The intelligent case for Trump Daniel McCarthy The geopolitics of Tetris Steven Poole

8 october 2016 [ £4.25 www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

Syrian nightmare
The insoluble conflict is now threatening world peace, says Paul Wood

BAHRAIN BD3.20. CANADA C$7.50.

EURO ZONE €6.95. UAE AED34.00.
SOUTH AFRICA ZAR79.90. USA US$7.20.

The dark side of the Pill Vice TV is a con

Lara Prendergast Neil Armstrong
Channel 4 is paid for by advertising and owned by you. Profits go back into delivering
our public service remit, including programmes from British producers.

Where are the ideas?
T
he Conservative party conference
in Birmingham this week seemed a
remarkably relaxed affair. The Euro-
pean question has been settled. Seldom has
victory in the next election looked more
secure. The Labour conference in Liverpool
had been a debacle, as the hard left set about
picking off the remaining moderates. Diane
James has resigned as Ukip leader after 18
days. It’s quite possible that her replacement
could transform Ukip into a new working-
class party — and then do to Labour in the
north of England what the SNP has done to
it in Scotland.
One cabinet member put it well: the
Tory party, he said, was like a piece of elastic
that had been stretched much too far under
David Cameron but has now been allowed
to revert to a more natural position. Gram-
mar schools, ideas about ‘shaming’ compa-
nies who employ foreigners — as if that were
something to be ashamed of: such notions
were banished during the David Cameron
years, but now they’re back. And if voters
find this off-putting, what are they going to
do? Vote for Jeremy Corbyn?
A party that accused its former leader
of shuttling between panic and compla-
cency is now in danger of doing the same.
Take the Chancellor, Philip Hammond. He
was remarkably keen to assert his dislike of
over-borrowing. ‘Piling up debt for our chil-
dren and our grandchildren to pay off is not
only unsustainable,’ he said. ‘It’s unfair and
it’s downright un-Conservative.’ Quite so. So
why did he then go on to say he would not
observe his predecessor’s target of balancing
the books by the end of the current parlia-
ment? It is an abdication of fiscal responsi-
bility dressed up as prudence.
The absence of proper opposition is bad
for the Conservatives, many of whom are
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
only in politics to keep the socialists out of
power. Labour is now a danger only to itself.
Under such circumstances, the Tories could
grow lazy and quickly start to adopt bad
ideas — or give up the hunt for new ones.
If the Conservatives were more dynam-
ic, they might make good use of this period
during which Theresa May is pretty much
unopposed in the House of Commons. Mrs
May could use this time rather as Marga-
ret Thatcher used the years after the 1981
Labour party split: to enact bold reforms,
push the boundaries of reforming Conserv-
Lack of opposition is bad for the
Tories, many of whom are only in
politics to keep the socialists out
atism and change the political landscape.
Instead we have a dash for selective educa-
tion and some random snarling at companies
thrown in.
There is already tension between those
who argued for Brexit and those who dis-
paraged it as regressive. The Brexiteers are
keen to shape Britain’s departure from the
EU as a liberal move that will allow the coun-
try to embrace the world. But some of those
who argued for Remain seem determined to
make Brexit conform to their caricature of
mean-minded politics — a British nativism.
Amber Rudd, for example, is a shrewd
politician who has the makings of a good
Home Secretary. Yet she felt the need to
talk as if she were throwing her hat into the
ring for the Ukip leadership contest. Her line
about ‘preventing migrants taking jobs that
British people could do’ sounded odd com-
ing from the mouth of a Conservative. Her
proposal to force companies to reveal how
many foreign workers they employed was
bizarre, distasteful and alarming.
Mrs May said in her conference speech
that ‘the Britain we’re going to build after
Brexit is going to be a global Britain’. If so,
why act as if the point of Brexit was to turn
up the heat on Johnny Foreigner and start
carping at companies who think globally
when they recruit? It’s quite true that Britain
has an immigration problem, one that Mrs
May was not very successful in solving. But
the solution lies in looking at work permits
and reforming the tax and welfare system, or
improving the incentives to work.
It would have been useful to have abol-
ished the ridiculous and unachievable tar-
get of reducing net migration to the ‘tens of
thousands’ and instead had a more mature
conversation about the nature of immigra-
tion. At the Spectator conference fringe
debate on Brexit, for example, the audi-
ence showed strong support for establish-
ing a principle of free movement of workers
between Britain, Australia and Canada.
Focusing on the nature rather than the
amount of immigration makes far more
sense — and now is the right time to take
the politically difficult decision to drop a tar-
get that everyone knows cannot be met. New
ideas are needed.
But this week’s Conservative conference
was not a festival of ideas — nor did it need
to be. All the Tories had to do to outperform
the Labour party was to gather in one room
and not start hurling abuse at each other.
The first few weeks of Mrs May’s premier-
ship should be seen as a leadership campaign
fought after she entered No. 10, an overture
to the party faithful.
Her proposal of a ‘country that works for
everyone’ is laudable, but we did not learn
much this week about how she plans to
achieve it. Hopefully, in the next few months,
we will start to find out.
3
 His imperial wreath
Of pharaohs and hieroglyphs, p42 is tantalisingly close, p14

Mavericks of the second world war, p38

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 12 Syrian nightmare BOOKS
7 Portrait of the Week A new Cold War is developing 34 Philip Hensher The Invention of
around this endless, bloody conflict Angela Carter, by Edmund Gordon
9 Diary Airports and Trumpistas Paul Wood
Chris Mullin 36 Steven Poole The Tetris Effect,
13 John Fuller ‘The Giant’: a poem by Dan Ackerman
10 Politics Theresa’s Tory love-in Philip Marsden The Marches,
James Forsyth 14 Meet the new Boris
Now he’s joking in earnest by Rory Stewart
11 The Spectator’s Notes Harry Mount 37 Andrew McNeillie
Brexit, Mrs May and T.S. Eliot ‘Intimacies’: a poem
Charles Moore 18 Brains for Trump
The smart case for the Donald 38 John Jolliffe SAS,
14 Barometer Tenement Scots; Daniel McCarthy by Ben Macintyre
untaxed Americans; risky sports
20 The students fight back 39 Claudia FitzHerbert Browse,
17 Rod Liddle Hungary’s landslide A free-speech movement is rising edited by Henry Hitchings
18 From the archive Brendan O’Neill 40 Peter Abbs ‘To Grieve’: a poem
Irish conscription 22 Unhappy Pill Andre Van Loon Lenin on the
24 Ancient and modern An oddly quiet medical scandal Train, by Catherine Merridale
Corbyn Augustus Lara Prendergast 41 Juliet Nicolson The Trials
27 Jenny McCartney 24 Who comes after Merkel? of the King of Hampshire,
The parenting trap Germany’s new leading women by Elizabeth Foyster
29 James Delingpole Brexit joys William Cook 42 A.S.H. Smyth on Egyptomania
31 Letters Grammar schools, 26 Why cathedrals are soaring 43 Andy Miller The Men’s Club,
Patrick Minford, rewilding, dyslexia The C of E’s unexpected success by Leonard Michaels
Simon Jenkins Stuart Evers Nicotine, by Nell Zink
32 Any other business
It’s the housing that really matters 44 Duncan Fallowell
Martin Vander Weyer Blitzed, by Norman Ohler
45 Patrick Skene Catling Not Pretty
Mary Wakefield is away. Enough, by Gerri Hirshey

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Grizelda, RGJ, Paul Wood, Bernie, Adam Singleton, Nick Newman, Kipper Williams, Geoff Thompson,
Tony Husband, K.J. Lamb, Hunter. www.spectator.co.uk To subscribe to The Spectator for £111 a year, turn to page 63
Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: editor@spectator.co.uk (editorial);
letters@spectator.co.uk (for publication); advertising@spectator.co.uk (advertising); Advertising enquiries: 020 7961 0222
Subscription and delivery queries Spectator Subscriptions Dept., 17 Perrymount Rd, Haywards Heath RH16 3DH; Tel: 0330 3330 050;
Email: customerhelp@subscriptions.spectator.co.uk Newsagent queries Spectator Circulation Dept, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200,
Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: dstam@spectator.co.uk Distributor COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QX
Vol 332; no 9815 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952 The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson

4 the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

 Our wonderful vestments, p48 How Tetris came west, p36
The C of E’s surprising success story, p26

LIFE
ARTS LIFE This is a revolt against the National
46 Neil Armstrong Is Vice’s new TV 61 High life Taki Union of Students, and its desire
channel all it’s cracked up to be? Low life Jeremy Clarke
to stifle ‘problematic’ viewpoints
48 Exhibitions Opus Angelicum: 63 Real life Melissa Kite Brendan O’Neill, p20
Masterpieces of English Embroidery 64 Long life Alexander Chancellor
Melanie McDonagh Bridge Susanna Gross If you’re attacked by Rod Liddle and
49 Radio Kate Chisholm 65 Wine club Jonathan Ray Liz Jones in one week, you’ve got
Opera Don Giovanni;
to be doing something right
Il tabarro; Suor Angelica
Michael Tanner AND FINALLY . . . Melissa Kite, p63
58 Notes on… A pint of Landlord
50 Theatre The Libertine; Michael Henderson My life looks a pretty picture, but
Father Comes Home from
the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) 66 Chess Raymond Keene it’s a reproduction. I am made of
Lloyd Evans Competition Lucy Vickery being, in the act of being, all green
52 The Heckler Kate Tempest 67 Crossword Columba Competition, p66
Lloyd Evans 68 Status anxiety Toby Young
54 Dance Giselle Battle for Britain Michael Heath
Donald Hutera 69 The Wiki Man Rory Sutherland
55 Television James Walton Your problems solved
Mary Killen
56 Cinema The Girl on the Train
Deborah Ross 70 Drink Bruce Anderson
Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth

CONTRIBUTORS
Harry Mount publishes
an updated edition of The
Wit and Wisdom of Boris
Johnson this week. He writes
about how Boris Johnson has
updated his wit on p. 14.
Simon Jenkins is a columnist
for the Guardian, and a former
editor of the Times and the
London Evening Standard.
He writes about cathedrals
on p. 26.
Claudia FitzHerbert Juliet Nicolson’s most Stuart Evers’s books include
is literary editor of the recent book is a family story, Your Father Sends His Love
Oldie. She contemplates A House Full of Daughters. and Ten Stories about Smoking.
the bookshop in the age of She considers the case of a He reviews Nell Zink’s
Amazon on p. 39. rogue aristocrat on p. 41. Nicotine on p. 43.

the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

 Home
T heresa May, the Prime Minister, said at
the Conservative party conference that
hers was now the party of ‘working-class’
people and would occupy the ‘new centre
ground’. She announced that Article 50 of
the Lisbon Treaty would be invoked by next
March, beginning the formal process for
Britain to leave the European Union. The
pound fell to a 31-year low and the FTSE
100 index rose above 7,000 to an 18-month
high. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, said: ‘We will no longer target a
surplus at the end of this Parliament,’ as his
predecessor George Osborne had promised,
but would spend on housing and transport.
More than 500 people were stranded on the
London Eye big wheel for three hours one
evening by a mechanical fault. A No. 26 bus
to Hackney Wick burst into flames outside
Liverpool Street station.
D iane James resigned as leader of the
UK Independence Party 18 days after
being elected. Under plans to stop England’s
reliance on doctors trained abroad, the
number of medical school places will
increase by 25 per cent from 6,000 to 7,500
a year from 2018, Jeremy Hunt, the Health
Secretary, announced. British servicemen
would be protected from ‘spurious’ claims
of misconduct by the suspension of parts of
the European Convention on Human Rights
during future conflicts, Michael Fallon, the
Defence Secretary, said. Amber Rudd, the
Home Secretary, told the Conservative
conference: ‘Reducing net migration back
down to sustainable levels will not be easy.
But I am committed to delivering it.’ Three
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
British-born scientists, David Thouless,
Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz,
won the Nobel prize for physics for their
work on very thin layers of matter; all
three now work in America. Schools were
overtaken by a craze for flipping plastic
bottles of water so that they land upright.
R ecipients of Employment and Support
Allowance with severe conditions
and no prospect of getting better would
no longer have to be retested, Damian
Green, the Work and Pensions Secretary,
announced. Gareth Southgate, interim
England football manager since the
departure under a cloud of Sam Allardyce,
endorsed Wayne Rooney as captain.
Durham County Cricket Club accepted
a £3.8 million aid package but was
relegated from Division One of the County
Championship. Mike Towell, aged 25, a
Scottish boxer, died after a bout in Glasgow.
Sir Neville Marriner, the violinist and
conductor, died aged 92.
Abroad
T he United States suspended talks with
Russia over Syria, blaming it for joining
Syrian government forces in ‘targeting of
critical infrastructure such as hospitals, and
preventing humanitarian aid from reaching
civilians in need’. The main hospital in the
sector of Aleppo where 250,000 are besieged
was bombed three times in a week. Russia
confirmed it had sent an S-300 air-defence
missile system to the Syrian port of Tartus.
Russia suspended an agreement with the
United States in force since 2000 by which
each side undertook to dispose of 34 tons of
weapons-grade plutonium; enough to make
more than 8,000 nuclear weapons. Turkey
suspended 13,000 policemen suspected of
links with Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric
who lives in the United States. German
prosecutors dropped an investigation into
Jan Böhmermann, a comedian accused of
insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
of Turkey by reciting a poem about him
copulating with goats.
I n one day, 6,055 migrants were rescued
from the sea off Libya, the Italian
coastguard reported. More than 98 per cent
of Hungarians voted against mandatory EU
migrant quotas in a referendum rendered
non-binding by a turnout of only 40.4 per
cent. In Colombia, 50.2 per cent of voters
rejected a peace deal to end the long civil
war there. Villagers near the Pakistan-India
border in Punjab were evacuated as tensions
continued over Kashmir. The Pope visited
Georgia and Azerbaijan, which has fewer
than 300 Catholics.
D onald Trump, the Republican candidate
for the American presidency, declined
to publish his tax returns in the face of
claims by the New York Times that he
might have paid none since declaring losses
of $916 million in 1995. Kim Kardashian
West was robbed at gunpoint of jewellery
worth £5 million at her house in Paris.
Seven species of yellow-faced bee native
to Hawaii were added to the US federal
list of endangered species. Two American
Samoan businessmen complained to the
US transport regulator that they were
obliged to be weighed before joining their
flights from Honolulu. CSH
7

A ny day now, the government
will make its long-delayed
announcement on whether a third runway
should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick.
Personally I am against both. During
my 18 undistinguished months as an
environment minister, I learned one thing
about the aviation lobby: their appetite is
voracious. They want more of everything.
Runways, terminals, you name it. I also
learned that in the end, often after initial
resistance, governments always give way.
A lthough from time to time industry
representatives hint that they would
be prepared to make concessions on the
handful of night flights that come in over
central London each morning, disturbing
the sleep of several million people, this is
soon forgotten once they have got their
way. On one occasion, when I suggested
inviting industry representatives to meet
the MPs whose constituencies were most
affected by night flights, I was told by
officials that they wouldn’t even turn up if
the invitation came from one so far down
the pecking order as I. When I eventually
got them round a table, we were given a
long list of reasons why nothing could be
done about anything, the most ludicrous
of which was ‘wind speeds over China’.
I don’t buy the argument that indefinite
airport expansion is essential for our
economic future. The answer is to develop
regional airports, making sure that they
are accessible by public transport. As
for Heathrow and Gatwick, demand
management, rather than predict-and-
provide, is the order of the day.
H ow are we to explain the Trump
phenomenon? A good friend (well
to the right of me) who lived in Houston
for many years went back recently to look
up old friends, all wealthy and successful.
He was astonished to find that many of
them seemed to think they were victims
of oppression, living under some sort
of tyranny. ‘They’re off their rockers,’
was his considered opinion. On a couple
of recent occasions I have had a little
glimpse of this. On a train from London
to Edinburgh the other day, I overheard
a conversation between two American
tourists and an academic-looking
Scotsman. One of the Americans was
calmly explaining why it was necessary
to build a wall along the border with
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Chris Mullin
Mexico and the Scotsman was going quieter
and quieter as he realised where the trail
was leading. And on a plane to France
three weeks ago, I came across a garrulous,
widely travelled American who was an
expert on bees. He, too, rapidly emerged as
a Trumpista. My point is this. These people
are among the 18 per cent of US citizens
in possession of passports. They’ve met
foreigners. They know about the world
outside. And yet somehow they, too, have
reached the conclusion that Donald Trump
Melissae di Erice: Gold and diamond rings
Cassandra Goad, 147 Sloane Street, London SW1X 9BZ
Telephone: 020 7730 2202 cassandragoad.com
is the messiah. He may have bombed in
the recent debate with Hillary Clinton,
but we’re by no means out of the woods.
W hat is to become of Barack
Obama when he retires from the
US presidency at the age of 55? I have
a suggestion. There is a vacancy on the
US Supreme Court, which the Republican
majority in Congress has blocked him
from filling. Obama, a constitutional
lawyer, is ideally qualified. And he might
have more influence as a Supreme Court
justice than he ever did as President.
G ood to see that the Treasury is back
under sensible management after the
damaging deficit fetishism of the Osborne
years, which has wreaked such destruction
on local government. If the present
regime of year-on-year cuts continues,
I foresee the elimination of just about all
non-statutory services. Already more and
more councils are hiving off responsibility
for parks, libraries, museums and litter-
picking, while youth provision has been
practically eliminated in many areas.
There is going to be a lot of clearing up
to do when this is over. Hopefully, too, we
will hear from the lips of the Chancellor
no more mendacious, divisive soundbites
of the ‘Skivers versus Strivers’ variety.
O ne of the great joys of my life after
politics has been the discovery that
the political meeting is not dead; it has
simply transferred to the literary festival.
Since I retired from Parliament I have
taken part in well over a hundred, from
Lerwick in the Shetlands to Fowey in
Cornwall and at most places in between.
When I was an MP I don’t recall many
people queuing to hear me speak, let
alone paying £10 or £12 a head for the
privilege. In retirement, however, I have
attracted audiences of up to 750. Some
480 turned up to my event in Edinburgh
the other day and almost 400 in Ilkley on
Saturday. Yes, I know it won’t last for ever
and I know that writers are sometimes
exploited but, hey, this is what my old
friend Tony Benn would have called
‘a blaze of autumn sunshine’. A pleasant
change from addressing small gatherings
of the converted in draughty halls.
Chris Mullin is a former Labour MP, and
has just published a memoir, Hinterland.
9

Theresa’s Tory love-in
T
heresa May doesn’t use an autocue
for her speeches. She feels that read-
ing off a screen at the back of the hall
makes it far harder to connect with the audi-
ence. But the Prime Minister had no need to
worry about her connection with the audi-
ence at this conference. Tory activists love
her; they regard her as one of their own and
are rejoicing at her leadership. ‘The grown-
ups are back in charge’ was a refrain heard
frequently in Birmingham this week.
The mood of Tory activists has been fur-
ther improved by what Mrs May has said
about Brexit. Her commitment to trigger
Article 50 by the end of March has reas-
sured them that Britain really is leaving the
European Union and the tone of her speech
on Sunday indicated that she is aiming for
the kind of clean break with the EU that
most of her audience at conference wanted.
(There were grumblings from pro-Remain
Tories that their brethren had largely stayed
away this year.)
May’s comments on Brexit have delight-
ed Tory Eurosceptics: ‘We are not leaving
the European Union only to give up control
of immigration again,’ she declared. ‘And we
are not leaving only to return to the jurisdic-
tion of the European Court of Justice.’
Those MPs who formed the awkward
squad under David Cameron are now
seeking out journalists to praise Mrs May.
One pointed to the chief whip, Gavin Wil-
liamson, who used to be Cameron’s parlia-
mentary private secretary, and said: ‘He used
to have to call me before the Prime Minis-
ter said anything on Europe and try and get
me to keep quiet. Now he has to call George
[Osborne] and Nicky Morgan. That’s how
much things have changed.’
If May’s aim was to make sure that she
didn’t alienate her right flank, she has suc-
ceeded. What complaints there were at
this conference came from the hardcore
Remainers. But May also had another objec-
tive in mind when she outlined her timetable
for triggering Article 50.
One of the Brexit ministers tells me that
the government hopes that the rest of the
EU will be willing to engage in preliminary
discussions now a date has been fixed and
that May will be able to test the waters at the
European Council in December, before the
formal negotiations begin.
She has made it clear that Brexit will not
consist of a series of opt-outs. Instead, she
wants to work out an entirely new, but close,
10
POLITICS|JAMES FORSYTH
relationship with the EU built around trade
and security cooperation. Nearly everyone
in Birmingham — and in the markets, judg-
ing by the fall in the value of the pound —
has taken this to mean that the UK is not
going to remain a member of the customs
union or the single market. This has raised
expectations among the Eurosceptic right
and Mrs. May will face quite a backlash if
she ends up disappointing them.
But, oddly, by suggesting she doesn’t
want Britain to remain a member of the
single market, May might have made dis-
cussions with the rest of the EU easier. The
other 27 states want to show that there is
no ‘better’ deal than membership availa-
ble and that the four freedoms — of move-
‘The grown-ups are back in
charge’ was a refrain heard frequently
in Birmingham this week
ment, goods, capital and services — are
inextricably linked. So, if the UK wanted
to stay in the single market, the conversa-
tion would turn on how this would not be
possible if Britain also sought to control
EU immigration. But if the UK is not trying
to stay, another more constructive discus-
sion becomes possible. It would allow other
member states to tell their voters that Brit-
ain had paid a price for its desire to leave the
EU’s jurisdiction. From this position, a free-
trade agreement could be reached covering
goods and some services.
Those involved in the preparation for the
negotiations admit that the task is complex.
‘Pick a Brexit, any Brexit…’
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
One jokes that ‘as soon as you solve one
problem, another five come along’. There
is optimism that the goods part of any deal
will be relatively straightforward. The City
and the Treasury are not so confident when
it comes to financial services.
But influential figures in the Brexit
department think that new EU financial ser-
vices rules could serve much the same pur-
pose as the current EU passporting rules in
terms of allowing UK financial services to
operate on the Continent. And there is also
a chance that the troubled European bank-
ing system could help the City get a better
deal than expected. European banks are not
keen to lend, currently — they would rather
build up their capital bases — and Europe-
an Central Bank efforts to make them do
so have not worked. At the end of last year,
however, UK banks were providing 1.1 tril-
lion euros in cross-border EU lending. This
suggests that EU members might be keen
for their companies to continue raising
money as easily as possible — in London.
Brexit will raise the stakes for Britain. It
will make it all the more important to get
domestic policy right. At this conference we
have seen the stirrings of an argument over
immigration. Some ministers, notably Philip
Hammond, have gone out of their way to
make the case for immigration according to
skills: to argue that making it harder for the
best and brightest to come here could snuff
out the UK’s advantage in growth sectors
of the economy such as technology. Mean-
while, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd
has been keen to stress that the government
remains committed to Theresa May’s target
of bringing immigration down to the tens
of thousands. Rudd — traditionally seen as
a liberal on immigration — won’t say how
quickly she wants to do this. It is her version
of Augustine of Hippo’s prayer: ‘Grant me
chastity and continence — but not yet.’
Theresa May keeps saying that she
doesn’t want her government to be defined
by Brexit, and on Wednesday, she made her
speech about the ‘new centre ground’, which
is a far greater political passion for her than
leaving the EU (after all, she thought it
would be better to remain). But this week
has confirmed how Brexit will totally domi-
nate politics until Britain has finished nego-
tiating its new relationship with the EU.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/EVENINGBLEND
The one daily political email you really need.

Birmingham
C hecking in to my hotel room on the
18th floor, for the Conservative party
conference here, I opened the door and
bumped into a workman on a stepladder.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘They shouldn’t have
let you in. All the water came through
from the room upstairs.’ He was painting
over the damage. Then he looked at me,
recognised me and asked, ‘Hard or soft
Brexit, then?’ I burbled slightly, not being
happy with the distinction, but eventually
said I thought ‘hard’ better described what
was needed. The painter told me he read
the Guardian and the Telegraph every day
to ‘get both sides’. He reckoned ‘hard’,
too: ‘It’s got to be divorce.’
P eople attack the whole business of
having an EU referendum, but one
of its pluses was that it invited millions of
people who had never before been asked
to form an opinion on the European
question to do so. Like the man on the
stepladder, they responded thoughtfully
— perhaps more thoughtfully than
people do in general elections when
a sizeable minority vote pretty much
automatically for one party or another.
We quickly developed a much more
educated electorate. The idea, strongly
touted immediately after the result, that
the voters’ majority view could be set
aside by Parliament because they didn’t
know what they were talking about has
almost completely vanished from political
debate, with the noisy exception of
interventions by Kenneth Clarke. Theresa
May’s strong recognition of this in her
speech here on Sunday makes this one of
the most extraordinary party conferences
I have ever attended. This is not because
of any high drama in the conference
hall, where the debates have, if that is
possible, been even duller than ever. It is
because of the complete and almost calm
reversal of a policy which the Tories had
until now maintained since the end of the
1950s. Without a flaming row in her party,
Mrs May has said unambiguously that the
orthodoxy of Macmillan, Heath, Major
and Cameron, the orthodoxy which
vanquished even Mrs Thatcher, has been
dethroned. We’re leaving, and the divorce,
though intended to be friendly, will be
absolute. The effect on those present is
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Charles Moore
oddly reassuring. Even most Remainers
seem keen to get on with leaving. The skill
of the pro-Europeans over more than half a
century was to make people believe that the
alternative to membership was unthinkable.
In the last six months, everything has moved.
First it became thinkable; from this week, it
becomes doable. At some point — probably
at several points — the negotiations will
go badly wrong, as they did indeed when
we were trying to travel the other way in
the 1960s and General de Gaulle was being
difficult. Nevertheless, a sincere decision to
leave cannot ultimately be prevented. The
Tories are all too used to insincere promises
about Europe, but this week they decided
that Mrs May is sincere.
D uring the campaign, the thrall of the
old orthodoxy was such that Leave
campaigners were reluctant to speak
openly about leaving the single market.
They feared that the prospect would seem
too frightening. Now, though Mrs May
did not quite state it in those terms, it is
overwhelmingly likely that we shall leave
the single market. One reason was put to
me succinctly here by Alexander Downer,
the Australian High Commissioner. If we
don’t, he says, we shall, in effect, still be in
the EU (though without voting power), so
countries like his will not be able to do any
trade deal with Britain, and will have to
stick with Brussels.
I t is only those educated out of their wits
who still find it difficult to understand
the terms involved. The leader in Monday’s
Times, angered by Mrs May’s speech, said
she was being ‘irresponsible’ to claim that
Britain would now become a ‘sovereign
and independent country’: ‘Every treaty
obligation that a country enters into
involves some dilution of sovereignty.
By definition, it means agreeing not to
do some things and thereby gaining a
collective benefit.’ You might as well say
that someone who enters into a contract
with somebody else thereby ceases to be
an independent individual. Indeed, the
word ‘treaty’ does not really make any
sense as a term in international relations
unless it refers to agreements made
between sovereign powers.
M rs May’s plain style may well come
to irritate people in a few months,
but just now it is extremely popular.
The lack of glamour, soundbites, smart
clothes, and ministerial overclaiming
is a blessed relief. I can’t pretend that I
find Mrs May an endearing figure, but
when she said in her speech that Britain
should not go round saying ‘We are
punching above our weight’ (a phrase
beloved of the Foreign Office), I almost
wanted to hug her. There isn’t even
much party knockabout. In the old days,
any speech which made some pathetic
jibe against ‘the brothers last week in
Blackpool’ could be guaranteed laughter
and applause. Now Labour is scarcely
mentioned, and Jeremy Corbyn, though
undoubtedly the most unintentionally
comic figure ever to have led the Labour
party, is passed over in silence.
I didn’t see the press pick it up, but Liam
Fox made a good point in his platform
speech here, about how trade works in
the modern world to the advantage of a
country like Britain. Francis Fukuyama,
he said, would have done better to have
written a book called not The End of
History, but The End of Geography.
H eywood Hill, the famed bookshop,
is 80 this year. To win its celebratory
Grand Prize of a new hardback a month
for life, you have to nominate the book
published in English since 1936 which has
‘meant the most to you’, explaining your
reasons in no more than three words,
which makes a haiku prolix. Then there
is a prize draw of the entries. Along with
several other writers, I have been asked
to nominate a book. I think I would say
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and my
reasons would lie, slightly cryptically, in
Eliot’s own words, ‘Now and England’.
11
 Syrian nightmare
Will this conflict in the Middle East lead to world war three?
PAUL WOOD

‘W
e are used to death,’ said Ismail.
He had been to the funerals of
four friends in a single week, all
killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to blood-
shed. We’re adapted to the situation and
this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose
someone, then the next day you say, OK, life
must go on.’
Ismail spoke to me from eastern Aleppo,
where as many as 250,000 people are under
siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on
rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twen-
ties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil
defence volunteers who dig people out of the
rubble after an attack. He could not endure
the despair on the faces of the injured who
knew they would not survive, he said.
In just two weeks, since a ceasefire ended
in a ‘rain of bombs’, the White Helmets have
documented some 400 civilians killed in
Aleppo, more than a third of them children.
Their work is extremely dangerous because
of the regime’s tactic of sending the planes in
again after rescuers arrive. ‘Double tap: it’s Halting the slaughter would mean planes had been blamed for the bombing of
famous now,’ Ismail said. ‘All the guys we lost grounding Russian planes as well as Syrian. an aid convoy into Aleppo as the ceasefire
[were] in that scenario… They [the regime] The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, Gen- collapsed.
do not discriminate. They kill everyone; they eral Joseph Dunford, was asked about a no- The Obama administration rejected a
don’t care… They are monsters.’ fly zone when he testified to senators last plan for a no-fly zone back in 2013. The Joint
The bombing has escalated now, because month. He told them, bluntly: ‘For us to con- Chiefs reportedly told the White House that
the regime has begun an offensive to retake trol all the airspace in Syria would require us it would take 70,000 US military personnel
Aleppo, the last city the armed rebels hold to go to war with Syria and Russia.’ to implement a no-fly zone over Syria. It was
anywhere in the country. One account says The question now is: could Syria start a number so large you might almost think it
that so many incendiary bombs are being world war three? Relations between Amer- was deliberately intended to alarm the pol-
dropped that a child woke her mother in the iticians. President Obama, eager to see out
middle of the night to ask if it was morning. Relations between America his last days in office without another major
Syria’s Guernica has produced one of the and Russia are now worse than foreign policy crisis, did not need much per-
war’s iconic images of suffering, five-year-old at any time since the Cold War suading.
Omran Daqneesh, sitting in an ambulance, ‘The logistics are enormous,’ said David
dazed and bloodied, white from masonry ica and Russia are worse than at any time Deptula, a retired US air force general who
dust. This one unbearably distressing picture since the Cold War. The US broke off its ran the no-fly zone over Iraq. Syria had much
reignited the debate over whether the West Syria talks with Russia this week. Russia, better air defences than Saddam’s Iraq, he
can stand aside while Syria bleeds. meanwhile, is ramping up its angry rheto- said, and his list of what would be required
But the inescapable fact for those who ric, accusing America of directing a ‘terror- was long: an array of bombers, fighters and
want to intervene — or intervene further ist internationale’ to prevent the Assad-Putin refuelling aircraft, as well as cruise missiles.
— is that Aleppo’s anguish is not the work alliance from winning. The US ambassador But he told me: ‘If you want to stop the Syr-
of the Syrian air force alone; Russian planes to the UN, Samantha Power, accused Russia ians from dropping barrel bombs off of heli-
are attacking too. In fact, Russian pilots instil of ‘barbarism’. copters on to innocent men, women and
even more terror than the regime’s. They fly The British are involved too, providing children, there are other ways to prevent
so high that people on the ground hear the RAF support for America’s air campaign it which are a heck of a lot more efficient,
jet’s engines only after the bomb has explod- and firing more rhetorical missiles towards rapid and less costly… direct attacks on the
ed — there is no warning of the attack. And Moscow. On Tuesday, Theresa May accused Syrian helicopter and fixed-wing forces. That
the Russians drop huge bombs — ‘bunker- Russia of supporting the regime’s ‘surren- can be done in 24 hours… That’s not a no-fly
busters’ — that can level a whole building. ‘It der or starve policy’ and called on Russia zone — that’s a focused attack… which is an
destroys everything,’ Ismail said. to allow in humanitarian aid. Russian war act of war.’
12 the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
 The general was not himself arguing to
bomb Syria’s airfields. ‘Why is it the United
States’s responsibility and not the United
Nations’? What is the critical US national
security interest that risks the spilling of
the blood of America’s sons and daughters?
What threat has Assad presented to the
United States?’
President Assad has survived in large part
because of Russia. The assistance started
early. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lav-
rov, visited Syria in early 2012, ostensibly to
seek a peaceful resolution of the crisis. But he
brought with him a large military and intel-
ligence team, a western diplomat told me.
They unrolled detailed maps of the coun-
try and, with their experience in Chechnya,
instructed the Syrians in counter-insurgency.
Then, last year, the Russians started bomb-
ing, after a period in which it looked as if
Assad might fall. No one believes that will
happen now.
The Giant
Can you see the giant at the end of the street?
Between those balconied façades? When you lift
Your head to where the dwindling rooftops meet
The sky, he’s there, slumbering and somnolent.
He’s guarding his generous but unwanted gift,
The hoard of fire that is his secret excitement.
The entire city is paved with his hot black tears.
His single eye is a weeping crust. He fears
That he’s unloved. He’s utterly bored all day,
Scowling at his irritating rival the sun.
His long fingers stir the steaming bay.
So we glance at him warily now and then
And somewhat admiringly, for his very presence,
His unbelievable size, and his great forbearance.

T he Russians know better than anyone

how weak the regime’s military really
is. Earlier this year, a senior Russian official
— John Fuller

astonished a visiting American delegation by
telling them that the Syrian army could field
only 6,000 ‘capable and loyal’ troops for a big
operation. Officially, the Syrian Arab Army
is 125,000 strong.
‘The paper strength of the Syrian army is
meaningless,’ said Tobias Schneider, a Ger-
man military analyst who has done some of
the best work on the regime’s forces. ‘The
only thing … is how much money they pay
a month to somebody. Offensives in this war
are 1,000 people. Anybody who actually had
the numbers they claim would be able to cap-
ture the whole of Syria.’ Schneider has been
getting leaked documents from inside the
Syrian military in Hama. What is happening
there is revealing. Hama is the base of one of
the regime’s most effective militias, the so-
called Tiger Forces. A leading member of the
Tigers was a ‘powerful thug’ called Ali Shelli,
Schneider told me. Shelli apparently went
too far, even for the regime, and was thrown
into jail for ‘looting and plundering citizens
at a checkpoint’, as the official report put it.
But Shelli was quickly released. And
nothing happened to him when months later
his men were caught smuggling weapons to
sell to Isis, hidden under sacks of wheat in
the back of a truck. The regime needed him.
Three more of the regime’s militia com-
manders in Hama were supposed to be in jail,
Schneider said. When the rebels launched an
offensive in Hama last month, the regime’s
defenders were warlords, smugglers, crimi-
nals, kidnappers and extortionists. ‘If you
strip away all the trappings of a state, the way
the war has done in Syria, this is what’s left.
They control the state; they are the regime.’
The regime tried and failed to retake
Kansaba with another semi-criminal mili-
tia, the Desert Hawks, until they finally suc-
ceeded using Afghan Shiite mercenaries. The
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
coming regime offensive against Aleppo will
be no different. Many of the troops massing
outside the city — and according to Ismail,
already entering it — are foreigners: fight-
ers from the Iranian Republican guards and
the Shiite militia they support in Lebanon,
Hezbollah; Iraqi Shiite militias, and Afghan
mercenaries. Iranian help on the ground has
been just as vital to the regime as Russian
help in the air.
What all this tells us is that the Syrian
army is not necessarily the strong institu-
tion that could ensure order if the US does
succeed in toppling President Assad. The
regime’s forces are in many ways a mirror
image of the rebels: a gang of militias more
than an army, riddled with criminals, preying
on their own people as much as defending
them. Neither side is strong enough for vic-
tory, so the fighting continues, with 400,000
dead so far.
What would the next American president
do? Donald Trump’s plan is secret but, given
his admiration for President Putin, he may
well side with Russia and back the regime,
while continuing to bomb Isis. Hillary Clin-
ton would continue to arm the rebels, though
perhaps opening a tap that has only been
dripping slowly under President Obama. She
has also said she is in favour of a no-fly zone,
though she has given no details.
One presidential candidate you probably
haven’t heard of, Evan McMullin, has been
discussing how this would work. McMullin
is an independent Republican from the Stop
Trump movement. He is polling in the low
single digits and not on the ballot in many
states, but his backers hope he will get just
enough votes to deprive Trump of victory.
McMullin, a former CIA officer in Iraq, is
a believer in the ‘efficient, rapid and cheap’
plan explained by General Deptula to bomb
President Assad’s airfields. Crucially, he says,
Russia should first be given a warning, so
they can get out of the way: ‘Russia just sim-
ply doesn’t have the strength that it used to.
Its military isn’t as strong as it was during
the Afghan war… They’re not able to pro-
ject force in contest; they’re able to project
force when they’re unopposed… We’re call-
ing their bluff.’
The Russian military has now announced
that it is sending a battery of the S300 air
defence missiles to Syria. This is not world
war three, but it is starting to look like a new
Cold War. Hillary Clinton’s no-fly zone rests
on the belief that Vladimir Putin will deflate
like a punctured balloon when challenged.
But what if he does not?
Paul Wood spent four years covering Syria’s
civil war for the BBC and is a fellow at the
New America foundation in Washington.
13
 BAROMETER
Tenement Scots
John Cleese referred to the editor of this
magazine as a ‘tenement Scot’. Do more
Scots live in tenements?
— The term tenement became associated
in Scotland with 14-storey blocks built in
Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries.
One collapsed in 1861, killing 35 residents
and leading to an Improvement Act which
largely did away with the old blocks.
— Today, 38% of homes in Scotland are
flats or maisonettes, markedly higher than
the 21% in England and Wales. But only
14,900 (0.6%) are ‘buildings in multiple
occupancy’, with shared facilities like the
original tenements.
More than a landslide
Hungarians voted by 98% to 2% to reject
the EU’s plan to resettle a share of
refugees in the country. Some referendums
where the result wasn’t so close:
99.83% of Eritreans voted in 1993 for
independence from Ethiopia.
99.8% of Falkland Islanders voted in 2013
to stay a British territory (3 voted against).
99.79% of voters in the Bosnian state of
Srpska last week voted to approve a
national day on 9 January — in defiance of
the country’s courts, which had tried to ban
the celebration.
99.59% of residents in the New Jersey
town of Lakewood voted in January not to
introduce a free school bus service.
98.83% of voters in South Sudan voted in
2011 to back independence.
Untaxed Americans
How unusual is Donald Trump in paying
no federal income tax?
Last year, 171.3m Americans were liable
for federal tax returns.
143.4m filed federal tax returns.
93.8m paid federal income taxes, while
77.5m (45%) did not. However, many of
them will have paid state taxes.
Source: Tax Policy Center
Risks of the ring
A boxer, Mike Towell, died after a bout in
Glasgow. How dangerous is boxing?
— According to a review of studies by the
American Association of Neurological
Surgeons, between 15% and 40% of
retired professional boxers exhibit some
symptoms of chronic brain injury.
— There were 488 boxing deaths in the
US between 1960 and 2011, with 66%
caused by brain injury.
— But boxing was not in the top 20 causes
of sport-related head injuries presented in
US hospitals in 2009. The list was topped
by cycling (85,389 injuries), followed by
American football and baseball.
14
Meet Boris Mark II
His jokes are back – but under much tighter control
HARRY MOUNT
T
he make-up lady at the BBC’s Mill-
bank studio in Westminster has
noticed a change in Boris Johnson’s
look. ‘His hair is much smarter now,’ she told
me as she slapped anti-shine talc on my pate
for the Daily Politics show. ‘But he still mess-
es it up a bit after I’ve combed it.’
Boris Mark II has entered the fray. As his
conference speech this week showed, he’s still
making the gags but they play second fiddle
to his more serious aspirations — as a suc-
cessful Foreign Secretary and, ultimately, PM.
Like some rare species of blond cock-
roach, Boris survived the post-referendum
nuclear fallout while the other Bullingdon
boys and the Notting Hill Set were wiped off
the face of the earth.
Even though he fought for Brexit, he was
astonished at the aftermath — just look at his
face, and Michael Gove’s, in that press con-
ference on 24 June after David Cameron
resigned. Boris — normally so good at hiding
his feelings beneath a thousand onion skins
— was shell-shocked.
Insiders say he was amazed to be offered
the Foreign Secretary’s job. His future had
seemed to offer little more than a backbench-
er’s life, well-padded with the money from his
Telegraph column, his books and a few celeb
outings. He was destined to become little
more than an upmarket Ed Balls, dismally
touring the TV studios, living off the crumbs
of yesteryear’s fame.
For some time after he started the job in
July, he went into comic purdah as he jet-
tisoned the clown costume. Craig Brown
warned that ‘Boris’s chosen destiny is to
become a sort of blond Jack Straw, flying all
over the world to read boring speeches to
bored audiences. Any possibility of offence or
excitement will have been expertly excised,
leaving nothing but a prolonged drone of
unimpeachable waffle.’
That was the case for a few months — a
bit of a worry for someone like me, trying to
add more wit and wisdom to an updated col-
lection of Boris’s greatest hits. Would I have
to just add in a few extra blank pages to cover
his post-referendum life? Thank God, his
conference speech showed funny Boris has
taken over once again from shocked Boris.
Welcome back the lovely P.G. Wodehouse
similes: asking people if they were in favour
of democracy is ‘like asking Maria von Trapp
whether she was in favour of raindrops on
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
roses and whiskers on kittens’. There were the
bathetic comparisons: ‘political freedom went
with economic freedom like buying a two-for-
one ice cream Snickers bar (only free markets
could produce something so ingenious) and a
copy of Private Eye (free speech of a kind still
unknown in much of the planet)’.
Boris also returned to his bewitching habit
of raiding the dictionary and minting his own
vocab. Here he was, enjoying ‘vast and rumi-
native feasts of lunch or dinner in the castles
of Mitteleuropa’, having ‘wonderful conver-
sations in my various Euro-creoles’, taking on
the ‘lingering gloomadon-poppers’.
So, Comic Boris returns. But there’s a
subtle shift. The jokes are no longer the main
course; they are the hors d’oeuvres. His con-
For some time after he started
as Foreign Secretary, Boris
went into comic purdah
ference jokes were gaffe-free and uncontro-
versial, and the serious message beneath was
clear: that liberal democracy and British soft
power are forces beyond compare.
Now Boris no longer has his Telegraph
column, he doesn’t have to pull in readers
with the histrionic touches or OTT lines that
were then turned by the press into gaffes.
Will the new-found seriousness take him
all the way to No. 10? Who knows? But I
recall a story an Eton friend of Boris John-
son’s told me. At every big hurdle in life, this
friend thought Boris wouldn’t quite pull it
off. Every time, Boris has proved him wrong.
Boris had done too little work, this friend
thought, to get into Oxford — he strolled into
Balliol with a Brackenbury Scholarship. Boris
was too much of a maverick to make it in the
Oxford Union — he became president. Boris
was too chaotic to become Spectator editor/
an MP/the London mayor. We all know what
happened next. This schoolfriend has been
proved wrong so many times that he thinks
Boris is bound to become prime minister.
I once asked Boris’s old classics tutor
about his chances of making it to Downing
Street. ‘Capax imperii nisi imperasset…’ said
the tutor, quoting the Roman historian Taci-
tus on the Emperor Galba: ‘He was up to the
job of emperor as long as he never became
emperor.’
I’m not so sure. The imperial wreath is
now tantalisingly close.
 We search
widely.
Murray International Trust
ISA and Share Plan
Plotting a path between defending your capital
and generating a good income needs an expert
sense of direction.

At Murray International Trust, we know how to explore

the world searching for those companies that may
deliver the right combination of capital preservation
and income generation. And because we insist on
meeting every company in whose shares we look
to invest, you can be confident we are guiding you
to potentially the best investments we can find.

Please remember, the value of shares and the

income from them can go down as well as up and
you may get back less than the amount invested.
No recommendation is made, positive or otherwise,
regarding the ISA and Share Plan.

The value of tax benefits depends on individual

circumstances and the favourable tax treatment for
ISAs may not be maintained. We recommend you seek
financial advice prior to making an investment decision.

Request a brochure: 0500 00 40 00

murray-intl.co.uk

Issued by Aberdeen Asset Managers Limited, 10 Queen’s Terrace, Aberdeen AB10 1YG, which is authorised and
regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. Telephone calls may be recorded. aberdeen-asset.co.uk Please quote MINT S 17
Affordable
healthcare
for you and
your family
Only
£8.71
a month

Healthcare that puts you first

We’re here to help when you need it most • Quicker diagnosis and treatment
• Approved private hospitals nationwide
Long waiting lists to receive tests or treatment can be a
stressful and worrying time for anyone. Benenden provides • 24/7 GP advice line from the minute you join
discretionary healthcare services to our membership of • No excess fees and everyone pays the same
around 900,000 people who can request our help with • Specialist consultants, health advice,
quicker diagnosis and treatment together with a range of psychological wellbeing and physiotherapy
advice and counselling services.
• No upper age limit, no exclusion for
pre-existing medical conditions
• The price doesn’t rise with age or service use
It’s good to know that Benenden also offer Travel and
£10 M&S gift card as a welcome gift†
Home Insurance and reassuring Health Assessments.

Join us today

0800 414 8099* quote SPECTATOR www.benenden.co.uk/spectatorhealth

We’re proud to be working in partnership with

Services have a six month qualifying period.
†Offer ends 16th December 2016 (M&S gift cards). Terms and conditions apply, for details please visit www.benenden.co.uk/spectatorhealth or telephone 0800 414 8099.* Please note that your call may be recorded
for our mutual security and also for training and quality purposes. Lines are open 8am – 5pm, Monday to Friday (except Bank Holidays). Benenden is a trading name of The Benenden Healthcare Society Limited and its
subsidiaries. Benenden Personal Healthcare is offered by The Benenden Healthcare Society Limited, which is an incorporated friendly society, registered under the Friendly Societies Act 1992, registered number 480F.
The Society’s contractual business (the provision of tuberculosis benefit) is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
The remainder of the Society’s business is undertaken on a discretionary basis. The Society is subject to Prudential Regulation Authority requirements for prudential management. Registered Office: The Benenden
Healthcare Society Limited, Holgate Park Drive, York, YO26 4GG.

AD/SPECTATOR/BENE0455/JW/07.16

The new reality on immigration
T
he good people of Hungary went
to the polls on Sunday and voted
by more than 98 per cent against
accepting even a few hundred migrants, as
per the European Union’s insistence. That
poll result must have been gravid with nos-
talgia for Magyars over the age of about 35.
They will remember that sort of election
result being de rigueur, rather than astonish-
ing. Indeed, in 1985 the Hungarian Socialist
Workers Party succeeded in capturing 98.8
per cent of the popular vote — and even
this was a bit of a disappointment, because
in 1980 it had pulled in 99.3 per cent. On
both occasions the ruling party was aided,
of course, by the lack of an alternative on the
ballot paper. And indeed by the sort of state
thuggery and oppression for which left-wing
politicians and journos in this country were
frequent apologists.
Speaking of which, the Guardian news-
paper took a long hard look at the Hungar-
ian referendum result, pursed its lips, nodded
its head and wrote the following introduc-
tory sentence to its in-depth analysis: ‘The
Hungarian prime minister has failed to con-
vince a majority of his population to vote in a
referendum on closing the door to refugees,
rendering the result invalid and undermin-
ing his campaign for a cultural counter-
revolution within the European Union.’
I have to tell you that this does not quite
do it for me, as an up-sum (as we say in the
trade) of that vote. It seems to miss out the
fairly interesting 98 per cent figure. But
then, the same newspaper was not terribly
convinced by our own referendum result
and worried about the closeness of the
margin and the almost incredible fact that
some Leave politicians may have lied dur-
ing the campaign. What margin of victory
would keep them happy, I wondered at the
time? Not even 98 per cent would seem to
be the answer.
Left-liberals take a very selective view of
democracy, don’t they? If I had won a ref-
erendum with more than 98 per cent of the
vote and almost half the electorate voting,
I’d feel pretty pukka — as did Hungary’s
prime minister, the newish bête noir of pro-
Euro-liberals now Farage is off the scene,
Viktor Orban. As he pointed out, the lack of
a 50 per cent turnout scarcely diminishes the
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
ROD LIDDLE
mandate, either morally, or — given Orban’s
parliamentary majority — in practice.
If the same question had been put to the
citizens of EU member states beyond Hun-
gary, my guess is the results would not be
quite so overwhelming. Probably ranging
from something like 60 per cent against in
the most refugee-friendly countries, such as
Sweden and France, to the late seventies in
the likes of Greece, Slovakia and Poland.
I’ve based those guesstimates on recent
opinion polls from the countries concerned.
So, not quite the hostility to the policy you
would find in Györ or Debrecen, but still a
massive majority opposed to more migrants.
More interesting than the figures them-
selves are the changes which have occurred
You would guess that the feeling
against migration, and migrant
quotas, will continue to build
in the west of Europe in the space of one
year. In 2015 a majority of Swedes were still
convinced that migrants had made their
country a better place in which to live, a sort
of vibrant and exciting smorgasbord of quite
the most wonderful little people, lightening
their drab Nordic lives with their exuberant
customs and their noble poverty.
They have latterly changed their minds,
having suddenly realised that some elements
of the smorgasbord have turned out to be
ever so slightly rapey, and other bits blow
themselves up just as you’re putting them in
your mouth. The trend, across Europe, is all
in one direction. There is now widespread
‘His thyroid is fine, but
everything else is underactive.’
aversion to the notion of unlimited migra-
tion and also simply to more migration.
As is ever the case with liberals, it is the
sudden onset of reality which has funda-
mentally altered their mindset. It can be a
bit of a bugger, reality. And remarkably, this
change has occurred despite the continual
hectoring from both national and EU politi-
cians and the vilification and indeed perse-
cution of politicians or political parties who
dare to voice opposition to the ‘let ’em all
in’ policy, as we have seen with Poland and
Hungary. You would guess that the feeling
against migration, and migrant quotas, will
continue to build until all countries are not
terribly distant in their views from those
of the Hungarians. Last year it was ‘Je Suis
Charlie!’ Next year it might well be ‘Magyar
Vagyok!’
Meanwhile, over here the shrieking con-
tinues. At the Labour party conference,
Diane Abbott claimed that the Brexit vote
had led to the widespread beating up of for-
eigners, which of course it has not. She also
said that people opposed to the free untram-
melled movement of people across the EU
simply didn’t like looking at foreigners. This
is an epic misjudgment of both the truth and
the reasons for which voters wish migration
to be, at the least, rigorously controlled.
The reality is that — as Fraser Nelson
has pointed out here before — there has
been vanishingly little in the way of hostility
towards incomers, no matter where they may
have arrived from. And the opinion polls
support this thesis. Lord Ashcroft’s poll, not
long after our own referendum, revealed
that there was no animus whatsoever
against the migrants per se from Leave vot-
ers, simply a genuine worry about the sheer
weight of numbers coming in and the prob-
able inability of our infrastructure to cope.
People are not so stupid as Diane Abbott
thinks them to be: in fact, they are rather
less stupid than Diane Abbott. She is one
of those Remainers who seems to yearn
not only for calamitous financial news, of
which there has been absolutely none, but
also for inter-ethnic strife — simply so that
she can be proved right. But it is very hard
to remember a single occasion on which she
has ever been right, about anything. And she
certainly isn’t right now.
17
 Brains for Trump
Why conservative intellectuals are backing the Donald
DANIEL MC CARTHY
L
ast week more than 130 right-wing
thinkers put their names to a defiant
document — a list of ‘Scholars and
Writers for America’ in support of Don-
ald Trump. It includes the editors of five of
the country’s leading conservative journals
of ideas: R.R. Reno of the Christian con-
servative First Things; Roger Kimball of the
New Criterion, the right’s leading journal of
the arts; Charles Kesler of the Claremont
Review of Books; the American Spectator’s
R. Emmett Tyrrell; and me, the editor of the
American Conservative. (Notably lacking
are names from America’s oldest conserva-
tive magazine, National Review, which has
been as hostile to Trump as the columnists
of the New York Times and Washington Post.
NR, representing what now seems like the
establishment wing of the right, published a
ludicrously ineffective cover story in Febru-
ary demanding that Republicans not nomi-
nate Trump.)
The list of scholars and writers for Trump
includes high-profile thinkers who have also
succeeded in business and politics — such as
Peter Thiel, Conrad Black and Newt Ging-
rich — as well as academics who are at the
top of their fields, such as the philosophers
Scott Soames, Robert Koons, Daniel N. Rob-
inson and Daniel Bonevac. Predictably, the
list elicited outraged and snarky social-net-
work comments suggesting comparisons
with a few other philosophers, notably the
Nazis Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.
As a Twitter or Facebook remark, that may
be merely in bad taste, but in the hard-
left climate of opinion on many American
university campuses, it could be taken seri-
ously. The risks that conservative scholars
take in openly supporting Trump are real.
Before the release of the list, there was much
debate among its signatories about whether
to include a statement about scholars who
wanted to sign but feared for their careers.
The list was the brainchild of F.H. Buck-
ley, a law professor at George Mason Uni-
versity near Washington DC. Buckley
— no relation to William F. Buckley, the late
founder of National Review — has occa-
sionally written speeches for Trump, but the
list was compiled and promoted without
input from the campaign, a necessity given
US election law. Given the official Trump
campaign’s shambolic nature, the informal
approach was best anyway.
18
What becomes obvious from compar-
ing Buckley’s list with the roll call of ‘Never
Trump’ journalists writing in the New York
Times, Washington Post and magazines such
as National Review and the Weekly Stand-
ard is how broad the intellectual support for
Trump is compared with the narrow social
and ideological range of the anti-Trump
right. Buckley’s list includes nationalist con-
servatives, libertarian conservatives, neocon-
servatives and Christian right intellectuals
from around the country, including deeply
conservative states like Texas and unshaka-
bly liberal-Democratic ones like California.
Hillsdale College in Michigan contributes
Other scholars wanted
to sign but feared
for their careers
several signers, including the president of
the college, Larry Arnn. The anti-Trump
right, by contrast, occupies what’s called the
‘Acela corridor’ served by the US passenger
rail system’s fastest train, the Acela, which
runs between Washington and New York.
But the divide among America’s right-
leaning minds is not so much geograph-
ic as cultural — a divide between those
who affirm the nation state and see liberal
Republicanism (as much as the liberal Dem-
ocratic party) as a threat to it and those who
find Trump simply too brash and obnoxious
to be presidential material. Anti-Trump con-
servatives might not identify as globalists,
but they value the kind of polite disagree-
ment one finds at Davos more than they
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Conscription in Ireland
From ‘More men’, The Spectator,
7 October 1916: Are we or are we not to
apply compulsory service to Ireland?
The difficulties, we admit, are very great.
Personally, we dislike the idea of seeing the
privilege — for such it is — of defending
the Empire accorded to men who have
disgraced themselves as did the Sinn
Feiners and the disloyal population of
Ireland in the recent revolt. At the same
time, it does seem a gross injustice that the
Irish people should not bear their share of
the common burden.
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
worry about America’s borders or cultural
solidarity.
The conservative New York Times col-
umnist Ross Douthat, responding to the list,
correctly characterised the view of many of
the signatories that ‘Trump is correct on par-
ticular issues (immigration, foreign policy,
the importance of the nation-state) where
the bipartisan consensus is often wrong, and
his candidacy is a chance to vote against an
elite worldview that desperately needs to be
chastened and rebuked.’ But Douthat insists
that however valid some of those concerns
may be, the Donald is temperamentally
unsuited to the White House. ‘Trump’s zest
for self-sabotage, his wild swings, his inabil-
ity to delegate or take advice, are not mere
flaws; they are defining characteristics.’
And yet Trump has succeeded not just
in one field but in many — in property, in
television and now in politics, by winning
the Republican nomination against well-
funded rivals who had the support of the
establishment right. Barack Obama won
the White House in 2008 by promising ‘hope
and change’. Trump — so temperamentally
unlike every other recent Republican and
Democratic nominee — promises to be a
much greater force for change. Already he
has changed the Republican party and the
conservative movement, reopening essential
questions of foreign policy, immigration and
the needs of the American workforce.
This is why I support him and why I
signed on to ‘Scholars and Writers for
America’. If President Trump does keep
out of wars like the one the last Republican
president started in Iraq, if he limits immi-
gration and helps restore the US labour
force to prosperity, he will have done what
no other Republican or Democrat could do.
On the other hand, should he live down to
the worst expectations — getting into wars
like Iraq to, as he puts it, ‘seize the oil’, or
inflaming racial tensions at home — I have
no doubt that he would be even more effec-
tively opposed in his folly than George W.
Bush was. The anti-war and civil-libertarian
left, which has been conspicuously silent in
the Obama years, would roar back to life.
The opposite would be true with Presi-
dent Hillary Clinton: in advancing globalist
economics and pushing a foreign policy of
interventionism and nation-building, she
would have the support of many Republi-
cans in Congress — and of Acela conserva-
tives in the pages of the New York Times and
Washington Post. She will reduce the left to
sycophancy and make accomplices of the
right’s ‘wets’. (Or ‘squishes’, as we call them
here.) Whether Trump succeeds or fails as a
president, he will force American politics to
make a choice between globalism and the
nation. With Clinton there will be no choice,
only more of the same disastrous policies we
have seen under both of the last two pres-
idents. With Clinton, there is neither hope
nor change.
 IT'S TIME FOR

CERTAINTY
After decades of delay, Britain cannot afford another false start over a new runway.
Only Gatwick can promise to deliver by 2025 - within environmental standards and at no
cost to the taxpayer. Only Gatwick can end the runway debate without starting a new one.

Britain needs certainty and now is the time to decide. It’s time for Gatwick.

Get the facts about the runway debate at gatwickobviously.com/debate and @LGWobviously
 The students fight back
A pro-free speech – and anti-NUS – rebellion is
gathering steam at universities all over Britain
BRENDAN O’NEILL
L
ast week, students at York Universi-
ty staged a walkout from the sexual
consent classes organised by their stu-
dent union women’s officers. A quarter of
the freshers decided they didn’t want to be
lectured to by union worthies about when
it’s OK to have sex. So they got up and left.
‘These talks are inherently patronising of
both genders,’ said Ben Froughi, a third-year
accounting student at York, who had stirred
up sex-class dissent by handing out leaflets
telling students the classes were optional
and they didn’t have to attend.
But sex-consent classes are mandatory
at some universities, including Cambridge
and Oxford. Young people are being chap-
eroned through the minefield of sexual-
ity, often against their will. Union officials
make out ‘as if they are more enlightened’,
says George Lawlor. He is another revolter:
a 20-year-old politics student at Warwick
who caused a media stink last year when
he published an article about why he didn’t
need consent classes, with a photograph of
him holding a sign that read: ‘This is not
what a rapist looks like.’ Lawlor tells me
he was ‘crucified in the media’ for taking
on the censorious campus naggers — ‘but I
survived’. Other students will survive too if
they stand up to the PC tyrants, he says.
Something dramatic is happening on
campuses. Two years ago, in this magazine,
I wrote about the rise of the Stepford Stu-
dents. These are the student leaders who
might look and sound rad — all dyed hair
and blather about ‘intersectionality’ — but
who are really just officious meddlers in
the lives of others. Whether they’re banning
sombreros because they’re offensive to Lati-
nos or No Platforming right-wingers and
off-message feminists, these student officials
strangle debate, and have tried to turn cam-
puses from hotbeds of social and intellectual
interaction into starched ‘safe spaces’.
Now, however, a counter-Stepford rebel-
lion is stirring. Students are sick of being
patronised, so they are shooting down this
PC creed. They aren’t hurling Molotov cock-
tails or staging sit-ins, as students of old did
— they’re setting up free-speech societies,
boycotting patronising lifestyle lectures and,
most strikingly, voting to get the hell out of
the suffocating grip of the National Union
20
for Students. These Students for Sanity, as I
call them, are reclaiming their rights.
Following the election of Malia Bouattia
as NUS president in April, students around
the country have called into question the
entire legitimacy of the NUS and what they
view as its undemocratic writ over student
life. Bouattia is famously batty. In 2014,
when she was the NUS black students’ offic-
er, she refused to back a motion condemn-
ing Islamic State, claiming that anti-Isis
sentiment is used to stir up ‘blatant Islamo-
phobia’. Her bluster about the ‘Zionist-led
media’ has got some students wondering if
she’s a conspiracy nut, and possibly preju-
diced. For many students, Bouattia’s rise
to the top of the NUS confirms this outfit
is more interested in pushing potty political
lines than in fighting for students’ rights.
In May, the student union at Lincoln Uni-
Students are waging a war of words
on the idea that universities should be
‘safe spaces’ free of controversial ideas
versity became the first to jump the NUS
ship: 881 students voted leave, against 804
for remain. They were followed by New-
castle’s SU, where 67 per cent of the 1,469
students who voted wanted out of the NUS.
Loughborough has left, as has Hull, where
NUS sceptics campaigned under the bril-
liant slogan ‘NUS? Hull no!’ and convinced
a large majority of student voters to vote
leave.
The new academic year has kicked off
with more anti-NUS revolts. ‘NUS sceptics’
at Queen Mary’s London, Aberystwyth and
Bristol are agitating to leave. ‘The NUS
is long past its use-by date,’ says Conrad
Young, a 21-year-old ancient history student
heading the leave campaign at Bristol. ‘It
refuses to reform and seems to have a dan-
gerous distaste for democracy.’
The NUS is facing its greatest ever crisis.
And it isn’t all about Bouattia. NUS officials
cynically depict the student thirst for dis-
affiliation as an angry, white, possibly Islam-
ophobic reaction against the election of the
NUS’s first Muslim president. But those
campaigning against the NUS insist theirs is
an uprising not against a woman with weird
views, but against the paternalism and Step-
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
ford mentality of the whole organisation.
An Exeter masters’ student who agitated
hard for disaffiliation tells me this isn’t an
‘anti-Malia’ movement — it’s a revolt
against the ‘undemocratic and unrepresent-
ative nature of the NUS’ and its ‘desire to
stifle “problematic” viewpoints’. The Exeter
rebels lost by the narrowest of margins: in
their May referendum 2,546 students voted
leave and 2,690 voted remain. Sophia Bry-
ant, a Warwick politics undergrad fighting
for disaffiliation, says ‘none of this is about
[Bouattia]’. It’s about democracy and free
speech.
She slams the NUS for its repeated
refusal to adopt a one-member-one-vote
system, which means its leaders are fantas-
tically unrepresentative: the number of del-
egates to the NUS conference who voted
for Bouattia make up a measly 0.005 per
cent of all students, making Bouattia’s man-
date over campus life about as convincing
as Kim Jong-un’s over North Korea. Bryant
says she’s had enough of the NUS ‘dictating
who can and can’t speak, what should and
shouldn’t be banned’.
B efore the disaffiliation campaigns there
was the free-speech fightback. Over
the past year, students around Britain have
waged a war of words on the most poison-
ous part of the Stepford outlook: the idea
that universities should be ‘safe spaces’ free
of controversial or scurrilous ideas. Students
at Oxford, the LSE, Leeds, Queen Mary’s,
Cardiff, Aberystwyth, Manchester, Edin-
burgh, Portsmouth and York have set up
free-speech societies with the express aim
of overthrowing NUS censorship and allow-
ing students to think what they like and say
what they think.
Student union bans have become an epi-
demic. University speakers, from far-right
blowhards to trans-sceptical feminists like
Julie Bindel, have been branded ‘offensive’
and found themselves No Platformed. Get-
togethers are banned if they involve ‘cultural
appropriation’ — fancy dress, essentially.
Student officials at Cambridge called off an
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ party fearing
that some of the costumes might be racially
offensive. Union bores at the University of
East Anglia stopped a Mexican restaurant
from handing out sombreros to students,
claiming it was racist.
More than 20 per cent of student unions
have set up ‘safe spaces’: a cute-sounding
euphemism for censorship zones in which
certain things can’t be said, certain news-
papers can’t be read, and certain hand sig-
nals can’t be made. At Edinburgh earlier
this year, a student was found to be in viola-
tion of the safe-space policy when she raised
her hand in an ‘inappropriate’ way during a
meeting. Things are so bad that politicians
now condemn students for being illiberal.
Surely it should be the other way round?
Last month Theresa May ridiculed ‘safe
spaces’, insisting universities must be ‘places
where there can be open debate’.
Do not be afraid, Mrs May. Britain’s cam-
pus contrarians are fighting for their liberty.
‘We don’t want to live in a safe-space bub-
ble,’ say the students who set up a speak-
easy at the LSE in January this year. The
LSE is one of the most censorious campus-
es in Britain. In 2014, student officials there
disbanded the rugby club for a year for the
crime of handing out an offensive flyer for
a party (it used the word ‘mingers’). They
made the rugby boys undergo a re-educa-
tion programme and appear in public hold-
ing signs that said ‘A good lad frees himself
of gender stereotypes’, like something out of
Mao’s China. LSE’s speakeasy rebels aren’t
standing for it. ‘We want to encourage dis-
cussion of difficult ideas as opposed to clos-
ing down debate,’ they’ve said.
At Aberystwyth University, a movement
called Students Against Censorship (SAC)
this year overturned the Union’s ban on
selling the Sun, the Express and the Daily
Star on campus. In 2013, a union motion that
could have been penned by Mary White-
house, titled ‘Boobs are not News’, banned
the sale of these papers; SAC demanded a
referendum and won by 364 votes.
Charlie Peters, a first-year philosophy
student at Edinburgh who is part of a band
of liberal students standing up to censorship,
‘Social media has opened up some exciting
opportunities to correct people’s grammar.’
says the tide is turning: ‘The anti-Stepfords
have often been a silent majority, but we’re
now seeing a real surge in students coming
out and saying, “Hang on, this is bollocks.” ’
The Students for Sanity aren’t only irri-
tated by the NUS’s crackdown on the liberty
to think but also by its meddling in students’
personal lives. Many student unions have
policies governing ‘banter’. Some forbid
the making of ‘sexual noises’ in bars. Others
have banned adverts for pub crawls: they
‘promote binge-drinking and unruly behav-
iour’, in the words of the Aberystwyth SU.
‘Student leaders are attacking the things
that make university fun,’ says Peters.
‘[They] used to fight for your right to party;
nowadays they’re nothing more than badly
dressed conservative politicians.’
More open-minded students sense a shift,
which also seems to be happening in the US,
where many of these nutty ideas stem from.
In August, John Ellison, dean of students at
the University of Chicago, sent a letter to
freshers telling them to brace for offence.
‘[We] do not condone the creation of intel-
lectual “safe spaces” where individuals can
retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds
with their own,’ he said. We need academics
in Britain to speak out against the small but
noisy mob who have made campuses such
illiberal places.
In recent years, the NUS has become
the very thing it might once have agitated
against. Where student leaders once demand-
ed greater freedom of thought and an end
to the idea that universities should coddle
students, now they limit free speech, moan
about student debauchery and police every-
thing from how students party to how they
have sex. Student officials have become ‘The
Man’; the authority figure they once hated.
The real radicals are waging war against the
NUS. It is these counter-Stepfords who carry
the liberal flame.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Hear Brendan O’Neill discuss students.

We’ve never had

Courts of Northern Italy
3ULQFHO\DUWRIWKH5HQDLVVDQFH
å0D\_å2FWREHU
/HGE\'U0LFKDHO'RXJODV6FRWW
å6HSWHPEHU
/HGE\3URIHVVRU)DEUL]LR1HYROD
‘A brilliant lecturer whose enthusiasm for his
subject was apparent and infectious. He was
also extremely congenial and entertaining.’
enough of experts.
Follow them as they lead the way on our vast selection of
tours for small groups spanning centuries and continents.
The calibre of our lecturers, all eminent in their academic
ĆHOGLVWKHNH\WRRXUVWDWXVDVWKHPDUNHWOHDGHUVLQ
FXOWXUDOKROLGD\V)URP9LQGRODQGDWRWKH$OKDPEUDWKHVH
itineraries offer outstanding insights as well as privileged
DFFHVVDQGPHWLFXORXVSODQQLQJ
Tours include: Granada & Córdoba | Walking Hadrian’s Wall
Bilbao to Bayonne | Samarkand & Silk Road Cities
Persia – Ancient & Islamic Iran | Walking a Royal River
Contact us:
+44 (0)20 8742 3355
martinrandall.com
$72/_$%7$<_$,72

the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 21

 Unhappy Pill
A new study shows that women taking hormonal contraceptives
have a greater risk of depression. Why isn’t this more of a scandal?
LARA PRENDERGAST
A
study came out last week that
should have caused great alarm.
For 13 years, researchers at the Uni-
versity of Copenhagen studied more than a
million women between the ages of 15 and
34 who were taking a type of drug — one
that is popular in all developed countries.
Taking this drug, the researchers found,
correlated with an increase in the risk of
depression. The correlation was particular-
ly strong in adolescent girls, who showed
an 80 per cent higher chance of being diag-
nosed with depression.
Usually when a story about women’s
health and depression breaks, a phalanx of
activists and campaigners pop up all over the
media to ‘raise awareness’ of the issue. Last
week, however, barely a peep — the papers
carried the story and a few online sites ran
delicately objective surveys of women on the
pill, but there were few howls of outrage.
Why the muted response? The answer is
that the type of drug in question was hormo-
nal contraception, and it is today a sin just to
suggest that it may not be the greatest gift
ever given to womankind. Almost everybody
agrees that female contraceptives — pills,
implants, patches or intrauterine devices —
have liberated us; set us free to be sexually
active human beings. Few dare raise con-
cerns about that, because to do so is to risk
being called a prude, and nobody wants that.
There are plenty of questions to be asked,
though. Not least because 3.5 million British
women are on the combined contraceptive
pill — known as the ‘Pill’ — and the study
showed that those who take it were 23 per
cent more likely to be on antidepressants —
possibly taking pills to cope with the Pill.
Many of my friends are on the Pill. We
started taking it towards the end of our teen-
age years, prescribed by the NHS, and lots of
us have continued to use it for the past dec-
ade. It has certainly done its job; we are now
reaching the final years of our twenties, and
not one of us has had a baby. I suppose that’s
progress, of a sort. We’ve spent a large chunk
of the most fertile period in our life taking
state-funded contraception. Only time will
tell how fondly we look back on that fact.
The advent of the Pill, which first came
to Britain in the 1960s, is not just regarded
as a medical breakthrough. The Pill is the
great turning point of the sexual revolution;
a Great Leap Forward for equality. It ena-
22
bled women to take control of their bodies,
whatever that means.
Children are now taught about repro-
duction from a very young age, and sex edu-
cation is compulsory from the age of 11.
Around the age of 16 — the legal age of
consent — school nurses start circling, ter-
rified that their sexually aware charges will
get knocked up. Doctors’ appointments are
booked, prescriptions are issued, and before
long teenage girls are popping a little pill
every morning as they brush their teeth.
To start with, girls were often put on a
cheap one, such as Microgynon. If you react-
ed badly, you were given the chance to try
a more expensive version. There seemed to
be little method behind each prescription. It
was trial and error, trial and error, until you
It seems to be a sin to suggest that
the Pill may not be the greatest
gift ever given to womankind
found a pill that didn’t make you cry for days
or turn you into a porker.
Most young women are familiar with the
arguments for taking the Pill; we were taught
them early on. It prevents unwanted preg-
nancies and abortions. It can reduce some
types of cancer — though it increases the
risk of others. But the overriding benefit is
that the Pill makes us equal: it lets a woman
approach sex as a man does — without the
fear of pregnancy.
The substantial negative side-effects tend
to be ignored or brushed aside. Research
such as the Copenhagen study should be
noteworthy, but it will probably end up as a
part of a warning in the small print. Nobody
wants to stop women protecting themselves,
or make them fearful of sex — even if it
makes them miserable.
‘In my day they were called “orgies”.’
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
The big pharmaceutical companies now
manufacture a number of ‘third-generation’
pills that promise to reduce the unappealing
side-effects. Around a million women in Brit-
ain are on these new pills, which promise to
be good for skin and help to stabilise weight.
But in 2014, all British GPs were told to warn
anyone taking the third-generation pills that
they were at risk of developing potentially
fatal blood clots. A study had revealed that
the annual risk of a woman of childbearing
age having a serious blood clot was one in
5,000 if she wasn’t on the Pill. The risk went
up to one in 800 for women on third-gener-
ation pills. But these pills are still very popu-
lar, despite a number of women having had
strokes while taking them.
When I was younger, sex education class-
es made you feel that you should be on the
Pill, rather than relying on more unfashion-
able, natural methods of contraception, such
as the rhythm method. It was what intelligent,
responsible women did. Ten years on, I’ve
begun to wonder whether the real rationale
was more pernicious. After all, it’s far cheap-
er for the state to give out contraceptive pills
than support mothers and children. No won-
der birth rates are dropping dramatically
across Europe. And so what if the Pill causes
depression, cancer and blood clots? Maybe
that’s just a risk worth taking in exchange for
sexual emancipation and fewer unwanted
babies.
It may be a worthwhile trade-off. What’s
disturbing, however, is how readily feminists
fall into line when it comes to the Pill. Dis-
sent is frowned upon. In 2013, Holly Grigg-
Spall published a book called Sweetening the
Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal
Birth Control. It was met with much dis-
dain, particularly in the US, where 11 million
women use the Pill. Her book was called
‘a dishonest anti-Pill treatise’ because she
dared to point out that hormonal contracep-
tives are ranked by the World Health Organ-
isation as a class one carcinogen alongside
tobacco and asbestos.
Grigg-Spall was dismissed as a ‘crank’
elsewhere because she tried to argue that
‘true liberation means being left alone to
experience feminine bodily functions like
ovulation, childbirth and breast-feeding in
all their natural glory’. One critic declared
loftily that trials had not found ‘modern birth
control pills to cause more depression, head-
aches, or weight gain than a placebo’.
Well, now a trial has shown a strong link
between depression and hormonal birth
control — and the normally loud feminist
lobby is silent. It’s not surprising that hor-
monal contraception is linked to depres-
sion. Hormones affect moods — and here
we are, in an era where millions of women
dose themselves up daily with powerful syn-
thetic hormones in order to not get pregnant.
We are sexually liberated, but emotionally
depressed; free, but not all that happy. It’s
reasonable to ask: is the Pill worth the pain?
COME ON BRITAIN,
LET’S BUILD IT

Heathrow Airport is our gateway to the world but it’s

LɈLJ[P]LS`M\SS(UL^Y\U^H`H[V\YIPNNLZ[WVY[^PSS
OLSW)YP[HPUMVYNLHUL^YVSLHUKZ\JJLLKPU[OLM\[\YL
/LH[OYV^L_WHUZPVUPZZ\WWVY[LKI`SVJHSYLZPKLU[Z;OL`
HNYLL^P[O[OL(PYWVY[Z*VTTPZZPVUI\ZPULZZLZL_WVY[LYZ
HPYSPULZ[YHKL\UPVUZYLNPVUHSHPYWVY[ZHUKHTHQVYP[`VM47Z

Find out more

www.backheathrow.org
*The latest independent polling shows 51% of local residents support expansion whilst 35% oppose. Populus interviewed 10,010
adult residents (18+) in twelve constituencies local to Heathrow Airport by telephone between 1 July and 3 August 2016. Results were
weighted to be demographically representative of all adults in each constituency, and were also weighted by past vote to be politically
representative of all adults.
 ANCIENT AND MODERN
Augustus vs Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn
has been re-elected leader of the
Labour party not by MPs but by his
teenage ‘fans’ in Momentum. So what
does Corbyn need to do when he wins
power? Follow the example of the
emperor Augustus, that’s what.
When Rome was a republic, its
monuments and military banners
proclaimed it as SPQR — Senatus
Populusque Romanus, a combination
of the senate, mostly consisting of
Rome’s elite families, and the people.
The Greek historian Polybius greatly
admired its clever balancing of powers
between senate, people and office-
holders.
In the course of the 1st century BC,
this system collapsed in bloody civil
war. From that final conflict in 31 BC
emerged Rome’s first emperor, the
revolutionary Augustus (d. AD 14).
The first thing he did was to ‘deselect’
the senatorial elites whom he felt
to be responsible for the collapse,
replacing them with coteries of his
own supporters. But in order to do
that, he had to deny the people the
right to elect officials. So he kept them
sweet with ‘bread and circuses’. It was
one-man rule, run by the inner court
of the emperor. Given the dramatic
nature of this change, however,
Augustus also took steps to bring the
military under his own control. It had
brought him to power: it must not
remove him from it.
At the moment, lacking power,
Corbyn and his ‘fans’ are simply
massaging each other’s egos in a
Corbyn Wonderland. When he comes
to power and fulfils his stated dream
of ‘democratic’ power-sharing under
the orders and in the interests of these
‘fans’, representative democracy and
so parliament will be at an end. That
will mean revolution — which will
require military backing.
But the British army and police
are fascist organisations. He must
therefore replace them with a
more understanding force — his
chums in Hamas, say, and the IRA.
The masses will then be appeased
with bread (there will be little else
to eat). Circuses will be women’s
work. One will be found to arrange
them: anyone. Even Abbott. Doesn’t
matter who.
— Peter Jones
24
Who comes after Merkel?
The German chancellor risks defeat if she does not stand aside
WILLIAM COOK
A
year from now, 60 million Germans
go to the polls in the most impor-
tant general election in mainland
Europe for a generation. The result will
define German — and European — politics
for the next four years. There are huge ques-
tions to be resolved, from the refugee crisis
to the financial crisis, but right now the ques-
tion in Germany is: will Mutti run again?
Angela Merkel’s nickname, Mutti
(Mummy) is a memento of happier times.
A year ago, her position as matriarch of the
Bundesrepublik seemed unassailable. And
then, last September, she opened Germany’s
borders to hundreds of thousands of fleeing
Syrians. Over a million refugees arrived last
year. The reaction of native Germans could
be measured at the polling booths. In last
month’s regional elections in Mecklenburg-
Vorpommern, Merkel’s constituency, her
Christian Democratic Union came third. In
local elections in Berlin, a fortnight later,
the CDU polled just 17.5 per cent, its worst
result in the capital since the war. No won-
der Der Spiegel (Germany’s leading news
magazine, and one of her most loyal sup-
porters) is now suggesting it may be time
for Mutti to leave the stage.
The Deutsche Bank crisis looks like
another nail in Merkel’s electoral coffin.
For ordinary Germans, Germany’s biggest
bank has been a symbol of economic secu-
rity. Still haunted by the spectre of hyper-
inflation, security is the one thing Germans
value above all else. The decline of Deutsche
Bank’s share price (from €30 last year to
around €10 today) is bound to give vot-
ers the jitters, adding to the impression —
already fostered by the refugee crisis — that
Merkel is no longer the master of events.
And so, for the CDU, a question that seemed
academic a year ago has become much more
pressing: can Merkel still win the next elec-
tion? And if not, should she be persuaded to
make way for a candidate who can?
The woman who’s setting the agenda in
German politics right now is young enough
to be Merkel’s daughter. Like Chancellor
Merkel, Frauke Petry was raised in East
Germany and trained as a scientist, but any
resemblance between them ends there. Mer-
kel was in her mid-thirties when the Berlin
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Wall came down — Petry was a teenager.
In the 1990s, while Merkel was working her
way up the hierarchy of the CDU, Petry was
reading chemistry at Reading University —
hence her fluent English. With her pageboy
haircut and her androgynous good looks,
she looks like a mischievous pixie. Since last
summer, she’s been the leader of Alterna-
tive für Deutschland, Germany’s new (and
rapidly rising) right-wing political party. The
political mischief she’s wreaking is turning
German politics upside down.
After failing to win an absolute majority
in the last general election, in 2013, Merkel
The decline of Deutsche Bank
adds to the impression that Merkel
is no longer the master of events
formed a ‘grand alliance’ with Germany’s
second biggest party, the left-leaning SPD.
This coalition opened up a space on the right
of German politics, a space which Alterna-
tive für Deutschland has filled.
Like a lot of new political parties, AfD
is hard to define because it’s still evolving.
It’s a bewildering amalgam of mainstream
and extremist views. Founded in 2013 by
a respectable group of politicians, econo-
mists and journalists to campaign against
the euro, it’s since become (primarily) an
anti-immigration party. And despite count-
less foot-in-mouth departures from Petry’s
‘liberal-conservative’ stance (by Petry her-
self, as well as various other AfD members),
it’s achieved results unseen by a right-wing
party in Germany since the war. In Germa-
ny’s last general election, just a few months
after its foundation, AfD polled 4.7 per cent,
just short of the 5 per cent required to enter
parliament. In subsequent local elections
they’ve polled as much as 24 per cent. In
Merkel’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, they
polled over 20 per cent.
Nobody seriously supposes that Petry’s
AfD will play any role in the next German
government (no other party will work with
them — for now, at least), but it seems highly
likely that they will play a significant role in
the result. Petry is by no means gaffe-free,
but she is presentable and plausible. Many
of her statements seem outrageous to well-
meaning liberals, but a lot of voters don’t which caused the biggest stir. She had the
seem to mind. Less than four years since its dash of stardust which German politicians
foundation, AfD already has representatives usually seem so anxious to avoid. The sol-
in 11 of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments. diers were all thrilled to meet her. I watched
In opinion polls, they’re achieving around 15 her put them at their ease. If you’ve never
per cent, which would make AfD the third come across her before, check her out on
biggest party in next year’s Bundestag. BBC’s Hardtalk, being interviewed by Ste-
phen Sackur (you should be able to find it

C omparisons with Ukip are invidious,

but like the rise of Ukip, the rise of
AfD is creating unexpected consequences
and changing the direction of other parties.
Already, a rift has opened between Merkel’s
CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU.
These parties have always worked in tandem,
but there are subtle differences between
them, which Merkel’s refugee policy — and
the consequent rise of AfD — has exposed.
Catholic Bavaria is more conservative than
the rest of Germany, which is reflected in the
keener conservatism of the CSU. Prominent
CSU politicians have been complaining that,
under Merkel, the CDU has moved too far
to the left. This summer, for the first time,
there was even talk of fielding a rival CSU
candidate for the Chancellorship.
However, there is another potential
chancellor who is eminently electable —
Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s defence
minister since 2013. A favourite of Merkel’s,
and widely tipped to succeed her, she’s been
a great success in her defence job and, pre-
‘Submit “Zero tax” if you must, but
I’d scrub “So that makes me smart”.
viously, as federal minister for family affairs.
Her father was a politician too (she was
born and raised in Brussels) but nobody
could accuse her of lacking a proper hin-
terland. She is a medical doctor and did not
enter politics until her early forties, working
in a women’s clinic first. She is married to
a professor of medicine, and along the way
she’s somehow found the time to raise seven
children (she also studied at the LSE).
I’ve only seen her once in the flesh, in a
muddy field in Poland. I’d blagged a press
pass to a Nato exercise. She’d come to meet
the German troops. There were lots of
other bigwigs there — Nato secretary gen-
eral Jens Stoltenberg, loads of military top
brass — but it was her fleeting appearance
online). It’s one of the most impressive per-
formances I’ve seen by a foreign politician
on British TV.
Normally it might seem frivolous to bang
on about a politician’s people skills, rather
than discussing policy, but these are not nor-
mal times. What I saw in Poland last year, up
close and personal, was a politician who can
reach out to people who aren’t that inter-
ested in politics — the sort of people who
rarely vote at all and are now voting AfD.
Von der Leyen is not a radical — her
approach is measured and pragmatic. She’s
an insider, not an outsider (a handicap in
today’s iconoclastic climate) but she’s what
Germany needs most right now, which is a
safe pair of hands. After more than a decade
as Chancellor, Merkel has used up her credit
with the German electorate. Her protégé is
ready for the top job — she’s been a minis-
ter for 11 years. Ursula von der Leyen is the
only credible candidate with the charisma
to unite the country. Will Mutti now do the
decent thing, and stand aside?

The Spectator presents

HOW TO MAKE
BREXIT A SUCCESS
Wednesday 19 October | RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London W1
Bar opens: 7 p.m. | Discussion 7.30 p.m.

Following the Brexit vote the UK has stepped into the great
unknown, but polls show that almost two-thirds of adults feel
positive about our future. Theresa May has promised to make
a success of life outside the EU, but what will that really mean?

SPEAKERS
• Andrew Neil • Dominic Raab MP
• James Forsyth • Gisela Stuart MP

In association with
BOOK YOUR PLACE TICKETS
www.spectator.co.uk/Brexit Standard rate: £25
020 7961 0044 Subscriber rate: £20

the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 25

 Why cathedrals are soaring
The Church of England’s unexpected success story
SIMON JENKINS
S
omething strange is happening in
the long decline of Christian Britain.
We know that church attendance has
plummeted two thirds since the 1960s. Bare-
ly half of Britons call themselves Christian
and only a tiny group of these go near a
church. Just 1.4 per cent regularly worship
as Anglicans, and many of those do so for a
privileged place in a church school.
Yet one corner of the garden is blooming:
the 42 cathedrals. At the end of the last cen-
tury, cathedrals were faring no better than
churches, with attendances falling some-
times by 5 per cent a year. With the new cen-
tury, everything changed. Worship in almost
all 42 Anglican cathedrals began to rise, and
it is now up by a third in a decade. This was
in addition to visits by tourists, who number
more than eight million. There are more vis-
its to cathedrals than to English Heritage
properties.
Business is booming, too. Cathedral turn-
over of £220 million has almost doubled
in a decade. This is not just in the ‘canon’
of medieval cathedrals but in depressed
Blackburn, Wakefield and Bradford. Ten
cathedrals now charge for entry and the ‘big
six’ — Canterbury, York, Durham, St Paul’s,
Winchester and Salisbury — make no claim
on central funds. If all cathedrals charged,
many of the church’s financial woes would
be relieved.
What has happened? An answer is not
easy to find. Becky Clark, the Church of
England’s officer for cathedrals, credits the
strides they have made in pushing out the
boundaries of their work. Cathedrals have
moved into concerts both rock and classical,
lectures, conferences, workshops and art gal-
leries. They have become local champions of
education, social welfare and urban regen-
eration — in other words, non-religious
activities. They have acquired, says Clark,
‘an appetite for risk which is often lacking
in religious communities’.
The same theme is echoed by Andrew
Brown and Linda Woodhead in a new
diatribe against the C of E, That was the
Church that Was. They attribute cathedrals’
resurgence to their autonomy. Ruled by
deans and chapters, cathedrals are immu-
nised from what by common consent is the
church’s stifling centralised bureaucracy.
26
They lend themselves to fund-raising, can
draw on local talent and have taken on roles
from an increasingly moribund local govern-
ment. They are reverting to their medieval
function as one-stop cultural and civic insti-
tutions.
Others find in the rise of the cathedral
a more subtle form of appeal. The sociolo-
gist Grace Davie sees a cathedral’s strength
as lying, specifically, in not being a parish
church. It makes no demands on the visi-
tor. It requires no show of loyalty. To Davie,
the cathedral offers a ‘vicarious religion’,
responding to ‘a desire for anonymity, the
option to come and go without explanation
A cathedral is a true museum,
however much modernist bishops
and deans hate the term
or commitment’. In a cathedral you can hide
your faith behind a pillar with none of what
Brown and Woodhead call ‘all that banging
on about Jesus’. No one demands you pray.
This analysis finds support in the C of E’s
own ‘growth research’ programme, which
stresses the cathedral as a place for ‘peace,
contemplation, worship, music and a friend-
ly atmosphere’. Significantly, it is midweek
evensong that has boomed, not Sunday
matins or mass, with attendances doubling
in a decade. These visitors are untroubled
by Philip Larkin’s church as ‘a shape less
recognisable each week/ A purpose more
obscure’. They come for the music.
As a non-worshipper who has spent the
past two years studying these buildings, I
‘Typical! Bloody Deutsche Bankers
reserving the best spots!’
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
find this plausible and refreshing. Cathe-
drals are by far the most magnificent group
of buildings in England. They have survived,
mostly for 900 years, as dominant features
of the English landscape. In its day, Lin-
coln cathedral was the highest building in
the world after the pyramids. Exeter and
Winchester had vaults that were the envy
of Europe. Nothing matched the English
cathedral in size until the Crystal Palace and
the Victorian station.
But I found cathedrals subtler plac-
es than this. Unlike those in continental
Europe, Britain’s have fiercely distinctive
personalities, the product of additions and
subtractions over centuries. They may be
awe-inspiring (Durham), uplifting (Ely) or
just lovable (Chichester), but each is differ-
ent from every other.
A cathedral is a true museum, however
much modernist bishops and deans hate the
term. It embraces architecture, sculpture,
painting, stained glass, wood-carving, cal-
ligraphy, embroidery and, above all, music.
Its contents are displayed not in cases but
beneath walls and roofs of unsurpassed
beauty, intended by their builders as com-
posite works of all the arts and crafts.
This gives a dimension to the enjoyment
of a cathedral that is beyond the mundane.
No museum equals the sensation of look-
ing up into the octagon of Ely, or climbing
the Chapter House steps at Wells, or gazing
on Lincoln’s Angel chapel. A Grinling Gib-
bons carving in St Paul’s, a Piper window in
Coventry or even a naked Antony Gorm-
ley in Winchester seems more evocative in
a cathedral.
The resurgence of these institutions is
shared with another facet of the nation’s
religious life — pilgrimage. Numbers trek-
king to Iona, Walsingham, St Albans and
Canterbury rise by the year. As with cathe-
drals, it is hard to distinguish those with
religious intent from those seeking secular
stimulus, those who like ‘hiking with a pur-
pose’, keeping fit or seeking companion-
ship. Clare Balding’s admirable Ramblings
programme on Radio 4 recently joined a
Canterbury pilgrim, Jacqui, off to celebrate
her recovery from alcoholism. No one men-
tioned God. But then religion as therapy is
as old as Stonehenge.
I have found in England’s cathedrals
an intangible mix of aesthetic and contem-
plative satisfaction. The most celebrated
— notably the 25 in the medieval ‘canon’ —
have qualities of a great novel or symphony.
They can overwhelm both the senses and
the emotions. The drum arcades at Durham,
the spire at Salisbury and the leaf capitals at
Southwell are masterpieces the equal of any
in Europe. Their soaring popularity chal-
lenges those inclined to pessimism about the
human condition.
Simon Jenkins’s England’s Cathedrals is
published this week by Little, Brown.

The parenting trap
O
ut of the fog of rumour and accu-
sation surrounding the melancholy
break-up of Brad Pitt and Angeli-
na Jolie, one source of contention seems dis-
tinctly modern: the couple rowed most fierce-
ly, apparently, over ‘parenting styles’.
Where once the public divided into ‘Team
Aniston’ and ‘Team Jolie’ on loyalties in love,
it’s now ‘Team Jolie’ and ‘Team Pitt’ on par-
enting. According to ‘friends’ and ‘ex-nannies’,
it appears that Jolie dealt with their six chil-
dren in an easy-going, continent-hopping
manner which aspired to their graduation as
‘children of the world’. Pitt, it seems, yelled
more and tried to enforce bedtimes, manners
and chores. Things reportedly came to a head
on a private jet where Pitt had a screaming
row with Jolie and their eldest son, and the
next day Jolie filed for divorce.
For years Jolie has told any reporter who
would listen that Pitt was the most admirable
of fathers. Rarely have two people hymned
each other’s ‘parenting skills’ so loudly for so
long. Yet Jolie has applied for ‘sole physical
custody’, which her attorney says is for ‘the
health of the family’, wreathing the break-up
in hints that Pitt is unsafe around his children.
The implicit charge is one of ‘bad parenting’,
of the sort that must no doubt be closely eval-
uated by teams of lawyers.
What happened? Divorces are tradition-
ally about all sorts of things: boredom, infi-
delity, control-freakery, addictions, the lavish
smorgasbord of unhappiness. Yet divorcing
parents at least used to reassure the children
that it wasn’t about them. The citation of ‘par-
enting styles’ in a celebrity divorce battle tells
the children the opposite: it is all about them,
and it’s gone kaput. The painful message is:
‘We can’t agree on how to bring you up, and
so the family is breaking up.’
Jolie and Pitt aren’t the only ones rowing
about the correct ideology of childrearing,
however. If you type ‘parenting’ into the
Amazon search field, there are thousands
of competitive blueprints for bringing up
baby, from Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother (advocating enforced study and
relentlessly high expectations) to Dr Laura
Markham’s Calm Parents, Happy Kids: the
Secrets of Stress-Free Parenting. A vast sub-
genre plays to the nagging belief — once con-
fined to food and sex — that other countries
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
JENNY MCCARTNEY
do it better. The Danes come out tops (The
Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest
People in the World Know about Raising Con-
fident, Capable Kids) but they have a looming
rival in the Dutch (coming this winter: The
Happiest Kids in the World: Bringing up Chil-
dren the Dutch Way). The French get a good
rap on manners (French Parents Don’t Give
In: 100 Parenting Tips from Paris). The most
oft-cited formula is for ‘happy, successful chil-
dren’, as though a child is some kind of plant
that you must position carefully in special-
ised soil for guaranteed results, rather than a
growing person with an independent, unpre-
dictable human will. It goes without saying
that hardly anyone wants to parent like a Brit.
I’m not saying that bringing up children is
easy, or that we should shun all advice from
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt aren’t
the only ones rowing about
the correct ideology of childrearing
experts, in person or in print. I remember tak-
ing solace from the ‘toddler-taming’ book of
Dr Christopher Green, a sensible paediatri-
cian whose advice tended towards the warm-
ly practical (his suggestion of calming a jumpy
toddler at lights-out time with a few squirts of
‘monster repellent’ from a can of hairspray
worked a treat). And there are some adults
whose own upbringings were chaotic or
neglectful, who would be helped as parents
by the formal iteration of the importance of
regular mealtimes, bedtimes, stories and basic
kindness, because no one did it for them.
But the thing is — when we get into the
more far-reaching theories — I don’t really
want to parent like a Dane, now the inter-
nationally acknowledged custodians of hap-
piness and hygge (their much-vaunted word
meaning cosy pleasures). I’ve got nothing
against the Danes, but I want to parent like a
Northern Irish woman who is slightly grumpy
in the morning until the first cup of tea, which
is what I am. Anyway, as the parenting indus-
try swells, so does unhappiness among chil-
dren and teenagers — manifested in rising
mental health issues and self-harm — rather
as the diet industry expands in line with obe-
sity. Worrying constantly about something
doesn’t seem to stop it from getting worse.
I was lucky enough to grow up in Belfast
in the 1970s, when ‘parent’ was a noun rather
than a verb and the turmoil in the state left
little time for extended self-examination. My
attitude would have given a tiger mother a
heart attack. I spurned all extracurricular
activities, regarding my attendance at school
as job done, and liked to be left alone to read
or to hit a tennis ball mindlessly off the back
wall. In return my parents clearly loved me,
broadly expected me to do well, and left
things at that. We were all satisfied. Even now,
the thought of someone bearing down upon
me with an agenda for success makes me feel
panicky and sick. With a tiger mother, I might
certainly have done better at the piano, but I
would have been all snarled up inside.
I think back to my father and grandfa-
ther, who came from tough working-class
backgrounds and had even more freedom
of movement than I did. They regarded
their mothers as benign representatives of a
domestic order with whom they touched base
to get fed, washed and occasionally chastised.
In hindsight, they interpreted their child-
hoods as thickly action-packed and happy.
It is surely imperative that we love our
children, encourage them and try to teach
them to be decent individuals. Yet the parent-
ing cult too often sells the dangerous illusion
that adults can strategically perfect a relation-
ship with a child, thereby leading them to per-
fect themselves according to our lights. We’re
being encouraged to see children as difficult
puzzles rather than sources of enjoyment. It’s
a perfect recipe for anxiety.
As we pore over our latest tactics, and
teenagers contemplate the abstract terror of
failure on multiple fronts from their bodies
to their grades, perhaps the healthiest parent-
ing advice of all is this: put the book down
and back off.
27

I want my Brexit good and strong
W
hat you really should have done if
you were in Birmingham on Mon-
day this week was skip the not
notably riveting Philip Hammond speech,
and head instead for the fringe event run
by the Bruges Group starring me, Professor
David Myddelton and Charles Moore.
I can’t speak for my performance (mod-
esty forbids me) but my fellow panellists
were brilliant: funny, incisive and as optimis-
tic as you’d expect of a pair of ardent Brexi-
teers addressing the victorious home crowd
for probably the first time since that happy
day in June.
‘Which of us here could ever have imag-
ined that we’re actually part of the major-
ity: the 52 per cent?’ I asked. And lots of
people clapped at the wonderful warm feel-
ing this gave them. But then I introduced a
worm into their apple. ‘What we learned on
24 June is that the establishment elite are
not representative of the country at large.
And what we have learned since is that they
are not about to give up any time soon…’
The most obvious example is this new
distinction, endlessly promulgated by the
BBC, between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Brexit. No
one talked about such a thing in the run-up
to the referendum. The only people talking
about it now are bitter Remainers trying to
frustrate the democratic process. Most of
us who voted for Brexit want it good and
strong and hard.
This is why I think our ex-Remainer PM
Theresa May played such a blinder with her
forthright Sunday speech on Brexit. Yes I
know there are those — even on the Leave
side of the argument — who insist it isn’t
possible, that there are all manner of compli-
cations which will stop us getting our way on
tariff-free trade and freedom of movement.
But you don’t go into negotiations conced-
ing the pass before you’ve even begun. Just
ask that guy who used to be PM.
One of the things I always loved about
being an outspoken Brexiteer was being on
the side of the people. It was like that time
I served briefly in the Sealed Knot as a Par-
liamentarian pikeman with Col John Birch’s
Regiment of Foot, shouting as we marched
off to battle catchy slogans like ‘A pox on
the King’ and ‘One King, King Jesus’. Within
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
JAMES DELINGPOLE
our ranks we embraced all manner of ideo-
logical convictions, from the socialist to the
libertarian to the shy monarchist. But one
thing we all agreed on: that the rotten estab-
lishment needed a proper kick up the arse.
It’s the same I think with the Brexit vote.
Since the result, lots of commentators have
speculated on what it really meant: was it
anti-immigration, was it about a yearning
for sovereignty, was it about protest, fish,
economics, freedom? And Theresa May has
wisely recognised that her legacy will large-
ly depend on how successfully she answers
these questions.
I think the solution is more basic than
our experts realise: what most of us would
You don’t go into negotiations
conceding the pass from the start.
Just ask that guy who used to be PM
really like, for a change, is a state that rep-
resents our interests. Let me give you an
obvious example of this — one that happi-
ly Theresa May has addressed already: the
legal harassment of our troops.
Almost every sane, normal person in the
country at large has enormous respect for
our serving men and women. It’s a brave and
selfless thing to trade in your Playstation
and Mum’s home cooking for a uniform,
military discipline and the real prospect of
having your legs blown off in a flyblown
land where diarrhoea is a way of life.
What kind of deranged, sadistic, unpat-
‘They’ve certainly changed
since they inherited the earth.’
riotic tosser would you have to be to send
such people to fight for their country not
only with their arms tied behind their backs
(in terms of rules of engagement) but, worse,
to allow ambulance-chasing lawyers (often
representing either lying gold-diggers or
murderous terrorists) to pursue them
through the courts once they got home?
Whoever created this state of affairs —
Tony Blair, presumably — was acting fla-
grantly against the interests of the British
people. Anyone, in any pub or café or hair-
dresser’s across the land, could tell you that.
Yet astonishingly, for years, even with a Con-
servative government with an ex-foxhunting
Old Etonian in charge, this outrageous and
inexcusable injustice was allowed to persist.
It’s one of the many irritations that I suspect
a lot of people would have had in mind on
23 June when they voted to give that remote,
smug, complacent establishment one mas-
sive boot in the goolies.
Note that it’s not a left or right thing. It’s
a plain bloody commonsense thing. Now
I’ll give you another example, one this time
where Theresa May’s administration has
fallen woefully short: the Hinkley Point C
nuclear project. If the government really has
to get involved with energy infrastructure
projects, then it has only one job: make sure
the British people get a good deal.
In no wise could this be said of Hinkley. It
commits Britain to buying outdated technol-
ogy, at three times the going wholesale rate
for electricity, in what has been described as
the ‘worst deal in history’ — to the benefit
of almost no one save French and Chinese
investors. There may be political reasons
behind this but the British people don’t care
about political reasons. What they want —
and deserve, because it’s their money — is
cheap, reliable electricity.
What we can see already is that this
administration is going to be a mixed bag of
good sense and off-the-scale stupidity. On
the latter side, next to Hinkley we can put
the all but inevitable HS2 and anything to
do with ‘industrial policy’; on the former we
can put stuff like grammar schools, the scrap-
ping of the Department for Energy and Cli-
mate Change and, with luck, the execution
of Brexit. Could be worse, I suppose.
29

Studying grammars
Sir: Isabel Hardman (Politics, 1 October)
states that no reputable research backs
up the belief that grammar schools
promote social justice. I am not sure she
is correct. For instance, Lord Franks’s
1966 report on Oxford University
recorded an accelerating rise in the share
of places taken by state school pupils at
that university in the 1939–1966 period.
This increased from 19 per cent to 34 per
cent, excluding the semi-private direct
grant schools. Include the direct grants
and the figure rises from 32 per cent in
1939 to 51 per cent in 1965. This change,
reversed in the comprehensive years after
1965, coincided with the introduction of
a national system of academic selection
throughout the United Kingdom. More
recently, the Higher Education Statistics
Agency recorded that children from poor
homes in selective Northern Ireland had
significantly greater chances of reaching
university than their equivalents in largely
comprehensive England. The difference
was even more marked by comparison with
wholly comprehensive Scotland. Critics
of grammar schools make much of the
outcomes in the few remaining besieged
grammar schools, perhaps forgetting that
these results are distorted because they are
so heavily oversubscribed.
Peter Hitchens
London W8
A cheer for Patrick Minford
Sir: For those of us who are perennially
suspicious of economists in general,
there are a few whose opinions are worth
considering. For me, Patrick Minford was
one of those who back in the 1980s seemed
to talk sense, following in the footsteps
of the controversial monetarist Milton
Friedman (‘Brexit’s philosopher king’,
1 October). My Keynesian economics
professor at Harvard Business School in
1973 told us sceptically: ‘If you believe
Milton Friedman, the US will be in
recession this time next year.’ It was.
It was Roger Bootle’s column in the
Daily Telegraph which drew my attention
to the remarkable research paper by
Michael Burrage for Civitas, and it was
he and Liam Halligan who in the run up
to the referendum seemed to make most
sense. They completely contradicted the
Treasury’s and other economic forecasts —
all of which, unlike the Burrage research,
were based on fantasy.
It is comforting to read Mr Halligan’s
piece about Patrick Minford’s successful
efforts to get sense into the otherwise
disappointing Brexit debate and to think
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
LETTERS
that, so far at least, his campaign group
have been vindicated.
Donald R. Clarke
Tunbridge Wells
Wild arguments
Sir: I very much enjoyed the pieces on the
subject of rewilding, first by Melissa Kite
(24 September) and then last week by Rod
Liddle. First, I found Ms Kite’s arguments
convincing and I concluded the practice
was foolish. However, Mr Liddle’s response
challenged my original position, and now
I am thoroughly torn on the issue. Might
I suggest a head-to-head debate between
your columnists to settle the matter as your
next Spectator event?
Evan Byrne
London E14
Keep out pine martens
Sir: Rod Liddle says he looks forward to
pine martens in England (‘Let’s bring the
wolves back into Britain’, 1 October). A
family of them moved into the roof of my
house in France this year. Both the noise
and the smell were awful, and we ended up
EASTERN
A I R W AY S
SUITS
BUSINESS
– Up to 4 daily departures *†
– Same day return journeys *
– Complimentary on board
drinks & snacks
– Express check-in service
– Fast track security channel *
– Executive airport lounges *
– On board seating allocated
at check-in
easternairways.com
ZK\Ʈ\DQ\RWKHUZD\"
* At selected airports † Except Saturdays
calling out the local pest-control man (sorry
Rod). The remedy? Playing loud French
pop music in the attic for five days and
nights. They did leave, and their entrance
holes were blocked, only for them to
appear again through another route.
Ian Wallis
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Oktoberfest moderation
Sir: Charles Moore in his Notes (1 October)
acknowledges the minimal disorder at the
Munich Oktoberfest. But he also records
that eight million litres of beer were drunk,
by six million guests. That’s barely two
pints each! No wonder there’s so little
disturbance (and, terrifyingly, what has
happened to the Bavarians?).
Peter Lucey
Wokingham, Berkshire
Merciless Athens
Sir: Pericles (or Thucydides) could turn a
pretty phrase, but his boasts about Athenian
generosity and liberality (Ancient and
modern, 24 September) would have rung
hollow in Naxos and Thasos. When they
tried leaving the Delian League they were
reminded they had sworn to remain ‘until
iron floats’ — no Article 50 for them!
— and Athens quickly brought them to
heel, imposing fines and ‘contributions’:
confiscating ships, razing city walls and
taking over gold mines. But they got off
lightly compared to the people of Melos.
Athens made them an offer they could not
refuse — join the League! — but refuse they
did, preferring to stay neutral in the war
with Sparta. They paid the price: their city
was taken, their men were slaughtered and
their women and children were sold into
slavery. They were even blamed for their
own destruction because they had failed to
accommodate Athenian might — the logic
of the rapist. Compared with the reality
of Athenian ‘live and let live’, Juncker’s
‘petulant schoolgirl’ act seems almost
charming.
Patrick Pender-Cudlip
Queen Camel, Somerset
Dyslexia exists
Sir: I can’t compose a smart reply
to Rod Liddle’s article on dyslexia
(17 September). But I have a dyslexic
son who got a 2:1 in politics at Leicester
University. His graduation was one of the
proudest moments of my life and his. Rod
Liddle’s casual dismissal of dyslexia made
me cry.
Jane Waring
Tadcaster, North Yorks
31
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Brexit spooks the markets, but the
housing crisis will swing more votes
‘I
rang and said can I have a council
house, I’ve nowhere to go, an’ the bloke
said no you can’t, we need them all for
t’Romanians,’ was a remark offered by a fel-
low patient, known to me as Fat Lad, when I
was hospitalised three years ago. ‘I’m telling
you, I’m the biggest Ukip supporter there
is…’ he went on, illuminating how — unno-
ticed by the comfortable classes — a short-
age of social and affordable housing was
helping to fuel the national mood that even-
tually led to the Leave vote.
Belatedly, Communities Secretary Sajid
Javid has had a Damascene moment: ‘Tack-
ling the housing shortage is not about polit-
ical expediency,’ he declares. ‘It is a moral
duty.’ He and Philip Hammond have pledged
£2 billion to fund accelerated housebuilding
on public land, plus a £3 billion Home Build-
ers’ Fund to encourage smaller builders and
developers.
This will act as a Keynesian stimulus
through the Brexit turbulence the Chancel-
lor warned of in his conference speech — but
I doubt it will come close to filling the gap
between the 170,000 homes currently built
each year and the 250,000 that experts say
we need, both to house a growing population
and to hold the price of housing down. That
will require bolder interventions, including
radical relaxation of planning rules, if social
unease is to be averted, particularly among
the disadvantaged young. Brexit moves
markets, shares rise as the pound falls, but
ministers should remember that domestic
issues such as housing actually drive voter
behaviour: trifle with them at your peril.
Meanwhile, in my Yorkshire town of
Helmsley the cheapest new-build house on
offer is a two-bedroom cottage in a cramped
courtyard at £395,000. Fat Lad will never be
able to buy it, or anything like it, and by now
I’ll bet he’s a Corbyn voter.
Rebalancing at last
My long-running campaign for fairer busi-
ness rates may not have been the most
laugh-out-loud of this column’s themes but
32
it has resonated with many readers who
are business owners, residents of provincial
towns with moribund high streets, or both.
Following George Osborne’s reforms last
October, inter alia allowing local authorities
to keep the £28 billion raised and spend it on
infrastructure that might actually help the
businesses which pay the rates, the new gov-
ernment has launched a valuation review
that recognises the imbalance of prosperity
between London and the provinces.
The Great Recession played havoc with
the commercial property values on which
rates are based: for bombed-out town-
centre retail spaces, rates became a bigger
cost than diminished rents. But the previ-
ous government shamefully deferred an
overdue revaluation beyond the 2015 gen-
eral election for fear of losing small-business
votes to Ukip. The review finally announced
last week adds 11 per cent to the capital’s
rates bill while cutting a similar percentage
for the rest of the country and maintaining
the overall take at its present level.
That’s a shift in the right direction, but
transitional arrangements mean that sav-
ings for non-metropolitan businesses will
be maddeningly slow to arrive. Those on the
painful side of the new equation have nev-
ertheless been quick to protest — led by BT,
where the rates bill will go up by more than
half a billion, provoking threats of higher
broadband charges to make customers pay.
Worst hit are West End retailers such as
Polo Ralph Lauren in Bond Street, facing
an 80 per cent rise to £3.9 million a year, and
Selfridges in Oxford Street, up 51 per cent
to £15.1 million. But foreign shoppers armed
with cheap sterling surely won’t notice any
consequent price rises.
By contrast, City banks in their shiny
new towers get off more lightly than they
probably deserve, with a rates rise of 34 per
cent. But not so the Bank of England, which
will have to pay 61 per cent more for being
where it is — though of course it can print
money to pay the bill. The governor might
even claim that will boost the economy,
but any struggling small-business owner up
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
north will tell him that a simple cut in the
cost of workspace and sales space through
lower rates would be a lot more stimulating,
if times are going to get tough again, than
any of his monetary gimmicks.
Man for the job?
Following my plea (17 September) for a
national debate on the ‘atomistic jungle’
which is the new world of work, I naturally
sat by the phone awaiting a call from Down-
ing Street inviting me to lead an inquiry
into the buyers’ market of low-paid flex-
ible working and insecure self-employment
I had described, and whether new rights and
protections are needed in response. Imagine
my surprise (and indeed that of former Tory
ministers and right-leaning think-tankers
who might have fancied it) to find Mrs May
has given that job to my old sparring part-
ner Matthew Taylor, former head of Tony
Blair’s policy unit, co-author of Labour’s
1997 manifesto and, when I first met him, an
early exponent of dark Mandelsonian spin.
The appointment has been called a
‘centre-ground land grab’ that shows off the
prime minister’s One Nation credentials.
But she might find the real Matthew Taylor
nowhere near the centre — to the left even
of his combative persona on Radio 4’s The
Moral Maze, and a bit subversive to boot.
All in good taste
My great predecessor Christopher Fildes
rings in to support another of my recent
calls, in concert with the Daily Telegraph: for
a new royal yacht and export sales flagship
funded by donations from repentant bank-
ers and FTSE executives. He has an even
neater suggestion, that Sir Philip Green
should offer the Queen the one of his own
floating palaces, Lionheart or Lionchase,
on condition that he be allowed to keep
his knighthood. But would Her Majesty be
happy with those marbled bathrooms and
crocodile-skin cocktail stools? A tasteful
refit might cost more than a new yacht.
Steven Poole finds the

© VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

addictive, frustrating,
therapeutic game of Tetris a
perfect metaphor for life
Claudia FitzHerbert
proposes a new kind of
bookshop – which will be
the saviour of civilisation
Juliet Nicolson reckons the
mad 3rd Earl of Portsmouth
was more sinned against
than sinning
Kate Chisholm is alarmed
that the BBC has appointed
a former Labour culture
minister as head of radio
James Walton is amazed
that so many people think
we should terminate babies
with Down’s syndrome
Lloyd Evans thinks Kate
Tempest’s poetry can’t be
described as ‘moreish’ –
‘less-ish’, perhaps

The Tree of Jesse Cope

(detail), c.1310–25
Melanie McDonagh — p48
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 33
BOOKS & ARTS
Thoroughly bewitching
Philip Hensher celebrates the breathtaking imagination — and dottiness —
of the seminal writer Angela Carter and deeply mourns her early death
The Invention of Angela Carter:
A Biography
by Edmund Gordon
Chatto, £25, pp. 544
Angela Carter was a seminal, a watershed
novelist: perhaps one of the last generation
of novelists to change both the art she prac-
tised and the world. Reading this splendid
biography, it is hard to avoid the false conclu-
sion that she always knew exactly what she
was doing. Her life, in its swerves and unex-
pected corners, always turns out to be con-
tributing to her work; how clever of her, one
starts to think, to get a job on a local news-
paper, to go to Japan, to have an array of
dotty, oppressive or plain witchy aunts, moth-
er and grandmother…. Of course it was not
like that. Carter’s life seems rich and inevita-
ble in the retelling because she made use of
almost everything. There was not much that
she wouldn’t look at with interest.
Her family background was half south
London and half Yorkshire, both of which
she revelled in. The wrong side of the
Thames provided reckless living, making do
and letting rip; Yorkshire provided a relish
of feminine plain-speaking moving imper-
ceptibly into witchcraft. ‘Dottiness’ loomed
large, and dressing for display, and food and
drink — Angela was first immensely fat as
a child and then, in a display of self-disci-
pline, thin to the point of anorexia. Food
was important because it was what the state
doled out to you through rationing, in the
1940s, and also what your terrifying mother
chose to give you, to show how much she
meant to you. Always afterwards food, even
bad food, could call up a sentence of rare
vividness. ‘My corner shop sells wrapped,
sliced white loaves that at a pinch could
34
BOOKS
poultice a wound’, a book review of hers
once kicked off.
There were books, too; she could fillet
a book, empty it of what she needed, see
through it and inhabit it. Her family knew
what it was to go to Oxford, and there was
no reason she could not have gone. But
an announcement by her always control-
ling mother that her parents would take
a flat in Oxford to make sure she was all
right changed Angela’s mind. She became
a journalist on a local newspaper instead,
and quickly married; in the 1950s, this
I know of nothing since Dickens
to match the glorious opening
of Nights at the Circus
could be the only way for ambitious women
from ordinary backgrounds to escape their
families.
The marriage, to Paul Carter, a silent
beatnik, was not a success, but Ange-
la hardly seemed to care. If her husband
glowered silently across their Bristol flat,
complaining that the housework had not
been done and ‘more time’ had been ‘wast-
ed’ by Angela writing in notebooks, at any
rate she had time to herself and opportuni-
ties to explore.
Her first five novels were written and
published at breakneck speed. The titles
— Love, Heroes and Villains — indi-
cate a conviction that fiction’s fundamen-
tal subjects are going to be taken on and
mastered for good. They were not success-
ful, exactly, but Carter’s name was being
made. One of the novels won the Somer-
set Maugham Award, requiring the winner
to travel. Carter had scarcely been abroad,
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
but she took the decision to go to Japan. At
the airport she said goodbye insouciantly
to Paul. That was the end of their marriage,
and the beginning of the full splendour of
her career.
In Japan, and always afterwards, Cart-
er gave the impression of doing exactly as
she chose, in her writing and her life, and
the results were beautifully fearless. Many
of the people she engaged with were lib-
erated by the encounter, and changed for-
ever. Edmund Gordon has tracked down
Sozo Araki, the man she fell in love with in
Japan, and had long conversations with him:
the passages in the biography dealing with
their relationship, and their life in a beach
house while Angela wrote her masterpiece,
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman, are luminous with his recollec-
tions, singing with the remembered joy of a
wonderful 40-year-old love affair.
Some people were damaged by the
ride. One friend never understood why she
was taken up and then dropped; a second
lover in Japan went off the rails after his
encounter; a dangerous lover back in Eng-
land frankly frightened all Carter’s friends.
But there seems no doubt that she brought
a light into the world; the tale of her sec-
ond marriage to a man 15 years younger
who was fixing up the house opposite is an
unlikely but completely convincing love
story. As Carter cheerfully pointed out to
visitors in her last days, it was one of the few
happy details of her very sad end that she
had taken out an enormous life insurance
policy in favour of her beloved husband and
son a matter of weeks before the diagnosis
of cancer that would kill her.
The novels, after the Japanese experi-
ence, are some of the greatest of the centu-
GETTY IMAGES
ry. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman is a truly breathtaking exercise
of the imagination. Something that had
been pent up for years was let loose —
whether in Carter’s talent or in postwar
English fiction. In any case, the combi-
nation of sumptuously inventive prose,
tumbling extremes of possibility and no-
nonsense, Yorkshire-grandmother con-
creteness was almost unprecedented.
Hoffman and the three novels that fol-
lowed, The Passion of New Eve, Nights at
the Circus and Wise Children, specialised
in the tall tale and the rendering possible
of the completely impossible through get-
ting the details right. If there has been any-
thing since Dickens to match the opening of
Nights at the Circus, as the smells of its hero-
ine, half-swan, half-Amazon, and the smells
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
of her champagne-ripe dressing room are
captured in eye-watering detail, I don’t
know what it might be.
Carter never quite got her due in her
lifetime, and had to put up with a good deal;
the moment when Selina Scott, covering the
Booker Prize in the year in which Carter
Angela decided to go to Japan and said
goodbye insouciantly at the airport to
Paul. That was the end of their marriage
was chairman of the judges, cornered her on
live television and completely failed to rec-
ognise her, is painfully fresh in the memory.
Heartbreakingly, Carter died at the age
of 52. I don’t suppose she will ever go out
of print, and the most hideous covers that
even Virago Press can devise are, happily,
incapable of deterring readers. Her reputa-
tion has been shaped since her death into
the idea she was making specific statements
about gender, sexuality and what it means
to be a woman. But so great was her curios-
ity about people of all sorts that she might
have looked at some of these critical pars-
ings and laughed demurely. She liked sur-
prising people — and wrote one of the best
critical works of the 1970s in praise of the
Marquis de Sade.
The biography has been a long time
coming, considering the immense scholarly
interest in her work in the 25 years since her
death. Edmund Gordon modestly regrets
his sex in dealing with a woman of such sig-
nificance. But there is no need to apologise:
this is an exemplary piece of work. Gordon
has patiently investigated many corners of
Carter’s life, interviewing Japanese boy-
friends, Salman Rushdie, an ancient Shef-
field hippy called Kaktus, people who loved
Carter and people who felt wounded by
her. He must be a very sympathetic pres-
ence with a microphone; the results are rich
and polyphonic, and you have the sense
that his interviewees were longing to tell
someone about the wonderful woman they
once knew.
He correctly draws attention to the rare
failures of his research, too — the first hus-
band would not speak, and other impor-
tant figures such as Lorna Sage or Carter’s
beloved literary agent Deborah Rogers
died before they could contribute. It is a
piece of work which will satisfy readers, and
on which further investigation can rest with
great confidence that nothing has been con-
cealed and no pathway has been neglected.
Everyone should read it.
35
 BOOKS & ARTS
GETTY IMAGES
Israelis compete in a giant Tetris tournament in Rabin Square,Tel Aviv, in August
A puzzling phenomenon
Steven Poole
The Tetris Effect: The Cold War Battle
for the World’s Most Addictive Game
by Dan Ackerman
Oneworld, £12.99, pp. 264
Everyone has played it, or one of its
manifold variations and rip-offs. Blocks of
different shapes fall from the sky; you have
to rotate and shunt them around so they fit
perfectly together at the bottom, and then
that horizontal line of blocks vanishes. This
is Tetris, and it was created in 1984 by a Sovi-
et mathematician called Alexei Pajitnov.
But how it came to the West is a remarkably
complicated cloak-and-dagger story, here
given its first book-length treatment.
The narrative opens with all the bad
bravado of a Dan Brown novel, as one of
the several businessmen chasing the rights
to the game flies into Moscow for a meet-
ing with Elorg, a department of the Soviet
trade ministry. Or, if you will, the ‘secretive
trade group’ housed in a ‘sparse communist-
era workplace’ somewhere in the ‘sprawl-
ing city’. Soon, however, the prose settles
down, and we are led readably through pot-
ted biographies of Pajitnov himself and the
other players.
One is an American named Henk
Rogers, who moved to Japan and — with
the release of his own game The Black
Onyx — popularised the Dungeons-and-
Dragons-style role-playing game in that
country. Another is Robert Stein, a Brit
of Hungarian extraction who specialised
in software-licensing deals between East
and West. There are the big beasts of the
36
Japanese corporation Nintendo. And then
there is Robert Maxwell. Cap’n Bob’s soft-
ware subsidiary, Mirrorsoft, had been sold
Tetris rights by Stein before Stein had got
a signed contract from the Russians. When
Pajitnov’s handlers eventually sold the most
lucrative rights to Rogers and Nintendo
instead, Maxwell complained personally
to his friend Mikhail Gorbachev. But the
supreme leader had a few more important
things on his mind in 1989, and gave Max-
well the brush-off. Before all these machi-
nations were concluded, various versions
of Tetris had appeared on PCs and home
consoles, but Tetris’s global breakthrough
moment really came when it was bundled
with Nintendo’s new handheld console, the
Game Boy, selling scores of millions world-
wide.
The Tetris Effect is full of fascinating
facts — for instance, that the trade negoti-
ators at Elorg invited Nintendo to sponsor
Tetris is thought to appeal to
women because basically it’s
a game about tidying up
the USSR’s space programme. (Imagine the
Nintendo logo on the side of a magnificent
Soyuz rocket as it launches, they suggested.
Nintendo politely demurred.) But it is very
much a story about the business, rather than
the culture or art, of video games. The Jap-
anese genius Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of
Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda, is men-
tioned in only eight lines. In the book’s most
fascinating interlude, Ackerman describes
the variety of mathematical papers that have
been written about Tetris’s extreme com-
plexity. There is currently no known way to
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
analyse the game fully, even given as many
computers and as much time as you like.
Ackerman spends time on suggestions
that Tetris is somehow uniquely drug-like,
and the interesting recent research that
playing video games (including but not
uniquely Tetris itself) soon after a trau-
matic event can alter the way the brain lays
down memories, so potentially protecting
the subject from PTSD. But the most poetic
description of the game in this book comes
from its creator, Pajitnov himself: ‘For
me,Tetris is some song which you sing and
sing inside yourself and can’t stop.’
Is Tetris the most important video
game of all time? So Ackermann suggests,
though an equal case could be made for
Pong, or Space Invaders, or even Tomb
Raider, which in the 1990s dragged games
into mainstream style-magazine culture.
But Tetris does remain special in its aus-
tere perfection. Arguably, indeed, it was its
very abstraction that made it such a break-
out success. Famously, Tetris was one of the
first games to appeal to large numbers of
women as well as men. There is a tongue-in-
cheek hypothesis to the effect that this was
because it is basically a game about tidying
up; more relevant, doubtless, is that it was
one of the few games of its time that was not
about spaceships or goblins. To this day it
feels inevitable, like a geometrical theorem:
more discovered than created. And eventu-
ally, of course, the blocks pile up to the top
of the screen in a jumble and you lose. So
it’s also a perfect metaphor for life.
Over hill and dale
Philip Marsden
The Marches:
Border Walks with My Father
by Rory Stewart
Cape, £16.99, pp. 351
When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs,
Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who
does not peddle bland abstractions. Many of
his parliamentary colleagues inhabit a blah-
blah land where terms such as ‘peace pro-
cess’ and ‘international community’ have
meaning. An upbringing in the Far East,
where his father was a diplomat, as well as
years spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, have
given Stewart direct experience not only of
nations but of town quarters, villages and
individuals.
Walking was his preferred method in
Afghanistan, where he tramped across the
country with a dog and a Punjabi fighting
stick. The dog couldn’t keep up and died,
but here for his latest tramp the Punjabi
dang comes out again. Somehow he has
found time when not at Westminster nor
attending to his Cumbria constituency, nor
with his young family, to walk 600 miles
through the border country of England and Now, decades later, the two of them are have lived here, planting trees and shap-
Scotland, formally interview dozens of peo- on Tyneside. They are walking arm-in-arm ing the house and ‘parklet’. In retirement,
ple and then to write it all up in this substan- beside a four-lane highway — Rory in his Brian has added his mark, building a Chi-
tial and very impressive book. black down jacket with his outsize stick, nese pagoda out of B&Q doors and discov-
His themes are various. He writes in Brian in tam o’shanter and tartan trousers. ering the power of the mini-digger. Then
detail of the area during the Roman period, If that sounds faintly absurd, then it is — comes the news that the old farm has been
its ethnic diversity then and now. He teases but it’s also rather wonderful. Their mutu- sold to a developer. Five hundred houses
out place names and bird names, and what al affection is obvious. Towards the end of are to be built, surrounding the parklet. ‘Oh
they reveal of the mosaic of peoples — Eng- the walk, Brian comes down and asks for dear,’ says Brian. ‘We better start planning.’
lish, Celtic, Cumbric, Northumbrian and an update on his travels. Rory speaks for 90 Rory Stewart is a politician. In his
Norse — who have settled there. He is con- minutes, with his father stroking his knuck- encounters he strives to be egalitarian.
cerned above all with questions of belong- les, interrupting only to say things like: He sleeps on a sofa in a housing estate in
ing and tradition and locality in a globalised ‘More history, darling….’ Wigtown, and interviews a reformed ex-
world. His trek necessarily looks for local The walk finishes at the family home in con. ‘Despite all the depressing aspects of
difference, for what makes one valley or vil- Perthshire. Seven generations of Stewarts the walk, I think there is something to be
lage distinct from another. But he finds little
awareness or interest in such things among
local inhabitants, who no longer share gen-
erations of accumulated experience. Most Intimacies
come from somewhere else. ‘I’m beginning
to think Britain isn’t one place, or two, or And so we sit here for a while together
three,’ he muses. ‘It’s just millions of sepa-
rate houses.’
an ancient couple in their gazebo
In the wilder, hillier sections of the walk, rediscovering truth in a glass or two
he presents the current conflict between making the most of freak warm weather.
farmers and environmentalists. Shepherds
like Willy Tyson (whose Herdwick sheep
beat those of the bestselling author James We do what we can with what we have
Rebanks in the local show) find their tra- written through us, and what we dream,
ditional agriculture and subsidised flocks
challenged by re-wilders. Upland pasture
we dream, or run to ground in stolen time
would be better left to revert to scrub: less like this, those intimacies for which we live.
flooding downstream, more biodiversity,
more birds. Stewart’s treatment of the argu-
ments is judicious but not quite equivocal.
Searching for solace in a broken world –
His constituency includes many hill farms bewildered by too much information,
— and hill farmers, unlike birds, have votes. sidelined by the techno generation,
But while birds cannot vote, birders can,
and the RSPB is always quick to tell us that
their devices no sooner new than old.
they have more members than all the politi-
cal parties put together. Their lives a solipsism where means are ends,
Such discussions are all well and good
but what raises The Marches above the
where speed and scale are deities,
pedestrian is the profoundly moving por- hubristic billionaires dictate new pieties
trait of Stewart’s father. In his early nine- and folk they’ve never met are friends.
ties, Brian Stewart travels down from time
to time to be with his son on his odyssey.
No longer able to keep up with our tireless All of whom are called and all chosen
hero, he meets him in museums and restau- and who would argue with that
rants, and they walk short sections together.
Cue reminiscences of a childhood spent in
or risk going viral among the trolls? And yet
the presence of this extraordinary man. it still remains what’s odd can never be even.
As a colonial officer, Brian Stewart
proved a brilliant linguist, achieving the best
ever results in his exams. He built affordable
We pour another glass, each to their tipple.
housing. He built a number of basic schools, The evening light begins to thin and fail.
explaining to Rory: ‘Cheap and cheerful, House martins dart announcing their arrival.
darling, a hundred pounds each.’ He drove
fearlessly into enemy-occupied territory
We wonder for another year at this miracle of April.
with a pistol on the dashboard of his car.
Behind diplomatic cover, he served for 20 Until I start up about the rise of Islam.
years as a spy and was at one time the sec-
ond most senior figure in the British secret
The cue for you to totter down the lawn
service. In Beijing, walking through town knowing that very soon I’ll move on
with his young son, he suddenly turned and to my party piece about the fall of Rome.
floored a man. ‘Sorry about that, darling,
I’m afraid he was trying to assault us.’ They
then went to McDonald’s to eat apple pie. — Andrew McNeillie
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 37
BOOKS & ARTS
proud of in modern Britain.’ Walks are little
miracles, he writes. His own provides such
a candid view of the people he serves that
it might be an idea to force all our MPs to
emulate him, take a week from their long
recess, pull on walking boots, clasp a big
stick and stride out after chance encounters
in the terraces and back lanes of their con-
stituencies.
Derring-do in the desert
John Jolliffe
SAS: Rogue Heroes
The Authorised Wartime History
by Ben Macintyre
Penguin/Viking, £25, pp. 384
The SAS was the first unit to be granted reg-
imental status for generations. Its chief aim
was to damage the enemy from behind their
lines in the North African desert. It was an
entirely independent unit, not answerable
to any superior command and therefore
anathema to the regular army mind. Its cre-
ator, David Stirling, had a record of com-
plete allergy to discipline or serious work
either at school at Ampleforth or later,
briefly, at Cambridge, where the Master of
his college sent him down after showing him
a list of 28 transgressions and asking him to
choose the three which ‘would be the least
offensive to his mother’.
In 1940 he found himself fretting in
reserve in Egypt in the group of three
commando regiments recruited from the
Household Division under Colonel Robert
Laycock, code-named ‘Layforce’. Stirling’s
first parachute jump left him unable to walk
for eight months, which he spent study-
ing every map he could find of the coastal
strip and the area behind it. He thus formed
a plan for working behind the enemy lines.
By a great stroke of luck he had access to
General Auchinleck, then Commander in
Chief, Middle East Command, and was able
to bypass all the intermediate levels of com-
mand which would certainly have sent him
packing. He was then authorised to raise a
force of six officers and 60 men, originating
from Layforce which had by then been dis-
banded.
Their training was uniquely rigorous.
Apart from parachuting, it included explo-
sives, map reading, radio operating, first aid
(including amputation in the field), naviga-
tion and intensive weapon training, memo-
ry training and, most daunting of all, night
marches of up to 100 miles ‘with full load’.
Their first sortie was a complete disaster,
largely because of appalling weather condi-
tions which would have caused a less obsti-
nate commander to postpone operations. Of
the 55 men who set out, only 21 returned,
without having fired a shot or planted a sin-
gle bomb.
38
A Special Air Service jeep patrol is greeted by its commander
David Stirling on its return from the desert in January 1943
But another maverick unit, the Long
Range Desert Group took the survivors
back to the Eighth Army forward base, and
it dawned on Stirling that if the LRDG could
get them out from a raid it could equally
get them in. Luckily their next raid, on the
enemy airfield at Sirte, went much better, in
spite of Stirling treading on a sleeping Ital-
ian soldier in the dark. Sixty enemy aircraft
were destroyed on the ground, 60 enemy
killed or wounded and a large ammunition
dump blown up, without the loss of a single
SAS man.
Training included parachuting,
first aid (including amputation in the
field) and 100-mile night marches
On the next raid no fewer than 90 planes
were destroyed, which would otherwise have
been attacking the convoys attempting to
relieve the battered but crucial British base
at Malta. A further raid attacked Benghazi,
and Randolph Churchill, the Prime Minis-
ter’s son, was allowed to come along as an
observer. In his most constructive action in
the entire war, he reported back so enthusi-
astically that the PM sent for Stirling to dine
with him in Cairo. The SAS was anyway just
the kind of daring sideshow that Churchill
loved (usually with disastrous results).
Stirling joined the PM, General Alexan-
der and Field Marshal Smuts for dinner and
afterwards asked them to autograph a piece
of paper as a souvenir. Later Stirling had no
hesitation in typing in, above the signatures
the words, ‘Please give the bearer of this note
every possible assistance,’ epitomising the
audacity and blind courage which were the
hallmarks of SAS operations throughout.
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
GETTY IMAGES
Stirling then asked the new C-in-C,
Montgomery, for 150 more men to supple-
ment his attacks. Monty refused dismiss-
ively, but later relented, commenting:
The Boy Stirling is quite, quite mad. Howev-
er, in war there is often a place for mad peo-
ple… Penetrating miles behind the enemy
lines… on a 400-mile front. Who but the Boy
Stirling could think up such a plan?
At the end of 1942 Stirling got his way and
a second force, 2SAS, was formed under
Stirling’s elder brother Bill, with a Special
Boat Squadron, appropriately under Lord
Jellicoe, who became for a time a govern-
ment minister after the war.
But there was a severe problem. ‘Stirling
was a born organiser who disliked admin-
istration... an officer of vaulting ambition
who now saw his creation expanding out of
his sole control.’ He was taken prisoner on
a typically dangerous mission and removed
to Colditz. Rommel had had his eye on
the SAS for some time and called him
‘the very able and adaptable commander
of the desert group which has caused
us more damage than any other unit of
equal size’.
After the invasion of Italy, more was
achieved on roughly the same lines. After
D-Day, attempts were made to cooper-
ate with the French Resistance, who were
often more concerned with killing each
other, with a view to political domination
after the war, than with damaging the Ger-
mans, who regularly went in for murderous
reprisals against innocent villages when
attacked.
The death-or-glory days were over, and
although there were still raids behind the
German lines, those lines were generally
in retreat, and the SAS were sometimes
in danger from friendly fire as the Allies
advanced.
Parts of this thrilling story have been
told before, but never with comprehensive
access to the reports, letters, diaries and
photographs in the possession of the SAS
itself, and to surviving friends and families
of the colourful, often semi-crazy heroes of
the regiment. Ben Macintyre is the ideal
narrator, both for his adroit handling of the
wide range of material and the appropriate
panache of his style.
After the war, the SAS produced sever-
al children. Its ethos was continued in the
creation of similar units in Canada, New
Zealand, Australia, France, Belgium and
Israel. And as late as 1989 Stirling sent the
following message to the sergeants’ mess:
Let me remind you that you must never think
of yourselves as an elite. You are something
more distinguished… with a special strate-
gic role which is probably unique among all
the armies of the world, and one which could
save an incalculable number of lives. Hence
the need for you to keep a low profile, for
reticence, and for the practice of security at
all times.
The magic of bookshops
Claudia FitzHerbert
Browse: The World in Bookshops
edited by Henry Hitchings
Pushkin, £12.99, pp. 224
now has one of the largest collections of
secondhand books in Scotland. This happy
story generates none of Smith’s usual glee-
ful acrobatics with Google tracks in the
brain. She mentions an online Alert Me
form, but moves on quickly — as though
to acknowledge the internet middlemen
is to risk undermining the very thing it is
the business of Browse to praise: the mate-
rial bookshop stuffed to the rafters with
material books which you didn’t know you
wanted until you saw them.
Except, sometimes, you do know what
you want and then explicit refusenikery
about the web turns to whimsy. Andrey
Driffield failed with a free bookshop in
Notting Hill, where customers viewed
his stock with extreme suspicion
Kurkov, in a piece about the Chernivtsi
bookshop in south-west Ukraine, waxes coy
about his longing to repossess a volume of
little known Lithuanian poetry, which he is
loath to look for online:
Kukutis was not remotely contemporary. The
tales he told were of the first world war…
of his love for the hunchbacked daughter
of a miller. Seeking ‘access’ to the world of
Kukutis and his author via the internet felt
like sacrilege.
However, the brief history of the Cer-
nivtsi bookshop is a brilliant bit of micro
history which uses starving Ukrainians sell-
ing off their domestic libraries to show how
‘the bookshops of the former Soviet Union
became European-style secondhand book-
shops and Ukraine itself became a second-
hand country.’
Pankaj Mishra manages to pack even
more into his essay about the Fact and
Fiction bookshop in New Delhi, in which
the poor student — Mishra — becomes
a successful writer guilty about his kin-
dle habit, while the curating booksell-
er — Ajit Vikram Singh — sinks from a
demanding discontent into an accusing
gloom. All this against a backdrop of the
liberalisation of the Indian economy and
the rise of a philistine Hindu national-
ism. Fact and Fiction opened in the early
1980s and closed in 2015. ‘Ajit called it a
mercy killing in one of the many articles
that appeared.’
Mishra’s essay stands out for its com-
bination of confession and reportage. He
is in the frame, but so is Ajit — we know
that Mishra hasn’t made him up. This is not
always the case; sometimes a note of magic
realism hovers. ‘She was about 49 then, and
she’s about 49 now’ writes Kurkov of his
bookseller. And here is Iain Sinclair on the
fabled book-runner Driffield, a ‘conserva-

It is not uncommon for writers to be

obsessed by bookshops. Some even find
their writing feet through loving a particu-
lar bookshop and developing a habit, which
helps to form the writers they become. And
often they end up in a rage with the common
run of bookshops. Why would they not? It
is, or used to be, a numbers game, and most
bookshops fail to stock most writers.
But in recent years online outlets such
as Amazon have changed the stocking (and
the hating) game. Since proper bookshops
became an endangered species, a use-them-
or-lose-them energy pervades the bookish
classes. It is a form of virtue signalling to
go to your local, if you have one, order in
what they haven’t got and pay more than
you would online.
The 16 writers collected here tell
stories about bookshops known and loved
throughout the world. They seem to have
made a vow of silence concerning Amazon
in relation to new books, and they bare-
ly acknowledge the internet revolution in
sourcing secondhand books. Ali Smith, who
in her fiction deftly mixes digital digres- WH ER E R AR E B O O KS LIVE
sions with the domestic minutiae of the
writing life, settles for a loving retrospect
of Leaky’s shop in Inverness, which opened
when she was a story-mad schoolgirl and
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 39
BOOKS & ARTS

tive anarchist’, a ‘self-promoting invisible’ in danger of overtaking him. The Febru-

and ‘a man who once failed with a free
Bolshevik ary revolution had come as something of a
bookshop in Notting Hill, where custom- on board surprise; even after decades of plotting the
ers viewed his stock with extreme suspi- Tsar’s demise, Russia’s revolutionaries were
cion. Driffield was a disappearance waiting Andre van Loon presented with Nicholas II’s swift abdication
to happen.’ after a popular revolt.
Perhaps sometimes it is the booksell- Lenin on the Train Worse, political moderates had seized
ers who hate writers, rather than the other by Catherine Merridale power; moderate, that is, from the Bolshevik
way round. Dorthe Nors, a Danish writer, Allen Lane, £25, pp. 368 point of view, which held that anyone debat-
describes a bookseller in Copenhagen who ing or negotiating was weak at best and crim-
didn’t take kindly to Nors’s determination inally deluded at worst. Lenin was furious
Full allowance must be made for the desperate
to change the position of her newly pub- tasks to which the German war leaders were about his remove from the fray. He simply
lished short stories from spine-on to face- already committed… Nevertheless it was with had to get back to Russia, to eradicate the
out. It seems not to occur to Nors that a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia last vestiges of autocracy and the relatively
anyone, reading this, might be on the book- the most grisly of weapons. They transported democratic socialism on the rise, led by Alex-
seller’s side. Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus ander Kerensky.
I certainly was, but that may be because from Switzerland to Russia.
In Lenin on the Train, Catherine Mer-
once upon a time I too had a shop, a circu- As so often, Churchill has the best lines. ridale gives us a detailed look at the famous
lar kiosk in an Oxford side-street. I loved Here he is about one of the most famous train journey from Zurich to Petrograd. We
it fiercely but was hounded out by half- episodes in European history: the safe pas- read that Lenin’s ‘sealed truck’ was actually
wit management who thought the path to sage given to Lenin by a Germany desper- no more than a series of carriages with locked
profit was to stock more rubbish. It wasn’t; ate for victory in the first world war. As long doors; the Bolshevik and his wife, along with
the bookshop failed anyway. Since then I as German high command could dream up a handful of other exiled socialists, travelled
have nursed a retirement dream: a book- ways to eliminate the threat from either the through Germany eagerly looking out of the
shop with an ace caff attached, to which West or East, there was hope it would not windows. The carriages were far from being
publishers send a complimentary copy suffer defeat. hermetically sealed, even though the law-
of everything published in the hope that Lenin, as Churchill wrote, was imperi- yerly Lenin had insisted on the train being
some titles would make the journey from al Russia’s ‘Vengeance’. Germany thought granted extraterritorial rights, heightening its
tables to shelves. The discerning punter Lenin’s arrival in Russia could mean an early estrangement in popular imagination.
would know to come, the scowling book- end to the war, as he had so often denigrated Merridale, who travelled the same route
seller would be freed of the obligation to the imperialist-capitalist war effort. In fact, as Lenin for the purposes of research (albe-
sell, publishers could rest easy that their they were spectacularly wrong, because the it with little noticeable effect in her work),
books were available to view, and the fit- Bolsheviks proved to be as militaristic as gives us a fascinatingly realist look at the
test might survive. Everything would be their autocratic predecessors. journey. German military guards travelled
turned on its head and civilisation saved. In 1917, Lenin was living in exile in in the end carriage, but the Russian party
Backers welcome. Switzerland, acutely aware that history was drew a chalk line beyond which they could
not pass. Lenin, who Merridale describes
as like a schoolteacher putting his pencils
To Grieve in neat rows, devised a system by which
the company’s smokers had second-class
to feel or show grief … to regret deeply ‘toilet tickets’ to indulge their habit: smok-
ing was not allowed in the carriages, and
those in actual need of the facilities were
Today I feel this loss of words, lapse given first-class ‘tickets’. Singing was not
of cadence, acoustic undertow: the not-quite- allowed at set times; ‘heart-on-sleeve’ Rus-
sian discussions were settled by giving the
silence of the water at the river’s mouth loudest debaters heavy newspapers to read
when the tide’s on the turn, brim-full, brim-still instead; and Lenin and his wife Nadezhda
Krupskaya had a carriage to themselves
after first refusing it on the grounds of
or the lull after the Dies Irae when the coffin’s everyone being equal.
lowered down on long ropes into the ground The stuffy and disputatious atmosphere
awaiting love’s last roses, dark gutturals of earth. of the train, first in Germany and later trav-
elling through Sweden and Finland, where
I am mourning the end of elegiac sound: the snow bent down the trees lining the train
tracks, lies at the heart of the account. And
digital monotone. No song below the breath, yet we start with a lengthy summary of the
historical context and end with the October
no shiver at ‘water’, no threnody at ‘death’. Revolution. Of course, these stories have
So I say: let us acknowledge what we have done, been told many times, by historians of every
suffer the shame. And should the words return persuasion, and although Merridale is inter-
esting, she is hardly groundbreaking.
That said, she is good at capturing the
let them be as deep as Latin on an ancient grave, frankly dodgy atmosphere of high poli-
perennial as April, musical as rain. tics and low motives that swirled around
post-abdication Russia. Even though we
already know about chancers like Alexander
— Peter Abbs Parvus, working for German Intelligence
40 the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
while helping the Bolsheviks, pocketing vast
sums of money in the process, it remains
intriguing to think about the thousands of
spies seeking to understand or profit from
events.
Merridale can bring humour into the
most gruesome moments. Reflecting on the
poisoning, shooting and drowning of Grigo-
ri Rasputin, she registers the shock of Brit-
ish diplomats, drily noting that this type of
murder would certainly not have happened
to a clergyman in Chelsea. Much of what
occurred in Russia in 1917 (as indeed before
and since) was beyond the experience of
people with less bloodthirsty governments.
In the end, Merridale seems in two minds
about Lenin. At one point, she calls him a
‘great’ man and the hope of the future, but
ends by calling him a monster, rotten to the
core. She reserves her straightforward dis-
gust for Stalin (as many others have done),
remaining ambivalent about what might
have been under a less cruel Lenin.
It is perfectly clear, almost a century on,
just as it was to Churchill in the 1920s, that
Lenin was bad news. The 20th century could
have turned out a lot better if he had simply
never been given a train ride, and been left to
fulminate in the Swiss Alps.
More sinned against
than sinning
Juliet Nicolson
The Trials of the King of Hampshire:
Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in
Georgian England
by Elizabeth Foyster
One World, £20, pp. 368
The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles
Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in
a basin of warm water, shivered in the dock
with fever but also with fear. Would the jury,
assembled in 1823 in London’s jam-packed
Freemason’s Hall at the end of an unpre-
decentally sensational two-week trial, find
him eccentric, delusional, simple-minded or,
instead, stark raving mad?
Elizabeth Foyster, a historian and sen-
ior lecturer at Clare College, Cambridge,
was alerted to this enthralling, almost unbe-
lievable true story with the caveat that the
vastness of the material in Lambeth Palace
archives concerning a scarcely remembered
trial of a hugely wealthy, relatively obscure
aristocrat had deterred anyone else from
attempting to make sense of it. Foyster, a
writer with a brilliant lightness of touch who
preserves every illuminating detail, includ-
ing the ‘shop tickets’ still attached to dresses
worn for an indecently hasty wedding, was
the perfect person to take on the challenge.
For long periods of his life the earl had
ostensibly lived in his grand Hampshire
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Hurstbourne Park, the Earl of Portsmouth’s family home in
Hampshire, provided the only protection and stability in his life
house in the manner in which his class were
expected to exist, managing his estates,
socialising with the neighbours, marrying a
decent woman, hobnobbing with the rich
and famous. In 1773 the five-year-old John
Charles had been sent away to board with
George Austen in the Rectory at Steven-
ton for help with his stammer. The Rever-
end’s daughter Jane became a guest at the
adult Portsmouth’s balls. Byron (a friend of
Portsmouth’s lawyer) was the best man at his
second wedding.
But all was not as orderly as it seemed.
Portsmouth was sexually turned on by
secret bloodletting trysts with local women;
indulged in atrocious treatment of animals at
abattoirs; obsessively sought out ‘black jobs’
(his term for funerals), while singing wincing-
ly loudly, out of tune; went bell-ringing with
his estate workers while half naked; was spied
on by servants as he snored on one side of
the marital bed while on the other his second
wife bonked the night away with a male fam-
ily friend. If vacillation between cruelty and
patheticness and the inability to tell the dif-
ference between right and wrong amount to
insanity, then Portsmouth certainly sounds
quite bonkers.
However, the excessive exploitation of his
mental weakness might have been enough
to send anyone mad. Foyster’s character list
includes school friends taunting Portsmouth
for his ‘singularly silly ways’, blackmailing
servants who accused their boss of sodomy,
and a self-serving lawyer pimping his daugh-
ter. Portsmouth’s own family were the most
culpable: the scheming, cold, formidable
mother, an appalling cuckolding second wife,
who ‘kept a whip under her pillow’, using it
on the naked earl ‘with very great severity’,
and a brother and a nephew who brought
the Commission for Lunacy in order to safe-
guard their own position and inheritance.
Eccentrically and disturbingly childlike, a
victim all his life of bullying and unkindness,
who often clung to inappropriate people
and crossed boundaries in a search of com-
passion, the earl was a man so innocent that
he believed pregnancy lasted nine years. And
yet dappling the darkness of this riveting
story is evidence of someone quick at figures,
capable of inspiring loyalty and of showing
kindness and compassion in return. Jones
the gardener, who ‘felt very uncomfortable’,
resigned at the inhuman treatment of his
boss, while Foyster describes Portsmouth’s
tenderness towards his much older first wife,
who cared for him with touching affection.
This is a fascinating if deeply disturbing
Hogarthian tale, often shockingly painful,
involving corruption, class, power, sex and
acute family dysfunction. It is also a story
of its time. In Georgian Britain ‘power and
wealth were no protection from the tyran-
nies of the mind’. In 1823 mental instability
was a hot topic: the foreign secretary Vis-
The earl was so innocent that he
believed pregnancy lasted nine years
count Castlereagh had committed suicide the
year before, intermittently mad King George
III had died three years earlier and Spencer
Percival, the prime minister, had been shot
by a lunatic in the House of Commons lobby
in 1812. Private madhouses, where the insane
could be locked away out of sight, were ubiq-
uitous.
In the courtroom the truth remained
elusive. As Foyster explains, the trial ‘unset-
tled this society’s confidence in its ability to
judge itself’. She makes no definitive judg-
ment about her story of a ‘mind on trial’ that
occupied that chilly February fortnight but
instead invites the reader to listen to the
testimony of more than 100 witnesses and
decide for themselves whether the earl was
certifiable.
Portsmouth’s crime may have been that
he never grew up. He had always been hap-
piest in his childhood home in Hampshire
and in a moving and profoundly sane let-
ter to his brother, he says he ‘will never
part from this house’. He was then in his
eighties, with the trial behind him, and
Hurstbourne Park continued to provide the
protection and stability that human beings
had denied him.
41
BOOKS & ARTS
GETTY IMAGES
The ruins of the temple at Karnak by David Roberts
The spell of the pharaohs
A.S.H. Smyth
Egypt: People, Gods, Pharaohs
by Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen
Taschen, £17.99, pp. 296
Egyptomania: A History of
Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy
by Ronald H. Fritze
Reaktion Books, £25, pp. 464
Writings from Ancient Egypt
by Toby Wilkinson
Penguin Classics, £10.99, pp. 337
Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of
everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on
the gift of the Nile, Rose-Marie and Rainer
Hagen’s (updated and reissued) Egypt: Peo-
ple, Gods, Pharaohs ‘aims to answer some
basic questions about life in Ancient Egypt
and whet your appetite to find out more’,
and achieves both in appropriate abundance.
42
It looks great, reads well, even smells nice —
and is positively jam-packed with wonderful
things.
Citing the fundamental continuity of
3,000-plus years of pharaonic culture, the
Hagens tuck away a (very) concise chro-
nology at the back of the book, and then
get on with the business of showing us
what Ancient Egypt looked like, and who/
why/how/when/where. The Valley of the
Kings; mummification; daily life: the struc-
ture is, perforce, not particularly original.
But between all the statues, scrolls, amulets
and 19th-century collapsing-temple illustra-
tions, there is still room to be surprised by
more unusual bits: the dream-analyses of
Kenherchepeshef (‘drinking warm beer =
bad’), the pornographic Turin Papyrus, and
the life of Paneb, foreman, drunk and wom-
aniser, who may or may not have been exe-
cuted by impaling. (We will not inquire too
closely into ‘the Scribe with Illegible Hand-
writing’.)
The authors conclude with a section on
‘Egypt and the Western World’ that incor-
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
porates some unabashed remarks about the
level of scholarly and financial support the
Egyptians now receive to protect the cash-
cow of their national heritage. All the same,
though, they lament that these days Ancient
Egypt is only ever in our thoughts when a
restorer breaks the beard off Tutankhamun’s
mask.
This is not the way that Ronald Fritze
sees it. Early talk of ‘Cleopatra chairs’,
Katy Perry videos and Highgate cemetery
in his Egyptomania laid the groundwork,
I thought, for a promisingly unorthodox
investigation into what, exactly, it is about
Ancient Egypt that has obsessed the out-
side world since before Herodotus.
I was wrong, alas. Or, rather, I was right;
but by the end of Fritze’s introduction
both the promise and the unorthodoxy had
somehow vanished.
Egyptomania is an awkward project,
being a more or less academic survey (Pro-
fessor Fritze is not an Egyptologist) of an
emphatically non-academic subject: to wit,
all the wonky ways in which (mostly) west-
erners have used and abused Egyptian his-
Pepi II writes to his emissary
Harkhuf to remind him to
bring him back a dancing pygmy
tory from Ben Carson right back to the
Book of Genesis. It is also a book of two
distinct and not necessarily compatible
halves.
The first part, ‘Egyptomania through
the Ages’, is a comprehensive brief on how
the Hebrews regarded Egypt as at once
a place of captivity and potential refuge;
how the Greeks came to believe all philos-
ophers had gained their wisdom there; how
Alexander began a tradition of monar-
chical pilgrimages; how Muslim writers
collected their own body of literature in
appreciation of the country’s mysteries;
and how Renaissance scholars inadvert-
ently began the drive towards a genuine
understanding of Ancient Egypt through
their obsession with the (non-existent)
Hermes Trismegistus. Notwithstanding
Fritze’s claim that he is writing ‘a history
of Egyptomania, not of Egyptology’, until
this point the two strands are essentially
inseparable.
The second part, ‘Varieties of Mod-
ern Egyptomania’, on the other hand, is
140 long pages of Rosicrucianism, black
supremacists and people who think the
pyramids were or still are some sort of out-
post of Atlantis — most of it with little or
no connection to the realities of Ancient
Egypt, but all of it laboriously enumerated
as though it were a subject of the utmost
seriousness. Fritze’s insufficiently ironic
tolerance of such ‘alternative scholarship’
(the Bible, we’re informed, ‘has proven hard
to correlate’) and his rather flat and over-
explicatory tone combine to leave the hith-
erto enthusiastic reader trawling leadenly
through a catalogue of pseudo-religions,
academic truthers, and the plot summa-
ries, seemingly, of every Victorian Egypto-
melodrama (or perhaps ‘fleshpotboiler’)
ever. (If you want to read things which are
at least not wilfully wrong, go back to the
source materials for the first half, most of
which are fascinating.)
Fritze’s view of Egyptomania as a ‘wide-
spread and persistent aspect of popular
culture’ is plainly overstated (Tutankha-
mun, yes; Champollion, no), and his lack
of any obvious personal Egyptomania —
apart from two half-anecdotes about some
things he saw in shops — is only puzzling.
To the author too, apparently: ‘Why Egypt
is so attractive in popular culture remains
something of a mystery.’
To return to Egypt proper, then, you
must have access to the written word. Writ-
ings from Ancient Egypt, translated and
introduced by Toby Wilkinson, provides
an excellent starting point.
Egyptian obsessions with stability and
order, and the conservative attitudes of
the bureaucratic elite (Wilkinson suggests
hieroglyphic literacy of ‘no more than ten
per cent, at any period of pharaonic histo-
ry’ — and fewer than 1,000 people since),
can render the vast majority of extant writ-
ings somewhat formulaic. There are a lot
of lists. But his selection of 40-odd texts,
many of them previously unavailable to
the general reader, shines light on a ‘sur-
prisingly rich and varied corpus’: first-per-
son accounts of invasion and rebellion, a
hymn about the king devouring the gods, a
dialogue between a man and his soul, some
tax legislation, and a letter from Pepi II to
his emissary Harkhuf, reminding him to
bring him back a dancing pygmy.
Wilkinson has opted for a fluid, contem-
porary flavour in place of literalist accuracy
(impossible, anyway, in many circumstanc-
es. Translating Egyptian wordplay, for
instance, is almost a complete non-starter).
The texts are mercifully light on apparatus,
and the notes unabashed about textual cor-
ruption, scribal errors, and other difficul-
ties. One sub-section is rendered, in full, ‘...
an obscure maxim about gluttony...’.
Literary colleagues might especial-
ly enjoy the final section: ‘Teachings’. In
amongst some light relief on how to not
waste time on chores, resist adultery and
‘be friendly with your local policeman’,
these deal principally with how to immor-
talise oneself through writing. The ‘Satire
of the Trades’ goes through the terrible
alternatives: the jeweller, the fisherman,
the stonemason. ‘So if you know writing, it
will be more beneficial for you/ than these
jobs I have put before you.’
Still: look on my works, and all that.
There is not one famous scribe from
Ancient Egypt.
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Jolly good fellows
Andy Miller
The Men’s Club
by Leonard Michaels
Daunt Books, £9.99, pp. 152
‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one
of the most admired and influential Amer-
ican writers of the last half century,’ states
the blurb on this reissue of the author’s first
and penultimate novel, originally published
in the US in 1978. Admired and influential
Michaels may have been, but that was large-
ly in his homeland and then as an essayist
and author of short stories, rather than as a
novelist. The Men’s Club was not published
in the UK until 1981 (by Jonathan Cape)
and is only now, 35 years later, being made
available in paperback by Daunt Books in
the category of ‘lost classics’.
If the phrase ‘crisis of masculinity’ did
not exist in the late 1970s, Leonard Michaels
could be said to have both anticipated and
captured it in this book. A group of seven
men — friends and strangers — gather in a
suburban house in California:
Women wanted to talk about anger, identity,
politics, etc. I saw posters in Berkeley urging
them to join groups. I saw their leaders on TV.
Strong, articulate faces. So when Cavanaugh
phoned and invited me to join a men’s club,
I laughed. Slowly, not laughing, he repeated
himself.
Over the course of one evening, the
men banter, drink beer, trade stories of the
women they’ve loved and the women they
haven’t, bawl, brawl and generally feel very
sorry for themselves. As well they might, for
The Men’s Club is a horribly acute and very
funny depiction of male-pattern emotional
idiocy, then or now.
The novel is written in a voice which per-
fectly fits the buttoned-up and often baffled
men who do most of the talking in it: bullish
yet uncertain of themselves or one anoth-
er. The anecdotes they tell of extra-marital
affairs, real or imagined, are often conveyed
with a bewilderment that not only do their
wives not understand them but nor, it tran-
spires, do the other members of the group
they are telling the anecdotes to. The mem-
bers of this men’s club talk at cross-purpos-
es even to themselves:.
‘It’s next door’s bloody drone again.’
Terry lifted a piece of pie to his lips and
said, ‘Personally, I prefer courtship.’ The pie
slipped into his mouth. He chewed. I looked
at his stunted thumbs. Brutal digits. He pre-
ferred courtship. Things figure in the human
world to the degree they don’t.
As the evening proceeds and declines,
with one excruciating yarn after anoth-
er, Michaels’s facility for the short story
comes to the fore — he is a writer adept at
conveying character, plot and ideas in rel-
atively few words, brilliantly ventriloquis-
ing characters who have little or no facility
for doing likewise. The cumulative effect
is remorseless and hilarious, building to a
pay-off which seems richly deserved yet is
barely comprehended by the membership.
These guys are a pack of dumb mutts who
(literally) howl like wolves, before breaking
into a goodnight chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly
Good Fellow’:
When we reached the last line, fourth or fifth
time around, ‘Which nobody can deny’, it
seemed awesomely true…
At the time that it first appeared,
The Men’s Club was a satire of Los Angeles
therapy-speak and 1970s encounter groups
as much as of gender politics —‘I don’t
want to do some oppressive fascist num-
ber on you. I mean if you would like to
talk now, I could dig it.’ Now it reads as
an exploration and indictment of a cul-
ture of masculinity that, 40 years later, still
struggles to articulate anything worth say-
ing. Michaels maintained that he intended
‘only to describe what is true among some
men’; in this terrific little book, he glori-
ously and somewhat depressingly succeed-
ed. Buy it for the man in your life and then
retire to a safe distance.
Smoke and mirrors
Stuart Evers
Nicotine
by Nell Zink
Fourth Estate, £14.99, pp. 304
Nell Zink’s route to publication became
something of a story in itself: one that
involved an email exchange about birds with
Jonathan Franzen, which led to Franzen’s
subsequently championing her work, and
ended with not one but two novels —
Mislaid and The Wallcreeper — published
together in a lavish, design-savvy edition.
But it was Zink’s style and ideas that drew
fervid, hyperbolic praise. Fresh and undenia-
bly original, this is fiction at odds with much
of American literary convention, Zink’s
prose refusing to conform to received ideas
of how novels are constructed; time shifts,
perspective changes and characterisation,
for example, are all treated casually, almost
with disdain. The word ‘genius’ was bandied
43
BOOKS & ARTS
around. So, unsurprisingly, Nicotine arrives family, however constructed, mitigates both.
with a certain amount of expectational But the characterisation is so flat, and the
baggage — and it’s a weight it struggles to plotting so muddled that it’s hard to know
shoulder. what Zink is driving at. Penny, Rob and Jazz
Penny, an unemployed business gradu- should be compelling company, but their
ate, is the conventional one in a family of narcissism and constant erotic obsessions
nonconformists. Her father, Norm, is a Jew- are wearying rather than enlightening. More
ish shamanist; her mother, formerly Norm’s frustratingly, when revelations surface, deto-
adopted child, comes from a South Ameri- nating like plot bombs out of nowhere, char-
can tribe; while her two stepbrothers were acters simply carry on as before, unchanged
abandoned by their mother in sketchy cir- and two-dimensional. As a consequence,
cumstances. When Norm dies, Penny ‘inher- Zink’s unsettling brilliance, as showcased in
its’ his family home, now occupied by a Mislaid, is underused in this ungainly and
group of pro-tobacco squatters. There she hurried follow-up.
meets Rob, a sexy asexual with a secret, and
Jazz, a sexually omnivorous vamp. Her life
begins to change. Sort of. Nazis and narcotics
Zink’s prose is an always fascinating
instrument, one as flitting and amorphous Duncan Fallowell
as the attention span of her characters.
Action is moved on by years in one sen- Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany
tence, focus narrows then widens, point of by Norman Ohler
view is switched and reversed. It can be Allen Lane, £20, pp. 360
bewildering, but her sentences can stun,
perfectly nailing a situation or emotion — Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis,
the death of Norm, for example, is superbly for compared to what our little group got
controlled. up to in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were
For all its technical artistry, however, shrinking violets in the drugs department.
Nicotine lacks cohesion, empathy, or a genu- We smoked cannabis, ate opium and some-
ine sense of what it is about. It suggests itself times took strong LSD; lines of uncertain
as a comedic meditation on contemporary content went up nostrils; and we swallowed
mores toward sex and death, and how the countless uppers (speed) and downers (tran-
quillisers, sleepers for looning on). Speed
was amphetamine sulphate. Benzedrine,
Dexedrine, Methedrine were the three orig-
inal brands, in rising strength. Soon there
FREE were many other names, including slang:
Desoxyn, Durophet, Durophet-M (speed
M AG A Z I N E with Mandrax), French Blues, Purple Hearts,
Black Bombers.
Many were prescribed by doctors who
didn’t regard them as outrageously danger-
M
A
ous. I also purchased amphetamine in clear
RT
RAJACO
IN
TE MB
S M& W
liquid form by the half pint from science
USARWIC
TR KL
ISSUE 8 / 1 OCTOBER 2016
ISEIGHT
undergraduates at both Oxford and Cam-
F O
O
T
bridge. In the early 1970s amphetamine sul-
phate appeared for snorting, an amateurish
BUY, KEEP, product, much cut. We took these drugs on
DRINK OR SELL?
HOW TO INVEST
WISELY IN WINE
an almost daily basis for years. In 1980 I gave
it all up. I was never addicted. I took drugs
to overcome inhibition and make my life
more fun, so I was not interested in switch-
BATTERY POWER
Robin Andrews off drugs like heroin. The moment you real-
THE M1 GOLDMINE
Ross Clark ise you’re no longer growing but repeating,
RE-EMERGING MARKETS
Elliot Wilson that’s the time to stop.
I mention this to give some perspective
THE BREXIT BUILDING BOOM
Matthew Lynn explains why you should ignore the doom-mongers
to the subject, and in particular to speed —
and invest in construction companies
which is one of two main thrusts in Ohler’s
book. In 1937 the Germans produced a
stronger version of Benzedrine with the
wonderful name of Pervitin. Ampheta-
M I S S E D YOU R C OP Y ? mine is closely allied to the body’s natural
adrenaline and all amphetamine products
Email your postal add ress to work the same way: high mental concen-
MON E Y@ SPE C TATOR .C O.UK tration, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, loss
to receive issue 8 of overview judgment. It’s the dosage that
makes the difference: dexamphetamine and
methylamphetamine are just stronger ver-
44 the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
sions. But this is a book about Nazis — so
Ohler needs to sensationalise. He does this
by comparing the German pep pill to mod-
ern crystal meth, an adulterated product
which is the bane of many a nightclub cir-
cuit. Though this comparison is soon with-
drawn in a footnote, he continues to make it
at various points throughout the text.
What is it about writers who write
books about drugs? They seem to develop
a contact high with the subject, generating
lurid backdrops, reeling hyperbole, bug-
eyed speculation which by the next page
has somehow transmuted into truths on
which towers of revelation are wobbling-
ly constructed. This is a shame when facts
can speak very effectively for themselves,
because Ohler can produce enthralling
pages about how Pervitin (prescription-
only from 1939) was widely deployed
among the German military, particular-
ly for the big-push strategies known as
Blitzkrieg. But he should have told us, for
comparison, to what extent pep pills were
deployed by other national forces. Nor
does he address the sexual aspect: a young
person on speed has libido suppressed
by cerebral intensity, followed by intense
randiness as the drug wears off.
Ohler’s second main thrust is the drug
diet of Hitler himself, equally fascinating,
and equally unsteadily presented. Hitler
was a health-food faddist with dreadful
flatulence. His personal GP was Dr Theodor
Morrell, who became a morphine addict.
He injected the Führer with vitamins, hor-
mones, steroids, vitalising juices prepared
from animal parts: a mind-boggling list.But
Ohler has to exaggerate: ‘Colds were ruled
out from the start by intravenous vitamin
supplements.’ Sorry — we still don’t have
a cold cure.
But the question of Hitler and drug
abuse turns mainly on the injection of
Eukodal. This was a German painkiller
made from codeine. I never injected any-
thing, but William Burroughs did and he
said that injecting Eukodal was the greatest
junk experience of his life. It was also the
most troublesome: it’s a short-acting high
and at one point Burroughs was injecting
it every two hours, creating open sores in
his veins.
At first Ohler only surmises that Mor-
rell injected Hitler with Eukodal; then he
asserts it across many pages; then he pulls us
up on page 270 with ‘None of this is proof’.
Similarly, in reference to Hitler’s overall
condition, one is told that ‘he moved in a
permanent fog’, but a few pages later that
‘Hitler was always the master of his senses
and knew exactly what he was doing.’
There is a third thrust in the text, poten-
tially the most interesting of all: drug exper-
iments at Dachau and Auschwitz which
‘focused on brainwashing and conscious-
ness control’. But it soon peters out. Per-
haps a second book?
GETTY IMAGES
Lessons in sex
Patrick Skene Catling
Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely
Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown
by Gerri Hirshey
Sarah Crichton Books, $27, pp. 500
Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influ-
ential career, as the author of Sex and the
Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan,
is revealed in this intimate biography in
50 shades of pink. ‘Let it be understood at
the outset,’ writes Gerri Hirshey, an Ameri-
can freelance journalist for many upmarket
periodicals:
Sex has imbued the soft core, hard times and
glory days of this story — sex surrendered, sex
wielded, lavished and revelled in, sex merely
endured and sometimes coolly transactional,
sex reimagined, promised and packaged on
glossy magazine covers for global dissemina-
tion...
Hirshey tells all about Helen’s life, every
nook and cranny, from her childhood pov-
erty in hillbilly Arkansas, steeply ascendant
to the pizzazz of A-list Manhattan. She is a
connoisseur of pizzazz, and her style is suit-
ably ornate.
Helen’s father Ira was a brutal misogy-
nist, nicknamed ‘Caveman Gurley’. Her
mother, Cleo, experienced agonising obstet-
rical difficulties giving birth to Helen and her
older sister Mary, was later crippled by polio,
and was depressed and pessimistic ever after.
When Helen was only ten, Ira died while
attempting to get into a lift already mov-
ing. Helen inherited financial anxiety and
remained parsimonious even when she made
lots of money. ‘By the time Mary and Helen
were school age,’ Hirshey relates, ‘Cleo had
begun her steady warnings that pretty girls
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
got the best in life, and her daughters had
better learn to use their brains and wits.’
Helen was made to believe she was not at all
pretty, and in adolescence was further handi-
capped by chronic acne, hence the book’s
title. As a young woman she lived according
to the creed she would proclaim always: to
have and to hold men, the single girl must
exert inner charm above the neck and below
the waist. Helen also persuaded generations
of girls that there was nothing morally wrong
about heterosexual intercourse before mar-
riage. She campaigned for women’s rights
in the bedroom and the boardroom, for the
contraceptive pill and, in the event of care-
lessness, for abortion.
Helen presented Cosmo’s first nude
male centrefold with a portrait of Burt
Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug
In a series of secretarial jobs and as a
smart advertising copywriter, Helen found
that the single life, if sufficiently promiscu-
ous, could be satisfying more often than not.
She later recalled that she ‘made love’ with
178 men before, at the age of 37, she decid-
ed to settle down. The years of research and
rehearsal enabled her eventually to find a
perfectly compatible Mr Right.
In 1959, she married David Brown, a
divorcé six years her senior, the producer
who conceived Cleopatra, perhaps the most
spectacular commercial flop in the history of
cinema, and then several great hits, including
Jaws and The Sting, which made him rich for
the rest of his life. He increased the couple’s
prosperity by shrewdly guiding the composi-
tion and marketing of Sex and the Single Girl,
based on the irrefutable theory that literary
works sell best with the highest possible erot-
ic content. ‘This is not a study on how to get
Helen Gurley
Brown at her desk at
Cosmopolitan c. 1965
married,’ she wrote, ‘but how to stay single
— in superlative style.’ She offered young
womanhood ‘lubricious operating instruc-
tions’. The book sold like diaphragms, more
than two million copies in the United States,
was a bestseller in 28 foreign editions, in 14
languages, and is still in print almost every-
where.
There was a certain inevitability that such
a talent should be recruited to save Hearst’s
Cosmopolitan from ignominious failure.
Under Helen’s editorship, with her husband
whispering salacious suggestions in her ear,
Cosmo, as the magazine was affectionately
known in 35 languages, in 100 countries by
68 million readers, became, Hirshey notes,
‘the largest young women’s magazine in the
world’. Its dominance was maintained by
Helen’s fearless pioneer spirit, constantly
devising new ways of promulgating the most
important Lessons in Love of her popular LP
record: ‘Capturing a Man if You Aren’t Pret-
ty’ and ‘How to Talk to a Man in Bed’.
It was Helen who exhibited the word
penis in Cosmo for the first time, in Novem-
ber, 1970. It was Helen who presented Cos-
mo’s first nude male centrefold, in April,
1972, with a portrait of Burt Reynolds, naked
on a bearskin rug. That issue sold 1.55 million
copies. From 1965 to 1972, Helen doubled
the magazine’s circulation and advertising
revenue.
While making publishing history, Helen
did all she could to improve her appear-
ance with cosmetic surgery, for David’s sake.
When she died, in 2012, only two years after
him, a line in the opening paragraph of her
New York Times obituary was accurate but
rather bitchy: ‘She was 90, though parts of
her were considerably younger.’ If only
Helen and David had been able to read that,
wherever they were, how they would have
laughed.
45
BOOKS & ARTS
ARTS
Kids’ stuff
For all its much-vaunted rebel soul, Viceland is just BBC2
in disguise, says Neil Armstrong
W
hen a new TV channel calls its
flagship food show Fuck, That’s
Delicious, we might surmise that
the Reithian ideals are not foremost in its
corporate philosophy.
You probably haven’t heard of Viceland.
You certainly haven’t watched it. It seeped
on to the airwaves with little fanfare and
few viewers. Viceland is the new 24-hour
TV channel of Vice Media, the Canadian-
American outfit that describes itself as the
‘world’s preeminent youth media company
and content creation studio’.
Vice began in 1994 as a magazine but
now encompasses a news division, a record
label, a film studio and myriad digital ven-
tures. It prides itself on being ‘alternative’,
’disruptive’, sticking it to The Man and on
appealing to young people — the highly
prized ‘millennials’ — who watch the vid-
eos it produces on their phones and tablets.
It claims hundreds of millions of viewers in
more than 30 countries.
Not for Viceland, though. The channel
launched on Sky on Monday, 19 Septem-
ber and, in its first few hours, ratings peaked
at an estimated 17,200 viewers. Viceland’s
schedule is built around documentaries and
unscripted programming and, according to
its website, it is ‘for and by young people
curious about life right now’.
It’s a description that summons up
memories of the ‘yoof TV’ experiments of
yesteryear: programmes characterised by
high-speed editing and jerky camerawork,
featuring hyperkinetic presenters address-
46
ing the ishoos of the day. They were meant
to be made by the kids for the kids but were
actually made by people like Janet Street-
Porter. The kids didn’t watch in their mil-
lions, the phenomenon fizzled out and Janet
Street-Porter became president of the Ram-
blers’ Association.
Viceland marked its opening with a
distinctly underwhelming two-hour docu-
mentary reeking of the bad old days. The
Viceland UK Census asked young people
Vice’s backers include such wild-
eyed radicals as Fox, Disney and
advertising giant WPP
questions about their lives and filmed their
answers. It turns out that some young peo-
ple work, some don’t. Some worry about
money, others not so much. There are those
who think Britain’s OK. There are those
who think it’s awful.
A couple of other offerings also failed to
convince. Big Night Out saw presenter Clive
Martin — ‘Vice’s T.S. Eliot of rave’ — trav-
el to Donetsk to get drunk with Ukrainian
teenagers. That appeared to be the sole aim
and it was achieved without incident, despite
the commentary’s attempts to generate a
sense of jeopardy: ‘I was going to have to go
behind military lines . . . which wasn’t going
to be easy’.
An episode of Black Market was a sym-
pathetic portrait of a pair of young drug
addicts who shoplift around £400 worth of
goods a day to finance their heroin habit.
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Joints of meat, woks, irons and male-groom-
ing gift sets (‘People cannot get enough of
them at the moment!’) were all grist to their
mill. Their plight was, the film suggested, the
indirect result of spending cuts that have
created the black-market economy that sus-
tains them.
So far, so predictable. But scrabble
around the schedule and there is some
excellent stuff.
The Vice World of Sports slot current-
ly has two startling documentaries, each
of which is positively Reithian. Boys of
Bukom tells the story of an impoverished,
ramshackle village on the coast of Ghana
that has produced more world-champion
boxers per capita than anywhere else in the
world. The Eternal Derby takes us to Serbia,
where football matches between Red Star
Belgrade and FK Partizan are an excuse for
apocalyptic orgies of violence that make
Glasgow’s Old Firm game look like an ecu-
menical coffee morning.
In Hate Thy Neighbour, sharp-as-a-tack
comedian Jamali Maddix, a mixed-race
Briton, spends time with far-right groups in

Sweden, holding them up to ridicule with his
faux-naïf questions à la Louis Theroux.
For Gaycation, Canadian actress Ellen
Page investigates homophobia in differ-
ent countries. The series was nominated for
an Emmy, having already screened in the
US, where Viceland has been running for
six months. It delivers moments of genu-
ine emotional impact as well as some truly
shocking scenes, including an interview with
a masked former policeman in Brazil who
admits to murdering gays.
In truth, for all Viceland’s much-vaunted
rebel soul, its best shows would not look out
of place in a late-night slot on either BBC2
or Channel 4. And all of its programmes,
good and bad, are analogues of long-estab-
lished formats. Big Night Out is simply Ross
Kemp Parties Hard. Black Market is Class
A Benefits Street. Gaycation is Whicker’s
Queer World.
‘Yes, you could pick individual shows and
say, “That could appear on that channel” or
“This could appear on this channel”,’ says
Kevin Sutcliffe, Viceland,’s senior vice-pres-
ident of TV and video. ‘The point is, they’re
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
not on those channels. They’re on Viceland,
in primetime.’
Sutcliffe is unconcerned by the poor
early ratings. ‘What is important to us is
to have a very strong brand. Our audience
will come to us because they know what the
Vice brand is about and we’re hopeful that
The ‘edgy’ label hoodwinks hipsters
into consuming conventional fare they
might otherwise have rejected
the strength of the commissioning will keep
them there. We will grow over time. We’re
just getting into our stride.’
Peter White is international editor of
Broadcast magazine. ‘I don’t think the rat-
ings will rocket but I do think the channel
will tick along quite nicely,’ he says. ‘It’s use-
ful to Vice for the way in which the company
is perceived. They just want to get 16-year-
olds to think Vice is cool.’
If Viceland’s opening schedule sug-
gests a broadly left-wing agenda, it’s worth
bearing in mind that it was Vice News that
produced the recent documentary Jeremy
Jamali Maddix,
Viceland’s
answer to Louis
Theroux
Corbyn: The Outsider (commissioned by
Sutcliffe), from which the Labour leader
did not exactly emerge covered in glory. In
fact, Vice’s carefully nurtured reputation as
anti-establishment is somewhat misleading.
In November, the New York Times report-
ed that Vice Media was valued at more
than $4 billion. The company’s financial
backers include such wild-eyed radicals as
Fox, Disney and advertising giant WPP. In
October 2012, that hip young gunslinger
Rupert Murdoch tweeted his approval of
the company, predicting that it was headed
for ‘global success’.
A cynic might wonder if the ‘edgy’ label
is anything more than a way of allowing
hard-nosed media execs to hoodwink too-
cool-for-school hipsters into consuming con-
ventional fare they might otherwise have
shoved to the side of the plate.
You can bet that Viceland would have
preferred the Daily Mail to have printed a
thunderous condemnation of the channel
and all it stands for, rather than recommend-
ing one of its programmes in its Weekend
Magazine listings guide.
47
BOOKS & ARTS

you find in the margins of manuscripts of dinary. From the end of the Black Death up
Exhibitions the same period. to the 16th century, techniques changed, and
All things bright and Yet, obviously enough, embroidery, and sometimes figures were sewn on to a back-
needlework generally, has never had quite drop, having been completed elsewhere.
beautiful the same recognition as those others, per- The problem with the material is stark-
Melanie McDonagh haps because art historians were chary of ly apparent. Colours fade on fabric and
it, partly because the material is uniquely thread far more markedly than they do on
Opus Angelicanum: Masterpieces of vulnerable to the effects of light and time, any other medium, especially black, blues
English Medieval Embroidery and partly, perhaps, because needlework is and greens. Reds are OK, but the patchy
V&A Museum, until 5 February 2017 seen as women’s stuff. survival of one colour group over the rest
Certainly women did take part in the gives an unbalanced composition. I’d like to
For much of the Middle Ages, especially production of English work (the term was have seen a reconstruction of what at least
from 1250–1350, ‘English work’ was enor- generic; for obvious reasons it wasn’t used one piece would have looked like originally
mously prized around Europe from Spain to in England), though probably not as design- — brilliantly garish, just like so much other
Iceland. Popes took pains to acquire it; bish- ers so much as needlewomen. It’s likely that work of the period. The ravages of time
ops coveted it; the quality have given us — as in cathe-
was such that the remnants © VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON drals — an altogether false
have ended up in the treas- idea of medieval taste, which
uries of Europe. London, liked colour, gold and silver,
especially the area around and lots of it.
St Paul’s, was famous for its The thing about these
production. And what was objects is that they were
English work? Embroidery, intended for use. Yet most
that’s what. Beautiful, cost- of the fabulously elaborate
ly, high-quality embroidered decorative scheme on, say,
pieces, much of it using gold the Madrid cope (c.1300) —
or silver thread, sometimes unique in its cycle of Old Tes-
embellished with pearls tament stories, including the
and precious stones. Mat- Creation (when God creates
thew Paris tells a story about animals, he includes a uni-
Pope Innocent IV spotting corn) — would not have been
some English bishops wear- visible to the congregation
ing lovely vestments and looking at the vestments at
badgering them to find some mass or in procession. You’d
of it for him, preferably for have seen the crucifixion stra-
the lowest possible cost. The tegically placed on the back,
point of the story was the with glimpses of the rest. So
pope’s acquisitiveness; what the notion that these deco-
it also makes clear is that rative schemes were some-
English work was conspicu- how stories in stitches for the
ous for its workmanship and unlettered doesn’t wash. These
beauty. things could be seen in their
The last exhibition of full glory by only a few peo-
Opus Anglicanum was 50 ple, including their makers —
years ago; now the V&A and God — though they’d still
is giving this generation have been beautiful to behold.
an opportunity to see for What this exhibition makes
itself pieces that have been abundantly clear is that right
assembled from around up to the Reformation, there
Europe from the 12th to were wonderful embroidered
the 16th century — though pieces being produced in
the catalogue observes that London, though few survive.
Anglo-Saxon embroidery The most impressive may be
was hot too. It’s a wonder- Stitches in time: The Steeple Aston Cope (detail), 1310–40 the pall for the Fishmongers’
ful collection, mostly liturgi- Company — guilds sent their
cal vestments — copes and members off to their eternal
chasubles that the priest or rest in style, their coffins cov-
bishop would wear at mass — but includ- some workshops were mixed. The pay rates ered with the guild pall — complete with
ing some secular pieces. What it should do reflected skill, with the draughtsmen getting mermaids, angels and merknights. It’s an
is put embroidery in its proper place as an eight pence a day in 1330, and needlewom- object for use, display and of craft pride.
art form alongside stained glass, floor mosa- en just over twopence. The exhibition, and It wasn’t just moths and light that took
ic, painting and manuscript illustration, website, usefully includes a video of couch- their toll on similar pieces. The iconoclasts
with which it shares exactly the same artis- ing, the technique whereby gold thread was of the Reformation — Thomas Cromwell’s
tic form and imagery. There’s one lovely attached to cloth by understitching, barely commissioners and their successors — gave
embroidered panel here of poor St Hippol- visible on the surface, and split-stitching, the vestments short shrift when they made
ytus being martyred which has grotesque which allowed the embroiderer to follow their inventories of church possessions;
figures at the top — animals with leering the contours of the shape they were filling many were wilfully destroyed, or melted
human heads — that are identical to those in, like brushstrokes. The skill was extraor- down for their gold. Bastards.
48 the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

Radio
Head ache
Kate Chisholm
Quite how one person is expected to oversee
not just radio but also ‘arts, music, learning
and children’s departments’ was not made
clear by the BBC when it announced the
stratospheric rise to power within the corpo-
ration of James Purnell as the new director
of everything that’s not TV or light entertain-
ment. You may recall that Purnell was once
culture minister under the Labour govern-
ment and in 2013 became head of strategy at
the BBC, an appointment that at the time was
excused (given Purnell’s lack of programme-
making experience) by Tony Hall, the direc-
tor-general, as ‘of course not editorial’. But
this new job is very much in charge of over-
all editorial content; it signalled the depar-
ture of veteran broadcaster Helen Boaden
from her post as director of radio, now seem-
ingly superseded by Purnell’s grandiose new
empire. Radio, the BBC’s most valuable asset
(in cultural terms, if not financial), is now at
the mercy of a man who for 20 years inhab-
ited the corridors of Westminster and since
then has been preoccupied with positioning
the BBC in the new digital world rather than
Purnell has no editorial experience,
no technical know-how, no track
record in creating audio programmes
with what actually goes on behind the mixing
desks and soundproofed walls of Broadcast-
ing House. It makes no sense.
It’s not just that Purnell was formerly a
politician, although that makes the appoint-
ment not just odd but alarming, given the
BBC’s essential requirement always to be
seen as independent of all political influ-
ence. It’s much more that Purnell has no edi-
torial experience, no technical know-how, no
track record in creating audio programmes.
He won’t know at first-hand what it takes to
make first-class radio; that it’s not just about
hiring sharp-minded, inquisitive reporters
and equally talented editors and produc-
ers; that time spent doing seemingly nothing
can be extremely productive; that creating
a collegiate atmosphere is vital; that ideas
come only in a climate of give-and-take and
freedom not from competition or criticism
(that’s all vital) but from obfuscation, man-
agerial manoeuvring and ‘right’ (or ‘left’)
thinking. And why, if he was the right person
for the job, has it been announced that there
will also, at some future date, be appointed
a new director of radio to replace Helen
Boaden? What will the powers of that new
director be? How much control will they
really have? How will they ensure that the
seven audio networks are free to develop
their individuality and independence from
each other?
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
It’s enough to make one bury one’s head
in the ether, hoping that there’ll always be
Opera
enough funding for the making of drama Hole in the heart
series like last week’s finely produced adapta-
tion of The Forsytes. On TV back in the 1960s Michael Tanner
there was enough money to splash out on 26
hour-long episodes, dramatising Galsworthy’s Don Giovanni
epic family saga so successfully that it cap- ENO, in rep until 26 October
tured the nation’s imagination. A 1990 radio
version, ‘the most expensive drama serial ever Il tabarro; Suor Angelica
made’ because it hired stars like Dirk Bog- Opera North, touring until 2 December
arde and Diana Quick, ran for 23 episodes.
But Radio 4 has come up with an ingenious Richard Jones’s new production of Don Gio-
solution to the financial demands of making vanni at ENO bears some passing resem-
such a major drama project by spreading the blances to the opera as envisaged by its
series over two years, broadcasting it in four librettist and composer. Mainly, however, it
distinct sections of seven episodes each, aired goes its own way, refusing most of the time,
across a single week to intensify the drama. especially at key moments, to listen to the
Until now I’ve always dismissed Gals- music Mozart wrote, with consequences that
worthy as being too preoccupied with class Jones no doubt regards as ‘creative infideli-
and the inane social chatter of those with ty’. When we enter the auditorium we see a
too much money and not enough to do. But contemporary streetlight and a phone booth,
this adaptation, by Shaun McKenna, has straight out of Jones’s production of Siegfried
had enough breathing space to give us what at the Royal Opera 20 years ago. The curtain
lies behind the snobbish, clan-like Forsytes rises on a huge ‘Wanted’ poster of Christo-
and even to feel some sympathy for Soames pher Purves, followed by a depressing series
and his bewitching daughter Fleur. They’ve of bleak rooms, in one of which the Com-
become real people, fully fleshed out, while mendatore is bedding a prostitute and wear-
the sound quality, the music (by Neil Brand) ing white boxers, signifiers of nudity at ENO.
and sophisticated production (by Mari- Two rooms away, Donna Anna is beseeching
on Nancarrow) have been so refreshing to Giovanni to humiliate her, establishing that
the ear. My only regret is that we now have in this version there is no question of unkinky
to wait until next year to find out whether
Fleur (impeccably played by Jessica Raine)
really will reform.
For more than 25 years the Libyan writ-
er Hisham Matar has been trying to find
out what happened to his father, a diplo-
mat turned dissident, who was kidnapped
in 1990 by Gaddafi’s henchmen and never
seen again. Was he murdered six years later
in the infamous massacre at the notorious
Abu Salim prison in the suburbs of Trip-
oli? In The Return, Radio 4’s Book of the
Week (produced by Kirsteen Cameron),
Matar goes back to Libya to find out. But
his book is much more than a quest for
answers and/or retribution for his father’s
loss. As adapted for the radio (by Anna
Magnusson) it becomes a powerful medi-
tation on family, home, and how the grim
realities of Middle Eastern politics have
impacted on a writer with an eloquent abil-
ity to speak for us all.
Just room to mention Imelda Staunton’s
brilliant reading of a short story by Jenny
Eclair in Little Lifetimes on Radio 4 (pro-
duced by Sally Avens). Penny is the recep-
tionist for a solicitor whom she begins to
suspect is having an affair with the firm’s
latest new recruit, Jodie, a spray-tanned,
lip-glossed beauty who keeps telling Penny
she needs ‘to spice up her life’. It’s the way
Staunton switches effortlessly from but-
toned-up Penny to gushing Jodie, squeez-
ing every layer of meaning from lines like
‘ “It’s espresso, not expresso,” says know-it-
all Jodie.’
49
ROBERT WORKMAN
BOOKS & ARTS
All blacks: Christopher Purves and Caitlin Lynch in Richard Jones’s ‘Don Giovanni’ at
ENO
lust, let alone love, except for the fairly inno-
cent pair Masetto and Zerlina — everyone
wears black apart from Zerlina in bridal
white and her lover in his shirtsleeves. Gio-
vanni dispatches the Commendatore with
a stab in the groin. A succession of horny
women cross the stage, Leporello opens a
door for them, Giovanni follows them in and
emerges five seconds later. He is trendily bi-
curious, too, since he has a Leporello looka-
like as one of his clients/tricks.
Christopher Purves and Clive Bayley,
both wonderful artists, have a good dou-
ble act going, and when the bald Giovan-
ni dons his servant’s ginger wig and glasses,
the disguise is convincing. Bayley also sings
extremely well, producing a catalogue aria —
from a phone book — of cold lechery. Purves,
who has shown in other works that he can be
powerfully sexy, seems unhappy in this pro-
duction, both vocally and in terms of acting.
He drains his voice of any lovely sounds, even
when seducing Zerlina, and seems interested
only in sadistic conquest. So the central char-
acter of the opera is not only heartless but
also lacks any kind of fascination, leaving the
work with a hole at its centre.
That gives Jones a chance to mess around
with Giovanni’s victims, too, most notably
with Elvira, for whom Mozart reserved his
gentlest, most compassionate music. Chris-
tine Rice acts and sings the role gloriously,
but is directed to be insane from her first
entry, and by Act Two she is merely rav-
ing. For the accompanied recitative to her
Act Two aria, with its aching strings, reveal-
ing Elvira’s torments of indecision, the con-
ductor Mark Wigglesworth seems finally to
rebel against the staging, and prolongs the
pauses so immensely as to belong to a whol-
ly different period and style of conducting.
There is a DVD of a performance from
50
Opera Australia in 2011, also with Wiggles-
worth conducting, which is superior in virtu-
ally every respect, and there Wigglesworth
shows what a fine Romantic conductor he is.
At ENO he seemed uncertain as to how to
cope with Jones’s new work: the Overture
was as flaccid as I have heard, the orchestral
playing in Act One was fast and almost eerily
quiet, at least from Row G of the stalls, and it
seemed as if Wigglesworth was trying not to
make too much of a contrast between what
we saw and what we heard. In Act Two he was
more his own man (to judge from the Austral-
ian performance) with bemusing results.
Even there, though, he has been finer:
the Sextet, surely the score’s most miracu-
lous passage, the moment when Anna and
Jones’s most creative-destructive
moment is the dénouement, which has
to be seen to be believed or disbelieved
Ottavio enter, to the accompaniment of
quiet trumpets and drums, is in the fullest
sense sacred. But there is no room for that in
Jones’s cramped ontology, so Wigglesworth
obediently underplayed it. Jones’s most cre-
ative-destructive moment is the dénoue-
ment of the action, which has to be seen
to be believed or disbelieved. Go and add
this new piece to your repertoire of operas.
The singing is of a high standard overall, the
action is never dull, and maybe the musical
unevennesses will be ironed out.
Opera North had a new production of
Gianni Schicchi last season, so its latest new
show is the other two items in Il trittico. I
find Il tabarro a merely depressing work,
Puccini conscientiously avoiding the kind
of lyricism of which he was supreme mas-
ter, producing instead a foretaste of Ital-
ian neorealist cinema at its grimmest. Lots
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
of scene-setting, thwarted loves and lives,
drab settings, an all-too-brief declaration of
passion, murder. Opera North’s production
is faithful, worthy, and has a sexy tenor in
David Butt Philip. Giselle Allen is the frus-
trated Giorgetta, Ivan Inverardi her uncom-
prehending, pitiable husband. Perhaps this
is the most honest of verismo operas, but it
pays the price in lowering the spirits without
producing any insights.
Suor Angelica is Puccini seeing how long
he can go on being almost saccharine without
actually collapsing into self-parody, though it
is vertiginous — and the Royal Opera’s pro-
duction, one of Richard Jones’s most egre-
gious successes, refuses to be erased from
the memory. Opera North’s account, direct-
ed by David Pountney and conducted by Jac
van Steen, is more straightforward, and gets
what I imagine to be the pious-cum-bitchy
atmosphere of a nunnery very well. Anne
Sophie Duprels is as compelling as she is in
everything I have seen, and the only miscal-
culation seemed to be the Princess of Patri-
cia Bardon, a power-dressed iceberg, vile to
the point of absurdity. The closing vision of
a transfigured baby’s face is well managed,
touching if not moving. At least someone
ends up happy at the end of a bleak evening,
even if they are in a state of delusion.
Theatre
Top of the Pops with silk
tights
Lloyd Evans
The Libertine
Theatre Royal Haymarket, until 3 Decem-
ber
Father Comes Home from the Wars
(Parts 1, 2 & 3)
Royal Court, until 22 October
Here are three roles all actors love to play.
The drunk (no need to learn your lines), the
dementia victim (ditto) and the aristocratic
roister-doisterer humping his way through
the brothels of restoration London. Noth-
ing quite beats the 17th century. Great cos-
tumes, stylish language, shoes that add three
inches to your height, and a parallel universe
of moral licentiousness where every cleavage
is there be ogled and every passing bottom
pinched. It’s Top of the Pops with silk tights.
Into this land of platitudes walks Dominic
Cooper, a super-smooth baddie, who has very
little warmth or humour about him, and not
a trace of vulnerability. Excellent qualities, it
turns out, for the role of John Wilmot, Earl
of Rochester, a scribbling philanderer known
for his lewd celebrations of erotic excess. The
play makes a virtue of Rochester’s misan-
thropy, and in the opening lines the wicked
Earl challenges the crowd to dislike him. He
Bathers, Rockpool Series V, 2014 oil on canvas 132 x 122 cms 52 x 48 ins

Exhibition and Book Launch 11th October – 11th November 2016

Art and artist are all of a piece. Here is a love of everyday ROSE HILTON by Ian Collins
245 x 290 mm, 208 pages
existence and empathy for other people – Rose much printed in full colour with
prefers her models to be her friends so that their characters over 200 illustrations. £35
ISBN: 978-1-84822-206-9
can permeate the canvas. Everything links into a toast to A limited number of signed copies
life and a spirit we should all share. Ian Collins will be available from 11th October

Exhibition catalogue £15 inc p&p

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

BOOKS & ARTS
then ambles through a checklist of predict-
able scenarios. Whores are fondled, wives
spurned, grandees mocked, oiks kicked,
servants showered with gold. The play suf-
fers from a lack of narrative focus and from
several glaring anachronisms. A pregnant
actress rejects the Earl’s proposal of mar-
riage claiming that the delights of pursuing
a stage career in London, while mothering a
bastard, are infinitely preferable to living as
a countess and raising her child as the heir to
a peerage and a fortune. The only character
who can stand up to Rochester is Charles II
(Jasper Britton), who grants him a valuable
commission, adding, ‘Don’t fuck it up.’ Which
is momentarily hilarious. And emblematic of
the show’s ambition. A pouty-lipped actor in
a Brian May wig saying a naughty word.
One of his lordship’s best-known works
celebrates the act of spewing in a tart’s ‘lap’,
an anatomical site chosen purely because it
rhymes with ‘clap’. These famous lines are
witty, self-indulgent and exultantly coarse
and they were intended by Rochester for
the private amusement of urbane gadabouts
like himself. Here he delivers them on stage
to a female character and this alters their fla-
vour alarmingly. The literary trifle becomes
an offensive diatribe written in a tone of
implacable aggression. At the play’s end, the
Kate Tempest, a 30-year old dramatist
and poet, has an appeal that’s hard to
fathom. Is it all in the elbows? Like most
performers raised on hip-hop, she recites
with her upper limbs flapping and wig-
gling as if by remote control. For empha-
sis she uses that impatient downward
flicking gesture, beloved of rappers, like
a countess at a buffet ridding her fingers
of unwanted guacamole.
Few would describe the south Lon-
doner’s poetry as ‘moreish’. Less-ish,
perhaps. She sates the ear too rapidly
because her technique has an obvious and
easily corrected fault: no variety. Tempo
and mood never change, so she can’t cre-
ate expectation, uncertainty, surprise or
relief. Every line sounds like its predeces-
sor, half sung on a falling note, and every
word seems to exult in its contact with the
dolorous and moribund. Here’s a snippet
from ‘My Shakespeare’, which the RSC,
along with BP, commissioned from her in
2012. Tempest delivers the poem in her
habitual tone of querulous anger:
He’s less the tights and garters
More the sons demanding answers
From the absence of their fathers.
The hot darkness of a doomed embrace.
Metrical rigour and adroit rhyming
are not yet among her accomplishments.
She has a pretty, cherubic face, framed
by unbrushed red-blonde hair and she
52
expiring fop repeats his challenge, ‘Do you
like me now?’ presumably hoping to elicit
cries of ‘ooh yes, you poor misunderstood
dumpling’. But there’s very little to relish in
this bracing portrait of a vain, brilliant fool
who blew his talent on booze and hookers
and paid the price. Dead at 33.
Some plays let you know in advance that
the auditorium will be a sleeper-lounge by
curtain-fall. Father Comes Home from the
Wars (Parts 1,2 and 3) is a three-hour grinder
by Suzan-Lori Parks. The central figure in her
‘triptych’, as she calls the play, is a black con-
script embroiled in the American Civil War.
His life is astonishingly uneventful. Hour one:
he confesses to betraying a neighbour. Hour
two: he helps a comrade escape a white tor-
turer. Hour three: he returns home to find his
marital bed fuller than he expected.
In the opening scene the play is merely
confusing. Crowds of scruffy chatterboxes
are gathered on a doorstep, in the middle
of the night for some reason, waiting for the
conscript to get out of bed. Some of the chat-
terboxes wear filthy 19th-century clothes and
some wear modern gear, baseball caps and
training shoes, equally filthy. Why? Search
me. One character is a dog reincarnated as
a human being (although I discovered this
only after the play had finished). The show
THE HECKLER
Kate Tempest
GETTY IMAGES
speaks in a Caribbean-lite patois that
translates ‘those things’ into ‘dem fings’.
This linguistic pattern has many fans
among the elite. It’s seen as an emblem of
barbarous innocence, of instinctive pas-
sions bred in the ghetto, of an unschooled
and therefore superior creativity. And it
particularly excites Arts Council gran-
dees who believe their mission is to reach
down to the uncivilised and protean
human type. Which Tempest perfectly
represents.
She is also, like many a timid and
parochial spirit, pessimistic to the point of
superstition. She sees malevolence eve-
rywhere. Even in Brighton, where next
year she will serve as the festival’s ‘guest
director’. To mark her appointment she
analysed the present epoch with damning
fatalism. ‘The fear spreading everywhere
and the divisions between us deepening
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
consists almost entirely of turgid jabber but,
as each section closes, the authoress throws
in a series of false climaxes: a mock execu-
tion, a failed knife attack, a gun aimed but
not discharged. She plays this trick six times
or more, unaware that audiences resist cheap
attempts to toy with their expectations. The
play concludes with a new dawn breaking to
symbolise freedom after slavery.
Such banalities reflect the calibre of
Parks’s talent. But she’s not to blame for
lacking ability. Her career as a teacher of
writing may have convinced her that she
has nothing to learn. And her pet subject,
black history, discourages critics from draw-
ing attention to her ineptitude. For this rea-
son she never receives helpful advice. Only
prizes. The Pulitzer, for example, which
seems to be reserved exclusively for fashion-
able bores. She’s also been garlanded with
the ever-so-slightly-bombastic MacArthur
‘Genius Grant’. Those conferring the prize in
future might be reminded that ‘genius’ is not
synonymous with ‘owns a keyboard’. Parks
threatens to add half a dozen sequels to this
‘triptych’ which, I now realise, is a techni-
cal term meaning ‘a tripartite slab of pious
waffle too disorganised to be described as a
three-act play’. At her next press night I shall
be at home, knitting an important scarf.
daily.’ The cure for fear and division is to
attend a gig, she suggests, although per-
haps not one of hers.
She’s drawn to ancient mythology and
her appetite expresses itself, characteris-
tically one might say, in terms of distaste
and pain. She finds herself ‘arguing’ for
what she calls ‘a new mythology’. ‘We’ve
lost our connection to mythology. I find
that kind of troubling.’ Hardly troubling.
Hardly true either. The archetypes of
Greek folklore are all around us. The nar-
cissistic, man-bewitching Kim Kardashian
is our Helen of Troy. All-conquering Zeus
and his irascible wife Hera, co-governors
of Mount Olympus, have their counter-
parts in Brad and Angelina. Any premier-
ship love rat could be the philandering
warrior, Paris, who prefers the couch
of love to the call of duty. Hephaestus,
the crippled wizard, is Stephen Hawk-
ing. And Artemis, the sexless huntress
worshipped from afar by impotent men,
sounds like the new prime minister. But
no one could accuse Tempest of suffering
from a lack of ambition. And her desire
to create a new mythology and to delight
us with its wonders can speak for itself.
Here’s a couplet from her poem, ‘Icarus’.
Foolish young pride, silly man-cub
How can you learn to fly if you ain’t even
learned to stand up?
— Lloyd Evans
 Triennial Solo Show
of over 50 new sculptures
@

MALL GALLERIES
The Mall, London, SW1
10-22 October 2016
www.hamishmackie.com
laura@hamishmackie.com
hamish@hamishmackie.com
+ 44 (0) 7971 028 098
If you would like a catalogue,
more information
or to be added to our mailing list
please get in touch
BOOKS & ARTS
LAURENT LIOTARDO
Viscerally exciting: Alina Cojocaru and Issac Hernández in Akram Khan’s ‘Giselle’
Dance
Yes, he Khan
Donald Hutera
Giselle
Palace Theatre, Manchester, English
National Ballet, touring until 19 November
Giselle endures in the collective imagina-
tion as a charming, sorrowful, supernatural
love story. Premièred in Paris in 1841, this
keystone romantic ballet concerns a peas-
ant girl whose trust in a disguised nobleman
destroys her fragile mind and heart. Little
wonder, given the ballet’s mixture of sunni-
ness, deception, spooky woe and redemp-
tion, that it retains a timeless grip or that the
title role has become the ballerina equiva-
lent of Hamlet.
English National Ballet will be at the
London Coliseum in January performing
Mary Skeaping’s Giselle, a chilling and his-
torically accurate version originally mount-
ed by the company in 1971. But first comes
Akram Khan’s brand-new take, another
savvy commission by ENB’s artistic direc-
tor Tamara Rojo.
Khan is celebrated for his mastery of
classical Indian dance and often striking-
ly theatrical contemporary choreography.
Although he worked successfully with ENB
on part of the company’s award-winning
first world war programme, Giselle is his
54
first crack at a full-length ballet standard.
The result is impressive: meaty and moody,
not completely satisfying but a vivid, viscer-
ally exciting showcase for a company ready
to seize a fresh challenge. The production’s
dramatic content renders it both ripe for the
Halloween season and, more unexpectedly,
a reflection on immigration issues.
Khan and his dramaturg, Ruth Little, have
sharply refocused the ballet’s narrative with-
out fully addressing all the questions arising
The Outcasts’ tribal gallop is breath-
catching; the seething, organism-like
whirlpool of bodies memorable
from the changes they’ve rung. Their Giselle
is no longer a naive village damsel but rath-
er a spirited member of a migrant commu-
nity (identified in the synopsis as ‘Outcasts’).
These factory workers occupy one side of a
huge grey wall; indeed, when the curtain rises
they’re pushing en masse against this mon-
umental divide. Behind it is Giselle’s lover
— and, as we soon gather, future co-parent.
Albrecht is still a member of an oppressive
ruling class (described here as ‘Landlords’)
whose handful of other representatives swan
about in fancy-dress haute couture.
The production’s somewhat ponderous
sociopolitical slant doesn’t always join up
with the human dimension. Nor was I entire-
ly convinced by Giselle’s emotional insta-
bility. The character’s famous mad scene
may now have greater scope, but the price
is diminished impact; parts of her break-
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
down felt remote or lugubriously drawn-
out. Excluding Albrecht, there are only four
Landlords served by two attendants. Given
the numbers, why don’t the Outcasts revolt?
It’s easy, however, to overlook misgivings
and get swept up by the sheer stagecraft: the
powerful imagery supported by sensational
dancing. Enhanced by Mark Henderson’s
darkly radiant lighting, Tim Yip’s designs are
fabulously strong. The same could be said
about Vincenzo Lamagna’s propulsive score,
which potently layers instrumental melodies
from Adolphe Adam’s original music with
ominous machinated sounds.
Khan’s choreography, meanwhile, pos-
sesses both an earthy ensemble drive and a
sensitivity to individual character expression.
The Outcasts’ tribal gallop is breath-catching,
and the seething, organism-like whirlpool of
bodies that protectively surround Giselle
during her fatal meltdown memorable. Alina
Cojocaru, as the first-cast Giselle, does what
great actors do with text: she finds a motive
for every move. She and Isaac Hernández’s
Albrecht share two duets, one a playfully
tactile, tender frolic underpinned by melan-
choly and the other an almost necro-erotic
farewell. In addition, Khan creates for Albre-
cht a superb solo at the top of Act Two that
unleashes all of this privileged man’s mock-
ing delirium; this surprising new mad scene
makes total sense.
There’s also great work by Cesar Cor-
rales, whose Hilarion is a sleekly ambigu-
ous operator with a real fire in the belly,
and Stina Quagebeur as Myrtha, a truly
minatory Queen of the Wilis. The latter are
creepy and cruel: long-haired, towering on
point and each wielding (but also, bizarre-
ly, holding between the teeth) a bamboo
rod. As the embodiment of forgiveness,
the spectral Giselle realises that the Wilis
are another form of hierarchy as cruel as
the Landlords. Saving Albrecht from them
is her way of breaking a cycle of violence,
injustice and abuse.
Television
Question time
James Walton
At my wife’s first 12-week scan, I was
expecting — and duly got — that much-doc-
umented sense of thrilled wonder at the grey
blobby thing on the screen. What came as
a genuine shock, though, was realising the
scan also had the entirely undisguised aim
of calculating the baby’s chances of Down’s
syndrome, on the apparent assumption that,
if they were high, we’d want to terminate.
In the event, this wasn’t a dilemma we
faced — which possibly makes it easy to
take the moral high ground. Even so, the
whole process left me feeling both uneasy
and rather naive. How long had this been
Jane Patterson
12 October – 7 November 2016
Monday - Friday 10.00-5.30
Saturday 11.00-2.00
Printed catalogue and e-catalogue available
upon request
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
going on? Did everybody else know about
it? And if so, when had they discussed it?
A World without Down’s Syndrome?
(BBC2, Wednesday), presented from the
heart by the actress Sally Phillips, starkly
answered the first and third of these ques-
tions: screening for Down’s was introduced
in Britain 30 years ago, and there was no
public discussion at all. Like me, you might
also not have noticed that the government
recently gave the go-ahead for a more
accurate form of screening on the NHS.
Described as ‘the most exciting development
in pregnancy care for decades’, it’s similar to
the kind available in Iceland, where the ter-
mination rate following a Down’s diagnosis
is now 100 per cent.
Phillips began the programme by show-
ing us film of her 11-year-old Down’s son
Olly telling jokes (not very good ones,
admittedly), playing with his siblings and
generally charming the pants off us. ‘I was
expecting tragedy,’ said Phillips, amid the
happy chaos, ‘but I got comedy.’
From there, she headed for the more
orderly world of King’s College Hospital to
ask Professor Kypros Nicolaides, a foetal-
screening specialist, ‘What’s so very dread-
ful to the world about Down’s?’ In fact, the
Professor didn’t look best pleased at hav-
ing his authority questioned by a woman
whose only qualification was loving her own
Image: No. 21. Room V, 2016, oil on canvas, 39 x 30 inches
Down’s child ‘more than life’. Nonetheless,
he managed to stay calm as he pointed out
that because such children sometimes ‘live
for very many years’, they can be ‘a burden
to a family and society that lasts a very long
time’. Besides, he assured Phillips, the whole
idea of screening is simply to offer women
more choice.
And choice, of course, was the explana-
tion put forward by all the medical profes-
sionals that Phillips questioned — even if
none appeared in much doubt as to what the
choice should be.
As her investigations continued, Phillips
often seemed understandably tempted to
abandon her patient quest for information
in favour of a full-on rant. Nonetheless, by
resisting the temptation and sticking deter-
minedly to quiet reasonableness, she ended
up raising a powerful, if perhaps rather lone-
ly voice against the apparent consensus that
a Down’s child is a disaster to be avoided at
all costs. By the end, I really wasn’t sure how
future generations will judge our attitudes. It
does seem likely, however, that the genera-
tions in question will contain far fewer peo-
ple with Down’s syndrome.
Now, there can’t be many BBC4 docu-
mentaries about trains that are too contro-
versial to repeat. But one that hasn’t been
shown since September 2012 was about
the launch of InterCity 125 in the 1970s.
55
BOOKS & ARTS

Because this was so crucial to the future of inconclusively. Which, I would suggest, is even though the railway track runs close,
British Rail, the company had to make sure about the best he could have done. True, the and because Rachel must have truly phe-
it got the right person to front the adver- programme was often confused and contra- nomenal eyesight, and because the trains
tising campaign. After exhaustive research, dictory (as well as riveting). Yet, given the must travel extraordinarily slowly, if not
it established with some certainty that the sheer weirdness, and maybe even the irre- haltingly — and you complain about South-
single most trusted person in Britain among ducible mystery, of Savile’s ability to get ern? — she can look right into Tom and
all ages and social groups was Jimmy Savile. away with his crimes, what else could it — Anna’s house and even clocks them hav-
Needless to say, this gives the lie to the or should it — have been? ing sex on the kitchen counter. (Plant some
consoling myth that ‘we all knew’ there was trees, FFS! Buy some curtains!) The train
something dodgy about the man. It also also offers her the view of another house on
sprang inevitably to mind during Sunday’s Cinema the street, and she conceives an idealised
Louis Theroux: Savile (BBC2) in which a fantasy life for the handsome young couple
shame-faced Theroux revisited his 2000 Wrong side of the tracks she often observes drinking coffee on their
documentary When Louis Met Jimmy — Deborah Ross decking, or drinking wine on their decking,
and the semi-friendship that later devel- or necking on their decking. (Get a room,
oped — to try and work out why he, too, FFS! With curtains!) But then she glimpses
was fooled. The Girl on the Train something that undermines her fantasies,
Theroux obsessively scrutinised some 12A, Nationwide drunkenly disembarks from the train —
of his old footage that hindsight reveals as and what does she do? She doesn’t know.
distinctly sinister. He spoke to a number of You will surely have seen the posters for The She wakes up the next day bruised and
Savile’s victims, all of whom found the origi- Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt staring covered in blood but can’t remember any-
nal documentary almost laughably gullible. from a train window beneath the question: thing (always a drag, that). Then the wife
He also heard from a couple of Savile loy- ‘What did she see?’ I don’t know . . . buddle- of the handsome couple — that is Megan
alists, including his former PA Janet Cope, ia? Bindweed? The occasional abandoned (Haley Bennett), who is married to Scott
who remains convinced that the stories supermarket trolley? That is all most of us (Luke Evans) — goes missing. Did Rachel
about his sexual abusiveness are ‘made up’. see from trains and while it’s true that bud- do something to her?
(‘Is it possible you’ve lost your objectiv- dleia, bindweed and the occasional aban- Betrayal. Jealousy. Disappointment.
ity?’ asked Louis through the most gritted doned supermarket trolley would make for Emotional abuse. The unreliable narrator.
of teeth. ‘What makes you ask that?’ replied a very dull film, it could scarcely be any dull-
Janet in a puzzled voice.) er than this. And that is the truth. How one wishes Patricia Highsmith
Above all, though, Theroux agonised This is an adaptation of the thriller by might have had a hand in this, or
— honourably, thoughtfully, but in the end Paula Hawkins; a thriller that, I would Hitchcock
venture, attained bestseller status large-
ly because it was touted as ‘the next Gone This has all the ingredients of a psychological
Girl’ and ‘the British Gone Girl’ and we all suspense thriller if only it were a) psycholog-
fell for it. I fell for it myself and if you read ical and b) suspenseful and c) not crap (basi-
the book, as I did, you’ll have got a quarter cally). How one wishes Patricia Highsmith
of the way through and, having worked out might have had a hand it, or Hitchcock, or
what was going on, binned it so you might anyone with a true feel for the genre. There
turn your attention to something more rivet- is no psychological dimension as the char-
UK/Int’nl edition Australian edition
ing, like pairing socks or compiling your tax acters aren’t characters as such, more cogs
12 months (52 issues) 12 months (52 issues)
return. It had none of Gone Girl’s literary in the plot machine. I’ve seen superior char-
UK Print edition £111
flair or smarts but good films can be made acter work on Hollyoaks, seriously. There is
UK Print plus Digital £129
Europe £185
from bad books (see Jaws, The Godfather even a psychiatrist who appears, serves the
RoW excl Aus/NZ £195 etc.), although it certainly isn’t a given. (Eve- plot, then disappears without trace. (Come
Australia £199 A$279 rything by Dan Brown, ever, ever, ever.) back, come back! All is forgiven!)
New Zealand £199 NZ$349
Our heroine is Rachel (Blunt), a The film is directed by Tate Taylor (The
I enclose a cheque for payable to divorced alcoholic who tips cheap vodka Help), who appears to have no aptitude
The Spectator (€, US$, A$ and NZ$ cheques accepted)
into her water bottle and commutes into the for pace, or mounting tension, and instead
Please charge my credit card for
(credit card charges will be made in £ sterling)
city every day because she can’t face telling offers scene after scene of close-up after
Visa Mastercard Amex Maestro* anyone she’s lost her job. In the book, the close-up — I can talk you through Blunt’s
city was London, but here Rachel has been pores if you like — as everyone hangs about
Card number
Expiry date uprooted to Manhattan. On her journey to in twos only discussing matters relating to
*Maestro Issue Number/Valid From Date and from upstate New York (presumably) the plot. It is wooden beyond belief. Blunt
Signature Date
she stares out the window at the passing gives it her all, and is probably the best thing
Name
Address
houses, which are so huge and plantation- in this, but she can’t surmount the material
style it looks like they’ve been airlifted in or the direction, which requires sozzled sob-
Postcode from 12 Years a Slave. (Is this what houses bing (in close-up) at every turn. She is meant
Country
Email
are like, just outside Manhattan?) to be a broken, desperate woman but with-
SHA10A In particular, she stares at one huge out the depth all we get is ‘Distraught Face’
The Spectator (1828) Limited and Press Holdings Media Group may use your information for plantation-style house as it’s where she over and over again.
administration, customer services and targeted marketing. In order to fulfil our commitments to
you we will disclose your information to our service providers and agents. We would like to keep used to live, and could still be living if she So, no more interesting than your aver-
you informed of new Spectator products and services. Please tick here to be contacted by: email
sms phone. We would also like to keep you informed of new products and services by post. Please hadn’t messed up. But it’s now occupied by age buddleia although, that said, your aver-
tick here if you would rather not be communicated to by us by carefully selected third parties .
her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), his age buddleia, while an invasive menace, does
SEND TO: The Spectator Subscriptions Dept., 17 Perrymount Rd, second wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) and
Haywards Heath RH16 3DH, United Kingdom
swish in the breeze, shed leaves and stuff,
their cute baby (a Cute Baby). Because no attract butterflies . . . don’t knock watching
ORDER LINE: 0330 3330 050 one in any of these houses has thought to buddleias until you’ve tried watching this is
plant trees at the bottom of their gardens, all I’m saying.
56 the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
 Apollo Collector Services
Expert insight and advice on managing an art collection

Apollo Collector Services offers and facilitates contacts with

an international network of art experts and experienced suppliers

Art Advisory O Art Finance O Collection Management

Apollo Collection Management System (CMS)

Free one-month trial
O Manage and store your collection details securely online
O iPhone and iPad apps
O Complimentary copy of the next issue of Apollo

www.apollocollectorservices.com/cms

www.apollocollectorservices.com
+44 (0)20 3856 3005 | info@apollocollectorservices.com

A pint of Landlord
D
own a lane in Keighley, in the old
West Riding of Yorkshire, they brew
the greatest ale in the world. Timothy
Taylor, the brewery is called, or Timmy Tay-
lor’s, should you feel sufficiently familiar. And
if you are not familiar with the ales brewed
by these modest Yorkies, you’re clearly not an
ale-drinker. And if you’re not an ale-drinker
then you’re not properly English.
Modest Yorkies, you may say: that’s a new
one. Well, they are. If you excel as they do,
you don’t need to blow your own trumpet.
Paul Tortelier, the great French cellist, was
once asked to nominate his favourite com-
poser. ‘Bach,’ he replied. ‘And if any musi-
cian tells you different, he is lying.’ You might
say as much of Landlord, the most famous
ale in the Taylor stable. If you don’t know it
is the greatest ale known to man, check your
pulse.
Malted hops and barley. There isn’t much
to making ale, except the skill that comes
with years. Peter Eells, the head brewer at
TT, retired last year, going out in glory after
the Campaign for Real Ale voted Landlord’s
younger brother, Boltmaker, its champion
beer of 2014. Best Bitter, Boltmaker used to
be called. There is also a Golden Best, a Dark
Mild and, in winter, Ram Tam.
We’re lucky in England to have so many
wonderful brewers — and so many people
WE BUY FINE WINE
Do you know what your wine is wor th?
CON TACT US NOW FOR
A F R EE VA LUAT IO N
+44 (0) 207 377 8097 | +44 (0) 203 091 0733 | wine@thelondonwinecellar.com
N AT I O N W I D E
58
NOTES ON …
By Michael Henderson
ale, brewed specifically for the nonce. Per-
TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES
haps it will mature, like a fine Burgundy!
What, then, is the reason for the Tay-
lor triumph, which has continued under the
new head brewer, Andrew Leman? It has
something to do with the water taken from
their own spring, and quite a lot to do with
the hops brought in from Herefordshire and
Kent, and also from Slovenia, close to the
Austrian border. The rest is down to human
agencies like the nose, and a pride in their
own traditions.
Beer testing in 1937 All brewers seek a balance between malt
and hops. Landlord, a hoppy pale ale, is, if
who enjoy drinking their work. It’s some- well kept, a majestic compound of bitterness
thing we do very well. One thinks of Harveys and maltiness. Though to call Landlord a
of Lewes, Batemans of Wainfleet, Joseph ‘pale ale’ is like calling Uncle Vanya a ‘Rus-
Holt of Manchester, Fullers of Chiswick, the sian tragedy’. There are ales, and there are
Wye Valley Brewery and Bathams of Brier- tragedies, and they’re not all the same.
ley Hill. But the reputation built up over the Michael Jackson, whose writing about
decades by Timothy Taylor, a reputation that beers of all kinds did so much for the dis-
has become almost an article of faith among criminating drinker, found parallels in rugby
beer drinkers, owes nothing to happenstance. league for Landlord’s hoppy maltiness, or
They started brewing ale in Keighley in malty hoppiness. It was, he said, like a com-
1858, ten years after two of the Brontë sisters, bination of loose forward and scrum half. By
who lived up the road, published Jane Eyre the time you’ve worked your way through a
and Wuthering Heights. On the brewery’s gallon of the stuff, it makes sense.
150th anniversary eight years ago they put Wherever you live, you are likely to find
up a marquee at a local prep school and held Landlord in a pub near you. It really is true
three days of licensed revelry. In my fridge what they say: by ’eck, the greatest ale in the
there remains a solitary bottle of Havercake world.
Fine Wine
COLLECTION
129 Richmond Road, London Fields,London, E8 3NJ
thelondonwinecellar.com
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
 CLASSIFIEDS
Travel & General

AUSTRIA TRAVEL

BEAUTIFUL, LUXURY TYROLEAN CHALET

Unique, secluded 370 year-old traditional chalet, near
Kitzbühel. Sleeps 10. Indoor pool/steam room/sauna.
Grand piano. Staff. Close access to the large Skiwelt
area. New to the rental market, thus introductory rates.
Available Christmas/New Year/Hahnenkamm downhill.
Email: chaletsollnhof@gmail.com | Web: www.chaletsollnhof.com

ITALY HEALTH AND

UK: CORNWALL
ITALY
VENICE. S/c apartments in newly
restored 15th century palazzetto.
Sunny canal views. Sleep 2/4. Canoe
available. Tel: 00 43 1712 5091
www.valleycastle.com
TUSCAN/UMBRIAN BORDER.
Hilltop house in 11 acres. Looks
amazing on the website.
Even better in real life. Check it out:
www.myhomeinumbria.com
TUSCANY/UMBRIA BORDER.
Renaissance Italy. Brilliant farmhouse
villa - our home. Etruscan/Roman
site. Sleeps 10. Pool. Magical views.
Therapeutic atmosphere. Amazing
feedback. View: www.ladogana.co.uk
CYPRUS
PAPHOS & POLIS. From £350 week.
1 to 6 bedroom villas and cottages,
all with own pool, near sea. Wi-Fi,
heated pools, 2 person discounts.
Tel: 020 8440 6219
www.sundancevillas.co.uk
PAPHOS & POLIS. 2 wheelchair
accessible villas with private pool
and hoist, wet room and more.
Villa Timily and Villa Ampelitis
(heated pool). Tel: 020 8440 6219
www.sundancevillas.co.uk
COLLECTABLES
UMBRIA/TUSCANY. Villa with
tennis court and pool. Our beautiful
farmhouse sleeps 12 (6 bedrooms, ARCHIVES, DOCUMENTS,
5 bathrooms). Magnificent hillside
albums, autograph letters,
location near Monterchi. Call us on:
photographs, memorabilia,
01732 762013, or visit
old books, postcards, etc.
www.belvederediprato.com
Will collect.
To purchase back issues of The Spectator Tel: 020 8994 2258
please call 01795 592886 or visit
PD\Á\HSKHPHUD#PVQFRP
www.spectator.co.uk/backissues
WELLNESS
RELAX, REJUVENATE AND
revitalize with Swedish, Holistic,
Pregnancy and Sports massages.
Traditional Thai, Aroma and Deep
Tissue massage. ITEC and IPTI City
and Guilds Qualified.
Tel: 07943 647151
SPEECHWRITING
Relax, I’ll Write It For You!
You’re due to speak / present at a
wedding / event. Don’t worry -
call Lawrence on 020 8245 8999 or
check www.greatspeechwriting.co.uk
SPIRITUAL
SPIRITUAL MERIT in need of
a boost? Take this opportunity to
turn things around by donating to
a project to improve the wellbeing
of everyone in Britain! We plan to
build a British Buddhist Meditation
Centre in Oxford and are in need of
funds (dana). The transfer of merit
is a tried and tested system that has
been around for centuries. Try it for
yourself and see the results! Email:
donations@ongchenfoundation.org
for details or visit our donations page
to donate directly.
www.longchenfoundation.org

the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 59


ARTS
Commission
Bespoke Art
Portraits... or anything else
www.mallgalleries.org.uk
www.therp.co.uk
FREE SERVICES
BOOKS
OUT-OF-PRINT BOOKS FOUND.
Free search. No obligation to
purchase. Tel: 01376 562334
Email: jeremy.dore@tesco.net
Green Ink Booksellers
BOOKS BOUGHT
Philosophy, Social Science and other
academic titles. Fair prices paid,
will travel within UK.
Tel: 01497 822870
books@greeninkbooksellers.co.uk
PROFESSIONAL
COMPANION
PROFESSIONAL COMPANION
available for all social engagements.
Tel: 07880 765401
Email: timfx5@hotmail.co.uk
Profile picture on request.
60
CLASSIFIEDS
General
LEGAL SERVICES JEWELLERY
GARDINERS SOLICITORS.
Domestic & Commercial STYLE NEVER GOES OUT
Conveyancing. Tel: Paul Gardiner, OF FASHION
020 7603 7245. Email:
paulgardiner@gardinerssolicitors.co.uk
Not Just Skilfully Resolving
Disputes....
BILMES LLP
28-29 Great Sutton Street,
London EC1V 0DS – London & Brighton
law@bilmesllp.com - Tel: 020 7490 9656
Solving Difficult Problems Effectively.
PERSIAN RUGS Cobra & Bellamy
OLD PERSIAN RUGS. Not a
is the leading name in classically designed
watches, retro in style reminiscent of the
1930s, 40s and 50s. Pictured here is the Cobra
shop, just a shed, telephone first.
Shabby chic. Desmnond North, East watch available in Stainless Steel at £99, Rose
Gold Plated and 21 Carat Gold Plated at £115.
Peckham, Kent. Tel: 01622 871353
Sienna Miller has chosen to eschew more
ĞƐƚĂďůŝƐŚĞĚǁĂƚĐŚĐŽŵƉĂŶŝĞƐƚŽŇLJƚŚĞŇĂŐ
WANTED for Cobra & Bellamy’s retro inspired watch
ĐŽůůĞĐƟŽŶ͕ŚĞƌĞŝƐĂƋƵŽƚĞĨƌŽŵŚĞƌ͞ŽďƌĂ
ΘĞůůĂŵLJǁĂƚĐŚĞƐĂƌĞĐůĂƐƐŝĐ͕ďĞĂƵƟĨƵůĂŶĚ
PART COMPLETED / ABANDONED ĂīŽƌĚĂďůĞ͕/ůŽǀĞĂůůŽĨƚŚĞŵ͘͟
Landrover. Defender or Series To see the whole Cobra & Bellamy watch
rebuild project. Any stage considered. ĐŽůůĞĐƟŽŶŐŽƚŽ͗
Reclaim your garage! www.cobrabellamywatches.co.uk
or call 01736 732112
Tel: 07876 141255
DETOX
AROMATHERAPY
MASSAGE
LUXURIATE AND CHILL OUT.
Fully qualified and experienced,
English aromatherapist (ITEC reg.)
Offers one hour treatments
in Lancaster Gate.
Please call on 07597 485185.
INTERIORS
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
‘Cameron just assumed Gove would
defer to him because of his inferior
status, both politically and socially’
— Toby Young, p68
High life
Taki
New York
Back in the Big Bagel once again preparing
for the greatest debate ever, one that will
decide the fate of the western world once
and for all. In the meantime, the mother
of my children is doing all the heavy lifting
back in Gstaad, moving to my last address
ever, that of my new farm, La Renarde. One
of those American feminists remonstrated
with me not long ago for making some chau-
vinist remark — on purpose, I might add —
just to get her goat. My, my, how easy it has
become to get that goat.
In a 1939 film, Dodge City, Errol Flynn
plays a Kansas marshal circa 1872 who visits
a local newspaper and sees the virginal and
sweet Olivia de Havilland writing away at her
desk. He’s keen on her and sits down and asks
her what she’s doing in such an insalubrious
place. She demands to know why he asked
what he did. ‘It’s undignified,’ says Errol. ‘You
should be home sewing buttons for some
lucky man’s uniform.’ If memory serves, I saw
that movie with my mother in around 1946,
and she agreed with Flynn — not that she
liked his wicked, wicked ways in real life.
I watched bits of the film last week on
TV and loved the part I just described. Boy
oh boy, show me a producer or director run-
ning a line like that today and I’ll show you
a dead man. They’d probably lynch the actor,
too, especially if it were Errol Flynn. Hillary,
you’ve come a long way, baby. Gender-neu-
tral bathrooms are on the rise in the Home
of the Perverse, and woe betide any old guy
who challenges the right of men to become
women and women to become men, as well
as men who become women but then change
their minds and become men again but then
change. . . oh, the hell with it, you know what
I mean.
Incidentally, did you know who the first
woman to run for president in the Home of
the Depraved was? No, not the black con-
gresswoman Shirley Chisholm in 1972, but
the comedienne Gracie Allen in 1940, when
FDR won his illegal third term. Gracie was
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
married to George Burns, also a profession-
al comedian, who had great success with
the fairer sex. Well into his nineties, he was
reverently asked on air who was the worst
lay he ever had. ‘Fantastic,’ he whispered
back. Gracie’s party was called the Surprise
Party and she even held a convention where
she nominated herself. When George told
her that she would make a fool of herself
and that presidents were born to be presi-
dents, she answered, ‘What about me? Was I
hatched?’ When the press asked her why she
wanted to be president, she answered that
she’d like to live in the White House. And
unless you’re president you can’t visit at will.
Now we’re finally about to get a female
president, unless The Donald pulls it off
in November. Here’s my fearless forecast:
Trump will win the popular vote but Hillary
will prevail in the Electoral College, hence
we will have the first female president. She
will win every Hispanic, black and Asian
vote, plus the gays and hipsters; the dum-
mies like myself will go for Trump. If, by a
long shot, Trump triumphs, it will be the first
time a billionaire moves into public housing.
By the way, did you know that 71 per
cent of black American women who are
employed are the primary wage earners in
their households, as opposed to 48 per cent
of white women? It shows that our black
male cousins ain’t that dumb. That’s why I’ve
got the old princess back home working to
move my stuff while I’m enjoying myself in
the Bagel: let the little woman work while
I stay home, get a bit high and chase some
young pussy.
Black women in America have a great
thing going for them. Minority-owned busi-
nesses in New York get more contracts from
the city than white-owned businesses, and by
a two-to-one margin. No white person dares
complain.
I feel funny about women. They can never
do anything wrong as far as I’m concerned.
I cannot even hate Hillary; she did, after all,
stick by her man. Norman Mailer wrote that
people can win at love only when ‘they are
ready to lose everything they bring to it of
ego, position, or identity’. He thought love
was more stern than war, and that men and
women could survive only if they reached the
depths of their own sex ‘down within them-
selves’, whatever that means. ‘They have to
deliver themselves over to the unknown.’
Talk about existential statements; Nor-
man certainly made them. He was accused
non-stop by hysterical females of portray-
ing patriarchal, male-dominated sex. What
is patriarchal, male-dominated sex? Man
on top, man horny, man pursuing? Sex is the
presence of grace, the voluntary surrender
of ego, the lust that is hopeless for some and
divine for others. Just think, the first great
war in history took place over a woman.
Would the Iliad exist if Paris had run off
with a son of Menelaus?
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
The first and only time I went to a meeting
of Sex Addicts Anonymous, this chap stood
up and gave a blow-by-blow account of his
sexual history. He had started life as a het-
erosexual, he said, and became hopelessly
addicted to pornography and prostitutes.
Then he decided to give gay sex a try and
soon became addicted to encounters with
multiple partners in public parks. I forget
how many times he said he was having it off
every day, but it was heroic. He was out there
day and night in all seasons and in all weath-
ers and would go without lunch and dinner.
In winter, he said, he was sometimes covered
in snow. Then he caught pneumonia, then
HIV. HIV became full-blown Aids. Finally,
he decided enough was enough. And now
here he was, relating his salutary tale in a
church hall over tea and inexpensive biscuits.
The point he was making was that he now
realised that his behaviour had been reck-
61
SEE THE WORLD
IN THE COMPANY
OF EXPERTS

r t an
el g h il
g ng

ha u a
Po Ir
a r wit n
ith

illo
i c ro r
B e s ea
om n o

M y th a g le
H e ko a l
w

d h
y re n
ar u ra
ge

ith e E
M e a s i te r

w u r n en
Ke e M y a

jo old
t h vo

tr ed
M

G
A

Discover our brand new exciting Telegraph Tours

Our latest portfolio is a mouth-watering prospect with a line-up including
world-famous chefs Rick Stein and Ken Hom, celebrated gardeners Alan Titchmarsh
and Monty Don, as well as leading figures such as Monty Halls, Professor Mary Beard,
Michael Portillo and Nicholas Crane.

What do these tours have in common? They are all unique, and have been created by
Telegraph editors for Telegraph readers. We provide the ultimate access to the biggest names,
brightest insights and best destinations.

Whether by rail, on a cruise, on a sports or cultural tour, see the world in the company of our experts.

To find out more, visit telegraph.co.uk/tt-telegraph-tours

For full terms and conditions, visit telegraph.co.uk/tt-telegraph-tours
less, and that it was reckless because he was
subject to a raging psychological addiction.
What he had thought was merely a habit
had taken him over and wrecked his life.
This fragile-looking man with nothing left
to lose except his humility was an impres-
sive and convincing speaker. Unfortunately,
I decided that I had now learned everything
I needed to know about sex addiction and
that was the last meeting I went to.
It must take a lot of courage to stand up
in front of an audience and admit to helpless-
ness in the face of an addiction. I don’t know
whether I could publicly give an account of
my own sex addition, for example, which took
the form latterly of a porn addiction so bad
that I used to petition God, even while look-
ing at it, to help me to desist from this abject
nonsense. Nor could I go on to state publicly
that, when I was diagnosed with metastasised
prostate cancer and chemically castrated as
My porn addiction was so bad that
I used to petition God, even while
looking at it, to help me desist
part of the treatment, I took it as an answer
to prayer and a part of me was genuinely
over the moon. Instead, I do my bit by telling
people about my debacle informally, usually
when drunk, guessing that a small percentage
will be secretly living in a similar nightmare.
If Facebook can filter a political bent into its
news feed, and Google can disqualify con-
tent containing certain trigger words, why, I
wonder, does internet porn flourish with few
restrictions and little comment? If we could
somehow harness the energy that is wasted
in private on pornography, we might not need
another Hinkley Point.
At Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, too,
a member will stand up each week and give
an account of his or her relationship with
alcohol from the first taste to the present.
I think it might be a requirement for the
12-step programme. At the first Alcoholics
Anonymous meeting I attended, this guy got
up and told such a harrowing tale I had to go
to the pub afterwards and have a stiff one to
cheer myself up. As was the case at the Sex
Addicts Anonymous meeting, the people I
met there were serious about beating their
addiction and a little dazed by their success.
At that first meeting, a south London gang-
ster from central casting said to me, ‘You’re
a wanker, mate. But here’s my card. If you’re
serious about being sober you can call me
day or night if you need someone to talk to.’
A friend in AA for 30 years once told me
a good story about a new AA member giving
his testimony. That new member was none
other than the great Barry Humphries. Mr
Humphries, claims my friend, was so nervous
about his forthcoming ordeal, that he went
to the lavatory and fortified himself with a
whisky miniature. As he tipped back his head
to get the contents down in one, an air bub-
ble momentarily blocked the flow. Barry
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Humphries tilted his head back as far as it
would go to get the dregs, and a surge of liq-
uid was released at such a speed that the next
moment he was giving his testimony to an
AA meeting with his head soaked in whisky.
It’s a favourite story. I’ve repeated it
often. So when I met Barry Humphries last
week before Taki’s splendid 80th birthday
dinner party, and found myself tongued-
tied at meeting a hero, I suddenly remem-
bered this story and repeated it to him. He
had expressed a degree of pleasure at our
introduction, but as my tale progressed, I
sensed it quickly evaporating. ‘Is that true?’
I said. ‘No! It’s not true at all!’ he said indig-
nantly. ‘It never happened!’ At that moment
we were called to the table. Embarrassed
and ashamed at having defamed Mr Barry
Humphries for years, I peeled off and went
in search of my name card on table 1.
Real life
Melissa Kite
After a year dealing with estate agents I can
only say: a plague on all their houses, except
the one of mine they’re trying to sell.
I do hate being obvious and lashing out at
oft maligned groups because it really is too
clichéd. I belong to several of these hated
groups myself, after all. Journalists, they get
it in the neck all the time. And hunters. See
Rod Liddle last week or Liz Jones the week-
end before that for some classic examples
of how the left rip me to shreds whenever
I dare to suggest that I would like to keep
the countryside a nice place in which to live.
Liddle moans that he is sick of hearing
about my ‘bloody horse ’, and wonders why
I don’t like the skies being full of artificial-
ly boosted numbers of marauding red kites
when my surname suggests I am one.
Rod, my dear man, as you well know, I
am not a red kite, I am a blue kite, and blue
kites are not birds of prey. I am a tough old
bird, however. I have to be, to put up with
the sort of grief I get in this lunatic world,
where anyone with any kind of experience
of rural reality gets told they are evil for
wanting man to remain at the top of the
food chain, with a place in the ecosystem,
and yes, boss of the foxes and the packs of
wolves and the wild bloody Eurasian lynxes.
There, I’ve sworn too now. He’s dragged me
down to his level. This is the danger. At some
point, the civilised descend into the anarchic
primordial soup to do battle with the loons
and everyone starts scrabbling about in the
swamp, chucking muck at each other and
screaming like harpies about whether or not
we should be eaten by wolves, wild cats and,
in all likelihood, if they get any bigger, foxes.
That we are actually having a debate
about rereleasing packs of wolves in Britain,
because Rod Liddle would really like to see
some, you know, locally, rather than having
to travel at great expense to Poland, tells you
everything you need to know.
The left are becoming extinct so fast that
they want to hurry it up by releasing savage
predators in a bid to put themselves out of
their misery. Their instinct for survival gone,
they wish only for the end, a terrible ripping
of flesh and then darkness. A blessed relief.
Extinction. No more Corbyn, no more Mili-
band. Just ravening beasts eating everything
that moves.
I could get into bed with all this. I could
say I yearn for the day when Brian May
meets an angry badger, Chris Packham
meets an angry lynx, Rod Liddle, while run-
Ms Jones and Mr Liddle might
well get together to try to cull me by
ambushing me on my ‘bloody horse’
ning from a pack of wolves near Inverness,
encounters a swooping monster kite (not
me, the bird variety; he keeps getting con-
fused about that so I’d better spell it out for
him) and Ricky Gervais slips over outside
his £10 million London mansion on a pile
of fox doo.
But I won’t, because I am not bitter and
twisted.
Unlike Ms Jones, who simply states that
she wants me culled because I don’t like cats.
The fact that I do like cats, am on record as
liking cats, have kept bloody sodding cats
all my life (here I go again, you see) doesn’t
seem to bother her.
Possibly, Ms Jones and Mr Liddle might
get together to try to cull me by ambush-
ing me while I am out on my ‘bloody horse’,
although I doubt they could aim a gun
straight, even if they asked Packham to help
them — particularly if they asked Packham
to help them.
All in all, as countless people have point-
ed out, if you’re attacked by Rod Liddle and
Liz Jones in one week you’ve got to be doing
something right.
Unlike estate agents, who, I have to say,
are so tiresome as to enforce all stereotypi-
cal notions about them.
Briefly, because I’ve got to go now and
see to my ‘bloody horse’, I sacked one agent
for dropping the price too low and hired
another on the basis that they would market
it for more. As soon as I signed with the new
one, they told me they would have to drop
the price to what the previous agent was
asking, but would not be charging me the 1
per cent of the previous agent, they would
be charging me 1.5 per cent.
And when I then sacked them and
63
LIFE
returned to the first agent, they served me
notice that, as I had signed a contract with
them, if this original agent now sells it, I will
owe both the selling agent 1 per cent and
them their 1.5 per cent, which they will come
for, I can be assured. Like a pack of wolves.
Long life
Alexander Chancellor
In olden days, before the internet arrived,
shopping was quite simple. You’d go into
a shop and buy something, and that was
it. If you liked the shop, if it sold things
you wanted to buy at a fair price, and if
the shopkeeper was efficient and agree-
able, you might return. But otherwise you
wouldn’t. The shopkeeper might hope for
your custom, but there wasn’t much else
he could do about it. The customer was not
only always right, as tradition dictated, but
was also left in peace.
How different things are today. The cus-
tomer is constantly harassed. Anyone who
has ever bought anything on the internet has
had his name and his transaction publicised
all over cyberspace. He is a sitting duck,
ready to be approached for custom by any
company in the world. For the rest of his life,
and probably for long afterwards, his email
inbox will be clogged with sale catalogues.
But even more annoying than straight-
forward salesmanship is the more oblique
approach. There is, for example, Amazon’s
claim to know what your tastes are. If you
buy a cushion, it will conclude that you are
interested in soft furnishings, and send you
a list of other things you ‘might like’ such as
sofas and armchairs; if you buy a machete,
it might decide that murdering people is
your hobby and therefore recommend an
additional purchase of a gun, a chainsaw, or
a noose.
But the most irritating thing of all is
the way that companies, having taken your
money, demand your feedback. I use a Lon-
don taxi service that follows up every jour-
ney with a text message asking me to rate
the driver’s performance. It says this will
help it to improve its service to customers,
but it feels more like asking me to act as a
school sneak and to collude in getting some-
body disciplined or fired.
All feedback requests are portrayed as
symptoms of love and care for the customer,
but really they are just a way of keeping a
company’s name in a customer’s mind. It’s a
subliminal kind of advertising. People who
64
buy things from Amazon are often asked
to describe the ‘experience’. What is there
Bridge
to say on that subject? Unless an item has Susanna Gross
been bought but not delivered, when a nasty
argument may ensue, there is no experience
worth describing — just the boredom of fill- It often strikes me that learning to bid is just
ing out a form on the computer screen. like mastering a language. As you take on
Nevertheless, feedback has become so new conventions and deepen your under-
ubiquitous that even hallowed institutions standing of what different bids convey, you
now demand it. I recently purchased a cro- can begin to communicate properly. Things
quet set from the venerable firm of Jaques are complicated by the fact that there are so
of London, founded in 1795, which claims many different dialects — how much simpler
to be ‘the oldest games company and sports life would be if we could all play the same
manufacturer in the world’. I ordered it on system and the same conventions, instead of
the internet, and it was promptly delivered having to agree on them afresh with every
to my home in Northamptonshire. I am very new partner. All the effort is worthwhile,
pleased with my purchase — mallets, balls though, when you realise the eloquence that
and hoops all beautifully made and packed can be achieved. At the top level, well-honed
into an old-fashioned wooden box. partnerships are able to convey their hands
I enjoyed hitting the balls through the so accurately that they may as well just show
hoops, but my pleasure was spoilt by the each other their cards. Take this deal from
arrival of an email message from Jaques the 2015 World Senior Teams Champion-
headed ‘Your opinion matters to us!’ ‘Dear ship. Playing for the USA, Zia Mahmood
Alexander,’ it went on. ‘Thanks again for was West and Michael Rosenberg East:
using Jaques London. We would like to
remind you that writing a review of your Dealer North NS vulnerable
experience will help us to improve our cus-
tomer satisfaction.’ I can’t imagine how such z J 3
a review could help Jaques do anything at y K 10 2
all; and maybe it wonders as well, for it farms X8 7 6
out the feedback branch of its business to wAQ J 6 5
another company called Trustpilot.
I looked up Trustpilot on Google and z A K 10 8 75 zQ6 2
N
found not only that it was ‘one of the y AQ 5 3 W E y J 8 7
world’s largest online review communities’ XA 4 2 S X KQ J 9 3
but that Jaques of London was just one of w 10 4
25,000 companies that collect customer
w—
reviews through it. This ‘review commu- z 94
nity’, as Trustpilot likes to call itself, seeks y96 4
to promote ‘transparency’ in the shopping X 10 5
process and to ‘enable consumers to engage wK 9 8 7 32
in dialogue with the companies they buy
from’. ‘By sharing your experience online, West North East South
you contribute to creating a better shop- Pass pass pass
ping experience for everyone,’ it says. ‘After 1z pass 2w pass
all, sharing is caring.’ 2NT pass 3X pass
But, of course, there is a less-trumpeted 4X pass 4z pass
purpose behind this sharing and caring; and 4NT pass 5w pass
this is ‘to build credibility, popularity, and rep- 5y pass 6X pass
utation’ of a company and thus its commer- 7w pass 7X all pass
cial success. For as long as companies believe
this, I can see no hope for peace ahead. Playing 5-card majors, Zia opened 1z.
Rosenberg’s 2 w was ‘Drury’, showing a
spade fit. Zia’s 2NT rebid was a slam try.
Rosenberg bid 3X to show a good diamond
suit, and Zia raised to 4X. With a double fit
established, 4NT was ‘Six Key Card Black-
wood’, checking for honours in both suits.
5w showed 1 keycard (the XK). Zia’s 5y
asked for the diamond or spade queen. 6X
showed both. Zia now bid 7w: ‘pick a grand
slam’. And with 7X, Rosenberg hit the top
spot — better than 7z , which relies on a
heart finesse. South led a heart. Rosenberg
won with the yA, led a diamond to the king,
ruffed a club, cashed the XA, came to the
Qz, drew the last trump and claimed. Now
that’s what I called being fluent!
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
 SPECTATOR WINE JONATHAN RAY
A
lthough many wine merchants are
tightening their post-Brexit belts
and rationalising their cellars, Yapp
Bros have thrown their net ever wider. They
might be the 2016 International Wine Chal-
lenge Loire Specialist of the Year and ditto
for the Rhône, but Yapps have recently been
fishing outside their traditional waters, mak-
ing first-time forays deeper into France and
into Germany and Spain.
Wise old truffle-hound that he is, Jason
Yapp’s touch clearly hasn’t deserted him and
we at The Spectator are the beneficiaries. All
the wines below are completely new both to
Yapp Bros and The Spectator and each and
every one is a delight. And to tempt us even
further, Jason has generously lopped a quid
off every bottle.
The 2014 Vom Kalkstein Grauer Burgun-
der (1) — that’s Pinot Gris to you and me
— comes from limestone (‘kalkstein’) soil
in Pfalz, Germany. Fine Pinot Gris is one of
my favourite grapes — not the crappy Pinot
Grigio grown in Italy but the classy Pinot
Gris one gets in Alsace and here in Germa-
ny. It’s whistle clean, dry but with just a hint
of sweetness, and is full of fresh apples and
citrus with a fine mineral backbone. It’s per-
fect as an aperitif or alongside an Asian stir-
fry. £8.30 down from £9.30.
The 2013 Staatliche Weinbaudomäne
Oppenheim Riesling (2), also from Germa-
ny, is a classic of its kind; it’s great to see the
Yapps branching out and listing a fine Ger-
man Riesling for the first time. It’s mouth-
tinglingly fruity, with limes, peaches and
apricots in the mix, yet it’s dry on the fin-
ish with a zingy freshness and a fine acidity.
£10 down from £11.
The 2015 Domaine Py ‘3ème Cuvée’
Blanc (3) is much more typical Yapp Bros
fare: an organic blend of Grenache Blanc,
Vermentino and Roussanne from Corbières
in the Languedoc. Almost all the production
here — in Cathar country between Carcas-
sonne and Narbonne — is red, and white
Corbières is a delightful rarity. I loved its
creaminess and its weight, its notes of peach-
es and pears and its long savoury finish.
£11 down from £12.
The 2009 Marqués de Zearra Rioja Cri-
anza (4) is a 100 per cent Tempranillo of real
panache. With two years in barrel and three
years in bottle before release (and a couple
since), it’s ripe, juicy and vibrant but soft and
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
gentle too and absolutely ready to go. 2009 ards and branched out on his own. Blended
was a tip-top vintage in Spain and, as Jason from Carignan, Grenache and Syrah, it’s
puts it, ‘It’s a crackerjack Rioja that drinks quite tannic at first sip. But I sloshed it into a
itself.’ So successful has this first-ever pur- jug, rinsed out the bottle and poured it back
chase of Rioja been that the first consign- and — voilà! — the tannin was gone, leav-
ment sold out before it even made it on to ing behind a deep, dark, smooth, spicy red
the Yapp list. £9.20 down from £10.20. of enormous character. £11.50 down from
£12.50.
Wise old truffle-hound that he is, The 2013 Domaine Jean-Louis Tissot
Jason Yapp’s touch hasn’t deserted Poulsard (6) is a charming and very tasty
him and we are the beneficiaries curiosity, a 100 per cent Poulsard (nope, nor
me) from the Arbois appellation (huh?) in
Fitou was all the rage a few years ago, the Jura, eastern France. The palest of pale
a wine-bar constant. But cheapo examples brick reds, it’s full of elegant red fruits on
flooded the market and the punters quickly the nose and palate and has a surprisingly
tired of it. The 2015 Domaine des Rebouls long, ever so slightly spiced finish. I loved it,
Fitou (5) is the best I’ve ever had, made by knocking it back lightly chilled with a plate
a small independent producer — Jean-Marc of soft cheeses. £11.50 down from £12.50.
Astruc — who used to supply the big co- The mixed case has two bottles of each
operatives but despaired of their low stand- wine and delivery, as ever, is free.
ORDER FORM Spectator Wine Offer
www.spectator.co.uk/wine-club
Yapp Brothers Ltd, The Old Brewery, Water Street, Mere, Wiltshire, BA12 6DY
Tel: 01747 860423; Fax: 01747 860929; Email: sales@yapp.co.uk
Prices in form are per case of 12 List price Club price No.
White 1 2014 Vom Kalkstein Grauer Burgunder, 13% £111.60 £99.60
2 2013 S. Weinbaudomäne Oppenheim Riesling, 12.5% £132.00 £120.00
3 2015 Domaine Py ‘3ème Cuvée’ Blanc, 13% £144.00 £132.00
Red 4 2009 Marqués de Zearra Rioja Crianza, 14% £122.40 £110.40
5 2015 Domaine Des Rebouls Fitou, 14% £150.00 £138.00
6 2013 Domaine Jean-Louis Tissot Poulsard, 13% £150.00 £138.00
Mixed 7 Sample case, two each of the above £135.00 £123.00
Total
Mastercard/Visa no.
Start date Expiry date Sec. code
Prices include VAT and delivery on
the British mainland. Payment should
Issue no. Signature be made either by cheque with the or-
der, payable to Yapp Brothers Ltd, or
Please send wine to by debit or credit card, details of which
Name may be telephoned or faxed. This offer,
which is subject to availability, closes
Address
on 6 November 2016.
How do you get your Spectator?
Postcode
(please tick here)
Telephone
SubscriptionRNews-standR
Email*
*Only provide your email address if you would like to receive offers or communications by email from The Spectator (1828) Limited, part of the Press Holdings
Group. See Classified pages for Data Protection Act Notice. The Spectator (1828) Limited, part of the Press Holdings Group would like to pass your details on
to other carefully selected organisations in order that they can offer you information, goods and services that may be of interest to you. If you would prefer that
your details are not passed to such organisations, please tick this boxR.
65
LIFE
Chess
Tal order
Raymond Keene
As I write, the Mikhail Tal Memorial
tournament in Moscow is still underway.
The Dutch grandmaster Anish Giri
stormed into an early lead, winning three
games out of his first five. But he was
toppled when coming to grief in the
following dramatic situation.
Aronian-Giri: Tal Memorial Moscow 2016
W4WDW4kD
0PDWDp0p
WDWDWDWD
1WDWDWDW
nDWHW!WD
)WDWDW)W
WDWDP)W)
DW$WDWIW
White has sacrificed a rook but can regain
material with 31 Nc6 Qb6 32 Nxb8 Qxb7 with an
extra pawn. Nevertheless, the Armenian triple
olympiad gold medal winner came up with
something far more dashing. 31 Qxb8 Rxb8 32
Rc8+ Qd8 Obviously forced. 33 Rxd8+ Rxd8
34 Nc6 Black resigns If 34 ... Re8 35 Ne7+ Kf8
36 Nc8 sheltering the promotion square for
White’s passed pawn. Or 34 ... Rb8 35 Nxb8 Nc5
36 Nc6 Nxb7 37 Nxa7 leaves White two pawns
ahead with an easy win. Finally 34 ... Rd1+ 35 Kg2
Rb1 36 Nb4 again ensures promotion.
In the next extract White also exploits a
pseudo-sacrifice of his queen to reach a
winning endgame.
Kramnik-Gelfand: Tal Memorial Moscow 2016
(see diagram 2)
28 Qxb6 This neatly snuffs out any counterplay
Black may have been expecting against the white
PUZZLE NO. 429
White to play. This is from Tal-Botvinnik, World
Championship (Game 12), Moscow 1961. Tal’s
next move did not force an immediate win but
gained sufficient material for him to prevail.
What was it? Answers to me at The Spectator
by Tuesday 11 October or via email to victoria@
spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first
correct answer out of a hat. Please include a post-
al address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 ... Be7
Last week’s winner Graham Baker, Campsea
Ashe, Suffolk
66
Diagram 2
W4WDWDWD
DqDWipDW
phW0W0Wg
DWDW0PDW
WHWDPDW)
DWDWDWDW
W)PDW!WD
DKDRDBDW
king. 28 ... Qxb6 29 Nd5+ Kf8 30 Nxb6
Rxb6 31 c3 In the resultant endgame White
has accumulated so many small advantages that
the win is almost automatic. These include a
passed h-pawn, Black targets on a6, d6 and f7
and mobile White queenside pawns. 31 ... Be3
32 Kc2 Kg7 33 b4 Kh6 34 Bc4 Bf2 35 Rh1
Rc6 36 Kb3 Rb6 37 Kc2 The former world
champion is in no hurry at all. His advantage is
of the type that will never go away. 37 ... Rc6
38 Kd3 Rc7 Surrendering the a-pawn is an
admission of total defeat but in any case White
will round it up at some point with Ra1.
Meanwhile Black’s pawn on f7 is also
threatened and 38 ... Kg7 fails to 39 h5. 39
Bxa6 Kh5 40 Bc4 Ra7 41 Bd5 Kh6 42 h5
Bb6 43 Kc4 Be3 44 Kb3 Bb6 45 Rh2 Be3
46 Re2 Bb6 47 Ra2 The final thrust. White’s
pawn on h5 is superfluous. Victory will come on
the queenside. 47 ... Rxa2 48 Kxa2 Kxh5
49 Kb3 Bf2 50 Ka4 Kh6 51 Kb5 Kg7 52
Kc6 Kf8 53 b5 Ke7 54 Kc7 Black resigns
The puzzle this week features one of
Mikhail Tal’s 1961 World Championship
wins. The Moscow tournament was organ-
ised in his memory. Alert readers will spot
a common theme in all three diagram
positions this week.
rDWDWDW4
0pibhWDW
WDnDpDWD
DRDp)pDQ
WDW0WDWD
)W1WDNDW
WDPDW)P)
DWGKDBDR
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Competition
Creation story
Lucy Vickery
In Competition No. 2968 you were invited
to take the title of a short story by Ted
Hughes, How the Whale Became, substitute
another animal or fish for ‘whale’ and pro-
vide a tale with that title. This comp was an
absolute delight to judge. There were oodles
of well-turned entries bursting with charm.
Well done. Special mention go to C.J. Gleed,
Michael McManus, Frank McDonald and
Tracy Davidson. The winners take £25 each.
The bonus fiver belongs to Bill Greenwell.
Call me Nana. I was born when my mother was
being born, into one gender, no need for more,
only the cycle, the cycle of endless begetting.
When I was a few days old, my great-great-great-
great-grandnymphs yelled, ‘We’re pregnant.’ And
indeed they were, my beautiful matryoshki. There
is nothing in this girly world so perfect as a broad
green leaf, and the suckling of it. Come on, let’s
make dew, I cry to my ancestors, or are they
descendants? I am often mistaken for my great-
grandbuglet, and sometimes for my great-great-
grandmother: so easy a mistake to make. Blessings
to the ants, who suckle themselves on our dew.
Excuse me, I must go to the labour-leaf. My life
looks a pretty picture, but it’s a reproduction. I am
made of being, in the act of being, all green. Until
the Ladybird of Doom looms over me.
Bill Greenwell: How the Aphid Became
‘That wrap it up, then? Everything from aardvark
to zorilla, right? Let me hear from you.’
‘I wonder…’
This was from a relatively junior archangel, a
recent appointment to the committee. God’s eyes
bulged to encourage him.
‘Well, the providential scheme hangs together
with the zoology and so forth, but perhaps too
neatly. Couldn’t we add a little weirdness?
Something that would amuse Homo sapiens but
also puzzle them, even freak them out a bit, an
addictive pleasure they will never really
understand?’
‘I’ve already given them sex. Isn’t that enough?’
God chuckled and was echoed round the table.
‘Well, this is the committee on biogenesis. I was
thinking maybe an additional life form, a sort of
constant animated tease.’
God checked his watch. ‘Constant animated
tease? Good idea. I was thinking along those lines
myself. Make it CAT for short. And now I believe
it’s lunchtime.’
Basil Ransome-Davies: How the Cat Became
Loki the Trickster begged a feather from Freyja’s
magic cloak. ‘From this,’ he boasted, ‘I shall create
a bird to mock Men who live in overweening cities
and forget the Vanir. It shall be fat and stupid, but
tough and wearyingly persistent. It shall live in
teeming numbers, especially where the great, sad
towers of concrete are raised, and shall be clad in
shapeless grey.’
‘You have given it Thor’s brains. Give it also
Thor’s appetite, but not his courage,’ said the
goddess.
‘Chips, kebabs, bread and pizza shall it guzzle,
day and night. Thence it shall foul its home. Sex-
 LIFE

mad it shall also be, breeding all year round unlike

more seemly birds, and monotonous its cries. In Crossword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

homage to your familiars, O Lady of the Slain, its

enemies shall be the cat and the falcon.’
2281: Fail 9 10 11

So the pigeon became. by Columba 12 13 14 15 16

Frank Upton: How the Pigeon Became

17 18

‘So,’ thundered God, somewhere in the white Each of eleven clues compris-
19 20
space between Books of the Old Testament. es a definition part and a hid-
‘Creation is insufficiently rich for the tastes of den consecutive jumble of the 21 22
Man. He looks upon my Works — the elephant, answer including one extra
the fly, the scintillating multitudes of fish beneath letter; the extras spell a three- 23 24
the waves and birds upon the air — wonders for word phrase. Clues in italics
the barest moment, then hunts, eats or imprisons consist of cryptic indications 25 26 27 28

every single thing I have devised without thought. of partial answers; in each case,
the indicated part must do as
He cares not about the beauty of the eagle, the
stated by the phrase to create
strength of the bear. He squanders his evenings,
the full answer to be entered in
instead, etching into cave walls images of things he
the grid. Definitions of result-
imagines his Creation. So I mock him with a white
ing entries are supplied by the
horse wearing a single horn at its brow. I put it
remaining unclued lights. Else-
into the world for just the moment it took for Man where, ignore three accents.
to see and wonder, ceasing its existence
immediately thereafter. He will yearn for it, seek Across
it, never find it. And that is how the Unicorn 1 Underwear, designer’s
became. And Unbecame.’ best, needs publicity
Adrian Fry: How the Unicorn Became (14, hyphened)
11 Quiet soak
The pig looked at the elephant and thought, ‘My 12 Hills near empty ravines (4)
snout is too small. I wish I had a trunk.’ Then he 14 Be ahead, going west, and
thought, ‘No, wait. A trunk would drag on the see town (6)
ground and I might trip over it. I don’t want to be 17 Son and father greeting
just a pig with a trunk. I want to turn into an cavalryman (5)
elephant.’ 20 Pole in grass pitch (7)
‘Wishing can make it so’, said a Voice from 21 European rows about right
the sky. ‘Close your eyes and wish as hard as ever ladders (7)
you can. Don’t open your eyes until you hear me 23 Established excellent
speak again.’ electronic platform (7)
The pig closed his eyes. He wished and wished. 24 Rise to height of
Slowly, he felt himself starting to change, his body inspiration (5)
growing larger and his snout stretching into a new, 25 Fixes special food (5)
longer shape. ‘Hooray, I’m an elephant!’ he cried 27 Distracted peer wrongly
as he opened his eyes. appointed (7)
‘I told you not to open your eyes’, said the 32 Pay must be right (7)
Voice. ‘The transformation was only half finished.’ 36 Shining silver and blue (5)
And that’s how the tapir became. 37 Marble on the way (5)
Chris O’Carroll: How the Tapir Became 38 Sternly examine part of
windpipe (6)
There was once an enormous fish, so large that 40 Impartiality in military unit
the sides of his body would barely fit between the (10)
banks of even the widest rivers. The creature was 41 Drone nearly over (4)
christened Colossal Carp on account of his size 42 Several nasty tests may
and the fact that he constantly carped and surprise IT expert (14,
complained about feeling chilly. His Maker, tired two words)
of the groans and gripes, decided to mollycoddle
the carp and knit him a tight-fitting onesie from Down
Wensleydale sheep wool to keep out the cold. 1 Less hot, sheltered side of
Pleased to be pampered, the fortunate fish now hill facing upstream (5)
flaunted his fleece swimming to and fro displaying 2 Pose with Arabian
the onesie’s shimmering shine to his envious fishy instrument (5)
friends. But Wensleydale wool, in spite of its 3 Record response, smitten
sheen, is prone when wet to shrink and shrink it (6)
did, compressing and crushing the carp’s large
frame to a fraction of its original size. The colossal
carp was colossal no more. And that is how the
minnow became the minnow.
Alan Millard: How the Minnow Became
NO. 2971: LINES FROM THE LEFT
Shoestring Press has just published Poems
for Jeremy Corbyn, an anthology of verse
written for the Labour party leader. But
how about poems written by Jeremy: let’s
have your best efforts (16 lines max) by mid-
day on 19 October. Email entries to lucy@
spectator.co.uk.
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
29 30 31
32 33 34 35
36 37
38 39
40 41
42
4 Clergymen in valleys (5) A first prize of £30 for the first
5 Education about endless correct solution opened on
danger around one spider 24 October. There are two
(7) runners-up prizes of £20.
6 Run outside shelter, (UK solvers can choose to
bagging acceptable bird (7, receive the latest edition of the
hyphened) Chambers dictionary instead of
7 Climbing ridge, stopped by cash — ring the word
very black tree (6) ‘dictionary’.) Entries to:
8 Bird tried to seek cover (9, Crossword 2281, The Spectator,
two words) 22 Old Queen Street, London
10 Raised objective tips for SW1H 9HP. Please allow six
youth weeks for prize delivery.
13 Plant with edible roots in
border round about (7)
16 Tear gas for instance poor
army had to clear (11)
19 Independent in past
21 Boss, in duel, hero protects Name
(9)
22 Look over abandoned spot, Address
filled with regret, and weak
(7)
26 Former confidence in
causes ruined (7)
28 One who’s beaming up
after starship’s last exams
(7)
29 Absolute entropy
31 Sole scheme supported by
Email
cheers (6)
33 Have to fill pit (5)
34 West end of city
35 Beginning, united in duty
(5)
SOLUTION TO 2278: WILL ALTERATIONS
Concealed Shakespearean characters were Rivers, Celia,
Celia (again), Hamlet, Costard, Polonius, Snug, Hero, Gallus,
Martius, Pistol, Collatine (The Rape of Lucrece), Bushy and
Hermia. ‘Disguises’ spelt Midsummer Night.
First prize John Honey, Brentford
Runners-up Geran Jones, London SW1; D. Rosendorff,
Coogee, NSW, Australia
67
LIFE
Status Anxiety
A good read... but
I don’t buy the plot
Toby Young
I
’m writing this from the Conserva-
tive Party Conference in Birming-
ham where the mood is buoy-
ant, to put it mildly. Everyone seems
delighted with the new captain and
completely unfazed by the perilous
waters ahead. If anyone is sad about
the demise of David Cameron and
some of his key lieutenants they’re
not letting on. It’s a case of Le roi est
mort, vive le roi!
In my spare time I’ve been read-
ing Craig Oliver’s referendum diary,
Unleashing Demons, and reflecting
on the events that led to Cameron’s
demise. As a Remainer, Oliver is in
no doubt about why his side lost: the
mendacity of the Leave campaign. His
lot were honourable men, constrained
by the facts and their human decency,
while the other lot were despicable
liars for whom no blow was too low.
And the book has a villain, some-
one who embodies the immorality of
his opponents. No, not Nigel Farage
or Boris Johnson, neither of whom
he takes particularly seriously. But
Michael Gove. It is Gove wot won it,
according to Oliver. He regards him as
a sort of evil genius, lacing the Leave
campaign with a combination of
‘brilliance and poison’ that bewitched
the British public. He is the demon
that the referendum unleashed.
Exhibit A in Oliver’s case is the
assurance Sarah Vine supposedly gave
MICHAEL HEATH
68
to Cameron when the Goves were
staying at Chequers last Christmas
that Michael wouldn’t break ranks.
He mentions this at least half a dozen
times in the book, clearly regarding
it as the height of dishonesty. Sarah,
whom Oliver portrays as a Lady Mac-
beth figure, denies this, claiming she
was deliberately vague when the sub-
ject came up in conversation. Accord-
ing to her, she may have said nothing
to prevent Cameron jumping to the
conclusion he did, but was careful not
to say anything that could lead to sub-
sequent accusations of deception.
What’s odd is that Cameron was
so willing to believe it. After all, Gove
has never made any secret of his
Euroscepticism and strongly advised
him not to hold the referendum. Did
it not occur to Cameron that one of
the reasons Gove didn’t want one
was because it would lead to them
falling out? My reading is that Cam-
eron’s judgment was clouded by his
position as the silverback gorilla in
the relationship, as well as a touch of
aristocratic hauteur. He just assumed
Gove would defer to him because of
his inferior status, both politically and
socially. He was Thomas Cromwell to
Cameron’s Henry VIII.
Oliver claims to have spotted signs
of Gove’s vaulting ambition that his
boss failed to notice, such as the time
they all went to visit a free school
together and Gove asked Cameron
about the difficulties presented by
Boris’s return to the House of Com-
Gove’s mons. Wouldn’t that enable Boris to
downfall was a start building a power base on the
lack of serious backbenches? Cameron dismissed
these concerns, saying it would be
ambition, not a problem for George Osborne, his
a surfeit of it putative successor, not for him. Oliver
the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
writes: ‘I could see that, as the PM
went back to his work, Gove looked
crushed. It struck me at the time that
he hated being dismissed as a poten-
tial leader by this casual comment —
even though DC did not realise what
he was doing.’
This view, that Gove always har-
boured leadership ambitions in spite
of his avowals to the contrary, and his
decision to campaign for Leave was
at least partly motivated by this, is the
central plank of Oliver’s case against
Gove, but I don’t buy it. It requires
us to believe that Gove’s decision to
first become Boris’s campaign man-
ager, then throw his own hat into the
ring a few days later, was a fiendish,
premeditated plot, when no plotter
could possibly be that stupid, particu-
larly not Gove. If he had always been
clear in his head about wanting to be
the leader, Gove wouldn’t have made
all those avowals in the first place and
would have declared himself as a can-
didate the day after the referendum.
In those circumstances he would have
had a decent shot. But the manner in
which he entered the race guaran-
teed he would lose. His downfall was
his failure to plot — a lack of serious
ambition, not a surfeit of it. He didn’t
realise he wanted the crown until it
was too late.
The lesson of Oliver’s book, which
is an entertaining read in spite of
his loathing of Gove, is that mix-
ing friendship and politics is danger-
ous. For Tories, loyalty to country will
almost always trump loyalty to friends
— and that can be heartbreaking, as
Cameron has learned.
Toby Young is associate editor of
The Spectator.
 Time, as it perhaps should be called)
The Wiki Man for the remaining 20 or 21. But the
Let there be light, days in which we get up an hour
later are not evenly spaced around
and at better times of day the winter solstice (if they were, we
Rory Sutherland would have put our clocks back on
17 September).
The purpose of daylight saving
is to ensure that as many as possi-
south of Swansea, yet Franco moved
to the same time zone as Berlin in the
1940s. Many experts think it’s time
they rejoined Portugal on GMT.)
What Britain could do, however, is
align the dates on which we change
our clocks with those in the United
States and Canada. This means the
first Sunday in November and the

W
e already drive on the
left, give road distances
in miles and drink pints.
So one good feature of Brexit is
that Britain will be able to develop a
whole series of exciting new idiosyn-
crasies to annoy continental Euro-
peans. For instance, I am planning
to bring a private petition to Parlia-
ment demanding that Britain formal-
ly adopt the UK tabloid approach to
metrication, where all low temper-
atures are reported in Celsius and
highs in Fahrenheit.
A colleague of mine, Pete Dyson,
has an idea that might raise the eye-
brows of our continental chums. He
points out to me that the EU-sanc-
tioned dates on which we change
our clocks for daylight saving time
are holding us back. Pete is a human
geographer, so he should know, but
just to be sure I checked with my
brother who is a bona fide astrono-
mer. It really is pretty dumb.
British Summer Time is a bit of a
misnomer. We spend 31 or 32 weeks
of every year on summer time, only
reverting to GMT (or British Winter
ble of our waking hours are spent
in daylight. If the arrangement were
optimised for southern England, we
could easily spend the whole year on
British Summer Time or synchronise
our clocks with France. This, howev-
er, would mean that during winters in
north Scotland, children would walk
to school in pitch darkness and farm-
ers would need to rise long before
daybreak to perform their vital work
of stuffing antibiotics into the front of
cows and pulling milk out of the back.
In truth, I have never bought the
Scottish argument. As far as I know,
cows don’t have watches, and so
have no idea what time it is when the
farmer turns up in the morning. And
it wouldn’t be hard for schools and
businesses in Caithness to kick off at
In southern 10 a.m. in winter months. But there
are other arguments for GMT. Even
England, we though I live slightly east of Green-
could easily wich, I find it a bit grim waking up
spend the in pitch darkness. And the ease of
doing business with North America is
whole year another factor. (If there is one coun-
on British try which should change its time zone
Summer Time wholesale, it is Spain: Madrid is due
second Sunday in March. It is com-
pletely insane to wait until the end
of March before moving to British
Summer Time as we do now. Brit-
ain is depressing enough in the win-
ter without imposing needless extra
weeks of evening darkness.
There are very good energy-saving
arguments for this move. The Royal
Society for the Prevention of Acci-
dents would support it, as would the
health lobby — since it would give
people more time after school or
work to engage in outdoor pursuits.
And it would also curtail what is per-
haps the worst aspect of living in Brit-
ain, which is the four months of the
year spent in light deprivation. March
is the worst part of this. The evenings
before Christmas are dark, but it’s a
cosy, Dickensian kind of darkness. By
March it’s simply depressing.
Phase Two of this plan will involve
extending winter school holidays
so we can actually bugger off some-
where nice. Any takers?
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman
of Ogilvy Group UK.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. A family of five from Brazil
who are close friends of mine are
visiting London next week. They
have been kind and generous to
me in the past so we arranged to
take them to lunch at a Michelin-
starred restaurant. However
since this plan was made, in true
Latino fashion they have invited
four others to join the party,
two of whom I have never met.
Mary, how can I now a) change
the venue to a less expensive
option, and b) ensure they do not
stray off the set menu?
—Name withheld, Wiltshire
A. I know you are well connected,
so why not commandeer a friend’s
central London premises and
hold the luncheon there instead?
In this way, even if you have it
catered, you can control the prices.
One cost-effective measure would
be to buy in luxury cold collations
which require no cooking and
lend glamour, with the addition
of UCL students to act as waiters.
Explain to your friends that, for
the very plausible reason that you
have failed to find a good enough
restaurant with a vacant table for
ten, you will be entertaining them
in a private home.
Q. I have joined a wealth
management firm dealing with
high net worth individuals and
families. My boss, who has been
very kind to me, unfortunately
opts for a huge double Windsor
knot in his tie. I fear that such a
lack of taste may put off some of
our more snobby clients but I am
afraid to say anything to him.
— Name and address withheld
A. You might adopt the same
démodé fashion yourself for a
few days. On day four, report to
work un-Windsored but wearing
a Hermès tie. Tell your boss it
was a gift from a snobbish friend
who told you that your Windsor
knot would put off clients since
it really only suits minor royals
with beards. Laugh as you recount
his ruling, as though it couldn’t
possibly be true. Leave your
boss to reflect on this intelligence
and possibly court some second
opinions on the acceptability of
the Windsor knot.
Q. I bought a horse from a girl I
know very slightly. It was a big
wrench for her to part with the
horse, but she’d had him for only
two years and used him mainly as
an emotional crutch during her
divorce. Stupidly, I said she could
come and see the horse now and
then to ease her transition. Now
she wants to hang around the
stable all the time contributing
nothing practical but getting in
the way of my efforts to build
a relationship with and bring on
my horse. How can I ease her out
of our lives?
— Name and address withheld
A. Put her to work. There are
always plenty of jobs to be done
around the stables, so hand her
some grooming kits, a shovel and
a yard brush and encourage her
to keep busy. Either she will set
to, in which case you will stop
feeling irritated by her presence, or
she will stop coming because she
doesn’t like getting her hands dirty.

the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 69

LIFE

until Yeats had joined it. Nor was he
Drink ever fully cured, as some of his later
Eat, drink and be worried mystical effusions testify. Much of it
is reminiscent of that most undozy
Bruce Anderson — and tragic — of deans, Jonathan
Swift, as he descended into lunacy.
‘Why do they call him Aristophanes?
Because he had such airy stoff an he’s
head.’ So, often, did Yeats.
Yet he was also one of the major
political intelligences of all time.
‘Easter, 1916’: has there ever been a
more profound political poem? Then
there is the definitive four-word his-
tory of Ireland, and of Israel/Pales-
student of the human condition than
Yeats has the explanation: ‘Lord,
what fools these mortals be.’
We compounded our folly by mov-
ing on to the indispensable cliché. No
phrase ever becomes a cliché unless
it was originally redolent of salt, pith
and wisdom. Then it grows mouldy
and has to be set aside, at least for
a generation. In the 1890s, ‘he has
the defects of his qualities’ was so
grossly overused that it would surely
have provoked a groan — to such an
extent that it was forgotten. Now, it is
restored to pristine wit, at least for a

W
e were surpassing Sydney
Smith. His idea of heaven
was pâté de foie gras to the
sound of trumpets. Our version was
an un-pâtéd foie: even more delicious.
Though no one had laid on Jeremi-
ah Clarke, there was music: a bottle
of Doisy Daëne ’75. In most of the
Bordeaux area, 1975 was an austere
year, and the fear was that the wines
would live and die as sleeping beau-
ties. Well, the Dozy-Dean had awak-
ened, to a harmony of structure and
sweetness. There seems only one
sensible response to such pleasures:
‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right
with the world.’
Instead, however, the conversation
took a melancholy tone. We started
with that unendingly paradoxical fig-
ure, W.B. Yeats. In the Hammersmith
of the 1890s, old women of both sens-
es often met to talk nonsense. Phre-
nology, ouija boards, séances: these
suburban Owen Glendowers tried to
call spirits from the vasty deep, and
were lucky that no one called for the
men in white coats. But no such gath-
ering, however absurd, was complete
tine: ‘Great hatred, little room.’ Or
what about that call to arms which
should inspire anyone of a Conserv-
No mystical ative disposition: ‘The fascination of
gathering, what’s difficult’. But it is followed by
however an instant and salutary corrective:
absurd, was ‘…has dried the sap out of my veins
and rent/ Spontaneous joy and nat-
complete until ural content/ Out of my heart.’ To
Yeats had think of that in the presence of foie
joined it gras and Barsac? An even greater
‘He does like a tidy garden.’
season. But one cliché cannot be dis-
carded. ‘Things fall apart, the centre
cannot hold… the best lack all con-
viction, the worst are full of passion-
ate intensity.’ Thus is summarised the
course of world events since 1914.
Thus did Yeats toll the funeral-bell of
the Enlightenment.
On reflection, that might explain
the absurdities of Hammersmith, and
the mysticism. Nietzsche had warned
that if you stared into the abyss for
too long, it will stare back at you. He
did; it did. Perhaps Yeats was trying
to avoid a similar fate and knew that
no rescue was to be found in reason.
On a dark winter night, small chil-
dren will often tell each other ghost
stories, so successfully that they are
terrified to be left in their bedrooms,
more than ever convinced that there
are bears under the bed. We were res-
cued from the adult equivalent by
some Viña Tondonia Gran Reserva
’04, which I highly commend, not that
there is ever a disappointment from
that noble producer. This is a gaudea-
mus igitur of a wine. Eat, drink and be
merry — and ignore the next line.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Critique
‘Americans,’ said my husband in
much the same tone that Betsey
Trotwood said ‘Donkeys’. It was
his way of explaining my dislike
of the verb critique.
I had bridled most recently in
reading a rather good review by
Professor Sir Paul Collier in the
TLS, where he said that ‘leading
economists have critiqued the
euro’. Some of my annoyance
came from a vague apprehension
that criticise had recently been
replaced by critique partly to
avoid the negative connotations
of the former, yet here the
connotations were as negative
as the blackest black hole. At the
same time, critique belonged, to
my mind, strictly to the world
of literary criticism and was
unfit for application to currencies.
I was wrong in most of what
I assumed.
Critique is not a very new
verb. ‘The worst ribaldry of
Aristophanes shall be critiqued,’
wrote Francis Coventry in 1751,
in The History of Pompey the
Little, a satirical novel told
through the fortunes of a lapdog.
(Coventry is so little known
now because he published the
book anonymously and went
and died young a couple of years
later.) The word wasn’t really
new then. It had been in use for
150 years with the spelling critic
or more often critick. Against
my assumption, critick/critique
from the first had a negative
connotation. It is, however, true
that its use for an informal oral
animadversion does seem to have
sprung up in America, no earlier
than the 1960s.
As a noun meaning ‘essay in
criticism’, Pope used the spelling
critick in the 1728 edition of
The Dunciad, and critique in the
edition of 1729. (That is not my
discovery, but was established
by the time the Oxford English
Dictionary got round to the word
in 1893.) Samuel Johnson had
used the spelling critick in his
Dictionary, but Henry Todd, the
clergyman who revised it in an
influential cheaper format in 1818,
adopted the Frenchified spelling
critique. The stress moved from
the first to the second syllable. It
was about this time that Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason was
translated by Francis Haywood
(being published in 1838), or
so reference books tell us. If
you look at the title page of his
translation, it says unashamedly
Critick of Pure Reason.
— Dot Wordsworth

70 the spectator | 8 october 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

 Winemaker’s dinner with
Champagne Armand de Brignac
T H U R S DAY 2 4 N O V E M B E R | £ 17 0 | 7 P. M .
DIC K I E F I T Z , 4 8 N E W M A N S T R E E T, L ON DON

Join us on Thursday 24 November 2016 for a very special Spectator Wine Club dinner at Dickie Fitz, featuring the extraordinary wines
of Armand de Brignac, the uber-chic champagne house whose blanc de noirs was recently acclaimed best blanc de noirs champagne in
the world at a blind tasting of 250 cuvées held by FINE Champagne Magazine and tastingbook.com.
Champagne Armand de Brignac, more familiarly known as Ace of Spades thanks to its striking logo, is famously owned by
Shawn ‘Jay Z’ Carter and is beloved by connoisseurs and glitterati alike. Winemaker Emilien Boutillat will be present to discuss the
house’s range of wines during a specially created three-course menu.
The contemporary brasserie Dickie Fitz, housed in a beautiful art deco-inspired space in the heart of Fitzrovia, has an excellent New
World cellar and cocktail list. Executive chef Matt Robinson has created a menu which embraces big Pacific flavours and celebrates the
very best of Australasian ingredients and influences.
This dinner promises to be heavily oversubscribed and we suggest booking promptly.

To book
www.spectator.co.uk/armand
020 7961 0243
Subscribers receive a 10 per cent discount.
Please call for further information.