22 july 2017 [ 4.25 www.spectator.co.uk [ est.

1828

Madness in
the Med
Nicholas Farrell exposes the migrant
taxi service from Libya to Italy

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Let May govern
I
t used to be said that loyalty was the
Conservatives secret weapon. While
other parties might descend into inter-
necine warfare, the Tories would always,
when circumstances demanded, show just
enough respect for their leader. The words
loyalty and Conservative, however, lost
their natural affinity during the Major years.
Since then, to borrow a phrase from the left,
the leadership of the party has descended
into a state of permanent revolution. After
the failure of her general election campaign,
Theresa May seems to have become a tor-
tured prisoner of her cabinet.
Talks of leaks are exaggerated. Its quite
true that our political editor, James Forsyth,
was able to disclose a row inside cabinet over
Philip Hammond saying that driving a train
was so easy even a woman could do it. He
did not come by this because ministers were
queuing up to spill the beans to journalists:
had this been the case, the story would not
have taken five days to emerge. And the
point is not Hammonds verbal slip, but the
mood inside the government. His colleagues
set upon him because they have very little
respect for him: a dangerous dynamic in a
government. Nor do they fear Theresa May
who, as they know, will walk the plank when
they tell her the moment is right.
But Britain now needs leadership and
the Conservative party seems unable to
provide it. At a time when Brexit negotia-
tions are under way, there needs to be clear
articulation of our aims and yet we hear
almost nothing. The Tories are open to the
charge that they are putting their own feud-
ing ahead of the national interest.
It is to Theresa Mays credit that she has
not run for the door, as David Cameron did
after the EU referendum result. She squan-
dered her partys majority in a needless
election, where she sought a highly personal
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
mandate that would have justified her rath-
er dictatorial form of governing. In other
words, she overreached, and was corrected
by the voters. But the inescapable fact
remains that she is Prime Minister, and the
Tories cannot ask her to stay in place with-
out allowing her to govern.
Over the coming months the govern-
ment needs to present a strong and con-
sistent line to EU negotiators. Mrs Mays
Lancaster House speech was an admirably
clear vision for Brexit and she ought to
be campaigning on it, as should all mem-
bers of her cabinet. Fussing about a hard
or soft Brexit is a pointless distraction: the
aim is an open Brexit, and all members of
the cabinet should devote themselves to
The Tories are open to the charge that
they are putting their own feuding
ahead of the national interest
articulating it. This is especially true for
Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary
and Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary,
the governments two most gifted commu-
nicators. They are both distressingly silent,
perhaps worried that any comment will be
seen as a leadership bid.
If the Tories are paralysed by fear of
each other, then the Labour party will make
headway. So they ought to come to an agree-
ment: that Mrs May should stay, at least until
the end of the Brexit negotiations in March
2019. And meanwhile, they ought to be
free to start governing again her cabinet
members trusted, as they were under David
Cameron, to pursue their agendas. If Justine
Greening has plans to reform education, let
us hear them; she is now free of the burden
of having to bring back grammar schools.
In the unlikely event that David Gauke has
imaginative plans to build on the welfare
reform agenda that he inherited, he should
be encouraged to proceed.
Following the election result, the govern-
ment is starting the EU negotiations from a
position of weakness, but there is no reason
to assume that this should cloud the even-
tual outcome. Whatever her other faults, Mrs
May has laid out her stall in very logical fash-
ion. She was quite right to state that no deal
is better than a bad deal and so remind
EU negotiators that they are risking losing
unfettered access to UK markets. It was
David Camerons failure to do this which
doomed his efforts to renegotiate Britains
relationship with the EU before the refer-
endum. When he should have been remind-
ing the EU that it was in danger of losing its
second biggest financial contributor, he was
instead already campaigning for a Remain
vote. It is little wonder that Donald Tusk and
his team treated him with contempt.
Theresa May, too, has a clear sense of
what she hopes to achieve for the negotia-
tions: for Britain to leave the single market
and the customs union, while negotiating a
free-trade deal and opting back into selected
areas of pan-European co-operation. It is a
far clearer picture than has been presented
by Labour, which is still torn between
Corbyns anti-EU instincts and the pro-EU
views of its parliamentary party.
Many Conservatives will have come to
the conclusion that in Theresa May they
were mis-sold a leader, that her supposed
appeal to the general public has proven to be
illusory, that she lacks warmth, ideas and the
inspiration to lead. But with the government
engaged in its most important negotiations
of the past half century, she remains the only
practical choice as leader. Aspirant leaders,
kingmakers and assorted malcontents
should leave their plotting for another day.
3
 Living the high life, p45
The Ovals century, p22

Back to the drawing board, p39

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 10 Madness in the Med BOOKS
6 Portrait of the Week Charity taxi boats increase 26 Mick Brown
migrant drownings In Search of the Lost Chord,
7 Diary Kirstie Allsopp, Sweden Nicholas Farrell by Danny Goldberg
and colonic irrigation
Jan Moir 12 Deus ex machina 28 Ian Thomson
Social networks cant replace religion The Fear and the Freedom,
8 Politics The Tories need a what, Melanie McDonagh by Keith Lowe
not just a who Graham Robb
James Forsyth 14 Overused superlative
Keep perfect for better things Limestone Country,
9 The Spectators Notes Laura Freeman by Fiona Sampson
Why the left grandstand 29 James Walton
Charles Moore 18 Poor conduct
Stop the Proms anti-Brexit sermons The Zoo, by Christopher Wilson
14 Ancient and modern Child deaths Douglas Murray 30 Alan Judd
15 Rod Liddle An extreme proposal Kids Company faces the music The Traitors, by Josh Ireland
17 Matthew Parris A letter to The Donmars Committee, reviewed Henry Keswick
The Spectators Leavebugs Miles Goslett First Confession, by Chris Patten

20 Barometer Chocolate oranges, porn, 20 Must Colston fall? 31 Daniel Hahn

and where does Dignitas find clients? Bristols struggle with a slavers legacy You Should Have Left,
Will Heaven by Daniel Kehlmann
23 Letters Team Boris, Ulster Tories
and smoking in pubs 21 Amsterdam Notebook 32 Houman Barekat
Sex, drink and marital disharmony on short stories
24 Any other business The Saudis Julie Burchill Tim Thomas
and Brexit desperation The Films of John le Carr: a poem
Martin Vander Weyer 22 Test of time
My lifelong love of the Oval
John Major

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Bernie, Geoff Thompson, Grizelda, Kipper Williams, Nick Newman, Phil Disley, RGJ Contents photographs:
Spectator readers party, Mary Wakefield; Getty Images; Edward Colston Statue, Bristol by Peter Hughes (CC BY-NC-SA-2.0) www.spectator.co.uk
Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: editor@spectator.co.uk (editorial);
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Subscriptions Dept., 17 Perrymount Rd, Haywards Heath RH16 3DH; Tel: 0330 3330 050; Email: customerhelp@subscriptions.spectator.co.uk; Rates for a basic annual
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4 the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

 Limestone country, p28

Bristols shame, p20

Her swansong, p18

LIFE
ARTS LIFE I drank myself into a stupor by
33 Interview 45 High life Taki noon, when I took to my bed
James Ivory on his life in films Low life Jeremy Clarke
demanding that Daniel have
William Cook 47 Real life Melissa Kite sex with prostitutes and sulking
34 Television James Delingpole 48 The turf Robin Oakley monstrously when he refused
36 Cinema Bridge Janet de Botton Julie Burchill, p21
Dunkirk 49 Wine club Jonathan Ray
Deborah Ross
Chris Pattens memoir is more
37 Opera AND FINALLY . . . concise and less ponderous than
Die Walkre; The Magic Flute 42 Notes on Shropshire his speaking tone; it is also often
Michael Tanner Julian Glover wrong-headed and delusory
Theatre
Queen Anne; Touch 50 Chess Raymond Keene Henry Keswick, p30
Lloyd Evans Competition Lucy Vickery

38 Classical music 51 Crossword Pabulum Ismail Merchant and I didnt need

LSO/Rattle; Prom 4: 52 Status anxiety to talk. I trusted him utterly and
Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim Toby Young he trusted me, and I think we
Richard Bratby Battle for Britain never let each other down
39 Exhibitions Michael Heath James Ivory, p33
The Encounter: Drawings from 53 Sport Roger Alton
Leonardo to Rembrandt Your problems solved
Martin Gayford Mary Killen
40 Radio Kate Chisholm 54 Food Tanya Gold
41 Pop Mind your language
Ezra Furman Dot Wordsworth
Michael Hann

CONTRIBUTORS
Jan Moir writes for the Daily
Mail and is a winner of the
Lynda Lee-Potter award for
outstanding woman journalist
of the year. Her diary is on p.7.
Nicholas Farrell, who
examines the Mediterranean
migrant crisis on p.10, is a
journalist based in Italy,
where he writes mainly for the
conservative Libero newspaper.
Mick Brown a senior
writer for the Telegraph and
author of Tearing Down The
Wall of Sound (Bloomsbury)
examines the wreckage of
the hippy dream (p.26).
Graham Robb is a translator,
historian and author, most
recently, of Cols and Passes
of the British Isles (Particular
Books). On p.28, he admires the
poetry of limestone country.
Sir Henry Keswick is
chairman of Jardine Matheson
Holdings, and a former
proprietor of The Spectator. He
worked with Chris Patten and
reviews his memoir on p.30.

the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

 Home
T heresa May, the Prime Minister, told
MPs before the summer recess: No
backbiting, no carping. The choice is me
or Jeremy Corbyn. Nobody wants that.
Her remarks followed a spate of leaks and
negative briefings from cabinet ministers.
It was said that Philip Hammond, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, had called
public-sector workers overpaid. He
responded by warning cabinet colleagues
against leaking, but maintained a 10 per
cent pay disparity was a simple fact. In a
presumed response to a poster on the wall
of the European Councils Brexit taskforce
meeting room, headed Tintin and the
Brexit Plan and showing Captain Haddock
lighting a fire in a lifeboat, Boris Johnson,
the Foreign Secretary, went jogging in a
T-shirt bearing Haddock expletives in
French such as Mille sabords (Blistering
barnacles! in the English versions).
T he annual rate of inflation
unexpectedly fell to 2.6 per cent
from 2.9, as measured by the Consumer
Prices Index (from 3.7 to 3.5 per cent as
measured by the Retail Prices Index).
The government outlined a sinister
tobacco control plan to prevent people
from smoking. Sir Michael Marmot, the
director of the Institute of Health Equity
at University College London, said that it
was entirely possible that austerity had
played a role in slowing down the increase
in life expectancy since 2010. Flash floods
damaged dozens of houses in Coverack,
Cornwall. The design was unveiled of a
slippery plastic 10 note bearing a likeness
of Jane Austen.
6 the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
F ive acid attacks in London in one
night provoked a frisson of horror
and some generalised tough words from
Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary. The
government set a new minimum funding
limit in secondary schools of 4,800 per
pupil, partly using money, it said, that had
been in the budget for free schools and
a healthy pupils project. The Electoral
Commission said: It is troubling that some
voters appear to have admitted voting
more than once in the general election,
which is an offence. The BBC revealed
whom it paid more than 150,000. Jodie
Whittaker, the 13th actor to play the lead in
Doctor Who, said: Doctor Who represents
everything thats exciting about change.
Roger Federer won his eighth Wimbledon,
and Garbie Muguruza beat Venus
Williams for the ladies title.
Abroad
D avid Davis, the British Brexit
Secretary, visited Brussels for formal
negotiations with Michel Barnier, the
chief EU negotiator, whose position was
that before trade talks began, substantial
progress had to be made on a financial
settlement, the status of EU citizens in
Britain and the problem of the Irish border.
Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel peace
prize in 2010, died aged 61, seven years
into an 11-year sentence for advocating
free speech and democratic elections in
China. Online images of Winnie the Pooh
were blocked in China because they had
been used to make fun of Xi Jinping, the
countrys portly ruler. Patilias Gamato,
the electoral commissioner of Papua New
Guinea, obtained a court order prohibiting
a blogger from calling him Tomato.
Larissa Waters, a Green party senator
famous for breastfeeding her daughter in
Australias parliament, resigned her seat
after it was found she held dual nationality
with Canada, which the law does not allow
for those in federal office. The bodies of a
man and wife lost since they went to feed
the cows in 1942 were found at the edge of
the Tsanfleuron glacier in Switzerland.
I n America, Republicans failed in
their attempt to pass a Bill to replace
President Obamas healthcare system. The
United States set about renegotiating the
North American Free Trade Agreement
with Mexico and Canada, which President
Donald Trump had called a disaster.
During his visit to Paris, Mr Trump said
in public of Brigitte Macron, the French
presidents 64-year-old wife: You know,
youre in such good shape. General Pierre
de Villiers resigned as commander of
the French army over budget cuts. The
Duke and Duchess of Cambridge toured
Germany and Poland. A patrolling security
robot in Washington DC tumbled down
some steps and toppled into a fountain.
L iberia closed down 50 companies
selling bottled water unfit for human
consumption. Jehovahs Witnesses in
Russia were ordered to disband by the
countrys supreme court. A Canadian
judge issued a warrant for the arrest of
Sheikh Muhammad ibn Musa Al Nasr for
promoting hate in a sermon in Montreal in
December when he is said to have declared
that Jews should be slaughtered. The Pope
put up a little sign on the door of his office:
Vietato lamentarsi (No whining). CSH

M onday morning and I am heading
south on Harley Street towards a
rendezvous with ramifications, a date
that is also a terrible coincidence. The
last time I was on this page I had just
been despatched to the Viva Mayr clinic
in Austria to have colonic irrigation.
Bizarrely, here I am again, on another
assignment to have the same treatment,
this time at its new London outpost.
Why oh why do section editors keep
sending me to do this? I rack my brain
for answers, for clues, a hint, a sign, but
nothing springs to mind. Any ideas?
Keep them to yourself.
S peaking of deep cleansing, the
Cumbrian family firm Lakeland
has just previewed its Christmas range
at the Oxo Tower, a day of unbearable
excitement for kitchenalia aficionados.
I love Lakelands endless, thrilling
gadgets to core, hull, pip and stone, plus
its devotion to stain removal and a lint-
free life. So whats new? Apparently
spiralisers are down, microwave egg
poachers are up and souping is the
new juicing. The next big thing is
fermentation, the process of turning
cabbages (UK sales up 39 per cent) into
um, delicious kimchi and sauerkraut.
Even Tom on The Archers is doing it, so it
is officially A Thing. Jan, says a Lakeland
personage, you would be amazed how
easy it is to ferment. Actually, I say, with
a melancholy sigh, I wouldnt. However,
what is not to love about the darling new
jars, complete with little blowholes to aid
the fermentation process. At night, in the
darkness of the pantry, I like to think they
whistle and chirp, like a pod of lightly
vinegared whales.
A t Glyndebourne, the crowd goes
wild for my friend Lise Davidsen,
who is making her debut there in
Ariadne auf Naxos. Lise is the 6ft-plus
30-year-old Norwegian lyric dramatic
soprano currently being hailed as the
next great singer of our time, but you
would never guess from her modest
manner. Backstage after the show, she
pads around barefoot, unfazed by the
timber-rattling ovation that greeted her
performance and the reviews have
been ecstatic, too. The Telegraph hailed
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
Jan Moir
her as magnificent; the Guardian went
with one of the greatest voices I have ever
heard. But my girl doesnt want to know.
Dont tell me! she cries, hands over ears
as she prepares to get the bus back to her
B&B in Lewes. Lise never reads her notices
in case they affect her performance. So she
sings on in Sussex, in happy ignorance that
she has caused a sensation.
WOO L LE Y & WA L LI S SA L I S B U R Y SA L E R O O M S
Potted Politics
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w w w. w o o l l e y a n d w a l l i s . c o . u k
S hould Kirstie Allsopp take note?
The television presenter has been
in the news for declaring on Twitter
that having a washing machine in the
kitchen is disgusting. Cue outrage from
thousands of inverted snobs who bridled
at a barons daughter telling them what
to do with their pants. In the Daily Mail
I wrote that perhaps it said something
about the fruitiness of her partner Bens
socks (God I am hilarious) and the storm
raged on. Displeased at the fuss, Kirstie
took to Twitter to say she was leaving
Twitter, then wrote online about exactly
why she was leaving Twitter, although
she would still be making marketing
announcements on Twitter, which is
why lets be honest she was on
Twitter in the first place. Shall we pause
to consider for a moment that Edward
VIII abdicated the throne with less fuss?
And may I say something else? Those
who invite reaction by their actions can
choose, like Lise Davidsen, to ignore it,
but only the foolish try to control it.
H ome for Lise is a remote town
called Stokke, which means log
in Norwegian, which is all you need
to know. Dad is an electrician, mum
worked in healthcare, no one in the
family is particularly musical. When her
parents come to her concerts, everyone
cries together afterwards. This creature
in our family! How did it happen? Lise
grew up wanting to be a nurse, then a
pop star, then the new Joni Mitchell,
but never an operatic. Her story is
already incredible, and suggests that
ones miraculous, incredible, personally
bevelled destiny is out there waiting; you
just have to keep going, beating against
the tide, until you find each other.
O h dear. Back in Harley Street it is
time to prepare for serious business,
as Theresa May would say. But no
treatments today (hipp hipp hurra, as
they say in Stokke); just an examination
by Dr Sepp. My new diagnosis sheds
light on my current physical state,
suggesting that I am vanilla intolerant
and magnesium depleted, which makes
me sound like a fragrant but broken-
down bomb. And who could argue with
that? Certainly not Kirstie Allsopp.
7

The Tories need a what as much as a who
T
heresa May has made it to the sum-
mer. In the aftermath of the election,
Downing Streets immediate aim was
to get the Prime Minister to the parliamen-
tary recess. On Thursday they succeeded.
They think that the next six weeks will give
the government a much-needed chance to
regroup and catch its breath. Like a cricket
team playing for the close, they hope con-
ditions will be more favourable when pro-
ceedings resume. But is there any reason to
think that things will be different in Septem-
ber? The summer break can do many things
but it cant conjure up another 20 Tory MPs
or put time on the Brexit clock.
Tory optimists claim things will be bet-
ter once everyone has had a lie down. The
theory goes that the resentments caused
by the way ministers were treated during
Theresa Mays first year in office, the woeful
general election campaign and the personal
animosities that have developed in cabinet
in the past few years have collided with the
Westminster summer party season, lead-
ing to an outbreak of leaking. They think
tempers will be less frayed when everyone
returns in September, refreshed and adjust-
ed to the change in the political weather.
The counter-argument is that the con-
ference season starts soon after parliament
returns. Party conference makes the West-
minster summer circuit look like a mind-
fulness festival. Even in the best of times,
it leads to lots of stories that cause prob-
lems for the leadership. This year will be
particularly fraught because it will be the
first gathering of the Tory tribe since the
election went so badly wrong. Without
extreme care, it will turn into a disorganised
beauty parade of leadership contenders.
Ministers fear it will be impossible to say
anything without it being seen as a leader-
ship pitch even if they dont intend it that
way. Meanwhile, backbench MPs already
seething at the behaviour of the partys
top brass will not react kindly to anyone
who looks like they are using conference to
advance their own ambitions.
One possible way to avoid confer-
ence spinning out of control would be for
Theresa May to outline a timetable for her
departure before it starts. No one thinks she
will lead the Tories into the next election,
so saying she will go after the Brexit deal
is done would not undermine her authority
8 the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
POLITICS|JAMES FORSYTH
any more that it has already been undercut
by the election result. But it would shift the
burden of proof on to those who want her
to go sooner. The acknowledgement that
there would be a contest would also make
it easier to handle the leadership question.
Every comment on the fringe or address
from the conference stage wouldnt be seen
as a challenge to May but rather as part of a
debate about the partys future.
While the Tory conference is a nuisance
to the government, Labours offers the party
some hope that things might get better. Its
fragile post-election unity is largely hold-
ing for now, with moderates keeping their
Their agenda must chime with what
Britain wants a proper economic
and political vision for the future
heads down and their concerns to them-
selves. But if the conference makes it clear
that the Corbynites wont stop until they
have deselected their internal opponents,
then things will start to look very differ-
ent. You might have thirty-odd Labour MPs
who think they have nothing to lose and so
become impossible to whip.
Any purge of the moderates would also
reopen the debate about forming a new
party. If there is no space for them in Labour,
they may choose to set up camp elsewhere.
If they do, they certainly wont lack finan-
cial backing. Labour figures in the corporate
world are adamant that the money for a new
party could be raised with extreme ease.
If Labour is prepared simply to sit back
and not say much, then this government
would likely lose the next election. Yet the
address current problems such as low pro-
I wonder if Seumas Milne got off
with the blonde lawyer.
nature of Corbyns supporters means that
they wont ever be passive. Instead, they
will want to cement their control over the
party, to make Labours turn to the left as
close to irreversible as possible. This might
break apart the internal coalition and such
a split would, obviously, ease the pressure
on the government. It would also remind
Tories that this is not a rerun of 1992-97 and
that defeat is not inevitable. This would help
calm some of them down.
The other great Tory hope is the sheer
volatility of politics in 2017; the wheel could
turn again. Both Nicola Sturgeon and There-
sa May were preposterously popular before
crashing to earth. Why they struck such a
chord with the public in the first place is
worth reflecting on. In both cases, what the
public seemed to like was that they didnt
seem to be typical products of contempo-
rary politics. (Ironically, they both are; they
have no great outside experience, very polit-
ical spouses and few other interests.) Their
initial popularity suggests an eagerness
to embrace something different from the
current ruling class, even the public dont
quite know what that is yet.
This is what the Tory party should be
reflecting on this summer. It needs a what
as much as a who; an agenda that chimes
with what the country wants. For all that
Brexit dominates the current scene, it will
not be such an all-consuming issue at the
next election. The negotiations will be over
and done and, barring yet another politi-
cal surprise, the transition period will, at
the very least, be drawing to a close. In
these circumstances, what will be needed is
a proper economic and political vision for
the future. This vision will not only have to
offer an account of how Britain will earn its
way in the world outside of the EU, but also
ductivity and the broken property market.
At the last election, the Tories turned
Brexit into a process story, with disastrous
results. Canvassers say many voters couldnt
understand why they were banging on about
an issue that they thought had been settled
by the referendum. This will be even more
true next time around. If the Tories are to
come through this period, it will be because
they have crafted an agenda that speaks to
the countrys long-term needs. This is what
they should spend their summer working on.

W e went to the first night of the
Proms last week. Thinking it was
all over, we left the auditorium just
before Igor Levit came back on for
a delayed encore in which he played
Beethovens Ode to Joy (transcribed by
Liszt) as an anti-Brexit gesture. We loved
Levits earlier rendering of a Beethoven
piano concerto, but were spared his
political views, so it was a perfect evening.
Two nights later, Daniel Barenboim took
advantage of the Proms conductors
podium to make an unscheduled
speech in which he deplored isolation
tendencies. All good Brexiteers deplore
isolation tendencies, which is one of the
reasons we dont like a European Union
with a tariff wall, but of course Brexit
was the great conductors target. Leaving
aside the right and wrongs of the Brexit
debate, why do so many people just now
feel entitled to use their non-political
position to try to effect political change?
T he disease is everywhere. On
Tuesday, Sir Michael Marmot, a
health don, reported that the rate at
which life expectancy was improving in
this country had just about halved since
2010 a story which quickly slipped into
the media suggestion that life expectancy
is actually falling. Sir Michaels non-
medical explanation was austerity
(guess who came into power in 2010) and
miserly increases in health spending.
Possible non-political explanations
like the poor health effects of more old
people living alone, or some of the special
health problems associated with higher
immigration, did not feature.
O n the same day, the Advertising
Standards Authority decided
that it will ban advertisements which
reinforce harmful gender stereotypes,
such as women using soft soap or little
girls dreaming of being ballerinas.
Again, the question is not whether
gender stereotypes are harmful a
good subject for debate but, by what
right does a regulatory body annex this
political space? The ASA used to apply
a simple (though not always easy) test:
was an advertisement legal, decent
and truthful? Now it seeks to turn the
industry into a tool for promoting its
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
Charles Moore
version of a just society. Does it have this
power? If so, who let it grab it?
I n theory, it is open to conservative-
minded people to hijack some public
position to unburden themselves of their
views. A right-wing health panjandrum (if
there were such a person) could pronounce
that we are all getting too fat because we
dont sit round a table for meals and say
grace before them. The weather presenter
could break off from talking about spits
and spots of rain to say how much sunnier
it will be after Brexit. A patriotic Supreme
Court judge could diverge from the case
before him to enthuse about the prospect
of the English law becoming, once again,
supreme. In practice, though, it doesnt
happen, partly because the public space is
being deliberately made a cold house for
anyone who does not share a certain set of
views, but also because the conservative
approach to life holds that there is a time
and a place for everything. The left thinks it
is always the time and always the place for
the same thing.
T he Electoral Commission is finally
sidling up to the consequences of its
failure to police voting registration. It finds
the thought that lots of young people may
have voted twice troubling. Why is it that
students are allowed to register in their
place of study as well as their home? After
all, they rarely stay long enough to live
with the consequences of their decision.
T he BBC reporter told us about Theresa
May addressing her MPs on Monday
night: The choice, she said, is me or
Jeremy Corbyn, and nobody wants that.
Presumably, Mrs May meant that no one
wants Jeremy Corbyn, but the actual
grammar of her sentence summed up the
problem more exactly: people dont want
that choice.
T he words Reith Lectures rarely
promise pleasure or enlightenment,
but you will surely derive both from
Hilary Mantels, recently finished.
I recommend listening to them on
iPlayer, because Mantels high voice is
expressive of her capacity for horror,
spikiness, wit and (half-concealed by
the other qualities) compassion. She is
the mistress of the striking analogy and
the haunting example. The imagination
and the intellect are equally stirred. Her
subject, under the title Resurrection: the
Art and the Craft, is historical fiction.
I like very much her discussion of how
we see the past now. The present in
every age turns the past to its particular
uses, but Mantel thinks our own era is
particularly condescending to what has
gone before. As she puts it, the word
modern is laden with value judgments,
mostly in our favour. We are shocked at
the cruelties of the past and blind to our
own. She thinks our ancestors had more
respect for the past than we because
they tried to balance the claims of time
and of eternity. For them, time was not
an arrow pointing forward, but a candle
burning down: We have climate change,
and they have sin.
T o understand the past, Hilary Mantel
goes on, we must recognise that,
for those who inhabited it, it was not
a rehearsal, but the show itself. The
dead are not our employees. We need
to show a certain respect. She recalls
going on a tour of Robben Island, the
prison now a museum which once
incarcerated Nelson Mandela. Her guide
was himself an ex-inmate. At each empty
cell, he would knock on the door, as if
seeking permission. She advocates such
hesitation on the threshold. I shall bear
this in mind as I work on the final volume
of my biography of Margaret Thatcher.
When you approach the famous door
of 10 Downing Street, it usually opens
without your having to knock, because
the doorman within is warned of your
approach. So you dont hesitate on the
threshold; but Hilary Mantel is right
for historical purposes, you should.
9
 Madness in the Med
How humanitarian efforts are creating an even greater migrant crisis
ollowing the EUs deal with Turkey
over people smuggling, the issue of
migrants trying to cross, and quite often
drowning in, the Mediterranean has largely
disappeared from the British media. There
have been no more images like that of three-
year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish
beach after the rubber dinghy in which his
family were trying to reach the Greek island
of Kos capsized in August 2015.
Now, people smugglers and migrants
know there is little point in trying to make the
crossing from Turkey to Greece because they
will only be sent back, in return for the EU
taking refugees directly from camps in Tur-
key. The deal has successfully curtailed the
activities of criminal gangs operating in the
eastern Mediterranean: in the first six months
of this year arrivals in Greece had fallen by
93 per cent compared with a year earlier.
But the problem hasnt gone away; it has
shifted westwards to Italy, where things just
go from bad to worse. Last year a record
181,000 migrants arrived there by sea, nearly
all from Libya, and this year there are sure to
be many more: over 90,000 have so far been
ferried across the Mediterranean from near
the Libyan coast to Sicily, 300 miles away,
according to the latest figures from IOM,
the UN migration agency. Earlier this week
IOM reported that 2,359 migrants have died
trying to cross the Mediterranean already
this year, on top of 5,083 deaths last year and
2,777 in 2015.
The EU, which has mismanaged the
migrant problem from the start, only sealing
the Turkey deal after years of inaction, has
washed its hands of the latest explosion of
migrant trafficking. It has ignored the Ital-
ian governments increasingly desperate
appeals for help.
Italy used to have a pressure valve. Most
migrants used the country as a staging post
to more prosperous countries in northern
Europe. But with France and Austria reneg-
ing on the Schengen agreement by reintro-
ducing border checks, they are stuck in Italy,
a country with an unemployment rate of 12
per cent and an economy forecast to take
another decade just to get back to the size
it was in 2007. Worse, the migrant problem
is concentrated in the south of Italy, where
the economy is weakest and taxpayers most
10
NICHOLAS FARRELL
scarce. Many migrants are living in hostels,
each at an annual cost of 13,000 to those
Italians who do pay tax. Others disappear
into the black economy, sleeping rough or
living in illegally let and overcrowded flats.
Thanks in part to guilt about their fascist
past, Italians are eager not to be racist, yet
they are sick of what they see as an illegal
migrant invasion and of the complicit role of
four unelected Italian prime ministers since
the resignation of the last elected one, Silvio
Berlusconi, in 2011. According to a recent
opinion poll published in the Rome daily Il
Messaggero, 67 per cent of Italians want Italy
to close its ports to rescue vessels or deport
The business model of the smugglers
does not include transporting their
customers all the way to Italy
all migrants ferried to Italy, and 61 per cent
want a naval blockade of the Libyan coast.
The left lost heavily in Italys local elec-
tions in June as a result of brewing anger at
the migrant crisis. Giusi Nicolini, the mayor
of Lampedusa who had won a peace prize
from Unesco and been praised by the Pope,
finished a humiliating third in her bid for re-
election, defeated by a rival from her own
Democratic party. She blamed her defeat
on local opposition to a crackdown on ille-
gal building, playing down the bigger issue
of migrant arrivals.
But Lampedusa, just seven miles long
and two miles wide, is 180 miles north of
the Libyan coast and has been in the front-
line of people trafficking, for which Nicolini
showed rather too much tolerance. Italian
I deny that I conspired with
the Russians in any way.
attitudes are hardening, thanks to obvious
and growing evidence that very few of the
arriving migrants can honestly be called ref-
ugees unless you widen that definition to
include anyone who lives in Africa, on the
basis that its standards of living and respect
for human rights are universally lower than
in western Europe.
The debate about migrant crossings tends
to be held in the context of people fleeing
from wars in Syria and Libya. Yet according
to Eurostat, the EUs statistical arm, of the
46,995 migrant arrivals in Italy in the first
four months of this year, only 635 were Syri-
ans and 170 were Libyans. By contrast, 10,000
came from Nigeria, 4,135 from Bangladesh,
3,865 from the Gambia, 3,625 from Pakistan
and 3,460 from Senegal. None of these coun-
tries can be said to be consumed by civil war,
and even if some individuals had reason to
claim asylum, international law dictates that
they should claim it in the first safe country
they reach which in every case would be
before crossing the sea to Italy.
What is causing growing Italian anger is
the role of charities and non-governmen-
tal organisations (NGOs) in the transport
of migrants across the Mediterranean. The
image the charities like to present is that of
desperate people putting to sea in any vessel
they can lay their hands on because what-
ever risks they run cannot exceed the dan-
gers of staying in their homelands. Save the
Children, for example, declares in heartrend-
ing prose on its website, between photos of
young children wrapped in foil blankets, that
children are fleeing bullets, poverty, perse-
cution and the growing impact of climate
change, only to drown in European waters.
The reality could not be more different.
The vast majority of migrants from Libya are
young men paying the equivalent of 1,000
each to people smugglers in what they see
as a calculated risk to reach a better life in
Europe. The business model of the smug-
glers does not include transporting their
customers all the way to Italy, but rather to
take them 12 nautical miles to the boundary
of Libyas territorial waters, so they can then
be rescued and ferried the rest of the way
to Europe. The people smugglers are quite
open about what they are doing: what can
only be described as a Libya-based migrant
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
travel agency has set up a Facebook page
offering tickets to passengers with dis-
counts for group bookings on ferries
i.e., smuggler boats complete with phone
number. The journey, it says, lasts only three
or four hours before rescue by an NGO,
Italian or EU vessel, which will complete the
ferry service to Italy.
Between October 2013 and October
2014 the second leg of the journey was pro-
vided by the Italian navy and coastguard in
a search-and-rescue operation called Mare
Nostrum, which brought 190,000 migrants to
Italy. But those vessels operated 150 miles
north of the Libyan coast near Lampedusa,
which itself is 170 miles south of Sicily. This
meant migrants had to undertake much of
the journey under their own steam. Mare
Nostrum encouraged them to take greater
risks and thus added to the death toll. The
operation was replaced in 2014 when the
EU agreed that Europe, not just Italy, should
shoulder the search-and-rescue burden. So
Operation Triton was launched. Under this,
search-and-rescue vessels from across the
EU operate up to a line 120 miles north of
Libya. However, all charity vessels (now
responsible for about a third of rescues)
operate right up to the Libyan coast. Among

They claim to be saving lives.

But they are colluding in a people-
trafcking operation
them are the Vos Hestia, a 59-metre former
offshore tug operated by Save the Children,
the 68-metre MV Aquarius, jointly operated
by SOS Mediterrane and Mdecins Sans
Frontires (MSF) and the 40-metre Phoenix,
owned by MOAS, a charity founded by an
American businessman and his Italian wife.
The operators of these vessels are legal-
ly obliged to assist those in distress at sea
if they are in a position to do so. What they
are not allowed to do is to operate deliber-
ate and unauthorised search-and-rescue mis-
sions within territorial waters, nor to pick
people off a boat which is not in distress
on the pretext of rescuing them. Moreover,
if they do save people in distress, they are
obliged under maritime law to take them to
the nearest safe port, which is seldom in Italy.
But these boats are entering Libyan
territorial waters. I asked an independent
Dutch research institute, Gefira, for evidence.
It used marine traffic websites (freely avail-
able to the public) which track ships in real
time via satellite. It discovered that a dozen
NGO vessels entered Libyas waters, often
many times. The Vos Hestia, for example, did
so on the 5, 16, 22 and 23 May; the Aquarius
on the 2, 5, 16 and 23 May and as recently as
9 July. The Phoenix was tracked there three
times, most recently on 10 July.
The NGOs are now under investigation
by Sicilian magistrates for possible collusion
with people smugglers. Carmelo Zuccaro,
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
the magistrate in charge, told the Turin daily
La Stampa in April: We have evidence that
there are direct contacts between certain
NGOs and people traffickers in Libya. He
says phone calls have been made from Libya
to certain NGOs, lamps have been lit to illu-
minate the route to these organisations
boats, and some of these boats have sudden-
ly turned off their locating transponders.
At the time, Save the Children said: The
Vos Hestia, which operates in international
waters and in coordination with the [Ital-
ian] coastguard, has never entered Liby-
an waters. It has since changed its tune.
George Graham, Save the Childrens Direc-
tor of Humanitarian Policy, said: Save the
Children operates in international waters,
moving closer to territorial waters only if
instructed by the Italian coastguard. On a
highly exceptional basis, and if deemed nec-
essary to save lives, Save the Children may
enter Libyan waters operating under the
coordination of the Italian coastguard. We
are not a ferry service. We do not commu-
nicate with traffickers or people smugglers.
Marco Bertotto, head of advocacy for
MSF Italy, admits: There were three occa-
sions in 2016 when MSF in critical and
urgent cases and with the explicit authori-
sation of the relevant Libyan and Italian
authorities assisted in rescues 11.5 nau-
tical miles from the coast. Also in 2017, we
have entered on a few occasions in Libyan
waters, and with the explicit authorisation of
relevant authorities. A MOAS spokesman
said Phoenix entered Libyan waters only
when authorised by the Italian coastguard in
Rome. Despite repeated calls and emails, the
coastguard declined to explain why it issued
such authorisations.
These charities, and others operat-
ing ships in the Mediterranean, of course
claim to be saving lives. But what they are
really doing is colluding either inten-
tionally or not in a people-trafficking
operation. If charities and NGOs stopped
providing a pick-up service a few miles
off Libya, and if Italy started returning
migrants to the North African countries
whence they came, the smugglers boats
would not put to sea.
Those who are dying are the victims of a
well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided
operation which will come to be seen as
great moral stain on Europe.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Douglas Murray and George Graham from
Save the Children discuss the Mediterranean
migrant crisis.
11
 Deus ex machina
Social networks cant replace religion
MELANIE McDONAGH
M
ark Zuckerberg says that Face-
book could be to its users what
churches are to congregations: it
could help them feel part of a more con-
nected world. That got a dusty response.
Facebook as church, eh? So the man who
helped an entire generation to replace real
friends with virtual ones and online commu-
nities is sounding off about people feeling
unconnected? Cause and effect or what?
He wasnt quite touting Facebook as an
alternative church. It is, rather, now using
artificial intelligence to suggest groups that
its users might join anything from lock-
smiths societies to addiction groups and
Baptist organisations and Mr Zuckerberg
is enthusing about the benefits of moving
from online to offline groups: People who
go to church are more likely to volunteer and
give to charity not just because theyre
religious, but because theyre part of a com-
munity. So hes trying to get more people
to join things. Only only! 100 million
of Facebooks two billion users belong to a
group that gives them a sense of community;
he wants to raise that to a billion.
Hes right, obviously, about the benefits
of being part of a group, from bellringers to
Free Presbyterians, though its a bit weird
for him to be evangelising for something
that already exists, something that you might
say is part of the human condition, given
that were social animals. To take the most
basic example, churches and parishes are
ready-made communities under the noses
of all of us. Just as theyre in radical decline
in developed countries, Mark Zuckerberg is
talking about how good it is to have a pastor
looking out for your wellbeing.
But its interesting that Zuckerberg iden-
tified the function of a church, specifically,
as something that needs replicating. Church-
es were once the most obvious centre of any
community, and at times of crisis, like after
the Grenfell Tower fire, people still congre-
gate there. But whats now evident is that
churches have other benefits. Specifically,
churchgoing seems to have a bearing on
the very contemporary problem of mental
health. The object of going to church isnt
12
mental wellbeing, but it happens to be a
documented side-product of doing religion.
And I dont mean in the Alastair Campbell
sense. A persistent finding in the field of
mental health research for some years is that
there is a beneficial effect of church attend-
ance; religious practice, per se. Its not about
affiliation or spirituality, but about actually
going to church. Including, I suppose, going
to church all by yourself.
Plainly, it isnt an infallible route to men-
tal wellbeing. At Easter the Archbishop of
The object of going to church isnt
mental wellbeing, but it happens to be
a side-product of doing religion
Canterburys daughter talked about her
depression, notwithstanding her father
being a bishop, and observed that in some
evangelical bits of the Anglican communion,
fellow Christians may unhelpfully attribute
your illness to demonic possession.
But overall, the research suggesting a
link between better mental health and active
religious engagement of some sort or other
is a sizeable one. One study published at the
end of last year in the Journal of Religion
and Health reviewed 74 studies in English
and Arabic between 2000 and 2012 and con-
cluded there was a significant connection
between religious belief and practices and
mental health. Note the practice bit, which
is true for Jews or Muslims, too. And in Jan-
uary of this year there was a study in the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders
from the department of psychiatry at Yale
Medical School. It says that ample literature
supports the protective effects of religious
affiliation on suicide rates. It goes on to
observe the mechanisms for this protective
effect include enhanced social network and
social integration, the degree of religious
commitment and the degree to which a par-
ticular religion disapproves of suicide.
Its not simple or infallible: theres another
small contradictory study suggesting that
religious affiliation could be a mental health
risk factor in some cases. Overall, however,
the evidence suggests that religion helps.
At its simplest, going to church is a way
of being communal, and as Mark Zucker-
berg points out, lots of us arent nowadays.
A Sunday service means you get to see
people and it involves simple routine, but
being in a parish can also include taking the
collection, helping out at a food bank, doing
the church cleaning, whatever. That brings
us back to the Facebook approach: anything
that makes you part of a bigger group and a
bigger picture is all to the good.
A friend of mine, Patricia Casey, pro-
fessor of psychiatry at University College
Dublin, is doing research into depression
and religiousness: and she too says that in
virtually all the studies, spirituality as dis-
tinct from religious practice fares less well
when it comes to mental health. Its inter-
esting because for a long time secularists
have tried to portray religious belief as a
form of mental illness, yet the evidence
suggests it might be the cure.
What the findings show, says Patricia,
is that even if you control for the social
support, religious attendance is still sig-
nificantly associated with lower levels of
depressive symptoms. In other words,
although being part of any group (well,
within reason not Isis or paedophile net-
works) is good for us, religious practice and
churchgoing have benefits beyond other
kinds of association. Our findings sug-
gest that the social support associated with
religious practice is likely to be qualitatively
different from the social support of having
friends in a football club or knitting circle,
says Patricia. If you believe in spiritual life,
its not that surprising: youre communing
with God here, not just other people.
Which isnt to say we dont get mental
health and social benefits from all sorts
of things, from knitting to football; theres
a well-documented association between
health and contact with nature, for instance.
When it comes to community, Mark
Zuckerberg is right about the merits of
going from online to offline. But churches
have been providing all this stuff for ever:
its odd, not to say, irritating, that Facebook
is discovering their merits just as they are
going out of fashion.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
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 Its got to be perfect
Lets keep the word for the things that truly deserve it
LAURA FREEMAN
W
hen I order a cup of tea in Costa,
the barista says: Perfect! I ask
for tap water in a restaurant: Per-
fect! I buy a card in Paperchase and at the
till its: Perfect! And: Perfect! again as I put
in my PIN. Perfect! when I say I dont need
a bag. It used to be Great! and even that
was too ecstatic a response to a side-order
of creamed spinach. Now, theres been a ser-
vice industry upgrade. No longer is the cus-
tomer always right; they are perfect. A little
thing, yes, but a symptom of a wider mania
for perfection. Everything from breakfast
muesli to career, home and family must be
perfect. Perfect interiors. The perfect diet.
A perfect body. Pretty, perky, perfect chil-
dren in pressed pinafores and collared shirts.
It is driven in part by magazines Per-
fect profiteroles! Perfect bikinis for every
figure! in part by social media. Not-
quite-perfect photos are filtered and fiddled
with until they are perfect enough for post-
ing on Instagram as proof of an ideal life.
It can be pernicious. Friends are made
miserable in the run-up to their weddings by
bridal-shop shysters selling the myth of Your
Perfect Day. Without these sugared almonds
(100), those white hydrangeas in cut crys-
tal vases (1,000), and that society photog-
rapher (price on application), the Happiest
Day of Your Life will fall short of the perfect
mark. And that, naturally, scuppers any hope
of a Perfect Marriage. The bride is a gibber-
ing wreck because she didnt, in the end, buy
a blue satin garter ribbon, and has there-
fore failed as the dream dress-up bride. The
groom makes a toast to my perfect, beauti-
ful wife, though all the guests know theyve
fought tooth and claw over the table plan
since the engagement.
It doesnt end there. Next is the Perfect
Pregnancy inspired by earth-mother blogs
and photographs of Sydney surfer girls
who are out on their boards well into the
third trimester. The mother-to-be asks her-
self why she isnt serene and barefoot on a
beach, but swaying on the train from High
Wycombe to Marylebone in the rush hour.
Then, the Perfect Birth. She has practised
her pregnancy yoga, her calming breaths.
The birthing bath is blown up, the massage
oils uncapped. She has read the California
mom-and-baby sites that promise a pain-
free, blissed-out birth and bondedness with
their breastfed baby.
Despair when it doesnt go to plan. A
friend was wretched when her holistic
14
birth (gentle stretching, deep-breathing,
lavender pillows) ended in an emergency
Caesarean. But I wanted it to be perfect,
she said a week later, sleep-deprived and
stitched-up. No matter that the baby came
out in one piece the experience wasnt as
the blogs had said. If only someone had told
her: Brace yourself. That would have been
kinder than selling her a pseudo-science
fairy-tale. If only someone had said: Itll
be awful, but youll have a nice baby at the
end of it. Notice I say a nice baby, not a
perfect one.
As a recovering addict of American hos-
pital telly dramas, I have seen 100 traumatic,
cliffhanging births that end with the doctor
laying the baby whose life looked so frag-
ile just before the ad break in the arms
of his mother with the words: Hes perfect.
He isnt, of course. No child could be. Hell
be colicky and fussy, hell make unsuitable
No longer is the customer always
right; they are perfect. A little thing,
yes, but a symptom of a wider mania
friends, play truant, leave his socks on the
stairs, and be maddening, loveable, impossi-
ble and joyous in equal measure. Not per-
fect, though. Dont start them on the perfect
rot before theyve even started teething.
Perfect used to be a mark of moral or
spiritual virtue. God was perfect; we did our
best. It applied to noble sentiments: a deep
affection and loyalty to ones King, Queen,
Church and Country as in I vow to thee, my
country, all earthly things above/ Entire and
whole and perfect, the service of my love.
Now its been degraded to apply to Victoria
sponges on The Great British Bake Off
thats a perfect bake and to the perfect
froth on top of a latte.
Ive just re-read H.E. Batess The Darling
Buds of May and been reminded of Pop Lar-
kins Perfick! His is not a prim, aesthetic,
photogenic perfection, but a pleasing, ram-
shackle one. Perfick is blue skies and sun-
burnt necks, scrap piled in the farmyard and
a glimpse of Mas plump calves as she stirs
apple sauce on the stove. Perfick is tomato
ketchup with absolutely everything. A sunny
days good enough for the likes of him.
Pops version of Perfick is liberating after
the restrictive, neurotic perfection of clean
and curated lifestyles. Keep perfect for the
big stuff; good enough will do for the rest.
ANCIENT AND MODERN
Death and childhood
Charlie Gard
is incurably brain-damaged, blind,
deaf, cannot cry, and cannot move or
breathe without help. At the request
of his parents, he has been kept alive
in hope of a minimal improvement.
Ancients did not feel about babies
as we do. About one in three died
within a month, and about half by the
age of five. Putting disabled babies
out to die was probably common.
There are about 55,000 inscriptions
on tombstones referring to ages at
death, yet only a handful relate to
those under six months. Few ancient
authors describe babies behaving like
babies; indeed, Latin had no specific
word for baby. Cicero remarked that
nature granted life on the same terms
as one accepted a loan, and nature
would call that loan in whenever it
felt like it. If a small child died, it
must be endured unemotionally; if a
child was still in the cradle, one must
not even express regret, however
cruel nature had been, Cicero added.
Personal grief is, of course, evident
in our sources, but one could always
have another one.
The satirical poet Juvenal, in full
moralistic mode, put his finger on
the point: Providing the populace
and the state with a citizen will be
appreciated, on condition that he is
a citizen with the right qualities
good at farming, and someone who
can do the business in peace and war.
All of which, he went on, would be
a matter of the moral and practical
training he received from the cradle.
This sentiment emphasised the
functional view that Romans publicly
took of children. Look to the finished
product was the Romans attitude:
the sooner the child grew up, the
better. Epitaphs of youngsters and
teenagers regularly praised them for
behaving like adults in the making.
Our children and grandchildren
are more precious to us than anything
else on earth. No one would want to
be in the situation of Charlie Gards
parents. But ultimately parents in
this situation must ask themselves in
whose interests their child is being
kept alive, and for whose sake. Is it
really the childs? And if so, to what
end for the child?
Peter Jones
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

My fears about the new extremism commission
T
he Egyptian-born Muslim cleric
Yusuf al-Qaradawi was once invited
to speak in this country and the
row which developed as a consequence was
both entertaining and instructive. Many peo-
ple said he shouldnt be given a visa because
of his extremism. Others, such as the main-
stream UK Muslim organisations, insisted
that this was a libellous description and that
Qaradawi was a moderate who had always
favoured dialogue with people of other
faiths; Ken Livingstone went further and
described him as being a leading progres-
sive voice within Islam.
So who was right? On the one hand it
is true that the Qatar-based Qaradawi has
been opposed to jihadi terrorist attacks
unless they take place against Jews and then
its not, according to him, terrorism. He does
not have much time for Jews, once refusing to
attend a meeting with them because: Their
hands are soiled with blood. They have mur-
derous, violent and oppressive hands. I can-
not soil my hands by shaking theirs. He has
also quoted approvingly from the fraudulent
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He believes
apostates in some circumstances should be
put to death, and homosexuals subjected to
the lash, that women who have been raped
must prove their virtue in order to escape
punishment, and that uppity women can
be beaten by their husbands, but only as a
last resort. The answer, then, would seem
to be that both sides were right. Within the
world of Islam, Qaradawi is indeed a moder-
ate and relatively pacific voice. And yet his
views, seen from over here, would appear to
be those of a bigoted, foaming maniac.
There are two points to draw from this.
First, that many people in this country delude
themselves about the Islamic world and its
fervent hatred for Jewish people, its subju-
gation of women and gays, its viciousness in
dealing with those who renounce the faith
etc. And second, that the term extremist is
not only stupid and virtually meaningless,
but endlessly contingent. Who has the right
to decide what is an extreme view and what
isnt? Nick Clegg or Yusuf al-Qaradawi?
I have mentioned Qaradawis visit before
because it was a beautiful example of liberal
delusion being smacked in the face by the
real world. I mention it again now because
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
ROD LIDDLE
the government is setting up something
called an extremism commission, which it
intends will root out extremism and, in the
hideous vernacular of our time, build part-
nerships with those opposed to extremism.
My suspicion is that this is every bit as
Orwellian as it sounds. Do not for a nano-
second swallow the notion that this com-
mission of well-brought-up liberal grandees
will confine themselves to rooting out peo-
ple (imported into this country or born here
from people imported into this country) who
wish to kill us all. A slightly warped sense of
fair play and the mental shriekings of the
left will ensure they broaden their scope. No,
they will tell us, with great pride, we are not
merely picking on Muslims. We are on the
The term extremist is not only
stupid and virtually meaningless,
but also endlessly contingent
warpath against all extremism and, since you
asked, we will decide what extremism is.
Already a little worried by the whole
business, the Evangelical Alliance commis-
sioned an opinion poll from ComRes about
this strange and ephemeral thing, extrem-
ism. The first thing they found was that a
very clear majority of the British people
thought pretty much as I suggested above
that labelling something or someone
extremist was stupid and, when it comes to
framing debates, not helpful. But the poll-
sters also asked people a whole bunch of
political questions and asked them to adju-
dicate on whether they were extremist or
not. So, for example, 36 per cent said that
wishing to leave the European Union was
extremist. On what we might call the other
The conclusions are so obvious
a man could have drawn them.
side of the coin, some 40 per cent reckoned
it was extremist to believe in the idea of
man-made climate change.
In other words, both halves of the country
believe that the other half is extremist. And
yet of course the word is simply an insult to
be flung at someone whose views we hate
or despise. We live in a narcissistic society,
and for the narcissist, any form of criticism
of their political position is hate speak and
extremism. But they are neither of those
things; they are simply opposing views.
I will bet that quite a few things in which
I believe and probably what the Evan-
gelical Alliance believes too would be
deemed extremist by this extremism com-
mission. For example, I think it is best that
children are brought up by a mother and
a father, both of whom subscribe to the
undoubtedly fascistic genetic derogation
they were assigned at birth. I also believe
that men who transition into being women
are in almost all cases not authentic
women. That, I suspect, would be considered
extremist, despite the fact that I have sci-
ence on my side. Just as do those who believe
in man-made climate change, I would con-
tend. I have no problem with civil partner-
ships but I do not think that my church
should sanction gay marriage again,
extremist. And so on.
The reason for this poll is the Evangeli-
cal Alliance is worried Christians will start
getting hammered again. They believe the
liberals will use this ominous commission to
outlaw a fairly large proportion of what they
believe in (and indeed, what the Bible tells
them to believe in). That the stranglehold
which the middle-class liberal elite have over
our culture and society without having any-
thing close to hegemony will be tightened
still further, and their views marginalised or
even criminalised. And the excuse given will
be they are trying to stop us being blown up,
or stabbed to death on London Bridge. Thats
my worry too that in order to placate the
sensitivities of the adherents of a recently
imported culture, the beliefs of indigenous
people will be proscribed. When there is not
the remotest comparison between them.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE
The argument continues online.
15

Its hard to like plastic right now, but it plays
an essential role in providing food and drink
that is clean, safe, convenient and fresh. If
it is made, used and disposed of correctly, no
plastic packaging should end up littering the
environment or being buried in landfill sites.
All bottles across the companys portfolio
have been 100 per cent recyclable for years,
yet at present, only 57 per cent of Britains
plastic bottles are recycled, according to the
Recoup UK Household Plastics Collection
Survey 2016. The challenge lies in persuading
everyone involved in their manufacture,
distribution and use to help ensure that
more bottles are collected and turned back
into new ones.
Coca-Cola Great Britain is playing a
leading role in changing the way we think
about the disposal of plastic. Through a
partnership with Lincolnshire-based Clean
Tech Europes largest and most-advanced
plastic-bottle recycling plant two billion
bottles have been recycled since 2012. Coca-
Cola is already the biggest user of recycled
plastic in Britain, but by 2020 it aims to double
the amount of recycled content in its bottles
from 25 to 50 per cent.
It will be harder to go above 50 per cent,
however, until there is a step-change in the
UKs recycling infrastructure. Rewards at all
levels from manufacturer to consumer
could reduce plastic waste and help to create
A DV E RT I S I N G F E AT U R E
WE WANT
EVERY ONE
OF OUR
BOTTLES
BACK
a genuine circular economy. While there is
already an incentive scheme operating in
Britain to encourage the recycling of plastic,
it doesnt inspire better design or increasing
levels of recycled plastic in certain products.
Manufacturers are required to purchase,
certain numbers of tokens known as Packaging
Recovery Notes (PRNs) from recycling
companies; the number of these bought reflects
the amount of plastic that will be recycled.
Companies could be financially
incentivised to design better products by
offering them a lower price for PRNs when
they reach certain levels of recyclability,
and more recycled plastic in their packaging.
There is huge scope for improving the design of
packaging to make it easier to recycle and to
reduce the consumption of resources in the first
place. A 500ml Coca-Cola bottle, for example,
now weighs just 19g half what it did in the
mid-1990s. A glaceau smartwater bottle might
look like any other plastic bottle, yet up to 30
per cent of the material used in it is derived
from plant sources rather than from fossil fuels.
But the idea needs to be taken further, so
that all those in the waste chain, including
local authorities and waste management
companies, are included in the scheme.
Funds raised from PRNs could also be
used by local authorities to improve recycling
schemes. At present, householders can be
confused by recycling collections, which
can vary from place to place these could
be rationalised, so everyone knows what
can be recycled and how they can recycle
it. Only 65 per cent of food packaging is
used in the home, while a further 25 per cent
is generated in restaurants, cafs and offices
some of which are good at collecting material
for recycling, others less so. The remaining 10
per cent of packaging is used by consumers on
the move, when it is often much harder to
recycle products.
Years ago, drinks bottles used to carry a
deposit; if you returned them to the shop where
you bought them, you could collect a small
refund. A new reward scheme to incentivise
recycling could give empty bottles a value
then perhaps even litter louts would think
twice about throwing them into the nearest
hedge. Anyone who came across a discarded
bottle in the street would be able to profit by
picking it up and presenting it for recycling.
Modern lifestyles require food and drink
products that are packaged for safety and
convenience. But there is no reason why
packaging should be allowed to become
an environmental nuisance. With a little
imagination, a used plastic bottle can be turned
from a problem into a valuable resource.

Dear Leavebugs, its time to admit your mistake
B
rexit, says my friend David Aaro-
novitch, is dying. We Remainer
irreconcilables certainly hope so.
But theres a slim chance the grisly Brexit
project could yet pull through, and its right
to acknowledge this. So in a spirit of can-
did friendship I write this letter to die-hard
Leavers, of whom a small but vigorous
colony survives on these Spectator pages
Dear Leavebugs, You know I am not of
your number, but I understand you. I even
feel for you. The Leave/Remain split is not
a divide between two halves of the British
population, but a war within the breast of
each person. Every feeling youve had, Ive
experienced too. Civil wars are always bitter;
wars within ourselves the most bitter of all.
As an understanding friend, therefore,
though never an ally, I write to warn you that
your project is in deep trouble.
I know what you really want. You just
want Britain out of any entanglement that
spans the English Channel. For you this is
as much an emotional longing as a practi-
cal calculation an antipathy whose roots
go deep, back to the first and second world
wars, to the Napoleonic wars, to Englands
fear of the French Revolution; back (though
some of you may disown this root) to Prot-
estant Englands detestation of Rome.
Be honest with yourselves. Though youre
ready to assert the material benefits you say
could flow from leaving Europe, you know
in your heart that such calculations are sec-
ondary and speculative. They are not what
drive you, but a posteriori arguments for an
impulse that came, first, from your heart: an
impulse that would survive the demolition
of any argument of economic advantage.
Admit it. For you this isnt about money.
Shut your eyes and make a supreme
effort to confess your inner motivation. What
is your immediate, instinctive, unguarded
answer to the question: What if Brexit made
us poorer? You know, dont you?
Youd be disappointed, of course, and
sorry. Impoverishment isnt what you
expect. But youd still think it was right to
leave. Your reasons are almost spiritual.
They relate to our whole identity as a peo-
ple; our nations soul; our place in history.
They do not (you believe) sit easily on any
spreadsheet of material gains or losses, but
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
MATTHEW PARRIS
are about destiny. Perhaps only secretly
you could contemplate the idea of being
poorer yet prouder: of exchanging a bit of
take-home pay for that greater prize: inde-
pendence and national self-respect. You find
haggling about GDP, chlorinated chicken
and Toyotas tariffs beneath the argument.
I, too, am conscious of those feelings
within myself. But we have to remind our-
selves there was never a majority, never will
be a majority, and was certainly no major-
ity at the European referendum last year,
for impoverishing ourselves in pursuit of
national self-respect. You know very well
that it was fear of such an eventuality that
you needed to dispel during your Leave
campaign. Hence that 350 million for the
There was never a majority
for impoverishing ourselves in
pursuit of national self-respect
NHS you always knew was offside but
dared not repudiate. You know you could
not have won without such reassurances.
That reassurance has been shattered.
Voters have understood well take a hit.
Few now believe well be richer. People are
coming to fear we would be poorer. You do
surely know this is the way the mood is turn-
ing. You know, too, how the same mood is
growing within the Lords and Commons.
You may think this faintheartedness is mis-
placed, but you cannot think it is temporary.
And you know MPs run with the breeze.
Can you still believe the hard Brexit you
favour, requiring Britains departure from
the single market and the customs union,
will ever get through this parliament, still
less a new one under a new government?
Your version of Brexit will either break or
be broken by government.
This leaves you with two alternatives. The
first is to settle (as youd see it) for half a loaf,
and reconcile yourselves to a soft Brexit,
with concessions to the EU on the European
Court of Justice, on immigration and on the
right to make our own trade deals.
To do this, though, brings a terrible risk
for you: one Ive have warned about ever
since the referendum. This soft Brexit on
which you might fall back is essentially the
Norwegian option. But you Leavers and
we Remainers argued so powerfully dur-
ing the campaign that we couldnt see how
being rule-takers but no longer rule-makers
was better than staying a member. That led
you to say right out and us to say stay in.
Wisely, you Brexiteers dropped the Nor-
way idea. Now we Remainers are reviving
it. Beware. Ask yourselves why. Beware, too,
Remainers bearing transitional arrange-
ments for the single market, customs union,
and jurisdiction of the ECJ. Suspect a plot by
my lot to procrastinate until you lot slip out
of vogue. Deadlines for any transition can
be put back until kingdom come. Allow us
to lure you into these thickets, and you lose.
Your other alternative is bolder. Cheat
Parliament of its chance to vote down a deal
by never reaching one. Keep your hostage in
Downing Street and storm on towards the
cliff edge in which we tumble out of the EU
without agreement. Persuade public opin-
ion that Brussels bullies brought us to this
breakdown, negotiation is now impossible,
and Britain must walk away and damn
the consequences.
Damning the consequences is all thats
open to you now. Double or quits: a reckless
strategy that could destroy the Conservative
party and land you in the rogues gallery of
history, but its your only hope. You speak
for millions, but unfortunately not tens of
millions. Good luck Charles; good luck,
James F and James D; good luck Freddy,
Rod, Dominic, Douglas. The way things are
going its double or quits for all of you. We
who are not about to die, salute you.
As ever, Matthew.
17
 KIDS COMPANY FACES THE MUSIC
Committee, reviewed
It was surreal to sit in the Donmar
Warehouse and watch Committee, a
musical based on the investigation into
the charity Kids Company.
The rst oddity was that anyone ever
thought to write a musical based on the
transcript of a Public Administration
and Constitutional Affairs Committee.
The second, that this production
wouldnt have existed if The Spectator
hadnt published an article (by me)
raising questions about Kids Companys
appallingly managed nances and the
behaviour of its chief executive,
Camila Batmanghelidjh.
Its strange that Camila has come to
this. In February 2015, it was considered
sacrilege to utter a word against her. She
was the untouchable friend of the BBC,
banks, politicians, rock stars, business-
people, models, thespians and Prince
Charles the embodiment of David
Camerons Big Society.
But her story is one of classic hubris.
After The Spectator dared question
her, other revelations came to light.
Batmanghelidjh spent 4,000 a month
renting a Grade II-listed house so she
could use its swimming pool; the charity
funded a clients sex-change operation;
an employees child was put through
private school. The charitys chairman,
Alan Yentob, further compromised Kids
Company by using his status as a BBC
panjandrum to take an uncomfortably
close interest in the Corporations own
coverage of what was hurtling towards
being a fully blown scandal.
The musical recreates the original
set-up of the hearing: Batmanghelidjh
(Sandra Marvin) and Yentob (Omar
Ebrahim) facing questions from MPs
with their backs to the audience, but TV
monitors allowing every ash of anger
to be seen. Neither was used to being
challenged, and they hated it.
While the overall idea of Committee
is interesting, it is fundamentally a
wasted opportunity, restricted by its
source material. Theres too much in this
production of Batmanghelidjh warbling
on about the catastrophically abandoned
children and young people. The defence
she mounted at the real committee
hearing may have been passionate, but
that didnt make it right or true.
The nal chapter of the story has not
been written yet because it cant be: the
Charity Commission and the Ofcial
Receiver both launched investigations
into it in late 2015 and, mysteriously,
have still not published their ndings.
Perhaps when they are known, another
theatre will properly tackle this
extraordinary tale of how the liberal
elite was so in thrall to one brightly clad
woman that it simply watched as millions
disappeared. Miles Goslett
18
Poor conduct
Daniel Barenboim ruined an exquisite Prom with a Brexit sermon
DOUGLAS MURRAY
L
ast weekend Daniel Barenboim
brought the Staatskapelle Berlin to
perform at the BBC Proms for a cycle
of Elgars symphonies. As Elgar only fin-
ished two of the things, it is among the easier
symphonic cycles to pull off. But the Staat-
skapelle played beautifully over two nights
at the Albert Hall, with moments of out-
standing musicianship. They were let down
only, at the end of the second evening, by
their conductor.
Turning around on the podium to face
the audience, he announced that there was
something he wanted to say. I dont know
whether all of you will agree with me, but
I would really like to share that with you.
And then he began to spoil the evening.
The Maestro informed us that the Staat-
skapelle had delayed their holidays for a
week in order to come and perform these
two concerts. He told us how much the
To my ears Elgars Second Symphony
speaks to many things, but the 2016
referendum is not among them
orchestra had fallen in love with these sym-
phonies and had particularly wanted to play
them for us. This we already knew. None
of the players appeared to be there under
duress. We witnessed no strings sawing away
sullenly, nor any among the wind sections
checking their watches.
When I look at the world with so many
isolation[ist] tendencies, I get very wor-
ried, Barenboim continued. I know I am
not alone. Most of the audience applaud-
ed. After reminding us that he had married
in the UK and been shown much affection
by the country (as though to suggest things
might be different now), he told us, The
main problem of today is not the main poli-
cies of this country or of that country. The
main problem of today is that there is not
enough education. And if you look at the
difficulties that the European continent is
going through now, you can see that, why it
is, because of the lack of common education.
Because in one country they do not know
why they should belong to something that
the other countries do.
The use of education in this context is
a serious euphemism. Across America and
Europe there are many people who dis-
agree with the electorates choices in 2016.
But had the Democrats won the US elec-
tion, or Remain won the UK referendum,
we would not be hearing such complaints.
Had the publics voted Clinton and Remain
last year they would have been correct and
well-educated. People voting the wrong
way must have done so because they were
uneducated.
What is worse is that they did so against
the advice of those better educated than
themselves, who are now forced to study
them in a belated effort at understanding.
Only, of course, in order to then correct them.
As Barenboim continued: This isola-
tionist tendencies [sic] and nationalism in
its very narrow sense, is something that is
very dangerous and can only be fought with
a real great accent on the education of the
new generation. The new generation have
to understand that Greece and Germany
and France and Denmark all have some-
thing in common, called European culture.
Throughout this my eyebrows began to rise.
After the concert I connected with various
other raised eyebrows.
None were angry, or furious just a lit-
tle less euphoric than we would have been
had Barenboim let the music speak for itself.
I was brought up on Barenboim. I regard his
recording of Elgars Cello Concerto (with
his first wife, Jacqueline du Pr) as some-
thing of a holy place. I left profoundly disap-
pointed in him, and sad that in an era which
is witnessing the politicisation of absolutely
everything, it should prove impossible even
to go to an orchestral concert without being
coshed around the head with politics.
And politics of such presumption at that.
I dont regard myself as especially uncul-
tured, uneducated or ill-read. Nor, like other
audience members I spoke with, would I
regard myself as isolationist in my political
or cultural interests.
But nor do I think that the masterworks
of classical music can only be heard on the
condition that you are governed by the
European Commission. Or that you can
enjoy orchestral music only on the proviso
that you endorse Angela Merkels ongo-
ing open-doors immigration policy. Some
advanced pessimist might even ponder how
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
long the one might survive the other.
There was also the sheer discourtesy of
the whole thing; to fully understand one
need only play this the other way around.
Imagine a strongly pro-Brexit conductor
using his platform on a German rostrum to
lecture a German audience about the pit-
falls of the EU and the sad lack of education
evident in any country repeatedly willing to
vote in Angela Merkel as Chancellor. Would
I be put off by such a speech? Very much
so. I no more desire conductors to channel
Nigel Farage after a symphony than Jean-
Claude Juncker. What is more, a British con-
ductor addressing a continental audience
as though they dwelt in a country of semi-
educated isolationists eager to begin the
pogroms might be deemed to lack courtesy.
Yet even that is not the worst thing.
The worst thing was the realisation that
the most dishonest effort will be ongoing.
That is the effort to force-feed us the idea
that the political construct of the European
Union (whatever one thinks of it) is one and
the same with all European culture, both
before and after the EUs creation. With
the follow-on implication that outside of
the one you are not allowed the other. As it
happens, spurred on by the excellent horn
section of the Staatskapelle, I spent part
of the concert pondering the musical debt
Elgar owes to Richard Strauss. But then any
Bloody gloating Brexiteers.
classical music buff knows that stylistically
Elgar was a German composer. To Daniel
Barenboim this proves his claim made in
a pre-performance interview with the BBC
that Elgars symphonies are the best case
against Brexit.
To which, beyond heavy sighing, the only
thing I might add is that to my ears Elgars
Second Symphony speaks to many things,
but the 2016 referendum is not among them.
Elgar managed to be influenced by Ger-
man culture and managed to write his great
works before even Valry Giscard dEstaing
was born. If Elgar could be subsumed in the
culture of the continent in his day, why on
earth can we not continue to be now? Why
should people keep getting away with this
claim that if we love European culture (and
who but a madman would not?), then we
must by necessity agree to be governed
under one political system, under one juris-
diction? Why must it be Dante or Brexit,
Goethe or bust? It is not just untruthful and
manipulative but ugly this colonisation
of our collective culture in the name of a
single current political ideal.
At the end of his remarks, Barenboim
concluded: The real evils of the world
can only be fought with a humanism that
keeps us all together. Including you. And
Im going to show you I really mean it. At
which point he directed the Staatskapelle
in a performance of the first of the Pomp
and Circumstance marches. Marvel at this
German orchestra playing your national
music, Barenboim appeared to be saying,
to the marvelment of absolutely no one in
an audience familiar with British orches-
tras playing Wagner and German orches-
tras playing Elgar.
Music is as Barenboim well knows
the international language. It should be
the art form most capable of bringing peo-
ple together. How strange to see him use it
instead to drive people apart.
Read Richard Bratbys Proms review on p.38.

Westminster and the EU

what happens next?
Wednesday 27 September | British Museum, London
With the Tories in crisis, the Brexit process ever more uncertain and
a Labour insurgency gaining ground, British politics has never felt
more unpredictable. Join Andrew Neil and a guest panel to discuss
the lie of the land as parliament returns.

Timings Tickets:
Drinks: 6.30 p.m. Subscriber rate: 25
Discussion: 7 p.m. Standard rate: 30

In association with
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www.spectator.co.uk/Westminster
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the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 19

 Must Colston fall?
Bristols struggle with the legacy of a slaver
WILL HEAVEN
E
dward Colston, mega-rich philan-
thropist around the year 1700, is the
nearest thing Bristol has to a patron
saint. The largest stained glass window in the
cathedral there is dedicated to him. Go and
do thou likewise, it commands.
Theres no doubt Bristol owes Colston.
He funded almshouses and schools here;
made countless donations to churches and
charities, some of which work wonders to
this day. And many signs of Victorian civic
gratitude to him litter the place. There
are half a dozen Colston roads and three
Colston schools, for instance including
one which churns out more England rugby
players than Eton creates prime ministers.
Colston is or was so venerated that
local schoolchildren are occasionally taken
on field trips to see a clump of his hair and
his nails, which are preserved like medieval
relics at the Merchants Hall. Beside a brass
statue of Colston on Colston Avenue is
a plaque proclaiming him to be one of the
most virtuous and wise sons of the city.
But theres now a great fuss being made
about this paragon. When I last saw the
statue, Colstons hands and face had been
splattered with whitewash. Students have
been pacing about with banners, calling for
it to be pulled down.
This is Bristols own version of the
Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which clam-
oured for the removal of the statue of Cecil
Rhodes from Oxford Universitys Oriel
College, on the grounds that he was racist.
Rhodes Must Fall plagued Oxford for years;
Rhodes quite rightly remains upright.
I went to Bristol recently, thinking that
Colston probably shouldnt fall, and that this
story was just another example of juvenile
activism. To my surprise, though, Im now
not quite sure that the protestors against
Colston dont have a point.
Roger Ball, a member of the Countering
Colston group, is an aircraft engineer and a
sort of hobbyist historian. In almost resigned
tones, he explained to me why Colston is
not someone we should be celebrating.
Colston made some of his fortune in the
Royal African Company in the late 17th cen-
tury. At the time, it had a complete monop-
oly over the slave trade from west Africa,
20
transporting about 85,000 enslaved Africans
across the Atlantic, including 12,000 children
as young as six. All of them were brand-
ed hot irons on flesh with the initials
RAC. Roger Ball says just under a quarter,
19,300, including 2,500 children, died during
the crossings, in filthy conditions. Colston
was eventually the deputy governor of the
company that oversaw this horrendous busi-
ness. Its absurd, argues Ball, to pretend he
was some sort of moral hero to be honoured.
The Countering Colston group are as
thoughtful and measured as Rhodes Must
Fall are hysterical and vituperative. They
dont wish to wipe his name from the city.
But Joanna Burch-Brown, a philosophy
lecturer at Bristol University, tells me they
think the cathedral and other churches
should stop hosting ceremonies presenting
Children should be told the full story
of his complicated life. People can be
heroes and villains. Its a useful lesson
him as a symbol of the good Samaritan.
David Olusoga, a black Bristolian, broad-
caster and historian, puts it starkly: For hun-
dreds of years now literally an annual
ceremony has been held in Bristol to remem-
ber fondly the life and the philanthropy of a
mass murderer. Imagine if that were a tradi-
tion maintained in the Deep South.
Its a persuasive argument. I dont think
the statue needs to go, but would it hurt
to add another plaque, explaining that,
although Colston was a great philanthro-
pist at home, he was also complicit in death
and suffering abroad? Should the cathedrals
window really insist: Go and do thou like-
wise? Perhaps, instead of visiting his relics,
the schoolchildren of Bristol should be told
the full story of his complicated life. People
can be heroes and villains. Its a useful lesson.
To deplore slavers and racists, you have
to remember them, said Lionel Shriver in
the pages of this magazine. Yet in Bristol, for
more than a century, Edward Colston has
been misremembered.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Will Heaven and Tom Slater from Spiked
magazine on Edward Colston.
BAROMETER
Smash the orange
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit
Office, said the governments Brexit plans
could fall apart like a chocolate orange.
But the point of a chocolate orange is that
it doesnt fall apart easily at all. Launched
by Terrys of York in 1932, many of its TV
adverts have emphasised this theme:
1978 Tap it and unwrap it yokel
shown tapping it lightly against tree trunk.
1998 Whack and unwrap man shown
thumping it against a wall.
2010 Smash it to pieces, love it to bits
several people struggle to break the orange,
including a secretary with a phone and
man who whacks it on a glass coffee table,
breaking the table.
Porn-watching
The government said porn sites must
introduce credit card-based age verification
systems to guard against access by children.
How many people look at porn online?
A 2016 NSPCC report said 65 per cent
of 15- to 16-year-olds and 48 per cent of
11- to 16-year-olds had accessed it in the
UK. In the younger group 19 per cent
admitted searching for it; the rest said they
had stumbled upon it accidentally.
A 2015 survey for a womens magazine
found that 90 per cent of women had
watched porn, 31 per cent every week.
A 2009 study to compare attitudes
of young Montreal men who regularly
watched porn with those who did not was
abandoned after the latter group could
not be found.
A 2013 study by an Israeli company
found that 8.5 per cent of all web-page
clicks are on porn sites.
Byng on target
A study by Michael Byng, who devised
Network Rails system for estimating the
costs of HS2, said the total could rise to
104 billion. How have official estimates of
the first London to Birmingham phase, and
of the whole project, changed?
phase 1 whole project
2011 16 bn 32.7 bn
2013 22 bn 42.6 bn
2015 27.4 bn 55.7 bn
Final journey
The High Court saw another challenge to
the law on assisted dying, which remains
illegal in Britain. From which countries did
the Swiss clinic Dignitas derive most of its
customers from 1998 to 2016?
Germany ....... 1,079 USA ................ 75
UK .................... 357 Austria ............ 51
France ............... 257 Canada ............ 48
Switzerland ...... 166 Israel ............... 33
Italy ................... 101
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
 AMSTERDAM NOTEBOOK
W hen my husband and I arrived
in our adored Amsterdam on a
sun-drenched schoolday afternoon
less than an hour in the air, first row on
the plane, merry but not messy we
seemed all set for a brilliant time. Were
both Brexiteers and ever since Freedom
Day weve been especially keen on
European city breaks, such visits now
having the pleasing feeling of a romance
whose days are numbered, and from
which one would be wise to squeeze the
sweetness while one may. After checking
in to the hallucinogenically gorgeous
W Hotel, I was struck by one of the most
enchanting of emotions the non-needy
can experience; of strolling out on a
summer evening in a place where no one
knows you. Including, as it turned out,
myself.
S omething which adds to the
dreamlike feeling of Amsterdam is
how similar in some ways it is to England
the language with its Hallo and
Dank U which gives it the oddness
of Philip Pullmans alternative Oxford.
Unlike my own beloved Brighton,
where stag parties can be viewed all
over town drinking their breakfast,
Amsterdam appears to have lost a lot
of marauding male tourist gangs to the
cheaper, harsher stamping grounds of
the ex-Soviet eastlands, and now seems
to host more hens, inquiring politely
where the red light district is. Talk even
in a raised voice outside
the approved perving playpen let
alone smoke anything and youre
liable to get a very old-fashioned look
indeed from a local. In short, the Dutch
seem to be just like the English if wed
ever grown up.
L ike the mature people they are,
the Dutch dont virtue-signal
there is vice, and there is virtue, and
one proceeds with each accordingly. In
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
Julie Burchill
particular, they dont use their estimated
880,000 bikes to virtue-signal its just the
smartest way to get around a city linked
by around 1,250 narrow bridges. Unlike
in Brighton, there are enviably few idiots
on bikes as big as tractors riding hell for
leather straight at pedestrians and believing
this is somehow fine as theyre not emitting
any fumes. Charmingly, there are groups
of young women on their way to and
from work, riding in perfect synchronicity,
chatting and laughing like herds of
mechanical birds.
T hey drink differently from us, too. And
when I say us I mean me. It started out
well we took in a pop art exhibition and
the Sex Museum and Ripleys Believe It
Or Not! but already I could sense myself
rushing ahead; I had a rendezvous with
oblivion, and I could see it blowing kisses
from the corner of my eye. I knew that the
way my interesting, interested husband was
behaving was the right way a few beers,
then a desire to experience the glorious city
we were in but I just couldnt do it. From
day three, we could have been anywhere
there was booze; Id wait till he was in the
lavvy, go for the minibar Bacardi: the
Healthy Breakfast then demand we go
out and experience Amsterdam, when what
I really meant was experience the
numerous bars lining the canals.
T he drink had caught up with me,
rammed the glass slippers on to my
numb feet and declared me The One, upon
which they turned into the Red Shoes,
whirling me away on a mad dance of
drunkenness except that makes it
sound more exciting than it was. I drank
myself into a stupor by noon, when I took
to my bed, demanding Daniel have sex
with prostitutes and sulking monstrously
when he refused, pointing out that as we
were going at it like rabbits my request
was ludicrous as well as distasteful. For
two days, my husband was my carer,
while I cared only for alcohol.
T wo swimming pools unswum
in; four expensive breakfasts
untouched; six museums unexplored
like some sottish, nihilistic version of the
Twelve Days of Christmas. And even
then as we packed between spitting
up blood I still had the nerve to smirk
smugly That was fun, wasnt it? No,
said D quietly. You were really boring.
I gaped at him, dumbstruck. Over the
years, Id been aware that my drinking
exacerbated my tendencies to be a bitch,
a bully and a braggart, and shamefully Id
been OK with this. But a bore me? Is
he drunk? I wondered, incredibly, before
the awful truth hit home.
B orn into the British working-class,
then at 17 becoming a journalist,
it was predictable Id become a drunk.
And Ive honestly loved these 40 years
of binge and spree but I feel now
that if I dont change my ways, I may
well lose my marriage. Trickily, I cant
help thinking that it was the person I
became through drinking all that
swagger, sass, sex-pestiness which
made my husband love me so much in
the first place; without drink, I cant help
thinking I literally will not be myself.
Lose myself, or lose my love, or lose both
and keep my life? Its a tough call.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Julie Burchill on drinking.
21
 Test of time
My lifelong love affair with the Oval
JOHN MAJOR
I
first walked into the Oval as a small boy
in the early 1950s. My family home was
in Brixton, only a few minutes from the
ground. More than 60 years later, those early
memories are still vivid. I sat on what were
then very uncomfortable wooden benches
with sandwiches, an apple and a bottle of
Tizer. On my lap was a schoolboy scorebook
in which I recorded every run. The Surrey
team that won the championship for seven
years in a row held me transfixed. I still
believe they were the greatest county side
of all time although Yorkshire would dis-
pute this vigorously.
The teams supreme bowling attack was
led by Alec Bedser stately as a galleon as
he ran up to the crease. His opening part-
ner Peter Loader was as thin as a rail and
fast as a whippet. To supplement this formi-
dable pair, Surrey had the spin duo of Lock
and Laker. When Bert Lock, the grounds-
man (no relation), swept the wicket between
innings, the crowd held its breath to see if
the dust rose: if it did, signalling a field day
for the spinners, they licked their lips in
anticipation. The prevailing wisdom was that
if Lock didnt get them, Laker would.
Surrey also had Peter May, the finest
English batsman I have ever seen. One day
I borrowed my fathers gold stopwatch, his
most prized possession, to time the seconds
it took for a May on-drive to hit the bound-
ary pickets. But as I pressed the stop but-
ton, the watch slipped from my grasp and
smashed on the stone terracing.
When I went home to confess my sin,
my father, gazing forlornly at the innards of
his watch, said very slowly: Tell me about
this Peter May. So I did, hoping that my
evident enthusiasm would mitigate the
offence. And it did, although my father was
still short of one gold stopwatch.
I recount all this because next week the
Oval will reach its own century: it becomes
only the fourth ground in history to have
staged 100 Test matches. England has sev-
eral magnificent cricket grounds, most obvi-
ously Lords, and many more have great
charm. To me, however, the Oval is special.
It is a second home, a theatre of dreams and,
in difficult times, a sanctuary. In the midst of
turmoil it has always brought me peace of
22
mind. Originally a market garden, it became
a field of play in 1845 and went on to host
some of the great events of sporting history;
predominantly but not only cricket.
The first FA Cup Final was held at the Oval
in 1872 (Wanderers beat Royal Engineers);
so was the first rugby international (Eng-
land beat Scotland). Athletics, lacrosse, ten-
nis, cycling and even baseball have featured.
This is unique among the worlds leading
sports venues.
Over the past 30 years, wise administra-
tors have made the Oval one of the worlds
finest cricket grounds. Right from the start
it has sat in the shadow of the famous gaso-
meter, but otherwise much has changed. In
To be there is always an event to be
there at the 100th Test match will be
to savour a slice of cricket heaven
the second world war it was first bombed,
then prepared but never used as a
prisoner-of-war camp. But through all these
changes its character has remained the same.
The ground has given me so many treas-
ured memories. In 1956 I saw Denis Comp-
tons Test swansong, when he defied the years
and his wrecked knee to score 94 before
being caught on the boundary off a sweep.
Eight years later I saw Fred Truemans 300th
Test wicket (Hawke c. Cowdrey b. True-
man). When the West Indies played at the
Oval, the Caribbean Brixtonians made it a
home game for the visitors. The atmosphere
noisy, affectionate and humorous was
quite simply magical. As was so much else I
have seen over the years: Devon Malcolms
destruction of the South African batting in
1994 and Kevin Pietersens unforgettable
innings to ensure an Ashes victory in 2005.
These are mere snapshots. The Oval
has hosted some of the greatest names and
moments in cricket history. It was, of course,
here that English cricket was said to have
died in 1882 when the demon Spofforth
(14 wickets for 90 runs) bowled Austral-
ia to a seven-run victory. In a mock obitu-
ary, the body of English cricket was said to
have been buried and the Ashes taken to
Australia. Thus crickets greatest and most
ancient rivalry was born.
It was at the Oval that W.G. Grace scored
a century on his debut for England, and
Don Bradman likely to remain the great-
est run-scorer the game has known was
bowled second ball for a duck in his last Test
innings. It was also where 21-year-old Len
Hutton scored 364 against Australia, at that
point the highest total in Test cricket.
As well as being a great batsman, Brad-
man was exceptionally polite. On a wet day
at the Oval in the 1990s, I was with Raman
Subba Row, the former England batsman.
Noting that it was The Dons birthday, we
decided to call him.
He asked how the Test was going and I
told him, adding that we were in the middle
of a rain break. Whats the weather like with
you? I asked. Dunno, came the reply. Its
three oclock in the morning down here!
The Oval is often privileged to stage the
final Test match in a series, which always
adds spice to the contest. No one yet knows
how the current South African series will
develop. But what we do know is that the
Oval will be full; world-class cricket will be
on display; the game will be fiercely fought;
the crowd (although partisan) will embrace
every fine performance; and the atmosphere
will be akin to a fiesta.
The Ovals 100th Test match will be a
moment for enthusiasts to savour and an
opportunity to look back on the grounds
great history. Conversation will flow natu-
rally from the game being played to the
cricket and cricketers of long ago. Some will
summon up and speak as though they
had been there the 1902 Test and Gilbert
Jessops famous hundred. Others, especially
Surrey supporters, may talk of the great Jack
Hobbs and the tens of thousands of runs he
scored on the same turf. Yet more may recall
the old groundsman Bosser Martin, who
perfect pitches broke the spirit of bowlers
and delighted batsmen. Others may reflect
on well, so much else.
To be at the Oval is always an event in
itself to be there at the 100th Test match
will be to savour another small slice of crick-
et heaven.
Lords is often said to be the cathedral
of cricket. If thats the case, then the Oval is
surely the high altar. For me, with a lifetime
of memories and devotion to Surrey, Lords
has my admiration but the Oval will
always have my heart.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

Yes to Boris
Sir: Get Boris (15 July)! Get Boris to be
prime minister, in fact. He is the only
possible candidate for the Conservatives
who has the flair, the experience, the ideas
and the sense of humour to rescue the party
and the country from its current malaise.
That he has opposition there is no doubt
but then so did Winston Churchill when
he was recalled by Lloyd George in 1917
to be minister of munitions, and again in
1940 when he became prime minister. To
sideline him at this time would be foolish in
the extreme and a further example of the
partys ineptitude.
George Burne
Woldingham, Surrey
Three-sided negotiation
Sir: Dr Kralls The view from Germany
(15 July), records the sadness of Germans
and other Europeans at the response of the
European Union to the departure of the
United Kingdom from the EU. The article
highlights two important and related truths,
which are seldom, if ever, appreciated.
The departure negotiations are, in
reality, three-sided. On the one hand there
is the future relationship between the UK
and 27 other countries. The essential point
for that relationship is that free trade in
goods and services is mutually beneficial.
If anyone doubts this proposition, it can be
proved mathematically through the law of
comparative advantage. On the other hand,
there is a discussion about the EU as an
organisation and what it secures from the
departure negotiations. In this regard the
interests of the EU are divergent from or
in opposition to the interests of both the
27 other countries and the UK. In order
to secure for itself benefits beyond any
value that it gives to its member countries,
the EU has to assign to itself a future
importance and omnipotence in order to
justify its demands. The UK negotiators
would do well to remember that the true
supplicant in the Brexit negotiations is not
the UK but rather the EU, which wants a
lot but gives nothing.
Timothy Straker
London WC1
Sectarian stitch-up
Sir: Why does the Conservative party not
field candidates in Ulster constituencies?,
asks John Nugee (Letters, 15 July).
Something must have stopped him studying
the Provinces electoral history over the last
25 years. Superseded by the Ulster Unionist
party in 1886, official Tory candidates,
approved by Conservative Central Office,
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
LETTERS
reappeared at the 1992 general election.
They stood in 11 of Northern Irelands
(then) 17 seats, winning a total of 44,608
votes (including 14,371 in North Down
where the Tory came second). Since then
Conservative party HQ has pumped in
money and advice, but to no avail. In June,
Tory candidates standing in seven seats
gained a mere 3,875 votes between them.
Sinn Fein and the DUP have turned Ulster
politics into an ugly sectarian duopoly.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
A mixed race
Sir: Simon Barnes wonders if tennis
player Johanna Konta is English (Game
changers, 15 July). It is a question answered
more than 200 years ago by Daniel Defoe,
who wrote in his poem The True Born
Englishman of our heterogenous populace
that: Fate jumbled them together, God
knows how;/ What eer they were theyre
true-born English now/scarce one
family is left alive,/ Which does not from
some foreigner derive.
Wynn Wheldon
London NW6
English rugby
Sir: Simon Barnes was pulling his punches
when discussing English rugby players who
are not actually English (Game changers,
15 July). While all international rugby
teams are guilty of adding foreign-born
players to their ranks under residency
rules which World Rugby is thankfully
changing the RFU is easily one of the
worst offenders.
Billy Vunipola was mentioned, but
what of his brother Mako (born in New
Zealand)? Other English players include:
Ben Teo and Denny Solomona (both
New Zealand), Nathan Hughes (Fiji),
Marland Yarde (St Lucia) and Manu Tuilagi
(Samoa). Even the England captain, Dylan
Hartley, isnt English, having been born and
raised in New Zealand. Ironically, Maro
Itoje (who has Nigerian parents), and who
was singled out by Mr Barnes in his piece, is
one of the most English players in the team,
having been born in England!
Evan Byrne
London SW9
Smoke damage
Sir: With respect, Mr Willis is not looking
beyond the tip of his irritated nose when
he complains about cigarette smoke
(Letters, 15 July). I dont care for cigarette
smoke either, but the smoking ban has
destroyed the rural public house, once
a cultural asset and now an endangered
species. Drive through the home counties
of London and mourn the derelict pubs,
their once-smart signs hanging forlorn.
Nick Dawson
London W12
Get involved, Melissa
Sir: Melissa Kite is obviously right to be
cross about not being allowed to ride her
horse in her village, and her point about
excessive signage is well-made (Real Life,
15 July). But the subsequent rant against
her parish councillors is slightly bonkers,
particularly when she seems to support
defacing signs and the smashing of car
windows.
My experience as a parish councillor
is that there are many who stand on the
sidelines, moaning about this and that, and
remarkably few who actually try to do
something for their village. Maybe its time
for Melissa to lend a hand.
Terence Blacker
Diss, Norfolk
WRITE TO US
The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London
SW1H 9HP; letters@spectator.co.uk
23
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Bending Londons listing rules to win
Saudi favour smacks of desperation
N
ow heres a tricky question. The
worlds largest oil company, poten-
tially worth six times as much as
ExxonMobil and ten times as much as
Royal Dutch Shell, wants to list its shares on
a major stock exchange next year, and has
indicated that the choice is between London
and New York. The companys initial public
offering of just 5 per cent of its shares prom-
ises a $100 billion deal that will generate a
fee bonanza for bankers, lawyers and PR
men in the chosen marketplace, with sever-
al more tranches to come. Clearly London
should go all-out to win this lucrative and
prestigious piece of business, which would
reconfirm the Citys pre-eminent place in
the financial world. But the company is Ara-
mco and its owners, the Saudi royal family,
are leveraging their power as Middle East
and Opec kingpins to demand special treat-
ment, as they always do. Just how far should
we bend over to accommodate them?
Touch your toes, boys, seems to be the
answer from the Financial Conduct Author-
ity, led by the Bank of Englands Andrew
Bailey. Without actually naming Aramco, the
FCA has come up with proposals to allow
foreign state-owned companies to list in the
LSEs premium category which normal- new business from further afield. And that
ly carries the highest level of governance
and requires 25 per cent of the shares to be
offered but with rule changes that blatant-
ly reduce protection for minority investors.
Most importantly, such companies would
no longer be required to do business with
their controlling state shareholder on arms-
length commercial terms, so investors will
only find out afterwards if the company has
sold significant assets back to its govern-
ment at below-market prices. Nor will inves-
tors have a vote on who represents them on
the companys board if they are unhappy
with the way their interests are treated.
If the Saudis asked for these exemptions,
we might ask why. Do they intend Aramco
(which has yet to produce an independent
audit of its oil reserves, for example) to con-
duct itself like other global energy compa-
nies whose shares are publicly traded, or to
24
continue as their private fiefdom but with
the benefit of being able to scoop up inter-
national investors cash? And if New York
is their only alternative destination its sure-
ly questionable whether we need to offer
them everything they demand. American
regulators would certainly insist on a higher
degree of scrutiny, while at the political
level there is the unpredictability of Donald
Trump to contend with, as well as an embar-
rassment of lawsuits by victims of the 9/11
attacks accusing the Saudi government of
supporting terrorists.
The Brexit angle
Cementing Londons claim to the Aramco
mandate was clearly on Theresa Mays agen-
da when she visited Riyadh in April with
LSE chief Xavier Rolet in her entourage
and there we glimpse the Brexit angle
to this story. The LSE has been knocked
sideways by the collapse of its proposed
merger with Deutsche Brse of Germany.
For fear of being reduced to a second-tier
offshore exchange while Frankfurt seizes its
big chance to become the hub of European
capital markets, London is eager to attract
vided 14 million of funding for the first six
means welcoming privatisation listings from
places not best known for their account-
ing standards, business probity or general
attachment to democracy and the rule of
law: Kazakhstan and Russia spring to mind,
as well as Saudi Arabia.
Those who rub their hands at the fee
prospects of Aramcos listing argue that this
is an example of the need for pragmatism
in expanding our trade horizons after Brex-
it: the City has always done business with
Johnny Foreigner, whatever his funny habits,
and sophisticated investors will simply price
such shares on their merits, marking them
down if they have governance faults.
But bending investor-protection rules in
order to usher representatives of unsavoury
regimes into the LSEs premium enclo-
sure is akin to offering them seats in Wim-
bledons Royal Box, waiving the dress code
and saying: Oh no, your eminence, of course
you dont have to switch off your phone.
Maybe it has to be done, but it smacks of
desperation.
Regeneration Game
Im a huge fan of Game of Thrones, the
epic television drama that has returned for
a seventh season. This is a show that offers
wisdom as well as bloody excitement and
parables for the Conservative leadership
struggle, though I hope well never have to
watch Theresa May emulate Cersei Lannis-
ters naked walk of shame. Its also a rich
source of aphorisms for management gurus,
emphasising as it does the importance of
succession planning, the dangers of debt
(especially to the merciless Iron Bank of
Braavos), and the need to be prepared for a
long economic winter ahead.
But most of all, Game of Thrones shows
how the UKs strengths in the creative
industries can be deployed to regenerate
depressed areas. Much of it is filmed at the
Titanic Studios in Belfasts old shipyards,
and on location around Northern Ireland. A
quango called Northern Ireland Screen pro-
series, and estimates that 146 million came
back in spending, not least by Thronie
tourists while a world-class skills base
has been built up and busloads of our finest
actors have been kept in steady work.
My Belfast correspondent, currently
queuing to be a battle-scene extra, tells me
the impact of Game of Thrones has been
really remarkable, a great boost to the econ-
omy of the entire region. DUP leader Arlene
Foster, in her previous role as enterprise
minister, was eager to salute the show as the
best thing to happen to Northern Irelands
post-Troubles image abroad a curious
example of a real modern conflict being
effaced by a fictional cod-medieval one.
And if the shows contribution passes 200
million after the final series next year, thats
200 million which Tory ministers wont have
to bung Arlene to keep her onside.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
 ON LOAN FROM THE BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Graham Robb admires
a poet who writes, like
W.H. Auden, in praise
of limestone
James Walton discovers
that imagining Stalins
sickbed is a strangely
enjoyable experience
Henry Keswick takes
another gleeful swipe at his
old enemy, Chris Patten
James Delingpole worries
that Game of Thrones has
become a paean to third-
wave feminism
Deborah Ross suggests
logging on to Wikipedia
before watching Dunkirk
Lloyd Evans suspects
Queen Anne was written
by Google Translate on
the wrong setting

Young Man Wearing

a Cloak (16th century),
attributed to Franois
Clouet or Daniel
Dumonstier
Martin Gayford p39
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 25
BOOKS & ARTS
A strange vibration
The original hippy message was innocent and pure before the
summer of love turned to the winter of exploitation, says Mick Brown
In Search of the Lost Chord:
1967 and the Hippy Idea
by Danny Goldberg
Icon Books, 14.99, pp 280
Among the many curiosities revealed in this
book, few are more startling than the fact
that at the height of the so called summer
of love in 1967 the British historian Arnold
Toynbee, on a visit to San Francisco, made his
way to the Haight-Ashbury district hippy
central to catch a concert by one of the
Bay Areas most popular bands, Quicksilver
Messenger Service. Just what Toynbee, who
was 78 at the time, made of the groups epic
exercise in free form, psychedelic improvi-
sation, The Fool, Goldberg does not men-
tion. But he does tell us that elsewhere in
the Haight, at around the same time, Dame
Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were
being busted at a party where pot was being
smoked, and that Nureyev performed a jet
into the back of a police van.
By then the Haight, as the district was
known, was to all intents and purposes
finished. Hippies had been the subject of
a cover story in Time magazine, and the
Haight was fast being populated by teenage
runaways, panhandlers, drug dealers and
assorted charlatans, a human zoo for gawp-
ing tourists in Gray Line buses, pausing only
to buy Love Burgers from an enterprising
merchant.
The summer of love was giving way
to the winter of exploitation. In October
1967, a group of community elders organ-
ised a mock funeral procession through
the Haight to mark the passing of Hippie,
devoted son of the media, suggesting that
from now on the acceptable term would be
free men. It would never catch on.
San Francisco, flowers in your hair, free
love it all seems as remote and unreal as
a fever-dream.
Danny Goldberg was a teenager in the
1960s, growing up in New York in a liberal
Jewish family. He was exposed to drugs and
student radicalism, became a rock journal-
ist, then a record executive and the manager
of Nirvana. Old enough to have savoured
1967 without fully digesting it, he has writ-
ten a book that sits halfway between social
history and memoir.
He describes how a multitude of differ-
ent elements the fight for civil rights, the
26
BOOKS
war in Vietnam, folk protest music, a grow-
ing disenchantment with materialism and
all forms of authority began to coalesce
to create a single movement, if one can
describe something so inchoate, amorphous
and varied in its ideas and objectives as a
movement, that would come to constitute
what Arnold Toynbee called a red warning
light for the American way of life.
The seedbed for the movement was the
Haight a neighbourhood of run-down,
Victorian wood-frame houses, settled by
artists, musicians and bohemians.
The principal catalyst, of course, was
drugs, notably LSD. The author Ken
Kesey, who had first sampled the drug as
a volunteer for hospital tests being con-
ducted surreptitiously on behalf of the
CIA, spread the word through a series of
acid tests in and around San Francisco, at
which the Grateful Dead acted as informal
house-band.
In October 1966, the American govern-
ment outlawed LSD. Three months later,
San Francisco, owers in your
hair, free love it all seems as
remote as a fever-dream
in January 1967, more than 30,000 peo-
ple gathered in San Franciscos Golden
Gate Park to protest against the new law
at the first Human Be-In, or Gathering
of the Tribes, as it was called: the tribes,
in this case, being hippies from the Haight,
anti-war radicals from across the Bay in
Berkeley, unreconstructed Beats from an
earlier generation, Hells Angels, assorted
free-thinkers and oddballs and the Diggers
an anarchist group, named after the 17th-
century English radicals, who advocated the
abolition of money and pioneered free food
programmes on the Haight. It was at this
gathering that Timothy Leary uttered what
would become the mantra of the movement
turn on, tune in, drop out.
Ronald Reagan, in 1967 newly installed
as governor of California, defined a hippie
as someone who looks like Tarzan, walks
like Jane and smells like Cheetah. Gold-
berg offers a more positive definition. It was
to strive to be a happy and good person,
observing the moral imperative to fight for
civil rights and against the war, and abide by
the spiritual notion that there were deeper
values than fame and fortune. Peace and
love. As a movement it was Dionysian,
idealistic, utopian, spiritual without being
conventionally religious. The term Gold-
berg uses to summarise the prevailing
mood is agape the Greek word distin-
guishing universal love from interpersonal
love (eros).
Goldberg recounts his own epiphany
after taking LSD for the first time not
the quasi-religious experience described
by Kesey and that other apostle of acid,
Timothy Leary, but a more down-to-earth
realisation that, having been brought up to
believe that everything in life was deep
and serious, drugs gave him permission to
be happy.
Goldberg writes in a style that is more
methodical than inspired, and he is clearly
more interested in some aspects of the era
than others. The chapters on music and
this is strange, given his own background
are curiously perfunctory, the pen por-
traits of leading artists of the day such as the
Grateful Dead, Phil Ochs and Country Joe
and the Fish as devoid of colour and anima-
tion as Wikipedia entries. Faced with having
to say something about the most signifi-
cant recording of 1967, Sgt Peppers Lonely
Hearts Club Band, Goldberg simply gives
up, admitting: I have nothing to add to the
thousands who have analysed the albums
music.
The rise of the Black Power movement
Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali
(idolised by pot-smoking hippies) and race
riots and the growing interest in eastern
religions are dispatched in a similarly des-
ultory manner. There is much in this book
to digest rare is a volume whose index
includes Thoreau, Chogyam Trungpa, Billy
Graham, the Black Panthers and Donald
Trump. But it suffers from the lack of a
developing narrative, and often seems stilt-
ed and episodic.
One of the more striking aspects of
the era was how the erosion of tradition-
al forms of authority created a vacuum
into which other forms of authority, both
benign and malignant, could enter. Haight
was full of lost sheep in search of a good
shepherd, and street-corner gurus, cults
and instant religions flickered like moths
around a bright light.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
 REX FEATURES
It was a setting in which a sociopath and
conman like Charles Manson could, and
did, flourish. Manson recruited his fam-
ily of drug casualties and runaways on the
streets of the Haight.
In the haze of good intentions and
unrealisable goals free love, the abolition
of money, the end of war, universal peace
and harmony and a movement rudder-
less in the current of its convictions (as
another writer on the period, Richard Gold-
stein, has described it), the abiding question
was, who was in charge?
The answer, of course, was nobody. The
Diggers disdained the hippies and the rad-
icals. The radicals, exemplified by the self-
styled cheerleaders of the movement Jerry
Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, disdained the
hippies for their abdication from serious
political work. The hippies just wanted
everybody to love everybody else and
thought the radicals were just the same old
control-freaks in new costumes.
Jerry Garcia, the good-humoured leader
of the Grateful Dead, was appalled when
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
Timothy Leary apostle of acid and,
according to Richard Nixon, the most
dangerous man in America
at the Human Be-In, Jerry Rubin mounted
the dais and started haranguing the crowd
about the need for political protest:
It was every asshole who told people what to
do. The words didnt matter. It was the angry
tone. It scared me. It made me sick to the
stomach.
Goldberg offers a lovely description of
a gathering of the movements elders, held
in February 1967 on the houseboat of Alan
Watts, the English Zen Buddhist, and includ-
ing the poet Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg
and Timothy Leary. At issue, as Watts put it,
was the question of whether to drop out or
take over. Ginsberg pointed out to Leary
that while he might have dropped out of his
job as a psychology teacher at Harvard, he
had multiple safety nets that would never
be available to the vast majority of teen-
agers who were taking acid and trying to fig-
ure out how to function in the world while
staying true to their new selves.
What, Ginsberg asked, can I drop
out of?
Your teaching at Cal, Leary snapped
back.
Ginsberg chuckled. But I need the
money.
The meeting moved on to discuss the
emergence of an ecological conscience and
how the new version of humanity would
abandon the cities for the countryside. There
will be deer grazing in Times Square in 40
years, Leary prophesied, with characteristi-
cally fanciful inaccuracy. (Goldberg harbours
a respect for Leary, whom Richard Nixon
hysterically called the most dangerous man
in America, that borders on the worshipful,
although readers of this book, and Robert
Greenfields definitive biography, are more
likely to conclude that Learys messianic faith
in LSD as the sacrament of the religion of
the future, and his own role as high priest,
shows just how deluded and egotistical he
really was.)
Nobody could answer the basic, practical
question of how to deal with the thousands of
teenagers descending on Haight, not know-
ing where theyre at, turning the putative
City on the Hill into a scene of crime-ridden
squalor.
What Goldbergs book vividly illustrates
is that there was much that was foolish, mis-
guided and naive about the hippy movement
(the origin of the hippy folk myth that smok-
ing bananas would get you high is chronicled
here in exacting and hilarious detail). But
there was also much that was innocent, and
pure, borne of what Goldberg calls commu-
nal sweetness. And what makes this book
ultimately beguiling is its absence of cynicism,
and Goldbergs touching faith in the original
hippy idea.
He tells a story of how in 1967 he was bare-
foot at San Francisco airport, trying to get on
a plane to return to New York for Thanks-
giving. An airline employee told him that
he could not board the plane without shoes.
Spying a young man with long hair, Gold-
berg explained his predicament and asked to
borrow his shoes. The young man gave them
up unhesitatingly. I am still not sure what is
more remarkable, Goldberg writes; the fact
that he gave his shoes to a stranger or that I
had the certainty he would do so. I am equally
certain that this would not have been possible
a year later.
He does not recount whether he returned
the shoes.
27
BOOKS & ARTS
The new age of the refugee
Ian Thomson
The Fear and the Freedom: How the
Second World War Changed Us
by Keith Lowe
Viking, 25, pp. 561
After years of estrangement in a foreign
land, what can immigrants expect to find
on their return home? The remembered
warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have
remained with some British West Indians for
over half a century of exile. Yet 100 chang-
es will have occurred since they left. Long
brooding over the loss of ones homeland
can exaggerate its charm and sweetness.
The first mass immigration to Brit-
ish shores occurred in the late 19th cen-
tury, when Ashkenazim arrived by the
thousand after escaping the pogroms in
Tsarist Russia. Many changed their names
and even their accents. The trappings of
orthodoxy beards, sidelocks left them
vulnerable to anti-Semitic abuse as they
settled in cramped London streets north of
Whitechapel Road.
Half a century later, ironically, the
descendants of those Victorian-era refu-
gees bitterly resented the presence of Jews
from Hitlerite Germany. Not only were
they seen as haughty, but they knew noth-
ing of British culture. An estimated 55,000
German-speaking Jews nevertheless stayed
I hear you come from Germany. Did
you know the Goerings? asked one
society hostess of George Weidenfeld
on in Britain after the war. Their descend-
ants are active now in the nations arts and
media. Of Britains Jewish refugee dynas-
ties, the Freuds are probably the most pro-
lific. The fashion designer Bella, the novelist
Esther, the publicist Matthew and the jour-
nalist Emma are all descended from Sig-
mund Freud, who escaped to London from
Nazi Vienna in 1938.
The historian Keith Lowe, a renowned
authority on the second world war, has
written sympathetically on the plight of
refugees from totalitarian Europe. His
2012 book, Savage Continent, offered
a grimly absorbing account of postwar
Europe and its lingering antagonisms. Its
sequel, The Fear and the Freedom, concen-
trates on the psychological consequences
of the 193945 conflict. Postwar propagan-
da and planning was effectively defined
by a new age of the refugee. An estimated
eight million Europeans had to be reha-
bilitated after the war. What to do with the
tide of human misery?
My mother, who fled from the Sovi-
et-overrun Baltic in the autumn of 1944,
assimilated so deeply within British society
that she could almost pass for an English-
28
woman. In London she read Country Life,
drove my fathers British-manufacture
Armstrong Siddeley saloon and said What
the dickens? quite a lot. Yet behind her
veneer of Englishness was another story
one of flight and terror.
Based on the case histories of 25 indi-
viduals, one for each chapter, The Fear and
the Freedom presents a vivid picture of
postwar loss and rehabilitation. Sam King,
a Jamaican who served in the RAF during
the war, loved Britain and the British royal
cult with its fripperies and rituals. Inevita-
bly as a West Indian room-seeker, King
experienced a degree of racism in postwar
London. He was surprised to find himself
categorised as coloured (Room to Let:
Regret No Koloured); in Jamaica the term
coloured applied to people of mixed race,
while in England it was one of the basic
words of boarding-house culture and of
polite vocabulary in general. Like the Jews
who came to Britain after the overthrow of
the Axis in 1945, King was often bewildered
by the clubs, codes and conformities of the
British. (The late George Weidenfeld, the
Jewish migr publisher, was taken aback
when a London society hostess asked him:
I hear you come from Germany. Did you Was the artist of Lascaux just desperate for peace?
know the Goerings?) But, as time went by,
so Sam came to assimilate gratefully into
British society.
Refugees who found themselves adrift
in the British zones of Germany after Hit-
Something in the water
lers defeat were often riven by feelings Graham Robb
of pain and foreboding. Allied aid work-
ers listened sympathetically to their tales Limestone Country
of loss and despair, but the local Germans, by Fiona Sampson
envious of K-rations and chocolate, often Little Toller Books, 13.49, pp. 182
conspired to thwart the new alliances; so
the war continued, pathetically, into peace- It was a shock, and an epiphany, says
time. As Lowe points out, the war had Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of
not brought freedom to areas of Europe her favourite places were built on and
claimed by the Red Army, but substituted out of limestone: the cosy Cotswold vil-
one form of tyranny for another: Hitlers lage of Coleshill, the shambolic hamlet of
for Stalins. Poland was liberated from Hit- Le Chambon in the Dordogne, the lime-
ler; but Poland was immediately afterwards stone Karst region of western Slovenia, and
occupied by Stalin. Neither of those words the honeycombed hills of Jerusalem and the
liberated, occupied is inaccurate Holy Land. Surely, I thought, this has to be
but in their juncture lies the sad fate of so more than mere coincidence.
many of the countries examined here by From a strictly demographic point of
Lowe. view, it isnt even much of a coincidence:
In his concluding chapter, Lowe con- about one quarter of the worlds popula-
siders Brexit calls for a curb on immigra- tion lives in limestone country or depends
tion. Make Britain great again but no on it for its water. But the mind of a poet
one seems to know what Britishness means can feed on the slightest chance connection.
any more. One thing seems certain. After While her neighbours in Coleshill go about
the destruction of peoples and places dur- their spongy, fossil-filled environment with
ing the war, British history can no long- nary a thought of chthonic forces, Samp-
er be viewed merely as a saga of warring son inhabits a half-soluble landscape of sub-
Saxons, Jutes, Angles and other German- terranean streams and geopathic stress cre-
ic tribes who settled in the 6th century ated by the compacted shells and skeletons
in post-Roman Britannia. We speak of of primeval sea-creatures.
Great Britain, after all, a country greater A professor of poetry and champion of
than the sum of its parts, diverse as they creative writing as a therapeutic tool, Samp-
may be. Lowes book, superbly researched son fortunately finds other people as inter-
and written, is the beginning of wisdom in esting as herself. This personal exploration
these things. of the ways in which a mind interacts with
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

a landscape might have been a gallery of
psycho-geographical selfies in picturesque
settings; which, to some extent, it is. She
relives an early love affair with a chain-
smoking Macedonian in the intractable,
dense and mysterious Slovenian Karst and
observes her past and present selves trying
on possible ways of living or dying in
limestone country. But this geologically
themed nature walk swarms with objective
facts, and the limestone itself hardly mat-
ters. A digressive and polymathic tour-guide,
Sampson has little time for the famous attrac-
tions of sedimentary rock all those boring
caverns with their tediously intrepid pothol-
ers and weird formations with silly names:
surely these attempts to make them more
interesting are an admission of dullness?
This bewitching little book, which might
have been designed to sit prettily in a lime-
washed cottage, is a long after-dinner causerie
on 1,000 different topics: vegetable garden-
ing, domestic plumbing, ludicrous peasant
lore, Galilean ornithology, the National Trust
and the Chicxulub extinction event. The psy-
ches like a carrier bag loaded with too many
groceries that first splits, then bursts as you
lift it out of the car. Its as if the self cant
contain the significance of the place.
Rooting through the spilled shopping is
an engrossing and informative experience.
The chapter on Le Chambon, where she and
her partner contentedly spend half the year,
is an unusually realistic description of a tatty
hamlet in la France profonde. This is not the
vulgar dream of idleness which Francophile
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
GETTY IMAGES
magazines refer to as the French
way of life. Le Chambon does have
the obligatory time-stopped feel-
ing and the picture-postcard views
the apricot mist, the white hair
and rosy cheeks of the farmer next
door but above it all is the con-
stant, inexplicable din: the snarl of
dogs and chainsaws, the screech of
poultry, the slamming of car doors
and wooden shutters, the pointless
yelling over short distances. The
hamlet deserves the epithet sleepy
only in the aftermath of the regular
neighbourly feast of foie gras and
truffles, roasted goose and lardy
spuds, bowls of chocolate, butter-
sodden pastries and staggeringly
potent homemade wine. Then comes
the brief silence of communal indi-
gestion and alcoholic stupor, while
the traditional rustic bonfire fills the
air with the smells of unseasoned
wood and tractor tyres doused in
petrol.
Even 200 years ago, British trav-
ellers to deepest France remarked
on this incongruous cacophony. This
might support Sampsons conten-
tion that stone creates a certain way
of life. In impervious granite coun-
try, water stays close to the surface;
in porous limestone country, it seeps away
underground and the human population
tends to be more sparse. To a native, the noise
apotropaically fills the wide spaces between
the scattered settlements. Le Chambon
lies only 25 km from the caves of Lascaux.
Those palaeolithic wall paintings might have
been an offering to gods of the sedimentary
underworld, but perhaps the prehistoric art-
ist was simply desperate for peace and quiet.
Even 200 years ago, British travellers
to deepest France remarked on the
constant, inexplicable din
Another system of limestone caves was
recently discovered near Le Chambon, and
it is no surprise to learn that the mazy cav-
erns are now filled with the sound of elec-
tro-drumming and disco glows of pink, blue
and green.
Back in sleepy Coleshill in the west
Oxfordshire Cotswolds, there are roaring
water pipes, the pervasive thrum of ama-
teur bell-ringing (so far and yet so near), the
humming of tin-roofed grain-dryers and the
continual soughing of the M4. Sampson and
her partner, both writers, must have the most
amazing powers of concentration, unless
this carrier bag of aperus is the poets wise
accommodation with distraction. Perhaps
there is, after all, something in the limestone
the subtle solidity of those extinct organ-
isms and the almost inaudible murmur of
subterranean streams.
Playing Stalin for laughs
James Walton
The Zoo
by Christopher Wilson
Faber, 12.99, pp. 239
Christopher Wilsons new novel is much
easier to enjoy than to categorise. And
enjoy is definitely the right word, even
though The Zoo tackles subject matter that
should, by rights, make for a punishingly
bleak read.
The narrator is 12-year-old Yuri, whose
misfortunes start with the fact that hes grow-
ing up in Moscow in 1953 and that a road
accident when he was six damaged his brain,
leaving him with a curious set of symptoms
that couldnt be worse suited to life under
Stalin: a total lack of guile, a tendency to ask
awkward questions and a face so angelically
trustworthy that everybody tells him their
deepest secrets.
Given that his wife is in a prison camp,
Yuris father Roman, a professor of veteri-
nary science at Moscow zoo, is understand-
ably worried that the authorities will come
for him next and one night they do. (Its
two secret policemen, Yuri announces char-
acteristically. A fat one whos out of breath,
and a skinny one with yellow teeth.) Their
reason for coming, though, is not what he
expected. Instead, he and Yuri are taken to a
dacha where Stalin is lying ill, and because
he believes the medical profession is riddled
with Jewish traitors has insisted on being
treated by a vet.
But even for a vet, suggesting that the
Man of Iron might be subject to such shame-
ful human weakness as a life-threatening
disease is highly dangerous and Roman
vanishes soon afterwards. Yuris face, mean-
while, works its magic again. Appointed
Stalins official food-taster and unofficial
confidant, he now has a ringside view of the
struggles for the succession among the Great
Fathers vicious underlings.
In clumsier hands, the decision to play
quite a lot of this for laughs albeit pitch-
dark ones could well have led to a quea-
sy mix of the heartless and the tasteless. Yet
Wilsons heightened realism and perfect con-
trol of tone mean that Stalins often comic
monstrosity never makes him any less mon-
strous. It also means that when the moments
of unalloyed horror come (and they do),
theyre all the more horrifying for stopping
our laughter in its tracks.
At one point, when Stalin rallies enough
to return to his old blood-curdling form,
Yuri finds himself both terrified and some-
how reassured that the man is still capable of
swearing freely and threatening clearly. Or,
as he puts it, in a way that will surely strike a
chord with anybody who reads this strange
and brilliant novel: It puts shivers through
me. It brings a smile to my face.
29
 BOOKS & ARTS
land reminds us, was widely
GETTY IMAGES
popular in sections of Brit-
ish society during the 1920s
and 1930s. Although always a
minority sport, Oswald Mose-
leys Blackshirts had their
own automobile club, holiday
camps, weddings and even
their own brand of cigarettes.
Moseley, a former Labour
minister and an accomplished
orator, drew thousands to his
meetings, preaching a popu-
list socialist message in which
he railed against housing
conditions and called for the
conscious control and direc-
tion of human resources for
human needs. If that sounds
familiar, its also worth not-
ing that many on the Left
were initially attracted by his
call for action against weak
and complacent govern-
ments allegedly in hock to the
wealthy few.
Anti-Semitism was
always part of the fascist
William Joyce better known as Lord Haw-Haw: package but in no one was it
an ideological enthusiast for fascism more virulent than in Joyce,
a natural hater whose pas-
sions and contradictions are
adeptly charted by Ireland. Amery was
The infamous four perhaps less ideological, his love affair
Alan Judd with fascism arguably an extension of his
rebellious, feckless and squalid youth. See-
The Traitors: A True Story of Blood, ing the rest of the world as sheep and him-
Betrayal and Deceit self as a heroic lone wolf, he took to drink
by Josh Ireland and drugs, masochism and male prostitu-
John Murray, 20, pp. 324 tion, carried a gun and a teddy bear and
had accumulated 74 motoring offences
Most books about British traitors feature by the age of 24. Like Joyce, he regarded
those who spied for Russia before and dur- Britain as terminally decadent and felt
ing the Cold War, making it easy to forget justified in taking arms (by propagandis-
that we also spawned a few who worked for ing from Germany) against a nation that
the Germans in the second world war. This had failed to live up to what it should have
book concerns four of them: John Amery, been. He ended up in Germany attempting
wastrel son of a Conservative cabinet min- to recruit British prisoners of war to fight
ister; William Joyce, the Irish-American for the Germans, with negligible success.
Nazi propagandist better known as Lord Eric Pleasant, son of a Norfolk game-
Haw-Haw; Harold Cole, soldier and petty keeper, was a weight-lifter and wrestler who
criminal who sent 150 or more Resistance had almost nothing in common with his fel-
members to their deaths; and Eric Pleasants, low traitors. He didnt drink, kept himself
a circus strong-man who disavowed nation- fit, felt no patriotic allegiance, was neither
al loyalties while donning German uniform. anti-Jewish nor anti-Bolshevist, indeed was
Their motives were mixed but, treachery virtually a pacifist he joined the Peace
apart, they had one thing in common: an Pledge Union, supporting appeasement.
insistence on their own rightness and thus Nowadays he might have described him-
their entitlement to whatever they wanted self as a citizen of the world. His creed was
at the expense of all others. Sorry, old man, himself that is, his right not to fight for
its just the luck of the war, you know, Cole or against anyone but to do as he pleased
said to a Frenchman as he betrayed him to (which later included shooting dead a thief
torture and death. and beating a fellow prisoner to death).
Cole was an unprincipled, naturally In Jersey when the Germans invaded, he
treacherous and criminal self-seeker who forsook pacifism, joined the underground
betrayed anyone and anything whenever it opposition and was caught and impris-
suited him. Amery and Joyce were ideologi- oned in Germany. There he volunteered
cal enthusiasts for fascism which, Josh Ire- to join the British Free Corps, a doomed
30
Nazi attempt to form a British SS unit (it
mustered only 27). He later wrote that he
joined to escape camp life and he certainly
made the most of his freedoms until caught
by the Russians postwar and sent to the
gulag. Eventually deported to Britain, he
was judged to have suffered enough and
was allowed to return to Norfolk, where he
lived a quiet life teaching judo and physical
education.
The others met earlier ends, Amery and
Joyce in appointments with Albert Pierre-
point, the hangman, and Cole in a gunfight
with French police, a swifter end than he
deserved. Irelands account of these men, at
first slightly confusing because of his use of
the buttonholing present tense and his often
unexplained access to their thoughts, feelings
and gestures, improves as the book goes on.
He comments intelligently on their motives
and describes enough of their worlds and
views to give us essential context. He wisely
doesnt speculate about what would happen
in equivalent circumstances now, but tells us
enough to make it hard not to.
By Patten or design?
Henry Keswick
First Confession: A Sort of Memoir
by Chris Patten
Allen Lane, 20, pp. 320
My old friend Richard Ingrams was
said always to write The Spectators
television reviews sitting in the next-
door room to the TV set. Im more
assiduous: I have actually read this
book under review. And Chris Pattens
latest memoir is a very enjoyable read the
account of a life of considerable privilege.
Born into a middle-class family in sub-
urban London, Patten won an exhibition to
Balliol before after a brief dalliance with
US politics he became a Conservative
apparatchik and, in due course, an MP. Once
hed reached the cabinet, he was a made man
and from his middle years onward gar-
nered a succession of agreeable posts, as the
last governor of Hong Kong, European com-
missioner, the odd university chancellorship
and chairman of the BBC Trust, while enjoy-
ing since 2005 a well-padded berth on the
red-leather benches of the House of Lords.
But though his memoir is more concise and
less ponderous than his speaking tone, it is
also often wrong-headed and delusory.
I must at the start declare an interest,
having spent five unhelpful years with Pat-
ten negotiating the future governance of
Jardine Matheson, an old established firm
of Scottish merchants trading in the China
Seas. We did not see eye to eye.
Nor do we now, as regards the future of
Hong Kong. Patten continues to be fear-
ful for the territory; and hes wrong. For 20
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
years the rule of law, as designated in the
Joint Declaration, has been sustained: the
judiciary has maintained its complete inde-
pendence and the Hong Kong government
has kept its transparency. Foreign merchants
have thrived and have not had rings run
round them by local tycoons, as Patten envis-
ages in his book. Of course there are some
blemishes. If certain red lines are crossed, the
Communist Party will always behave irra-
tionally. But this seldom affects the ordinary
citizen or the overall rule of law.
And theres some humbug here, too,
when it comes to the rule of law. As Pat-
ten does not mention, he was potentially
open to criminal investigation for breaking
the Official Secrets Act in filming The Last
Governor, a TV documentary about his
time in Hong Kong. The Attorney General
invoked the Shawcross Doctrine to rule that
it was not in the national interest that police
enquiries continue.
Patten is critical of the sinologists in the
Foreign Office led by the late Sir Percy Cra-
dock, but it would perhaps have been better
if he had listened a little more to advice and
understood the history of China and the rise
of the Communist Party. If he had negotiat-
ed more tactfully there might have been in
place by now universal suffrage with a select-
ed and approved list of candidates. It would
not have been full democracy as we know it,
but still better than the status quo.
Patten has been wise to understand
that independence for Hong Kong is in no
circumstances negotiable. He should also
understand that sovereignty means sover-
eignty.
The chapters on the Conservative party
are revealing of his character. I always found
him a bit of a snob; here, he piques himself on
membership of an informal dining group:
the Whips dubbed us the Blue Chips,
which gave a slight impression of a group of
weak-chinned and self-satisfied chaps who
thought themselves born to rule. He adds
with careful modesty:
There were indeed four proper toffs two
sons of marquesses, and two of earls (one of
them Irish, so perhaps he counts as four-fifths
toff) but the rest of us were a pretty mixed
bunch: middle-class scholarship boys on the
whole.
He saw himself as on the liberal wing of
the party but many in the party deplored
his role in removing their hero Lady
Thatcher. He was a divisive character. I
was present at Alistair McAlpines elec-
tion night party in 1992, the year when Pat-
ten cruelly lost his Bath seat to the Liberal
Democrats; and it is true that a number of
the people present cheered his loss as a
Conservative gain.
There are also characteristically pro-
vocative chapters on the BBC, the Catholic
Church and Oxford. He was not a suitable
chairman of the BBC. He was a poor admin-
istrator of a large bureaucratic organisa-
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
tion; and had been the beneficiary, even
before he arrived, of his chum the younger
Dimbleby and John Birt, driving a cart and
horses through the rules of the BBC pro-
ducers guidelines in order to promote him
in The Last Governor. Birt privately called
it an opportunity too good to miss, but the
BBC hierarchy knew perfectly well that the
guidelines forbade the anchor-presenter to
be a close friend of a documentarys subject.
Its not an episode that Patten addresses in
his book.
Such flexibility is characteristic. When
Pope Benedict XVI visited England in 2010
Patten was the lead organiser of the event,
and he has also advised the Vatican on mod-
ern communications. The Pope cannot be in
error on matters of faith and doctrine, and
the Vatican does not approve of same-sex
marriage; but Patten showed his independ-
ence of the Churchs teaching by voting for
the change in the House of Lords. As he puts
it: I am a Catholic who has occasional doubts
and disagreements
The Oxford chapters are less controver-
sial and more filled with pageantry and the
opportunity to dress up. Pattens charming
and modest music-publisher father, Frank,
would have enjoyed all this. He published
the lovely song She Wears Red Feathers
(and a Hula-Hula Skirt). His son has done
the same in life.
angles. (Yes, this book manages to make
The cold grip of fear
Daniel Hahn
You Should Have Left
by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the
German by Ross Benjamin
Riverrun, 10, pp. 110
A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house
somewhere up an Alp in early December.
The air is clear, the views stunning, the
isolation splendid. He rented the home
through Airbnb surprisingly cheaply,
as it happens. He has come to this place
for a family holiday with his wife Susanna
and their four-year-old, Esther, but also to
get some peace and quiet in which to con-
centrate on his current job. His last movie,
Besties, was a smash hit, and now the pro-
ducer wants a screenplay for Besties 2,
and the sooner the better. And as we read
through his notebook, in which hes hoping
the screenplay will take shape, the whole
set-up seems quite promising, really.
True, his initial ideas for the movie
arent quite as brilliantly inspired as hed
hoped, but theyll do for now. And true,
his relationship with Susanna a beau-
tiful actress somewhat out of his league
is under a bit of strain for reasons well
discover; but itll probably work itself out.
And yes, true, theres something odd about
the house, but oh, Im sure its nothing to
worry about
Thats where hes wrong, of course:
there most definitely is something to
worry about. The temporarily disappearing
reflections, for starters. That thing with the
baby monitor. The woman from the photo
in the laundry room. The unexplained mes-
sages. The whole business with the right
the basic rules of geometry really scary.)
The working notebook is soon overtak-
en not only by domestic matters but also
a sense of menacing claustrophobia, even
in these vast open spaces, as the charac-
ters and readers teeter on the edge
of an inexplicable abyss. And it gets worse
and worse, as a mind seems to lose its grip,
and a perfectly normal, logical setting slips
chillingly out of control.
Our novelist, however, is in total con-
trol. Daniel Kehlmann first made his name
in the Anglosphere a decade ago with
Measuring the World, a large-scale best-
selling historical novel about two early
19th-century German scientists. Here he
and his translator Ross Benjamin squeeze
an enormous amount of readerly anxiety
out of very few carefully placed words (the
entire book is only 110 tiny pages long).
One interruption reads simply, Some-
thing strange just happened. He avoids
explaining too much, so the unnamed nar-
rators doubt is our doubt, and we like
him are never quite sure of where we
31
BOOKS & ARTS
stand. Which parts of this constantly self-
undermining story do we believe?
Using some neat formal trickery and
cleverly suggestive atmosphere, this is
a story about a marriage in trouble, and
about a seemingly impossible desire to pro-
tect a young child from threatening reality,
but also about something else, something
unavoidable and powerful but terrifyingly
vague (and maddeningly hard to describe
usefully in a review). At first glance there
may not seem much to this little book, but
it has a funny way with dimensions its
effects are amplified, and they linger.
A choice of
short stories
Houman Barekat
It cant be easy to switch between editing
others peoples fiction and writing your
own: how do you suspend that intuitive
critical impulse? Gordon Lish, who is best
known as the editor of Raymond Carvers
short stories but has also written plenty of
fiction in his own right, is familiar with this
dilemma, and in White Plains (Little Island
Press, 18.99) he has fun with it. These sto-
ries are replete with parenthetical um-ing
and ah-ing over synonyms, punctuation
and grammatical solecisms a prolix
testament to the agonies of prose com-
position: Losing tone here, not retaining
purchase on stance here, falling to pieces
with the cowards frolic along the phrase-
ological here. When Lish declares, at the
outset of one story, that every utterance
in this book has been coddled he really
means it.
The material collected here ranges
from short fictions such as Naugahyde,
a terse, elliptical dialogue between a mar-
ried man and his mistress, to meander-
ing soliloquies such as Declaration of
Dependence, in which the author gives
out his personal telephone number and
encourages the reader to give him a call
only if you are... feeling truly up to it
and up for it. Lishs riffing whimsy and
winkingly mannered prose style wont be
everyones cup of tea; readers who wish
to preserve their sanity would be well
advised to dip in and out of White Plains,
rather than read it in one stretch.
Altogether more accessible is Joshua
Ferriss The Dinner Party (Viking, 14.99)
which teases wry humour out of stagnant
or moribund relationships in contempo-
rary New York. A man who comes clean
about an affair pleads, in mitigation, that
everybody else is at it too; a woman con-
soles her sexually underperforming part-
ner with a damning pat on the head. Ferris
gently lampoons the hapless obliviousness
of his male protagonists, who are jolted
out of their complacency by the decisive
32
The Films of John le Carr
The films of John Le Carr
Are impossible to understand
The Tardis more pleasurable
More plausible
Anything mildly erotic.
When Ahmed opens his shirt
You can see hes
Been badly done over.
Possibly some competitive
Middle-aged Old Etonians
Have got him to betray
His family
In Gentlemens Clubs where
Everyone works for both sides,
A kind of togetherness
On opulent stairwells
Ever upwards to the big bow-wow.
The end is so complicated
Everyone only pretends recognition
Utter stupidity would be a better judge
Thus deprived from the cinema
And glad to be back
In some kind of real
Time travel,
I hurry home to watch
Part One of
Casanova in Blackpool.
Tim Thomas
actions of their partners. In their sensitive
rendering of the emotional distance that
opens up often with jarring suddenness
in the terminal phase of formerly inti-
mate relationships, these vignettes call to
mind Joseph Conrads poignant observa-
tion that We live as we dream alone.
But there are also flickers of warmth.
The Breeze depicts the restlessness of a
woman whose boyfriend is an inveterate
homebody; her enjoyment of their evening
on the town is ruined by her niggling sense
that she is missing out on the possibility
of a different night, better companions,
competing visions of a finer life. It feels
for all the world like yet another break-up
is in the offing, but the story ends on an
ambiguous note, so perhaps they will mud-
dle through.
Mary Gaitskills Dont Cry (Serpents
Tail, 8.99) offers a bleaker take on
male-female relations, and sex in particu-
lar. In An Old Virgin, a doctor indulges
in unwholesome speculations about her
patient, a fortysomething virgin: she imag-
ined her virginity like a strong muscle
between her legs, making all her other mus-
cles strong, making everything in her extra
alive. Mirror Ball is a parable about a cas-
ual encounter in which the man holds back
his soul whereas the woman is afraid of giv-
ing hers away; when she relents, Her little
demon consorts punched their fists in the air
and cheered.
This framing of sexual contact as a
humiliation of our personal particularity
implies a somewhat passive and pessimis-
tic view of female sexuality, and the prig-
gish vibe is not helped by some rather icky
descriptions: a young womans vagina is her
warm spring darkness, and a man performs
cunnilingus like a bear picking berries
with the elegant black finger of its tongue
(this occurs, aptly, on page 69).
There is nonetheless something grimly
compelling about the Darwinist biological
determinism that informs Gaitskills inter-
est in the crude cinder blocks of male and
female down in the basement, holding up
the house. A conversation in the collec-
tions opening story, pointedly set at the
start of the Reagan years, establishes the
mood: Weakness is really evil in a way. Its
like being connected with the ugly things in
the world. Youre the clubfooted straggler
endangering the herd. You make people
depressed and sentimental.
Jim Shepard might want to steer clear
of Gaitskills book. In an impressively futile
gesture, Shepard some time ago declared
war on the psychological turn in fiction
what he calls the tyranny of the epipha-
ny. To this end the stories in The World to
Come (Riverrun, 16.99) are resolutely plot-
driven, and firmly situated in the material
world: civil and military infrastructure fea-
tures prominently, as does ecology.
Safety Tips for Living Alone tells of a
disaster in which an Air Force base in the
Atlantic is a destroyed by a storm, killing
many servicemen. The narrative alternates
between the unravelling of the disaster and
the distress of the wives back home. Con-
cerns had been raised about the safety of the
structure, and ignored; state incompetence
was to blame. Similarly, the narrator of Pos-
itive Train Control laments the deregula-
tion of rail safety and its deleterious impact
on the management of hazardous materi-
als. Elsewhere we have a journal of a 19th-
century sea voyage, an account of a
17th-century volcanic eruption leading to a
tsunami, and a plodding tableau of agrarian
hardship. (The most fortunate of us persist
without prospering.)
The collections overriding themes a
plaintive mistrust of governmental author-
ity, and timorous awe at mans impotence in
the face of natures destructive power are
apposite to our times, but the competently
pedestrian prose belongs to an earlier era.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
 ARTS

PHOTO BY CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY IMAGES

Ivory towers
As one of his greatest films
returns to the cinema,
James Ivory talks to William Cook
about his 50-year career

G
reat novels rarely make great mov-
ies, but for half a century one direc-
tor has been showing all the others
how its done. James Ivory has worked his
magic on all sorts of authors, from Kazuo
Ishiguro to Henry James, and this week the
finest of all his adaptations returns to the
big screen. A film thats almost two and a
half hours long, non-stop talking, set in the
Edwardian era who would have thought
that would be such a huge success? says
Ivory, on the phone from his home in upstate
New York. Yet somehow, this taciturn direc-
tor turned a wordy novel by E.M. Forster
into a gripping drama. How did he do it?
By creating the ideal setting, meticulous in
every detail, then stepping back and giving
his creative colleagues room to breathe.
Howards End is an object lesson in
directing without vanity. Ivorys artist-
ry is invisible he casts his spells behind
the scenes. He gives his actors time and
space to get inside their characters. Youre
absorbed by them because you believe in
them, and because you believe in them, you
care about them, even when theyre just sit-
ting around in stuffy drawing rooms, writing
letters and drinking tea. Emma Thompson
won an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe
for her performance as Margaret Schlegel,
a decent woman torn between idealism
and bourgeois respectability, but she could
have shared these prizes with several of her
co-stars. Like all the best conductors, Ivory
allows his soloists to shine. Filmmaking is
like making music, its a collaborative effort
a lot of people have a lot to say when
youre making a movie, and youve got to lis-
ten to them, he says. You have to do whats
good for the film. You have to put ego aside.
Howards End may be remembered as
Ivorys greatest movie, but his ability to
tease out great performances is by no means
confined to just one film. Lee Remick was
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
never better than in The Europeans; Chris-
topher Reeve was never better than in The
Bostonians. Ivory treats his actors as equals,
and from Greta Scacchi in Heat and Dust to
Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a
View, his stars have always risen to the occa-
sion. Has Hugh Grant ever surpassed his
role in Maurice? Has Anthony Hopkins
ever surpassed his role in The Remains of
The Day?
So what makes Ivory such a master film-
maker? Sure, hes a talented auteur; but
above all, its because hes a superb team
player for 44 years, the quieter half of the
film industrys leading duo.
James Ivory was born in California in
1928, raised in Oregon, and studied film-
making at the University of Southern Cal-
ifornia. In 1959, he met the Indian film
producer Ismail Merchant, who became his
companion and artistic partner. He want-
ed to make films with good stories well- physical energy.
written, well-acted stories that made sense
and were truthful and civilised, says Ivory.
In 1961 they formed Merchant Ivory Pro-
ductions and for the next 44 years they were
inseparable, making dozens of films togeth-
er. Critical acclaim arrived early, but they
had to wait a long time for their first block-
buster. Wed been making films for 20 years
before we had a really huge hit.
They made their first four films in India
before relocating to America, and India
remained a part of them, throughout their
joint career. Wherever he was and whatev-
er he did, there was India he was India,
says Ivory, of his soulmate. His Indian-ness
was part of everything he did. Their life-
long bond was broken only by Merchants
death, from an abdominal ulcer, aged 68.
Otherwise theyd surely still be making mov-
ies together. Since Merchant died, in 2005,
Ivory has made a few more films but, both
professionally and personally, his relation-
ship with his beloved Ismail was clearly the
fulcrum of his life. He really was fearless,
remembers Ivory. He had tremendous drive
and enthusiasm and optimism, and endless
From the 1960s to the 1990s, Merchant
Ivory was a synonym for sophisticated cin-
ema intelligent, sensitive stories, in for-
eign or period settings, often adapted from
classic fiction and always immaculately told.
33
BOOKS & ARTS
They could be radical and daring (Maurice
was a trailblazer for gay cinema), but in an
era of sexploitation flicks and shoot em ups,
the brand was a badge of quality, a guarantee
to moviegoers that they were in safe hands.
Their personalities were perfectly
attuned, in private and in public. Ivory was
(mostly) reserved while Merchant was ebul-
lient. His powers of persuasion were leg-
endary, but he was charming rather than
bludgeoning. It made all the difference in
the world. Big stars were keen to work for
them, even for smaller fees they knew the
budgets would be modest, but that produc-
tion standards would be first rate. Backers
were delighted to support intellectual films
that actually made a profit: A Room with a
View cost less than $4 million and took more
Their personalities were perfectly
attuned. Ivory was reserved while
Merchant was ebullient
than $70 million at the box office. At that
point the studios came to us, thinking we had
some secret, that we could make these films
for very little money which would then make
a lot of money for everybody and get rave
reviews. After half a lifetime together, their
partnership had become instinctive. Ismail
and I didnt need to talk. Somehow, we were
just like one machine, moving forward. I
trusted him utterly and he trusted me, and I
think we never let each other down.
Yet despite the cinematic finesse, Ivory
has never been afraid to fight his corner.
In James Ivory in Conversation: How Mer-
chant Ivory Makes Its Movies (published by
the University of California Press in 2005)
he described uber-producer Harvey Wein-
stein as a large, restless and ambitious man,
unlovely in manner and speech, possess-
ing no artistic talent of any kind (it could
almost be a put-down from one of his Henry
James adaptations). Of course the Miramax
co-founder is distinguished by the stature of
his foes, but most directors lack the balls to
bell the cat. Not Ivory. All he has is money
and the power that gives him, claimed Ivory,
in that book. He also took a stylish swipe at
British film director Alan Parker, who once
said Merchant Ivory hailed from the Laura
Ashley school of film-making. His joke
will be remembered long after Parkers own
films are forgotten, quipped Ivory (actually,
for those of us who remember Laura Ash-
leys elegant furnishings with much fond-
ness, it wasnt quite so much of an insult as
one might suppose).
Cinephiles thought of Merchant Ivory as
a duo, but they were actually part of a trio.
The novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala pro-
vided the backbone of their work, writing
the scripts for 23 of their movies, from the
screenplays of her own novels, The House-
holder and Heat and Dust (which won the
Booker Prize) to her Oscar-winning adapta-
34
tions of A Room with a View and Howards
End.
What made her such a good scriptwriter
all along was that she was a very, very good
novelist, says Ivory. Usually film directors
dont have the luck and the opportunity to
work with a first-class fiction writer. Her
death, in 2013, left Ivory the last one stand-
ing, and marked the passing of an age. In
todays fragmented culture, where relation-
ships are so fleeting, its hard to imagine a
director, producer and screenwriter work-
ing together so happily and productively for
more than 40 years. We all knew each other
very well the longer we worked together,
the better we got, he recalls. We were all
very close. We had different apartments in
the same building, and we were constantly
meeting and talking. We were like a family.
Jhabvala also turned him on to Henry
James. Hes an author whos made for you!
she told him. You would love his books!
She gave him a copy of The Europeans,
the film of which became Merchant Ivorys
first commercial hit in 1979. She knew my
strengths and she also knew my weakness-
es, says Ivory, of this multifaceted, multina-
tional writer. And without her, there might
have been no film of Howards End. Thats
the mountain you want to try and climb,
she told Ivory, after hed filmed A Room
with a View and Maurice. Ivory reread the
book and decided to proceed, and although
hes made many other fine films, before
and since, his canon would be incomplete
without it. Indeed, the most famous lines in
this book could be a manifesto for his film-
making: Only connect! Only connect the
prose and the passion, and both will be exalt-
ed, and human love will be seen at its height.
A restoration of Howards End is at selected
cinemas nationwide from 28 July.
Television
Dethroned by feminism
James Delingpole
Im a bit worried about Game of Thrones
(Sky Atlantic). Not seriously worried:
theres too much money invested, too much
narrative hinterland accrued, too much fan-
loyalty not to frustrate, too engaging a cast,
too brilliant an original conception for the
makers to cock it up too badly.
Nevertheless, there were a couple of
things that troubled me about the first epi-
sode of season seven. One: Ed Sheeran.
Hes not the first pop star to make a cameo
appearance in Thrones that honour fell a
while back to purveyors of epic, weirdy-war-
bly, Icelandic whale-music-rock, Sigur Ros
but hes definitely the most obtrusive.
When Sigur Ros did it, no sooner had
they started singing than they were driven
offstage by a hail of coins from an unim-
pressed King Joffrey. With Ed Sheeran, on
the other hand, we had to endure a full scene
of him sitting there in the woods, being ami-
able Ed Sheeran with his ginger Ed Sheeran
hair singing an Ed Sheeran-style song and
being himself. And you just sat there think-
ing: Here I am watching Ed Sheeran doing a
cameo in Game of Thrones. Surely the very
least they could have arranged is for him to
have been stabbed, or something?
Worse, though, for my money, was the
scene at Winterfell, which has been invaded
by something more terrifying and insidious
even than White Walkers: feminism. Sansa
Stark, for example. Through the six previ-
ous seasons, her main job has been to act as
the most put-upon descendant of Ned Stark
multiply raped by her evil husband the
Bastard of Bolton, manipulated by Little-
finger, eventually to be rescued by strong
female Brienne of Tarth. Less of a character,
more of a plot device to evoke sympathy for
the House Stark, and fire up our desire for
revenge.
Now, suddenly, shes full of ideas. Theres
Jon Snow trying to make plans. And here
she is undermining him at public meetings
with silly ideas of her own. Then, after hes
put her down and asserted his authority, fox-
ily congratulating him in private on his wis-
We had to endure a full scene of Ed
Sheeran being Ed Sheeran. Why was
he not stabbed or something?
dom with an intimacy that makes you half
wonder: Oh good Lord. Not another Cersei/
Jamie scenario, surely?
Meanwhile, Winter is coming and the
White Walkers whove been dithering
frightfully since the Battle of Hardhome
two seasons ago, I must say are finally on
their way. So one of Jon Snows edicts is for
all the people of the realm from 10 upwards
boys and girls, he stresses to be trained
in spear work, etc.
Some of the men present gruff, untu-
tored Northern chauvinists that they are
pour scorn on this notion. But then up
pipes plucky, strong, completely made-up
female Lyanna Mormont, Lady of Bear
Island. She may be only about 10 and have
but a handful of men under her command.
Most importantly, though, she has already
read the entire collected works of whatev-
er the Seven Kingdoms equivalent are of
Germaine Greer, Susie Orbach and Betty
Friedan, and is certain that girls her age with
rudimentary training are as well suited to
taking on armies of semi-invincible undead
creatures as the next man. Course they are,
petal.
Meanwhile, strong female Arya Stark
(plot spoiler alert though if you havent
seen it why the hell youre reading this now I
do not know) has opened the episode by sin-
glehandedly wiping out the entire family of
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
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BOOKS & ARTS

Walder Frey (using her special face-chang-

COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES

ing skills taught by Jaqen Hghar). Strong
female Cersei Lannister is plotting her next
move having employed her feminine wiles
to destroy the once-overmighty Sparrow
religious movement. And strong female
Daenerys Targaryen is, of course, preparing
to take over the Iron Throne aided by her
vast army of fanatically devoted eunuchs
and her dragons.
What am I saying here? Look, individu-
ally, I love all the strong female characters
(Arya has always been my favourite, as
she probably is yours too) and their won-
drous antics. But collectively all this female
empowerment gets a bit relentless, not to say
implausible. If youre going to create a bril-
liantly realised cod-medieval, macho fantasy
world of arms and armour, why undermine
all that hard-won verisimilitude by turning
it into a paean to third-wave feminism for
insufferably woke millennials?
Why if this nonsense goes on, theyll be
turning Dr Who into a woman next, you
mark my words!

Cinema
Visual, visceral, confusing
Deborah Ross
Dunkirk
12A, Nationwide

Christopher Nolans Dunkirk has already

been described as a masterpiece and a
glorious, breathtakingly vivid triumph, but
we need to be cautious. Look at all the fuss
about Baby Driver and what an average film
that turned out to be. This certainly isnt
your regular war film no one, for exam-
ple, says its quiet and is then told: yes, too
damned quiet but in wanting to deliv-
er a visceral, visual experience, without the
hindrance of exposition or back stories, the
narrative is often confusing and doesnt add
up to much emotionally. I suppose I should
also add that, aside from the odd glimpse
of a nurse, there are no roles for women,
although, in this instance, I have decided not
to call for any kind of boycott. (I must be
softening in my old age.)
This account of the Allied evacuation of
occupied France in 1940, which still seems
entirely miraculous 338,226 men were
rescued is told from three perspectives:
land, air and sea. By land, it is Tommy (Fionn
Whitehead), a teenage squaddie who, at the
films outset, is seen scrambling to the beach
through a Dunkirk under heavy fire. He will
later encounter another young solider, Alex,
as played by One Directions Harry Styles,
who doesnt embarrass himself, but as this is
a film with sparse dialogue its the visuals
that do the heavy lifting hes given little
to say, which may be a blessing. By air, its
36
Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden as the Spitfire
pilots seeking to protect those below. (Given
their flight helmets, it was often hard to tell
which was which; there is a lot of eyebrow
acting either way.) Meanwhile, by sea, its
Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance), a civilian with
a little boat who has responded to the call
for help and who picks up a shell-shocked
officer (Cillian Murphy) on his way. Last-
ly, one more character: Kenneth Branagh
as the highest-ranking naval officer at the
scene, and who, in a regular war film, would
have been played by Kenneth More. Its just
one of those roles that calls for a Kenneth,
you could say.
Filmed in the Imax format its bigger
and better, basically; they probably dont
put it like that in Sight & Sound, but its the
truth there are some breathtakingly vivid
moments: spilt oil setting the sea on fire; sol-
diers trudging apocalyptically through the
sludgy foam at the waters edge; the swooping
view from the Spitfire cockpits, filmed with
real cameras in real planes. Nolan (Incep-
tion, Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises) has
eschewed CGI, which is welcome, but it tells
in some places. Instead of swarms of soldiers
populating the beach, it sometimes looks
like a couple of post office queues (bit busy,
I thought; Ill come back later), and instead
of swarms of civilian boats, its Mr Dawsons,
and thats about it. I would also suggest that,
as nothing is explained, and as the ear-shat-
tering orchestration often drowns out what
dialogue there is, you may wish to do some
research before you go. (Wikipedia is quite
good.) In this way, you wont be torment-
ing yourself with questions like, What is this
mole that Kenneth keeps speaking of?*;
and, if the Germans have cornered their
enemy, why arent they relentlessly bombing
the hell out of them?
But mostly you must understand that
Nolan wants us to come at events as they
happened, which means this isnt about
individual heroism, or any kind of character
development. (No one carries a letter from a
beloved in their inside pocket, for example.)
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
It is brave, and even admirable, but if you
are fond of an emotional core? Then you
will sorely feel the lack of it.
*A mole is a structure used as a pier,
breakwater, or a causeway. (Wikipedia)
Opera
New kid on the block
Michael Tanner
Die Walkre
Grange Park Opera
The Magic Flute
Longborough Festival Opera, until 22 July
The new Grange Park Opera at Horsley
is amazing, as everyone who visits it must
agree. In less than a year a pretty large, com-
fortable theatre, with excellent acoustics and
a large stage, has been erected from noth-
ing, and among the first productions is one
of Die Walkre, a demanding work in all
respects, and one which, when it is largely
successful, as the performance I went to was,
provides an exalting and moving experience
such as few works can. You probably need
to be as difficult and abrasive a personality
as Wasfi Kani to bring it off, but there is no
doubting that she has.
The creative team has as its most impor-
tant members Stephen Barlow conducting,
despite his concurrent work at Buxton; Ste-
phen Medcalf directing, and Jamie Vartan
designing the sets. Since the curtain rises as
The performance I went to was
extraordinary and to be remembered
with gratitude
the Prelude begins, one instantly sees that
the drama is set in the late 19th century,
sharply contradicting the brilliant evocation
of the primeval in Wagners score odd too,
that the uninvited guest Siegmund should
stagger in wearing a vast wolfskin, while a
maid who looks as if she has emerged from a
1920s comedy needlessly fusses. The setting
is heavy, vaguely similar to the sitting room
in Wahnfried, Wagners Bayreuth home,
with a balcony running round three sides, on
which unwanted characters wander, one of
them interestingly Hagens mother, a figure
whose appearance Wagner didnt envisage.
So much, so bad, though no worse than
one expects from a contemporary produc-
tion. Look, register irritation, then try to
forget though that is made more diffi-
cult if these mythological characters are
mainly dressed as upper class Wilhelmians,
living among cases of stuffed creatures and
advanced weaponry. However, as soon as
Siegmund opened his mouth it was clear
that he would be the evenings hero. Bryan
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
Register, who I havent previously come
across, is in all respects ideal: a moving actor,
a powerful and sensitively used voice, with
an intelligent understanding of this sympa-
thetic role. The Sieglinde of Claire Rutter
was slightly disappointing, a fine presence
but less steady vocally than I expected; Alan
Ewings Hunding is a black bass, even less
hospitable than Wagner intended, but ade-
quately menacing. Siegmund had to break a
glass case to extract the sword Nothung, but
the First Act was a triumph, thanks in large
part to the pacing of Stephen Barlow and
the playing of the Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra.
The elaborate setting remained the same
throughout. The splendid Wotan, Thomas
Hall, had to contend with the fiercest Fricka
I have seen in the last 50 years, Sara Fulgo-
ni, whose demolition of the gods view that
he wasnt responsible for how his children
behaved achieved cosmic force: all creating
gods are responsible for whatever their cre-
ations do. This Second Act, Wagners most
daring and devastating in so many ways,
made its full impact despite a rather blus-
tery Brnnhilde, Jane Dutton, who failed to
clinch the characters great moments. The
Valkyries, with their Prussian helmets, lug-
ging body bags, were a thrilling crew, even
if their Ride remains an oddity in the work.
Barlow wasnt always successful in building
Wagners paragraphs, and the immense cli-
maxes could, several times, have been more
stunning. Even so, the performance as a
whole I went on 10 July was extraordi-
nary and something to be remembered with
gratitude.
For my first non-Wagnerian trip to Long-
borough I saw The Magic Flte, as the mac-
aronic production with spoken dialogue in
English and singing in German needs to be
called. Unfortunately we lost our way get-
ting to Longborough, and arrived just after
the Overture; Im sure it was conducted
as well as Anthony Negus conducts every-
thing I have heard, though Wagner is closest
to his heart. I was startled to see a hospital
bed centre stage, and a couple of large white
puppets as the prominent items on stage,
with some leafless trees carried on occasion-
ally. Fortunately the bed soon went was
someone dreaming it all? and the pup-
pets only made an unwelcome reappearance
near the end. Otherwise there was little in
the way of scenery or indeed of produc-
tion. Ive grown so used to superlative eve-
nings at Longborough that this one came as
a shock. Most of the singers were adequate,
but none made a strong impression, and
the Papageno of Grant Doyle, excellently
sung, was a charmless Aussie redneck, while
Jihoon Kims Sarastro spoke and sang in a
lugubrious Esperanto. The sense of this sub-
lime pantomime as one of the great works of
lofty search was never even intimated, and
the only deep moment in the performance
was the O Isis und Osiris of the priests,
where Mozarts noble spirit reaches a realm
that even he had previously not attained.
But most of the audience seemed to enjoy it
far more than I did.
Theatre
Out of sorts at the RSC
Lloyd Evans
Queen Anne
Theatre Royal Haymarket, until 30
September
Touch
Soho Theatre, until 26 August
The RSCs summer blockbuster is about
Queen Anne. Its called Queen Anne. It
opens at the Inns of Court where drunken
wags are satirising the royals with a naughty
sketch about boobs and beer guts. Everyone
on stage pretended this was hilarious. A few
audience members did too, out of politeness.
The principal characters arrive with their
dramatic goals on display. Queen Anne
wants to rule wisely. Her general, Marlbor-
ough, wants to conquer widely. His wife,
Sarah, wants to help her monarch to rule
Its like watching a week-long
episode of Blackadder with all the
jokes removed
wisely and her husband to conquer widely.
And Sarahs scheming cousin, Abigail, wants
to befriend the Queen so that she can marry
a steady salary. These characters are neither
very admirable nor very wicked and their
objectives dont cohere into a single narra-
tive. Nor do their stories conflict with each
other very much and the result is a flaccid
lump of half-kneaded dough. Its like watch-
ing a week-long episode of Blackadder with
all the jokes removed, bar two. And here
they are. The theme is the 1707 Act of Union.
The union will bring stability. That got a
decent laugh. The Scots cant be trusted. So
did that. The female leads are hard to care
about because the beautiful Sarah (Romo-
la Garai) is too haughty and impatient with
the dim and dumpy Anne (bravely played by
Emma Cunniffe). Its like watching Liz Hur-
ley giving deportment lessons to Danniella
Westbrook.
The acting doesnt help. Players in the
smaller roles shriek their words like life-
guards emptying a shark-threatened beach.
When the Queen enters, everyone throws
a bow and then straightens up in a sculpt-
me-for-eternity pose. Thrift is the guiding
principle of the costume design. Sarahs
shiny pink ball gown makes her look like a
poached salmon. Marlboroughs joke-shop
wig is a Captain Hook number made out of
bin-liner material cut into strips and treated
37
BOOKS & ARTS
with crimping tongs. His cheapo court cos-
tume features seven slabs of ill-assorted col-
our: mauve, brown, scarlet, black, white, grey
and gold. He looks like a Christmas cracker.
It might be incautious to suggest that the
head of wardrobe, Hannah Clark, is colour-
blind but I wouldnt trust her to slow for a
red light.
The gravest failing is the language, which
mixes Shakespearean pastiche Your
Majesty, if I may make so bold with 21st-
century newspeak the costs of war are
spiralling. Were told that a character has
lost his job. When Marlboroughs enemies
accuse him of peculation, he gets suspended,
pending an enquiry. Note to dramatist. Be
a dramatist. The failure to master, or even
to attempt to master, the spoken idiom of a
bygone era suggests a lack of talent, a lack
of effort, or a lack of respect for the craft.
There exist reams of letters between Sarah,
Anne and her husband which anyone might
consult. But not the dramatist, apparently,
whose script is an affront to public taste. And
how mortifying for the RSC. They, if anyone,
have good reasons to verify the authentic-
ity of period dialect produced under their
august banner. Romola Garai might have
spoken up as well. Instead shes landed her-
self in a silly-season embarrassment written
by Google Translate on the wrong setting.
The hit show Fleabag began as a Dry-
Write production at Soho Theatre. Here
comes a follow-up, Touch, from the same
company. The setting is a filthy London bed-
sit where Dee, a Swansea nymphomaniac, is
using her unquenchable sexuality to make
friends in the big bad city. She seduces a
black lesbian, a teenage intern, an uptight
posh boy and a spanking fetishist called
Miles (caddish name!), who supports Brex-
it and runs a free school. Only one question
is worth asking here: is this half as good as
Fleabag? Answer, no. Its just as good, just as
original, just as explicit, just as outrageous-
ly and effortlessly funny. But its different
enough not to be a carbon copy.
Dee is a recognisable human figure
whose cynical joie de vivre captures a certain
hedonistic London vibe. And her journey is
overshadowed by tough emotional realities.
At 33, shes left it late to strike out alone
in the capital and shes susceptible to the
charms of her ex who races down the M4 to
lure her back to Swansea. Writer Vicky Jones
produces brilliantly caustic dialogue and her
powers of characterisation are wonderful.
She writes superb women, naturally, and she
has a knack for making ghastly males easy to
connect with. The cocky young intern, Paddy,
has a sweet and bashful side. And the villain-
ous Miles offers perceptive comments on
millennials. Theyre desperate, he says, to
meet a Brexiteer so that they can boast, Ive
got one! Ive found a racist! In the flesh. This
is an exhilarating snapshot of the capital at
its worst and best. Hogarth would have rel-
ished it. Lovers of Hogarth will relish it too.
38
Classical music
Hadyn recreated
Richard Bratby
LSO/Simon Rattle
Barbican Hall
Prom 4: Staatskapelle Berlin/Daniel
Barenboim
Royal Albert Hall
Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of
Delight! wrote Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the
top of his Second Symphony. He should have
listened to more Haydn. Sir Simon Rattle
certainly has. Rattle becomes music director
of the London Symphony Orchestra in Sep-
tember, and for the last concert before their
union becomes official, hed trawled through
Haydns immense back-catalogue to assem-
ble an unbroken 55-minute sequence of
orchestral movements from Haydns sym-
phonies, oratorios and half-forgotten ope-
ras. This is an adventure, he declared, in
that slightly goofy way that gets audienc-
es instantly onside even while it infuriates
those who, after four decades of achieve-
ment unsurpassed by any British conductor
ever, still fail to understand what Rattle does
and why he matters.
At this point I was planning to take a
swipe at the Rattle-bashers the tedious
collection of cynics, snobs and the profes-
sionally underwhelmed who are already
preparing to spatter cold, stale water on Rat-
tles plans for London. But Haydn makes
that impossible. Hes just too life-affirming.
Anyone whos discovered him knows that
Haydn offers delights emotional, intel-
lectual, fantastical of such freshness and
generosity that his music should really be
classified as a mood-altering substance. No
other composer, to my mind, has a greater
capacity to dispel irritation or lift a mood of
depression, wrote the psychiatrist Anthony
Storr. There is an objectivity about his music
which shames self-absorption.
Rattles imaginary orchestral journey
was an attempt, in equal parts reverent and
gleeful, to make exactly that point. The aim,
he said, was to showcase Haydn at his most
original, most bizarre, most witty, and while
some of these pieces were familiar like
the Chaos prelude to The Creation, played
with a rapt, vibrato-free intensity that could
have been mistaken for a period-instrument
ensemble others, like the Adagio from
Symphony No. 64 came as a discovery even
to this lifelong Haydnista. Rattle found its
eccentricity as well as its grace: bringing up
the violas to warm phrases from within and
coaxing a fierce sweetness from the disso-
nant oboes that precipitate the movements
central crisis.
Elsewhere, he simply let his players fly.
The LSOs leader Gordan Nikolitch prac-
tically bounced out of his seat, while in the
Minuet from the Le Matin symphony, a
single impeccably placed bassoon note (the
last) turned the whole central Trio section
into an epigram. At last, after the final play-
ers vacated the stage in a reimagining of the
premiere of the Farewell symphony, Rattle
was left alone in darkness. Through antiph-
onal loudspeakers the oddly poignant little
melodies that Haydn wrote for mechani-
cal flute-clocks at the palace of Eszterhaza
warbled and clashed before resolving into
C major. Whereupon the lights went up,
the musicians returned, and Rattle plunged
headlong into the finale of Symphony No. 90.
Gimmicky? Inauthentic? None of the
12 symphonies that Haydn wrote for Lon-
don in the 1790s was played uninterrupted
at its premiere. And the wackiest gags in this
concert the farcical re-tuning in the finale
of Symphony No. 60, and the dummy end-
ings which tricked the Barbican audience
into premature applause not once, but twice,
in No. 90 were actually written into the
music by Haydn who, like Rattle, knew a
thing or two about connecting with his pub-
lic. If Haydns symphonies arent receiving
their due in a culture thats got used to epic
blowouts by Mahler and Strauss, whos to
say that repackaging them into hour-long
sequences isnt exactly what hed have done?
I left this concert grinning like an idiot.
A few nights later at the Proms, Dan-
iel Barenboim conducted the Staatskapelle
Berlin in Sir Harrison Birtwistles Deep
Time. Cue the familiar Birtwistle land-
marks: black, peaty grunts from basses and
tubas, splintering piano and percussion, and
jagged brass eruptions that rear through
the musics crust like outcrops of millstone
grit. Birtwistle apparently conceived it as
the belated final part of a trilogy with The
Triumph of Time (1972) and Earth Danc-
es (1986), but in this superbly played UK
premire I didnt sense quite the same ruth-
less momentum that drives those works.
The soul of the piece seemed to lie, rather,
in what came after each climax keening
oboe and sax melodies, and passages of quiet
disintegration. Perhaps the old Minotaur is
finally mellowing.
It was dwarfed by Elgars Second Sym-
phony, played with heroic sweep and heart-
melting beauty. The cult around Barenboim
can be off-putting, but the tenderness and
understanding with which he probed Elgars
most troubling secrets, combined with the
radiance of the orchestral sound, made this
one of those great Proms occasions that
you hear about more often than you actu-
ally experience. Barenboim then killed the
mood with a rambling sermon from the
podium whose content overshadowed (on
social media at least) any discussion of the
altogether more complex things that hed
so eloquently helped Birtwistle and Elgar
to say. Rattle at least knows when to let the
music do the talking.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
Exhibitions

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND. DAVID LAING BEQUEST TO THE ROYAL SCOTTISH ACADEMY
A game for two
Martin Gayford
The Encounter: Drawings from
Leonardo to Rembrandt
National Portrait Gallery, until 22 October

Some art can be made in solitude, straight

out of the artists head. But portraiture is
a game for two. Thats the lesson of The
Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to
Rembrandt, a marvellous little exhibition at
the National Portrait Gallery. It is essential-
ly a medley of Old Master works on papers
from various British collections which
might sound a little on the quiet side. But
that would be the wrong conclusion: on the
contrary it poses intriguing questions and is
full of visual pleasures.
Notable in the latter category is a long
row of Holbeins studies of the early Tudor
court and a striking array of works by Anni-
bale Carracci and his school. But there is
much else to pore over: these are often inti-
mate works, which take you physically close
to the marks of the artists hand. Its worth
peering to take in a tender little study by
Filippino Lippi of a fellow artist, the sculp-

The best of these drawings condense

a wordless relationship
tor Mino da Fiesole (c. 14803), or to exam-
ine a tiny Parmigianino profile of a little boy
(c. 1535). But The Encounter also makes a
serious point: any portrait is the record of
a meeting between two people which is
why it is a complicated business.
For one thing, a portrait may be affect-
ed not only by what the artist knows about
art, but also by how well he or she knows
the subject. One of the most touching in the
show is Carlo Dolcis red and black chalk
study of his shoemaker (c. 1630). This tiny,
careworn man with enormous ears is half
smiling, as if chatting with the painter as
he probably was. Here is the record of a per-
son, a moment and also a friendship.
Old Woman Wearing a Ruff and Cap (c. 162540), attributed to Jacob Jordaens
A portrait documents a certain amount
of time, and a drawing can do so faster than
a painting, pinning down an instant. Thus, in
about 1636 on the margin of a sheet of stud-
ies, Rembrandt jotted down the way his wife brings to the process of portraiture: skill, Theres a sheet of grimacing, bearded codg-
Saskia inclined her head, the way their baby observation, empathy. But how about the ers on show from the workshop of Hans
nestled in her arms. Theres a huge amount sitter? Well, without the subject, obviously Holbein the Elder: useful staffage to fill in
of information in a few lines, probably tak- there is nothing to investigate. Painters can the jeering crowds behind martyred saints.
ing much less than a minute to draw. depict people without models, but the results To get a proper sense of verisimilitude,
Annibale Carraccis study of his friend feel different and often more repetitive. however, it is necessary to scrutinise a real
Giulio Pedrizzano (c. 15934), a lute play- An invented face is very different from one person. Theres a beautiful demonstration
er, could not have taken much longer. His that has been carefully contemplated. of Pisanello (c. 13951455) doing just that
pen was shooting over the paper, the sitters The exhibition begins with some draw- around 1435. He planned to put a couple of
moustache, nostrils and eyes not much more ings that make this clear. These are not corpses dangling from a gallows in the back-
than blots of ink. But the mans proud, pen- portraits, just made-up heads and bod- ground of a fresco and had already sketched
sive, slightly quizzical presence is there. ies, pictures of nobody in particular. Many an actual hanged man. But he wanted more
Its not hard to grasp what the artist painters kept an image-bank of these on file. information about how the victims neck tilt-
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 39
 BOOKS & ARTS
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF CHATSWORTH SETTLEMENT TRUSTEES.
Carlo Dolcis red and black chalk study of his shoemaker, c. 1630
ed and how his hands looked, tied together.
So he got a lad, perhaps his apprentice, to
pose as a stand-in for the cadaver. The result
is a delicate portrayal of an early 15th-centu-
ry teenage back, topped off with one of those
pudding-basin haircuts worn by Henry V.
Leonardos Study of a Nude Man (c.
15046) is similar: not a formal likeness,
but a careful record of a particular body.
With Pontormos Study of a Nude Youth
(c. 15234), in contrast, you dont feel that
so much. The pose, the figure bending over
clutching a toddler, would have been impos-
sible to hold for more than seconds. One
wonders whether there was a model at all:
the convoluted body and anxious round-
eyed face seem to reveal more about Pon-
tormos own dreams and neuroses (every
painter, they used to say in the Renaissance,
paints himself).
40
In a true portrait the sitter is passive, but
their presence, personality and appearance
are crucial. Consciously or unconsciously,
they are putting on a spectacle. They react
to the observer, and the artist responds to
them. Thats why the best of these drawings
seem to condense a wordless relationship.
We dont know all that much about Hans
Holbein the Younger from written docu-
ments. There are few surviving traces of his
personality, no letters. But these drawings
can tell us an amazing amount about his visu-
al experiences. In the one of a young women
who was possibly called Mary Zouch, c. 1533,
you see what he noticed: her patient, averted
gaze, blonde hair, and the set of her mouth,
cautious but firm. You even seem to eaves-
drop on him as he worked. The words Black
felbet (black velvet) are neatly noted in the
middle of her bodice: a note from Holbein
to himself, as if muttered in heavily accented
English. When looking at it you feel youve
met her, and in a way encountered him too.
Radio
The joy of the Proms
Kate Chisholm
Summer nights, hot and humid, mean just
one thing its Proms season again. Sore
feet, sweaty armpits, queuing outside the
ladies loos, home on the Underground with
a head and heart buzzing with Bruckner or
Bacharach, Handel or Honegger. Just as spe-
cial is the nightly feast on Radio 3 a live
concert, guaranteed every evening, and on
top of that specially commissioned talks and
literary events to get us thinking. On Sunday
afternoon, in between the Mozart and Schu-
mann performed by Bernard Haitink and
the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE)
at the Royal Albert Hall, Sarah Walker took
us inside the working life of an orchestra.
What does it take to create the particular
sound of an ensemble of individual players?
How important is the conductor? Who paci-
fies the hotel manager after the brass section
has had a post-concert party?
In How to Start a World-Class Orchestra,
Enno Senft, double-bass player and found-
A pigs carcass is used to conjure up
the sound of people hitting the dead
body of Mussolinis mistress
er member, talked about the early days of
the COE in the 1980s when booking play-
ers meant using a phone box on the street
to make international calls. Senft reminded
us of what it used to be like (and could be
again?) to travel across Europe, stopping at
every national border to fill in yet another
customs form for a violin or cello, oboe or
clarinet. Everyone paid for their own trav-
el. He was once asked to get off the night
train from Vienna to Bologna because his
double bass was taking up the top bunk and
he couldnt afford to pay for another ticket.
Perhaps the most shocking fact is that back
in 1981 the LSO only had one female player;
in contrast, from the start the COE ensured
that 50 per cent of its players, mostly in their
early twenties, were women.
James Judd, founder conductor, recalled
an early concert in Palermo. It was ten
oclock at night. The orchestra had only just
made it there, taking the last plane from the
mainland before a freak snowstorm stopped
all flights. They started with Schoenberg in a
very beautiful church. The lights went out.
Total darkness. But everyone went on play-
ing. Gradually candles were brought in to
help the players. The wonderful strange
thing, said Judd, was that in the darkness I
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
went on conducting. It led him to think, Im
absolutely not needed.
Late Junction last week, presented by
Verity Sharp (still available on iPlayer if
you search under Radio 3), celebrated the
forthcoming late-night Prom dedicated to
Scott Walker by introducing Jarvis Cockers
personal mixtape. Walker, famous for those
Sixties hits, Make It Easy on Yourself and
The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore,
soon moved on from smoochy balladeer to
become so avant-garde he influenced David
Bowie and Cocker himself. As Sharp sug-
gested, If you like your music to have meat
on the bones, hes your man.
Cocker introduced his selection of seven
tracks (listen out for Blanket Roll Blues
which so dangerously plays with timing and
pace) by telling us the story behind Clara,
which has a weird, creepy, disruptive back-
drop to Walkers most beautiful voice. It
begins with a repetitive percussive sound, a
bit like hailstones falling on corrugated iron.
The song is about Mussolinis mistress Clara,
Cocker explained, who was put to death by
hanging. That peculiar sound was created by
someone tapping on a pigs carcass, and its
meant to conjure up an image of people hit-
ting Claras dead body as she hung from the
gibbet.
A reminder meanwhile from the World
Service of the crucial geopolitical signifi-
cance of the Bosphorus Straits, connecting
as they do the otherwise landlocked Black
Sea with the Mediterranean world. In his
new series On the Black Sea (produced by
Monica Whitlock), Tim Whewell begins
in Istanbul, with a ship-spotter who tracks
and photographs the shipping that passes
through this extraordinary waterway. Its so
narrow at times its only 700 metres wide, but
along it passes enormous oil tankers, carriers,
and the Russian fleet travelling south from
the naval ports along the Black Sea coast.
Whewell and his friend go out at 4.20 a.m.
to look for ships, driving along the shore in
the semi-darkness. Halfway along the wind-
ing road, they hear the hooting of a ships
siren. Sure enough, out of the dawn mist
looms an enormous ship with lots of camou-
flaged green trucks on board, Russian mili-
tary vehicles on their way to the war in Syria.
Whewell then boards the Odessa ferry at
Haydarpasa, in the heart of Istanbul, right
opposite the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia
and Topkapi Palace. His journey will take
him through the Straits and out into the
open waters of the Black Sea. Twenty-four
hours later theyre in Odessa, in southern
Ukraine. Its always been a place on the
edge, a small Big Apple, says Whewell, a
mix of different cultures because of its con-
tact with Europe through the boats that nav-
igate through the Bosphorus. But thats all
changing. Only three boats now operate the
ferry service; back in Soviet times there were
300. Odessa is becoming more isolated, less
cosmopolitan, more Ukrainian. Its new lead-
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
ers want to deny its multi-ethnic past. But
who dares ignore history, or geography?
Pop
A genuine oddity
Michael Hann
Ezra Furman
Barbican Hall
The most compelling pop singers in music
right now at least in the branch where
pop singers still play guitars were on stage
last week. The 1975, fronted by Matty Healy,
finished the tour in support of their second
album, a US and UK number one, with a
headline show at the Latitude festival, the
chosen spot for recreational drug-taking by
kids who have just finished their GCSEs.
Ezra Furman played his most prestigious
London show yet, appearing at the Barbican
as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations
of his label, Bella Union.
Healy and Furman are very different
the one a genuine popstar, the other off
in the margins but also defined by their
similarities. Both want to speak directly to
teenagers about the insecurities and unhap-
Furmans are some of the best shows
Ive seen in 35 years
pinesses they share (Healy, whose audience
is large and fervent and young, has succeed-
ed in this; Furman attracts a rather older
crowd, who recognise and adore his musical
reference points). Both shy away from any
conventional masculine posturing: Healy,
sylphlike and doe-eyed, flounces around
onstage in a sexually ambiguous way; Fur-
man, who identifies as gender fluid, normal-
ly wears dresses and make-up. Both define
themselves in terms of a relationship to reli-
gion: Healy is a dedicated atheist, who has
addressed his lack of faith in song; Furman
is an observant Jew, who will not play live
on Friday nights. Both spent years trying to
make an impression before sudden break-
throughs, and in conversation with them, its
evident insecurities haunt them both.
This review was meant to contrast Fur-
mans stripped-down appearance at the Bar-
bican with the dazzling production, hugely
influenced by the visual artist James Turrell,
that The 1975 rolled out for the last time at
Latitude. Blame the M25 that it doesnt: after
five hours getting no more than 30 miles
from my home in north London, I turned
back when it became apparent The 1975
would be well into their set before I reached
Suffolk. In a sense, perhaps, this was for the
best: while The 1975 are now a fearsomely
consistent live group, Furman flies by the
seat of his pants, and his Barbican show was
a genuine oddity. It would have been a mis-
match.
Furman had been on the brink of giving
up music when his fifth album, a glorious
explosion of old fashioned rocknroll and
desperate soul-searching called Day of the
Dog, began attracting rave notices in Britain
not so much in the US, where he still plays
bars and clubs (presumably cross-dressing,
gender-fluid, observant Jewish punk rock
kids inspired by old fashioned rocknroll are
ten a penny there). You might sum up what
he does wracking himself about faith,
mental health, rootlessness and the redeem-
ing force of rock music with a single line
from his song Tell Em All To Go To Hell:
I sleep in the alley/ And I walk through the
valley/ Of the shadow of the Fabulous Four.
For the Barbican, though, he was with-
out the Boy-Friends, the backing band who
provide the light to the darkness of his lyr-
ics. At one point he introduced a song by
saying: And now some more of whatever I
want, which held true all night. But what-
ever he wanted wasnt always that enticing.
Hark! To The Music was recast from a jaun-
ty pop song into Furman banging a floor tom
while screaming its lyric: Hop to the music
if youre just too sick/ And youre doomed,
and youre dying/ And its much too quick.
And not one, not two, but three poems read
over piano improvisation was at least two
too many. Furman has in the past covered
Nirvanas In Bloom in concert a song
that was Kurt Cobains cry of contempt for
the fan who likes all the pretty songs, and he
likes to sing along but he dont know what
it means. There was a strong sense here that
Furman was sending a message to the peo-
ple who like all the pretty songs, but dont
know what they mean. And at times it got a
little wearing.
Nevertheless, given Furmans desire to be
consistent to himself he told me in 2014
that his desire was to live his life with radi-
cal honesty, despite his ongoing issues with
depression there is no point complaining
about it. One might as well criticise water for
one minute being a refreshing drink but then
flooding much of lowland Cumbria. It does
what it does, and so does Furman. If you
dont like it, dont come back.
And the high points were marvellous:
Restless Year was recast from something
perky and frenetic into an R&B chug in the
style of the Velvet Underground. The arriv-
al of a string quartet added light and shade
near the end of the set, leavening the dread
of the lyrics. Turning Haunted Head into a
duet with the female singer Du Blonde was
a terrific choice: Furmans own voice is high
and cracked and piercing, but Du Blonde
softened the edges.
Furman has played some of the very best
shows Ive seen in 35 years of going to gigs,
so Ill be back for his next appearance. But
this was not a concert for the neutral: if you
plan to see Furman for the first time, youre
best off waiting until you see the words and
the Boy-Friends on the poster.
41
 NOTES ON

Shropshire
By Julian Glover

I
found the land of lost content last week,
west of the Clee Hills in the Shropshire
Housman wrote about, but hardly knew.
It is deep England, thick with trees, stone-
built farms that look like forts and tracks in
gullies cut by ancient feet.
The villages here have rhythmic names:
Bouldon, Peaton and Cockshutford or
simple Heath, where there is now no village
at all, only the pure Norman chapel stand-
ing in grass with its long old iron key on a
hook outside. It was built for a settlement
lost at the Black Death. Few sounds here
are unnatural: you hear birdsong more than
cars or planes.
I was riding my horse James, with two
friends on Cassie and Rubin, along paths
bursting with nettles. We scrambled over
streams and slippery red mud on to the
Brown Clee Hill by Nordy Bank, where our
horses nibbled at turf on Neolithic ramparts.
There is no better way to get the feel of
the place you are in, above the ground but
travelling slowly enough to sense chang-
es you miss in a car. The parkland of the
Burwarton Estate gave way to the fring-
es of the Midlands, where we rode through
wheat fields and eyed up hunt jumps before
we climbed into the marches, heading for
friends who live outside Craven Arms, the
only town to be built by a railway junction
The land of lost content best seen on horseback
named after a pub. At friendly Tugford Farm
we stabled our horses and ourselves, and
commiserated with Cassie, who had been
disgracefully kicked by her friend James as
they raced around in celebration at eating
the greenest grass of their lives.
Amid all this: the castles, the half-tim-
bered barns and the big old inns which line
the turnpike road from Much Wenlock to
Ludlow, there was power, too in the flash-
es of failed modernity. On Abdon Burf the
hill fort was quarried away a century ago and
the remains of the cable railway which car-
ried the hard black dhustone away still lie
rusting there. Titterstone Clee Hill is capped
by strange radar domes; and on the slopes
below, as our horses drank at a field trough,
we found a cemetery which marks the site
of the Wheathill Bruderhof, a happy refuge
opened by German idealists in 1942, looking
for somewhere the Nazis might never come.
A few years later their blond-haired
commune was caught in a Path news report
made with the sort of cheery optimism
our media age has lost, led by a prototype
bearded Jeremy Corbyn, all allotments and
ghastly communal eating. Of course it didnt
work out in the end voluntary equality
never does and part of the site is now a
caravan park, through which we cantered,
leaving hoof prints in grass of golf-course-
green neatness. Do Not Jump said a stern
sign on the gate at the end evidence that
the Ludlow Hunt also comes this way.
And the next day we went on west, on to
Wenlock Edge, where routes run for miles
through Englands temperate rainforest.
Under the trees we called out a half-
remembered Kipling poem: If you enter
the woods/ Of a summer evening late/ You
will hear the beat of a horses feet.
The poem ends: But there is no road
through the woods. In Shropshire, though,
there still is and it was wonderful.

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42 the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk

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Katzs offers a kind of Judaism you can
enjoy over lunch, which I find amazing
because I have never managed it
Tanya Gold, p54
High life
Taki
I switch personalities at Spectator parties,
depending who the guests are: for our read-
ers tea party, I am a warm and gracious
semi-host, swigging scotch, but gracious-
ly answering questions about my drinking,
love life and writing habits. For our sum-
mer Speccie spree, I turn into a tight-lipped,
street-smart tough guy, conscious of my brave
obscurity but determined not to give in to the
Rachel Johnson syndrome of self-advertise-
ment. (Whew, that wasnt as hard as I thought
it was going to be.)
The tea party for our readers is always a
polite affair. After all, the ham better be nice
to the knife, or else. I particularly liked meet-
ing the father and son from Mexico, both
loyal readers, Louis the father coming all the
way over to meet the son who is studying
up in Manchester. I dont think any publica-
tion can match the gentleness and savoir fare
of our readers, and I even managed to con-
vince some of them to skip the tea and try the
scotch. (But I missed the lady who began sub-
scribing the year I was born, 1936. Perhaps it
was too hot for her to drive to London.)
The summer shindig one week later is an
altogether different occasion. It is a rowdy,
sweaty affair, with people pushing and shov-
ing and some even trying to brush up close to
BBC sex-pots like Emily Maitlis and Laura
Kuenssberg. They should be ashamed of
themselves. This year we had the Prime Min-
ister, the Foreign Secretary, and the Minis-
ter for Brexit all attending. Personally, I was
happy to stand and drink G&T all evening in
the company of Lord Lamont and my buddy
Simon Reader.
While discussing sex with Rowan Pelling
and Lord Worcester, the sainted editor drift-
ed over and told me to go and greet a past
editor, now Foreign Secretary, Boris himself.
Cyprus and the impasse with the occupying
Turks came up. I cannot use the language Id
like to concerning Erdogan and the ruling
Turkish gang, but the Greek foreign minister,
the old, hard-core communist Kotzias, is no
better, in fact hes worse. But commies have
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
always known how to negotiate hard, hence
the collapse of the talks. Boris, who as edi-
tor once saved my job, also asked me about
my love life. Now I know that the world is
full of wretchedly poor people for whom my
love life represents, above all, the possibility
of escape, however fleeting, from the grim-
ness and despair of their own lives, and that
is the sole reason the Right Hon. Boris John-
son asked me. So I demurred, despite the fact
that it made me feel self-absorbed and uncar-
ing for the poor and wretched of this world.
(Whew, that was a bit harder.)
In The Radetzky March, Joseph Roths
1932 novel, the author kills off its most admi-
rable character in a scene of comedy as well
as tears. Damant kills the swinish Tattenbach
in a duel he did not initiate, and is killed in
return as Tattenbach drops dead. One kills a
scoundrel and he kills you back. Life might
be sweet but you cant have it all. I thought
of Roth and his novel while speaking with
Norman Lamont about Iran and the Amer-
ican-Zionist campaign to discredit the Shiite
The annual Speccie spree is a rowdy,
sweaty affair
Republic that has been going on full steam
since the fall of the Shah in 1979.
Since the catastrophic George W. Bush
decision to invade Iraq, Israeli activities in
Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, Egypt and the
Gulf can no longer be viewed in isolation
from one another. However great the blun-
der of 2003, George W. managed to legitimise
Israeli policies among Arabs who had sworn
eternal enmity to the Zionist state. In fact,
theyve all become secret Arab allies, and
Israel is no longer viewed as the central prob-
lem plaguing the Middle East. According to
great democracies such as Saudi Arabia and
the UAR, its Iran and its client state of Syria
that are the causes of all evil in that sweaty
part of the world.
Not so fast, says the great Middle East
scholar Taki. Incidentally, does anyone read-
ing this remember a place called Palestine,
and how its inhabitants lost their land to the
Zionists, who cried foul and asked for Amer-
ican help while evicting Palestinians from
their birthplace? Nah, I didnt think so. Well,
Iran is now the bogeyman because the Sau-
dis said so, and we know that the Saudis are
never wrong, plus they just pulled off a major
victory when they killed hundreds of cam-
els caught between their sands and those of
Qatar.
Iran is not an Arab country, nor is it an
expansionist power. It tries to protect the Shi-
ites spread all over the Middle East, and also
supports militias that resist Israeli aggres-
sion such as Hezbollah and Hamas. The lat-
ter are called terrorist organisations by the
state of Israel, no stranger to terrorising its
neighbours, and by Uncle Sam, also known
to bomb so-called enemies to smithereens
from 30,000 feet. In Iraq, all Iran did was fill
the vacuum after the Americans overthrew
Saddam and left. That was to be expected as,
after all, Shiites are in the majority in Iraq, a
small detail that escaped the great mind of
the man who decided to attack Iraq in the
first place.
But not to worry. Both Lord Lamont, a
former chancellor of the exchequer, and I
know the score, which means everything will
be honky dory in the Middle East sooner
rather than later. Yippee!
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
Valencia was a furnace. During the short ride
from the airport, the taxi driver supplement-
ed his chat about the weather with a photo
on his phone sent by his father-in-law. His
father-in-law lives about an hour away. The
photo showed a bus stop on a deserted street.
Attached to the bus shelter was a temperature
gauge with large green digital numbers show-
ing 50.5C. Little wonder, observed the taxi
driver, that the street was deserted.
He dropped me outside the Sercotel Sorol-
la Palace hotel where Eva was waiting on the
steps. Eva was the Spanish PR lady, or shep-
herdess, in charge of 13 travel journalists from
all over Europe on a three-day cultural tour
of the city. Eva I am ever so sorry, I said. Shit
happens, she said pleasantly and idiomatical-
ly. We transferred to another taxi and set off to
the old town to find the group, who this morn-
ing were looking at churches. At least I had
turned up, said Eva in the taxi. A veteran Ital-
ian travel journalist had had a panic attack on
the plane as it taxied to the runway. So severe
was it that the plane had returned to the ter-
minal and she was taken off. Two others had
45
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cancelled at the last moment because their
publications had gone bust.
We found the journalists minibus parked
outside the seminary and chapel of the Patri-
arch, founded in the 16th century. We entered
through a small ancient door, passed through
a dim cloister and entered the cool peace of
the seminary chapel, lit only by sunlight fil-
tered through a cupola. I flopped down in a
pew beneath a gruesome painting of a man
being burnt to death on a bonfire of faggots.
He was reclining on these faggots as though
advertising an extremely comfortable sofa and
looking with compassion on his executioners,
who were staggering under the weight of the
extra faggots they were adding to the confla-
gration. In the nave, a motley party of sweat-
ing, weary and dumbfounded tourists were
being lectured to by an insanely enthusias-
tic tour guide. Solemn or gruesome frescoes,
the colours still vivid, were painted on every
possible surface, including the interior of the
cupola. Tall, worldly-looking priests in long
black frocks passed to and fro. The chapel was
extraordinarily beautiful.
It was by now almost midday. The night
before I had attended the Spectator Summer
party. After that I had gone to a party at the
Groucho club. Then I had caught the bus from
Liverpool Street to Stansted airport. Stansted
airport at 4 a.m. is a wide awake circle of hell,
especially if you cant walk in a straight line.
Even more so if you swipe your boarding card
at the automatic gate, are refused entry, then
you read your boarding card for the first time
and realise that you have gone to the wrong
airport.
At the help desk I joined a queue of peo-
ple with apparently insoluble problems of
one sort or another. A woman broke down
and wept inconsolably over the counter. In
my case, however, the problem was magically
solved if I handed over half a weeks wages to
fly with Ryanair instead of easyJet, and on a
plane that would get me to Valencia only an
hour later than if I had gone to the correct air-
port. Armed with a boarding card that allowed
me to enter the outer hell of the baggage
search hall then the inner spiral of the duty
free designer shops, I progressed unstead-
ily to the gate, then to the aeroplane. After
all that, to sink down, stinking and unshav-
en, and still drunk, into a solid pew in a dark,
cool, frescoed 16th-century seminary chapel,
was a foretaste of passing through the gates of
death into damnation, then being unexpected-
ly and mercifully given a last-minute reprieve
of eternal rest. Then I realised that the appall-
ingly dressed, sweating, dumbfounded tourists
were in fact the group of international travel
journalists I was joining. And all too soon we
were ushered back outside into the furnace to
wait for the minibus to take us to the cathedral
to have a quick gander at the Holy Grail.
As we waited, Eva introduced me to the
journalists. One of these, a forthright German
woman in an eye-catching straw hat, expressed
keen interest as to why I was joining 24 hours
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
later than everyone else. I was standing in the
shade of the seminary wall with the journal-
ists assembled around me like a firing squad. I
had been to a fantastic party, I said, and was so
drunk afterwards that I had gone to the wrong
airport. But they were all so hot and dazed,
and they had already heard so many extraor-
dinary excuses, that my tale was greeted with
silent indifference, and then the bus came and
we filed resignedly aboard.
Real life
Melissa Kite
Two months after I cancelled Sky, a strange
letter arrived in the post.
We are writing to you because we havent
heard anything from you since we previously
wrote to you about your overdue account,
it said. Of course, I realise that it is easier
for a rich man to get himself prosecuted for
attempting to push his camel through the eye
of a needle than for a customer to leave Sky.
But I had taken no chances.
My Sky account was terminated not by a
call centre flunky trilling And how can I help
yourself today? Can I call yourself Melissa?
It was cancelled by a service excellence con-
sultant on the executive support team.
I dont much like doing this, but some-
times the only way to get anything done in
this country is to push the cluck-it button.
On this occasion, I had spent so long first
trying to move Sky to my new house, then try-
ing to cancel Sky as the price went up and up,
that I simply couldnt get anywhere as a cus-
tomer and had to start blabbing.
After I wrote about my troubles, the exec-
utive support team contacted me. Whereas
before I was just a customer of 15 years argu-
ing with a call centre in Naff-off-istan, once I
was assigned to the crack team tasked with
handling complainers who set off sirens in the
PR department, my troubles really began.
A sweet Scottish lady telephoned me to
conduct meandering philosophical conversa-
tions punctuated by impenetrable sophisms
such as, I want to reach an understanding of
the type of journey youve had. Yes, I would
say, but I really dont want to discuss my jour-
ney, I just want you to let me move my Sky
services from London to Surrey for a reason-
able price.
Yes, she would say, we hear you and
we want to action that and take it forward,
understanding the journey youve had and
building on it. Yes, I would plead, but can
I just have Sky for less than 89 a month? To
which she would reply: Yes, I am going to go
through this with you and action a solution
surrounding the issues on your journey.
After days of this, we were no further for-
ward and the executive support service excel-
lence consultant might just as well have been
a travel agent from Thomas Cook, she was
banging on so much about journeys. In the
end, I had to tell her I just wanted to cancel. I
simply didnt have the time to go on any more
journeys with her.
Yes, she said, and we want your feed-
back so we can understand why your jour-
ney
No! Please just cancel my account!
But alas, the cancelling journey dragged on
throughout my house-moving journey and
before long I was in my new cottage on a
TV-less, broadband-less journey. And I was
no further forward getting Sky for less than
89 a month or cancelling it. But then I hit
upon the idea of telling the executive support
team that my new house didnt have a place
to put a satellite dish, because the chimney
stack needed work so we couldnt fix any-
thing to it (which was true). Im on a renova-
tion journey, I told the excellence consultant.
This worked a treat. She agreed to cancel my
account and looked forward to the time when
my chimney would allow me to recommence
my Sky journey.
After making sure I was paid up, I can-
celled my direct debit. But a few weeks later,
Sky debited my account for the following
month. I emailed the service excellence con-
In the end I had to cancel: I simply
didnt have the time to go on any more
journeys with her
sultant, who apologised and said the amount
would be credited back to me.
A few weeks after that, I received a for-
mal demand for payment of arrears from the
amusingly entitled Director of Change, Qual-
ity and Billing.
I emailed service excellence again and
reminded her that as I did not have Sky, I
could not owe Sky 34.60 plus a late payment
charge of 7.50.
She apologised again and assured me that
she would place a credit on my account to
clear the outstanding balance.
I thanked her but pointed out that while
it was kind of her to pay my bill, it was still
unsatisfactory to have a bill, you know, for
services I hadnt had. What I wanted was for
Sky to acknowledge that I was no longer a
customer. I was an ex-customer. My account
had ceased to be.
She replied: I understand that you are no
longer a Sky customer. Our systems are set
up to see all ex-customers and active custom-
ers as Sky customers. I apologise if this has
caused you any inconvenience and stress.
No. No inconvenience or stress. Im just
on a journey. When I get there I expect the
nurses will sort the TV out for me.
47
LIFE
The turf
Robin Oakley
A woman I once encountered at the din-
ing table whose prime years were clearly
behind her described herself as approach-
ing fifty. Noting our raised eyebrows she
added, Look dears, I dont have to say from
which side. Suddenly the weighing room
too seems full of veterans. Lightweight jock-
ey Jimmy Quinn is certainly approaching 50
from the wrong end while Frankie Dettori
and Franny Norton, both still in their riding
prime, are 46. It was, though, the 49-year-
old John Egan, who recently shrugged
off a chipped vertebra in a Kempton fall
with a teenagers resilience, who had me
comparing. I noted lately the remarkable
coincidence that both he and his talented
apprentice son David, the only father-and-
son team currently riding, had secured
exactly 16 winners each from an identical
140 mounts this season.
At Ascot last Saturday John told me
that he began partnering winners on the
Irish pony racing scene at the age of seven
Suddenly the weighing room is full
of veterans winning ones, too
in the 1970s. Around 500 followed before he
entered full-scale racing with Noel Meade
and then Mick OToole. The former cham-
pion Irish apprentice in 1986 among such
rivals as Charlie Swan and Johnny Murtagh,
Egan senior looks back with special pleas-
ure on the Golden Jubilee and July Cup he
won on Les Arcs, trained by Tim Pitt and
owned by his friend Willie McKay. The for-
mer middle distance horse took up sprint-
ing and ran in his first Group One at the
age of six.
Les Arcs Golden Jubilee came at 33-1,
but punters may remember too, amid a col-
ourful career including a few brushes with
authority, the Ebor Handicap John won on
Jane Chapple-Hyams Mudawin at 100-1.
With support from trainers like Mark John-
ston and Mick Channon he has had plenty
of success at Ascot while Egan Senior and
Franny Norton are rated by many too as the
canniest riders around the tricky Chester
circuit. Says John, There is a knack to Ches-
ter but at the end of the day youve got to be
on the right horse. I prefer it when Franny
isnt in the race, otherwise we end up aiming
at each other. His partnership with Welsh
trainer David Evans, who always has some
48
two-year-olds ready, has normally ensured
he makes his mark early in the season, but
Bridge
one winner in May this year was down to Janet de Botton
sheer luck: trainer Evans had intended to
book Johns 5lb-claiming apprentice son
David for a Brighton ride on Sheer Intensi- The first week of July is heaven for those
ty, but clicked the wrong button and booked of us who dont normally hear the words
dad instead. bridge and holiday in the same sentence.
Sheer Intensity was one of 31 winners Off we trot to Biarritz to walk on the beach,
for the articulate apprentice who has been eat delicious food and, at around 4.30 p.m.
two years with Newmarket trainer Roger every afternoon, take a stroll in the sun to
Varian, a trainer who, he is quick to point the old Bellevue casino to play some bridge
out amid the current controversy over the finishing in time for dinner ofc.
exploitation of apprentices, does everything Back home the LMBA held their Lon-
by the book and gives him every chance. don Swiss Congress last weekend at YC
Says father John of the row about appren- no walk on the beach that. Swiss is a pun-
tices expenses and trainers retaining their ishing format; you continually play people
winning percentages: At the end of the day with the same score as you so the last couple
as an apprentice its success you need, not of matches can often decide the winner.
money. In the Sunday teams one team had been
David, a graduate of Newmarkets Rac- leading for most of the day. They were still
ing School who lives with his father in in front going in to the last round, when they
the town, certainly has the pedigree. His drew Kiril Delev, son of World Champion
mother is former champion jockey Rich- Nevena Senior, not to mention stepson of
ard Hughess sister Sandra and his grand- Brian. In seven boards he made a nice guess
father was the revered former jockey and to land a game, a great switch to beat a game,
trainer Dessie Hughes. David could well be and then this gem:
in a position to challenge for the appren-
tice title but says he doesnt want to lose his Dealer South E/W Vulnerable
apprentices weight allowance too quickly.
His father adds: Some of the youngsters
zQ9 5 4
just arent ready when they reach that stage.
Suddenly theyre out there in midfield with yQ4
no support playing against David Beck- X 10 9 8 5 4
ham. When I asked David what advice his w AQ
father had given him he replied: Work hard. z 10 7 zKJ 8 2
Listen rather than speak and keep your N
head down. Johns response to the same
y3 W E
y76 5 2
question was: Train hard. Keep focussed. XAK 3 S XQ 7 2
Remember that its the horses that matter w K 10 9 8 752 w64
and aim to be champion jockey because zA6 3
youve got to believe you have that ability. y AK J 10 9 8
John, who rode a winner on his 49th birth- XJ 6
day, says that apprentices have it easier now. w J3
In my day you only got a few rides at the
end of the season so that you stayed on for
the next year. Now they get far more oppor- West North East South
tunities. 1 y
He himself has clearly kept focussed 3w X pass 4y
despite a couple of years successfully pre- All pass
paring horses for the breeze-ups. He is con-
fident in his own ability to keep competing
at the top level, saying that of the competi- West led XA against Kirils 4 y, East sig-
tion he faced riding alongside the likes of nalling an odd number with the 2.
Ray Cochrane, Pat Eddery, Michael Kinane, Keen to knock out the entries to dum-
Christy Roche and Bruce Raymond: They mys Diamonds, West switched to a Club
were serious pilots, there arent so many (the z10 might have led to a different out-
now. Being his sons mentor and trainer come this time). Kiril finessed the Queen,
and using gyms and equicizers that werent and led another Diamond off dummy which
available when he began has probably West won and played another Club. South
helped John retain his fitness and enthu- ruffed a Diamond and drew trumps.
siasm. I wish though that I had met father After Wests weak overcall, with A,K of
and son not at Ascot, where their rides drew Diamonds on the side, it was clear who had
a blank, but at Salisbury that night. John zK and, having eliminated Easts exit cards,
scored on Koeman for Mick Channon at it was easy to lead a Spade to the nine, end-
11-2 and David on Lyricas Lion for Michael playing East to lead away from the King.
Attwater at 20-1. That would have been a Congrats to Kiril, Nick Boss, Claire Rob-
nice double. inson and Martin W. Jones. Well done guys.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
 SPECTATOR WINE JONATHAN RAY
E
sme Johnstone at FromVineyardsDi-
rect.com is the past master at digging
out little parcels of top quality, fully
mature vino from fine French estates and
Im delighted to report that his touch has
not deserted him. Along with a brace of tip
top whites and a ros, weve a trio of really
tasty (and tastily priced) clarets, each one so
delectable theyre just begging to be drunk.
First, the 2016 Domaine du Bicheron,
Macon-Pronne Vieilles Vignes (1), an
old favourite that I remember we offered
a couple of years back in a previous vin-
tage to the delight of Spectator readers.
This vintage is even better. Made from old
vine Chardonnay in the Mconnais, this is
beautifully structured and everything qual-
ity white burgundy should be. Its soft, sup-
ple, creamy and buttery, with oodles of ripe,
juicy fruit; think white peaches and pears
with a touch of citrus. Nice price too. 11.95
down from 12.95.
If you fancy a Sauvignon Blanc of similar
style and quality to the above Chardonnay,
theres the 2016 Reuilly, Domaine Mabil-
lot (2). Its the absolute antithesis of the
lean, austere, mineral Sauvignons that one
can find among the wines of Sancerre and
Pouilly-Fum, and which many folk indeed
love. No, this has abundant weight and ripe-
ness and, although it has that typical Loire
Sauvignon grassiness and even flintiness,
theres a hint of tropical fruit too and suc-
culence. Id say it was a Sauvignon Blanc
for Chardonnay lovers and utterly delicious.
12.95 down from 13.95.
The 2016 Moulin de Gassac Guilhem
Ros (3) is an absolute peach of a wine
and, I reckon, pretty much essential sum-
mer drinking. Made at Mas de Daumas
Gassac which is arguably the best estate
in the Languedoc its certainly the best-
known its a half-and-half blend of Syrah
and Carignan aged for six months in stain-
less steel. Uncomplicated and wonderfully
drinkable, its delicately pale and vibrantly
fresh and fruity, with that lovely touch of
spice and herbs one gets in Frances deep
south. 8.45 down from 8.95.
The 2010 Ch. de lAbbaye de Saint-
Ferme (4) was only introduced to From-
VineyardsDirect.coms list a month ago;
since then theyve sold some 300 cases of
it. Im not in the least surprised because its
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
really remarkable value. A Cabernet/Merlot
Bordeaux Suprieur produced at an 11th-
century estate founded by the Benedictines,
its just so darn drinkable. Its soft, smooth
and mellow with perfectly balanced fruit,
acid and tannins and I all but drained the
bottle at a sitting. 10.45 down from 10.95.
The 2015 Vintage Claret (5) is FromVine-
yardsDirect.coms new house claret and
Its nigh on impossible to
nd mature claret of this
quality at this price
will only ever be produced in fine vintag-
es. As you well know, 2015 was a spectacu-
lar vintage in Bordeaux and this is a little
belter. Made by Jonathan Maltus he of Le
Dme and Ch. Teyssier, and famously the
first Englishman to get a perfect 100/100
ORDER FORM Spectator Wine Offer
www.spectator.co.uk/wine-club
2 Square Rigger Row, Plantation Wharf, London SW11 3TZ
Tel: 020 7549 7900; Email: service@fromvineyardsdirect.com
Prices in form are per case of 12
White 1 2016 Macon-Pronne Vieilles Vignes, 14%
2 2016 Reuilly, Domaine Mabillot, 13.5%
Ros 3 2016 Moulin de Gassac Guilhem Ros, 12%
Red 4 2010 Ch. de lAbbaye de Saint-Ferme, 14%
5 2015 Vintage Claret, 14%
6 2002 Ch. Clos lEglise, 13.5%
Mixed 7 Sample case, two each of the above
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score from Robert Parker its full of ripe,
juicy, bramble fruit and boasts a wonderful
softness thanks to its luscious Merlot-domi-
nant fruit. 11.45 down from 11.95.
Finally, the 2002 Ch. Clos lEglise (6), a
gloriously grown-up claret from that bit of
the Ctes de Castillon that sits right next
to Saint-milion. I really cant remember
the last time I drank a 15-year-old claret for
less than 15 quid and certainly not one as
good as this. Its a complete and utter steal.
The estate produces such fine wine that
the entire property was recently bought by
Gerard Purse of Ch. Pavie and the fruit now
goes into Esprit de Pavie. This means, sadly,
that Ch. Clos lEglise is no more. Its nigh on
impossible to find mature claret of this qual-
ity at this price, so do snap this up while you
can. 13.95 down from 14.95.
The mixed case has two bottles of each
wine and delivery, as ever, is free.
List price Club price No.
155.40 143.40
167.40 155.40
107.40 101.40
131.40 125.40
143.40 137.40
179.40 167.40
147.40 138.40
Total
Sec. code Prices include VAT and delivery on the
British mainland. Payment should be
made either by cheque with the order,
payable to FromVineyardsDirect.com,
or by debit or credit card, details of
which may be telephoned or faxed. This
offer, which is subject to availability,
closes on 2 September 2017.
49
LIFE

Chess
New in chess
Raymond Keene
New in Chess is one of the worlds leading chess
magazines. At one time or another, every
contemporary champion and leading
grandmaster has contributed to it. Of particular
interest are the regular columns by the English
grandmasters Nigel Short and Matthew Sadler.
The group also publishes many high-quality
books. In Chess for Hawks, Cyrus Lakdawala
regales us with a number of inspirational
examples, including several from his own games.
The title suggests a certain predatory attitude is
necessary in striving for victory, but the prime
message conveyed is: never give up, even if you
only have the tiniest of edges. Persistence is
everything.
The always reliable Steve Giddins has
compiled the most instructive games he can find
from the magazine for The New in Chess book
of Chess Improvement, and arranged the expert
commentary in thematic chapters. It is not a
book for neophytes, but experienced players will
find it a treasure trove of useful information.
Competition
Cat call
Lucy Vickery
Diagram 1 In Competition No. 3007 you were invited
to submit a poem about Larry, the Down-
rDW1rDkD ing Street cat.
DbDpDpgp Larry came to No. 10 in 2011 from Bat-
tersea Dogs & Cats Home during David
W0p)nDpD Camerons premiership. He was left behind
0WDn)WDW
when the family moved on, though Mr Cam-
eron denied that this was because he hated
WDBDNDWD cats. Although he has been less than impres-
)WDWDNDW sive in his role as Chief Mouser apparent-
ly spending more time kipping than hunting
W)QDW)P) down rodents the ten-year-old tabby has
$WGW$WIW inspired a book, a cartoon strip and has
accrued 136,000 followers on Twitter.
Honourable mentions go to Sylvia Fairley,
Frank Upton, Basil Ransome-Davies, Paul
Diagram 2 Carpenter, Frank Osen and John OByrnes
WDWDrDkg Emily Dickinson-inspired entry.
The prizewinners, printed below, are
DbDpDpDp
rewarded with 30 apiece and Max Ross
WDW)rDpG pockets the bonus fiver.

0p1n)WDP
Finally, the Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman in
Timmans Titans recounts his games with every Much have I travelled in the realms of men,

world champion he has encountered. This
autobiographical approach from a player who
for decades has competed at the major chess
contests offers a unique insight into chess life at
the top. This weeks game is taken from his book.
WDpDWDWD
And lots of homeless mutts and moggies seen;
In many a city dustbin have I been
)WDWDNDW To tell of which would tax a poets pen.
Hopeless and crazed with hunger was I then,
W)WDW)PD All skin and bone, a thing unwashed, unclean;

Timman-Spassky: Hilversum 1983; English

Defence
1 c4 b6 2 d4 Bb7 3 d5 e6 4 a3 g6 At the
time, Spassky had a partiality for this dubious
double fianchetto. 5 e4 Bg7 6 Nf3 Na6 7 Nc3
Nc5 8 Qc2 exd5 9 cxd5 Nf6 10 Bc4 0-0 11
0-0 c6 12 d6 The right way to maintain the
opening advantage. Although White cannot
permanently block the long diagonal of Blacks
queens bishop with his push, he does gain
territory with it, and, after some preparation, he
can play for an attack. 12 ... Ne6 13 e5 Nd5
14 Ne4 a5 15 Re1 Re8 (see diagram 1) 16 h4
The signal for the attack. 16 ... b5 17 Ba2 c5
18 Bg5 Qb6 19 Rad1 c4 20 Qc1 Black has
gained territory on the queenside, but White
imperturbably carries on building up his attack.
PUZZLE NO. 466
DB!R$WIW
20 ... Nc5 21 Nxc5 Qxc5 22 h5 Re6 23
Bh6 Bh8 24 Bb1 Rae8 (see diagram 2) 25
Bf5 A powerful move, winning the exchange.
25 ... gxf5 26 Qg5+ Rg6 27 hxg6 With 27
e6 White could have ended the game elegantly
27 ... Rxg5 28 exf7+ Kxf7 29 Nxg5+ Kf6 30
Nxh7+ Kf7 31 Ng5+ Kf6 32 Rxe8 winning on
material. 27 ... hxg6 28 e6 Qxd6 29
exf7+ Kxf7 30 Qh4 Bf6 31 Ng5+ Bxg5
32 Bxg5 Rxe1+ 33 Rxe1 Qf8 Black has
managed to avert a direct mating attack, but
now the white pieces have free play on the
dark squares. 34 Qd4 Kg8 35 Re5 Qf7 36
Qa7 Bc6 37 Qxa5 Kh7 38 Qd8 f4 39 Re8
Qg7 40 Rf8 c3 41 bxc3 Black resigns
I lived a life unbeautiful and mean
Till I was saved and brought to No. 10.
Then felt I like a pauper made a king
Dumfounded by my rich inheritance;
Now every morning I hear angels sing
Of paradise, of pomp and circumstance.
Ah, here I have the best of everything,
A life of ease no wizard could enhance.
Max Ross
Larry says, her garb is odd
The colours loud and louder
She never purrs, but praises God
And others of His clowder
He says she likes a kitten heel
Or crazy-angle-necks
Larry likes her sex appeal
Respects her leather keks
Larry says, her stroking hand
Is very sure and stable
Shed kill a mouse, if it were planned,
Or wore a designer label

White to play. This position is from Quparadze-

rDWDWDkg But lately she has hissy fits
And clips him with a Vogue
Uzunoglu, Cesme 2017. Black is hoping for coun- DpDWGpDW Her visitors hate cats to bits
terplay on the a1-h8 diagonal but Whites next
move put paid to this. What did he play? Answers
WDW0bDpD And sport an Irish brogue
Bill Greenwell
to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 25 July or 0WDWDWDW
nDWDPDPD
via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a With the spryness of a puma, with a wicked
sense of humour,
prize of 20 for the first correct answer out of a
hat. Please include a postal address and allow six DN)WDPDW With a satirists demystifying eyes
He patrols the Whitehall railings itemising
weeks for prize delivery.
PDPDWDWD human failings.

DKDRDWDR
Thats Larry, folks, the Witty and the Wise.
Last weeks solution 1 Bc5+
Last weeks winner Keith McDermott, Hes as salty as a sailor, hes as hip as Norman
Allerton, West Yorkshire Mailer,
50 the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
 LIFE

Hes got cool, hes got charisma, hes got class.

He has super-potent mojo, doesnt give a damn Crossword
for BoJo,
And tells Damian Green to shove it up his arse.
2319: Poem III
by Pabulum
Since the Maybot installation as the leader of
the nation
Like a zombie dragged-up version of Farage,
Larry hangs out at a distance till her personal
assistants Unclued lights are words from
Shut her down for several hours to recharge. a famous poem whose title
will appear in the completed
When you earn your bread and butter co-existing grid and must be shaded. Else-
where, ignore an accent.
with a nutter
Its a contradiction, but as Larry says,
Never mind a funny living, its the gift that keeps Across
on giving. 4 Fox then dish regulator
Hes already bought a welcome mat for Jez. (11, hyphened)
G.M. Davis 11 Foals need bananas like
certain bats (9, hyphened)
Im a house cat, a mouse cat, 12 Some ignore a great bore
A clever cat and proud. (5)
Im a fat cat, a rat cat, 13 Payments to Pope in old
The darling of the crowd. coin and notes (7)
Call me classy if you choose 14 Nun pig ignored for a
And regal if you must; long time (3) Down
I feast among the famous folk 15 Tidy number dine on 1 NCO catches composer in 39 Imbecile in Australian river
For I am upper crust. beef (4) race (6) (5)
Im here in No. 10 to stay 20 Underhand goblin only 2 Half a canticle boosted 40 Grand poem lifted bovine
Though families come and go; within Quebec (7) luminary (5) type (4)
And it would shatter hoi polloi 21 Liqueur I get with round 3 Involved conflicts
To know the things I know. (7) distressed gentlest man A first prize of 30 for the first
Of all the felines in the world 24 Tinker and MC possibly (11) correct solution opened on 7
I guess there cannot be in conversation (6) 6 Embryo foulest criminal August. There are two runners-
A cat with greater privileges. 25 Powdered fruit sustains left on the shelf (6) up prizes of 20. (UK solvers
MAGNIFICAT thats me. me (6) 7 Room to manoeuvre as can choose to receive the latest
29 Cardinal we inducted in famous general will (6) edition of the Chambers
Frank McDonald
the middle (5) 8 Unlike Simple Simon, dictionary instead of cash
31 Girl digs timeless proverbs pensioned not so poorly (7) ring the word dictionary.)
Im the Battersea Bruiser, no pussy-cat loser,
(6) 17 Imperfect flex? (5) Entries to: Crossword 2319,
Ten Downing Streets chav cht-elain;
33 Sloppy tinhorns dropping 18 Teachers gaga policed The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
When theres mouses need fixin and rats ripe
gold pieces (6) when raving (11) Street, London SW1H 9HP.
for nixin 38 Such as should block very 19 Impressions of river got by Please allow six weeks for prize
No problem, guys, Larrys your man. sharp weapon (7) fishes (5) delivery.
41 Mature cheese (French) 22 Zoo Chile restructured
No mutt calls me Mog I live high on the hog, from abroad (3) contains one protozoan (9)
My PMs an A1 role model: 43 Slimy scrubber 25 Cheerful Muslim not
Top care and attention plus index-linked Liechtenstein expelled (4) indeed unknown (5)
pension 44 Soldier from Arabia edges 27 Columns in Spain tapir
Each day is a dream-ticket doddle. away (3) mounts (5) Name
45 Pink plant spoken about by 28 Implement gnome spotted
True, some of her cronies are freeloading spooks (7) (3)
phoneys 46 Great Danes regularly 30 In Dominica that fellow Address
And backstabbers (thats entre nous), pulled chariots (5) Pabulum once swam (7)
But I did like Obama oh boy, what a charmer! 47 Competitors back from 34 Perhaps cross Georgias up
Michelle was a cool kitty, too. N. Europe including old for a drink (6)
bishop (9) 35 Aim at high things in
Whichever lot win, whoever gets in 48 Wild guy cudgels afternoon shoot (6)
I keep shtummo and dont dish the dirt; Republican for trickery 36 Story about rabbit
Email
Labour or Tory, its all hunky-dory (11) producing enzyme (6)
This job is a cinch and a cert!
Mike Morrison
NO. 2316 : DIVINE ALTERATION
NO. 3010 : MONSTER MASH-UP

In memory of the late great George Redundant words were 12A virgin, 16A crazy, 38A mammal,
Romero, and taking as your inspiration Seth 18D state, 21D greed, 25D tendon, 34D extremist. These
respectively defined 14A vestal, 20D lunatic, 6D marsupial,
Grahame-Smiths 2009 Pride and Prejudice 23D Indiana, 33A cupidity, 15A paxwax, 41A absolutist.
and Zombies, you are invited to provide an Roman gods (underlined) in these words were turned into
extract from a mash-up of a literary clas- their Greek equivalents.
sic of your choice and horror fiction. Please
email, wherever possible, entries of up to First prize Nadya James, Heanor, Derbyshire
150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by mid- Runners-up Ben Stephenson, London SW12;
day on 2 August, providing a word count at Rowan Priestman, Burdrop, Banbury, Oxon
the end of your entry.
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 51
LIFE
Status Anxiety
Winter is nearly here
bring on the body count
Toby Young
A
s a Game of Thrones fan, I
feel ambivalent about the
fact that the saga is finally
wending its way to a conclusion. The
latest season, which debuted on Sun-
day, is the last series but one; there will
only be a total of 13 episodes across
both. On the one hand, I feel sad
about the fact that a television series
that has given me so much pleasure
is coming to an end. But Im also a
little relieved.
At times, following the sprawl-
ing cast of characters and multiple
storylines has felt a bit too much like
hard work. The past few seasons have
become bogged down as the writers
have dutifully charted the fates of
minor figures such as Tommen Bar-
atheon, an almost supernaturally bor-
ing princeling. I often found myself
having to Google who the characters
are just to keep track of them. The
overarching storyline inched forward
at a snails pace and the series began
to take on a soapy quality a drama
without a proper engine.
I kept going, of course. Partly
because there were still little nug-
gets of goodness to be found in each
episode, but also because Id already
invested so many weeks months,
years in the series. Watching these
epic, multi-season shows often feels
like that. You put up with the fallow
periods in the hope that, eventually,
MICHAEL HEATH
52
your investment will pay off. Its an
act of faith.
The last season ended promisingly,
with numerous characters being killed
off, including young King Tommen,
who threw himself out of a window.
This is one of the delights of Game
of Thrones. George R.R. Martin, the
author of the books on which the series
is based, prides himself on not becom-
ing sentimentally attached to any of
his creations. Each one could die at
any moment, with the heroes faring no
better than the villains, and plenty of
them do. I became a little nervous last
season, when Jon Snow who seemed
to have been killed at the end of sea-
son five was brought back to life by
the Lord of Light. Oh no, I thought,
does this mean some other long-dead
characters might be revived, too?
Thankfully, none have been so far. The
slaughter of half the cast at the end of
season six bodes well for season seven,
since it means the writers can focus on
the central characters and start weav-
ing their different storylines together.
Please God dont bring the ghastly
Tommen back to life.
I do a regular Thronescast after
each episode with James Delingpole
on Ricochet, an American satellite
radio station, and this week James
questioned George R.R. Martins
commitment to his amoral universe.
The Game He pointed out that a politically cor-
of Thrones rect attitude to the female characters
is creeping in, with women gradual-
women are ly replacing men as the rulers of the
able to take on Seven Kingdoms. I think hes being
powerful men a little oversensitive. Yes, a patriar-
provided chal era is gradually giving way to a
matriarchal one, but the warrior prin-
theyre willing cesses are all drop-dead gorgeous and
to go topless frequently nude. If youre a female
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
character in Game of Thrones, the
rule seems to be that you can take on
powerful men and beat them at their
own game provided youre willing
to go topless. Im not convinced thats
a feminist manifesto.
The first episode of season seven
was pretty good, with all the chess
pieces being moved into position for
a satisfying endgame, but there was a
duff note the one being sung by Ed
Sheeran, who had a cameo as a trou-
badour in the Lannister army. What
the hell is he doing in the series? The
only explanation I can think of is that
one of the producers wants Sheeran
to sing at his 12-year-old daughters
birthday party so she can take self-
ies with him, stick them on Instagram
and impress her friends, and the only
way he could persuade the singer to
do it was to offer him a small part.
Luckily, Sheerans character has been
befriended by Arya Stark, one of the
sagas most psychopathic murderous
characters. With a bit of luck, shell
cut out his tongue.
The reason Sheerans cameo
didnt work is because it broke the
fourth wall. It was a rare moment
of knowingness in an otherwise
relentlessly unironic series. Game of
Thrones doesnt send itself up, which
is just as well, because so much of it
is plainly ridiculous, with its drag-
ons, dwarves and giants. It requires
a greater suspension of disbelief
than other TV shows and that may
be why viewers become so invested
in it. Its straight-faced portentous-
ness Winter is coming! is what
makes it so compulsive.
Toby Young is associate editor
of The Spectator.
 always been appealing; not that Rog
Spectator Sport has much to be modest about. The
Rog apart, Wimbledon ready-made personalised Ro8er
T-shirts were the sign of a man who
2017 was a disgrace knew what he was doing. Maybe just
Roger Alton a bit naff. But thats why we love him.
But without Rog and a couple of
fine matches (Nadal, Konta) Wimble-
don was a disgrace: two poor finals,
bravely kept at bay some of the most
hostile fast bowling I have ever seen
from Morne Morkel and Vernon Phi-
lander. If only England could have
kept it up for another day. If only.
O ne great sportsman congenitally
unable to shortchange anyone is
Chris Froome, whose fortitude in an

F
or obvious reasons this column
always welcomes King Roger
Rules The World headlines on
the back pages. And the front too.
So warm congrats from one Rog to
the greatest Rog of all. Is Federer
the best sportsman ever? Pel? Ali?
Bradman? Maybe, but its hard to
challenge Rog. Look at this year: two
grand slams at 35 and four children
under seven to tire him out, too. What
odds on the two sets of Federer twins
for the mixed doubles in 2040? Their
dad will probably still be reaching
the quarter-finals. Though just a word
Rog: maybe you were slightly overdo-
ing the whole Von Trapp shtick with
the younger twins in their little suits
and you in floods of tears. I mean I
know youre Swiss, but baby blue?
The Fed is now so far ahead that
he felt compelled to give the next
bunch of tennis players a sharp bol-
locking for being tactically naive and
not competitive enough. Since my
generation and Rafas generation,
yes, the next one hasnt been strong
enough to push all of us out really.
This slight lack of modesty has
and a first round full of players pick-
ing up 35 grand for turning up unfit or
unwilling to try. Andy Murray effec-
tively gave up against Sam Querrey,
though he did have a good excuse.
Djokovic gave up; so did Venus Wil-
liams. And Cilic weeping over his
blister? Its hard to imagine Pete
Sampras doing that, or Ivan Lendl.
One of the worst Wimbledons ever.
S pare a thought for anyone who
took their kids to Trent Bridge on
Monday to see a hard-nosed, gritty
fight for survival in one of the most
unforgiving arenas of all: five-day
Test cricket. What? Englands col-
Two poor lapse was lamentable. Only Root and
nals and a Cook were dismissed by wicket balls.
rst round Jennings and Ballance dont seem up
full of players to it, and Stokes, Ali and Bairstow,
all admirable players, didnt show
picking up any understanding of whats needed
35 grand for Test cricket. This was an extraor-
for turning dinary contrast to the last session of
the previous day. After South Afri-
up unt or ca declared, Cook and Jennings had
unwilling 14 minutes at the crease, weary and
to try aching after a day in the field. They
incredibly close Tour de France is a
great act of courage. He looked about
to die after losing the overall lead on
an impossibly steep finish a week ago,
but by the weekend had snatched it
back. Then he had to change a wheel
and was stuck at the side of the road
for nearly a minute just after his rivals
had piled on the pace at the foot of a
climb. Incredibly, on a category one
climb he caught up, booed all the way
by the French. Instead of falling out
of contention he held on to his lead.
Froome is the face of cycling in a
post-Armstrong world: quiet, unas-
suming, deadly and above all clean.
I admire him hugely and everyone
in Britain should too. But the pub-
lic seem reluctant to give him his due
while turning cartwheels of excite-
ment when Jamie Murray wins the
Wimbledon mixed doubles.
Can anything stop Froome win-
ning in Paris on Sunday? I very much
doubt it, and if so, it will be his fourth
(and the fifth victory for a British
rider since 2012). This is one of the
great sporting achievements of this
or any age.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. Last summer a friend of my
brother-in-laws house-sat for
us while we were in Greece for
a week. We paid him 25 a day
and all he had to do was look
after our dog and water the
garden when necessary. I left
food for him, including fruit, in
our fridge. Mary, I say including
fruit because, to my annoyance,
when we got back we found he
had stripped my raspberry canes
of every single raspberry and
eaten most of our figs. Because
we couldnt find anyone else he
is returning this year and it might
sound feeble but I just cant tell
him not to help himself. What
can I do?
C.J., Chagford, Devon
A. Buy a harmless food dye in
navy blue and spray the produce
before you go. Leave notices
adjacent announcing: Fungicide
trial in place. Do not disturb fruit.
Q. I recently joined Instagram
and was flattered and moved to
see how quickly I have gathered
followers as of today I have
over 200. Since many of these are
really old friends of 40 years or
more, who I never get to see, it is
a brilliant way to keep in touch
with each other and share news.
My problem is that, although
I have posted 16 images of
genuinely amazing (no swanks)
things going on in my life, Im
averaging only 22 likes per post.
Mary, how should I interpret this
disappointing feedback?
Name and address withheld
A. Unless youre selling something
and your Instagram account is
designed to drive commercial
traffic, you must restrain your
impulse to post. Most Instagram
users are already suffering from
amazement fatigue, and even
when friends are well disposed
towards one rather than envious,
there is such a thing as too much
stimulation. You must put up a
maximum of five posts a week.
Q. With regard to security gates,
I cant think of an insurance
company insisting on them, but
many people like to blame their
insurers for all sorts of vulgarity.
Dont forget that humble farmers
like us have to have our modest
electronic gates as cattle grids are
not trustworthy. (As a common
little self-made man I long to
have massive gates with coats of
arms, but my aristocratic wife says
that would be vulgar and likes our
battered wooden gates.)
Name and address withheld
A. Many thanks for your key
refinement of my pronouncement.
Q. As a proud Brexiteer, I was
recently gifted a great British
Brexit calendar. The kind giver
is a regular visitor to my home,
but my son is an avid Corbyn
supporter and Remoaner. Where
can I display it in the house
without instigating mayhem?
G.B London
A. You should not provoke
disharmony in the home. Keep
the calendar within your personal
wardrobe or bathroom.

the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk 53

LIFE
Food
Salt-beef delirium
Tanya Gold
K
atzs Delicatessen, estab-
lished 1888, is a theme park of
Jewish-American food, with
tribute gift shop, on the lower east
side of Manhattan. There is nowhere
more Jewish than Katzs except
Haredi Brooklyn, but if you go there
you dont come back. Katzs offers a
gentler Jewish experience, if you can
conceive of such a thing, or it at least
attempts it; it offers a kind of Juda-
ism you can enjoy over lunch, which
I find amazing because I have never
managed it. (No one, for instance,
talks about the Holocaust in Katzs,
not because they dont want to but
because they cant. Try saying Treblin-
ka with a dumpling in your mouth.)
Its tourist value was proven when
Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in Katzs
in When Harry Met Sally to prove she
was deserving of a Jewish man (Billy
Crystal) with a serious case of ghetto
madness, simply by sampling the cui-
sine; and yes, I think she was. That a
tribe of this tenacity and intellectual
rigour went for fish balls, salt beef
(here called pastrami) and the dump-
lings that I suspect killed Nazis during
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Support
The Foreword didnt bode well.
This was on the first page of
The Taylor Review of Modern
Working Practices. It was a
Foreword by Mathew as though
he were some promising infant.
In the second sentence he gave
thanks for the support and the
respect for my independence
which has been shown by her
[Theresa Mays] team. Two things
support and respect should
have a plural verb: have. As for
support, we would hear it more
than 100 further times. Support
came thick and fast, more than
once per page. Sometimes it
meant agree with: We support supported record employment
the basic principle of a more
54
the Warsaw ghetto uprising by sheer
density remains a mystery to me;
perhaps it is inverse vanity. I dont
know why the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions (BDS) movement isnt
all over Katzs. Perhaps they like the
food. Perhaps Jews appropriated the
food from someone else, but I cant
think of anyone else who would
admit to inventing it.
The exterior is red-brick and one
storey: a diner from myth. The window
display is as screamingly self-regarding
as any anti-Semite would wish; Katzs
doesnt do self-hatred and I under-
stand this, because with a salami, where
would you start? Katz is written every-
where in neon, in differing sizes and
Some wait, fonts. It is signage for amnesiacs, by
some eat; all maniacs. There is merchandise in the
window: baseball caps; T-shirts; can-
abandon the dles; a history (or rather autobiogra-
attempt in phy) of Katzs; and what may be solid
the end. It is gold rye bread on a plinth that says
World Pastrami Eating Champion.
impossible to Such is the charisma and self-
nish anything belief of this deli, people from the
at Katzs midwest of America, and Japan, are
Make no mistake, self-picking fruit is the future!
of support is simply help, as
in supporting individuals to
remain and progress in the
labour market. In traditional
English, that would have read
dynamic, responsive welfare helping individuals to remain
system. More often it was used or supporting individuals who
in strange ways, as befits a public remain.
body such as the Royal Society of But how would you under-
Arts, which Mr Taylor heads. Let stand supporting in this ripe
us call the new language Ras. sample of Ras: Portable benefit
Ras sometimes uses support platforms can be third-party
to mean help make possible. vehicles supporting gig economy
Thus the review says Flexibility businesses to make payments on
has been a key part of enabling behalf of an individual working
business to respond to changing through them. There it is not
market conditions and has helping businesses but (as it says
on the same page) to nudge
rates. In Ras, a chief new meaning people. Now if someone asked
the spectator | 22 july 2017 | www.spectator.co.uk
queuing round the block with dazzled
eyes. It is in its way like Maxims in
Paris, and this, I think, would delight it.
Inside, it is a faded yet glittering cav-
ern, stretching towards yet more neon
signs that say Katzs, and photographs
of celebrities eating, or recovering
from eating, salt beef. The atmosphere
is chaotic, for who can ease themselves
into Jewish culture? And so there is an
air of madness here; of forcing yourself
into something or something into
you, in this case salt beef before it
ends. Half the queue surges for table
service, which feels wrong, because it
requires patience and there is none
here; the other half queues again, at
a long counter above which is a map
of the United States of America in
neon, and the famous contribution of
Katzs to the liberation of Europe, or
the colonisation by Jews of the Middle
East, depending on your politics: Send
a salami to your boy in the army.
If you survive the queue, you fight
your way to a beige plastic table with a
tray holding, in my case, chicken soup
and a dumpling and a salt-beef sand-
wich on white. Some wait, some eat; all
abandon the attempt in the end. It is
impossible to finish anything at Katzs.
Is it metaphor? Is American Judaism
an unfinished work of art or are these
sandwiches just too big? The food is
huge, dense, salty and, if you care about
salt beef, the very best; eating it is as
powerful an act of Jewish identity as I
can imagine, even as it falls apart in my
hands; it feels and this is a compli-
ment quite close to strangulation.
Katzs Delicatessen, 205 East
Houston Street, New York, NY 10002,
tel: +1 212-254-2246 0000.
me if Id like to be supported
down the stairs, I would not
expect a sharp nudge in the back.
The motive force of support in
Ras can be quite strong, as when
the review speaks of supporting
individuals to pay the right tax.
Perhaps such support comes from
uniformed personnel. A mature
example of Ras syntax appears
in digital solutions to support
self-employed people comply
with their legal requirements.
To support people comply is in
English make people comply.
As a Ras proverb might say: You
can lead a horse to water but you
cant support him drink.
Dot Wordsworth
 Gin-makers Lunch
with Brighton Gin

Join us in the Spectator boardroom on Thursday 17 August for a very special Gin-makers Lunch with Jonathan Ray.

As well as being the magazines drinks editor, Jonathan is a co-founder of Brighton Gin, voted the UKs best gin at the
Peoples Drinks Awards. He will lead guests through a brief tasting of his favourite gins and tonics while explaining how
and why he helped co-found Brightons rst (legal) distillery.

Guests will then enjoy a four-course cold lunch provided by our partners Forman & Field, followed by a number of wines that
Jonathan added in his revised version of Simon Hoggart Lifes Too Short to Drink Bad Wine. These will include Hamilton
Russell Chardonnay from South Africa, Domaine Josmeyer Pinot Blanc from Alsace and Quinta do Noval Red from the
Douro Valley in Portugal, as well as one or two other treats.

This promises to be a fascinating and hugely enjoyable occasion, so book now to avoid disappointment.

The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP

Thursday 17 August | 12.30 p.m. | 75

For further information and to book

www.spectator.co.uk/brightongin | 020 7961 0015
 Courage and commitment - thats the

FP CRUX European Special Situations Fund

Since launch*
Return on 1,000 invested 1 year 2 years 3 years 4 years 5 years
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CRUX European Special Situations Fund 1,285 1,469 1,592 1,754 2,379 2,750

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Index : FTSE World Europe ex UK 1,290 1,369 1,384 1,611 2,059 1,950

Cash : Bank of England Base Rate 1,003 1,008 1,013 1,018 1,023 1,037

Source: FE 2017, bid-bid, 1,000 invested, cumulative performance to 30.06.17. *Launch date 01.10.09. Bid-bid, TR, 30.06.16 - 30.06.17.

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Past performance is not a guide to future returns. The
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Consult your nancial adviser, call or visit: 0800 30 474 24 www.cruxam.com

Fund featured; FP CRUX European Special Situations Fund I ACC GBP class. The Henderson European Special Situations Fund was restructured into the FP CRUX European Special
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promotion is issued by CRUX Asset Management, who are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority of 25 The North Colonnade, Canary Wharf, London
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