — at least not
in a good way. The latter, now rebrand-
ed Met Life and straddling Park Avenue
like a bad memory, is frequently cited as
the most reviled building in the city. Mean-
while, the best Bauhaus buildings are also in
Manhattan as well as in Chicago, the super-
lative Seagram Building on Park Avenue and
the Illinois Institute of Technology campus,
designed by Gropius’s successor as Bauhaus
director, Mies van der Rohe. But Mies never
dallied in Britain, which rather troubles
Powers’s theory.
Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund
have written the more approachable book.
Almost chatty in style, it considers the Bau-
haus diaspora through the microscope of
Hampstead. And the photographs are won-
derful. Powers is more scholarly, more keen
to argue a point, sometimes a little effort-
fully. His wide-angle lens reaches even to
Birmingham, where at the art college a Bau-
hausler called Naum Slutzky taught Patrick
Le Quement, who eventually designed your
neighbour’s Renault Scenic.
One book celebrates, the other re-
evaluates. It is modish to say that modernism
failed, and to point out that Bauhaus rhetoric
was way in front of Bauhaus achievements.
But the Bauhaus was a school, not a factory;
an idea, not a style. And that idea was: decent
buildings arise from a proper understanding
of materials, structures and purposes. It is
a timeless idea, wherever it goes.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Conning the dons
A.N. Wilson
The Professor and the Parson:
A Story of Desire, Deceit and
Defrocking
by Adam Sisman
Profile, £12.99, pp. 288
In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly
biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was
not merely one of the best historians of his
generation but also a former intelligence
officer, fascinated by tricks, lies and fraud.
He himself wrote a mischievous series of
anonymous articles for The Spectator, pur-
Distinguished scholars were
taken in, and recommended Peters
for senior academic posts
porting to emanate from the 17th-century
pen of ‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’,which gave
a hilarious picture of his contemporary dons
at Oxford and their crazy ways. One of his
funniest books was an exposé of the sinol-
ogist Sir Edmund Backhouse, a benefactor
of the Bodleian Library, whom Trevor-Rop-
er proved to have been a forger and liar on
a heroic scale.
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But perhaps the supreme irony of
Trevor-Roper’s life was that, on behalf of the
Sunday Times, he authenticated the ‘Hitler
Diaries’ forged by Konrad Kujau: fascinat-
ed as he was by hoaxes, he fell for the great-
est literary hoax of the 20th century. It was
a humiliation which delighted his enemies,
and it will always haunt his memory.
On a more modest scale was his inter-
est in a very minor fraudster who came
his way in 1958. This was one Robert
Michael Parkins, or Robert Parkin Peters,
who claimed he was being persecuted by
the Bishop of Oxford and the president
of his old college, Magdalen. Peters was
a habitual fantasist who, through a long
life, repeated three types of deception.
He claimed academic degrees and distinc-
tions for himself; he illegally practised as
a clergyman — eventually even professing
to be a bishop of something called the Old
Polish Catholic Church while having not
one word of Polish; and he was a serial big-
amist, clocking up at least seven marriages.
Young women seemed to have found
this paunchy, balding fake parson quite
irresistible. The last wife, who stayed with
him for more than 30 years, helped him run
a spurious sounding college, called various-
ly the Cambridge Religious Studies Centre
and Monkfield, which was, astonishingly,
accredited by various reputable academic
institutions such as the University of Hull
and which, even more astonishingly, attract-
ed (presumably fee-paying) students.
The doctorates and MA degrees which
Peters gave himself nearly always, on inves-
tigation, turned out to be inventions. Yet
he popped up again and again, at academ-
ic institutions on both sides of the Atlan-
tic, often getting posts at universities. Also,
in defiance of injunctions from the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury and various bishops
in Britain and South Africa (for a time he
was rector of a church in the Orange Free
State), he was often to be seen elaborate-
ly vested in clerical attire and conducting
the liturgy. (He really had been ordained as
a C of E clergyman but was defrocked
for bigamy.)
One of his cleverest tricks was to work
for a while as a proofreader at Oxford Uni-
versity Press, which gave him access to the
unpublished theses of graduate students.
He was then able to plunder their con-
tents, which he passed off as his own work.
When in prison for bigamy, he was visited
by the Bishop of Birmingham, who offered
him the post of secretary upon his release.
Peters/Parkins would type out fulsome ref-
erences for himself for academic postings
and take them in with the rest of the bish-
op’s correspondence. The bishop always
signed papers when pushed in front of him,
without checking.
Trevor-Roper, for whom the subject of
Peters was a pastime rather than an obses-
sion, reckoned that he must have applied
33
BOOKS & ARTS
for almost every academic post advertised.
Many of the heavyweights, such as Trevor-
Roper himself and Geoffrey Elton, grew
wise to ‘Peters’. But some very good schol-
ars, including Patrick Collinson, were taken
in by him and wrote him references —
recommending him, for example, as vice prin-
cipal of one of the colleges of the University
of Durham.
Sisman’s deadpan tone heightens his
comic effects. Often while reading his book
in a public place I embarrassed myself by
uncontrollable guffaws. Partly it is Peters’s
pomposity and aggrieved self-importance
which is funny, partly his lasciviousness,
which lasted into an impressive old age —
no woman, it seems, could be in his presence
more than a few moments without him liter-
ally pressing his attentions upon her.
But I think the truly funny thing is that
Peters was a conman on such a small scale.
One admires the amount of effort involved
to start ‘Monkfield’, pass it off as a place of
learning and persuade Hull and Lampeter
to give it accreditation. This is a truly won-
derful story. I wonder how many more such
frauds there are at large, in schools, colleges
and churches. And how do we tell the frauds
from the often equally spurious ‘real thing’?
A spiral of deceit
Mia Levitin
Liar
by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Pushkin Press, £14.99, pp. 283
The Hebrew word for ‘truth’ (emet)
is comprised of the first, middle and last
letters of the alphabet. Truth, scholars say,
pervades all things. Talmudists add that
the aleph, mem and tav that form emet
are balanced, grounded characters, while
the letters that make up the word for
‘lie’ (sheker), teeter precariously on
the page. In our post-truth era of Pinoc-
chian politicians and social media spewing
falsehoods, however, it may well be truth
that sits on shakier ground.
Like Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s previ-
ous novel Waking Lions, Liar considers
the consequences of a moment of misjudg-
ment that unfolds as if fated. Following a
verbal altercation at the ice-cream parlour
where she works, 17-year-old Nofar finds
herself falsely accusing a has-been talent-
show star of sexual assault:
She didn’t know things would go so far. She
just wanted him to leave her alone. But then
everyone came and he humiliated her again,
this time in front of everyone, and when
they asked her if he’d touched her, a kind
of ‘Yes’ came out of her, not intentionally,
the ‘Yes’ of hysteria, and then it continued
with the police and, later, on TV.
In the aftermath of the incident, there
34
is little room for Raskolnikovian remorse;
rather, the retelling of the tale to a widen-
ing audience allows Nofar — whose name
means ‘water lily’ — to blossom. ‘The truth
becomes some people,’ writes Gundar-
Goshen, ‘and others are made beautiful
by falsity.’
Liar offers a modern twist on the Cinder-
ella story. Why settle for the attentions of a
pimply Prince Charming when one can escape
the ‘abyss of ordinariness’ with the adulation
of the crowd? The plot proceeds at a brisk
clip, as suspense builds as to whether Nofar
will recant, be turned in or send an innocent
man to jail. A few clunky plot devices are
easily forgiven for the sheer charm of
the storytelling, peppered with the author’s
dry wit, which leaves nothing — not suicide,
not even the Holocaust — sacred.
A clinically trained psychologist,
Gundar-Goshen renders a nuanced con-
sideration of morality, probing what she
refers to as the ‘grey areas of the soul’.
She doesn’t let readers off the hook with
simple good guy/bad guy delineations: nei-
ther the accused nor the accuser is entire-
ly innocent or entirely evil. Nor, we might
conclude, are we. While the book will be
published in the US as The Liar — a short-
ening of the original Hebrew title The Liar
and the City — Pushkin Press’s UK title
sans article effectively echoes the accusa-
tions of ‘Liar!’ reverberating throughout
the novel. We see each of the characters
playing fast and loose with the truth, wheth-
er with white lies or whoppers — including
a deaf-mute witness who is neither deaf nor
mute, a cowardly war veteran decorated for
bravery and an elderly woman who appro-
priates her dead friend’s identity to pose as
a Holocaust survivor.
In another nifty Talmudic party trick,
the trio of letters forming ‘truth’ (aleph,
mem and tav) find themselves at the
end of the first few words of Genesis, ‘In
the beginning God created’. In Gundar-
Goshen’s oeuvre, while benevolence ema-
nates from certain celestial bodies, God
seems to have stopped his work of creat-
ing the heavens and the earth. In a secu-
lar society, left to navigate ‘the minefield
between the truth and the lie’ on our own,
‘My memory’s started to go, so we won’t,
for example, always have Paris.’
perhaps it’s only human empathy — which
Gundar-Goshen extends in spades — that
offers any hope of redemption.
Liar was inspired by a news story of
a false accusation of assault by an Eritrean
refugee who was a minor. The media’s
vilification of the girl made it ‘too easy’
to exclude her from humanity, Gundar-
Goshen explained in an interview on BBC
Woman’s Hour: ‘It’s much more difficult,
but also much more interesting, instead
of calling her a monster to try to under-
stand her.’ We are driven to lie when the
truth fails us, says Gundar-Goshen. More
intriguing than a lie, then — whether in lit-
erature or in life — is the intolerable truth
it hopes to hide.
Lost and found
Fiona Sampson
Orphans of Empire: The Fate of
London’s Foundlings
by Helen Berry
OUP, £20, pp. 384
One of the oddest of Bloomsbury’s event
venues must be the Foundling Museum.
The handsome building on Coram’s Fields
houses what remains of the London Found-
ling Hospital, which opened on the site in
1745. Its imposing rooms are lined with oil
portraits of past patrons and among the
artefacts on display is the original score
of George Frideric Handel’s fundraising
The Messiah, which he donated to the hos-
pital. In the 18th century the Foundling
Hospital was a fashionable cause, and the
great and good flocked to associate with its
charitable works.
But some of the museum’s cases tell
another story — the history not of great
names but of the anonymous children of
the desperate poor. The ‘foundlings’ the
hospital was built to cater for were not,
generally speaking, orphaned children,
but babies being given up by mothers who
couldn’t care for them, usually because
they were unmarried, though occasion-
ally through more general poverty. As
a result, shame was written into the found-
lings’ existence. Their names were changed
on admission and the smart uniforms
they later received were a badge of
double dishonour, signifying both ‘charity
cases’ and ‘bastards’.
The museum displays identifying
tokens left by mothers, either in the hope
of reclaiming the child at a later point or
so that the baby might grow up to know
who he or she was. They include scraps of
cloth taken from what the baby was wear-
ing when admitted as well as handstitched
hearts, engraved silver badges, charms,
buttons and coins snapped in half that
could be matched together upon reunion.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
These are objects redolent with pain, and
it can feel incongruous, even voyeuris-
tic, to view them while sipping wine at
a reception.
Yet spectatorship is part of the hospi-
tal’s history. In the decades after it opened
its doors in 1741, regular admission days
were announced in the national press and
mobbed by so many desperate mothers
that a ballot system had to be introduced.
Their grief and humiliation — ‘successful’
mothers had their babies removed imme-
diately — can only have been intensified
by the presence of wealthy visitors who
paid to watch the spectacle. But the hos-
pital needed these onlookers’ money. It
had received its Royal Charter in 1739,
thanks to two decades of fundraising and
campaigning work by the retired sea cap-
tain, Thomas Coram. But more funds were
always required.
Coram’s system sent all babies to be
fostered by wet nurses in the country for
their first years, then brought them back
to the institution for education before they
were apprenticed to fairly lowly trades. In
its day this was good, costly care and bet-
ter than anything else on offer, including
parish relief. Admissions swelled, espe-
cially after 1756 when parliament ruled
that all babies should be accepted, and
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
six receiving centres were founded
outside London.
A total of 18,539 infants were admitted
before the end of the 18th century. But the
mortality rate was eye-watering: two thirds
did not survive childhood. Public revulsion
led to the removal of an enormous pub-
The mortality rate was eye-watering.
Two thirds of the foundlings did not
survive childhood
lic subsidy in 1771; but the hospital sur-
vived and became the charity now known
as Coram, continuing to care directly for
children until 1954, and working with adop-
tion and care to this day.
Unsurprisingly, the hospital’s archive
occupies a shelf length ‘the equivalent
of 17 double-decker buses’, according to
Helen Berry. Her well organised, work-
manlike account concentrates on its 18th-
century history and does an important job
of clearing a way through a mass of rep-
etitious detail, while acknowledging how
telling and human that detail is. She is par-
ticularly good at interweaving a surviving
autobiographical account by one found-
ling, George King, with records of many
other lives, from foster mothers attempt-
‘Taking Leave’ by
Emma Brownlow
(1865): a foundling
prepares to make
his way in the world,
in a painting by the
daughter of John
Brownlow, himself a
foundling, who rose to
become director of
the hospital
ing to be reunited with the children they
fostered to apprentices surviving abuse.
Berry notes that the hospital yoked tre-
mendous privilege to the austere lives of
foundlings, and points out that it was patron-
ised by establishment figures partly because
it was seen as a source of labour for Britain’s
naval and colonial ambitions. But, as she also
shows, 18th-century supporters focused at
least as much on the social problem posed
by so many numerous unwanted babies,
who were seen as potentially criminal yet
also innocent.
Meanwhile, charitable involvement was
a way for the rich to accumulate social
kudos. What linked foundlings to the
‘empire’ of Berry’s title wasn’t just their
labour potential. It was also the attitude
of contemporary wealth to disadvantage,
whether at home or abroad. The degrada-
tion associated with foundlings and their
mothers was so thrillingly ‘foreign’ for those
spectators at an admission day that it was
almost like visiting another country: one to
be exploited, perhaps, but with expressions
of piety.
Berry’s study is a useful reminder that
today, as we consume the foundling hospi-
tal’s stories of abandonment along with our
canapés we could do worse than to check
our own expressions.
35
BOOKS & ARTS

refugees from war zones, including Iraq and the odds stacked heavily against idealistic
A class act Afghanistan. Clanchy describes the school teachers, not only because of the cha-
Carey Schofield as ‘a gathering point for one of the most otic backgrounds of the students but as
mixed communities ever to function on a result of Ofsted demands and the shifting
Some Kids I Taught and the earth’. dogmas of politicians.
What They Taught Me She was sad but resigned that none The author begins by talking about her
by Kate Clanchy of her poetry group won Foyle priz- profession, describing the ‘terrifying con-
Picador, £16.99, pp. 288 es that first time, — until she scrutinised fidence trick’ of classroom discipline as
photographs of the winners and realised that a ‘series of stinging humiliations and
Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary per- they were all white, many, she discovered, painful accidents and occasional sub-
son. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teach- from boarding schools. She concluded that lime flights which leave you either crip-
ing in difficult state schools, as well as an they shared a landscape of aproned, cake- pled or changed’. After decades of
acclaimed poet (awarded an MBE in 2018 making grandmothers, deck chairs and teaching she can now ‘look at the back
for services to literature) who has nur- copies of the National Geographic. ‘This row in that indefinable teacherly way that
tured a generation of successful young was the landscape that was recognised brings quiet’.
migrant writers. as poetic.’ Stories are at the heart of this book,
In 2006 she was one of the judges for the Clanchy complained and lobbied and ‘long-stewed’ stories with a jostling, over-
Foyle young poets of the year award. Seven continued to work with her pupils, con- lapping crowd of characters: the young peo-
years later, seeing how the winners were vinced that their loss of country, and in ple Clanchy has taught, their families and
scything through Oxbridge and networking many cases close family members, could be her fellow teachers. Among dozens of others
‘like an artsy version of the Bullingdon Club’, a gain to them as poets. The shock of dis-
she wanted the same opportunities for her location ‘made them listen to their inner In the cataclysmic disorder of British
own pupils, ‘not just the poetry, but the sense voice’. And she was proved resoundingly to
of entitlement’. She was teaching at a compre- have been right. In the past few years her secondary schools the odds are stacked
hensive in east Oxford, a generally unloved pupils have won awards across the board, heavily against idealistic teachers
institution, ‘record-breakingly under- including the Betjeman prize as well as the
subscribed’, where more than 50 languag- Foyle young poets. there’s Royar, the son of a Kurdish widow,
es were spoken. Some pupils were born in Some Kids I Taught and What They ‘with the honour of a family on his shoul-
Britain to parents from Commonwealth Taught Me is a collection of essays that ders in a country which doesn’t know what
countries, some were migrants from eastern conjures up the cataclysmic disorder of honour means’, who compliments a counsel-
Europe or South America and others were life in a British secondary school, with lor on her blouse and is reported for sexual
harassment. There’s the menacing, resent-
ful Cheyenne, showered with presents by
her errant father and stamped through with
poverty, who has more consumer goods than
Przedwiosnie (Early Spring) Clanchy’s own children, ‘more calories and
less nutrition; more cash and less financial
security’. There’s the beguiling Nepalese
While the white rays of noon shone down I tried to tame the trail Akash, out and proud at school, who ‘does
of bones that lay scattered across the meadow from the slaughterhouse not have the words even to begin to explain
to his mother what he is’. And there’s
Priti, from Bengal, and her taller cousin
and left this abandoned edgeland of loose sediment Priya, who write a novel about an Ameri-
cordoned off by the colour of rotten straw – can summer camp. When Clanchy suggests
that they should write instead about their
memories of Bengal, Priya replies: ‘We are
but a nimbus cloud hovered clear as an eye in the palm of my hand not in books.’
struck through with a whip of post-glacial drizzle. The notion of not belonging, of being
excluded, recurs constantly. It extends
to the refugees, to the troubled, to those
As it crossed the constellations lounging in their paralysis and time began to leak with learning difficulties and also to
upon a path more stable than the one through the indoor hall bright pupils deprived of prizes by schools
that prefer to reward those who have
simply made progress. ‘Teachers underesti-
I forgot the reason for the day, a walking tour mate how hard it is to be clever,’ Clanchy’s
to ramble through the folded layers of culture’s rubble: friend Jeannie laments. Her daughter Annie
‘works bloody hard, on her own, mostly. She
pays a price. She’s never going to get the
struck more by the crows as they posed like pieces of dark flint, popularity prize. Where’s her maths prize?’
shifting what was already shifting eastwards, Clanchy’s venom is reserved for the
church. She rails repeatedly against
Catholic schools and scornfully refers
struck more by the cosmos riding its scientific revolution to those Muslims who choose to send
than by the lump of contaminated earth caught in my hand. their children to them as being attracted
‘by the general anti-sex vibe’. Nevertheless,
Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught
— Michael Sobol Me is full of treasures. Clanchy believes
(translated from the Polish by Jade Cuttle) in happiness and success and retrieves
36 the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
much that is cheerful from the tangled
messes of her pupils’ lives. She says that
she went into teaching because she want-
ed to change the world, and that a state
school seemed the best place to start. It’s
clear from this book that she has changed
the world for a significant number of
young people.
Don’t be put off by its ghastly title. Read
it. It will make you a better person, kinder
and more understanding.
The gifts of Gabo
Frances Wilson
Solitude & Company: A Life of
Gabriel García Márquez told with
Help from his Friends, Family, Fans,
Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks
and a few Respectable Souls
by Silvana Paternostro, translated from the
Spanish by Edith Grossman
Seven Stories, £20, pp. 336
Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of
2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was
the product of 17 years of research and
300 interviews, including one with Fidel
Castro. So what does Solitude & Compa-
ny add to the fairytale history of ‘Gabo’, as
Latin America’s greatest teller of historical
fairy tales is generally known?
In the year 2000, when García Márquez
was still alive, Silvana Paternostro began
conducting her own interviews with Gabo’s
family, his ‘first and last friends’, his agents,
editors and fellow writers. She has now cut,
spliced and transcribed the tapes in order to
create the effect of a bar full of drunks inter-
rupting one another. ‘Is that tape recorder
off?’, asks Quiqui Scopell, a photographer.
‘Leave it on!’
The model for the book is George
Plimpton’s Truman Capote: In Which Var-
ious Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and
Detractors Recall his Turbulent Career, and
García Márquez is as suited to the vox-pop
treatment as Capote was. What is grandly
called oral history and otherwise known as
gossip (‘This isn’t for you to repeat,’ con-
fides one of the revellers) was described by
García Márquez himself as ‘fiction about
fiction’; and it becomes clear, once you get
to know his muckers, where Gabo got his
gift of the gabo.
He comes from a culture in which
everyone tells stories or, as Quiqui
puts it, ‘talks shit’. One of Gabo’s old-
est friends goes off on a riff about anoth-
er friend who kept a pet cricket called
Fififififi — ‘listen, this is true!’ — who told
his master one day that he had made his
lunch: ‘Maestro, maestro, I prepared some-
thing for you’, at which point maestro put
Fififififi into his mouth and swallowed him.
Solitude & Company divides into two
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Gabriel García Márquez on the
Colombian 50,000 peso note
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
parts. The first tells the story, through
Gabo’s siblings and early ‘arguers’, of how
the youngest of 12 children, born in 1927 to
what a distant cousin described as a family
of witches, was raised by his grandparents
in Aracataca, which sounds suspiciously
like Abracadabra and became, in One Hun-
Aged 39, Gabo isolated himself for
eight months in a bare room in order
to write the great Colombian novel
dred Years of Solitude, the magical town of
Maconda. Having read so many books that
his family feared ‘he would lose his mind’,
Gabo then dropped out of law school to
become a journalist, after which he started
to write fiction based on the stories he had
grown up with.
He then, aged 39, gave up his job, bor-
rowed money and isolated himself for
eight months in a bare room with a type-
writer in order to write the great Colombi-
an novel. ‘His entire family,’ says Emmanuel
Carballo, who read One Hundred Years as
the chapters appeared, ‘his wife, his sons, his
friends, we all made an empty space around
him because he was frenetically dedicated
to one thing.’
The reason why Gabo
chose Carballo as his first
reader was because, explains
Carballo, ‘I’m very talent-
ed.’ One Hundred Years was
‘made’, Carballo continues,
‘with a superhuman gust of
wind’, an image repeated
by Rodrigo Moya, who says
that, according to García
Márquez’s wife, when Gabo
was writing a particularly
intense part of the novel ‘his
face swelled up. The pro-
cess of a work like that is
a little superhuman, and so
those things happen’.
According to Maria Luisa
Elio, the dedicatee of One
Hundred Years, Gabo ‘knew’
the book was ‘a marvel’; but
according to Guillermo Angu-
lo, his friend from his impov-
erished Paris days, Gabo
knew nothing of the sort: ‘In
fact he was very doubtful that
it would be a good novel.’
Maria Luisa Elio thinks the
novel was ‘really good’ but
not ‘to that degree’ — by
which she means, as Gabo’s
godson Santiago Mutis
puts it, the degree to which
‘everyone kneeled down
before him’. ‘And now,’ says
Quiqui Scopell, well into his
drink, ‘they dare to compare
that Hundred Years to Don
Quixote.’ That Hundred Years, he continues,
is ‘a bad, folkloric novel’ in which ‘yellow
butterflies jerk off’.
The second half of Solitude & Compa-
ny explores the effect on his old friends of
‘Gabolatry’, when García Márquez became
the guest of presidents and dictators. ‘Gabito
said it, so that’s it,’ grumbles Quiqui. Fame
‘attacked’ him ‘like a bull’, says his godson.
‘And then gradually, slowly, another person
begins to appear.’
Most of the party agree with this,
although they argue about whether the
change began with the success of One Hun-
dred Years in 1967 or the Nobel Prize in
1982. ‘The Nobel didn’t change him at all,’
says Carmen Balcells. ‘He became famous
and pedantic,’ contests Emmanuel Carballo,
‘and pedantry and feeling important both-
er me a great deal.’ His godson, fast becom-
ing my favourite of the crowd, says that the
older Gabo is ‘much more interesting’ than
the younger Gabo, because he is obliged by
age to reflect on ‘how he became who he is’.
Which is what Solitude & Company does
too. This superb book is biography minus
the moral obligation or dutiful reverence —
in other words, without the boring bits. As
Quiqui puts it: ‘No! No! I’ll have this drink
and we’re leaving.’
37
 BOOKS & ARTS
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The massacre of Christian Armenians at Adana
A nation born in blood
James Robins
The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s
Destruction of its Christian
Minorities, 1894–1924
by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi
Harvard, £25, pp. 636
Turkey greets you with a chilly blue eye,
a flared eyebrow, a cliff-like cheekbone.
The face of the republic’s founder glares
imperious from almost every office wall,
shopkeeper’s kiosk and airport terminal.
Turkish citizens regard Mustafa Kemal
reverentially: the nation’s first president,
courageous leader of the 1919–1922 war
of independence, deliverer from the great
powers’ imperial cleaver. An impenetra-
ble cultish mythos envelops him. Even
for Istanbul’s young cosmopolitans, any
word against Kemal spurs a visceral reac-
tion.Recep Erdogan, the current president,
whose politics are anathema to Kemalist
ideology, still has to invoke him for the pur-
poses of propaganda. To an American intelli-
gence officer who met the man in the fraught
summer of 1921, however, Kemal was
38
a ‘clever, ugly customer,’ with the look of
‘a very superior waiter’.
It’s little wonder that an American
would view Kemal in such a way. His
nationalist movement was waging a quasi-
guerrilla insurgency against the victors of
the first world war, who sought to carve
up the moribund, defeated Ottoman
empire. In the process, Kemal completed
what his predecessors had already begun:
the definitive slaughter and removal of
the empire’s remaining Christian population:
Pontic and Ionian Greeks, Assyrians and, of
course, Armenians.
In their expansive and detailed new vol-
ume The Thirty-Year Genocide the historians
Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi depart from
well-established accounts of the Armenian
genocide which often consign earlier and
later frenzies of slaying to introductions and
conclusions. They roll three crimes into one.
First, the Hamidian Terror (1894–96) under
the sclerotic rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II.
Secondly, the obliteration carried out by the
formerly liberal Committee of Union and
Progress (1914–18). And finally, the Kemal-
ist ‘cleansing’ campaigns during and after the
war of independence (1919–24).
Morris and Ze’evi document each peri-
od well, if often gruellingly. They include
a distressing but accurate summary:
An Armenian woman from eastern Ana-
tolia, born in the 1880s, would likely have
seen her parents killed in 1895 and her hus-
band and son massacred in 1915. If she sur-
vived, she probably would have been raped
and murdered in 1919–1924. Certainly she
would have been deported in that last
genocidal phase.
They are right to draw a link between all
three in the sense that, no matter the ide-
ological motive, the result was the same:
a complete eradication of ethnic and reli-
gious minorities, leading to a death toll that
approaches two million. But it is the ideo-
logical motives that the authors encoun-
ter trouble with. To their credit, they admit
that ‘the bouts of atrocity were committed
under three different ideological umbrel-
las’. Yet for their thesis to work, there must
be unity of purpose. And they’ve picked the
wrong one.
They find an ‘overarching... banner’ in
Islam, which, they say, ‘played a cardinal
role throughout the process’. Partly, their
It’s arguable that there would be
no Turkish nation without the
destruction of its Christian peoples
misreading is down to relying extensively
on the accounts of Allied officers or west-
ern missionaries quick to attribute bouts of
savagery to ‘fanatical Mohammedanism’.
This skips over the fact that ‘Christians lived
in relative security under Ottoman rule for
centuries’. What changed?
The only theory that could explain all
three fits of carnage is this: a siege mental-
ity. Abdülhamid II, the Committee of Union
and Progress and Mustafa Kemal (also
a CUP member) were all gripped by a fear
of the state’s disfigurement and collapse,
and they directed apocalyptic violence
against those they perceived as traitors or
fifth columnists.
Indeed, only this could explain some-
thing Morris and Ze’evi consign to a des-
ultory footnote: the Turkish republic’s
94-year-long campaign against the Kurds.
They are Muslim, too, by majority, but from
1925 engaged in rebellions and resistances
against the state — and have suffered dearly
for it. In a way, paranoia about partition is the
galvanising politics of the Turkish elite to
this day.
The authors also withdraw from a bit-
terly ironic point made by pioneering writ-
ers such as Taner Akçam, Ugur Üngör, and
Hrant Dink, a very confronting and uncom-
fortable idea indeed: contrary to the mirac-
ulous or messianic view of Mustafa Kemal,
there would not be a Turkish nation without
the destruction of its Christian peoples. The
very foundation of republican Turkey is an
abattoir of mud and blood.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Two men and no baby
Leyla Sanai
The Ginger Child: On Family,
Loss and Adoption
by Patrick Flanery
Atlantic Books, £14.99, pp. 277
The sorrow of involuntary childlessness is
profound. The award-winning novelist Pat-
rick Flanery and his husband knew this pain.
Their craving to love and nurture a child left
them with an intractable emptiness.
Flanery has no siblings; his parents lived
abroad, and he had a difficult relationship
with his father. So his desire was to create the
close-knit family he never had. I sympathised
deeply with the couple. Their tenderness and
dedication to parenthood is obvious, but
when they investigated the options open to
them, they found most doors if not actually
locked, then spring-loaded shut.
Despite Flanery’s sensitivity, he occa-
sionally shows lapses of insight, as when he
admits resenting those female friends with
one child whom he asked to be surrogates,
who told him they never wanted to give
birth again, only to change their minds. He
must have realised that once they’d recov-
ered from the ordeal of childbirth, the urge
to have — and keep — another child would
be as strong in them as it was in him.
Flanery shows a similar lack of under-
standing when, having looked at the restric-
tions on surrogacy in the UK, he wonders
how adopting a child who’s been forcibly
taken from its birth parents can be ethically
any less compromised than surrogacy. Free
of the subjective fog, he should have seen
how in the first situation the move is purely
for the benefit of an already existing child.
Having found surrogacy unfeasible, the
couple moved towards adoption. From the
start, there were warning signs that it would
not be easy. A social worker told them
that it was not a problem that they were
gay (they hadn’t asked); and, on discover-
ing that Flanery was a novelist, joked that
a previous gay client wrote pornogra-
phy — as though that were the norm for
gay writers.
Flanery and his husband identified them-
selves on the paperwork as ‘queer’ rather
than gay. Although the term is no longer
used as a homophobic insult and is includ-
ed in the LGBTIQ spectrum, I worried that
some social workers might equate it with
‘weird’. And so it proved.
The adoption process was laborious, the
tasks the couple had to complete patronis-
ing and often insultingly simplistic (‘draw
a spider and label each leg with one of
your worries’) and for months their search
seemed fruitless. Furthermore, their stat-
ed limitations — they felt unable to cope
with severe physical or mental disability —
were ignored.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
The dissertation-length analyses we get
of gender stereotypes and homophobia in
the films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant
are unnecessary. Ditto the many pages
musing on the word ‘envy’, as applied to
a woman’s biological ability to give birth.
Why not just call it ‘longing’ or ‘yearn-
ing’, words which encompass the sorrow
and coveting?
The Ginger Child will inevitably stir
strong emotions. Some readers may point
out that biological parents don’t have the
luxury of imposing limitations on what
sort of child they’d accept. Others may
say the couple’s later justification for their
actions (which I won’t reveal) was dis-
ingenuous. Did they, as they state, feel
‘unequipped’ to look after a child who prob-
The adoption process required the
couple to draw a spider and label
each leg with one of their worries
ably had undiagnosed learning difficulties?
Or were they merely unwilling to give up
a metropolitan lifestyle of art galleries
and travel?
I think that some of their fears were pre-
mature: their disappointment at the boy in
question not tearing himself away from his
extended foster family to say goodbye to
them after a visit was surely because the for-
mer had constituted his family all his life.
But other warning signs were undeniably at
odds with a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Adopters
being selective may seem unkind or selfish,
but ultimately it’s better for all parties not to
proceed under those circumstances.
This is a compelling, heart-wrenching
memoir that exquisitely describes a visceral
pain all too many of us feel.
To hell in a handcart
Louis Amis
Only Americans Burn in Hell
by Jarett Kobek
Serpent’s Tail, £12.99, pp. 297
An immortal faery queen from a magi-
cal gynocratic island arrives in Los Ange-
les to track down her missing daughter.
This is actually the entire plot of a novel
entitled Only Americans Burn in Hell. Of
course, as in Jarett Kobek’s previous book,
I Hate the Internet, the fictional element
is a foil, with most of the pages devoted to
sociopolitical diatribe laced with various
kinds of life writing.
It’s also basically the same diatribe in
both books, against a global society in which
‘everyone’s life is still dominated by the
whims of the very rich and the social mores of
the slightly rich’. Everyone’s to blame: Presi-
dent Trump’s supporters are referred to sim-
ply as ‘the Fucking Assholes’, no worse than
‘liberals in the celebrity branch of Ameri-
can governance’ and ‘the faux-left who write
books for Rupert Murdoch’. Twitter out-
rage is ‘a shitty iteration of the Church’. And
‘the socialists are the most annoying people
in America’.
But what Kobek really can’t bear are the
mechanisms, primarily within both social
and mass-market media, through which we
persuade ourselves that ‘everything is going
to be okay’. His focus in I Hate the Inter-
net was techno-feudalism, whereby every-
thing that happens online — including all
social activism — ends up only enriching the
oligarchy of platform-owners. Now, it’s
Hollywood fantasy movies, which fraud-
ulently dress stories about the ‘unexam-
ined glory of American foreign policy’ and
the ‘meaningfulness of war and violence’
in themes of social liberation. So the faery
island involves some contemptuous pastiche
of Wonder Woman and Black Panther.
‘I’m a terrible writer,’ Kobek advises in
the introduction. The prose has a deliberate-
ly negligent feel. But the internet is a cred-
ible threat to the novel as a form: ‘The only
solution was to write bad novels that mim-
icked the computer network in its obses-
sions with junk media’ and ‘in its irrelevant
and jagged presentation of content’. And
the election of a reality-TV star to the US
presidency does seem to have stymied sat-
ire as we knew it. ‘Reality collapsed into fic-
tion,’ Kobek writes. His faeries are ‘a cracked
attempt at the sorry bullshit that people
in the Hyperreal actually want to read,
which are mindless tales about supra-
natural creatures’.
Into the mix comes a mortal prince, also
from a faraway kingdom — that of Saudi
Arabia. By virtue of his arbitrary wealth, this
prince is also a kind of wizard, able to alter
reality with a hand gesture. And Kobek, the
‘terrible’ authorial divinity, wields the same
power: cancelling characters with a sneer and
loutishly kicking over his own plot structures.
The ‘magical bullshit’ that the faeries exhib-
it during their visit to LA operates ‘like...
a smartphone, but without supplying every
stupid fucking detail of your sad little life
to the sociopaths who operate megalithic
American companies’. It can also frequently
‘solve an intranarrative problem while mov-
ing forward the storytelling’.
Kurt Vonnegut is a major influence,
but Kobek’s tenor is quite different. The
defining idea of this novel is that novels no
longer have any value. ‘I’m burnt out,’ he
writes. ‘Stop hoping that books will save
you. Stop pretending. Everyone else has.’
The prognosis for this approach is at least
as bleak as for any other. But, in the mean-
time, the boundlessness of Kobek’s discon-
tent is somehow captivating. And he isn’t
courting any particular constituency or
coterie, which alone is a precious quality
in the online age.
39
BOOKS & ARTS
Chivalric spectacle, martial display, marriage market, medieval G8.
Laura Freeman on why the Late Middle Ages were mad for jousting
E
mperor Maximilian I liked to say he
invented the joust of the exploding
shields. When a knight charged and his
lance struck the opposing shield — bam! —
the shield shattered and the shrapnel went
up like fireworks. It’s almost impossible to
turn the pages of Freydal. Medieval Games.
The Book of Tournaments of Emperor Maxi-
milian I and not imagine Batman-style cap-
tions. Clank! Thwack! Kapow! The knights
and princes of the painted miniatures are
all-awl, all-action iron men. Their horses are
hooded to stop them bolting and every har-
ness is stitched with bells. All the horse would
have heard was the jangling, not the thunder
of hooves or the roar of the tiltyard crowds.
The editors of this splendid facsimile
of Maximilian’s Freydal (1512–15), pub-
lished by Taschen, suggest that the impact
of two galloping knights in steel armour
was equivalent to two small cars crashing at
40 miles per hour. What’s more extraordi-
nary is that the knights who were knocked
down generally got up again. The combined
protection of concealed leather caps and
steel helmets meant that the biomechanical
impact on a jouster’s brain when struck and
unseated would have been far less forceful
than that of a car crash. Which is just as well
because the gilded scenes of Freydal show
some gnarly falls. As the shields and lances
fly, the riders hit the dust. Necks, shoulders
and backs are bent, broken and dented. One
contestant hangs grimly on, upside down,
grasping the horse’s neck, saved from being
trampled only by a foot caught in the left
stirrup. Other tournament books survive
from the Middle Ages, but none show so
many spectacular smash landings.
Maximilian, son of Emperor Frederick
III of Germany and Eleanor of Portugal, was
born in 1459 at Wiener Neustadt, and became
known as ‘the last knight’. He caught the
tournament bug early, attending his first one
at the age of 14, held to celebrate the meet-
ing between his father and Duke Charles the
Bold of Burgundy. Tournaments, first staged
in northern France in the late 11th century,
were feats of diplomacy as much as martial
display: somewhere between the Olympics
and the G8 summit. The name tournament
came from the turns a knight and his mount
performed to return to their starting
positions ready for the next assault.
40
ARTS
Knight fever
Tournaments were settings for elabo-
rate displays of finery, advertisements for
artists and craftsmen. Leonardo da Vinci
made silverpoint sketches for fantastical
winged helmets and breastplates blazoned
with roaring lions. Hans Holbein designed
tournament armour for Henry VIII (c.1527)
with fine etched and gilded steel in a style
known as ‘Grenwich garniture’. Even the
horses wore cloth of gold.
The artistry was all-embracing, however,
including bejewelled dances, opulent cos-
tumes, music from 40-strong bands, audience
stands draped in tapestries. Tournaments
were all-day productions, climactic, operat-
ic, consequential. Noble standing, national
branding and match-making were all decided
here. Heralds vetted the ancestry of prospec-
tive combatants. Tournaments were marriage
markets. Victory on the field ensured advan-
tage in the game of dynastic thrones.
Maximilian held tournaments to mark
his wedding to Mary of Burgundy (1477),
his coronation as King of the Romans
The impact of two galloping knights in
armour was equivalent to two small
cars crashing at 40 miles per hour
(1486) and the First Congress of Vienna
(1515). He fed and spread the craze, send-
ing gifts to younger royals who looked up
to him like Henry VIII, who received some
decorative horse armour and a horned hel-
met. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, the
most famous tournament of them all, was
Henry’s tribute act to the pageants of the
Emperor who had died the year before.
(The lavish tented palace that housed
Henry during his famous tête-à-tête with
the King of France in 1520 will be recre-
ated for the 500th anniversary at Hampton
Court next spring, complete with jousting,
foot combat and Tudor wrestling.)
Maximilian was captivated by the whole
tradition of jousting, which reached its high
point in Burgundy in the 15th century. Here,
magnificent chivalric spectacles called pas
d’armes were staged in which individual
combats were woven into mythical-allegor-
ical narratives. A prince could knock seven
bells out of a duke while playing at Lancelot
or Galahad. Maximilian confidently traced
his ancestry back to Charlemagne, King
Arthur, Julius Caesar, Hercules and Jupiter.
Freydal, hero of Maximilian’s Tournament
Book, is the emperor’s alter ego, defeat-
ing all-comers, dancing in pointed slippers,
receiving his laurels, in pursuit of a fair lady
— an idealised Mary of Burgundy. In Theu-
erdank, an unfinished second volume, our
hero grapples with bears, lions, avalanches,
rockfalls, a shipwreck, booby traps and the
Devil himself.
Freydal and Theuerdank were part of
Maximilian’s ‘programme of paper gran-
deur’. Between 1510 and 1515, he commis-
sioned not only the Book of Tournaments,
but also ‘The Triumphal Arch of Maximil-
ian’, a paper monument constructed from
195 woodcut blocks; ‘The Triumphs of Maxi-
milian’, a 139-block ceremonial procession of
heraldic glories; and ‘The Carriage of Maxi-
milian’, an eight-block, 12-horse spectacu-
lar by Albrecht Dürer. This was the age of
Gutenberg. Paper was modern, urgent and
cool; marble expensive, immobile, old hat.
Maximilian’s ‘Arches’ and ‘Triumphs’ could
be printed many times over and papered as
friezes and murals in noble houses across
the empire. ‘He who does not care how he is
remembered,’ said Maximilian, ‘will be for-
gotten as soon as the bell’s toll ends.’
If the ‘Arch’ and ‘Triumphs’ celebrate the
imperial Maximilian, Freydal is the young,
romantic, questing Maximilian. Across 255
miniatures, Freydal competes in 64 tourna-
ments told in four parts: two jousts, one foot
fight and a masquerade. While the more
than two dozen anonymous artists who
worked on the leaves are allowed some cre-
ative licence — in one scene, Freydal fights
Maximilian’s son Philip the Handsome, who
cannot properly be born until Freydal wins
the hand of his lady — the folios are accu-
rate to the last pommel in their rendering
of equipment. It is thought that Maximilian
looked at each preparatory drawing before
it was worked up in tempera — coloured
pigment bound with egg — and highlighted
with gold and silver leaf. What the average
Augsburg illuminator knew about lance-
to-lance combat wouldn’t fill a manuscript
margin. Maximilian knew his escutcheons.
Freydal is a remarkable catalogue of hal-
berds, maces, awls, pikes, daggers, swords,
glaves, flails, poles and throwing stars.
Freydal often fights dirty. In Folio 186, he
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Lance encounters: a plate from The Book of Tournaments, Maximilian’s remarkable encyclopedia of jousting
thrusts a dagger into the eye slit of Adam
von Frundsberg’s visor. In Folio 39 Freydal
batters Claude de Vaudry with a mace and
kicks him in the shins for good measure.
Max always wins.
The costumes are sumptuous, the head-
wear preposterous. Competitors wear hel-
mets decorated with pheasant feathers,
ostrich plumes, peacock fans, stag’s antlers,
ram’s horns, ass’s ears and with pelicans,
monkeys and bunches of flowers. One rival,
Wolfgang von Polheim, used to joust with
a basket of eggs on his head to prove his
perfect balance. In an early scene Freydal’s
horse wears a protective metal shaffron with
its own fearsome, lancing unicorn’s horn.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Maximilian delighted in disguises. In the
masquerade scenes, guests dress as Span-
iards, giants, cockerels and in fetching crim-
son drag. One of the most beautiful balls
has guests dressed as Ottomans in porphyry
Wolfgang von Polheim used to joust
with a basket of eggs on his head to
prove his perfect balance
robes and plaited turbans. Here mummer’s
fantasy meets historic fact: in July 1497 Max-
imilian received the envoy of Sultan Bayezid
II and gave a banquet in his honour.
The foreground pageants are rarely so
interesting as the background intrigue. Jest-
© KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM, VIENNA
ers caper, wallflowers pine, minstrels strum
in the gallery and Guineveres sit gossiping in
rows. One lady plucks another’s skirt as if to
say: ‘So pretty! From Bruges?’ An evening’s
pause for wine, pipers, acrobats and the kiss-
ing of a pale, sleeved hand — then back to
the tiltyard, back to the fray.
Freydal. Medieval Games. The Book of
Tournaments of Emperor Maximilian I
is published by Taschen (£150). Hampton
Court will mark the 500th anniversary of
the Field of the Cloth of Gold with a special
exhibition starting on 10 April 2020 and,
from 23 to 31 May, a festival of Tudor sport
and entertainment.
41
BOOKS & ARTS
THE LISTENER
Peter Doherty & the
Puta Madres
Grade: A
Old skag head’s back, then — older
(40 now!), probably none the wiser,
still a very good songwriter. This
may be the best thing he’s ever done,
at least since those incendiary first
moments of the Libertines.
Yeah, I can do without the
affected drawl skittering this way and
that around the melody — he’s better
doing his affected Steve Harley yelp
— but there’s not too much of that,
still less the old angular post-punk
guitar. Instead you get the occasional
lo-fi shambolic babyish jug-band
thrash, all of which are good, and a
bunch of slower songs illustrated with
violin and delicately picked guitar.
The best is ‘Paradise is Under Your
Nose’, a stunning ballad handled
with restraint and taste and with a
peculiarly moving last refrain: ‘I miss
you now, my love,/ I want you now,
my love.’ It’s a lovely song.
The introspection continues on
the cutely self-knowing ‘Narcissistic
Teen Makes First XI’ and the sweet-
as-hell ‘Someone Else To Be’, where
he explains he’s looking for a leather
jacket in which he can ride into the
sun. I don’t know what he’s in search
of, paradise being under his nose or, at
worst, up it. But the good songs keep
coming, the gentle ‘Travelling Tinker’
and the irresistible ‘Shoreleave’,
which seems to borrow its tune from
‘Blanket On The Ground’ and in
which he tells us ‘I never lost control.
I never had control’.
I can even put up with his
excruciating Yankee scat monkeying
on ‘Punk Rock Bonafide’. He is
such a great talent in this admittedly
limited medium. And so often such
a dickhead. Ah well.
— Rod Liddle
42
Radio
Up close and personal
Kate Chisholm
‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was
asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the
BBC. ‘Yes, of course. I have to,’ replied Ayes-
hea Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist. She was
talking from Colombo to David Amanor of
the World Service’s The Fifth Floor, which
looks at current news stories from the per-
spective of those intimately involved with
them and is always worth catching for its
alternative, less formal approach and Aman-
or’s gentle probing to find the real story.
Perera described the chaos on arriving at
the airport in the Sri Lankan capital on the
evening of Easter Day and the weirdness
of going to see the Church of St Anthony
next morning to find that from the outside it
looked just as she had always known it. Only
when she looked more closely did she notice
the scattered shards of glass, the bloodstains
on the road, and that the church clock had
stopped at 8.45.
‘When you have a connection, as a Sri
Lankan, it’s difficult to report the facts,’
said Perera. It’s physically and emotion-
ally exhausting; there’s more at stake. Peo-
ple were thrusting mobile phones at her to
prove they had been there, inside the church,
when the bomb went off, showing her pic-
tures of overturned pews and worshippers
covered in blood. Others were screaming,
shouting, moaning for their loved ones lost
in the bombing. It was like walking into
‘a wall of raw grief,’ Perera said.
She grew up in Colombo when it was still
a heavily militarised city, with roadblocks
everywhere, before the civil war of 2009
put an end to the sporadic bomb attacks. As
a teenager, she could be stopped three or
four times just on her way to buy a takea-
way after a late night out. It’s that personal
knowledge which gave her report so much
immediacy, tracking down individual acts
of kindness, like the Muslim family who
were living between two Christian house-
holds. They were holding things together,
she explained, providing tea and solace
for the Christians as they sat in vigil with
the bodies of those who had been killed.
‘I’ve noticed that those two aren’t really mixing
with the rest of the class.’
Last week’s The Reunion on Radio
4 instantly got my attention as Sue
MacGregor brought together three of
the airmen who had been shot down over
Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm
in January 1991 and held as prisoners of
war. She reminded us that a coalition of
35 countries had joined together to drive
Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi troops out
of the Gulf state and that the biggest audi-
ence in American TV history had watched
President Bush announcing the start of the
war on 16 January. It all seemed so long ago,
yet for John Nichol, John Peters and Rob-
bie Stewart it is still as potent as if it hap-
pened yesterday.
You could hear it in their voices as they
recalled the excitement of flying at just 50ft
above the ground in their Tornado jets. ‘You
could have been hit by a catapult,’ interrupt-
ed MacGregor. But Peters and Nichol were
shot down and captured on their first mis-
sion, in the early hours of 17 January, eject-
ing once they realised that behind them their
plane was bright orange, totally ablaze. Stew-
art, who was captured two days later, broke
his leg when he landed and was operated on
Why has the Qwerty keyboard layout
survived given that its combination
of letters is so awkward?
by an Iraqi surgeon who told us: ‘In the dark-
est of times… you can still find some good
seeping into your life.’
You may remember footage of Nichol
and Peters as they were paraded in front of
the TV cameras, apparently reading from
a script written for them in which they crit-
icised the war. The UK press decided they
were cowards who had given in to pressure,
hounding their families for pictures and
quotes. One reporter stuffed a mike through
the letterbox at the home of Peters’s moth-
er and asked her: ‘Do you think your son is
being tortured, or is he dead yet?’
Tim Harford’s series for the World Ser-
vice, 50 Things that Made the Modern Econ-
omy, has now set off in search of its second
half-century of crucial inventions. Harford
packs so much into his nine-minute pro-
grammes, taking us in his latest episode on
the bicycle from Pierre Lallement’s hair-
raising two-wheeled ride in Connecticut in
1865 to the surprising fact that world bike
production has kept pace with the rise of the
automobile. How did that happen, Harford
wanted to know. The bicycle’s green creden-
tials have something to do with it, and the
way it has liberated women, first from their
corsets and whalebones and, 150 years later,
by ensuring that teenage girls in Bihar have
access to education.
Harford always seems to ask the right
questions, wondering previously why the
Qwerty keyboard layout has survived given
that its particular combination of letters is
so awkward and that later layouts such as
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 peter brown

E xhibition dates: 8 -31 May 2019

Peter Brown has won a reputation as a great ‘plein air’ artist and rightly so. He enjoys the bustle of everyday life in the
city as much as the more tranquil moments of painting along the tow path of the Norfolk broads. But in this exhibition
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paintings depict this studio at different times of the day, often with his family forming part of his busy work place. A
painter at peace with himself, perhaps, which indeed he should be, for this year he succeeds as President of the New
English Arts Club.

28 Co r k Stre et, Lo ndo n W1S 3NG Te l: + 4 4 (0)20 74 37 55 4 5 info@me s sum s.c o m w w w.me s sums.com
BOOKS & ARTS
Dvorak are much more efficient. Qwer-
ty was originally developed for telegraph
operators as they deciphered Morse code
but has never been logical for typists (was it
intended to slow them down?) and even less
for computer operators. If you look on your
iPad you should find Dvorak as an alterna-
tive layout but no one ever switches over to
it. Why not give it a try, Harford suggested.
Television
The end is in sight
James Walton
Channel 4’s When I Grow Up had an impor-
tant lesson for middle-class white males eve-
rywhere: you’re never too young to be held
up as a git.
The series, billed as ‘a radical experiment
in social mobility’, gets a group of seven- and
eight-year-old children from different back-
grounds to work together in a real-life office
setting — which in Thursday’s first episode
was, rather unexpectedly, Hello! magazine.
The editor-in-chief Rosie Nixon began
by announcing, in the tones of one making
a brave stance against prevailing social atti-
tudes: ‘I do feel passionately about diversi-
ty.’ And this, of course, was also the brave
stance taken by the programme itself and
Despite the tragic disadvantage of
living in Middlesbrough, Isabella
is a keen reader of Dickens
its on-hand experts, who included Faiza
Shaheen, activist, prospective Labour can-
didate and all-round Jeremy Corbyn fan
— although the programme captioned her
simply as ‘economist’.
Faiza (PPE, St John’s College, Oxford)
duly lamented the perniciousness of racial,
gender and class-based privilege in British
life. Yet, even with her on board, the pro-
gramme left nothing to chance, carefully
casting the children involved so as to reach
its preordained conclusion.
In this process, Exhibit A was Charlie
— from ‘affluent Berkshire’, as the narra-
tor damningly informed us — whose oblig-
ing bumptiousness constantly conjured up
images of the production team rubbing their
hands with glee at having found him. (Luck-
ily, if the thought ever crossed their minds
that there was anything questionable about
making a TV hate figure out of a small boy,
they managed to suppress it.)
‘I’m good at teamwork,’ Charlie
explained, ‘but I know how to take things
over nicely when I need to’ — and, sure
enough, he often needed to. The group’s first
assignment was to host a batch of apparent
celebrities at a Hello! theatre evening, where
the team leader was supposed to be Samu-
el, a sweet and shy black child. But he was
44
soon supplanted by Charlie who regaled the
assembled willowy blondes with his plans to
become ‘a singer, dancer, actor and model —
a quadruple threat’.
Back in the office, Charlie also chose
the photos of the evening for the magazine:
something he found ‘pretty easy’, although
this may have been because he mostly opted
for photos of Charlie. And with that, he
donned a hat of the kind that really should
have had the word ‘Press’ sticking out of the
hatband and brazenly took over a Myleene
Klass fashion shoot from a sweet and shy
northern child.
Meanwhile, playing the hero to Charlie’s
villain was Isabella, who, noted the narra-
tor sorrowfully, ‘lives in Middlesbrough’.
Oddly, despite this tragic disadvantage, Isa-
bella is a keen reader of Dickens and was
easily clever enough to be made the overall
editor of the children’s contributions. The
way the programme told it (i.e. not entirely
believably), she then pulled together a royal
feature and the Myleene shoot without any
adult interference. She was also genuinely
impressive at restoring the morale of all the
people Charlie offended.
She was so effective, in fact, that Charlie
ended the episode distinctly chastened — or,
if you prefer, successfully reprogrammed.
‘I’ve learned the importance of listening to
other people,’ he recited, before leaving Isa-
bella to complete the makers’ message. ‘I
thought I couldn’t be the boss,’ she declared
(even though this wasn’t particularly evident
at the time), ‘but now I’ve realised I can.’
Fortunately, a more genial example of the
current trend for shows about children from
different backgrounds came with ITV’s
Planet Child. The idea here is to explore
‘what it means to grow up in the 21st cen-
tury’, now that ‘we’ve moved from the Stone
Age to the Phone Age’ (a formulation the
narrator was audibly proud of).
Wednesday’s programme began with
a blizzard of statistics about the mollycod-
dling of British children. Nearly 90 per cent
of primary school pupils are delivered to the
school gates by adults. Three-quarters spend
less time out of doors than the average pris-
on inmate. But, as we learned, not all glob-
al parents are so weirdly anxious. In Tokyo,
for instance, we watched a six-year-old mak-
ing his way to school alone, by bus and very
busy underground. So might it be that we’ve
become a bit overprotective (and that the
Pope isn’t a Protestant)?
To find out, presenters Chris and Xand
van Tulleken came up with ‘a ground-
breaking experiment’, which, perhaps
anti-climactically, consisted of seeing if
various primary-age siblings could catch a
bus from the Imperial War Museum to the
London Eye.
As it turned out, they could. Not only
that, but they took obvious pleasure in doing
something for themselves. Earlier in the epi-
sode, five-year-old Abi claimed the furthest
she’d ever travelled without grown-ups was
‘a metre’. Now, with the aid of older brother
Leo, she showed up at the London Eye with
her eyes gleaming. ‘We were on our own!’ she
said wonderingly. ‘I felt bigger than I am!’
Music
All at sea
Alexandra Coghlan
Billy Budd
Royal Opera House, in rep until 10 May
Man of La Mancha
Coliseum, in rep until 8 June
The climactic central scene of Benjamin
Britten’s Billy Budd ends unexpectedly. The
naval court has reached a verdict of death,
and Captain Vere must depart to tell Billy
his fate. Voices fall silent, the stage emp-
ties, and for two whole minutes the unseen
drama is distilled into just 34 chords. And
not sprawling elbowfuls of notes either, but
plain old triads — the child’s building blocks
of harmony.
It’s wilfully, maddeningly ambiguous and
utterly inspired. It’s also a touchstone for
any performance — the moment the opera
reveals itself either as a parable, groping
Warner seems so determined to
keep her options open that she risks
abdicating interpretative responsibility
gradually but surely towards redemption,
or a darker tale of the indiscriminate cru-
elty of fate.
Deborah Warner’s Billy Budd cruis-
es into Covent Garden from Madrid and
most recently Rome, its sails billowing full
with praise and awards. You can see why.
Michael Levine’s designs, lovingly lit by Jean
Kalman, are airy and architectural — less
a ship than the idea of a ship. An endlessly
evolving space articulated by swaying ropes
and moving walkways, its unfixedness offers
a telling contrast to the rigid hierarchy and
stratification of life on the ‘floating prison’
of the Indomitable.
Warner, like Britten, is less interested in
the sweaty, salty realities of 18th-century
seafaring than in the social and psychologi-
cal landscape of this ‘tiny floating fragment
of earth’. She crews it with care in a fine
ensemble cast, many of whom have been
with the production since its 2016 première.
But oddly, given this long gestation,
there’s little sense of community. Back-
lit scenes reduce individuals to silhouettes,
a faceless mass where they should be vivid
character sketches. A non-specifically 20th-
century updating confuses matters further,
blunting the story’s explicitly Napoleonic
situation (which comes ready-charged with
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
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BOOKS & ARTS
Individual performers make their mark: Jacques Imbrailo as Billy Budd and Alasdair Elliott as Squeak
revolution and recent mutinies) without
offering much in return.
Which brings us back to those chords.
Like Melville’s original novella, Britten,
Forster and Crozier’s opera is a study in
ambiguity — suggesting much but stating
nothing, dissolving homosexuality, Chris-
tianity and moral philosophy into a shad-
ow play of gesture. But there’s a fine line
between charged possibility and an inert
refusal to commit. Warner’s elegant, light-
touch production seems so determined to
keep its options open that it risks abdicat-
ing interpretative responsibility altogether.
Only in this one moment — the offstage
interview — does she risk a statement,
restoring both figures to the stage for a
dumbshow. It ends in a single touch from
Billy to Vere, a gesture of benediction that
turns the condemned sailor instantly from
man to martyr. Accompanied by stuttering
chords from Ivor Bolton’s rather ragged
orchestra, it’s a declaration that lacks con-
viction, coherence, and one ultimately cast
adrift on Britten’s ‘infinite sea’.
But individual performers make their
mark. Jacques Imbrailo (Billy), Toby Spen-
ce (Vere) and Brindley Sherratt (Clag-
46
gart) are an unimproveable central triangle
— Imbrailo’s impetuous innocent caught
between Spence’s remote, professorial
Vere and Sherratt’s silken, self-loathing
villainy. The word ‘love’ curdles with sick-
ening sweetness in Sherratt’s mouth, while
Spence’s youth and unyielding purity
reframes the power dynamic between cap-
tain and crew. Supporting roles are richly
cast, with Sam Furness’s pitiful Novice and
Kelsey Grammer, for all his
personable presence,
can’t sing
the gruff warmth of Clive Bayley’s grizzled
Dansker standing out.
If Warner’s Budd is a fascinating failure,
the same cannot be said of English National
Opera’s Man of La Mancha. The company’s
annual collaboration with commercial pro-
ducers Grade Linnit has generally exceed-
ed expectations, ranging from a superb
Sweeney Todd to a perfectly serviceable
Carousel. But Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion’s
Don Quixote-inspired musical is a weaker
show, old-fashioned and awkward even at its
Tony Award-winning height, and in Kelsey
© ROH 2019/CATHERINE ASHMORE
Grammer it lacks the star power to propel it
into anything approximating life.
La Mancha is a one-song show (one-
and-a-half if you count the sweet, slight
ballad ‘Dulcinea’). If you can’t deliver
‘The Impossible Dream’ with the urgent
intensity of an X-Factor finalist you’ve got
nothing. Grammer, for all his personable
presence, can’t sing. And unlike Camel-
ot’s King Arthur or My Fair Lady’s Henry
Higgins (vehicles for the not-really-singing
talents of Richard Harris and Rex Harri-
son), the role of Cervantes/Quixote really
does need to supply the musical thrills so
lacking elsewhere in Leigh’s anonymously
Spanish score.
Director Lonny Price updates the origi-
nal Spanish Inquisition setting to a mod-
ern-day squat, peopled with a motley
group of bafflingly mid-Atlantic miscre-
ants. If this is an attempt at edginess and
engaging with fashionable issues of fascism
and free speech, then it fails to land, as
does the wildly misjudged assault of Dan-
ielle de Niese’s energetic but unfocused
Aldonza/Dulcinea.
Where previous ENO musicals have
made a virtue of its ‘concert-staging’ sim-
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
plicity, supplementing the lack of technical
toys with strong ensemble performances,
La Mancha just feels budget. Orchestra,
chorus and dancers are left twiddling their
thumbs for hours on end, leaving you won-
dering at such pointless profligacy. A comic
cameo from Nicholas Lyndhurst’s Gover-
nor/Innkeeper and Peter Polycarpou’s San-
cho Panza are the only redeeming features
of a production whose ‘Impossible Dream’
remains, well, exactly that.
Cinema
The invisible man
Deborah Ross
Tolkien
12A, Nationwide
Tolkien is a biopic covering the early life of
J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) and it is
not especially memorable. I’m even forget-
ting it as I’m trying to remember it. Yes, it’s
one of those. Come back, come back, I need
to remember you at least until the end of
this review. But, no, it’s fading, fading, fad-
ing. Still, I’ll do what I can before it is fully
gone, which may happen any minute now.
This is quite the race against time, in fact.
So, quickly, quickly. The film opens in
1916, during the first world war, with Tolk-
ien, then 24, on the front line at the Bat-
tle of the Somme. As directed by Dome
Karukoski, the horror of the battlefield is
interwoven with imagery from Lord of the
Rings — mythical characters thundering
past on horseback etc., thereby equating
the battle for Middle Earth with the battle
for Europe.
It’s that heavy-handed, in other words.
We then spool back to his childhood, which
was certainly tragic. His father died when
he was three (although I had to look up
I need to remember the film at least
until the end of the review. But,
no, it’s fading, fading…
how and why; for a tick-boxing exercise this
doesn’t even tick the boxes that well) while
his beloved mother died when he was 12.
He came home from school one day and
there she was, slumped in the armchair.
(Again, I had to look that up: diabetes.)
Father Francis (Colm Meaney), a Catholic
priest, becomes his guardian and arranges
for him to lodge with Mrs Faulkner (Pam
Ferris), which I expected to lead to fun and
japes, as with the landlady played by Julie
Walters in Brooklyn, but no such luck. Fer-
ris is dumped after one scene.
He attends King Edward’s School in
Birmingham, where he forms a ‘fellowship’
with three friends who wish to ‘change the
world though the power of art’ which, as
played out here, seemed tossy and shallow
rather than deep or heartfelt. His friends
may well have been the blueprints for Bilbo
and Frodo et al — that is definitely the
heavy-handed suggestion — but none are
small with hairy feet, so that, I have to say,
was also disappointing.
Meanwhile, he falls in love with Edith
(Lily Collins), his fellow boarder at Mrs
Faulkner’s, but she is Protestant and older,
so the relationship is forbidden by Father
Francis, although true love will conquer all
and so on. On one date they are in a tea-
shop when he tells her he likes to invent
his own languages and I’m thinking: hang
on, this is the first we’ve heard of it. Isn’t it?
You don’t get any proper sense of the force
of his imagination, so every now and then
the film has to grind to a halt, in effect, to
spell it out.
Usually, with biopics, if you can’t come
at the subject from a clever angle, a singular
central performance can save it — see Rami
Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody — but Hoult
has nowhere to go with a character that, as
drawn here, is purely earnest and bland.
Also… nope, thought I had one last thing
to say. But all gone now.

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the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 47

BOOKS & ARTS
Theatre
One of the great
whodunnits
Lloyd Evans
All My Sons
Old Vic, until 8 June
Three Sisters
Almeida Theatre, until 1 June
Hell Yes I’m Tough Enough
Park90, until 18 May
It starts on a beautiful summer’s morning in
the suburbs of America. A prosperous mid-
dle-aged dad is chatting with his neighbours
in the garden of his comfortable home, but by
nightfall his family has been destroyed. This
is one of the most momentous convulsions in
all drama. Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting,
which he never again surpassed, is a match
for the best. By the best I mean Oedipus.
Jeremy Herrin’s production emphasis-
es the lush fertility of America in the late
1940s. Trees in full leaf overlook the timber
house that is perhaps a little too small for
its millionaire owner. Joe Keller is a pio-
neering industrialist who served a brief
jail term for supplying faulty components
to the air force during the war. More than
Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting,
which he never surpassed, is
a match for the best
20 pilots died. A retrial found Joe innocent
and the blame was shifted to his partner,
Deever, who was imprisoned and ostra-
cised by his family. Deever’s son, now a
lawyer, suspects malpractice at the second
trial and he arrives at the house to stop his
sister from marrying Joe’s son and accept-
ing money from the tainted Keller firm.
Another mystery surrounds Joe’s other
child, Larry, who was serving as a pilot
until his plane went missing.
Bill Pullman stresses Joe’s easy-going
chumminess but misses his ambition and
shark-like cunning. Overdoing the meek-
ness, he seems more of a chief scout than
a giant of industry. Not a complete per-
formance. Sally Field’s turn as the batty
matriarch on the verge of a breakdown is
more convincing but she has a lot more to
play with. She’s casually bitchy to her son’s
girlfriend, she trembles with horror as she
describes her prophetic dreams, and she
coos and purrs over George, the former
neighbour, who reminds her of her missing
son. Oliver Johnstone (George) is outstand-
ing as the troubled lawyer whose arrival sets
the story on fire. He twitches and sweats
like an addict, and he fondles the rim of his
battered trilby as if it’s about to be repos-
sessed. Chris (Colin Morgan) is a model
48
of charming yuppie goodness, and Jenna
Coleman shines as the pretty girlfriend with
a steely heart.
But the star of this play, as in Oedipus,
is neither the characters nor the rhetoric
they unleash as disaster engulfs them. The
star is the storyline. It’s not just a tragedy,
it’s one of the great whodunnits. Which of
the suspects really approved the faulty com-
ponents? And what happened to the missing
son? The revelations in the final act make it
almost impossible to watch this play without
feeling one’s hands bunching and clenching
with fear and anguish. Perhaps this isn’t the
greatest version ever staged but it succeeds
in stirring mountains of emotion.
How admirably brave and eccentric of
Chekhov to write a play, Three Sisters, in
which nothing happens. A dashing soldier
arrives in a small town. Several depressed
ladies swoon over him. He leaves. The
depressed ladies carry on being depressed.
Rebecca Frecknall lays on a sparse mod-
ern-dress production whose bleak aesthetic
finds a melancholy echo in the script. There
are great performances from Patsy Fer-
ran as Olga, a bored sex bomb, and from
Freddie Meredith as a deranged gambling
addict. Frecknell’s last show at the Almei-
da, Summer and Smoke, reached the West
End. This is better, clearer, easier to enjoy.
If it transfers, the Almeida would do well to
redact the barmy essay written in the pro-
gramme notes by the adapter. ‘They think,’
muses Cordelia Lynn, ‘just because you’re
a writer you know how to write things but
actually you know fuck all.’ There are better
ways to advertise yourself.
Hell Yes I’m Tough Enough is an irre-
sistible title for a political satire. The action
is set during the 2015 election and the writ-
er has fun misnaming the characters: Nick
Clog, Ned Contraband, George Oblong.
Ned and his opponent Dave are portrayed
as a pair of dissembling halfwits who cher-
ish the luxuries of office and regard politics
as a game to be won at the expense of gulli-
ble voters. Both are so inept that they need
to be coached by spin doctors. Two each,
making four in all. That’s too many. Repeti-
tiveness becomes a problem. Dave’s chief
of communications, Glyniss, is an over-
bearing loudmouth while Ned is being han-
dled by another female bossy-boots and
a hippy dreamer who gets a few laughs but
whose character belongs to Woodstock,
not Westminster.
The writer Ben Alderton, who also
stars as Dave, assumes that politics is run
by thick, vain, boorish, charmless, foul-
mouthed parasites. This is only partly true.
A writer who wants to expose bias and
mendacity mustn’t commit those sins him-
self. This is an energetic, crisply played sat-
ire but it’s too detached from reality to
strike home. Alderton’s next play might
give his characters a better chance by mak-
ing them more intelligent and likable.
Exhibitions
Let there be light
Martin Gayford
Henry Moore at Houghton Hall:
Nature and Inspiration
Houghton Hall, until 29 September
Henry Moore was, it seems, one of the most
notable fresh-air fiends in art history. Not
only did he prefer to carve stone outside —
working in his studio felt like being in ‘pris-
on’ — but he felt the sculpture came out
better that way too, in natural light. What’s
more, he believed that the finished works
looked at their best in the open air.
This last idea is tested in a new exhi-
bition, Henry Moore at Houghton Hall:
Nature and Inspiration — and it turns out
that the artist was absolutely right. This
— the latest in an enterprising series of
shows at this north Norfolk mansion — is
a focused selection, not a massive retrospec-
tive. Nonetheless, it prompts several unex-
pected conclusions.
Firstly it suggests, as he himself insisted,
that Moore was an outdoors sculptor (not
all of them are; Moore’s old protégé Antho-
ny Caro felt, also rightly, that his own work
worked best inside, enclosed by the walls of
a white cube). In fact, you are greeted by a
powerful demonstration of that point as you
arrive. There, parked opposite the grand-
ly reticent entrance front, is ‘Three Piece
Sculpture: Vertebrae’, 1968–69, in bronze:
a colossal work some 24-feet long, versions
of which are distributed around the world,
including one outside Dallas City Hall and
another in a plaza in Seattle.
It’s hard to believe, though, that it’s ever
looked more in context than it does here,
undulating in the spring sunshine with Pal-
ladian architecture on one side and vistas
of greenery on the other. A stroll around
Nature and Inspiration — which is spread
around the formal garden and deer park
as well as inside the house — indicates that
with Moore (1898–1986) the bigger and
more abstract a work is the better. And,
more unexpectedly, that he reached his peak
as an old-age pensioner.
This is not conventional wisdom. The
critical focus is usually on Moore’s earli-
er phases: his youth as an Epstein-inspired
carver, the neo-romantic period drawing
on the Tube during the second world war,
and the reclining figures and family groups
deposited on many a housing estate or sky-
scraper frontage in the post-war years. By
that time, Moore was virtually the official
sculptor to the welfare state.
I went to school in Bishop’s Stortford,
near his Hertfordshire studio, and remem-
ber him being pointed out as he pottered
around the local shops: a famous man. By
that time, as the trail of ‘Three Piece Sculp-
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

Moore’s art has never looked more in context than it does here, undulating in the spring sunshine with Palladian architecture on
one side and vistas of greenery on the other: ‘Large Reclining Figure’, 1984
ture: Vertebrae’ clones around the globe
implies — there are other examples in New
York, Washington, Jerusalem and Toronto
— he was internationally established: a Brit-
ish cultural flag-bearer. The Americans had
De Kooning and the abstract expressionists,
we had Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Of course, by then, to younger artists
and dealers Moore seemed very old hat.
The avant-garde was absorbed with pop,
op, land and performance art. Moore’s later
sculptures were dismissed as so many huge
bronze bubbles, blown up by teams of assis-
tants in a light industrial manner. But per-
haps that judgment was wrong.
Nothing else at Houghton quite match-
es that first sight of ‘Three Piece Sculpture:
Vertebrae’, which might be Moore’s master-
piece. But the 20-foot high ‘Arch’ (1963–9)
is majestic too, even though it is represented
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
by a white fibreglass version, as the bronze
is too heavy to move. It’s only when he gets
more descriptively figurative, in ‘Mother
and Child: Block Seat’ (1983–4), that things
go awry. This simultaneously looks too much
It is a surprise to discover
that Moore reached his peak
as an old-age pensioner
like a real person, and too little. Its head is
a knobbly bulge, but one arm and hand are
—weirdly — quite naturalistic.
It seemed that Moore needed to start
with natural forms, but then move away
from them. You don’t really need to know
that ‘Arch’ or ‘Three Piece Sculpture’
were inspired by bones in order to enjoy
them. What’s important is that, as he said,
the sculpture has ‘a force, a strength, a life,
THE HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION: ACQUIRED 1987
a vitality from inside’. And these really do.
It helps that the final results are so much
bigger than the source. When small Moores
are put side by side with the objects that
inspired them — a flint stone with a con-
voluted shape and an elephant skull —
a curious thing happens. The pieces of art are
upstaged by the model. The elephant skull,
especially, is an amazing item that would
also fascinate Damien Hirst. And in gener-
al the displays inside are not so strong. The
array of medium-sized pieces in the Geor-
gian Marble Hall is overshadowed by its
magnificent surroundings, crammed with
busts and classical antiquities.
I was reminded of the title of a painting
by Howard Hodgkin from the mid 1970s: ‘A
Small Henry Moore at the Bottom of the
Garden’. These would look better there. In
fact, I’d rather like one at the bottom of mine.
49

The Isles of Scilly
‘Y
ou can get away from everything,’
said Harold Wilson of the Isles of
Scilly, ‘not only in distance but also
in time’. During recess, Wilson would fre-
quently catch the sleeper from Paddington
to Penzance before making the notoriously
choppy crossing to Britain’s most westerly
archipelago. There he would unwind in his
cottage on St Mary’s — a place where the
red box could not easily follow.
This family of five islands 28 miles off
the nose of Land’s End has always enjoyed
a somewhat secretive coterie of admirers —
Jude Law and Michael Morpurgo to name
but two. Deserted beaches with a Caribbean
colour palette are surely part of the draw,
as are hedgerows festooned with wild gar-
lic, pink bells and exotic aeoniums. The near
subtropical climate is a botanist’s paradise:
there is nowhere warmer or more fertile on
the British Isles.
It’s no wonder, then, that the island-
ers are fiercely protective of St Mary’s and
the so-called ‘off-islands’ that surround
it. An islander is considered a Scillonian
only if their grandparents were born and
raised here.
Scillonians forged their strong seafaring
heritage in the perilous Atlantic waters
beyond the archipelago’s northern rocks.
As soon as they caught sight of a ship on
50
NOTES ON …
By Joanna Rossiter
GETTY IMAGES
Harold Wilson in the Scilly Isles in 1965
the horizon, the islanders would race out to
it in boats called gigs in order to earn the
chance to pilot it to safety. The stakes were
high. A hefty fee would be paid to the crew
who reached the ship first — often enough
to feed their families for a year.
Many a ship has been caught off-guard
by these unpredictable seas. More than 1,300
men were lost in 1707 in one of the worst
disasters in British maritime history when
a Royal Navy fleet misjudged its route into
the English Channel from Gibraltar and met
its end on the edge of St Agnes.
Hidden inside a little church by a seclud-
Theatre
TOM BURKE HAYLEY ATWELL GILES TERERA
BY HENRIK IBSEN
IN A NEW ADAPTATION BY
DIRECTED BY IAN RICKSON
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ed beach on St Agnes is a stained glass win-
dow crafted by Scilly artist Oriel Hicks. It
depicts two Scillonian gigs coming to the
aid of a sinking ship. Amid the swirling seas
are the words of Isaiah 43: ‘When you pass
through the waters, I will be with you.’
Six lighthouses keep watch over the
seas around the islands. Most were built in
the 1800s by a family of distinguished
engineers called the Douglasses. It was
grim but rewarding work: during spells of
bad weather they were said to have lived
off puffins and limpets. That the lighthouses
still stand tall today makes them a marvel of
Victorian architecture.
At low tide a handful of times a month,
the sand flats are exposed between Tresco
and Bryher and visitors and islanders alike
walk on foot from one island to the other.
Whatever the tide, one still feels remark-
ably cut off: no newspapers arrive on any of
the off-islands until well into the afternoon.
For Harold Wilson, this was clearly a selling
point. Those who wish to own a slice of Brit-
ish political history (or who simply wish to
escape its current, painful episode) can pur-
chase Wilson’s grey, blockish bungalow for
themselves: it is on the market for a little less
than the average London property price.
Don’t expect frills, however. As one islander
quipped, ‘the view is the best thing about it’.
DUNCAN MACMILLAN
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I don’t know what was more wretched:
that her bum won an award or that
I wrote about it
— Tanya Gold, p62
High life
Taki
Charlottesville is an enchanting Virginia
college town graced by the neoclassical
architecture of the university’s founder,
Thomas Jefferson. I flew there with two
friends, the talented photographer Jonathan
Becker and the Vietnam Special Forces Sil-
ver Star winner Chuck Pfeifer, all of us close
buddies of the deceased. It was the memo-
rial service for Willy von Raab, scourge of
drug dealers and illegal immigrants while
commissioner of customs for eight years
under Reagan. The humorist P.J. O’Rourke
and I were the two speakers, and after
a rousing ‘America the Beautiful’ we retired
for an afternoon of southern hospitality and
University of Virginia co-ed watching.
This is not woke, I know, but neither
are heterosexuality, beauty or grace — or
Christianity, for that matter. Charlottesville
brought back memories of careless sunlit
days lounging around the frat house drink-
ing mint juleps and writing love letters to
Sweet Briar girls: Mary Blair Scott, Ellen
Hurst, Natalie Farrar, three beguiling sul-
try southern belles, now in their late seven-
ties or even early eighties. Believe you me,
as they say in the Bronx, jejune Oxford eve-
nings à la Sebastian Flyte had nothing on us
— zero, zilch.
The rituals of spring are ever present in
Virginia: the cherry blossoms and the mag-
nolias, the pretty girls in their shorts on Fra-
ternity Row, the famous serpentine walls
and the imposing Rotunda of Mr Jeffer-
son keeping one’s mind off the horrors and
ugliness of big American cities. If only we
could go back in time. That’s an old lament
of mostly old people. But sitting in the cafés
you sat in 60 years ago does concentrate the
mind on how lovely youth once was.
How confident we were that life would
be a fantastic adventure shared with a myr-
iad of beauties. The honour system that was
observed strictly by everyone on and off
campus made it easy to be a young adult.
There were no scams or hoaxes, no phoney
accusations of rape or vile language, none of
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
what makes students today so exasperating-
ly limp, woke and looking to take offence.
No one talked about identity or empower-
ment; only freaks swore. Wearing a coat and
tie was not mandatory but everyone did so.
The only one in my class who did not was
George Finn, excused by his peers because
he had fought in Korea.
What I remember distinctly was that our
ways were not the only right ones. We did
not insist that all others were wrong. We
did not seek to impose a single standard,
and we did not become extremely upset
when others seemed not even to recognise
those truths that we held to be self-evident.
I suppose that was because of the honour
code we so believed in and adhered to. One
did not lie about one’s perceived enemies or
make up stories.
The University of Virginia, some of you
may recall, was the location of a piece, writ-
ten by a female journalist by the name of
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, that alleged a gang
rape by UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity
(one, incidentally, that I was invited to join,
though I declined). The story turned out to
be untrue. Rolling Stone ran the false item
on its cover and repented later — after it
had collected from the higher sales the arti-
cle had generated.
Which is par for the course. Intolerance
is now the norm, and there are none more
intolerant than those on the left. In order
to provoke, I stopped our driver in front of
a large house proudly flying the Confeder-
ate flag and admired it. Everyone was very
polite. That’s Virginia for you. One of the
many wrongs brought about by PC is the
adoption of ghetto language and manners
by people who have never been near a ghet-
to or a project. We can thank Hollywood and
television for violence and the F-word now
being the norm.
A pretty female student served us drinks
in an outdoor café facing the campus and
I asked her if we needed to show her our
draft cards. She looked confused. We used
to have to register for the draft at 18,
I explained to her, so we had phoney ones in
order to be able to drink legally. She thought
that very quaint and she found us quaint too,
if a bit unconventional and strange.
After that it was mostly downhill. A lit-
tle jolt of pleasure came from seeing a large
oak tree planted by Thomas Jefferson still
standing and in perfect form, but even that
reminded me of a very drunken picnic long
ago under its branches. Mind you, the nicest
part of the trip were the people we celebrat-
ed Willy’s life with, all of them Americans,
mostly southerners, with wonderful manners
and dressed for the occasion. The broth-
er of the head of my fraternity told a story
about how I had approached his brother and
announced that I had broken the honour
code and needed to leave the university at
once. I then apparently declared that I had
lied about true love to various girls at Sweet
Briar. The head would not hear of it. He cor-
rectly guessed that I needed to go to Palm
Beach. ‘Did you mean it when you said it to
them?’ he asked. ‘Yes, definitely. I meant it
every time,’ I answered. ‘Well, then it’s OK.
You’re excused, and you’re staying put.’
Too much honesty can cramp one’s style,
n’est ce-pas?
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
Santino was unusually short in the leg and, in
his mid-twenties, was already rapidly losing
his hair. He had recently come from Argen-
tina to France to train as a tourist guide. He
was earnest about his vocation and hoped
one day, he told us, to become a guide spe-
cialising in Unesco World Heritage sites. To
this end he was studying every night into the
small hours, cramming into his head as much
French history — and whatever else guides
have to learn to pass the rigorous guiding
exams — as he possibly could.
When Santino smiled, his eyes closed
automatically and the effect was endear-
ing until one saw the abjectness. During the
week the impression deepened that at some
point in his life he had suffered a great trag-
edy — apart from the overnight hair loss
— and his training to be a guide was a fresh
start in life.
So far his impression of French history
was that it had happened in sections, each
one introduced by a fanfare of trumpets. He
was big on Henry IV — the good king who
came to a sticky end — and on the essential
facts of the Wars of Religion, such as that
they were fought between Catholics and
Protestants. He had dutifully tried to memo-
55
LIFE
rise the successive French kings. Also signif-
icant dates in French history, though some
of these were more immediately accessible
than others, and we had to stand idly or talk
among ourselves while he angrily thrashed
his brains for the right one. Because his Eng-
lish was not quite as good as he hoped or
imagined it was, the same applied while he
continued to search for the right word after
all of our increasingly wild suggestions had
been rejected.
The Palace of Fontainebleau came at
the end of a week during which he had also
guided us around a grim-looking medie-
val castle and an elegant chateau built on
the massive ramparts of an earlier fortress.
In his zeal to impart as much of his scanty,
hastily assembled historical knowledge as
possible, Santino was jealous of our atten-
tion and one came away from each of these
places with the impression of having looked
at his tragically earnest face and its frustrat-
ed contortions for two to three hours and
seen little else. His recitation of what he
could recall of the bland facts was unleav-
ened by the slightest trace of humour.
Which was such a shame. If he had told us
on day one that traditionally French peas-
ants don’t mind being pissed on, as long as
it’s from a great height, it would have been
The effect was like stumbling
on an orgy at its peak – not
that Santino noticed
all we needed to know and he could have
had the rest of the week off.
The Royal Palace of Fontainebleau was
a grand and fitting finale to the week. Except
that once again Santino’s wanting to stuff us
with facts obliged us look at his face instead
of at the ornate splendour forming the back-
ground to it. The first signs of his party’s
rebellion came here, in Henry II’s mistress’s
boudoir. The walls and ceiling were adorned
with eroticised female nudes and lascivious
satyrs, life-sized. The effect was like stum-
bling on an orgy at its peak. In Santino’s
innocence, however, the significance of the
decoration was lost on him. In fact, I don’t
think he even noticed it. Neither did he real-
ise he was in a king’s mistress’s bedroom.
(We knew because we had all surreptitiously
glanced at the information plaque, which was
in English.) Nor even that it was a bedroom.
He was waffling on about God knows
what, and was racking his brains for either
a date or a word in English, when he noticed
with benign annoyance that our atten-
tion had wandered away from his face and
was transfixed by the sculptured eroticism,
which was stunning. To recapture our atten-
tion he indicated a devilish face behind
him that appeared to be leering at us over
his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what is this,’ he
admitted candidly. ‘It’s a satyr,’ said the
best-looking woman of our party. He was
astonished. ‘Is Satan?’ he said. ‘No,’ she said.
56
‘A satyr.’ Now he was panic-stricken at not
knowing something that we all did. ‘What is
this satyr?’ he said. The best-looking woman
approached him, laid a caressing hand on his
young shoulder and in a pantomime whis-
per said: ‘Santino. It’s all about sex.’ He went
beetroot. ‘But I did not know this,’ he said
angrily, suggesting that it was a downright
scandal that he hadn’t been told.
In Marie Antoinette’s boudoir I decided
to take the plunge and tell him he talked too
much and that we were, in any case, over-
loaded with historical information. ‘Santino,’
I said. ‘I can hardly remember the name of
our hotel, let alone anything you are saying.’
He was devastated and I thought he was
going to cry. ‘But I do my best!’ he wailed.
Real life
Melissa Kite
A leaflet came through my door from
the NHS inviting me to take part (if that is
the right term) in Cognitive Behavioural
Therapy.
What a kind offer, I thought. They must
know I’m stressed. Fine, so I didn’t think
that. I thought: what a blasted cheek!
This leaflet is a mailshot, clearly, and
has been distributed to every home in my
area at a cost of goodness knows how much.
I looked at the glossy thing in all its impu-
dence and presumption and decided to
chase after the postman.
He was three doors down when I caught
up with him and he wore a cheery smile as
usual. ‘Can I ask you something?’ I called
and as I approached him he could see I was
waving the leaflet.
He grimaced. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s
a cheek, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I’m glad you say that because that’s
exactly what I was thinking. Please tell me
everyone has got one of these? Because if
not, the state is even more overbearing than
I thought. I’m worried the thought police
have been reading my columns and have
decided I must be sent for re-education or
some form of mind control.’
He shook his head. ‘No, everyone’s get-
ting one, don’t worry. It’s not just you. And
the worst of it is, they post them all first
class recorded. So we have to tick off on a
list when each one is put through each door.
It takes us ages. It’s costing them so much
money you would not believe.’
‘It’s costing us so much money,’ I correct-
ed him. He laughed: ‘You got that right!’
I read and reread the leaflet and it
directed me to a website, whereupon the
biggest cheek of it all was revealed: they
weren’t offering me free CBT at a local
NHS hospital or GP surgery, which in spite
of everything I would have had a bit of, just
to get my money’s worth and make a nui-
sance of myself.
No. They were directing us to a website
where, get this, we could have an online con-
sultation. What an absolute dead loss. I know
nothing much about CBT other than it is not
to be confused with CGT, which I keep typ-
ing by mistake and which is, of course, capi-
tal gains tax. But I know you ought to sit in
a room with the therapist.
I also know that Cognitive Behavioural
Tax, sorry Therapy, is the big, new cure-all
that everyone is blathering on about.
Every friend who has had a go at it has
told me how wonderful it is. ‘Oh, it’s marvel-
lous,’ said a horsey mate. ‘It really sorts out
your crowded head.’
I like my crowded head. It’s one of the
few things I do admire about myself. My
ability to cram anxiety upon anxiety into my
cranial space is a source of great pride to me.
However, every now and then it does all
get a bit much. And then there is this busi-
ness of how I’ve apparently now paid, with
My ability to cram anxiety upon
anxiety into my cranial space is
a source of great pride to me
my tax, for this leaflet to be delivered to me
and for the online CBT counsellors who are
waiting for me to log on and have my head
uncrowded, or whatever it is they are going
to do.
So I went on to the web page and read
about how it is done:
‘The therapist and client work together
to understand problems in terms of the way
people think, feel and behave. For exam-
ple, David received a letter asking him to
meet with his boss. He immediately thought
“They reckon I’m rubbish and are going to
sack me.” This led him to feel really anxious,
his heart started to beat faster and he felt
dizzy. He thought he would faint if it got any
worse and would humiliate himself. He felt
unable to go into work and avoided contact
with colleagues. Now, it could be that David
is actually going to get the sack, faint and
humiliate himself. However, it might also be
true that this reflects a tendency to expect
the worst and to be critical of himself. Often
we think, feel and behave in a particular way
for a reason. This can be related to our child-
hood, life experiences and the circumstances
we live in (life events, families, housing, soci-
ety, etc.)’
Yeah, I’d go with the first option. I’d say
David is basically going to get the sack, faint
and humiliate himself because that is what
life does to you. I wouldn’t go into work if
I were David. I’d pull that duvet over my
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
head quite tightly and not come out for days.
After which, you know, I’d tell myself
to get over it. These thing happen. What
doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
I don’t think I’m a good subject for CBT.
Wild life
Aidan Hartley
Laikipia
‘An elephant has fallen over,’ said the man
running up to me. My first thought was that
poachers had killed the animal for its tusks.
‘Has it been shot?’ The man shrugged. ‘He
was eating leaves, then he just fell over.’ As
Claire and I made our way to the place, I was
worried. Around our home, where we see
elephants almost daily, I have come to learn
that our destinies are closely interwoven.
Meet a calm elephant who goes on brows-
ing while gently billowing his ears because
his herds are not being hunted and we know
our valley is at peace. A skittish elephant is
a harbinger of danger, a sign that poachers or
armed raiders are about. The time I found a
carcass with its tusks hacked out — faceless,
bloated, its grey hide streaked with white
vulture droppings — is etched in my memo-
ry as the start of a season of raids and attacks.
Elephants are also like a barometer of
human survival in our area, because they
require huge rangelands of forests and pas-
ture. I know this does not apply to most of
Africa, but around us happy elephants mean
healthy landscapes. As the charcoal burners
destroy the wilderness, as the bush is cleared
to make way for shacks and farms that swift-
ly become dusty wastelands, the rains disap-
pear with the topsoil and the elephants die
out but they do not go quietly. In the shadow
of Mount Kenya’s melting glaciers, I have
seen an elephant-flattened man, bashed
repeatedly into the ground. What was most
striking about the scene was the evident
vengeful anger of the attack — as if that ani-
mal had done it as a warning to the rest of us.
We found the elephant lying on his side
in a pool of mud and surprisingly, he was still
alive. Right away I recognised him as one of
the old bulls who have roamed our valley
for decades, usually moving around with his
club of old gentlemen bulls. He was prone
but still immensely powerful, churning his
legs and flapping his ears and trunk. It was
clear he could not get to his feet at all. I got
very close, trying to find signs of a bullet
wound, a snare wire or a spear. I began to
think he must have broken a leg. His tusks
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
were only about 30 or 40lb but he seemed
very elderly and starved. It had not rained
Bridge
properly on the farm for nine months and Susanna Gross
there was no food. In the spot where he fell,
he had been peeling off the yellow bark of
the fever trees, a bitter chewy food that must ‘You know what people say about you?’ Zia
have had little goodness in it. On the morn- Mahmood told me the other day. ‘You play
ing he fell, it had rained for the first time and really well but then go berserk. Good-good-
the whole area was slippery mud. good-berserk.’ He’s absolutely right, and
I have never been so close to a wild ele- I love him for telling me straight, in typical
phant. I found myself studying the rippling Zia fashion.
hide, the hairs on his enormous tusked head I’ve been struggling for a long time to
and trunk. He reminded me of a giant octo- overcome my sporadic lapses of concentra-
pus with his great limbs roiling in the mud. tion at the table. Of course, it happens to
He gazed at me through a big golden eye, many of us: we get tired, we lose focus, we do
sighed from the bellows of his lungs and silly stuff. But I’m determined to minimise
then he did something extraordinary. He these blips, and, like several of my friends
used his trunk to suck up a muddy pud- who play competitively, have decided to
dle of water and he squirted it at me with take myself off to a sports psychologist.
hosepipe strength. To me he seemed to be This will come as good news to some of
saying: ‘Don’t just stand there, do some- my partners, who know all too well what I’m
thing — or go away.’ In the noonday heat he talking about. Playing with Alex Hydes in
now sucked up more water and this time he the London Easter Pairs, I bid an excellent
splooshed it over his head to cool off. slam but then — inexplicably — fantasised
I told Claire I thought there was no hope that I held ace-doubleton in my hand when
for the old boy. I called the Kenya Wild- in fact it was a singleton, and managed to cut
life Service and they said they would send myself off from dummy. Luckily, a few hands
a vet with his team. I rather scoffed at the later, ‘berserk’ turned to ‘good’:
idea that the elephant could be saved, but
the rangers arrived a few hours later. After
Dealer North EW vulnerable
In the shadow of Mount Kenya’s
melting glaciers, I have seen an
zA7
elephant-flattened man y AQ 9 6 5
studying the old bull closely, the vet conclud- XK 6 3 2
ed the elephant had no injuries at all, which w A 10
was incredible. I had expected they would
find a mortal wound and put the old fellow z 98 3
z 10 6 5 4 2
out of his misery. I was so depressed by this N
I did not want to stick around and watch y 10 7 2 yK4 3
W E
them put him down. X9 7 S X AQ J 8 5
Instead, with brisk efficiency the rang- wQ 4 3 wJ 2
ers reversed their Land Rover near to the
elephant’s bottom, tied a sturdy rope to the
z KQ J
tusk closest to the ground, hitched this to
the vehicle and then drove slowly away. The y J 8
rope pulled the bull’s head upwards until he X 10 4
was forced to stand up — at which point eve- wK 9 8 7 6 5
rybody ran in all directions and the elephant
took off into the wilderness at great speed.
The mud had just been too deep for the old West North East South
boy and he had not been able to get to his 1y Pass 1NT
feet. Everybody was delighted. Pass 2X Pass 2y
Pass 2NT Pass 3NT
Pass Pass Pass 
West led the z4. I won in dummy, and
played Aw and w10, overtaking East’s wJ
(I might have ducked), then a third club.
West won and switched to the X9, won by
East’s XJ. East returned a spade. I won and
cashed my winners, coming down to yAQ9
in dummy. East came down to yK4 XA, so
I threw him in with the X10 to play a heart
for an overtrick. Not that it made up for the
‘My constituents are right behind me.’ botched slam…
57
LIFE
Chess
Déjà vu
Raymond Keene
In my column of 20 April I reported on the
overwhelming victory by world champion
Magnus Carlsen in the elite Gashimov
Memorial tournament at Shamkir, Azerbaijan.
Almost immediately he went on to repeat his
annihilation of the world’s best by taking first
prize at the Grenke tournament in Baden
Baden and Karlsruhe, in Germany.
After struggling in his World Championship
contest against Fabiano Caruana in London,
Carlsen appears rejuvenated, and is treating the
world’s elite rather as Alexander Alekhine dealt
with the illuminati of his day at the great
tournaments of San Remo 1930 and Bled 1931.
My theory is that Carlsen, a quick learner, has
absorbed lessons from the astounding games of
AlphaZero, the brainchild of Demis Hassabis
CBE and his DeepMind group.
Game Changer by Matthew Sadler and
Natasha Regan (New in Chess) explains the
development and playing style of AlphaZero.
Carlsen-Aronian: Grenke Chess Classic 2019
WDW4WDkD
DW4WDW0p
-WF3G9JKěGÌRGSKINS
W0W1W0bD
0WhP0WDW
PDPDWDWD
!W$WGPDW
WDWHWDP)
$WDWDWIW
White has a small edge here as he can slowly
create pressure along the b-file. Black’s best plan
is to sit tight but instead Aronian lashes out in a
misguided attempt to create counterplay. 26 ...
f5 27 Re1 e4 28 fxe4 fxe4 Now Black loses
a pawn for nothing but 28 ... Nxe4 runs into 29
Qxd6 Rxd6 30 Nxe4 dxe4 31 Bf4. 29 Bxc5
Rxc5 30 Nxe4 Qe5 31 Rce3 Rcc8 32 h3
Qc7 33 Nd2 Re8 34 Re7 Rxe7 35 Rxe7
Qd8 36 Qe3 Rc7 37 Re6 Rc5 38 Qb3
Black resigns
PUZZLE NO. 552
Black to play. This position is a variation from
Keymer-Carlsen, Grenke 2019. Black is a piece
down. What is the only move to stay in the game?
Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 7 May
or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is
a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a
hat. Please include a postal address and allow six
weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Be5
Last week’s winner Alan Norman,
Impington, Cambridge
58
Competition
Cheesy feat
Lucy Vickery
Meier-Carlsen: Grenke Chess Classic 2019 In Competition No. 3096 you were invited
to submit a short story that ends ‘I feel like a
WDWDWgkD half-eaten gorgonzola.’
DWDWDpDp
Thanks to reader Mark O’Connor, who
suggested that this observation which, in
WDWDnDpD case you were wondering, comes from a let-
DWDWDWDW ter written by Lytton Strachey to his elder
brother James on 27 July 1908, might be
W)WDWDWD
incorporated into a challenge.
DQDWHW)W It turned out to be a tricky one: despite
valiant — and often ingenious — attempts
WDW0W)W) to incorporate the given phrase without the
1WDWDNIW
edges showing, there was an inevitable ele-
ment of stiltedness and contrivance. Medusa
and Emile Zola enjoyed starring roles in
many entries — some more successful than
The advanced passed pawn creates insuperable
problems. 40 ... Qe1 41 Kg2 Bxb4 42 Qb2 others.
h5 43 h4 Ba5 44 Qb8+ Nf8 45 Qa8 Bc3 Honourable mentions go to unlucky los-
46 Qc6 Qc1 47 Qd5 Ne6 48 Qc4 Ba5 49 ers Jonathan Hughes-Morgan, Harriet Elvin,
Qd5 Bb4 50 Qb5 Qc3 51 Qd5 Qc1 52 Hugh King, Phil Stapleton and Josephine
Qb5 Bc3 53 Qa4 Bd4 54 Nd1 Kg7 55 Kf3 Boyle. The prizewinners, printed below, are
This king march is suicidal. White should wait rewarded with £30 each.
with 55 Qb3. 55 ... Bf6 56 Ke2 Nd4+ 57 I was sad to hear that John Whitworth,
-F3D
a regular presence in these pages over the
decades, has died. His funny, clever and well-
Svidler-Carlsen: Grenke Chess Classic 2019
made poems will be much missed.
WDW4W1Wi I learnt how to fly before I could drive. For
DpDWDW0p complicated family reasons I’d spend school
W0WDW4WD summer holidays with Aunt Bea. She’d ferried
Spitfires during the war and now flew her own
DW0WDWDW light aircraft whenever she could. ‘Leave your
troubles on the ground, boy. By the time you
WDWDQ0WD come back to earth you’ll have them in
)W)PhWDW
proportion.’ She wouldn’t let me take off or land
— ‘your parents put me in loco’. But I was
B)WDW$P) allowed to handle the controls in the air. ‘Shift her
around a bit, lad — you’re not pushing a pram
DWDW$WIW down the street.’ And she taught me her cockpit
drill. (‘Not kosher WRAF, but it suits me.’)
Check instruments, then fuel, landing-gear,
ailerons and hatch-exit. (‘Nothing worse than
Carlsen exploits his ‘octopus’ knight on e3 by getting stuck inside.’) ‘Finally, report to the smelly
sacrificing a pawn to get his kingside attack cheese in ground control. So, I,F,L, A, H-E, and G.
going. 25 ... Re8 26 Qxb7 g5 27 Rfe2 This Best remembered as, “I Feel Like A Half-Eaten
is a blunder. 27 d4 was the best try. 27 ... g4 Gorgonzola.”’
28 Rf2 Qh6 29 Qc7 Ref8 30 h3 gxh3 31 W.J. Webster
g3 fxg3 32 Rxf6 h2+ 33 Kh1 g2 mate
It was the worst of times. A Europe-wide work-to-
rule meant support duties assigned willy-nilly; the
only qualification seemed a functioning heartbeat.
WDWDW4ri So we agreed to accept substitutes.
We’d discussed approach and appropriate
0pDWDWhp tone, settling for what our advisers labelled ‘light-
touch/jokey’. I glimpsed the translators shuffling
WDW0WDqD in: surely that one was watering the flower beds
DW0PDWDW
earlier? Wasn’t that the security man from
downstairs? But perhaps they multitasked, with
PDPDpGPD skills we hadn’t appreciated.
Handshakes and pleasantries over, I began
DW)WDWDW with my prepared joke: ‘I would like to talk to the
big cheese — or the deputy.’
WDWDBDWD Their officials stared back. One removed his
$WDWIQ$W earpiece, shook it and peered into it in disbelief.
Had I misjudged?
They went into a huddle. Withdrew. Time
passed. Then a suited negotiator appeared,
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 LIFE

clutching the transcript. ‘Please?’ he asked. The

translators had done their best but the result Crossword
would finish my career. ‘I feel like a half-eaten
gorgonzola.’
2406: Heptad
D.A. Prince by Pabulum
Flaubert became more expansive as we opened
another bottle with the cheese. ‘So, Emile,’ he Clockwise round the grid from 6
run the names (9,5,7,6,8,7,8) of
smiled, ‘another novel through the press already,
the leading members of a group.
eh? I don’t know how you do it, my dear fellow.’ The unchecked and corner letters
‘It’s really quite simple, Gustave: I begin my could make SILVER INVEN-
story, proceed to the middle, and when I reach the TORS RUN AROUND and 18 is
end, voilà, I send it to my publisher, and he takes an anagram of the group’s name
care of the rest.’ (two words). An English ver-
‘Yes, yes, the story’s all very well. But what sion of the name (two words) the
about style? I barely finished half a page today. group gave to a seminal work will
appear diagonally in the com-
I will agonise for hours over an ambiguous phrase pleted grid and must be shaded.
here, an extraneous comma there. You know, when Ignore one accent.
Perseus struck off Medusa’s head, those hideous
writhing serpents still lived on, and began to Across
consume the flesh of her face. That is how the 9 Stunner somersaults with
tentacles of my manuscript enmesh and assail me. worried screech (7)
Yes,’ he sighed, reaching for a grape, ‘I feel like 10 Work encapsulating dry
a piece of half-eaten gorgon, Zola.’ painter’s charm (7)
David Shields 11 Dancing display (skipping
tango, of course) (4)
Who was I? I knew I existed but only as something 13 Letter to the Hebrews in Down 31 Soup’s constant lover (6)
nascent, warm and fluid, freed from the confines of honour of religion (6) 1 Child quite upset coming 33 Extremely strong pickle, we
where I was formed. I experienced being 15 Enzyme with round shape? to steppes (6) hear (5)
transported, then poured into something that No chance! (5) 2 No Scots sharing trumpet 35 Sportspersons try climbing
seemed like a permanent home. Still embryonic, 17 Pop’s shrinking (3) of silver (5) (4)
half-formed, half-aware, I settled motionless, 19 Lovely soul secure in 3 Part of plant people note
waiting for further development. Pure as a fantasy world (9) (6) A first prize of £30 for the first
newborn babe to begin with, contamination 20 Snake studied in extended 4 Co-diners demanding dog’s correct solution opened on 20
entered my heart. I had a sense of being state (7) dinner (4) May. There are two runners-up
corrupted, polluted, infected with unwholesome 22 Busy hôtel-Dieu finally 5 Shirt with panache, old prizes of £20. (UK solvers can
toxins and troubled by slowly congealing lumps. excised organ (8, two president brought over (7) choose to receive the latest
As my liquidity dwindled, what fluid I had was words) 7 Musketeer hosts most edition of the Chambers
whisked away and alien rods were inserted into 23 Twerp is backing protest excellent functions (7, dictionary instead of cash —
my innards. A long wait followed until, as a fully (5, hyphened) hyphened) ring the word ‘dictionary’.)
24 Sister reserves afternoon 8 Licentiate with gold Entries to: Crossword 2406,
formed substance afflicted with varicose veins, I
time for old relative (5) carriage (6) The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
was placed on a table where, cut to the quick with
26 Tissue wrapping polled 12 Spanish lady kept secret Street, London SW1H 9HP.
knives, I finally learned who I was. And how do I
poison plant (8) seaweed (7) Please allow six weeks for
feel? I feel like a half-eaten Gorgonzola.
29 Is cutting wind special 14 Russian lass houses a prize delivery.
Alan Millard
around Nutmeg State? (7) thousand dwellers in boats
32 Bad children catching ball (6)
She oozes into my office like baked brie welling Name
in galleries (9) 16 Poet’s love-song is bright,
voluptuously from its rind. Her lips are the glossy
34 Expert swimmer, reverse involving alto and tenor (8)
red of a wax-wrapped edam, and the curves under
of unskilful (3) 18 Very fair lady, oddly Address
her clinging dress move with that appealing 36 Enthusiasm of top brainless, runs away (8)
combination of softness and firmness you musician mummy shunned 21 MCPs live in central
encounter when you palpate a properly ripened (5) Russia (7)
camembert at room temperature. In the grip 37 Bats hate neon gas (6) 22 Batter funny little drum (6)
of male impulses as robust as aged gouda, I feel 38 Place a great many talked 25 Ancient bird and another
the stirrings of a hunger no mere ploughman’s about (4) two start to sing (7)
lunch could satisfy. 39 Restaurant contains tree 27 Unfinished places beside
‘I’m Chloe Chichester of Chichester’s with climbing plant river in Swiss town (7)
Champion Cheeses,’ she informs me in a voice as (trimmed) (7) 28 Chap almost hurt sectarian Email
smooth and warm as a gruyère-emmental blend in 40 Hostellers rallied without (6)
a fondue pot. ‘You worked for my father on that her in town halls (7) 30 Name of female I see (6)
counterfeit feta case. You thought you shut down
the Greek gang, but they struck last night. Father’s
dead, and I’m holding you accountable.’ SOLUTION TO 2403: HEX AD
She produces a small gun from her handbag
and aims it at my heart. I feel like a half-eaten
gorgonzola. The second and fourth letters of six unclued lights gave
Chris O’Carroll abbreviations of the states forming New England:
ACATER (13) Connecticut, ERNIE (24) Rhode Island,
AMBEROID (27) Maine, ANCHOS (1D) New Hampshire,
NO. 3099: ANIMAL MAGIC KVETCHED (22) Vermont and SMEAR (34)
Massachusetts. NAG/LEND (17/36) is an anagram of
You are invited to dream up an imaginary ENGLAND suggesting ‘New England’.
animal that is a hybrid of two existing ones
and write a poem about it. Please email First prize Mike Conway, Grantham, Lincs
(wherever possible) entries of up to 16 lines to Runners-up John Sparrow, Padbury, Bucks;
G.H. Willetts, London SW19
lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 15 May.
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 59
LIFE
No sacred cows
The hypocrisy of the
Charity Commission
Toby Young
O
n Monday, I appeared on
Good Morning Britain to
debate President Trump’s
forthcoming state visit with Asad
Rehman, the executive director of
War on Want. I was surprised to learn
that War on Want, a charity in receipt
of lottery funding, is a partner in the
Stop Trump Coalition, the group
behind the anti-Trump demonstra-
tion last year. It is hoping to organise
an even bigger protest next month.
The reason this came as a shock
is because the Charity Commission
issued an ‘official warning’ to the Insti-
tute of Economic Affairs in February
for a report on how to create a pros-
perous post-Brexit UK that wasn’t
sufficiently ‘balanced’ and ‘neutral’
and therefore fell afoul of the rules
regarding ‘political activity’. The IEA
is the second thinktank to be told off
by the regulator for being too ‘politi-
cal’ in the past 12 months. Last year,
it ordered the Legatum Institute to
take down a report on UK trade pol-
icy that, like the IEA report, argued
for a particular post-Brexit strategy.
The regulator’s targeting of these
thinktanks is a little baffling, given
that it hasn’t reprimanded other char-
ities, such as the Institute for Public
Policy Research, which have pub-
lished reports on the UK’s post-Brexit
trade policy. Where was the ‘official
warning’ for the Resolution Founda-
tion, a charity that published a report
MICHAEL HEATH
60
claiming the vote for Brexit had left
the average UK household £1,500
worse off? Could it be because the
IEA and Legatum are right-of-centre,
whereas the IPPR and the Resolution
Foundation, which is run by a former
Labour party policy director, are left-
of-centre? It would be ironic if a UK
government regulator wasn’t being
‘balanced’ and ‘neutral’ in its choice
of which charities to reprimand for
being insufficiently ‘balanced’ and
‘neutral’. But it certainly looks that
way — particularly when you dig
into the activities of War on Want.
The executive director’s Twitter
feed makes his politics clear. On 20
April, Rehman tweeted: ‘Tony Blair
is like that embarrassing old white
man who you wish would just shut up
and stop spouting racist rubbish.’ In
another tweet he lists his ‘campaign-
ing passions’ as ‘anti-racism’, ‘anti-
fascism’, ‘anti-capitalism’, ‘climate
justice’ and ‘smashing patriarchy’.
The UK’s wealth, he tells us, derives
from ‘slavery, colonialism and neolib-
eralism’. He chastised the Extinction
Rebellion protesters for not being
clearer that the way to combat global
warming is ‘ending neoliberal capital-
ism’. Rehman’s unrelenting hostility
to capitalism strikes me as perverse,
given that War on Want’s objective
is to end global poverty and the free
Is it being enterprise system has lifted more
‘balanced’ than a billion people out of extreme
poverty since 1990. Then again, per-
and ‘neutral’ haps it’s not surprising. In case you
in who it haven’t worked out Rehman’s British
reprimands political leanings, he tweeted a pic-
for not being ture of himself with ‘principled and
dedicated comrade’ Jeremy Corbyn.
‘balanced’ Admittedly, that’s Asad Rehman’s
and ‘neutral’? Twitter feed, not War on Want’s, but
the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
the latter recently urged its 34,000
followers to join the anti-Trump pro-
test on 4 June. The charity, which has
received almost £400,000 from Comic
Relief in the past two years, also pub-
lished a report on trade policy enti-
tled ‘The Trans-Pacific Powergrab:
Why joining the Trans-Pacific Part-
nership would be bad for people and
planet — and the UK’. Not ‘political’
enough for the Charity Commission?
Another of Rehman’s ‘cam-
paigning passions’ is ‘Palestine’, and
War on Want’s stream of anti-Zion-
ist campaign messages prompted a
group called UK Lawyers For Israel
to lodge a complaint with the Charity
Commission in September. It accused
War on Want of ‘misleading and anti-
Semitic propaganda’ and called for
an investigation into its connections
with NGOs linked to terrorist organ-
isations, including the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, which
aims ‘to destroy the state of Israel’,
according to its manifesto. So far, the
regulator hasn’t publicly responded.
I asked the Commission why it
hadn’t given War on Want so much
as a wrist slap, given the treatment it
has meted out to the IEA and Lega-
tum? ‘We will be contacting the char-
ity for further information in order to
assess these concerns,’ said a spokes-
man. ‘Political purposes cannot be
charitable in law; where concerns are
raised with us that suggest a charity is
not complying with our guidance on
campaigning and political activity, we
deal with these robustly in line with
our regulatory and risk framework.’ I
won’t hold my breath.
Toby Young is associate editor of
The Spectator.
 terminal injuries, often accompanied
Spectator sport by that routine of beating the ground
Coronation Street is no with their hand to indicate that yes,
that really did hurt. Should the ball
match for Elland Road always be kicked out at that point? I
Roger Alton don’t think so.
Also generally lost in the piety
was Leeds striker Patrick Bamford’s
fabulously deceitful face clasp and
types. Say the words ‘That bastard
Tinkler’ to any Leeds fan of a certain
age and you will get instant recogni-
tion (and probably a pint).
Tinkler himself, as he told the
Guardian, can live with that. ‘There
are people who still bear a grudge.
I was a farmer in the (area)… there
was one man who’d come to me and

S
ay what you like about Elland
Road — and in my experience
it is not a place to linger —
but Leeds United is the soap opera
that just keeps on giving. The sainted
Marcelo Bielsa, their coach, has won
himself massive plaudits and dou-
ble page spreads in the press for the
near-miraculous feat of making The
Damned United vaguely likeable,
even momentarily.
Bielsa gifted Aston Villa a goal
after Leeds had scored a contro-
versial opener. Villa thought that
play had stopped for an injury;
Leeds didn’t kick the ball out, and
scored. Cue general handbags, after
which Bielsa ordered his players to
let Villa score.
In the general moral carnival that
ensued, it was good to see that cen-
tre back Pontus Jansson wasn’t hav-
ing any of this nicey-nicey stuff and,
channelling the spirit of Norman
Hunter, did try — unsuccessfully —
to stop the goal.
We should be careful about too
much of this as players go down
increasingly regularly with seemingly
agonised drop to the floor when mild-
ly caught by a flailing arm. Ah foot-
ball, don’t you love it!
Readers of a certain vintage will
recall that ‘dirty Leeds’ have form in
this area. Back in April 1971, Leeds
were desperate for points in an ago-
nisingly tight race for the First Divi-
sion title with Bertie Mee’s Arsenal.
Playing West Brom, and already 1-0
down, a loose ball from Hunter can-
nons into the Leeds half.
Albion’s Colin Suggett is 15
yards offside and the linesman
flags. However, referee Ray Tinkler,
as was his wont, is playing advan-
tage and the whistle stays silent; the
flag though is kept up, and Leeds
stop playing. West Brom press
on, Jeff Astle scores an apologetic
Players tap-in and the goal stands. Elland
Road explodes in fury.
go down The TV commentator Barry
increasingly Davies, seemingly promoting a riot,
regularly with shouts: ‘Leeds will go mad, and they
have every justification for going
seemingly mad.’ Leeds lost the game and missed
terminal out on the title by one point. But they
injuries like a grievance, these Yorkshire
say “I’ll have some of that bastard
referee’s potatoes”. I used to charge
him a fiver a ton extra for calling me
a bastard. It never bothered me, I’ve
always said yesterday’s dead, tomor-
row’s yet to come.’ Good thinking
Ray, but I am not sure the worthies of
Elland Road agree.
In the ever-expanding Leeds
United book of grievances, pride
of place should also go to the 1975
European Cup Final against Bayern
Munich in Paris.
The Parc des Princes looked more
like a battlefield with several Bayern
players suffering serious injuries in
the wake of ferocious tackles; Leeds
had several penalty appeals turned
down and a Peter Lorimer goal disal-
lowed for offside.
Naturally enough Leeds fans riot-
ed throughout the game and after-
wards the club was banned from
European competition for two years.
But true to form they feel they were
cheated by the referee and still chant
‘Champions of Europe’. Who needs
Coronation Street when you’ve got
Elland Road?

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. A university friend and I want
to get an invitation to a very good
shoot owned by a colleague of
my father. To this end we thought
we could make better friends by
inviting him to my club for lunch
or dinner. This club is the sort of
stuffy, traditional place he would
approve of. I was only able to
become a member because they
had a special five-year deal for
people who joined it the year they
left school. The problem is that,
as the member, I am the only one
allowed to pay. How can I make
sure that my friend, who is vague
and disorganised, pays me back
his share of the bill?
— Name and address withheld
A. Tell your friend that you’ve
been told the club has a special
offer on the day/night in question.
They will give you a 15 per cent
discount if you settle your bill in
cash. Ask him to make sure he has
an appropriate sum on him and
that he hands it over to you in the
lobby before your guest arrives.
Q. A pair of old friends came to
supper recently and brought with
them a box of dark chocolate
mints as a present. When I
opened the box I found the
chocolates were white with age
and tasted disgusting. The ‘best
before’ label indicated they were
six months out of date. When I
invite people for supper I look
forward to their presence, not
their recycled presents. Should I
rewrap the box and keep it to one
side in the hope that my friends
invite me for a return supper, at
which point I can hand the mints
over, or would that be churlish?
— A.S., Hungerford, Berks
A. Since they are old friends, this is
no time to imagine an insult or to
assume the present was recycled.
Just ring to thank them but add
that since the chocs were fusty, they
should keep a weather eye on the
shopkeeper who provided them.
You may be doing them a favour.
It is good to be alert at an age
when shopkeepers may think your
powers of discernment are waning.
Q. We have enrolled our daughter
at a nursery school where the
parents are in the habit of
spending thousands of dollars
on birthday parties, taking over
hotels and installing go-kart
tracks, for example. We don’t feel
we have to compete. We gave
our own daughter’s party in my
studio (I’m an artist), and the
children pronounced it the best
ever. But the latest invitation we
have received says ‘No presents’.
Instead it asks us to make a
donation. Half the money will
go to the child and half to a
charity of which this three-year-
old approves. Mary, how can we
tackle this absurdity without
falling out with anyone? The way
the donations are set up, everyone
will see what we have given.
— J.V., Manhattan
A. Just pay ten dollars into the
fund and act daft. The parents will
assume you meant to pay more
and it was a slip of the digit. If
they do fall out with you, so much
the better.

the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 61

LIFE

sure she is yet — that is the reason that
Food I hate Kiln.
The dark side of Soho Kiln is fashionable. I fantasise
that whenever I type that word Spec-
Tanya Gold tator readers sigh and turn to Rod.
Don’t go to Kiln. It won a meaning-
less award — best UK restaurant at
the National Restaurant Awards 2018,
actually — for being (and I admit I do
not know what this means) ‘demo-
cratic’. Does this mean Rosa’s Thai
Café — which I endorse for its natu-
ral light — is run by Viktor Orban but
Kiln is run by someone more dedicat-
ed to the principles of social democ-
Prize and learning it in a street in West
Hampstead (as her son carried an arti-
choke from a taxi, and said, with too
much pleasure, ‘A certain professor
must have died’).
Kiln is in Brewer Street, which is
teeming, as ever, with genial and over-
flowing filth. It’s the street where
I once watched an Orthodox Jew
bounce into a sex shop like a space
ball with a painted-on beard. The
guilt came later. It’s near the expen-
sive spectacle shop where they won’t
answer your questions if you are ugly.
We arrive at Kiln. We have no res-

E
ach suburban soul yearns for
the Soho of their youth. It isn’t
that Soho was better in the 1990s
when I invaded the Colony Room,
twitching, and took a fag off Sarah
Lucas. It is that I was.
This was the view of a friend after
I last wrote on Soho restaurants. We
once ran holding hands through the
sprinklers in St James’s Park laughing
at Peter Mandelson, who was passing
with his dog, and that is my memory
of the Blair years.
So Soho, which is thick with met-
aphor anyway — its very name is a
hunting call: death for one and ecstasy
for another — is a district to measure
your age. The new buildings barely
matter in this reasoning, even if I hate
them. The stones — and the possibili-
ties — remain. You can’t erase the
energy of that much bad sex. It is you
that has changed. You are journeying
to husk. An almost-corpse. That is why
you are addicted to banquettes and
sticky toffee pudding and waiters who
pretend to care. You should begin to
investigate grave sites.
Now, if she is right — and I am not
racy? Aren’t all restaurants, like all
newspapers, tyrannies?
I haven’t taken awards seriously
I usually go to since I covered the Rear of the Year
and watched a woman with bright
restaurants to hair posing with her bum sticking out.
avoid kitchens, I don’t know what was more wretched:
but that is that her bum won an award or that I
wrote about it. I don’t remember the
not possible woman. I only remember the bum.
here – it is Awards should be ignored unless it
all kitchen is Doris Lessing winning the Nobel
ervation. We give my name and wan-
der the streets, and receive a text when
there is a place for us at the bar. After
what feels as epic a journey as the
Hobbit’s to Mordor, we are inside. It
looks like an industrial kitchen that
resents light. I usually go to restau-
rants to avoid kitchens but a kitchen
is unavoidable here. It is all kitchen.
We eat a lamb skewer, grilled pork,
beef neck curry, turnip salad and crab
and pork in clay pot. The price is good
— £55 including wine. It is edgy Thai
food and I suppose I would enjoy it if
I wasn’t sitting in noisy semi-darkness
on a bar stool. Who needs semi-dark-
ness in Soho interiors when the dark-
ness is deep both within and without?
I wouldn’t call this restaurant demo-
cratic, which was probably a reference
to its queuing system. I would call it
populist: a restaurant for the Twitter
age — and Twitter was the only thing
that David Cameron was right about.
I can take the despair. It’s the hype I
can’t stand.
Kiln, 58 Brewer Street, London
W1F 9TL; www.kilnsoho.com

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Lapwing
Some birds seem inherently
comical. I can’t help being
amused by the duck taking its
name from its habit of ducking.
In English it has enjoyed
this name for some time — a
thousand years or so. Before that
it was called ened, a word related
to the Latin anas, anatem.
Similarly, the swift is so called
because it is swift. That name
seems to go back fewer than 400
years, and I’m not sure what it
was called before that. Swallow,
perhaps, since it has something in
common with it.
But there are some false
friends among the feathered
tribes. The lapwing was itself
friendless last week, when
Natural England stopped
farmers shooting its predators.
Its alternative name, peewit,
comes from its cry, and it is
also known as the peeweep,
peesweep or tewhit.
Its older name, lapwing, has
nothing to do with a lap or a
wing. In this, John Minsheu was
mistaken when, in his Ductor in
linguas: the Guide into Tongues
(1617), he said it was so called
‘because he lappes or clappes
the wings so often’. Minsheu
— whose own strange name
may derive from the village of
Minshull in Cheshire — found
no fortune in lexicography.
He called his comparison of
words in 11 languages ‘the most
unprofitable and unpleasant
studie’, labouring to provide a
‘candle to light others, and burne
out my selfe’. Anyway a lapwing
is, as it were, a leap-wink.
Before the Conquest, the form
of the name was hléapewince,
and the -winc part meant ‘to
waver’, like the wink of an eye.
The Oxford English Dictionary
attributes this name to the bird’s
manner of flight. Birdwatchers
will tell me whether it might also
refer to the bird’s distraction
behaviour of drawing predators
away from its nest on the
ground by pretending to have
a broken wing.
As for the wheatear, its Cornish
name is still, they tell me, whiteass.
Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies
of England (1662), said that its
name came from it being ‘fattest
when wheat is ripe’, but wheat
doesn’t come into it, since the first
syllable means ‘white’. The French
give a similar name to the green
sandpiper, chevalier culblanc.
I suppose it’s the opposite of
a robin redbreast.
— Dot Wordsworth

62 the spectator | 4 may 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

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