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Hammond’s House of Horrors
W
hat is the point of Philip Ham-
mond? Most chancellors have an
agenda, but it’s hard to discern
any purpose or direction from the current
one. Gordon Brown’s project was to over-
see the largest expansion of government
spending in peacetime history — which he
achieved, albeit with ruinous results. George
Osborne spoke about trying to wind this
programme back. The results were decided-
ly mixed, but at least he had an idea about
what he sought to achieve. Mr Hammond,
by contrast, has spent his time in the brace
position preparing for Brexit.
When he delivers his Budget on Monday,
he might have to admit that the country does
not seem to be quite so worried. Companies
have been hiring at a rate never seen before.
Youth unemployment is at an all-time low.
Salaries are (finally) rising faster than infla-
tion. The Office for Budget Responsibility,
which has been almost as gloomy as Mr Ham-
mond in its outlook, will have to admit that it
has yet again got it wrong and that the pub-
lic finances are in healthier shape than it has
assumed. Income inequality is near a 30-year
low, and corporation tax receipts are churning
in at a rate that has astonished the Treasury.
So it’s time for some innovation, some
policies that might speed the recovery along.
Instead Mr Hammond — we are told —
will follow Mrs May’s lead and declare that
austerity is over. He will celebrate this by
resuming the Brown project: expanding gov-
ernment spending, increasing the national
debt and lifting the tax burden (already at a
30-year high) even higher. It’s a very strange
form of conservatism.
For a while, of course, a government can
get away with increasing spending without
raising taxes — it simply borrows more.
That might be a reasonable thing to do in
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
the depths of a recession. But if you carry
on indefinitely the debt becomes a burden,
and the cost of servicing that debt rises all the
time. The government already spends more
on debt interest than on defending the realm
or educating children — and that’s with
interest rates still near 400-year lows. With
long-term rates now rising, the government’s
debt situation could yet return to critical.
What we don’t yet have — mercifully —
is a recession. But as the Bank of England
likes to point out, it’s been 11 years since the
last one and we’re overdue. Recessions and
booms have been an integral part of our eco-
The Chancellor’s lack of vision
makes it harder for voters to see why
they should not vote for Corbyn
nomic system for generations and there is no
reason to believe that the economic cycle has
been abolished. If things are going well now,
the government ought to try to balance its
books and prepare for the inevitable storm.
With chances rising of a no-deal Brexit, there
may soon be economic turbulence ahead
of us. The remedy for this would be stimu-
latory tax cuts, yet the Chancellor seems
to have put his faith in borrow-and-spend.
In cabinet meetings, Mr Hammond stays
silent while other ministers list ideas for
growing the economy. His own initiatives
tend to involve raising taxes on unsuspecting
groups such as the self-employed. The great
danger is that his lack of economic vision
or leadership makes it harder for voters to
see why they should not vote for Jeremy
Corbyn. If higher taxes and higher spending
is the best way to grow an economy — as
the policies Mr Hammond will announce on
Monday will suggest it is — why not go for a
party that truly believes in it? If the Tories no
longer believe in letting people keep more of
their money, what’s the point?
Mr Hammond had been originally due
to give his Budget speech next Wednesday,
until his officials pointed out that this was
Halloween and would invite unhelpful head-
lines about Hammond’s House of Horrors.
The civil servants involved in drawing up his
Budget say it’s a dud and that it will contin-
ue a soft drift towards higher taxes without
any kind of compelling organising narrative.
It will emphasise what is already painfully
obvious: that the Tories have no ideas besides
Brexit and they can’t even get that right.
What Mr Hammond should be saying on
Monday is that Britain stands ready to walk
away from talks with the European Union,
and that while no one actively seeks a no-
deal Brexit, it makes sense to announce
what it would involve: that Britain would
use its new powers to unilaterally eliminate
tariffs on industrial imports from the EU
and the rest of the world, embracing glob-
al free trade; that capital gains tax would be
cut, and that new investment would quali-
fy for complete tax relief. Tony Abbott, the
former Prime Minister of Australia, points
out on p22 that no-deal Brexit would mean
that Britain would trade with the world as
Australia does now: through World Trade
Organization rules.
Instead, Mr Hammond has been going in
the opposite direction, trying to stop White-
hall departments getting ready for a no-deal
Brexit by refusing to authorise spending on
the necessary preparations. He is turning
out to have been badly miscast as chancel-
lor, a deep disappointment at a time when
the party and country needs strong econom-
ic leadership. We can only hope that this will
be supplied by his successor.
3
 Bring on the
four-day week, p61

Ma Larkin, p32

King of trees, p38

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 12 American nightmare BOOKS
6 Portrait of the Week When Donald Trump goes low, 32 Andrew Motion
the Democrats go lower Philip Larkin: Letters Home,
9 Diary What do #MeToo women feel Freddy Gray 1936–1977, edited by James Booth
about downtrodden husbands?
Miriam Gross 13 John Mole 34 Kate Womersley
‘Going Home’: a poem Heart, by Sandeep Jauhar;
10 Politics Even ministers don’t
14 All the rage Nine Pints, by Rose George
understand Brexit
James Forsyth America has forgotten its manners 35 Max Décharné
John R. MacArthur How Does It Feel?,
11 The Spectator’s Notes
16 Homage to Ambazonia by Mark Kermode
It’s a pity Orwell’s memory
is monopolised by the left Anglophones are rising up against Tim Hopkins
Charles Moore Francophones in Cameroon ‘The Shadow’: a poem
Colin Freeman Kathryn Paige Harden
15 Lionel Shriver Immigration poses
18 Blood Brotherhood Blueprint, by Robert Plomin
a dilemma for the USA
The Khashoggi affair is as much 36 Stuart Jeffries
18 Ancient and modern about Turkey as Saudi Arabia If I Chance to Talk a Little Wild,
Doctors and death Hannah Lucinda Smith by Jane Haynes
21 Matthew Parris 22 How to save Brexit 38 Jeff Noon
In defence of Nick Clegg Nothing to fear from no deal New crime fiction
27 Lara Prendergast Tony Abbott Philip Marsden
The horror of Halloween costumes 25 Mad about the beast The Glorious Life of the Oak,
29 Letters The Irish problem; Desert Twitchers must learn when to back off by John Lewis-Stempel
Island narcissists; the smoking French Isabel Hardman 39 Tim Martin
30 Any other business Can the 26 Balancing act A Station on the Path to
Budget make Brexit better? The circus isn’t always a bad place Somewhere Better,
Martin Vander Weyer for an animal by Benjamin Wood
Dea Birkett
Rod Liddle and Deborah Ross
are away.

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, RGJ, Grizelda, Geoff Thompson, Bernie Andrew Burton, Percival, Nick Newman, RGJ, Kipper Williams.
www.spectator.co.uk Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773,
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© 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 | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk

 Happy Halloween!, p27
Suggs’s thugs, p35

Oh deer, p25

LIFE
ARTS LIFE Blood is the 13th most
40 Interview 53 High life Taki traded product in the world,
Ennio Morricone explains how Low life Jeremy Clarke and over 1,000 times more
to be a real composer 54 Real life Melissa Kite expensive than crude oil
Richard Bratby
57 The turf Robin Oakley Kate Womersley, p34
42 Exhibitions Bridge Janet de Botton
Spellbound: Magic, Ritual
Last year a friend of mine went
and Witchcraft
Mary Wakefield AND FINALLY . . . to a Halloween party dressed as
50 Notes on . . . Harvey Weinstein complete with
43 Opera Morwenstowe towelling dressing gown and Oscar.
Radamisto; Dido and Aeneas/Jonas/ Will Stone
I Will Not Speak
He misjudged the mood
Alexandra Coghlan 58 Chess Raymond Keene Lara Prendergast, p27
Radio Competition Lucy Vickery
Kate Chisholm 59 Crossword Lavatch Am I to stop writing for
44 Theatre 60 No sacred cows The Spectator on the grounds that
Stories; The Inheritance Toby Young I don’t want to appear between
Lloyd Evans Battle for Britain the same covers as Rod Liddle
46 Dance Michael Heath or James Delingpole? But I love
Manon 61 The Wiki Man being in the same magazine as
Louise Levene Rory Sutherland these nincompoops
47 Television Your problems solved Matthew Parris, p21
A Dangerous Dynasty: Mary Killen
The House of Assad 62 Drink Bruce Anderson
James Delingpole Mind your language
48 Cinema Dot Wordsworth
Bohemian Rhapsody
Jasper Rees

CONTRIBUTORS
Freddy Gray is deputy editor
of The Spectator and currently
on a six-month secondment to
Washington, DC to oversee
Spectator USA. On p12, he
writes about the midterms.
Hannah Lucinda Smith is
Turkey correspondent for the
Times. Erdogan Rising, her book
about the Turkish President,
is published next year. On p18
she writes about the politics
behind Khashoggi’s murder.
Andrew Motion writes
about Philip Larkin’s letters to
his mother on p32. His award-
winning biography of the poet,
Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life,
was recently reissued with a
new introduction.
Kathryn Paige Harden
is an associate professor of
psychology at the University of
Texas and is currently writing
a book on genetics and social
inequality. She reviews Robert
Plomin’s book on DNA on p35.
Stuart Jeffries reviews an
unusually verbose book about
the talking cure on p36. He’s
the author, most recently, of
Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives
of the Frankfurt School.

the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 5


Home
T heresa May, the Prime Minister, found
herself in another crisis over Brexit.
Backbenchers whispered that 48 letters
were being collected to present to the
chairman of the 1922 Committee to trigger
a vote of confidence. What annoyed some
of her own MPs was a scheme (intended
to make less likely the imposition of a
backstop agreement over the Irish border)
to extend by up to a year the Brexit
implementation period that was supposed
to end on 31 December 2020. During an
emergency cabinet conference-call, Esther
McVey, the Work and Pensions Secretary,
was said to have told Mrs May that she was
‘devastated’ by the provision. An unnamed
Conservative former minister told the
Sunday Times: ‘The moment is coming
when the knife gets heated, stuck in her
front and twisted. She’ll be dead soon.’
It was unclear what the heating signified,
but the formulation was criticised; Yvette
Cooper called it ‘vile and dehumanising
language towards a woman MP’.
M rs May told the Commons that
‘95 per cent of the withdrawal
agreement and its protocols are now
settled’. Organisers of a march through
London calling for a People’s Vote (a
referendum on Brexit) said that 700,000
people had turned out. Jeremy Corbyn,
the leader of the Labour party, was not
able to join them, as he was in Geneva
exercising solidarity with Chileans. Sir Nick
Clegg, the former deputy prime minister
and leader of the Liberal Democrats, got a
job as vice-president of global affairs and
6 the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
communications at Facebook with a seven-
figure salary. Britain’s annual deficit was
reduced by an annual £13 billion through
revisions to the independent Office for
Budget Responsibility’s forecasts, giving
Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, leeway in his Budget on 29
October. The sale of Wembley stadium fell
through. Waterloo Station was paralysed
by strikes and signal failures. Dyson was to
make electric cars in Singapore. John Lewis
stopped selling DVD players.
A mere Singh Dhaliwal, 35, the leader of
a gang of 20 British Asians mainly of
Pakistani heritage, who raped and abused
girls from Huddersfield between 2004 and
2011, was jailed for life with a minimum
of 18 years. The girls, as young as 11, had
been targeted for their vulnerability; one
was abducted from a care home. The men,
jailed for between five and 18 years, were
convicted in three trials subject to reporting
restrictions since November 2017. The
second trial was in danger of being upset
when Tommy Robinson, the former leader
of the English Defence League, filmed
defendants outside the court; an allegation
of contempt of court against him was this
week referred to the Attorney General. The
King and Queen of the Netherlands made
a state visit to Britain.
Abroad
S audi Arabia, which had been denying
that Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist living
in America, was murdered in its consulate
in Istanbul, then said he had died there
after ‘a fist fight’. This week the Saudi
Foreign Minister said: ‘We are determined
to punish those who are responsible for this
murder.’ Turkish officials were reported
to possess audio and video recordings of
Khashoggi’s torture and death. President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said the
killing had been planned days in advance.
President Donald Trump said there had
been ‘lies’ but resisted calls for the US to
stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
P resident Trump said that America would
withdraw from the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, because
Russia had long been violating it. John
Bolton, the US National Security Adviser,
who had recommended withdrawal, visited
Russia for talks. A caravan of thousands
of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador
and Guatemala was allowed into Mexico,
and declared its intention of entering the
United States, 1,000 miles away. An express
train mowed into a crowd of festival-goers
at Amritsar in India, killing 58; the burning
of an effigy of the demon king Ravana
filled with firecrackers meant revellers on
the line could not hear the train’s approach.
T he European Commission instructed
debt-burdened Italy to revise its
budget, which it said displayed ‘serious
non-compliance’. China opened the world’s
longest sea bridge, spanning 34 miles, from
Hong Kong to the mainland via Macau.
Japan and the European Space Agency
(of which Britain is a member) launched a
spacecraft to Mercury expected to arrive
in December 2025. A 75ft Greek merchant
ship more than 2,400 years old was found
6,500ft beneath the Black Sea. CSH
We understand wealth.
But more importantly,
we understand you.

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E ight years ago, in the course of doing
some research into literacy teaching in
London, I visited many primary schools.
One thing that struck me — and I didn’t
of course mention it in the pamphlet I
wrote on the subject — was how many
primary school teachers were severely
obese. One isn’t supposed even to notice
it. But it’s been worrying me ever since.
Obesity inevitably involves lower energy
levels, less mobility, reduced staying
power — all weaknesses which, however
talented a teacher may be, are likely to
impair his or her ability to cope with
young children. What’s more, teachers
are role models. I feel great sympathy for
obese people, but I would be troubled if
my young child were being taught by a
seriously obese teacher. Now the papers
are full of statistics showing that record
numbers of 11-year-olds are severely
obese. I have no idea whether there
is any correlation in obesity between
teachers and their primary school pupils,
and in any case it would be impossible to
ascertain. But the whole subject seems to
me to be cause for concern.
I wonder whether any #MeToo
supporters watched the first episode
of Still Open All Hours (series five)
now showing on BBC1 on Sundays.
I came upon it by chance and was
astonished that anything so charmingly
old-fashioned (starring David Jason
of Inspector Frost fame, 78) was still
being made. The plot revolves around
three men — one youngish, one elderly,
the third a middle-aged immigrant —
who have one thing in common: they
are all terrified of their domineering
wives. ‘She who must be obeyed.’
Downtrodden husbands and despotic
wives have, of course, been the staple of
domestic comedies (and occasionally
tragedies) for centuries, and everyone
knows one or two such couples. Indeed,
my own poor husband is often somewhat
downtrodden. But do #MeToo advocates
ever see men in this light?
R eading extracts from More Dashing,
the recently published collection
of letters by the renowned travel writer,
war hero and, yes, dashing ladies’ man
Paddy Leigh Fermor, reminded me of
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Miriam Gross
one of the most embarrassing incidents
of my life. I had been invited to a dinner
party at which Leigh Fermor — whom I’d
never met before and would never meet
again — was one of the guests. I can’t recall
much about the dinner itself except that
Paddy dominated the conversation with his
exuberance and his extraordinary ability
to quote long passages of poetry in various
languages. Afterwards, as sometimes
happened in those days — it must have
been the 1970s — the hosts rolled back
the carpet and put on some dance
music. I was standing near Paddy who,
flushed with wine, grabbed hold of me,
pressed me tightly to his bosom and
started whirling me round the room
taking long clumsy steps. He was slightly
shorter than me (in high heels). While
dancing he started declaiming a long
monologue from a play. I wish I could
remember what it was, it may have been
in French, Racine perhaps. His face
was shiny with perspiration. Everyone
was watching. I tried to keep up with
his erratic movements and I knew that
my bottom was sticking out in ungainly
fashion. I love dancing but this was
agony. The music and the recitation went
on and on. Leigh Fermor, according to
his biographer Artemis Cooper, had the
rare gift of making everyone feel livelier.
I am the exception that proves the rule.
He made me feel a complete ass.
O ne of the minor characters in
William Thackeray’s novel Vanity
Fair is a loyal black footman, Sambo —
in ITV’s recent adaptation of the book,
he’s called Sam. Watching one of the
early episodes, I was rather taken aback
to hear Sam’s employer being addressed,
in Sam’s hearing, in these words: ‘My
dear Mrs Sedley, I do wonder at your
judgment in letting him loose on your
porcelain.’ The speaker was snobby, rich
old Miss Crawley. I don’t remember the
novel very well, but the words struck a
false note. Yes, racism was widespread
in 19th-century England and Thackeray
was not immune to it. But this gratuitous
insult did not ring true. So I downloaded
the novel for free onto my Kindle and
did a search. None of the references to
Sambo included anything resembling
the offending sentence — so it must
have been inserted by the scriptwriter.
Presumably the intention was to make
quite sure that no one in the audience
was in any doubt about the bigotry of
white people in the Victorian era. But the
effect on black viewers must have been
hurtful and unsettling.
Miriam Gross is a former literary editor
of the Sunday Telegraph and the author
of An Almost English Life (Short Books).
9

Even ministers don’t understand Brexit
T
he Brexit negotiations are becom-
ing so complicated that even the
cabinet admits that it doesn’t under-
stand what is going on. The Prime Minister
has been told by several of her colleagues
that they won’t back any deal she agrees
until they have seen written legal advice,
setting out what it means. If a Brexit deal is
going to be impenetrable even to secretar-
ies of state who have followed every step of
the negotiations, what hope does the pub-
lic have?
This extraordinary state of affairs was
summed up by the cabinet meeting this
week during which ministers discussed
where the negotiations stand. Theresa May
would agree on the money to pay the EU,
but not the full terms of Brexit: those nego-
tiations would be ongoing. She would also
commit to Northern Ireland staying aligned
with EU rules on goods to avoid a hard bor-
der. The rest of the UK might agree to follow
EU rules as well. This is to avoid triggering
the backstop, which would see Northern Ire-
land put under a separate regime to the rest
of the UK, if the UK diverged from the EU.
It’s not a particularly attractive plan, but
it’s being sold to the cabinet on the grounds
that the alternative — a ‘no deal’ Brexit —
would be even worse. In the cabinet meet-
ing, David Lidington, Theresa May’s de facto
deputy, said that he was the only one of them
who had been an MP on Black Wednesday
and he could remember the turmoil. A no-
deal Brexit would repeat this drama, he said,
with all of the political consequences. Philip
Hammond, the Chancellor, made the same
case. But the rest of the cabinet is becoming
less inclined to accept this — with ministers
asserting themselves more and more.
I understand that Mrs May was trying to
wrap up the meeting by 11.15 a.m., in order
to go and meet the Dutch royal family. But
her ministers refused to cut the conversa-
tion short (Brexit was, slightly absurdly, not
the first item on the agenda) and the meet-
ing ended up running on for an extra 35
minutes. Claire Perry, the energy minister,
accused her colleagues of using the discus-
sion over the backstop to position them-
selves for the leadership. Several of those
present took this as a dig at Jeremy Hunt,
10
POLITICS|JAMES FORSYTH
the Foreign Secretary, who had argued
forcefully that the UK must have a way of
getting out of any deal signed. But Hunt
wasn’t actually in the room when Perry
made her comments — he had slipped out
to put on his morning suit ahead of the
meeting with the Dutch king and queen.
Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General,
made clear to cabinet this week that Mrs
May is set to sign them up to a deal that
would be hard, perhaps impossible, to get
out of. He told ministers that the nettle they
had to grasp was whether the UK would
No. 10 has long been convinced the
public will define a successful Brexit
by the two Ms: money and migration
accept a backstop that it couldn’t get out of,
go for no deal, or renounce the backstop.
This makes it harder for Michael Gove,
who has until recently been arguing that Mrs
May’s imperfect deal should be accepted,
with a view to making Brexit better after-
wards. As one Brexiteer who had previously
advocated the ‘just get out’ strategy puts it
to me, ‘It has to be possible to say: we’ll fix it
later.’ It is harder to say that when the Attor-
ney General is warning that later fixes might
not be possible.
No. 10 has long been convinced that the
public will define a successful Brexit by the
two Ms: money and migration. If the UK
stops sending large sums of money to the
European Union every year and free move-
ment clearly ends, voters will accept that the
referendum result has been delivered, even
‘There’s an outbreak of Mad Human Disease.’
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
if the UK continues to follow EU rules in
various other areas.
Exacting Brexiteers argue that the reac-
tion to Mrs May’s Chequers plan shows that
voters want more than this. They point to
the lack of public support for the plan as
evidence that there’s a desire for a clean-
er break with the EU. There may be some
truth to this. But Chequers’ bigger problem
was that the Brexit secretary and the man
who had led the Leave campaign both quit
over it. This left Leave voters inherently sus-
picious. This problem was compounded by
the fact that there was almost no effort by
No. 10 to sell the plan to the country at large,
which meant it was defined by the criticisms
of David Davis and Boris Johnson.
No. 10 needs to be careful, because the
public’s views on Brexit can’t just be boiled
down to money and migration. Over the
years voters have often been told that poli-
ticians would love to help with a problem
but can’t because of EU rules. If that con-
tinues after Brexit, there will be a backlash.
The deal for fishing will probably decide the
fate of more parliamentary seats than a deal
for cars will — a point that is being made to
No. 10 by the new Scottish Tory contingent
and by Mr Gove, the adopted son of a fish-
ing merchant whose business was devastat-
ed by the deal that Ted Heath struck to enter
the European Economic Community.
This brings us back to the biggest Brexit
question of all: whether there will be a deal
or not. The sheer lack of preparation for
no deal makes it a less likely option. But as
Gove warned at cabinet this week, there is
a danger that UK officials will strike a deal
with the EU that the cabinet can’t support.
Civil servants might agree a deal while fail-
ing to realise that it will be politically unten-
able. If parliament rejects the deal that Mrs
May agrees, there may be no time (or incli-
nation) to strike another one with Brussels.
For this reason, it is past time for poli-
ticians to take control of the negotiations.
The stakes are too high to leave the matter
to civil servants. Mrs May’s best hope is to
send her Brexit Secretary to Brussels.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/COFFEEHOUSE
Hourly updates from Parliament and beyond.

M rs May says she is taking her stand
on the issue of Northern Ireland
and the integrity of the United Kingdom.
If so, good; but it cannot be the whole
truth. After all, she surrendered on
the Irish border issue in negotiations
last December until, at the very last
minute, the DUP forced her to row
back. I think the irreducible core of her
position is something which she does
not fully disclose: that she is determined
to keep Britain in the customs union,
though perhaps only approximately and
certainly by another name. This cannot
work, surely, because to the EU it is
‘cherry-picking’ and to the Brexiteers it is
BRINO, but there must be a reason why
she revives it each time it is stamped on.
It would be very interesting to know if she
has given some private undertakings to
the British motor industry.
I f you think about it, it is obvious that
The People’s Vote march last Saturday
in London could not have been attended
by 750,000 people, as its organisers allege.
That is the equivalent of every man,
woman and child in Edinburgh, Oxford
and Cambridge (to take three Remain-
voting cities). Sky News reported that the
organisers claimed more than 500,000
(itself a preposterous figure), and by
Monday this had swollen in most reports
by 250,000. Only the Sunday Telegraph
mentioned that such estimates are
dubious. It was a big march, certainly
(and mostly an amiable one), but visibly
much smaller than the march against the
Iraq war in 2003 (two million claimed
by the organisers, probably more like
300,000) and the Countryside Alliance’s
Liberty and Livelihood March of 2002
(organisers and police roughly agreed on
400,000). Of course, I do not know how
many were there on Saturday (I would
guess about 150,000), but nor does
anyone. And that is the point. Earlier this
year, I checked with the Metropolitan
Police. They told me they no longer
produce their own estimates of crowd
numbers, leaving it to organisers to
announce the figures. This cop-out (mot
juste) makes it much more likely that
the march’s numbers will be successfully
exaggerated for propaganda reasons
because there is no objective check. The
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Charles Moore
police would be the right people to provide
one because, for public order reasons, they
need to know about crowd sizes, and they
have the helicopters. Numbers are the most
important propaganda element in almost
any demonstration, yet they have been
allowed to become fictional.
T here is much shock professed about the
metaphors used to describe Mrs May’s
political plight — talk of the ‘killing zone’,
or her being stabbed, and worse. I feel this
shock myself, but in fact such metaphors
are routine in politics and almost always
have been. Think, for example, of Harold
Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ —
arguably more tasteless, since it compared
a cabinet reshuffle with a Nazi murder
spree. The real reason it seems shocking
in this case surely, as it did when John
McDonnell favourably invoked people
who wanted to lynch Esther McVey, is that
it is men speaking about a woman. On
this, old-fashioned chivalry and modern
feminism agree.
I t is a feature of our age of activist judges
that a legal principle can be stretched
way beyond what it is supposed to mean.
The prototype was Roe vs Wade, in the
United States, which discovered the
right to abortion hidden inside the right
to privacy. The latest such development
is the expansion of ‘vicarious liability’,
currently besetting Morrisons because
a disgruntled employee leaked the
company’s payroll data. The Appeal Court
has decided the company is liable, even
though the employee in question was
acting criminally against the company.
If the concept continues to enlarge in this
way, it will soon be impossible for any
business, charity, voluntary organisation,
church, school to employ anyone. The
unintended consequence will be a
100 per cent gig economy.
T his year’s Orwell Lecture will be
delivered by the novelist Kamila
Shamsie. She will be complaining, it is
announced, about this government’s talk
of citizenship being ‘a privilege and not a
right’. (Actually, it is both.) No doubt she
will have interesting points to make, but
it is a pity that Orwell’s flame is always
tended by the left. There is a right-wing
case for Orwell, or, to be more precise,
an anti-left-wing case. Plenty of Orwell’s
writing about England could make
him a proto-Brexiteer, and it would
be interesting to air this just now. His
greatest satires were directed chiefly at
communists, and he had a hearty dislike
of the New Statesman. More than 50
years after his death, it was revealed that
he had supplied the Attlee government
with a secret list of people who should
not work for its Information Research
Department because they were Stalinists.
One could describe the left’s monopoly
of his memory as ‘Orwellian’.
D o you remember that brief couple
of weeks in British history when
we all had to say ‘I agree with Nick’? It
seems a long time ago, and now Sir Nick
Clegg is off to Silicon Valley to be the
head of Facebook’s global affairs and
communications team. Some sneer, but
the move makes perfect sense. Correctly
clocking that he has no future in British
politics, and that the European Union is
not an area of growth and opportunity,
he thinks that the United States has
a brighter future than our common
European home. I agree with Nick.
O ur son has revived the old game
where you take the title of a book
and change only one letter in it for comic
effect. It is fun for all the family. He
produced The Two Towels, Golf Hall and
The Voyage of the Lawn Treader. Our
daughter offered Lady Chatterley’s Liver
and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s
Scone. My wife’s contribution was
unrepeatable. I thought of The Gropes
of Wrath. It is a wonderful feature of
language that minute alteration can
make all the difference.
11
 American nightmare
When Trump goes low, the Democrats go lower
Washington, DC
A
s if American politics were not scary
enough, the prospect of President
Hillary Rodham Clinton has once
again reared its frightful head. The woman
is a proven horror, politically speaking. One
senior Democrat strategist calls her the ‘kiss
of death’. She loses elections she ought to
win because people don’t like her.
Just over a week away from the
midterm elections, Democrat candi-
dates in various states are said to be
relieved that she isn’t conducting one
of her vanity tours of the country. She
has even fallen foul of the #MeToo
movement, after she dared to say
her husband, Bill, had not abused his
power over Monica Lewinsky.
Still, like death, Hillary never
goes away. Last week, one of her
most trusted advisers, Philippe
Reines, hinted that she may run in
the next presidential election. ‘It’s
curious why Hillary Clinton’s name
isn’t in the mix — either conversa-
tionally or in formal polling — as a
2020 candidate,’ he said. ‘Is it a lack
of support? She had 65 million peo-
ple vote for her.’
Wiser heads may shake, but Clin-
ton 2020 has a certain grim logic. If not
her, who? In two years, Bernie Sand-
ers, torchbearer of left-populism,
will be 79. Joe Biden, Barack Oba-
ma’s vice-president, will be 77. Both
have tried and failed before. Eliza-
beth Warren has for years been presented as
the woman who could unite the left, but she
has turned herself into a national joke with
her insistence that she is Native American
when she isn’t, at least not really. Trump calls
her Pocahontas, which is funny.
The younger Democrat stars — Kama-
la Harris, Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker, Amy
Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand — lack clout.
There is a lot of hype around Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the pretty Hispanic congres-
sional candidate from the Bronx, but she
isn’t the brightest. Last week, she said that
humanity must fight climate change like it
fought the Nazis, which is sweet, but stupid.
The other person everyone enjoys talking
about is Michael Avenatti, the ‘creepy porn
lawyer’ who represents Stormy Daniels but
12
FREDDY GRAY
now has his eyes on bigger things. He says
if he runs against Trump, he’ll ‘kick his ass’.
None of them — apart from Avenatti,
perhaps — is able to match Trump’s turbu-
lent charisma. They all find the President
so odious that they can’t do anything but
grandstand against him. They keep resorting
to identity warfare and sneering at Trump’s
thick, racist, sexist voters — which is exactly
how they lost the last election.
For the past two years, commentators
have been talking up the prospect of a Dem-
ocratic ‘blue wave’ in the midterms. This is
billed as the great correction to Trump;
America expressing its disgust at the mon-
ster in the Oval Office. In March, Nate Sil-
ver, the liberal darling prognosticator, said
that the ‘enthusiasm gap’ between Demo-
crats and Republicans could lead to a blue
‘tsunami’ in November. Take that with a
pinch of salt: in 2015, Silver told the media
to ‘stop freaking out’ because Trump was not
going to win the Republican nomination.
Nevertheless, the special elections of
2017 did go against Trump, and Democrat
excitement seemed justified. The youthful
anti-Trump ‘resistance’ movement was noisy
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
and large. They could even be bothered to
vote. The unhappy rust belt states, which
Trump won in 2016, started to turn back
towards the Democrats. Despite the thriv-
ing economy, Trump’s nascent working-class
coalition looked unsustainable.
Fast forward to last month, and the Pres-
ident seemed to be floundering. He was
dogged by the exhaustive Mueller investi-
gation into ‘collusion’ between his
election campaign and Russia. His
foaming against the media, which
is usually well received by every-
body apart from journalists, started
to sound a bit desperate. He man-
aged to annoy large chunks of the
public over Hurricane Florence:
he had praised his administration’s
emergency response to the hurri-
cane before it had even struck. For
good measure, he added that Hurri-
cane Maria, which killed 3,000 peo-
ple in Puerto Rico last year, was also
an ‘incredible success’. His approval
rating sank below 40 per cent.
Then something very strange hap-
pened: America went mad over Brett
Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to the
Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was
accused of having sexually assaulted
Christine Blasey Ford as a teenager at
a house party 35 years ago. There was
no evidence, beyond Ford’s moving
but hopelessly vague testimony. Yet
the Democrats seized on the story as
a hideous example of the right-wing
patriarchy. In doing so, they helped turn his
confirmation hearings into a major culture
war, and they lost. Judge Kavanaugh is now
Justice Kavanaugh, and Trump is milking the
victory for all it is worth.
The Democrats are indignant. They
insist that Kavanaugh’s elevation has only
further motivated their supporters. Women
voters are angry about sexual injustice and
desperate to show it. But if the polls are to
be believed, Republican support is equal-
ly if not more fired up following l’affaire
Kavanaugh. Perhaps ‘innocent until proven
guilty’ is a more popular philosophy than
‘believe all women’.
Many voters who were not necessarily
enthused by Trump have rediscovered their
loathing of Democrats. Trump’s approval
rating has duly shot up: it’s now at 47 per
cent, according to the latest figures, which
is higher than Barack Obama’s was at the
same stage in his presidency.
As the midterms approach, Republicans
suddenly have the momentum. Early voting
figures this week suggested that Republican
voter turnout is higher than expected in sev-
eral key states. It now looks as if the Grand
Old Party will gain several seats in the Sen-
ate. It’s most likely that they will lose the
House of Representatives, but it will prob-
ably not be an anti-Trump flood. Besides,
incumbents are expected to lose: the last
leader to win seats in both houses in the
midterms was George W. Bush in 2002, the
year after 9/11. Before that it was Franklin
D. Roosevelt in 1934.
The American left’s problem is that it
can’t calm down. Anti-Trump protestors are
now regularly seen screaming, bullying, even
hitting people in the streets. Activists have
taken to abusing famous Republicans in
restaurants; in the age of the camera phone,
these incidents are always recorded, and
always end up benefiting the person being
shouted at. The joke in Washington is that
some Republicans, realising the possible
advantages, have been hanging out in lib-
The left’s problem is that it can’t
calm down. Anti-Trump protestors are
even seen hitting people in the streets
eral restaurants in the hope that a mob will
attack them on camera.
Rather than appealing for moderation,
senior Democrats are stoking the incivil-
ity. Former attorney general Eric Holder
recently came up with a new party motto:
‘When they go low, we kick ’em.’ Hillary
Clinton, not wanting to be outdone, told an
interviewer that, ‘You cannot be civil with
a political party that wants to destroy what
you stand for, what you care about.’
In other words, Trump has proved that he
is, as everyone says, a rabble rouser. But the
rabble he rouses most is the one that oppos-
es him. The Democrats now find themselves
all but advocating public disorder while ful-
minating about how dangerous Trump is.
That suits the Trump agenda perfectly.
He has even invented a new Twitter meme,
‘#JobsNotMobs’. Like all Trump’s sayings,
the phrase is at once moronic and brilliant.
It speaks perfectly to his strengths — unem-
ployment in America is close to a 50-year
low — and the Democrats’ great weakness.
Trump knows how damaging privileged
white liberal unrest can be.
He is a far more formidable politician
than most commentators realise. He under-
stands that America is fighting a class war
as much as a culture war. The Democrats,
traditionally a party for blue-collar workers,
now represent the well-educated and the
well-off who don’t need low-income jobs.
The Republicans are now the party of the
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Going Home
Folk Festival
Closing her last set
She sings of going home
While couples rise up
From the bales they share
To fold into each other’s arms
Already spirited
Across love’s threshold,
Then later as I step
Alone into our house
I think of us as the song
Must have me do
On this dusky, scented
Summer night
That still belongs to you.
— John Mole
working class. According to a new survey, 18 much that they lose the plot. In recent days,
of America’s poorest 19 states are Repub- for instance, he’s been spreading conspiracy
lican controlled. The Democrats run the theories about how Democrats are doling
five richest state legislatures. The American out cash to the caravan of illegal immigrants
poor aren’t socialist by instinct. They want coming into America. To spice it up, he
jobs and better life prospects. Trump offers adds that ‘unknown Middle Easterners’ are
that, or at least appears to. The Democrats, among those trying to enter America. Natu-
meanwhile, are busy getting hung up on his rally, the media screams racism.
‘dehumanising’ proposals to prevent obliga- None of this is pretty. Trumpism puts off
tory transgender lavatories in schools. as many people as it turns on, which is why
Trump has long sensed that, on immigra- this year’s midterms are so fraught. In these
tion, Americans are far to the right of where fevered times, small incidents can become
the political class feels comfortable, and he’s election-changing. Trump fans are equally
been proved right. As the midterms get clos- capable of behaving so badly they generate
er, he has been pleading with Republicans a righteous backlash: look at the far-right
to talk less about tax cuts and amplify his rally in Charlottesville last year, for instance.
rhetoric about strong borders. He’s also Last weekend, the Democratic leader Nancy
holding massive rallies all over the country, Pelosi was accosted by thugs calling her
where he does what he does best, which is ‘a piece of shit’ and a communist. Trump
what people on social media call ‘owning the doesn’t exactly discourage such behaviour
libs’. This means infuriating his enemies so at his rallies.
American politics has always been
unpleasant; Trump has just removed the
mask of civility. What is extraordinary, how-
ever, is the extent to which he has turned
the Democrats into the nasty (or nastier)
party. Trump’s enemies continue to fall into
the silly traps that he lays out before them.
Senior Democrats now compete to out-do
him in the uncouth stakes, while still pre-
tending to occupy the moral high ground.
A party like that deserves Hillary Clinton.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Freddy Gray presents the weekly
Americano podcast.
13
 All the rage
When did America forget its manners?
JOHN R. M ACARTHUR
M
y father, an avowed liberal, taught
me old-school manners: hold
the door and give up your seat
for ladies; stand up when anyone, male or
female, enters the room or approaches you
at a social gathering; extend your hand in
greeting; listen politely when others speak.
My mother issued similar instructions in
French, and as a consequence I almost never
fail to say bonjour before I address a French
merchant or telephone operator. Now 93, she
recently admonished me that ‘one shouldn’t
make fun of people for being incapable of
doing this thing or that thing’.
So it’s come as a rude surprise that good
manners and polite behaviour seem to
have disappeared wholesale from American
society. In business life and in social situa-
tions — to say nothing of social media —
indifference to what once passed for social
norms has grown to alarmingly high levels.
Vile and insulting language has become the
standard, not the exception, to the point
where the lessons I learned as a child have
become largely irrelevant.
Blame for the rise in national coarseness
naturally leans toward Donald Trump, whose
public mockery of everything from John
McCain’s experience as a POW, to the handi-
capped, to Christine Blasey Ford’s imprecise
memory, to Stormy Daniels’s ‘horseface’ has
set the bar both higher and lower than at any
time in recent memory. To be sure, Trump
sets a bad example for everybody. It’s hard
to imagine a worse role model for children,
since every act of Trump misconduct seems
to lead to greater gratification and rewards
for the child king of the US.
But more distressing than the daily bar-
rage of offensive tweets is that the Trump
effect has apparently taken hold of my once-
proper fellow liberals and left-wingers. Over
the past several months, the ‘opposition’ to
our President has become outrageously
Trump-like, and I fear where it will lead.
It’s dangerous to generalise, of course.
Before the civil rights movement took hold,
southern ‘hospitality’ and courtliness often
masked violent and vicious tendencies, main-
ly aimed at blacks but also toward poor whites.
In Chicago, near where I grew up, Mayor
Richard J. Daley could be extraordinarily
14
rude to anyone who crossed him. And I’m
aware that lots of contemporary liberals and
conservatives maintain a minimum level of
courtesy in their public and private dealings.
Yet I can’t help noticing the degradation
of everyday politeness in my immediate cir-
cle of political, media, and social acquaint-
ances. It’s partly the tweeted insults, many
of them unprintable, that I received in my
recent confrontation with #MeToo support-
ers over an essay we published in Harper’s
Magazine by a formerly prominent radio
journalist, a ‘male aggressor’ of the type they
want permanently banished. Hate tweets on
a mass scale are something new in the world,
and that they come from people who alleg-
edly align with the oppressed — sometimes
women, sometimes minorities, sometimes
It’s come as a rude surprise that
polite behaviour seems to have
disappeared wholesale from society
the handicapped or otherwise disadvan-
taged — is sadly ironic. I’ve been subjected
to hate mail from right-wingers — the worst
was for my appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s
O’Reilly Factor on Fox News just after 9/11.
But letters, no matter how enraged, threat-
ening or incoherent, don’t match the feroc-
ity of a Twitter storm. And even if they hate
you, the letter writers usually feel obliged to
make something resembling an argument,
not just to express an angry sentiment.
The #MeTooer of the moment is Rebecca
Traister, a writer who relishes the broadside
insult. In a recent New York Times interview,
she was quoted on the beneficial effects of
white-hot anger: ‘In early 2017,’ outraged by
the defeat of Hillary Clinton, ‘I was walking
with my husband, and I felt like my brain
was going to boil. I was telling him how hard
it was for me to think because I was so angry.
He said to me, “Well, maybe that’s your
book: anger.” I was like: “Of course, that’s
my book.” ’ The resulting volume is titled
Good and Mad.
I also feel incoherently mad some-
times, but mostly I manage to keep it under
wraps. One of those recent occasions was
in a crowded elevator headed to a party on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
normally I could expect to meet lots of
like-minded liberals. During the ride up, a
left-wing editor with whom I’ve had friendly
relations for years practically shouted at me:
‘Well, you’ve been in trouble lately. How’s
it feel?’ She was obviously referring to the
piece by the banished male malefactor, and
I was frankly shocked at the aggressive tone
and at her asking the question in front of
strangers on the way to a social event.
Suppressing the urge to rebuke her for
rudeness, I used what’s become my stock
response: I had published far more contro-
versial pieces that provoked much more
dangerous reactions, so the #MeToo Twitter
storm wasn’t much to fear. Unsatisfied with
my response, she shifted her attention to my
wife: ‘How do you feel about the piece, as a
woman?’ It was a rude question, given my
female editor and I had published the piece,
not my wife.
Once at the party, I thought I was safe.
Almost immediately, however, I was intro-
duced to another defenestrated ‘male
aggressor’, a radio personality whose show I
very much missed. Assuming he was an ally,
I told him that I’d published the controver-
sial piece by his former radio colleague, who
happens to be paralysed and confined to a
wheelchair. Rudely, he dismissed my writer’s
case. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he confided. ‘He
[my writer] actually was culpable — he did
some bad things.’ No solidarity among lib-
eral victims, handicapped or not, but plenty
of nastiness and no politesse.
I’d feel better if I was pure and princi-
pled in all this, but I’ve been infected, too.
Angered, even enraged, by the firing of Ian
Buruma at the New York Review of Books
for publishing a piece by another disgraced
‘bad man’, the one-time Canadian radio
journalist Jian Ghomeshi, I tried to rally sup-
port for the idea of freedom of expression. I
twice attempted to reach the publisher of the
NYRB, Rea Hederman, a southerner whom
I know to be a gentleman. But he never
returned my phone calls. I then tried to con-
tact NYRB’s associate publisher, Catherine
Tice, to make the same argument: never give
in to a mob for publishing something unpop-
ular. Stand by your editor and don’t cave in
to advertising pressure. She at least returned
an email saying she would talk to me, but
since then it’s been radio silence.
During this brief campaign, I had asked
my assistant, a woman, to place the multi-
ple calls to NYRB. Voicing frustration about
what she felt was a runaround from the
NYRB receptionist, I lost my temper and
called the receptionist myself. His tone was
arrogant, and I started arguing with him, so
he hung up on me. I called back and shouted
into the phone: ‘Let me speak to someone in
authority!’ My late father would have been
appalled. I’m not telling my mother.
John R. MacArthur is the publisher of
Harper’s Magazine.

The march of the migrants
poses a dilemma for the US
T
rump has hinted that Democrats may
have been secretly funding the ‘car-
avan’ of more than 7,000 Honduran
immigrants trooping towards the United
States. I don’t think so. In the lead-up to the
midterms, if any party would sponsor by far
the largest organised mass migration to the
US on record, Republicans would.
For politically, the spectacle is a gift.
Thousands of clamorous would-be asy-
lum seekers crammed onto a bridge
with no toilets, stampeding, breaking into
fights, demanding to cross the Mexican
border, the better to gatecrash the US: it
was a premier photo op for anti-immigra-
tion Republicans. Trump has threatened to
close the American border and bring in the
military. Nevertheless, most of the Hondu-
rans leapt from the bridge to swim or be
ferried to the Mexican side of the Suchiate
River, and are now streaming toward their
last hurdle, protected by Mexican federal
police. It’s El Norte or bust.
The image of that multitude on the
move, full of women clutching scream-
ing babies while vowing never to return to
a homeland grown intolerable, isn’t just a
snapshot of the present, but a vision of the
future. More than the terrorism it may abet
and the climate change that may spur it,
mass migration, all in one direction, is this
century’s biggest story.
Defending his resolve to keep the car-
avan from entering the US, Trump has
described many of the Hondurans as ‘bad
people’. And OK, it’s possible a throng des-
perate to leave rampant violence behind
includes a handful of gang members, since
maybe the most dangerous country in the
world isn’t even safe for thugs. But Trump is
missing the point, for impugning particular
immigrants as ‘bad people’ is a losing argu-
ment. The problem isn’t that they’re bad. The
problem is that they’re people.
Perfectly deserving people, who had the
lousy luck to be born in a shitty place. In
every single media interview I’ve encoun-
tered, a migrant’s story has been sympathet-
ic. In this sense, the open-borders contingent
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
LIONEL SHRIVER
wins hands down, every time. Last week, the
Hondurans on Channel 4 News seemed very
warm and very nice.
Across the West, we hear the same
appeal, and it’s always persuasive: these are
people who only want to work, to find safe
homes in which to raise their families and
to embrace a ‘better life’ — our better life.
The sole difference between them and us
isn’t qualitative but geographical: they’re
there and we’re here. We’re lucky; they’re
not. Good or bad fortune isn’t meritocratic.
Americans have no more of a moral right
to dry homes and safe streets than those
Hondurans do. The issue of immigration
intersects with scores of moral issues, but it
Americans have no more of a
moral right to dry homes and safe
streets than those Hondurans do
isn’t about morality. It’s about self-interest.
That’s what makes it so uncomfortable. The
pursuit of self-interest isn’t necessarily con-
comitant with the pursuit of virtue.
Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El
Salvador all suffer from high crime, politi-
cal instability and economic malaise. If poor
prospects and a culture of violence justi-
fy asylum, every citizen of these countries
qualifies. That’s 39 million people. Given the
recent example of Venezuela, the prospect
of whole nations simply emptying out isn’t
preposterous. Yet I don’t fancy my home city
of New York, already inundated with Cen-
tral Americans delivering pizzas on electric
bicycles, being flooded with still more mil-
lions of their compatriots, even if they’re
hard-working and ‘good people’.
I expect the left-wing media to continue
to trot out family after family, in immigra-
tion crisis after immigration crisis, to testify
on camera that they’ve come a terribly long
way, that they aspire only to thrive and that
the circumstances they fled were horrid. The
petition is unerringly affecting: Jon Snow
can’t lose. But this is the wrong conversa-
tion, just as Trump’s accusing the Honduran
caravan of being riddled with ‘bad people’ is
the wrong conversation. If the test is wheth-
er immigrants are fellow humans just like us,
and whether they come from a worse place
than the country they want in to, we pretty
much let them all in. With such a no-brainer,
there isn’t a conversation to be had.
But the right conversation is a bitch.
Europe lies next door to a continent whose
population will double to 2.5 billion by 2050,
rising to an eye-popping 4.5 billion by 2100.
This is the continent likely to suffer the most
from climate change, already afflicted with
desertification, and always prone to drought.
It’s poor and corrupt. Its governance is broad-
ly appalling. And most Africans have mobiles,
connecting them to promised lands where life
isn’t quite so nasty, brutish and short.
For the US, that surge of Hondurans is
a wavelet in an incoming tide; for Europe,
2015 was mere prelude. Yet this autumn’s
caravan may further entrench an effective
protocol. Populous, organised assaults on
borders can overcome physical barriers and
overwhelm bureaucracies. Migrants try-
ing to get into Ceuta and Melilla have had
remarkable success with storming the fences
simultaneously. Should they take their cue
from the Hondurans, canny migrants cur-
rently chafing in Libya might all hit the Med
in a flotilla on the same afternoon.
Millions if not billions of decent, ordinary
people in need of food, clean water, shelter
and medical care are bound to constitute a
form of moral blackmail. They will all have
heartbreaking stories. And if we continue to
confront the issue as a question of sympathy
rather than existential self-interest, they will
nearly all get in.
Thomas Friedman has astutely charac-
terised the West vs the rest as order vs disor-
der. But with over-stressed welfare systems,
accelerating cultural upheaval and rising
right-wing militancy, the lands of order can
slide to chaos themselves. If in the next few
decades we’re looking at migration on the
scale I think we are, we may be required to
develop a hard heart, or simply surrender to
forces larger than we can control. I’m not
sure which is worse.
15
 Homage to Ambazonia
Anglophones are rising up against Francophones in Cameroon
COLIN FREEMAN
Calabar, Nigeria
S
imon Ngwa is a gentle and polite man,
and he apologised to me first for what
he was about to say. ‘I’m sorry if this
upsets you, but we in Cameroon are very
bitter towards Britain,’ he said. ‘As a child, I
was taught to look up to the British Crown
as a symbol of fair play and the Queen as
a guarantor of moral values. But Britain is
doing nothing to stop this genocide.’
Mr Ngwa and I had our conversation in a
shabby refugee centre in the Nigerian town
of Calabar, on Cameroon’s western frontier.
Despite his impeccable manners, Mr Ngwa
is a wanted man back home in Cameroon.
His crime? To have been a member of the
Southern Cameroons National Council, a
group campaigning for independence for
Cameroon’s English-speaking minority.
Compared with Boko Haram, the Niger
Delta Avengers and some of the other out-
law crazies rampaging round this corner of
West Africa, the council doesn’t sound like a
very scary bunch. But right now, standing up
for the rights of English-speakers in Franco-
phone Cameroon can get you killed.
Did you even know there were English
speakers in Cameroon? Most people don’t.
They think of it as a French-speaking place
that sends us the odd good football player. I
suspect that most Britons are unaware that
we even left a colonial footprint there, let
alone a forgotten tribe of Anglophiles like
Mr Ngwa. All that may be about to change.
After half a century as one of Africa’s most
stable states, Cameroon is sliding into a
vicious, though largely unreported, civil war.
On one side are the five million Anglo-
phones. Their region, they say, is under-devel-
oped, with all the best jobs in government
hogged by French speakers. On the other
side, meanwhile, is Cameroon’s strongman,
President Paul Biya, who has clung to power
since 1982, and who absolutely refuses to
countenance any Anglophone demands for
a fairer deal. The fissures in ‘La République’
first opened up in 2016, when Anglophones
protested against plans to impose French-
speaking judges on them. The government
responded with a violent crackdown on pro-
testors and the troubles began.
Two years later, towns like Bamenda,
16
Mr Ngwa’s home town, are seeing atrocities
committed by both sides daily. I joined the
Anglophones’ WhatsApp group last week
and my phone has ever since been spitting
out images of slaughter and mayhem in a way
that it normally only does in Iraq or Libya.
Some of the horrors are carried out by
Mr Biya’s feared Battalion d’Intervention
Rapide, a US-trained military force known
by Anglophones as ‘The Beer’. Others are
the work of Anglophone ‘self-defence’
groups, which have sprung up by the dozen
in the past year. They’re not armed with
much more than machetes, clubs and Dane
guns — homemade muskets first brought
in by Nordic colonial traders. So usually all
After half a century as one of
Africa’s most stable states, Cameroon
is sliding into a vicious civil war
they can manage is to kidnap, kill and occa-
sionally behead the odd Beer member. They
also organised a widespread Anglophone
boycott of the recent presidential elections
which did nothing to stop Biya winning
again.
So where does Britain come into all this?
Speak to any Anglophone activist, and you’ll
soon find out. It all goes back to the end of
the first world war, when what was then
German-run Kamerun was divvied up into
a big French chunk and a smaller British
chunk, known as British Cameroons.
The latter was brought to life in the writ-
ings of Gerald Durrell, who spent much of his
time downing gin there with the Fon of Bafut,
‘I’ve come as Jo Whiley.’
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
a bibulous Anglophone chief who helped him
collect green-leaf vipers and flying mice.
The British Cameroons ceased to exist
in 1961, when there was a referendum
and Anglophones had to decide wheth-
er to become part of Nigeria or join up
with their French brethren. Many wanted
self-rule instead, including the Fon, who
famously described the referendum as a
choice between ‘the Fire and the Deep
Sea’. But independence was ruled out by
Foreign Office mandarins, who traditional-
ly frowned on plucky little statelets wanting
to go it alone.
Times, though, have changed. With Brex-
it Britain now seen around the world as the
champion of the go-it-alone cause, Cam-
eroon’s separatists think they deserve our
support. They dream of a breakaway state
called Ambazonia, which, they point out,
would have the same population as Scot-
land and even bigger oil reserves. ‘If Scot-
land can have independence, why can’t we?’
asked Mr Ngwa.
In practice, all Britain is likely to do is
join forces with America and France to prod
Mr Biya into giving some devolved powers,
though he has not shown much interest so far,
which is why ‘Ambazonians’ think their only
option is to carve out a homeland by force.
This plan doesn’t look very promising either,
if their military field-craft is anything to go by.
‘Robert’, a fighter with an Anglophone
group called the Red Dragons, told me that
his unit had relied mainly on magic charms
when fighting Mr Biya’s troops. By abstain-
ing from sex and wearing no metal zips
or studs in their clothes, they could make
themselves bullet-proof, he told me. Then
he added: ‘In my first battle, seven of my
comrades died. Nearly every time we fight
them, they win.’
Still, rather like the impasse in Catalo-
nia, the heavy-handedness of the govern-
ment response has all but ruled out a return
to the status quo. And judging by the way
Anglophones now spit out the word ‘La
République’, there’s every chance the war
will worsen.
True, it’s not yet at the stage of Rwan-
dan-style communal violence. Day to day,
Anglophones and Francophones still get on.
But it’s hard to see a way back. A younger,
internet-mobilised generation wants a bet-
ter hand than history has dealt it, but Mr
Biya, a throwback autocrat, sees compro-
mise as weakness.
And this is one colonial legacy that Brit-
ain might feel a prick of conscience about.
British student radicals might prefer to con-
centrate on lobbying Cambridge to return
its Benin Bronzes but in Cameroon people
are dying because they were lumped half a
century ago into a state that didn’t fit them.
Where’s the #BiyaMustFall campaign on
the campuses? When Mr Ngwa told me how
sad he was to be abandoned by the Crown, I
couldn’t think of much to say in our defence.
 ANCIENT AND MODERN
Doctors and death
The Royal College
of Physicians has suggested that doctors
should learn to talk to patients about
death. But talk about what, precisely?
The medical diagnosis? Matters
spiritual? Philosophical?
In a play about his fate, Prometheus,
the mythical champion of mankind,
said that he had benefited mortals by
preventing them from foreseeing their
death. Asked how, he replied ‘I lodged
blind hopes in them’. This reflected
a school of medical thought which
took the view that offering the patient
encouragement could prevent them
‘giving up on themselves’ and actually
keep them alive.
Not everyone took that approach. In
a world where anyone could become a
doctor (we hear of 18-year-olds starting
to practise), it was vital to maintain one’s
reputation. So doctors were advised to
steer clear of treating the dying. Those
observing the ‘scientific’ teachings of
Hippocrates (5th century bc) simply
confined themselves to ‘rational’
assessments of whether a patient would
improve or survive. The famous doctor
Galen (2nd century ad), accurately
describing the slow decline that we still
recognise today (pre-senility, senility, last
days), did alleviate the early signs, but
agreed that the time came when one had
to walk away.
The ancient philosophers filled the
gap with sage observations: ‘we are dying
every day’, ‘Are you lengthening your
living or your dying?’, ‘Should you obey
Nature or Nature obey you?’ But one
wonders what purpose that served. In
that world, a third of children would be
dead before their first year, a half before
their fifth: every child who made it to five
would have had first-hand experience
of the death of many siblings. Only 8 per
cent would make it to sixty. Reflections
about death carved on epitaphs often
record some comfort in it.
But in today’s world of advanced
medicine and virtual (how virtuous!)
reality, the natural world seems far away.
Can doctors, then, bent on frustrating
nature, make the best comforters or
philosophers?
Atlantic publishes Peter Jones’s
Memento Mori: What the Romans can
Tell Us about Old Age and Death on
1 November.
— Peter Jones
18
Blood Brotherhood
Erdogan is using Khashoggi’s murder to his advantage
HANNAH LUCINDA SMITH
Istanbul
I
n another time, in another place, we
might never have known about the death
of Jamal Khashoggi. In a Saudi consu-
late, the staff are guaranteed to say nothing.
The reason we know so much is that Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has
been willing to tell the world not just what he
knows, but what he suspects. It has been clear
from the offset that this isn’t just about the
death of a journalist but a battle for political
leadership of the Islamic world.
On Tuesday, in his first full statement on
Khashoggi’s killing, Erdogan said that the
perpetrators should stand trial in Turkey, and
that everyone responsible should be pun-
ished ‘from the highest to the lowest’. It was
a warning shot, clearly intended for the Saudi
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who
now has to answer for Khashoggi’s murder.
But Erdogan also offered a veiled threat to
anyone questioning his own motives in this
affair. ‘There has been a campaign of slander
and implication [against Turkey] in various
media,’ he said. ‘We know who is conduct-
ing this and what their purpose is. These
attempts on our country’s reputation will not
stop us from seeking the truth.’
Seeking the truth has become a danger-
ous business in Turkey. Erdogan has been
making a great fuss about the Khashoggi
affair but he’s no champion of free speech
and has executed his own press crackdown
in a less gruesome but no less enthusiastic
fashion than Saudi Arabia. Turkey has the
highest number of journalists behind bars of
any country in the world. Almost all critical
news outlets have been seized by the gov-
ernment or bullied into silence since the
2016 coup attempt. Meanwhile Erdogan’s
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
supporters have gradually expanded their
media influence. Earlier this year, a large
media group which had long been critical
of Erdogan’s AK Party was purchased by a
government-allied businessman.
It’s worth remembering that almost
everything we know about Khashoggi’s dis-
appearance we know from media tamed by
Erdogan. Most of the leaks, from the grisly
details of how Khashoggi was carved up with
a bone saw, to the latest revelation that a
member of the hit squad donned his clothes
and walked out of the consulate to make
it appear that he was alive, have appeared
in the pro-palace pages of Yeni Safak and
This isn’t just about the death of a
journalist but a battle for political
leadership of the Islamic world
Sabah. (The latter is owned in part by the
brother of Erdogan’s son-in-law.)
The first statement on Khashoggi’s dis-
appearance came from the Turkish-Arab
Media Association, which is run by Fatih
Oke, a former bureaucrat in Turkey’s press
ministry. This ministry has traditionally
been used to keep an eye on what foreign
journalists are saying about Erdogan, rath-
er than providing us with helpful informa-
tion, and in June, after Erdogan won his
re-election, it was taken under full control
of the presidency. In a statement released
last week, after Riyadh finally admitted that
Khashoggi had died in the consulate, the
association extended ‘thanks to our Presi-
dent Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who always
makes us feel the support he has for us, who
manages this whole process with great devo-
tion and diplomacy’.
The association shares a building in
Istanbul with various Syrian and Egyptian
journalists in exile. Since the start of the
Arab Spring, Istanbul has become a haven
for a certain type of dissident. Anyone ban-
ished from their own country for their con-
nections with the Muslim Brotherhood will
find refuge in Erdogan’s Turkey.
From here, these dissidents can freely run
Arabic-language radio stations and news
websites criticising their regimes back home.
As a result, Erdogan is now more popular
overseas than in Turkey. He is seen as the
leader of a rising brand of political Islam. If
you scan social media, you will find scores
of Urdu and Indonesian fan pages devoted
to him, as well as Arabic ones. In footage of
recent anti-Assad demonstrations in north-
ern Syria, Turkish flags fluttered alongside
Syria’s opposition flag.
So accommodating is Erdogan of the
journalists who subscribe to his politics that
two years ago he hosted a group of Syrian
media activists for a round table at his pal-
ace in Ankara. It is an invitation that he has
never once, in the five years I have been
working in Turkey, extended to journal-
ists working for western media outlets. One
member of the Syrian group at the palace,
who dared to post a cheeky selfie on Face-
book showing him pulling a funny face with
Erdogan in the background, was, as a result,
cast out by the community of Muslim Broth-
erhood activists.
Khashoggi, too, was an open supporter of
the Brotherhood — and that is key to under-
standing Erdogan’s interest in his case. The
two men had met on at least one occasion, and
Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancée had written for a
publication edited by members of Erdogan’s
court. Just before his death, Khashoggi was
preparing to establish himself within Turkey’s
circle of Brotherhood exiles. Late last month
he bought an apartment in Istanbul with his
fiancée, and on his final weekend in London
Andrew Neil Fraser Nelson
BOOK NOW
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
‘Nope — still can’t see Brexit.’
he told other delegates about his plans to set
up a news channel in Istanbul.
Erdogan’s own links with the Brother-
hood go back a long way but have grown
stronger in the wake of the Arab Spring.
When the movement seized power in Egypt
Since the start of the Arab Spring,
Istanbul has become a haven for
a certain type of dissident
in 2011, Erdogan saw his chance to posi-
tion himself as the leader of the new Mid-
dle East. This was a direct challenge to Saudi
Arabia, the leader of the old Middle East
and an avowed enemy of the Brotherhood.
When the Brotherhood government
in Egypt was ousted by military coup only
two years later, Erdogan’s dream began to
crumble. Meanwhile, the Syrian opposition
— again, Brotherhood-led and based in
James Forsyth
TICKETS
Subscriber £35 (Includes drinks
Standard £40 and canapés)
Istanbul — had collapsed into infighting and
ineffectuality. By last year, Erdogan’s only
state-level friend in the region was Qatar —
another country that backs the Brotherhood.
When Riyadh launched its economic war
against Turkey over its support for the Mus-
lim Brotherhood, Doha sided with Erdogan,
filling its supermarkets with Turkish prod-
ucts and sending troops on joint exercises.
Then came the rise of Crown Prince
Mohammad bin Salman — a ruthless power-
grabber who despises the Brotherhood. His
appointment as heir to the throne in June
last year precipitated Khashoggi’s exile from
Saudi Arabia three months later. In March,
MBS, by then the most powerful man in the
kingdom, publicly described Turkey as ‘part
of the triangle of evil’. Erdogan now hopes
to reframe the political dynamics across the
region by using Khashoggi’s death to under-
mine the Saudi Crown Prince’s authority.
Khashoggi was a brave and honest critic
of MBS, though not of his father, King Sal-
man, nor of the Saudi monarchy more gen-
erally. His murder has rightly provoked
outrage. But this is about more than one jour-
nalist who knew and was saying too much. It
is about a huge faultline in the Middle East.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Hannah Lucinda Smith and Azzam Tamimi
on the Muslim Brotherhood.
18
19
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In defence of Nick Clegg
A
s I write, the sneering at Nick Clegg
has started. The first cuckoo I’ve
heard in this chorus is calling from
the left. Last week Nesrine Malik in the
Guardian launched a scornful attack on Mr
Clegg’s decision to quit public life in Britain
and join Facebook in America. ‘Thanks for
nothing,’ she says.
I feel sad about the paper Ms Malik writes
for. The Guardian took an historic wrong-
turning when in 2010 it decided not to be inter-
ested in the possibilities for centre/centre-left
co-operation. These days the paper often
sounds like the voice of the Labour left:
rasping and angry rather than the open-
minded and inquisitive liberal voice it once
was. Malik and her fellow Guardian column-
ist Gary Younge last week removed them-
selves from the nominations for this year’s
Comment Awards on the grounds that they
didn’t want to be on the same list as my
Times colleague Melanie Phillips. This is the
first time I’ve seen ‘no-platforming’ invad-
ing mainstream Fleet Street and it’s a baleful
development. Am I to stop writing for The
Spectator on the grounds that I don’t want
to appear between the same covers as (say)
Rod Liddle or James Delingpole? But I love
being in the same magazine as these nin-
compoops, offering readers (as I suppose)
respite. One has a civic duty as a columnist
to show readers there is a better world.
But this column’s purpose is to lament the
fate of men and women in public life today
who have tried to steer a middle course, only
to be mocked — or, worse, savaged — by the
extremes of left and right in our new century.
Malik accused Clegg of ‘quite simply flee-
ing the scene’. She complains about those
who, on quitting politics, seek work out-
side politics that is well-rewarded. Her tar-
gets all seem to be centrists. She concludes
that ‘Clegg’s decamping is a good remind-
er of what landed us with Brexit in the
first place — the recklessness of politicians
for whom the stakes are very different’.
This is wholly unjust. You could level
the criticism (though I would not) at Jacob
Rees-Mogg, whose well-remunerated work
in wealth management (you might com-
plain) insulates him from the consequences
of Brexit for poorer folk. But I don’t believe
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
MATTHEW PARRIS
Mr Rees-Mogg is careless of the poor; he
probably believes the Brexit project would
make everyone richer. And Clegg used his
time as deputy prime minister to lift the
poor out of taxation; most of his efforts were
directed towards the less advantaged; then
when Brexit loomed he worked tirelessly
for Remain, for precisely the reason that it
would hurt those less wealthy than himself.
His decision now to seek work elsewhere
reflects nothing about his personal compas-
sion. It reflects his conclusion that no useful
place for him in British politics is available,
and that his energies will be wasted. He has
made an entirely practical choice.
Malik is described by her own newspaper
as ‘a former private equity investor’. What is
I lament the fate of those in public
life who have tried to steer a middle
course and have been mocked for it
she saying, then? That Clegg organised his
own career progression in the wrong order?
But we could guess at Clegg’s or Malik’s
inner motivations until the cows come home.
Instead, I start from Clegg’s conclusion that
there is no political future for him and his
abilities in today’s Britain. I take that as a
fact. If you know a way he could get back
into politics, tell me — or, rather, tell him.
I know only that at a critical time, in the
wake of the economic crisis of 2008, when
after an inconclusive general election inter-
national confidence in Britain’s ability to
get itself a proper government could have
collapsed, Clegg took the risk of leading a
reluctant party into a difficult coalition. I
hope Malik was cheering him on. For Brit-
ain (and in the event, David Cameron) it
proved a lifesaver. For Clegg and his party
it was a disaster.
As a man he paid a devastating price.
Sniped at throughout in the most personal
terms, denounced as a traitor and turncoat,
as two-faced, as a liar and a quisling, exco-
riated by the Tory right as the obstacle to
their purist ideological plans, undermined
by Tim Farron and Vince Cable in his own
party, and scorned by the Labour left as a
Tory collaborator, Clegg would have needed
the hide of a rhinoceros for it not to hurt.
He lacks the hide of a rhinoceros and it did
hurt. But he soldiered on until, widely reject-
ed within his party, his constituents kicked
him out. So now, still young, he’s looking for
a new career. Can you blame him?
He’ll be fine. It isn’t his personal politi-
cal homelessness for which we need to weep,
but the new unfashionability of moderates
in politics with the courage to compromise.
Centrists have so much to be proud of in
the years since Margaret Thatcher came
to power. Labour could have died without
Tony Blair. ‘New’ Labour might never have
gained traction without the brave defections
of Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David
Owen. As for Mrs Thatcher’s achievements
in office, where would she have been with-
out William Whitelaw, Peter Walker, Jim
Prior, Peter Carrington or Francis Pym, gen-
tly steering her away from the rocks? Who
could have brought the Tories election vic-
tory in 1992 but John Major? Where would
Britain be without the work of Michael Hes-
eltine or Chris Patten?
These are the men and women and this
is the thinking that kept me and countless
others in the Conservative party. If I were
18 today — indeed if any of them were 18
— would we be attracted to the Tories as our
natural party? I hear Conservative voices
— sour, harsh or angrily uncompromising,
sometimes on these pages — whose whole
tone is calculated to push people away. And
the same is true of the left.
Well, they’ve pushed Nick Clegg away.
‘Thanks for nothing’? Thanks for so much.
But off he trudges, heading west. There will
be a sense of ‘good riddance’ among some
of my colleagues in Conservative journal-
ism. They could not be more wrong.
21
 How to save Brexit
Britain has nothing to fear from no deal
I
t’s pretty hard for Britain’s friends, here
in Australia, to make sense of the mess
that’s being made of Brexit. The refer-
endum result was perhaps the biggest-ever
vote of confidence in the United Kingdom,
its past and its future. But the British estab-
lishment doesn’t seem to share that confi-
dence and instead looks desperate to cut
a deal, even if that means staying under
the rule of Brussels. Looking at this from
abroad, it’s baffling: the country that did the
most to bring democracy into the modern
world might yet throw away the chance to
take charge of its own destiny.
Let’s get one thing straight: a negotiation
that you’re not prepared to walk away from
is not a negotiation — it’s surrender. It’s all
give and no get. When David Cameron tried
to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership, he
was sent packing because Brussels judged
(rightly) that he’d never actually back leav-
ing. And since then, Brussels has made no
real concessions to Theresa May because it
judges (rightly, it seems) that she’s desperate
for whatever deal she can get.
The EU’s palpable desire to punish Brit-
ain for leaving vindicates the Brexit project.
Its position, now, is that there’s only one
‘deal’ on offer, whereby the UK retains all
of the burdens of EU membership but with
no say in setting the rules. The EU seems
to think that Britain will go along with this
because it’s terrified of no deal. Or, to put it
another way, terrified of the prospect of its
own independence.
But even after two years of fearmon-
gering and vacillation, it’s not too late for
robust leadership to deliver the Brexit
that people voted for. It’s time for Britain
to announce what it will do if the EU can’t
make an acceptable offer by March 29 next
year — and how it would handle no deal.
Freed from EU rules, Britain would auto-
matically revert to world trade, using rules
agreed by the World Trade Organization. It
works pretty well for Australia. So why on
earth would it not work just as well for the
world’s fifth-largest economy?
A world trade Brexit lets Britain set
its own rules. It can say, right now, that
it will not impose any tariff or quota on
European produce and would recognise
22
TONY ABBOTT
all EU product standards. That means no
border controls for goods coming from
Europe to Britain. You don’t need to negoti-
ate this: just do it. If Europe knows what’s in
its own best interests, it would fully recipro-
cate in order to maintain entirely free trade
and full mutual recognition of standards
right across Europe.
Next, the UK should declare that Euro-
peans already living here should have the
right to remain permanently — and, of
course, become British citizens if they wish.
This should be a unilateral offer. Again, you
A negotiation that you’re not
prepared to walk away from is not
a negotiation: it’s surrender
don’t need a deal. You don’t need Michel
Barnier’s permission. If Europe knows
what’s best for itself, it would likewise allow
Britons to stay where they are.
Third, there should continue to be free
movement of people from Europe into
Britain — but with a few conditions. Only
for work, not welfare. And with a foreign
worker’s tax on the employer, to make sure
anyone coming in would not be displacing
British workers.
Fourth, no ‘divorce bill’ whatsoever
should be paid to Brussels. The UK gov-
ernment would assume the EU’s property
and liabilities in Britain, and the EU would
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
assume Britain’s share of these in Europe.
If Britain was getting its fair share, these
would balance out; and if Britain wasn’t
getting its fair share, it’s the EU that should
be paying Britain.
Finally, there’s no need on Britain’s
part for a hard border with Ireland. Britain
wouldn’t be imposing tariffs on European
goods, so there’s no money to collect. The
UK has exactly the same product stand-
ards as the Republic, so let’s not pretend
you need to check for problems we all know
don’t exist. Some changes may be needed
but technology allows for smart borders:
there was never any need for a Cold War-
style Checkpoint Charlie. Irish citizens, of
course, have the right to live and work in the
UK in an agreement that long predates EU
membership.
Of course, the EU might not like this
British leap for independence. It might hit
out with tariffs and impose burdens on Brit-
ain as it does on the US — but WTO rules
put a cap on any retaliatory action. The
worst it can get? We’re talking levies of an
average 4 or 5 per cent. Which would be
more than offset by a post-Brexit devalu-
ation of the pound (which would have the
added bonus of making British goods more
competitive everywhere).
UK officialdom assumes that a deal is
vital, which is why so little thought has been
put into how Britain might just walk away.
Instead, officials have concocted lurid sce-
narios featuring runs on the pound, gridlock
at ports, grounded aircraft, hoarding of med-
icines and flights of investment. It’s been the
pre-referendum Project Fear campaign on
steroids. And let’s not forget how employ-
ment, investment and economic growth
ticked up after the referendum.
As a former prime minister of Austral-
ia and a lifelong friend of your country,
I would say this: Britain has nothing to lose
except the shackles that the EU imposes on
it. After the courage shown by its citizens
in the referendum, it would be a tragedy if
political leaders go wobbly now. Britain’s
future has always been global, rather than
just with Europe. Like so many of Britain’s
admirers, I want to see this great country
seize this chance and make the most of it.
 We strive to
discover more.
Aberdeen’s Asian Investment Trusts
ISA and Share Plan
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 Mad about the beast
Twitchers must learn when to back off
ISABEL HARDMAN
R
ichmond Park is an eerie place at
this time of year. It’s not just that it’s
the deer rutting season, when huge
stags fight over their harems, charging heav-
ily about the misty grassland and bellowing
as they go. It’s also the herds of photogra-
phers looming out of that mist, as strange as
the prehistoric cries of the deer. Deer rut-
ting is one of the most spectacular sights
of autumn, and if you’re an amateur wild-
life photographer like me, it’s hard to resist
the attraction of rising early to photograph a
200kg monster roaring into the dawn.
I did just that last week, pedalling my
way to the park in the morning gloaming,
tripod on my back and a bag full of camera
batteries. Shortly after I arrived, I heard my
first stag. It was still too dark and the mist
too thick to make out anything other than a
collection of jaggedy shapes in the distance,
so I crept closer over the soggy grass, and
peered through my long lens. Sure enough,
there was a tremendous beast, stalking
around a collection of does, his antlers the
size of a sapling. But not all the shapes were
deer. Surrounding the animals was a second
herd of men wearing camouflage and clutch-
ing long lenses.
These photographers were creeping
closer and closer to the animals. I must have
been about 80 metres away from the herd,
and that felt close enough. These men —
and they were all men — can’t have been
more than 20 metres away. Some were even
closer. I had come for the stags, but I ended
up being fascinated by the way the need
for the perfect photo meant these snap-
pers were quite happy to put themselves in
harm’s way: not only are stags heavy, they’re
also fast and can move at 40 miles an hour.
And in the rutting season, they’re so full
of testosterone that they’ll attack anything
that comes between them and their sex
drive. A couple of years ago, a woman was
gored by one.
Those interested in these things will rec-
ognise the behaviour of these men. It’s not
limited to wildlife photographers, but also
to a dedicated subset of naturalists known
as ‘twitchers’. While some photographers
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
will do anything to get the perfect shot,
twitchers collect lists of the rare birds and
animals that they’ve seen. Both will hap-
pily travel hundreds of miles, take risks to
themselves and, more controversially, the
animals around them.
It was presumably those foolhardy pho-
tographers who the Royal Parks had in mind
when it warned visitors getting too close to
the deer that they were threatening their
own lives and also the wellbeing of the ani-
mals they had become obsessed with. Adam
Curtis, who manages Richmond Park, said:
‘Once, I counted 60 photographers encir-
Turn up to any natural spectacle
and you’ll find people for whom an
obsession has turned rather dark
cling a single stag. There are some very
responsible wildlife photographers out
there, but sadly there are far too many who
value the photo over the subject.’
It’s not just during the Richmond rut-
ting season that the behaviour of humans is
almost more breathtaking than the animals
they’re looking for. Turn up to see any natu-
ral spectacle, whether stags, rare birds or an
unusual orchid, and you’ll find that among
the crowd of admirers are people for whom
an obsession has turned rather dark.
In a few cases, the warnings do get
through, convincing some twitchers and
photographers to change their habits. David
Morris is a conservationist in northern Eng-
land, and he gave up the practice of chas-
ing after a new rare bird when he became
‘I didn’t realise there was a service charge.’
tired of the behaviour of a minority of those
around him. ‘There was a lightbulb moment;
I saw some photographers pushing too close,
the use of tape lures [when photographers
play a tape of the call of the bird they are
trying to see in order to flush it out of hid-
ing] and flushing birds out of vegetation
when they didn’t show sufficiently well.
I came to the conclusion that personally I’d
rather see birds in their home range, not as
some wind-blown, knackered target.’
Joe Harkness has written a book, Bird
Therapy, about how he uses birdwatching
to help manage his obsessive compulsive
disorder. He gave up local twitching when
he realised it was actually making his mental
health worse.
‘I went on this twitch where there was
this bird that appeared in Norfolk,’ he says.
‘There were hundreds of people. It was hor-
rific. They were encircling this bird. I leaned
forward, saw it, and then this bloke asked
me if I’d seen it. When I said yes, he physi-
cally picked me up and lifted me out of the
way so he could see it.’
Even those who do enjoy a good twitch
fret about some of the people they find them-
selves alongside. Sean Cole is a twitcher and
orchid enthusiast, and once travelled from
the Isle of Rum in Scotland to near Land’s
End in order to see two different birds. He
fell asleep on arrival in Land’s End and
missed the hermit thrush he was on the hunt
for, having had to wait a tense two hours to
see it. ‘When I hear that there’s a bird around
that I “need” [haven’t seen],’ he says, ‘I won’t
rest until I see it. I just don’t feel right until I
do, and if I decide not to try to get there and
I hear that other people have seen the bird,
that can haunt me for life.’
Nevertheless, Cole dislikes twitchers
who become so obsessed with their subject
that they are prepared to put animals in
danger. He tells the story of a grey-cheeked
thrush, freshly arrived on the Isles of Scil-
ly from America, which ended up hopping
further and further away from the crowd
of over-zealous twitchers until eventual-
ly a large wave swept the exhausted crea-
ture into the sea and drowned it. He was
also exasperated this summer when orchid-
hunters ended up trampling over a col-
lection of rare bright green fly orchids in
Kent. But he does think that the destruc-
tion of habitats through ignorance of what’s
living there is a far greater problem than a
few clumsy obsessives.
I can’t mock twitchers: I’d arranged my
own trip to photograph the Kentish orchids
until they were destroyed. I’d like to think
that I’m a little daintier on my feet, and that
I wouldn’t break rules just to get the best
photo. But I do know that urge, even though
I don’t like it. It undermines the reason most
people become naturalists: when you’re pre-
pared to put yourself and the animal you’re
after in danger, then it’s no longer about the
wildlife, but about you.
25

The circus isn’t always a bad home for an animal
I
n a British circus, you will no longer find
big cats, dancing bears or sea lions bal-
ancing on balls. Anne, the last elephant,
paraded around the ring for the final time
almost a decade ago, after a circus career
lasting more than 50 years.
The only wild animals that continue to
perform under the big top are a fox, three
camels, three raccoons, four zebra, half a
dozen reindeer, a zebu, and a macaw called
Rio. This menagerie travels with two small
family- run traditional circuses, Circus
Mondao and Peter Jolly’s Circus.
Almost a million pounds have
been spent on each animal, trying
to get them banned from perform-
ing. The mighty Royal Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
(RSPCA) has been running this cam-
paign, alongside the Born Free Foun-
dation, PETA and the militant group
Animal Defenders. Earlier this year,
the British government announced a
ban on all wild animals in travelling
circuses by 2020.
Circus wasn’t built on wild ani-
mals, but on the horse. In 1768, 250
years ago this year, on an abandoned
patch of marshland near London’s
Waterloo, the retired cavalryman
Philip Astley and his wife Patty laid
out a rope in the shape of a ring. They
filled this magic circle with astounding
street acts — tumblers, jugglers, acro-
bats, clowns.
The size of this ring was determined
by the horses. After experimenting, the
Astleys found the best diameter was
42ft. This allowed riders to stand on horse-
back and canter around, using centrifugal
forces to keep them upright. Every circus
ring since has measured the same. (There
were some other animals in this first cir-
cus: a swarm of bees. Patty’s trick was to
ride around the ring smothered in them
as if wearing a giant muff.) It wasn’t until
over half a century later, with the arrival of
the American menagerie, that wild animals
were introduced to the British circus.
In a circus, Rio the macaw counts as a
wild animal, so he needs to be licensed. But
you can also buy a macaw without a licence
on the internet. Search and you’ll find plen-
26
Balancing act
DEA BIRKETT
ty: ‘Beautiful macaw parrot. Starting to
talk and dances. Will go on your hand and
lets you cuddle him and play with him. No
time wasters.’ A cage will cost you around
£70 from Amazon — ‘ideal for narrow
boats and caravan trips’. Anyone can take
a pet macaw away on holiday with them in
their motorhome. Yet the same bird will be
banned from travelling in a circus trailer. It
seems you’re only wild if you’re in the ring.
I don’t think big cats belong in the circus
environment. The days of Kasanga the lion
are long gone and I don’t mourn their loss.
The last lion left the British ring more than
ten years ago; the lion tamer Thomas Chip-
perfield has recently had his application to
present big cats refused. There weren’t any
big cats in Astley’s first astonishing shows
and there shouldn’t be any in circuses today.
But I don’t support a multi-million pound
campaign to rescue a macaw who may be
quite happy where he is — and definitely
happier than in a motorhome.
The call to ban circus animals — even a
macaw — is a great fundraiser for charities
like the RSPCA. It’s also a simple win. No
politicians, no prominent artistic directors,
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
no reality TV stars, no arena-filling comedi-
ans will stand up in defence of a minority
circus community with no clout. But if the
government and its allies were really con-
cerned about animal welfare, they’d focus
on domestic animals and those used in our
most established sports.
Almost 2,000 pet owners were prose-
cuted last year for abuse, yet no one advo-
cates a ban on keeping a dog or owning a
cat because of this. One in every 100 race-
horses dies as a result of competition or
training. The RSPCA doesn’t call to
outlaw horse racing. It doesn’t even
want a ban on racehorse whipping,
stating the ‘whip must be reduced
to the minimum needed to ensure
horse and jockey safety’. Yet in cir-
cus, they say, ‘forced training and per-
formance, loud noises and crowds of
people are often unavoidable reali-
ties for the animals’ and therefore
it has to be banned. No mention is
made of the crowds at Cheltenham.
It is still possible to see a circus
animal without having to pass through
a sea of screaming protesters. Early
this year, I watched an enchanting ani-
mal act by the contemporary French
circus company Bêtes de foire and
their dog Sokha at the Barbican the-
atre, as part of the highbrow London
International Mime Festival. Sokha
pretended to be dead. The human per-
formers tried to lift his legs to make
him walk; he refused. Afterwards,
nobody gathered at that distinguished
stage door to try to free Sokha. But
Rio hears screams of ‘Abuse!’ every night
he performs.
It is circus, not the animals, that is the
real target. The original pop-up, with its
nomadic lifestyle and exotic inhabitants,
isn’t house-trained. In a time of regula-
tion and fear, such fabulous unconformity
offends people. The intoxicating smell of
the sawdust ring has become offensive and
unclean. Circuses must be like everything
else, sanitised or banned. The campaign to
ban animals from the circus shows that the
world still mistrusts travelling people.
Dea Birkett is ringmaster of Circus250.

The horror of Halloween costumes
H
alloween used to be easy. It was a
fancy-dress party: you could wear
whatever you liked. The idea was
to have fun.
As teens, my friends and I would dress
up as ghouls, spiders or witches, with cones
of black paper on our heads. When we
became more mature, Halloween turned
into a tarty affair. We thought this seemed
authentic, somehow all-American. Our
costumes became flimsier and more flam-
mable. One girlfriend made a habit of always
going dressed as ‘sexy cat’.
Inevitably, somebody would dress as a
zombie Princess Diana or Amy Winehouse,
or another celebrity who had died unpleas-
antly. The more risqué the better. I was once
served a drink by a man with a toy doll tied to
his lower half. He had come as Jimmy Savile.
But Halloween is changing. It is no long-
er a night of uncouth revelry. It has turned
into an opportunity for political posturing, a
moment to show that you understand what’s
acceptable and what’s not. Now that the
photos are online within hours, if not min-
utes, it is very important not to get it wrong.
Two years ago, Brexit costumes started to
appear. Revellers wore mutilated EU flags
or came as gravestones with ‘Brexit means
Brexit’ as the epitaph. A more facetious take
was the ‘plummeting pound’ costume.
Suddenly, you had to signal that you were
on the right side of the argument. Donald
Trump became the ultimate Halloween
inspiration. People carved pumpkins into
‘Trumpkins’ with angry faces. Some orange
face paint and a Make America Great Again
cap, and you could dress as the President,
just like every other person. Trump-related
costumes have evolved quickly. You can
now buy a ‘sexy anonymous op-ed costume’,
inspired by that New York Times article writ-
ten by one of the President’s staff.
Feminism has crashed the slutty party.
Last year was the first #MeToo Halloween
and skimpy costumes suddenly looked a bit
dated. Was ‘sexy cat’ letting the sisterhood
down? For a #MeToo-friendly Halloween,
people felt obliged to go as a suffragette
or a character from The Handmaid’s Tale,
with a long red cloak and a white bonnet.
The latter was both a literary and political
statement. No wonder it became so popular.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
LARA PRENDERGAST
Earlier this month, an online retailer
began selling ‘sexy Handmaid’s Tale’ cos-
tumes, to see if there was demand for a more
coquettish version. They were forced to stop
because of the outcry. ‘There’s nothing sexy
about oppressing women,’ said CNN, in its
most stern voice.
These are choppy social waters. What is
an appropriate ‘frightgeist’ costume? And
more importantly, what isn’t? Last Hal-
loween, a friend went dressed as Harvey
Weinstein, complete with towelling dressing
gown and an Oscar. He reasoned that it was
the perfect look: what better way to display
solidarity with the movement than by dress-
Halloween is no longer a night
of uncouth revelry, but an
opportunity for political posturing
ing up as the monster at the centre of it all?
He misjudged the mood. A handmaid rep-
rimanded him for ‘trivialising’ #MeToo. She
asked him to remove his dressing gown —
and, feeling the pressure, he did.
As each year passes, Halloween becomes
a more frightening experience. Social media
has made costume parties more prominent
and therefore more terrifying than they
once were. Costumes are rarely forgot-
ten. One bad choice and the next thing you
know, your picture is going viral, thanks to
a post uploaded on to Instagram, which was
picked up by a website that placed you no. 37
on their article ‘50 inappropriate Halloween
costumes that just didn’t get the memo’.
How to get it right? The ideal woke cos-
tume needs to show you are clued up and
have a keen sense of irony, but know where
to draw the line. Why is it acceptable to
go dressed as Trump — a man not exactly
famed for his gracious behaviour towards
women — but not Weinstein? Halloween
is not the time to discuss such matters. You
must just hope you don’t miscalculate.
The easiest blunder to make is ‘cultur-
al appropriation’, which means borrowing
from a culture that isn’t your own. Helpfully,
there are plenty of lists online which detail
what is and isn’t considered suitable. Every
year, new costumes are added. Red Indi-
ans, geishas or Day of the Dead costumes
have been verboten for a while. According
to Bustle, a site for millennial women, ninjas,
Egyptian queens and voodoo doctors also
‘reduce a culture to a costume’ so should
be dodged. The site advises dressing as a
ballerina, a box of popcorn or a hashtag, to
avoid causing offence.
So, what to go as this year that is astute,
culturally sensitive and still a little crass?
Gareth Southgate, in an M&S waistcoat,
would be safe. A troop of killer Saudis —
complete with bone saws and some music to
drown out the screaming — would seem apt
for a carnival of horror, but dressing in a Mid-
dle Eastern outfit isn’t without risks.
Stormy Daniels or a pregnant Duchess
of Sussex would be a classic choice; both
just require some padding under your top.
Melania Trump is another failsafe. The pith
helmet and starched white linen shirt she
wore in Africa would be relatively simple to
copy, for a very 2018 Halloween look. Then
again you may be accused — like she was —
of dressing like a colonialist.
No doubt there will be some Russian
assassins around, with natty bottles marked
‘Novichok’. But the safest option for scaredy
cats is to go dressed as an inanimate object.
This year, I might go as Salisbury Cathedral.
The famous 123-metre spire can be made
out of that old faithful, a cone of paper.
When did this all become so serious?
Halloween was meant to be a tacky busi-
ness; a silly American festival we knew
was naff but loved anyway. Now it is a
sartorial minefield where a faux pas can
mean you are cast out like a witch. That
really is spooky.
27
 







 




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Irish problem
Sir: What James Forsyth calls ‘the EU plan’
to keep Northern Ireland in the customs
union after Brexit (‘The Irish problem’,
20 October) would no more ‘ease Northern
Ireland away from the UK and push it
more towards Dublin’s orbit’ than it has
already done itself through numerous
legislative differences. With regard to
social issues such as abortion and same-
sex marriage, Northern Ireland is far closer
to the Republic (as it once was) than to
the rest of the UK. It would therefore be
no great stretch to avoid awkwardness of
land border checks (and respect the spirit
of the Good Friday Agreement) by having
such checks at the sea ports. In addition,
a favoured position outside the EU but
within the customs union could bring huge
economic advantages to Northern Ireland.
If not blinded by their ‘Ulster Says No’
ideology, even Arlene Foster’s DUP would
probably acknowledge this. It’s high time
for Theresa May to call their bluff.
A better solution to the conundrum
would, of course, be Irexit (with all of
Ireland in a customs union with Britain),
but since this is not likely to happen, the
suggested plan would be the next best
thing. It could even be seen as keeping the
Republic within the economic orbit of the
UK, with advantages on both sides. So why
not simply ask them? A referendum within
Northern Ireland on this issue would be
far less contentious than the re-run of the
Brexit referendum that many are calling for.
Noreen O’Donovan Hage
Ballydehob, Ireland
Desert Island narcissists
Sir: Norman Wisdom’s choosing five of
his own records on Desert Island Discs
(Letters, October 20) was a classic example
of narcissism; Sue Lawley was prompted
to ask drily what he would do on the
desert island when he wasn’t listening to
himself singing. But he was only following
a tradition in which the bar was set by
Dame Moura Lympany, who selected
eight of her own performances. The great
Englebert Humperdinck limited himself
to one, but made up for it by asking for his
autobiography as his book choice.
Mark Revelle
Southill, Bedfordshire
Celebrity royals
Sir: Your leader praising the royals as being
in tune with the times avoids mentioning
the real reason behind the success of this
strategy (‘Modern family’, 20 October).
The ‘bad soap opera’ of recent history has
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
LETTERS
been cleverly replaced by the adoption of
celebrity culture. One only has to browse
the guest list of the Cambridges’ and
Sussexes’ weddings to see how this new role
has been embraced in order to enhance
the Firm’s popularity. A PR masterstroke,
maybe. But is it dignified?
Mick Wharton
Laxfield, Suffolk
Chess politics
Sir: If Raymond Keene’s powers of chess
analysis were as weak as his comments
about the recent election of the World
Chess Federation president (Chess, 13
October), he would not have become a
grandmaster. He argues that the English
Chess Federation ‘wasted’ its vote by
backing Georgios Makropoulos, the Greek
candidate, rather than England’s Nigel
Short. But as everyone knew, Makropolous
was the only candidate with a chance of
beating Arkady Dvorkovich, a former
deputy prime minister of Russia and close
associate of Vladimir Putin. Even Short
realised his candidacy stood no chance,
which is why he withdrew at the last
minute — in favour of Dvorkovich, whom
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he had previously described ‘an agent of
the Russian government’. So any vote
for Short would have been truly wasted.
Dvorkovich won, keeping the federation
under Russian control to Keene’s apparent
satisfaction. Keene also suggests that the
decision to back Makropolous had gone
down badly with members of the English
Chess Federation. Yet those members later
voted nearly unanimously to re-elect their
own chief executive, president and chair of
governance.
Stuart Skelsey (ECF Member)
Whitley Bay, North Tyneside
Mais ils fument
Sir: A quick word on ‘Why French kids
aren’t fat’, as Gavin Mortimer writes
(‘Grosse negligence’, 20 October). The
answer is that they smoke. I’m 55, I live in
Paris and I have a house full of teenagers.
The western world in general doesn’t
smoke any more, but the French youth
are smoking like a 19th-century coal-fired
power plant. Stop by any French lycée and
you’ll see hundreds of smokers outside,
both boys and girls. As parents we just don’t
know what to do anymore.
But yes, mind you, they’re not fat.
Frédéric Gion
Paris, France
Unfair to Furtwängler
Sir: Norman Lebrecht claims to have found
proof that Wilhelm Furtwängler — director
of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third
Reich and, to many, the greatest conductor
of the 20th century — was a secret
enthusiast for Nazism (Music, 20 October).
This is despite the fact that he refused to join
the Nazi party, declined to give the Hitler
salute, and helped Jews escape the Gestapo.
Lebrecht has two main pieces of
evidence. The first is a photograph of
Furtwängler extending his hand to Hitler.
Yet this is not a gesture of ingratiation,
but one of defiance. Hitler had greeted
Furtwängler with the Nazi salute, which
civilians were legally obliged to return.
Furtwängler refused to comply.
Lebrecht’s reading of a letter from the
pianist Artur Schnabel in 1947 is equally
misleading. Far from being Lebrecht’s
‘impeccable source with no axe to grind’,
the Austrian-born Schnabel spent the war
in the security of the United States, took
out American citizenship in 1944, and in
1947 had every reason to play up his anti-
Germanness. And, far from this letter
appearing ‘now, out of the blue’, as Lebrecht
claims, it has been in print for half a decade.
John Adamson
Cambridge
29
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Can Hammond’s Budget make
business feel better about Brexit?
‘U
ncertainty is draining investment
from the UK, with Brexit having
a negative impact on eight in ten
businesses,’ says Carolyn Fairbairn of the
CBI. OK, let’s pause for a chorus of ‘She
would say that, wouldn’t she?’ But even if
we shade off for ‘scaremongering’, her sur-
vey (of 236 firms) is bleak: ‘44 per cent of
businesses with contingency plans intend
to stockpile goods… 30 per cent intend to
relocate production and services overseas…
15 per cent intend to move jobs…’ And I’ve
seen no rival surveys that contradict the gist
of it. So what can Monday’s Budget do to
make business feel better?
Suggestions abound, and Chancellor
Hammond is not as hobbled as he might
have been since higher-than-expected tax
receipts have made it a little easier for
him to meet the Prime Minister’s promise
of extra NHS spending, which is his big-
gest headache. Here’s my own round-up of
recommendations, starting with the small-
er businesses that are the lifeblood of any
economy in difficult times. Don’t discourage
them by cutting the VAT threshold from its
current level of £83,000 annual turnover, but
do find more ways to relieve them of busi-
ness rates, particularly where they bring dis-
used premises back to use. And don’t abolish
the incentive of entrepreneurs’ relief, which
allows the first £10 million gains on selling a
business to be taxed at only 10 per cent.
As for bigger businesses, don’t be tempt-
ed to raise corporation tax from the relative-
ly low rate of 19 per cent which is generating
record receipts; indeed, tinker as little as
possible, since tax complexity adds another
layer of disincentive to investment. Don’t
rush into a hastily drafted ‘Amazon tax’ on
online sales, because it will hit consumers
and domestic web-based businesses while
the global tech giants dance around it. And
do find the odd billion to sustain scientific
research that might otherwise be lost as we
leave the EU.
But with so many ‘don’ts’, where will
Hammond find any new money? Stand by
for pain on pension reliefs, fuel duties and
30
income tax thresholds. And if he’s look-
ing for a gimmick, what’s the silliest pro-
posal in current circulation? That would be
tax breaks on gym membership and home
fitness equipment, designed to boost the
nation’s exercise levels. But Spectator read-
ers know that’s better achieved by walking
the dog, so let’s throw vets’ bills into the for-
mula too. ‘Golden retriever relief’: there’s an
eyecatcher for you, Chancellor.
Dogged by scandal
My call for a suggested new name for RBS
generated a thin postbag. ‘Banky McBank-
face’ had a certain whimsy but ‘Dogger
Bank’ — evidently a reference to what
goes on in dark car parks rather than to the
blameless North Sea shallows — needed
too much explaining. More seriously, many
of you thought the bailed-out bank should
not try to spin a new image that implies
the bad old days are over when in fact they
are not. In particular, the unresolved issue
of mistreatment of thousands of small and
medium-sized (SME) business customers by
RBS’s restructuring arm GRG — accused of
profiting from the sale of assets of compa-
nies the bank had forced into administration
— has left a lingering stench.
To recap, a consultants’ report for the
Financial Conduct Authority in 2016 iden-
tified ‘widespread inappropriate treatment
of customers by GRG… that in a signifi-
cant proportion of cases… appears likely
to have caused material financial distress’.
But the report also concluded that RBS
could not be acted against by the regula-
tor; nor were victims likely to gain satis-
faction in court. So any hope of redress or
reform was left to RBS’s board, which not
only denied the allegations in the first place
and was accused by Treasury select commit-
tee chairman Andrew Tyrie of being ‘wil-
fully obtuse’ about them — but also closed
down the accounts of the businessman Law-
rence Tomlinson who (at the behest of Vince
Cable as business secretary) wrote an earlier
report on GRG’s brutal modus operandi.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
The FCA (apparently for fear of being
sued by RBS) released only a redacted ver-
sion of the 2016 report but the Treasury
select committee, now with Nicky Morgan
in the chair, published it in full this Febru-
ary. Despite its impact, FCA chief Andrew
Bailey confirmed sheepishly in July that no
disciplinary action would follow — enabling
RBS chairman Sir Howard Davies to wax
lyrical about a new era under a new name,
and his underlings to garner headlines such
as this week’s ‘RBS diverts £2 billion to help
SMEs handle Brexit’.
But the scandal has not been buried.
The RBS GRG Business Action Group has
vowed to carry on a legal fight on behalf
of hundreds of affected firms. Another
report this week called for a beefing up of
the Financial Ombudsman Service to sup-
port SMEs that feel wronged by their banks.
And my own local MP Kevin Hollinrake, co-
chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group
for Fair Business Banking, has gone one
better and called for a public inquiry, having
concluded that RBS (and other banks) have
been ‘shockingly’ protected by the FCA
rather than held properly to account. Hol-
linrake also wins my competition: RBS, he
says, is the Untouchable Bank.
Facebook’s snake
Even in an era of unbridled abuse of politi-
cians, it may seem harsh to call Sir Nick Clegg
a snake. But in the great board game of cor-
porate fortunes, ‘Discredited and all but
forgotten former Lib Dem leader becomes
your head of global affairs’ seems unlike-
ly to herald an upward-pointing ladder for
Facebook, troubled as the social media giant
already is with allegations of lax data secu-
rity, devious tax arrangements and hosting
platforms for terrorists and subversives. The
Clegg appointment might even turn out to
be a snake as slippery as ‘Gordon Brown
opens your new London HQ and says your
great company can look forward with hope’.
That, back in 2004, was the curse of doom for
Lehman Brothers.
 © BODLEIAN LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Philip Marsden celebrates
the special place of the oak
in British history
Stuart Jeffries wonders
how Jane Haynes gets away
with breaking all the rules
of psychotherapy
Kate Womersley worries
that after Brexit the price of
blood is sure to go up
Richard Bratby reveals a
Spinal Tap-like list of rules
for his interview with Ennio
Morricone
Lloyd Evans bets that you
will slip into a coma before
the first interval of The
Inheritance
Louise Levene wonders
why the English National
Ballet bothers taking
Manon to the provinces

Disease of the eyes caused

by witchcraft, from
Opthalmodouleia, 1583,
by Georg Bartisch
Mary Wakefield — p42
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 31
BOOKS & ARTS
A remarkable show of devotion
Philip Larkin wrote often and regularly to his mother throughout her long life.
It was a ritual he both cherished and resented, says Andrew Motion
Philip Larkin: Letters Home,
1936–1977
edited by James Booth
Faber, £40, pp. 612
On 13 September 1964, at the age of 42, Phil-
ip Larkin began writing to his mother Eva
(his ‘very dear old creature’) by taking stock:
Once again I am sitting in my bedroom in a
patch of sunlight, embarking on my weekly
task of ‘writing home’. I suppose I have been
doing this now for 24 years! on and off, you
know: well, I am happy to be able to do so, and
I only hope my effusions are of some interest
to you on all the different Monday mornings
when they have arrived.
A great deal of what is characteristic about
Letters Home is evident here. The sense of
taking part in a ritual (‘Once again’); the
pleasure in fulfilling a filial duty (‘happy
to be able to do so’); the acknowledgement
that it’s a bit of a chore (‘embarking on my
weekly task’); the faint self-mockery (‘effu-
sions’); and the air of being engaged in a per-
formance (‘I am sitting in my bedroom in a
patch of sunlight’).
These things aren’t in themselves
remarkable, but what is astonishing is that
Larkin maintained the balances of his
‘task’ for such a long time, and with such
devotion. We learn from James Booth’s
introduction to his selection from the cor-
respondence that it falls into two main
groups. One contains a little less than 100
letters and cards belonging to the period
between Larkin’s departure from his home
in Coventry to study in Oxford in 1940, and
the death of his father in 1948. The second
covers the period between his arrival to
work in the library at Queen’s, Belfast in
1950, and his mother’s death aged 91 in
1977. For the first 22 years of this latter
period Larkin wrote a letter to Eva every
Sunday, and a card and/or another letter
mid-week; for the last five years of her life,
when her mind had wandered, he dropped
her a line most days, and sometimes twice
a day.
When Anthony Thwaite published Lar-
kin’s Selected Letters in 1992, he baulked
32
BOOKS
at the size of the correspondence with Eva
and decided not to include any of it. When
I published my biography of Larkin in
1993, I had space to quote only from a suf-
ficient number of the letters to give a clear
sense of the relationship they express. This
means that Booth’s edition offers the first
panoramic view of the correspondence,
and even this is (necessarily) incomplete.
By his own account, some 4,000 of Lar-
kin’s letters and cards to his mother sur-
vive from the period 1936–1977. He has
chosen 607 of them, adding a handful of
the surviving replies from both parents,
and also a small number of the few surviv-
ing letters to Larkin’s sister Kitty.
The good news is, Booth is an efficient
editor and provider of footnotes: this is the
last significant collection of papers relat-
ing to Larkin’s life that needs to be pub-
Eva’s preoccupation with trivialities
was transformed by Larkin into a rare
poetic appreciation of the everyday
lished. In addition, the sheer scale of the
correspondence reminds us that Larkin —
although curmudgeonly (and worse) in all
sorts of ways — was also capable of great
kindness. Whatever else the letters demon-
strate, they embody (with a few exceptions)
a remarkably sustained show of devotion,
for which Eva was clearly grateful.
And of course there are other ways to
value the letters as well. There are a few
good brief portraits of interesting figures:
Dylan Thomas (‘He wore two sailor’s jer-
seys, a shabby purple-yellow checked
sports coat, and speckled grey trousers’);
E. M. Forster (‘A toothy little aged Billy
Bunter’); Betjeman (‘he seemed a rather
humble and crushed creature’). There are
Larkin’s usually amusing cartoons, which
show him and his mother as ‘creatures’ at
once shapeless and distinctly affection-
ate. And there are a few flashes of appeal-
ing descriptive writing (at Oxford, for
instance when he tells his sister ‘gusts of
snow blow past Big Tom and away into the
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Meadows, where are no footprints’ —
then follows up with characteristic under-
cut by adding: ‘Tell me if you like [this].
It’s quite easy’).
The less good news is that the vast mass
of the letters’ content is humdrum or triv-
ial — because it speaks so exactly to the
minute particulars of Eva’s life, and to sim-
ilar elements in his own day-to-day exist-
ence. Booth in his introduction tries to
persuade us that Larkin spoke to Eva with
an openness unusual in mother-son rela-
tions, when he talked to her as a student
about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Maybe so,
maybe not. And anyway, such forthright
moments are very few and far between,
as Larkin himself suggests when he writes
to her in June 1945 and says ‘I hate lay-
ing myself open — I hate being prodded
and turned over and pinched like fish on a
slab.’ He’s writing about job applications
when he says this, but the same principle
applies on the home front.
He says next to nothing about the other
important relationships in his life (Kings-
ley Amis, Monica Jones, Maeve Brennan),
nothing about his poems beyond a few
obvious indications of sources, and noth-
ing of interest about books he is read-
ing, or ideas he is entertaining. Instead,
we get: ‘My inside feels a trifle con-
gested at the moment, for I have eaten
nearly a whole tin of salmon for supper,
& nearly a whole tin of asparagus.’ And:
I didn’t shop very carefully yesterday, & for-
got bananas (I eat these regularly now —
they are easy things to manage) and have
no caster sugar for my grapefruit. I might
find some bananas today, but the sugar will
have to wait.
Even a little of this sort of thing goes
a very long way for the general read-
er, no matter how warmly it was meant
and received. Moreover, the cumulative
effect is not just dull, but likely to pro-
voke thoughts that clash with the char-
ity on show. Larkin was generous to write
to Eva as much he did, no doubt about it.
But he almost always did so in ways that
allowed him to keep himself to himself —

and only to express strong opinions when
he knew they would not cause his mother
to disagree. Including, presumably, the rac-
ist opinions which are dotted through the
book, and which Booth ineffectually tries
to dim by reminding us they do not repre-
sent the whole of Larkin’s social response.
When Larkin tells Eva in May 1970 that
‘Mr [Enoch] Powell is still saying we must
keep out the immigrants — a pity he isn’t
leading the Conservatives’, he gives a clear
view of the attitude that lies beneath and
informs everything.
In other words, the correspondence is
a form of control as well as charity. It was
also a form of attachment he at once cher-
ished and resented. He admitted as much,
in another unusual flash of candour, in a
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Under a spell: Philip Larkin with Eva in 1965
letter written in April 1970 in the after-
math of a visit he has paid to Eva:
I’m afraid I was not a very nice creature when
at home. I wish I could explain the very real
rage & irritation I feel: probably only a psy-
chiatrist could do so. It may be something to
do with never having got away from home. Or
it may be my concern for you & blame for not
doing more for you cloaking itself in anger.
What we glimpse here is the ‘violence a
long way back’ that Larkin mentions in his
ferocious late poem ‘Love Again’ — vio-
lence compounded of his father’s right-
wing severities, and his mother’s adhesive
dependency. And although, due partly
to his father’s early death, he was able to
moderate if not entirely dispel the influ-
© THE ESTATE OF PHILIP LARKIN
ence from that quarter, he was to some
extent under his mother’s spell for most of
his life. In some ways — as his correspond-
ence with others amply reveals — it suffo-
cated and depressed him. In other ways it
suited him fine. He could play Eva’s need
of him against the demands that other
women might otherwise make to take
over his life.
And as far as his poems were con-
cerned, Eva in all sorts of unlikely ways
acted as his muse. Her preoccupation with
trivialities was transformed by Larkin into
a rare poetic appreciation of the everyday.
Her long and slowly failing life, with all its
accumulating fears, kept his concentration
fixed on the central theme of his work:
‘Age, and then the only end of age.’
33
BOOKS & ARTS
Outpourings of the heart
Kate Womersley
Heart: A History
by Sandeep Jauhar
One World, £14.99, pp. 288
Nine Pints: A Journey Through the
Mysterious Miraculous World of
Blood
by Rose George
Portobello, £14.99, pp. 384
The numbers invite awe: three billion beats
in a lifetime; 100,000 miles of vessels. But on
the hospital floor, wonder is often in short
supply. Doctors forget how intimate their
examinations and investigations can be.
Stethoscope to chest. Order a blood test.
I remember on a morning ward round
at medical school, our consultant wanted
to check that the oximeter was working
(a device which measures heart rate and
blood oxygenation through the nail bed).
He asked a harassed junior doctor to pre-
sent her forefinger. The screen’s digits
betrayed her stress levels. She was clini-
cally tachycardic. Her pulse was so fast it
would have been worrying had it been the
Distress can cause our beating pump
to change shape, making it quite
possible to die of a broken heart
patient’s. I have not forgotten this uninvit-
ed invasion of her heart. Although we now
know that Galenic humours aren’t to be
found in blood, and that the heart is not the
seat of emotion, they remain physiological
sources where our feelings and life stories
can be read.
Sandeep Jauhar, a New York cardiolo-
gist, knows it’s possible to die of a broken
heart. He describes how distress can cause
our beating pump to change shape. Part-
memoir, part-history of his medical spe-
cialty, Heart links the physical organ with
the emotional one. Jauhar pairs engaging
descriptions of how the heart works with
tales of creativity and self-experimenta-
tion that enabled treatments for infarc-
tions, arrhythmias and myopathies. It was
the first I’d heard of the electrical engineer,
Wilson Greatbatch, who blew his $2,000
savings to make the first implantable pace-
maker. Today, that device metronomes one
million hearts all over the world. These his-
tories circulate around stories of Jauhar’s
patients, his family and his own health fears.
Aged 45, he finds himself staring at a CT
scan that shows partial blockages in his
coronary arteries. ‘I felt as if I were getting
a glimpse of how I was probably going to
die,’ he writes.
Jauhar doesn’t think fixing his, or anyone
else’s, heart is a mere question of plumb-
34
ing. It’s rare to hear a spe-
GETTY IMAGES
cialist say that ‘cardiology
in its current form might
have reached the limits of
what it can do to prolong
life’. The 1957 Framing-
ham Study sought to pre-
dict a person’s risk of heart
complications even before
symptoms appeared. The
researchers measured
things that were easy to
measure (like cholester-
ol and blood pressure),
while choosing to dismiss
‘psychosomatic, consti-
tutional, or sociological
determinents’. In the 1950s,
this passed as scientific rig-
our. Today, it sounds like
wilful ignorance. Jauhar
despairs that the Ameri-
can Heart Association
still does not list emotion-
al stress among its key
modifiable risk factors for
heart disease.
Rose George is also
interested in the body’s
physiological functions, and
as a journalist, not a doctor,
she has an even keener eye
for their social and political
qualities. She has written
previously about the global
waste and transit industries.
In Nine Pints, she revisits
these themes on the small- Illustration depicting the circulation of the blood
er square-footage of the
human frame. Blood is a
commodity. It’s the 13th most traded prod- ic. In Nepal we learn about the practice of
uct in the world, and moe than 1,000 times chapaudi, the social exclusion of girls on
more expensive than crude oil. But blood their periods. George’s tone deepens with
is no normal product: paying for it makes it authority and anger: prisoners have been
less safe. A blood market that rewards sell- extorted for their plasma; in the 1980s, Brit-
ers rather than donors attracts people at ish haemophiliacs received contaminated
the highest risk of carrying blood-borne ill- clotting factors; adverts from the feminine
ness (saying that far the greatest risk of any hygiene industry still depict menstrual flow
transfusion is human error in mismatching with blue water. Beliefs around blood have
the blood with the patient). Having a reli- always been a form of aspiration, as well as
able donation system is critical. A unit of the basis for exclusion and shame.
blood currently costs the NHS £124.46 — Nine Pints and Heart close with excit-
a steal. After Brexit, the price of a pint is ed visions for future innovation: artificial
sure to go up. blood and artificial organs. But both authors
George’s nine chapters demonstrate warn against too much medicine. What are
that blood is a living tissue which defies our we willing to try to live that bit longer?
attempts to make it stand still. We meet fas- A company called Ambrosia runs a trans-
cinating characters like the haematologist fusion service using plasma from young
Janet Vaughan, who set up London’s Emer- people to ‘superboost’ old veins (if you
gency Blood Transfusion Service in 1939, cough up $8,000 per bag). More than half
with its fleet of repurposed ice cream vans of all transfusions in the US already have
delivering the red stuff around the capi- no clinical indication. Ever more sophisti-
tal. We are talked through the practice of cated implantable defibrillators will flog the
applying leeches to help re-graft amputat- heart in its final pitiful beats. Rather than
ed ears. It’s a health and safety nightmare requesting yet another intervention, Jau-
because each annelid worm is essentially ‘a har reminds us of the comfort that may be
needle that can walk’. On to South Africa, found in seeing the heart as a ‘safety valve
and the changing face of the Aids epidem- that can facilitate a quick and humane end’.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk

The road not taken
Max Décharné
How Does it Feel?
A Life of Musical Misadventures
by Mark Kermode
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99, pp. 240
In the 1970s, when Mark Kermode first
picked up an instrument, the UK record
business was a very different place. There
were five weekly music papers — NME,
Sounds, Melody Maker, Record Mirror and
Disc. Around 15 million people tuned into
Top of the Pops every Thursday; Radio 1
reached more than 20 million listeners a
week, and chart 45s could sell 500,000 cop-
ies. Today, the idea of schoolchildren saving
up their pocket money to buy the latest sin-
gle feels as if it has long since gone the way
of other formerly popular activities such
as stamp collecting and origami. The times,
as Dylan almost remarked, they’ve been
a-changin’.
‘As a teenager, I wanted to do two things,’
says Kermode. ‘To become a pop star, and to
watch movies.’ These days he is best known
as a film critic — a career he explored in
a previous autobiographical volume, It’s
Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a
Film Obsessive (2010). But his entertain-
ing new book is a wry memoir devoted to
four decades of mostly failing to fulfil that
other youthful ambition. It was not for want
of trying.
Others in the past have felt the need to
choose between two divergent potential
careers: in the 1790s, the future Duke of
Wellington burnt his violin to concentrate
on military matters. Kermode, however, has
pursued a dual path, and his growing fame as
a critic sometimes gave him television expo-
sure for his music. As he points out, a fair
few examples of this have surfaced on You-
Tube, but sadly, no one seems to have had a
camera handy in the mid 1980s when Mark’s
Manchester University group Hopeless (for-
merly Herpes One Hundred) treated an
audience of students to a rousing version of
‘Seasons in the Sun’ by Terry Jacks, coughing
up fake blood from capsules they had been
chewing: ‘The floor was awash with slimy
red drool, a sea of sticky nastiness.’ It is not
for nothing that he regularly cites The Exor-
cist among his favourite films.
From building his own electric guitar
while at school using a template given in
Everyday Electronics magazine, via a revolv-
ing series of teenage bands, some of whom
split up before actually playing a show, to the
heady excitement of door-stepping David
‘Kid’ Jensen at BBC Broadcasting House,
Kermode eventually found his true calling
when he switched in the 1980s to playing
upright bass and developed a serious skiffle
habit that has lasted to this day.
In the early 1990s, he ran the house band
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
on the BBC TV show Danny Baker After
All — a gig he landed after reviewing films
on Baker’s BBC Radio 5 show. One week
they backed Suggs from Madness covering
a Morrissey song, apparently a conciliato-
ry gesture following missiles thrown when
the former Smiths frontman appeared in
front of 37,000 people at the 1992 Madness
reunion in Finsbury Park. Kermode blames
this on Morrissey having ‘misjudged the
crowd’ — a view first put forward at the
time by the NME — but I was the drummer
in the opening band onstage that day and
for the whole of our set we too were pelt-
ed with rocks, coins and bottles by shaven-
headed thugs who seemingly couldn’t bear
to wait another couple of hours for someone
to come on and sing about how baggy their
trousers were.
Today, any musicians able to stump up
the fee can rent the legendary Sun Studio in
Memphis overnight, once it’s closed to tour-
ists, but most are not trailed by a film crew
plus a documentary team from BBC Radio
2 like Kermode’s band The Dodge Brothers
in 2012. Full marks, however, for admiring
the pictures on the walls of the pioneers who
made the studio famous in the 1950s, such
as Elvis, BB King and Jerry Lee Lewis, and
then taking down the glaringly out-of-place
one of Bono from U2 because, as Kermode
said at the time: ‘I’m not spending two eve-
nings in Sun with a bloke in a stupid hat and
a mullet haircut looking at me.’
This is a book which is happily content
to move from one episodic reminiscence
to the next. You don’t have to be a skiffle
enthusiast to enjoy it, but obviously it pre-
supposes a basic interest in the twists and
turns of the author’s life. Overwhelmingly,
what comes through with every anecdote is
the author’s genuine enthusiasm for music,
much of it these days of the pre-1960 vari-
ety, although the book’s title is taken from
a 1975 single by Slade. Many people who’ve
kicked around in bands will recognise a lot
of the situations here, generally rendered
with self-deprecating humour: the dodgy
equipment, the dodgy clubs, and especial-
ly the dodgy promoters. Musicians mostly
do it for the love of it, even if sometimes
a punter after the show might simply tell
you, as Kermode once found while play-
ing a Mersey ferry: ‘You’ve had your fun.
Now fuck off.’
The Shadow
As the sun to the moon,
So a parent to a favoured child,
Bestowing a concentrated bounty:
But such a child – like the moon –
Has a cold and dark side.
— Tim Hopkins
The fabric of
human identity
Kathryn Paige Harden
Blueprint: How DNA Makes
Us Who We Are
by Robert Plomin
Allen Lane, £20, pp. 266
The Romans invoked Fortuna, the god-
dess of luck, to explain the unexplainable;
fortune-tellers study tea leaves to predict
the unpredictable. In Blueprint: How DNA
Makes Us Who We Are, Robert Plomin
defies the ancients and the mystics, promis-
ing that your fortune can be predicted and
explained by your genes.
Plomin is a psychologist who built his sci-
entific reputation on twin and adoption stud-
ies of intelligence, academic achievement
and mental health problems. In a book that
urges working ‘with the grain’ of your unique
gifts, Plomin’s talents as a scientist are clear-
est in the first half of the book, where he
narrates the major projects of his tentacular
career — first an adoption study in Colorado,
then a US-wide study of adolescent siblings,
and finally a twin study in the UK.
A reader new to the subject will learn
a lot from these early chapters about the
logic of twin studies and the ‘big findings’
of behavioural genetics. The biggest finding
of all is that ‘everything is heritable’. If you
had inherited different DNA, you would be
different, and not just different in eye colour
and height. You might be smarter and more
outgoing; you might watch less TV and drink
less alcohol; your wife might not have left
you and your dog might not have bitten you.
In large part thanks to Plomin’s tireless
scientific pace, this conclusion regarding the
ubiquitous impact of nature is no longer all
that scientifically controversial. And, as his
first chapter describes, it is not really news.
Most people already believe that our body
weight and intelligence and personality have
at least something to do with our genes.
Nevertheless, many readers will feel a reac-
tionary thrill while reading Blueprint. Plo-
min is violating an academic taboo by stating
plainly that genetic differences should be
taken seriously when we try to understand
people’s lives.
There’s a good reason, of course, for this
taboo. Genetic research on human behav-
ior is entangled, both in historical fact and
in popular imagination, with the horrors
of eugenics. Plomin sidesteps this histo-
ry. He also avoids any mention of race, the
typical flashpoint of controversy for genet-
ics books. Both omissions will strike many
readers — particularly in America, where
racial divisions loom large — as irrespon-
sible. Scientific racism never went away,
and any discussion of genetic influence
unwittingly attracts a swarm of far-right fan-
35
BOOKS & ARTS
boys. But these omissions could be more
charitably interpreted as the product of an
author appropriately sticking to what he
knows: Plomin’s twin and adoption results
really aren’t relevant to understanding racial
disparities. Besides, Blueprint doesn’t need to
talk about race to stir up controversy.
Plomin scarcely mentions the titular met-
aphor of DNA as a blueprint, which is just
as well. (A blueprint is a technical drawing
where each jot has a direct relationship with
a single component of the finished product —
and so functions nothing like DNA.) Instead,
If you had inherited different DNA,
your wife might not have left you and
your dog might not have bitten you
he returns again and again to DNA as a ‘for-
tune-teller’ that is ‘100 per cent reliable’ and
that can ‘predict your future from birth’. The
claim of perfect reliability will certainly be
news to, say, the US Food and Drug Admin-
istration, which warned about the potential
for inaccurate results in direct-to-consumer
genetic testing. And the claim of ‘predicting
the future’ radically oversells the state of the
current science. In psychology, the best ‘DNA
fortune-teller’ (aka, polygenic score) can
predict a child’s future education about as
well as her parents’ income can. Better than
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36
nothing, to be sure, and a remarkable testa-
ment to the progress being made in human
genetics. But it’s still a far cry from a fortune-
telling device.
Plomin acknowledges this when writ-
ing as a scientist (‘prediction of individual
differences is not precise’), but the nuance
is lost when he returns to being a salesman
(‘polygenic scores… can tell our genetic for-
tunes’.) Ultimately, ‘fortune-teller’ works
best as a metaphor for how people interpret
their genetic information in the light of what
they already believe to be true about them-
selves. Plomin makes sense of his personal
struggles to maintain body weight by noting
that his polygenic score for body weight is
above average, just as I make sense of the
fact that I’m jealous and stubborn by noting
that I’m a Taurus.
As if ‘DNA fortune-teller’ wasn’t suffi-
cient catnip for critics, Blueprint also serves
up a nature-versus-nurture binary, arguing
that the ‘only systematic, stable and long-
lasting source of who we are is DNA’. On the
other hand, environments shared by chil-
dren in the same family, such as schools and
parents, ‘don’t make a difference’. Insisting
that DNA matters is scientifically accurate;
insisting that it is the only thing that mat-
ters is scientifically outlandish. Counter-
arguments come easily, even if we restrict
ourselves to the same methods that Plo-
min embraces. Twin studies clearly show
that family environments make a substan-
tial difference to outcomes such as wheth-
er people go to college and to which God
they pray. And poor children whose ‘DNA
fortune-tellers’ predict that they will succeed
in education still end up worse off, econom-
ically, than rich children who are geneti-
cally predicted to fail in education. Are we
really meant to believe that education, reli-
gion and social class are not part of the mak-
ing of ourselves?
To education, religion and class we can
add culture and nationality. Like most psy-
chological research (including my own), the
studies in Blueprint are conducted entirely
with WEIRD populations — Western, Edu-
cated, Industrialised, Rich and Democrat-
ic. (We can add another W for White, given
the focus of nearly all behavioural genetic
research on people of European ancestry.)
Plomin has spent so much time focusing on
psychological differences within WWEIRD
societies that the ‘systematic, stable and long-
lasting’ forces of culture, shared by every
participant he’s ever tested, have faded to
invisibility. Hoping to understand psycho-
logical differences in personality and intelli-
gence within a homogenous group of people,
who are all living in a particular place at a
particular time, is a perfectly legitimate goal,
and one I share. But treating psychological
differences between British schoolchildren
as if they constitute the entire warp and weft
of ‘who we are’ is a thin and frayed concep-
tion of the fabric of human identity.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
The outlandish claims in Blueprint are all
the more curious because they are unnec-
essary. ‘DNA matters’ is just as interest-
ing as ‘only DNA matters’, with the added
advantage of being correct. The finding that
everything is heritable raises unresolved
philosophical questions about human agency
and freedom. The new availability of cheap
and non-invasive methods for measuring
people’s DNA raises tricky ethical questions
about who should have access to the coming
avalanche of genetic data. (Your local police
department? Your music streaming service?
Your dating app?) Plomin’s body of scientific
work continues to show us that these philo-
sophical and ethical questions are important,
but Blueprint does little to answer them.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Sam Leith talks to Robert Plomin on our
books podcast this week.
No shrinking violet
Stuart Jeffries
If I Chance to Talk a Little Wild:
A Memoir of Self and Other
by Jane Haynes
Quartet, £20, pp. 248
‘I have fallen in love many times in my con-
sulting room,’ writes the psychotherapist
Jane Haynes. ‘I do not mean that I want to
have an explicit sexual relationship,’ she
clarifies. That said, she describes herself as
the Desdemona of the consulting room, fall-
ing in love as she listens to ‘someone share
the pity of their history’. And like Othello’s
stories that titillated Desdemona, Haynes’s
narratives of her and her patients’ painful
lives are compelling, if passing strange, par-
ticularly given that her profession is usually
reticent about what goes on behind closed
doors between shrink and shrunken.
Haynes offers her insight into that secret
world: ‘They present me with their “lives”
just as Salome was presented John the Bap-
tist’s head on a golden platter.’ Perhaps
don’t stress that to prospective patients, eh?
Therapists aren’t supposed to write like this.
They’re not meant to be seduced by clients’
narratives. And they aren’t supposed to be
quite so discombobulatingly gabby in print.
Freud, after all, insisted that the analyst
must remain a blank slate in order to facili-
tate the transference process that he took
to be essential to psychoanalysis’s talking
cure. Haynes and many other therapists
don’t hold with this: she follows Freud’s
disciple-turned-critic Sándor Ferenczi, who
thought analyst and analysand should be
co-participants in what Haynes calls ‘the
healing encounter by the creation of a sym-
metrical dyad’.
But there’s a problem with this. The dyad
is never symmetrical — not least because
 Jane Haynes, self-
styled Desdemona
of the consulting
room, with her dog
Dido
JOHN HAYNES
no analyst has ever paid an analysand at the In the book she tells Miss Suicide, hon-
end of a session, so far as I know. Indeed, estly if brusquely: ‘I didn’t have a burning
Haynes points out that ‘long therapy can be desire to save you... there had already been
the monthly equivalent to a short-term mort- too many failures for that, and it would have
gage’, though she admits to ‘fee structuring’ been hubris on my part to think I could
for poorer patients. No matter: her brand of become your saviour.’ Later, Miss Suicide
relational psychotherapy, following Ferenc- became, along with several other former
zi, holds that ‘self-disclosure of the analyst
could be an important reparative force’. Therapists aren’t supposed to write
Haynes broke the secular confessional’s
seal ten years ago with her first volume of like Haynes. They’re not meant to be
memoirs — admittedly only after clients seduced by their clients’ narratives
read and approved what she planned to
publish, but still outraging colleagues who patients, a guest at Haynes’s dinner parties,
one easily imagines flinging scatter cush- some of them Proust-themed. I yearn for an
ions around north London couches in exas- invitation, and picture myself entering twirl-
peration. In that book, Who Is It That Can ing my moustache with top hat, cane and
Tell Me Who I Am? (she has a thing about reputation for licentiousness as the Baron
Shakespeare: her first book’s title was King de Charlus.
Lear’s question; the new book’s comes That memoir became the only self-pub-
from Henry VIII’s wail about his dad), lished book to be shortlisted for the PEN/
Haynes wrote about a patient she Ackerley award for autobiography. Now
called Miss Suicide. After cancelling a Quartet is publishing a new volume. Miss
session, Miss Suicide bought some whisky Suicide doesn’t reappear (hope she’s OK,
and paracetamol, checked into a Holiday concerned face), but Haynes has a cast of
Inn, took the pills and booze and pulled characters a novelist would enjoy juggling.
a plastic bag over her head. A passing There’s the Pianist, whose ‘tyrannical per-
chambermaid saved Miss Suicide’s life. fectionism meant that nobody had ever
Haynes transcribed the dyad’s subse- witnessed him perform’, but who finally
quent conversation. Haynes: ‘I knew that brings tapes of his playing for the enchant-
you had put a plastic bag over your head ed Haynes to hear. There’s the Professor,
but [laughing] I didn’t know it was a Tesco who leaves his sexless marriage for a ‘Dio-
shopping bag!’ ‘Yes, it was, it was!’ replies nysian carnival of flagrant desire and unac-
Miss Suicide. ‘I hadn’t premeditated it. You customed international extravagance’ with
see, it was to hand and I thought, well, just a post-doctoral European research student
to make sure.’ called the Scarlet Woman. After marrying
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
him, she mutates into la belle dame sans
merci and abandons him, leading him to
lick his wounds with a third wife. There’s
the New Yorker who flies in for a week of
intense therapy after one of his twin sons
takes his own life, and he’s further trauma-
tised by being unexpectedly exposed to a
forensic investigator’s iPhone images of the
death scene.
One character, an eminent QC, sees
Haynes for three years but ultimately she
admits defeat: a new drug regime rath-
er than therapy ameliorates his lifelong
depression. It’s hard not to admire Haynes
for confessing her failures — in this admis-
sion, as in others in this memoir, she goes
where her peers fear to tread.
Near the end she reports that some
patients have been disappointed not to find
themselves written up in her books, assum-
ing that ‘their lives are too bland to have
left any mark’. I imagine her giving them
proof copies, adding: ‘Sadly, your story
didn’t make the cut. How does that make
you feel?’
Haynes also mines her own life for
copy. As a girl, she was abandoned by her
mother, who was sectioned and given ECT
after a nervous breakdown, and raised,
albeit briefly, by a father dying of syphi-
lis, who ultimately suffered what doctors
called ‘general paralysis of the insane’.
She became an actress but had an epiph-
any after reading R.D. Laing’s The Divid-
ed Self and trained as a therapist. Soon
she was taking LSD with her charismatic
Glaswegian mentor in front of her young
children, reading erotic poetry at counter-
cultural 1960s night clubs, and in raptures
over Laing’s playing of Scriabin. In one
memorable scene, Haynes is transfixed as
the cross-legged guru, a kind of upscale
but equally libidinous Austin Powers, asks:
‘Whose womb would you be born from?’
The question inspires Haynes to reflect on
what her mum did to her and what she in
turn did to her two children, with conclu-
sions familiar to readers of Philip Larkin.
The book is as engagingly digressive as
a Ronnie Corbett monologue, and Knaus-
gaardian in its mash-up of the literary and
the personal (a chapter on Proust follows
a painful meditation on her apparently
incurable irritable bowel syndrome). But
it’s rather undone by dustjacket encomia.
Matt Lucas (foil to David Walliams in Lit-
tle Britain) praises her writing. And we
learn from the blurb that the Blue Door
practice in Marylebone which Haynes
runs with her daughter Tanya was ‘hailed
by Tatler as one of London’s most prestig-
ious private practices’. Is ‘prestige’ what
one wants from such a consultancy? And
if so, why?
Not for the first time, Haynes’s judg-
ment seems questionable. Indeed, the wis-
est remark in this thoroughly entertaining
book comes from someone else, the Freud-
37
BOOKS & ARTS
ian analyst Adam Phillips. ‘People organise
their lives to avoid the imagined catastro-
phe of certain conversations; and they come
into analysis, however fluent they may be,
because they are unable to speak.’ Haynes,
who quotes this with approval, sees her job
similarly: as encouraging her patients to talk
about the unspeakable.
Once, while I was interviewing Haynes
a few years ago in her St John’s Wood con-
sulting room, her phone rang. ‘Don’t worry,
be happy,’ went the ring tone. As this book
shows, there’s so much more to therapy
than that.
Crime
Family mysteries
Jeff Noon
Maggie is sitting alone in the park when
she’s approached by Harvey, who introduc-
es himself as a recruiter for MI5. This is the
starting point of Mick Herron’s This is What
Happened (John Murray, £16.99). The com-
pany Maggie works for is under investiga-
tion as a possible threat to national security.
She takes on a task, to feed a virus into the
company’s computer network, but during
this operation she accidentally kills a secu-
rity guard. Harvey places her in a safe house.
No windows, a locked door, no television, no
internet, no way of knowing what’s going on
beyond her room. Years pass. Harvey visits
now and then, telling her the country has
descended into anarchy. They have sex.
This is a book that starts out as a spy
thriller and then becomes something very
different: a psychological game, a cruel
seduction. It’s intriguing and filled with
surprises, but for it to work Maggie needs
to be, well, a bit thick. She needs to fall for
every single thing that’s being told to her.
This aspect stretches our belief. Sometimes
it reads like John le Carré rewriting Alice in
Wonderland. Two solitary people, each liv-
ing a fantasy life, each seeking a different
kind of escape. It can only end in violence.
The woman at the centre of Elizabeth
Klehfoth’s All These Beautiful Strangers
(Penguin, £7.99) is born of a good American
family, but a family struck by tragedy: Char-
lie Calloway’s mother has been missing for
years, presumed dead, and her father is the
main suspect. But without a body noth-
ing can ever be proved against him. Char-
lie has lived in doubt since her childhood.
Now she’s 17, a high school student, seeking
membership of a mysterious society called
The A’s. The club forces students to perform
a series of daring tasks in order to achieve
membership. Charlie’s determination to
join uncovers a surprising link to her past,
to the supposed death of her mother.
Klehfoth is very good on the pressures of
youth, the need to fit in versus the urge to
38
become an individual. But the more Charlie
finds out about her family, the more her pre-
sent company appears superficial. The need
to discover the true fate of her mother sets
her on the first steps to adulthood. She is
drawn back to the lake house, her childhood
home, where mysteries old and new merge
in the final revelations.
Ane Riel offers an even darker version
of family life in Resin (Doubleday, £12.99).
The Horders live in isolation on a island.
Liv was declared dead at the age of six, the
result of a drowning accident. But this is a
story invented by her father, Jens, in order
to protect her from the wider world. Liv is
alive, bound by her father’s rules and mad-
ness. The central metaphor is the preserv-
ing of insects in amber, freeing them from
decay. If only Jens could do the same to a
human being, to a loved one...
The story is told from several points
of view, including that of Liv’s mother,
who never leaves her bed, growing fat-
ter and weaker, her flesh turning to mush.
Her letters to Liv are poignant and ten-
der, the only traces of love, and hope. Riel
asks this question: what do we do when the
The king of trees
thing which attempts to save us from harm Philip Marsden
becomes the main instrument of harm?
There is no easy answer, except that life The Glorious Life of the Oak
can never be stilled completely. Resin is by John Lewis-Stempel
brilliantly written and quite relentless in Doubleday, £8.95, pp. 96
its search for monsters.
The Martian Girl by Andrew Martin Over the past couple of years, I’ve been
(Corsair, £14.99) starts with Jean research- planting up much of the pasture on our
ing the life of Kate French, a Victorian small Cornish farm with native hardwood
trees, mainly oak. I now know I needn’t
Liv was declared dead at the age of six, have bothered. As soon as the grass stops
being cut, little oaks spring up of their own
the result of a drowning accident. But accord. This last dry summer in particular
this is a story invented by her father has seen dozens appear, tiny three-leaved
stalks that push through the sward with their
mesmerist who performed under the stage multi-layered greens beautifully tinged with
name the Martian Girl. The other obses- reddish anthocyanin. It gives the impression
sion in Jean’s life is a man known only as that if everywhere were simply left, and if
Coates, a roguish cad whose charm dissi- there were no browsing beasts, it would be
pates when Jean suspects him of killing a a matter of decades before all open country
man and dumping his body in the Thames. reverted to its post-glacial pre-neolithic state
This is a very London tale, inhabiting the of wild oakwood.
city’s dark corners, backstreet theatres and The oak stands out not only as our most
hidden alleyways. Coates is a creature of the abundant tree, and the largest in volume,
streets, driven only by primal urges. but also deeply impressive in almost every
The Martian Girl herself starts to take respect. From its robust youth to its magnifi-
over the story, presented through chapters cent maturity and long old age, it has a pres-
of Jean’s research. The mystery of the per- ence that is tempting to anthropomorphise.
former’s death (was she killed by her stage This princely tree, man’s arboreal compan-
partner?) coincides with Coates’s evil inten- ion! Of the many tree books published in
tions against Jean, as their affair turns nasty. recent years, none has been more success-
This is witty, complex storytelling, learned ful than Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life
and blunt by turns, and you never know of Trees, in which he examines how trees
what delights the next sentence might bring. ‘feel’ and ‘talk’ to each other. It is an engag-
The book is full of codes: of mindreading, ing study, not as unscientific as it sounds
of human and inhuman behaviour, of life — but it falls into a trap that John Lewis-
itself, and the clues left behind by acts of Stempel, with a countryman’s guile, steps
violence and by acts of love. An intriguing around. Citing the Ents, Tolkien’s breed of
novel, flawed, but gently so, almost as if the talking trees in Lord of the Rings, he com-
flaws allow the story to breathe, the people ments: ‘A tree is not an Ent.’
to come to life more fully. Lewis-Stempel is one of the best of the
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk

new generation of nature writers, an oak
himself in that particular corner of the liter-
ary forest. As a working farmer, from a long
line of Herefordshire farmers, he has daily
exposure to his source material. In books
such as Meadowland, The Running Hare and,
most recently, The Wood, he has distilled his
knowledge and his enthusiasm into a style
that is as rich and earthy as its subject. This
very brief study of the oak follows a similar
one last year of the owl.
We are taken on a ramble through British
history, with the oak as subject, and then on
through oak ecology. There’s a list of celebri-
ty oaks around the country, and a discussion
of the oak in literature. From John Clare to
Alfred Tennyson and George Bernard Shaw,
the oak has been vigorously versified. John
Evelyn left a panegyric to the tree: ‘As long
as the Lion holds his place as king of beasts,
and the Eagle as king of birds, the sovereign-
ty of British trees must remain to the oak.’
There are also a number of oak recipes —
oak leaf wine and acorn coffee (no thanks).
The oak has maintained its pre-
eminence by providing something differ-
ent for each age. To the Druids it was a rus-
tling canopy under which to invoke the gods.
To builders of the Middle Ages, it was the
core of many buildings. The nervous minis-
ters of Tudor and Stuart England looked at
oak woods and saw ships, while the burgh-
ers of the industrial age saw resource — pit-
props for mines or tannin for leather. The
ecologists of our current era hold up the
oak as exemplary habitat, the very stand-
ard of biodiversity — a mature tree can host
1,000 species of fungi, flora, fauna, epiphytes
and invertebrates.
Lewis-Stempel has always been adept
at infecting his readers with the urge to go
out and get muddy. If this stocking-filler of
a book does that, it will have succeeded.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
Spotting a particular oak on a winter night,
he recalls: ‘The oak was the mighty giant,
who held the ball moon in goblet fingers.’
Who would not like to step outside and see
such a sight?
Highway to hell
Tim Martin
A Station on the Path to
Somewhere Better
by Benjamin Wood
Simon & Schuster, £14.99, pp. 368
A lingeringly strange atmosphere hangs
about Benjamin Wood’s third novel, in
which the settings and paraphernalia of
a new wave of British weird fiction — old
children’s TV series, rustic bloodletting,
the starkness of the northern landscape —
encroach steadily on a retrospective story of
childhood murder and deceit.
The setting is northern England in the
early 1990s, as the young Daniel Hardesty, a
bookish 12-year-old, embarks on a road trip
to Yorkshire with his estranged dad Francis,
a jobbing stage carpenter, philanderer and
liar. They’re on their way to the set of The
Artifex, the sci-fi TV drama on which Fran-
cis works and with which his son is obsessed.
Fictional, of Wood’s own creation, and with
fragments interspersed throughout the text,
the series comes across as a weird-science
British crossbreed of Catweazle and The
X-Files. Since Daniel’s narrative begins
by enumerating ‘the items that were in my
father’s glove box, catalogued the day his
car was found by the police’, it’s hardly a
spoiler to say that father and son end up
somewhere much darker than the studios of
Yorkshire Television.
An English
oak in a misty
meadow at
dawn
GETTY IMAGES
For Daniel, the trip involves a shatter-
ing loss of innocence; for his father, a ter-
rible gain in experience. The unevenness
in Francis’s character is noted at the out-
set, when Daniel’s long-suffering mother
remarks on the ‘two weathers’ in his person-
ality, between which ‘he could switch with-
out warning, without reason’. As the road
trip sours and Francis’s frustrations mount,
he graduates from easy, boastful, mendacious
charm to a new and chilly psychopathy. As
the extent of his criminality grows, he seems
to become more himself, acquiring, accord-
ing to Daniel, a ‘strange repose’, in which
‘nothing he had done appeared to shock him.
Nothing he’d resolved to do was weighing on
him, either’.
Much of the book’s effect will depend
on whether the reader buys this transforma-
tion, which drives an escalating sequence of
threat, torture and murder in the second half.
The voice that Wood cultivates for his narra-
tor does a lot to sell it. As he probes the site
of his childhood trauma, Daniel offers a piti-
less forensic monologue that tests the moral
weight of every scene, taking the measure
of a man he loved ‘though everything he
claimed to feel for me was just an affectation
or a gesture of persuasion’ as he regresses to
what seems to be ‘his resting state, his factory
setting, to be unburdened of the people he
was meant to care about’.
In the end I couldn’t follow him quite that
far; after the fearsome suspense and weird
set-dressing of its first half, full of interject-
ed fragments from The Artifex and ago-
nised narrative foreshadowing, the book’s
second half seemed to take a deliberate
twist towards more familiar (if horrifying)
ground. But it’s still an impressive exercise in
mood and narrative command, with a freez-
ing chill that takes some time to depart from
the mind.
39
BOOKS & ARTS
‘Maestro will do’
For all his commercial success, Ennio Morricone is a modernist of
uncompromising seriousness, as Richard Bratby finds out
E
nnio Morricone’s staff wish it to
be known that he does not write
soundtracks. ‘Maestro Morricone
writes “Film Music” NOT “Sound Tracks” ’,
explain the printed interview guidelines.
‘Maestro Morricone is a composer. Com-
posers do not use the piano to compose
music with, they write their music down
directly in musical notes without the inter-
ference of any musical instrument.’ Well,
that’s Beethoven told. In the classical music
world, you hear tales about ‘riders’, the Spi-
nal Tap-like lists of minimum requirements
that pop stars issue before consenting to
walk among mortal men. You don’t tend to
encounter them, though. In the UK, emi-
nent conductors are addressed as ‘Simon’
or ‘Andris’. Morricone? ‘Maestro will do,’
writes his management.
But why pretend otherwise? At 91, Mor-
ricone is a pop-cultural phenomenon, whose
music for more than 500 films including The
Mission, A Fistful of Dollars and Cinema
Paradiso props up every movie compilation
CD you’ve ever seen discounted at Tesco, and
whose 1960s scores for Sergio Leone’s psy-
chological westerns (‘Try to avoid the term
“Spaghetti Westerns”,’ caution the guidelines.
‘Italians consider it an insulting description’)
remain so influential that merely humming
two bars of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
is enough to bring an entire genre to dusty,
sweaty imaginative life. If his staff treat him
like a pop star, it’s because for media purpos-
es he is one.
He didn’t start that way, though. It’s rela-
40
ARTS
tively rare now to hear him talk about his
studies in the 1940s under the Italian com-
poser Goffredo Petrassi — a serious figure
of neoclassical leanings, who taught a flo-
tilla of postwar modernists. That grounding
proved fundamental. ‘With Maestro Petras-
si, we had to try to compose as they used to
do in the past, starting from the year 1100
right up to modern times. And then I went
to Darmstadt, the festival in Germany, and
really understood what it was to write con-
temporary music,’ he says.
The name of Darmstadt is significant —
the postwar festival where German classical
music confronted a compromised tradition
Morricone constructs his themes
according to rigorous precepts,
sometimes before he has seen the film
and remade itself on ultra-modern terms.
Italian music, similarly compromised, made
its own swerve towards radicalism. But,
‘Maestro Morricone does not like being
reminded of the war’. So let’s just say that
by the time he was writing his first scores for
his former schoolmate Leone, Morricone
was also playing trumpet in the Gruppo di
Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, an
avant-garde improvisation collective whose
members at one point included the maver-
ick experimentalist Frederic Rzewski. That
Morricone still cites Luigi Nono and Aldo
Clementi as favourite composers gives you
the general drift.
‘Nuova Consonanza really reunited me
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
with the love of my life — composing abso-
lute music, music that is not related to a film,
or to a pop song. One of our rules was to
avoid anything that was melodic, anything
that was usual. We had to produce very
strange sounds, very complicated sounds,
because we wanted to get as far away as pos-
sible from the so-called traditions of classi-
cal music. The experience with them really
helped me to bear the burden of working in
the commercial sector.’
And there’s the central contradiction of
Morricone’s career: that a modernist of the
most uncompromising seriousness (seek out
a recording of his Musica per 11 Violini of
1958 for a palate-scouring taste of his work
away from the soundstage) should opt to
work in unashamedly commercial cinema,
instead of confining himself to social-realist
projects such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Bat-
tle of Algiers (1966). And that a composer
with such a melodic gift should believe, as
a matter of aesthetic principal (it’s all in his
book Composing for the Cinema), that ‘in
contemporary art music composers do not
write themes any more. None of us is inter-
ested in making them’. He won’t be drawn
on whether his career choices were essen-
tially ideological — a conscious decision to
engage with a mass audience, as Kurt Weill
did in the 1920s. He has, though, compared
the position of cinema in modern culture to
that once occupied by opera.
‘I never gave up the idea of concealing
radical and contemporary elements, even in
my simpler film scores. For instance, some-
 A major modernist hiding in plain sight: composer Ennio Morricone at 91
times I quoted the name of Bach, or I added
just three or four notes from Frescobaldi, or
even from Stravinsky — even though the
filmgoers or the director would never real-
ise it. It was a kind of moral reward for me.
OK, I have to write music that is more easily
listened to, because the audience otherwise
will not understand. But I still don’t give
up completely, and I put in something that
is really very satisfying and very rewarding
for me.’
It should keep film music PhD students
busy, too. The startling fact, as Morricone
explains in Composing for the Cinema, is
that he constructs his own themes accord-
ing to rigorous structural and dramatic pre-
cepts, sometimes before he has even seen
the film. Melodies as spontaneous-sound-
ing as the theme from Cinema Paradiso, or
the sky-punching finale of The Untoucha-
bles, are fabrications as synthetic, and as
carefully assembled, as any post-Schoen-
berg tone row. Perhaps that’s why Morri-
cone’s music always carries such a powerful
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
sense of itself. The music is almost self-
aware: these are movie themes that know
they’re movie themes, and Morricone con-
trols every aspect of their presentation.
Silences are as potent as sounds and tone-
colour, too, is vital — think of the Jew’s-
harp and Pan-pipes in the Leone westerns,
or the loping, predatory bassoons in Quen-
‘I never gave up the idea of concealing
radical elements even in my simpler
film scores’
tin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Unlike
composers in the Hollywood system, Mor-
ricone never delegates his orchestrations to
other hands.
‘Being a composer means writing the
whole of the music, from the first point till
the end, including orchestration. Otherwise,
the very last touch of the composition is in
the hands of the orchestrator. And so, the
music is no longer the music you wanted
to write. I am a real composer, and I think
that orchestration is an integral part of com-
position. I mean, if you don’t do your own
orchestration, you’re not 100 per cent a com-
poser, in my opinion.’
Well, they said to call him Maestro.
What’s beyond question is that Morricone’s
career has been underpinned by an artistic
seriousness whose ferocity might surprise
those who roll their eyes when ‘Gabriel’s
Oboe’ tops another Classic FM poll. ‘I can
never be passive,’ he says. ‘I like compos-
ers who work with honesty, who are very
honest in their profession. That’s the kind
of composer I admire.’ His O2 concert will
be his last in the UK. And perhaps, once
the industry circus that surrounds him has
found a new cult figure and rolled away,
the world of classical music will see that a
major post-war modernist has been hiding
in plain sight.
Ennio Morricone’s final UK concert, with
the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, is
on 26 November at the O2, London.
41
BOOKS & ARTS
© THE MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC, BOSCASTLE
Stuffed doll in Edwardian-style black dress with stiletto through face,
south Devon, England , 1909–13
you let un out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble”.’
Exhibitions The witch bottle usually lives in the Pitt
Spelling it out Rivers down the road, where it’s a star turn,
and it’s clear why. The little bottle has men-
Mary Wakefield ace, charm and it conjures a crowd: the old
lady, keeper of the witch; the mysterious
Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and ‘they’ who caution her; the spectral witch
Witchcraft inside, plotting her escape. And it made the
Ashmolean Museum, until 6 January 2019 rational boy smile — which, as it turned out,
was quite a feat.
Just in front of me, visiting Spellbound at the Behind the bottle, in that first room,
Ashmolean last week, was a very rational there is also a modern-looking ladder
boy of about seven and his proud mother. attached to the wall. We’re conducting an
‘I don’t believe in magic, witches or experiment, said the girl attendant. Do you
Father Christmas,’ he announced to the girl dare go under it? And I’m afraid it’s at this
presiding over Room One. early stage that Spellbound loses its magic.
‘Perhaps you’re spiritual but not reli- There are interesting objects: manu-
gious,’ said the girl. scripts picturing the earth at the centre of
The rational boy gave her the look she a cosmos teeming with demons; 15th-centu-
deserved. ry ‘zodiac man’, from the Astronomical Cal-
In that first room pride of place is given endar by Nicholas of Lynn, over from the
to a squat little silvered bottle with a hand- Bodleian. A third room contains the weird
written label: ‘Obtained in 1915 from an old witch-like charms found in medieval homes:
lady living in Hove, Sussex. She remarked: a toad run through with thorns, a ‘witch-
“and they do say there be a witch in it, and if ladder’ tied with feathers. But everywhere,
42
as a refrain, this message: aren’t we all a bit
superstitious? Are you sure you’re not irra-
tional too?
But, of course we are. That’s what’s so
confusing. Do the curators really imagine
that any 21st-century visitor (save the boy)
thinks themselves purely scientific? We’re
almost as batty as our forbears — more so
for having less excuse. We read star signs,
we go to church, we spend thousands on
face creams that promise to reverse ageing.
We fall in love with strangers, we smoke, we
believe in ghosts. If Spellbound is under-
pinned by the idea that it’ll be fun and pro-
vocative for visitors to realise that they
too are irrational, then it’s underpinned by
a mistake.
There are other missteps too. Sometimes
we’re encouraged to enter the dark ages;
feel the medieval fear. The catalogue seems
aimed at Potter fans: all feathers, spells and
gold. The ancient artefacts are presented
as evidence of a world thick with violence
and voodoo. Then a label will explain, in a
sheepish way, that there may well be a more
rational explanation.
The heart stuck with pins wasn’t
intended to harm an enemy, but to ward
off evil; the ‘witches ladder’ (a string tied
The objects that sound witchiest
on paper – a mummified cat or a
shrivelled heart, say – just look sad
with feathers) might well have just been
a ‘sewel used for driving deer’. I’d like to
have known what exactly a ‘sewel’ was and
how it worked. It’s neither spooky enough
nor scholarly enough.
Perhaps the curators can’t be blamed for
the fact that the objects that sound witchi-
est on paper — a mummified cat or a shriv-
elled heart, say — look so sad out of context.
Because they’re not beautiful or beautiful-
ly made, they lack power. By contrast, as
you walk back out of the Ashmolean you
pass objects with real presence: an ancient
pilgrimage cross, worn from touching; the
magnificent hand-sewn cloak of a native
American shaman.
Other decisions seem more baffling. If
the architects of Spellbound wanted us to
enter into the medieval mind, why com-
mission a set of installations by contempo-
rary artists? There’s a pair of embarrassing
model dragons, a fish skeleton covered in
droplets of plastic — but why?
In one little room a red laser zips about
making scribbles on the wall. ‘In Vitro’, it’s
called, by Katharine Dowson. The rational
child and I walked in together and then out
together in the same fluid movement. We
ended up side by side in front of a wall of
padlocks — a selection of the thousands cut
from Leeds Centenary bridge. See? says the
exhibition again. We’re still at it, still mak-
ing love charms in the 21st century. But are
we? Did the lovers who left padlocks on the
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
bridge really think they were casting a spell,
or were they just having a moment, doing
something soppy?
‘The closed padlock represents everlast-
ing love,’ said the child’s mother appear-
ing beside us. ‘Well, they’re all broken now
aren’t they?’ observed the boy.
Opera
On the road
Alexandra Coghlan
Radamisto; Dido and Aeneas/
Jonas/I Will Not Speak
Hackney Empire, and touring
until 24 November
Wolverhampton; Workington; Blackburn;
Sheffield; Lancaster; Hackney. Every year
English Touring Opera does what our
national opera company doesn’t: packs up
its props and takes to the road, bringing
opera to the bits of the UK other companies
don’t even think about reaching. And not
just Traviatas and Toscas either, but properly
interesting, often unusual, repertoire.
With a core staff you can pretty much
count on your fingers, and ticket prices that
would scarcely buy you a sandwich at the
Royal Opera House, let alone a seat, the
whole operation is one of those minor mira-
cles of the arts world — a company where a
little bit of funding goes an awfully long way,
and not just geographically.
Then there’s the talent. ETO has had an
eye for young singers since the beginning,
and a look through past casts finds everyone,
from Christopher Purves and Sarah Con-
nolly, Susan Bickley and Amanda Echalaz,
starting their careers with the company.
Which isn’t to say that everything ETO
touches turns to gold. With fringe works
come greater risks, and there are both hits
and misses in its autumn season — an all-
baroque pairing of Handel’s Radamisto
and a triple bill of Purcell, Carissimi and
Gesualdo, with semi-staged performances
of Bach’s St Matthew Passion thrown in for
good measure.
Headliner Radamisto is a solid, uncom-
plicated winner. The plot — warring families
and nations in ancient Asia Minor — lends
itself poorly to updating, and director James
Conway’s decision to leave it be is a relief.
As it is he nudges the action forward just
a couple of centuries to the early days of
Armenian Christianity, the jewel tones and
gilding of whose art are the starting point for
Adam Wiltshire’s handsome designs, which
cope efficiently with a widescreen drama
that demands battlements and cliff faces as
well as palaces.
The real interest here, though, is musi-
cal. Peter Whelan conducts the period Old
Street Band in a crisp, swift (and, yes, merci-
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
fully cut) version of Handel’s score, sensitive
to his young singers, two fine horns adding
their own sonic gilding. If countertenor Will
Towers is a little woolly-toned in the title role
of warrior Radamisto, it works for a drama
in which it’s the women who really get things
done. Ellie Laugharne’s softly lyrical Polis-
sena (impeccably sung) conceals a steely
core, her coolness a foil to the pulsing heat of
Katie Bray as Zenobia, Radamisto’s wife —
her coloratura arrow-sharp and just as dead-
ly. Grant Doyle’s baddie Tiridate and tenor
John-Colyn Gyeantey’s baddish Tigrane do
the business more or less idiomatically, but
it’s the women who power this production.
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is the cen-
trepiece of the second evening. Framed
by Carissimi’s Jonah and the whale orato-
rio Jonas and I Will Not Speak — a newly
conceived sequence of poetry, narration,
motets and madrigals inspired by infa-
mous composer-murderer Carlo Gesualdo
— it becomes the central panel in a rather
ambiguous musical triptych, conceived by
three different directors, but all conducted
by Jonathan Peter Kenny. There’s faith here
certainly, flickering as the candle flames that
illuminate I Will Not Speak. But also vio-
lence and desire.
Much slighter than the composer’s better-
known Jephte, Jonas is a radiant final chorus,
a passionate musical prayer for the title char-
acter, and not a lot more (the whale is, disap-
pointingly, silent). Director Bernadette Iglich
plays the same games here that she did with
Jephte back in 2006. Once again narration is
divided between multiple soloists who wan-
der absently around the stage throughout, all
earth-toned linen and intense expressions.
This sub-Peter Sellars approach (shared by
the company’s St Matthew Passion) adds lit-
tle, actively confusing the drama at times,
apparently mistaking dim lighting and a lack
of action for profundity. A strong central
performance by Jorge Navarro-Colorado as
Jonah is a redeeming feature.
James Conway’s I Will Not Speak is bet-
ter. Verses by George Herbert and Saint
John of the Cross are nicely spoken, a foil
to the harmonic howls and ecstatic convul-
sions of Gesualdo’s still-confronting music,
sung well here but missing the communica-
tive energy and musical trust of a regular
consort of collaborators. But the drama feels
overextended, lacking the clarity of I Fagio-
lini’s Gesualdo theatre-piece Betrayal or the
humanity of Sciarrino’s Gesualdo-inspired
opera The Killing Flower.
Initial appearances suggest that Seb Har-
combe’s Dido and Aeneas will be straighfor-
wardly handsome (Wiltshire’s Jacobean set
and costumes, artfully crumbling and askew,
are a real treat). But Harcombe has other
plans, peeling back the familiar music to
reveal a psychodrama that hits you some-
where between heart and head. No power-
ful, mature queen this; Sky Ingram’s Dido
is a volatile, neurotic woman-child, whose
nemesis the Sorceress (a superb Freder-
ick Long) is less a malign force than a dark
alter ego. Susanna Fairbairn’s earthy Belin-
da tries to keep things on the rails, but the
fragile resolution and alliance with Nicholas
Mogg’s deliciously ineffectual Aeneas grad-
ually implodes. A closing coup de théâtre is
the final stab the show needs to tip it from
artful to downright devastating.
Radio
Words and sentences
Kate Chisholm
‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pame-
la, who teaches creative writing to prison-
ers in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think
of her work as being about bars, bare walls
and what happens when they leave jail. It’s
all about meeting the prisoner as a person.
She soon realised ‘how different prison
writing is’. It’s much more direct, heartfelt.
Jamie wrote a poem after just half an hour in
Pamela’s class. He gave it the title ‘My jour-
ney in the care system’. More than a quar-
ter of all prisoners were brought up in care,
a figure that rises to almost half for those
aged under 25. To Jamie it was a relief, ‘get-
ting that finally out in the open’. Now his
poem is published in the magazine Time In,
which Pamela creates with her students.
She and Jamie were talking to Carlo
Gebler on Inside Stories, the Sunday night
feature on Radio 3 (produced by Conor
Garrett). Gebler has spent almost 30 years
as a tutor in the prison system and is accus-
tomed to the strangeness of being in a cell
with a high-security student. ‘Being mean-
ingfully engaged while in prison through
art or education,’ he argues, ‘is surely what
every prisoner should be.’ But he, too, is
adamant that it’s not about rehabilitation,
about making better people for the good of
society. It’s about giving prisoners the basic
human right to education, which so many of
them have missed out on because of chaotic
lives at home, school exclusions, trouble that
often begins as early as nine or ten before
they’ve even left primary school.
Now Gebler wonders whether he has
made any difference. He taught at the Maze
prison during the Troubles. Every wing had
a library stacked with books, anything from
Karl Marx to Shakespeare. Tim, who served
a sentence for possession of arms and explo-
sives, came across a collection of American
short stories. Reading them was like ‘a mar-
vel’ because he forgot entirely where he
was, in a cell in H-block. He escaped, in his
mind. Writing, too, stopped the boredom,
the monotony of every day being the same.
This was an inspiring programme
because of Gebler’s impassioned commit-
ment and the survival skills of those he
spoke to. ‘Prison nearly killed me and you
43
BOOKS & ARTS
guys helped me live through it,’ said one of
his former students. I hope Rory Stewart,
the Prisons Minister, was listening. Also the
governor of the young offenders’ institution
somewhere north of Birmingham where
Freddie Pargetter is currently incarcerated
on a drugs charge. He could do with some
meaningful engagement.
It’s been hard to work out what the
writers are trying to achieve with this
social-conscience storyline in The Archers.
Freddie’s sudden fall from grace, his will-
ingness to be drawn into Ellis’s unsavoury
circle, his obsession with earning money
from drugs came out of nowhere. He was
given one of those unexplained charac-
ter makeovers beloved of soaps in need
of a dramatic storyline. Poor Freddie has
been wrung through the mill. His mother’s
attempts to get him off his sentence by call-
ing on a posh barrister can surely not be
allowed to work otherwise it will be seen as
a classic case of rich white boy being given
special treatment.
Over on Radio 2, the network (currently
shedding its star presenters with the news
that Simon Mayo is now leaving the drive-
time show after months of speculation and
bad press) devoted its Faith in the World
Week to the gospel rapper artist Guvna B.
He grew up on an East London estate and
remembers seeing his first gun aged 11 when
a friend pulled one out of his backpack ‘like
a video game’. He realised then that a few
wrong decisions can lead to something dan-
gerous. In Keeping the Peace with Guvna B
(produced by Dan Tierney) he wanted to
find out how people choose to be peacemak-
ers, not breakers.
Mark was set upon on his way home
from school six years ago and stabbed sev-
eral times for no reason. ‘I saw my funeral
happening.’ He decided that ‘God has put
me through this for a reason,’ and he now
works mentoring young people. We don’t
care enough, said another youth worker
with the Oasis project in Waterloo. He told
us about the 92-year-old volunteer who sits
in the coffee shop and listens to anyone who
comes in, sharing stories. He says it’s given
him a new lease of life. ‘Too many young
people don’t feel part of anything. We have
to make them feel special,’ says Guvna B.
He also talked to Colin and Wendy Parry
whose son Tim was killed in the Warrington
bomb attack by the IRA. ‘We don’t forgive,’
says Wendy, ‘but we have never been angry.’
Instead they have set up their Peace Foun-
dation, creating projects with children as
young as five, planting peace in the play-
ground. There was a lot of music in this pro-
gramme — Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong,
the Black-Eyed Peas, Guvna B himself —
but it was used to reflect on and add mean-
ing to what was being said, the rhythms
of speech and music complementing each
other rather than battling it out while the
listener struggles to keep up.
44
Theatre
Baby love
Lloyd Evans
Stories
Dorfman Theatre, until 28 November
The Inheritance
Noël Coward Theatre, booking until
19 January 2019
Stories by Nina Raine is a bun-in-the-oven
comedy with a complex back narrative.
Anna, in her mid-thirties, had a boyfriend
12 years younger than her but the relation-
ship died just as Anna was ready to sprog.
Aged 38, and desperately broody, she needs
to get preggers pronto. We join her on a
Sperm Quest. Though Anna could easily
arrange a casual bareback fling, she insists
on divulging her goal to her prospective
lovers before they drop their Y-fronts and
deliver the oats.
The action opens as a family drama with
Anna’s Dad (Stephen Boxer) pottering
around the kitchen, drink in hand, mak-
ing sarky comments about Anna’s sex life
while she sits at a laptop scrolling through
mugshots of potential dads. Her brother
(Brian Vernal) tosses in comic asides of his
own. I wanted to hear more from this fam-
ily of witty goofballs but the script has an
interest in social anthropology and it takes
us on a guided tour of male archetypes. All
of the possible fathers are played by the
brilliant Sam Troughton who uses the play
as a showcase for his virtuoso talents.
We also wander up a few scenic byways.
Anna enjoys an evening of proxy parent-
hood while babysitting a friend’s daugh-
ter. ‘What would happen if you slapped
the sun?’ asks the charming nipper. We
hear of a tragic Russian Jewess who fled
pogroms in the 1930s but found happiness
as a landlady in Belsize Park. There are
many amusing digressions of this sort and
they hide the fact that Anna (nicely played
by Claudie Blakley) is dramatically inert.
Her character is well drawn: an amusing,
highly sociable and morally principled
theatre director. But her predicament is
static. She’s incapable of growing or chang-
ing, except in the most obvious way, at the
waistline.
And the narrative is structured as a frag-
mented patchwork whose proper alignment
becomes clear only in the final scene. This
is a substitute for suspense and although
the replacement works well enough, the
play would be more satisfying with a clear-
er focus on Anna’s inner life. Raine’s last
script, Consent, was memorable for its
sexual intensity and its savage wordplay.
This is a more relaxed and playful affair,
a pipe-and-slippers Sunday evening com-
edy. Good undemanding fun.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
The Inheritance is an imitation of How-
ards End set among gay rich New York
artistes. Wow, it’s camp. Twelve male actors
mince around the stage like a platoon of
Larry Graysons, crooking their wrists, roll-
ing their shoulders, posing hand on hip
and saying ‘ooh!’ while rolling their eyes.
The high-concept narrative opens in a writ-
ers’ workshop where the gay scribblers are
learning how to create the great American
novel with the help of a mythical guru, E.M.
Forster. Paul Hilton plays him like Tony
Benn impersonating Clement Attlee. If you
enjoy seeing strapping young lads prancing
around the footlights, you’ll warm to this
display of fake improvisation.
If you’re neutral you’ll slip into a coma
before the first interval. (There are five
in all.) The reptilian plot takes an hour to
tell us this: Luke is engaged to Toby but
resents Toby’s new friend, Adam. Next, a
morbid trip through the Aids nightmare of
the 1980s narrated by Walter, a high-mind-
ed bore. Then, the frat boys contemplate a
Trump victory which worries them far more
than Aids. Then, a dispute over an inherited
country house. Then, the gay apostles hold
The Inheritance isn’t a piece
of theatre, it’s a mesmerically
boring TV pilot
a camp discussion about why camp men are
so camp. This wins the Campest Scene Ever
award. (Previous winner: the play’s opening
scene.) In Part Two Vanessa Redgrave pops
up as a dotty matron in dungarees who wit-
ters a lot about very little.
Anyone hoping for a faithful update of
the novel will be disappointed. E.M. For-
ster’s original tried, rather laboriously, to
contrast the artistic and rational impulses
in human nature by opposing a nice kind
family with a nasty selfish family. This ver-
sion doesn’t even set itself that modest
goal. Writer Matthew Lopez ditches most
of Forster’s narrative and concentrates
instead on the tribulations of rich, arty gay
men in Manhattan. That’s not me, of course.
But I would dispute that my lack of interest
is my fault. After all, I found the Odyssey
quite interesting and I’m not a homeless
Greek warlord.
A glance in the programme notes
reveals the real problem. A throng of 19
co-producers (half that number would
be a lot) have invested money in this and
are hoping for big profits when the show
becomes a Netflix box set. Stephen Daldry,
the man behind The Crown, is the director.
This isn’t a piece of theatre, it’s a mesmeri-
cally boring TV pilot that made me spend
an entire Saturday wishing I was in an oxy-
gen tent.
A single line was worth hearing. ‘My
heart is pure, unfortunately it’s surrounded
by the rest of me.’ There. I saved you one
day of your life.
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 BOOKS & ARTS
LAURENT LIOTARDO
Joseph Caley and Alina Cojocaru in English National Ballet’s Manon
Dance
Stranger danger
Louise Levene
Manon
Manchester Opera House, and touring
until 20 January 2019
Like it or not, provincial ballet audiences
love a story they can hum and any director
planning to tour a swan-light, sugar plum-
free menu has always done so at their peril.
Tchaikovsky isn’t compulsory: a really well-
known story, however undanceable, can usu-
ally do decent business (Northern Ballet’s
extremely silly Three Musketeers is a reliable
granny-magnet). But less familiar titles can
be box-office poison — as English National
Ballet is forever discovering.
When the former Royal Ballet star
Tamara Rojo took over in 2012, she imme-
diately set about breaking down the vanilla
46
tastes of ENB’s regional fanbase with a lav-
ish new production of Le Corsaire. The 1856
pirates-and-slave-girls romp had every-
thing the once-a-year balletgoer demands:
tutus, toe shoes, tunes. But it played to
shockingly thin houses. Last year’s La
Sylphide fared slightly better and Akram
Khan’s Giselle lured a more contemporary
dance crowd. Buoyed up by these promis-
ing signs, Ms Rojo decided to risk a three-
city autumn tour of Kenneth MacMillan’s
Manon to Manchester, Milton Keynes and
Southampton, blithely disregarding the
fact that ENB had already made an unsuc-
cessful tour of the ballet in 2008. Sales
have not been brisk. Pearls? Swine? Possi-
bly, but words like ‘hope’ and ‘experience’
also limped sadly to mind when the ballet
opened its heavily discounted run at Man-
chester Opera House last week.
All the sadder because this is a really
terrific revival: handsomely staged, metic-
ulously rehearsed and vividly danced. Mia
Stensgaard’s tourably flatpack sets (bor-
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
rowed from Royal Danish Ballet) are a
triumph of understatement: a few sliding
panels, a chandelier, a puff of smoke and we
can imagine ourselves in a bedroom, a salon
or a swamp. Luxury coaching from Anthony
Dowell, Dmitri Gruzdyev, Irek Mukhame-
dov, Viviana Durante and veteran Mac-
Millanist Gary Harris has guaranteed fine
performances at every level.
James Streeter was on goatishly good
form as Manon’s sugar daddy, Fabian Rei-
mair was suitably disgusting as her rapist
gaoler and Daniel McCormick stood out
among the three lords a-leaping. Jeffrey
Cirio made a strong debut as the heroine’s
pimping brother although many of the gags
in the drunken duet fell flat thanks to direc-
tionless lighting and a focus-pulling corps of
prostitutes dressed as dayglo marshmallows.
The ballet’s crowd scenes are so packed
with character and incident that MacMillan
freeze-framed the ensemble for Manon’s
private dance for Monsieur GM (set to
Massenet’s seductive ‘Scènes pittoresques:
Air de Ballet’, sweetly played by the ENB
Philharmonic), but last Wednesday’s star
had no trouble holding our attention.
The old classical certainties, finger
turns and fish dives, are twisted to
a darker, dirtier purpose
Alina Cojocaru first sketched Abbé Prév-
ost’s lovely, light-minded heroine for the
Royal Ballet in 2003 at the age of 22 (going
on 12). Her innocent bloom suited the fresh-
faced, convent-bound schoolgirl but it was
a while before the Romanian star got the
measure of Manon’s willingness to capitalise
on her own allure. Fifteen years later, she is
complete mistress of the role and lets us see
every stage on the road to perdition.
Cojocaru’s Act One entrance is still
a breath of clean air but we sense how alive
she is to possibilities as she rapidly learns to
appreciate the hideous gulf between love in
a garret and a diamond collar/nice fur coat.
By the time she hits Madame’s hôtel partic-
ulier, she is every inch the grande horizon-
tale, wriggling through Massenet’s ‘Ouvre
tes yeux bleus’, passed from hand to sweaty
hand under the proprietorial gaze of Mon-
sieur GM. Though not blessed with pretty
feet — her shoes have the look of mum-
my-wrappings — her light, fast pointework
blinds you to their faults.
Cojocaru’s Covent Garden Manons
were always shared with Johan Kobborg
whose Des Grieux used to haunt the broth-
el scene like a reproachful ghost, real tears
pouring down his cheeks. Her partner last
week was ex-Birmingham Royal Ballet
signing Joseph Caley whose acting is rather
more low-key (as a standing-room punter
once said of the great Igor Zelensky’s Des
Grieux: ‘He’s got two expressions: confused
and very confused’).
Fortunately, Prévost’s hapless young
seminarian is a character best conveyed Asma, who that same year had been the ted with cigarette burns and minus his penis
through the choreography. Caley, schooled subject of a glowing Vogue feature. And — courtesy of the Assad regime. Protestors
by the role’s creator Anthony Dowell, cali- understandably so. Though of middle-class handing out flowers were machine-gunned.
brates his dancing to show us Des Grieux’s Syrian stock, she had been raised in Britain The opposition coalesced behind various
moral decline. His pussyfooted Act One with a perfect accent, a first-class degree in Islamist groups, each committing atrocities
solo was sculpted with chastening clarity but computer science, and a career in invest- of their own. Soon, swathes of the country
three acts with a girl like Manon take their ment banking ahead of her. She was the lay in ruins.
toll. By the final duet the pair are taking Middle East’s Princess Di and shared both ‘I don’t think Bashar has ever been com-
a wrecking ball to the old classical certain- her reforming zeal and common touch, once fortable with brutality,’ said one observer.
ties, promenades, finger turns and fish dives travelling incognito round Syria to enlighten Quite possibly not. Those who have met
accelerated and twisted to a darker, dirtier herself as to ordinary people’s concerns. him — such as the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen
purpose. Southampton doesn’t know what Just imagine the double act the al-Assads
it’s missing. might have made. But it was not to be. Like Like Michael Corleone,
Michael Corleone, Bashar was a prisoner Bashar al-Assad was prisoner
of his genetic stock: his dad was such a psy-
of his genetic stock
Television cho that he used to force his male soldiers
to demonstrate their obedience by stabbing — have testified to an old-fashioned courte-
Bad blood puppies to death on parade and his female ousness, which sits quite at odds with those
James Delingpole ones to bite the heads off live snakes; mum barrel bombs and sarin gas massacres. And
was a wicked manipulator in the manner of yet, and yet, it’s Bashar’s name at the bottom
Livia Soprano; his younger brother Maher of documents, smuggled out of Syria, author-
‘How did this mild-mannered eye doctor is another psychopath who likes person- ising such inexcusable, fell deeds.
end up killing hundreds of thousands of ally to shoot unarmed demonstrators with Perhaps the saddest thing about this fas-
people?’ someone wondered about Bashar a sniper rifle and instigates most of the cinating documentary was realising just how
al-Assad in BBC2’s extraordinary three- regime’s atrocities. So when the time came completely avoidable the Syrian conflict was.
part documentary A Dangerous Dynas- for Bashar to give his speech to parliament, A bit more diplomacy here, a few more con-
ty: House of Assad (BBC2, Saturday). It’s blood proved thicker than water. cessions there, and Syria might now be a bea-
a question we’ve all occasionally pondered Hard to believe that at that point — con of peace and stability instead of a basket
as the Syrian body count rose — 500,000 only seven years ago — Syria was still case. But in real life, as in fiction, that’s not
thus far — and as six million refugees fled a very peaceful place. But quickly the vio- how tragedy works. As someone once said,
the country. The answer is so lurid and com- lence escalated. One hapless 13-year-old there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-
plex that it could have come from one of boy’s body was returned to his parents dot- hew them how we will.
Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Chinless, studious, polite Bashar was
never meant to become president of Syria.
His thuggish military officer father Hafez,
who seized power in 1970, had earmarked
RAQUELLE AZRAN VIETNAMESE CONTEMPORARY FINE ART
the job for his dashing equestrian soldier Indochine Scenes: Vietnamese and French Paintings from the 1900’s
son Bassel. But when Bassel was killed in a
car crash, the reluctant Bashar (rather in the 3rd – 10th November 2018
manner of Michael Corleone replacing his daily exhibition hours 11.00 – 18.00
elder brother Sonny) was forced to take on
the role that would transform him inexora-
bly from a healer to a killer of men (women,
and children…).
In tragedy there is often a key moment
where the protagonist is offered the chance
to avoid his fate — ‘take it!’ we all urge
silently from the stalls — but where instead,
inevitably, he chooses the dark side. Bashar
had several of these, most notably in 2011
when he gave an address to the Syrian par-
liament that might have saved his reputation
and spared the lives of half a million people.
The speech was in response to an unfor-
tunate incident in the town of Deraa when
one of his distant cousins, head of the local
secret police, had brutally beaten up some
kids for spraying anti-regime graffiti on the
walls. It was the Arab Spring and every Mid-
dle Eastern leader was paranoid and jumpy.
But this, Bashar’s former culture minister
recalled, would have been his chance to leap
on to the riderless wild horse of revolution Guy Peppiatt/Stephen Ongpin Gallery During event: +44 (0)7906 638 640
and take charge: he could establish himself 6 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street Gallery: +44 (0)20 7930 3839
St James’s, London raquelle.azran@gmail.com
as the region’s voice of reform.
SW1Y 6BU www.artnet.com/razran.html
He would have been helped, hugely, by
his charming, charismatic, photogenic wife
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 47
BOOKS & ARTS
Mercury rising: Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody
Cinema
Drag Queen
Jasper Rees
Bohemian Rhapsody
12A, Nationwide
There is a moment in Bohemian Rhapso-
dy when the screen swims with print. The
reviews for Queen’s epic new single are in,
and they unanimously denounce the song
as a vacuous and bloated irrelevance. This
feels like a brazen hostage to fortune for a
biopic whose botched gestation saw writ-
ers, stars and directors roll on and off the
project for a decade. But then Queen were
always bomb-proof.
The script we finally have before us
is by Anthony McCarten, who specialis-
es in rewriting the lives of difficult Brits.
See also Darkest Hour and The Theory of
Everything, whose lead actors both won
Oscars. Lightning will probably not strike
thrice for Rami Malek. Fitted with rabbity
prosthetic incisors, he pulls off a remarka-
ble facsimile of Mercury’s pouts and howls
and calisthenic struts. But he’s got more of
a job on to animate him when not perform-
48
ing to a stadiumful of clapping disciples.
We meet Farrokh Bulsara unloading lug-
gage from planes. Within minutes he has
talked his way into a struggling band of slight-
ly dull blokes, accidentally snapped his mic
stand in half, named himself after a Roman
god and taken a slightly dull girlfriend (Lucy
Boynton) who will intuit he’s not remotely
heterosexual rather before he does.
The story of the band’s lightbulb
moments are duly trotted out, from the
Dadaist yodels invoking Galileo and Bis-
Where are all the vodka vats, the
cocaine pyramids? All the frantic
and ceaseless rutting?
millah to the disco throb of ‘Another One
Bites the Dust’. But along the way, as Fred-
die and the slightly dull blokes bitch and
bicker and rock and roll, you are overcome
by the sapping impression that almost noth-
ing happened the way it’s being presented.
Pernickety academics will note some songs
landing out of sequence: ‘Fat Bottomed
Girls’ too early, ‘We Will Rock You’ too late.
But more demoralisingly, the weird tale of
a Parsi immigrant, an astrophysicist, a den-
tist and an electrical engineer is packaged as
a succession of predigested clichés: the dis-
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
approving father, the obstructive produc-
er, the mistrusted manager, the controlling
sidekick, the obstreperous star who takes off
on his own.
On it all plods. Mercury’s life is uninquisi-
tively boiled down to a set of emojis: angry,
lonely, lusty, etc. And there are grievous
omissions: where are all the vodka vats, the
cocaine pyramids? All frantic and ceaseless
rutting with possibly underage groupies has
been primly expunged. There’s one big party
scene, but the slightly dull trio (one of whom
is now a recluse, while the other two had
script approval) troop off early to go home
with wives we barely meet. A likely story
The most callous rearrangement of the
facts strikes Mercury down with Aids two
years early. This enables the script to posi-
tion the band’s triumph at Live Aid as his
defiant resurrection. ‘I don’t have time to
be their victim,’ he declaims. ‘I’m going to
be what I was born to be.’ The Wembley set,
trotted out faithfully and in full, is set up as
the redemptive climax from the off. As a
spectacle it has undeniable power, much as
it did then. To brag that it alone inspired a
stingy nation to donate is an outrageous fib.
The costumes and wigs are splendid, and the
songs are still up to snuff. But this homage to
a showman is more famine than feast.
See the film at polroger.co.uk
 NOTES ON …

Morwenstowe
By Will Stone

T
he first time I encountered Morwen-
stowe on Cornwall’s wild north-west
coast I was alone. It was early spring
and the church wore a fresh skirt of prim-
roses. As I crossed the stone stile next to the
lych-gate, the churchyard inclining before
me, I glimpsed beyond the sturdy grey
church tower a triangle of greenish blue, a
patch of sea tantalisingly held between the
sides of the combe. The faint but undying
roar of the Atlantic rolled in across the pas-
tureland. Here was a scene of raw beauty
preserved by isolation, a fortuitous harmony
of landscape, architecture and perspective
where something of the spiritual, the poetic
undeniably lingered. Now in early autumn
I return, greeted by rooks loitering by the
gate like bored pall-bearers.
The name Morwenstowe breathes history;
‘stowe’ is old English for ‘meeting place’ and
Morwenna — meaning fittingly ‘waves of the
sea’ — was a Welsh saint who settled here
in the 6th century. Her church is enclosed
by sycamore and scrub oak, sculpted into
smooth elongated shapes by the relentless
winds driving inland. A sheep track leads
invitingly west. Suddenly the greenish blue
triangle is an ocean, flecked with white tufts
of surf where the heads of black rocks pierce
through. Towering cliffs to north and south
bear intriguing names like Henna Cliff and
GETTY
Parson Hawker in c. 1869
Higher Sharpenose Point. Between them
are the ‘mouths’, Marsland, Welcombe and
Spekes Mill, with their primeval waterfalls.
On the point, walkers are seen bent under
the weight of their towering packs, like Sher-
pas or brick-bearing Roman slaves. This is
the untamed ‘wreckers’ coast’, whose lines
of shark’s teeth rocks would slit the hulls
of unwary merchant ships. Sailors were
forewarned. ‘From Pentire Point to Hart-
land Light, a watery grave by day or night.’
R.S. Hawker (1803-1875), Anglican
vicar and poet, is a name synonymous with
Morwenstowe. Parson Hawker dressed in
strange and colourful garb, black reserved
for his socks alone. He adored birds, gave
his ten cats freedom of the church and led
a tame black pig called Gyp on a rope. This
eccentric clergyman, who once dressed up
as a mermaid, championed the poor and
personally hauled the corpses of drowned
sailors up from the rocks for Christian buri-
al. Hawker’s anthemic ‘Song of the Western
Men’, impressed Dickens and his Arthuri-
an infused verses attracted Tennyson, who
even paid a visit in 1848.
Hawker left us the attractive rectory
whose charming folly-like towers he mod-
elled on his former churches. But his finest
heirloom to posterity must be his hut, a sim-
ple cabin embedded in a nook of the sheer
furze-clad cliff, which Hawker constructed
himself from driftwood and timbers from
wrecks. Here he would relish the sunset in
solitude, smoke opium and write poems. I
descend the deep cut steps, free the sea-worn
latch of the stable door, and perch on the old
wooden plank seats whittled with long dead
names and dates and varnished by genera-
tions of use. Hawker’s oceanic sunset is still
there, ever-changing yet eternally pristine. I
gaze in silence at the bridge of amber form-
ing across the sea’s darkening surface: a
Coleridgean vision, even without the opium.

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The six-day week was first promoted
by God, and the five-day week
by Henry Ford
— Rory Sutherland, p61
High life
Taki
New York
In the dark she still looks good. The mys-
tery and magnetism linger until dawn, then
you slowly see the lines and the harshness.
As with a lady of the night who has smoked
10,000 cigarettes, the coming of the light is
the enemy. New York ain’t what she used
to be, that’s for sure. She’s a tired old place:
upper-class vertical living has gone to seed
and the fun honky-tonk side of the city has
been gentrified and made boring. As mayor,
Michael Bloomberg did his best to ruin the
glamour of New York, allowing glass behe-
moths to bury the Chrysler building, one
of the world’s monuments to architectural
brilliance. Bloomberg was and is a low life,
who knows how to count to 50 billion but
couldn’t tell you Admiral Nelson’s Chris-
tian name if his miserable life depended on
it. The present mayor, de Blasio, is a low life
without the billions.
What happens in the sky is felt in the
streets below. The once exclusive Vanderbilt
Avenue, where stores sold expensive tennis
gear and hunting shotguns, is now a dark and
dreary place, and just as well. The Vanderbilt
was the hotel where the swells met, under
the clock, from before Fitzgerald’s time until
long past Taki’s. It has gone with the wind,
a victim of Bloomberg types who descend-
ed on the city like the northern jackals that
went down south.
The tens of millions of tourists who come
here have turned the place into Disneyland,
with thousands upon thousands of obese
men and women staring open-mouthed up
at Trump Tower or Grand Central. Food
vendors draw people into the streets, Ben-
gali taxi drivers honk their horns as if they
were back home, and gumshoe cops are seen
as rarely as the fuzz is in London town. No
one walks the beat any more, not even the
hookers. Grand Central Terminal opened
more than a century ago and it is still the
most beautiful railroad station ever. It was a
welcoming public palace, and more movies
were shot there about heartbroken couples
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
than CNN and the New York Times have
broadcast and published false news. The
vast, vaulted hall was a place anyone could
visit, its inclusive grandeur welcoming the
poorest and the richest. No longer. The man
in the grey flannel suit who used it twice per
business day no longer travels; he works on
his computer in his suburban home. This
man of 1950s renown has been replaced by
the hustler, the professional beggar, and the
thug looking for trouble.
Park Avenue has been re-zoned but its
buildings are still stately and expensive. It’s
the people who live in them that are the
problem. They are very rich but their man-
ners are those of the carpetbagger. And
they look even worse. No one wears suits
or dresses nowadays. Men wear jeans and
trainers and women wear leggings. Oh yes,
I almost forgot: no one speaks English any
more — in the street, that is, and I live on
Park Avenue and 70th.
Immigration from the southern part of
the Americas began in earnest in 1965 and
is now in full flow. Whites are a minority in
the city. Unlike the immigrants of times past
who yearned to learn the language, these
ones don’t so much as try. Even my house-
keeper, Margarita, who has been with me for
40 years, does not speak a word of you-know-
what. There are Spanish channels on televi-
sion and every telephone message instructs
one to press a button for Spanish. A large
part of the police force is Hispanic, and the
largest of the criminal gangs operating in the
city are Dominican. Black New Yorkers have
lost control of the heroin trade to Hispanics,
but the black community is still a large recip-
ient of that foul and evil drug.
New York used to be a sprawling Hopper
painting: grand, sometimes melancholy, but
golden. News-stands and candy stores, din-
ers and cinema palaces, mixed headily with
red-hued apartment houses laced with fire
escapes. Beaux-arts townhouses and elegant
co-ops lined the avenues on the upper east
and west sides. Over the years the luncheon-
ettes and candy stores came tumbling down
to be replaced by condos and office towers.
It’s called progress. The longer one lives in
New York the more one loves the vanished
city. It’s the same in London, but not Paris
or Rome.
Fifty years ago last week, Aristotle
Socrates Onassis married the most famous
widow in the world, Jackie Kennedy, on
Skorpios, his private island in the Ionian.
The island is now owned by a Russian oli-
garch who keeps people out with dire warn-
ing signs on its beaches. I thought of Jackie
last week as I crossed 998 Fifth Avenue; 998
was developed by Jackie’s maternal grand-
father in 1912. No one remembers Ari and
Jackie any more, nor does anyone notice
998 in particular. It is par for the course. Tall,
slender and glassy is the style nowadays, and
I for one hate it, hate it, hate it. New York,
New York, once upon a time a hell of a town.
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
My reactionary first world war reading jag
continues. The literature is vast, but so is my
capacity and fascination. I began reading
systematically, then went in search of thrills.
Typing ‘my top ten first world war books’ into
a search engine has also been a wonderfully
fruitful source of leads. Space, and probably
your boredom threshold, won’t allow me to
list mine. I want to stick my neck out, howev-
er, and give a cheer for two books by liaison
officers: one a Anglophile Frenchman liais-
ing with the British, the other a Francophile
Englishman liaising with the French. As one
might imagine, both books are tragicomic.
Emile Herzog was the son of a textile
tycoon. In the first world war he served as
an interpreter, then as a liaison officer. The
Silence of Colonel Bramble is a series of
fictional sketches set in a British officer’s
mess near Ypres. The principal characters
are the eponymous and taciturn Colonel,
a major, a regimental doctor, a veterinary
officer, a padre and a French liaison offic-
er. The sketches consist mainly of dialogue.
The well-educated characters discuss politi-
cal philosophy, mathematics, nature, war,
religion and other such weighty topics, but
always return to the subject of national char-
acter. (‘It’s the Hun’s fault,’ said the Colonel
sadly, ‘that war is no longer a gentleman’s
game.’ ‘We never imagined that such cads
existed,’ said the Major.) The characters
stand out as sharply as the Walmington-on-
Sea platoon, and the conversation, though
generally more profound, is as funny. Her-
zog wrote under the pseudonym of André
53
LIFE
Maurois. First published in French, the book
was a huge a success, launching Herzog’s
writing career.
Lieutenant Edward Spears liaised
between the French Fifth Army under Gen-
eral Lanrezac and the British Expedition-
ary Force under General Sir John French.
He was the first British soldier to arrive in
France. His book Liaison 1914 is a day-by-
day account of his work between 5 August
and 14 September. Spears is the embodi-
ment of the British soldier’s Roman ideal.
According to Spears’s account, General
Lanrezac, as a man, is an English music-
hall comedian’s idea of a Frenchman: sulky,
bombastic, grandiose, treacherous. As a gen-
eral he alternates between insane courage
and pusillanimity. Conversely, General Sir
John French is a French music-hall come-
dian’s idea of an Englishman: bluff, blink-
ered, witless, unreliable. As a soldier Sir
John alternates between hallucinatory opti-
mism and panic. Spears is these two gentle-
men’s go-between.
A meeting is arranged. Sir John tries to
speak French. By an unfortunate coinci-
dence, he tries to pronounce the word ‘Huy’
— the name of a village and strategic river
crossing. It is Spears’s opinion that ‘Huy
is one of the most difficult [French] words
imaginable to pronounce, the “u” having
practically to be whistled.’ Lanrezac, who
speaks not a word of English, and hates Sir
John on sight, is frankly rude.
Later, during the great retreat from
Mons, Spears’s difficulties in reconciling the
respective generals’ movements are com-
pounded by Sir John’s inexplicable absenc-
es from his own headquarters. Lanrezac’s
opinions of the British Expeditionary Force
become so abusive that Spears threatens to
resign unless he receives an apology. Incred-
ibly, he gets a decent one. Meanwhile the
French continue to attack the invaders with-
out counting the cost, a third of a million
Frenchmen are killed in a single month and
the French armies are pressed back almost
to Paris. Spears’s 500-page memoir reads
like a page-turner of a novel.
The day after I’d finished Liaison 1914,
I checked the listings to see if there was any-
thing worth watching at the local cinemas.
They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s
colourised Imperial War Museum first world
war archive film compilation was showing at
the local arts centre for one night only —
starting in half an hour. I’d booked a ticket
three weeks earlier after reading a preview
in a newspaper but forgotten all about it.
I rushed to the cinema and took my front-
row seat a minute before the film started.
Perhaps you have read one of the reviews
that appeared in the papers the next day.
The adjective ‘staggering’ was used in sever-
al of them. It was. It has been my experience
that the more one reads the literature and
history of the first world war, the greater the
sense of distance and alienation one feels
54
from the generation that fought in it. But
when, half an hour into the film, the screen
broadened, black-and-white turned to col-
our, and the young soldiers’ faces vying for
the camera’s attention actually spoke, the
thrill of recognition was so electrifying that
I couldn’t take in all I was seeing. And how
we laughed at their jokes! Their humour was
exactly the same as ours! Our little auditori-
um rocked with surprised laughter. They had
become us instead of them, only with rotten
teeth. Or am I deceiving myself?
Real life
Melissa Kite
Just when you thought there was nothing
more for women of the left to nonsensi-
cally oppose, I bring you news of a baffling
development. Female horse-riders of a liber-
al persuasion are burning their bridles. Yes,
there’s a new craze among the lunatic fringe
of the horse world whose members are cast-
ing their reins on to the muck heap.
This trend is mainly confined to people
who can’t ride very well and who are terri-
fied of horses, making it extremely risky for
all concerned.
You would have thought nervous riders
would put extra tackle on for more control
but the happy-clappy hippy-dippies of the
horse community — who also happen to be
the least skilled by a long chalk — are abso-
lutely determined to throw off the shackles
of imperialist oppression as personified by a
nice leather Stübben bridle.
These people have been riding their hors-
es unshod for a long time, claiming barefoot
is kinder, even as their horse’s hooves crum-
ble beneath their not inconsiderable middle-
aged weight. Now they’re going hands-free,
making them shoeless, clueless, bitless and
scared witless.
I suppose they think that if they don’t
pull on the horse’s mouth, the animal will
like them more and give them less trouble.
This is an idea that is not even half-
baked. It is totally unbaked and it has come,
as usual, from the proponents of natural
horsemanship. Naturally, it is going to end
in tears.
I first encountered the bridleless cult on
the Facebook page of a ‘friend’ who posted a
video of herself hacking her horse bareback
down a Surrey lane with only a makeshift
rope round its neck.
The poor pony was doing its best to coop-
erate but was so confused about which way
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
it was supposed to go as she sat there doing
nothing that in the end it started going back-
wards, whereupon the girl leaned forward
and stuck her hand under its nose, presuma-
bly offering it a treat or the illusion of a treat
in order to entice it to move forwards.
This it did, for a few seconds, until the
person in charge of the camera stopped vid-
eoing, presumably because the horse began
to veer off in another direction, or perhaps
trampled the camera-operator.
But no matter. Because dozens of hors-
ey women on Facebook started liking the
video and posting admiring comments such
as: ‘Wow!…This is incredible!… What an
inspiration!’
The girl herself hash-tagged the video
#DreamsCanComeTrue. Well, yes, but not
the dream of the poor dog walker who is
going to get run over by you. Or the car driv-
er who is going to have to slam on his brakes
and career into a hedge if you appear out
of nowhere going backwards in his direction
on your way home.
Also, there is the issue of the Highway
Code, which states that horses hacked out
in public must always be ridden in a saddle
and bridle.
I couldn’t see any alternative under the
circumstances but to try to burst the bub-
Now they’re going hands-free, making
them shoeless, clueless, bitless
and scared witless
ble of the hysteria that was taking hold, so
I posted a plea to anyone considering rid-
ing without a bridle to please think how they
would move half a ton of animal quickly in
the event of an emergency.
The girl promptly posted a tart reply say-
ing that if I knew how to ride with my seat
this would all seem easy to me. Yes, I replied,
it would be easy for me, because I really can
ride with my seat. I can show-jump with my
arms out to the side, and I’ll challenge her to
a hands-free riding duel any day of the week.
But how many of her hippy-horsey
friends and followers can ride without reins?
Had she thought of the skill set of the sam-
ple of riders she was influencing? They can’t
ride with tack, never mind without.
But I’m afraid that barely 24 hours later,
it began.
A lady I know said she went on a hack
with a female companion who insisted that,
as seen on Facebook, she was going to ride
her horse without a bit in its mouth, just
a sort of halter, you know, au naturel.
They got into the woods by default, the
bridleless horse following the horse of my
friend who did have a bridle on, and then the
bridleless horse went bananas.
Not being under any form of control,
it meandered wildly, pulling her in every
direction to scoff the greenery until she dis-
mounted, shaking with fear, and led it home.
You’d have to say: quod erat demonstran-
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dum. But they don’t like science, this lot.
Back on Facebook, I’m told, the girl had
posted more footage of herself going side-
ways down a track, pale-faced with terror.
References were made to the Dalai Lama
and Nelson Mandela. I can’t bring myself to
look in case I contract the madness.
The turf
Robin Oakley
Watching whip-thin jockey George Baker,
just short of six feet, greeting his mounts
used to make me think of the weight-reduc-
ing regime described by the 1920s rider Jack
Leach. The elegant Leach always dined well.
Next day he would go jogging in three sets
of underwear, four sweaters and a rubber
suit before taking a Turkish bath. He took
off extra weight so that at the track he could
have a sandwich and a glass of champagne.
‘This made me feel like a new man, and if
I had a few ounces to spare the new man got
a glass too.’ Not quite how modern riders do
it in these breath-testing days.
George Baker suffered a growth spurt
and in a matter of months moved from riding
comfortably at 8st 1lb to ‘having to waste my
arse off to do 8st 9lb’. Sadly, he is no longer
riding. In September 2016 he was in his prime,
having partnered Harbour Law to win the St
Leger. In February last year, substituting for
another rider, he went to ride on the snow
in St Moritz. His horse broke a leg and in
a hideous fall George suffered massive bleeds
on the brain. Having post-traumatic amnesia
for 24 hours is serious; he endured it for four
weeks. But when I met him at Newbury last
month you would scarcely have known he
had been ill apart from a certain stiffness in
his walk. His autobiography Taking My Time
(Racing Post, £20) is therefore not just the
usual jockey’s tale of tough contests on the
track, favourite horses ridden (like the game
Premio Loco), and nights out with the boys.
It is also a hugely encouraging story of how
a man and his wife have coped with life-
changing trauma at the age of just 34.
Wife Nicola takes over a section of the
book to describe the period in hospital that
remains nothing more than a blur to George
when he was belting out Adele’s ‘Hello’ at
the top of his voice, crouching like a dog on
the bed because he had watched Crufts on his
iPad and mixing steak, mashed potato, orange
juice and ice cream into a single gooey mass
to eat. He would ask Nicola to tip the porters
they met as she wheeled him around the hos-
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
pital and proposition pretty nurses in front of
her. There have been plenty of downs as well
as ups — weepy moments, tantrums of sheer
frustration, cleanliness phobias — but this is
a brave story of a journey back to near-nor-
mality. George has intriguing reflections, too,
on the practicalities of his trade, insisting that
not enough is made of getting horses to relax,
and that it is much easier to get horses to per-
form well by making them want to do it. The
physical effort, he says, is a bit of an illusion:
you often have to kid horses along. He reck-
ons that fewer than 10 per cent of them actu-
ally want to win.
Horses, of course, don’t know the names
they race under. When Colonel Edward
Riley acquired an animal called Bad News
he asked the previous owners why it was so
called. Because, they said, they had heard
that ‘bad news travels fast’. It won him 47
races over the next eight years. Well cho-
sen names include Au Renoir, by Peintre
Celebre out of Goodbye, and Wait For The
Leach would go jogging in three
sets of underwear, four sweaters
and a rubber suit
Will, by Seeking The Gold out of You’d Be
Surprised. With Fifty Shades of Hay (Rac-
ing Post, £12.99) David Ashforth, an inde-
fatigable researcher as well as the wittiest
man writing about racing, has provided the
punter’s perfect bedside compendium. He
includes my old favourite Pot00000000.
That animal was originally to be called Pota-
toes but when the Earl of Abingdon asked
a stable boy to write out the name the lad
chalked it that way and the Earl retained it.
David tells us how major owners like the
Queen choose their horses’ names, although
naturally she doesn’t figure in the chapter
headed ‘Sexcetera’, which concentrates on
naughty titles such as Soixante-Neuf, Sheila
Blige and Hoof-Hearted. Hayley Turner has
had to endure winning on the likes of Wun-
derbra, Bouncy Bouncy and Juicy Pear while
rather more sophisticated was the naming of
Geespot, by Pursuit of Love out of My Dis-
covery. The asides provide as much fun as
the monikers in the Ashforth collection. Of
the animal called Henry Kissinger he notes:
‘An enormous amount has been written
about Henry Kissinger, quite a lot of it by
Henry Kissinger.’ On My Ex-Wife’s Ashes
David reflects: ‘Possibly not named out of
affection. Won at Penn National in 2003.’
Having taken over his famous father’s
franchise, Felix Francis still puts ‘A Dick
Francis novel’ on the cover of his books.
Since Crisis (Simon & Schuster, £20), the
tale of a crisis-manager’s encounter with a
dysfunctional Newmarket training family, is
the eighth he has produced alone he sure-
ly no longer needs that sales aid. As ever, it
is pacey and professional although it feels
strange for an author steeped in racing to
speak through a hero who knows it so little.
Bridge
Janet de Botton
Vytas and Erikas Vainikonis, father and son
bridge enthusiasts, are the generous hosts of
one of the best five days of championship-
level bridge in the calendar. Held in Vilnius
(capital of Lithuania for my fellow geogra-
phy dunces), it starts with 12 invited teams
competing for the highly prestigious Vilnius
Cup and follows on with the Pairs and Teams
Grand Prix of Poland. One hundred and
thirty pairs and 50 teams competed in these
tournaments and attracted multiple world
and European champions as well as regular
bridge nutters like me and my friend Jona-
than Harris. Of course, there was endless chat
and analysing of hands and all their complex-
ities. Today’s offering comes from the Grand
Prix Pairs — and brought in different results
from all round the room. Those in 5w mostly
made six and those in six mostly made 5!
Dealer South Love all
z K Q 10
yAJ 4 3
XA 8 5 3
w54
z J 9 8 6 5
zA7 3 2
N
yK W E
yQ9 6 5
X Q10 9 6 4 2 S XK J 7
w98 wK
z 4
y 10 8 7 2
X Void
w A Q J 10 7 6 3 2
West North East South
5w
Pass pass pass
This was the bidding at my table. West led
a trump and Declarer wrapped up 12 tricks
in no time: eight clubs, two spades and two
aces. Easy peasy what’s the problem? Well,
at several other tables South opened any-
thing between 1w and 4w and got to slam
when East/West competed in Diamonds.
Against 6w most Wests led the y K won
with the Ace. It looks rather natural at trick
two to play XAce discarding your singleton
Spade. This fails on the layout as Declarer
has to lose two hearts. The counterintuitive
solution is to draw trump at trick two and
play a spade to dummy! This is an unusu-
al Morton’s Fork. If West takes his Ace he
has no choice but to give South an entry to
dummy, providing three discards for his los-
ing hearts, and if he ducks South can pitch a
heart on the XAce and just give up the yQ.
Very neat indeed.
57
LIFE
Chess
Condottieri
Raymond Keene
The recently concluded European Club
Cup, held at Porto Carras in Greece,
resembled late medieval Italian warfare —
populated by armies of mercenaries who
seemed to have no allegiance to the
geographical area of the clubs they were
representing. Thus the British grandmaster
David Howell was on the same Norwegian
team as the world champion Magnus
Carlsen, while the Chinese grandmaster
Ding Liren was playing on top board for
the Alkaloid team from Macedonia. The
eventual winners were Mednyi Vsadnik
from St Petersburg.
This week a selection of play from this
remarkably powerful event.
Carlsen-Potkin: European Club Cup, Porto
Carras 2018 (see diagram 1)
World champion Magnus Carlsen only achieved
victory in one game. This game was, however,
vintage Carlsen. In the diagram position Black
seems to stand actively and has his weaknesses
covered. Carlsen grinds on though, and eventually
the black player’s defences collapse. 28 Rb1 h5
After 28 ... b6, preventing White’s next, the
position is completely equal. 29 a5 Now White
can create annoying pressure against the b-pawn.
29 ... h4 30 Rb6 Qd7 31 Qb2 Nd3 32 Qb1
Nb4 The last chance was to launch a
counterattack with 32 ... Qa4. 33 Qe4 Qd4 34
Qxd4 cxd4 35 Rxb4 dxe3 36 fxe3 Rd1+ 37
Kf2 Ra1 38 Rb5 Ra2+ 39 Kf3 g6 40 c5 Kg7
41 Ke4 Rxg2 42 Rxb7 The queenside pawns
win easily for White. 42 ... g5 43 c6 g4 44 c7
Rc2 45 Kd3 Rc1 46 Kd2 Rc6 47 a6 gxh3 48
a7 h2 49 Rb1 Black resigns
Ding Liren-Efimenko: European Club Cup,
Porto Carras 2018 (see diagram 2)
The Chinese grandmaster Ding Liren had a fine
tournament, narrowly missing a win against
Carlsen. In the position that follows Ding Liren’s
next move traps a black knight. Black struggles
PUZZLE NO. 529
Black to play. This position is from Carlsen-Ding
Liren, Porto Carras 2018. Black tried 1 ... Nxg4
here but Carlsen eventually held on for a draw.
What would have been a better way to try for
an advantage? Answers to me at The Spectator
by Tuesday 30 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 postal
address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Nd6
Last week’s winner John McAleenan, Newry,
Co. Down
58
Competition
Accentuate the negative
Lucy Vickery
In Competition No. 3071 you were invited to
Diagram 1
supply a demotivational poem.
This was your opportunity to come up
WDW4WDkD with a bracing antidote to the world-view
DpDWDp0W peddled by an eye-wateringly lucrative self-
help industry that feeds on a mix of insecu-
WDqDWDW0 rity and the aspirational narcissism du jour.
DW0WDWDW You came at the challenge from various
angles, but the opening to Tracy Davidson’s
PDPDWhWD entry speaks for many:
DWDWHWDP It doesn’t matter what you do in life,
It’s just a constant loop of pointless shite.
WDQDW)PD Honourable mentions go to Adrian Fry’s
$WDWDWIW paean to the power of no and to Douglas G.
Brown’s 21st-century spin on Longfellow’s
‘Psalm of Life’. The winners, printed below,
Diagram 2 earn £25 each.
WDW4W4Wi When you are feeling down, be sure
DWDqgphp That worse is yet to come,
The most that humans can endure
WDbDWDpD Is bound to come to some
Which could be you, so should you be
0WDp)WDP Uplifted for a minute,
pDp)nDWD Just dig a hole, six foot by three,
Jump in and lie down in it.
DWDWDWDR The cloud that’s hanging over you
R)BDN)PH Has got no silver lining,
DWGQDWIW You know that you are overdue
For trouble, and resigning
Yourself to misery is best —
Accept that life is crappy.
bravely but is eventually mown down by the At least you never will be stressed
force of the Chinese attack. 27 f3 Now 27 ... With trying to be happy.
Ng5 is met by 28 Bxg5 Bxg5 29 hxg6 fxg6 30 Katie Mallett
Bxg6 with a winning attack. Black prefers to
give up a piece but in the long run this is Every day is Monday morning.
Don’t expect completion, ever,
hopeless. 27 ... Nxh5 28 fxe4 dxe4 29
Only hopes that die aborning,
Bxa4 f6 30 exf6 Bxf6 31 Bxc6 Qxc6 32
Only more futile endeavour.
Bh6 Rf7 33 Ng4 c3 34 Rxc3 Qe6 35 Nxf6
Nxf6 36 Rxa5 Ng4 37 Bf4 Rdf8 38 Qc1
Entropy is our condition,
e3 39 Rc7 Qe4 40 Rxf7 Black resigns Alienation just the same.
Knowledge, principles, ambition?
The world chess championship begins Counters in a pointless game.
on 9 November at The College, London
WC1 (www.worldchess.com for tickets). Why speak the words that have been spoken?
Language is at best inane.
Why repair the thing that’s broken?
Broken it will be again.
WDWDWDkD Everywhere it’s always raining,
To the grave like lice we crawl,
DW4bDp0W Truest poetry most feigning.
WDWDWhW0 Bollocks is the sum of all.
Basil Ransome-Davies
0W0WDWDW
Success is never guaranteed,
NDW0WDP4 Says Phil, my friendly lifestyle coach.
DPDBDRDP So if at first I don’t succeed,
I just give up — this new approach
PDPDW)WD Has made me less depressed, says Phil.
Now every time I pay his bill,
DWDRDWIW I compliment my mentor’s skill,
And kid myself it’s what I need…
When any challenge comes along
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
 LIFE

I try it once, and hope to fail.

Believing failure makes me strong, Crossword
I laugh… But here’s a sorry tale,
As pitiful as you may read:
2382:
My bank account begins to bleed A pointed
All thanks to Phil’s felonious creed —
Too late I realise I’m wrong! remark
C. Paul Evans
by Lavatch
Sure, I guess, you could go out
and climb that mountain peak,
and if you trained for years, perhaps
you’d reach the goal you seek,
Three unclued lights make up a
nine-word quotation. Remain-
ing unclued lights are of a kind.
but wouldn’t you enjoy it more
to just stay in your chair?
After all, though you could win, Across
no one but you would care. 1 Norway blocking the euro
perhaps till now (8)
You’d get a trophy for your shelf, 8 Excuse one departing
a cheap and chintzy prize, French city (4)
and everyone you’d show it to 12 Bill the Spanish for Jew’s
would yawn and roll their eyes. harp? (5)
14 Break dance, say, to get
So take a seat and pour a drink. going again (7)
There’s nothing you need prove. 17 Hospital’s moved organ in
Turn the telly on. Relax. the body (5) 6 Mum likewise gets pounds A first prize of £30 for the first
18 Hold off from rating and and shillings in cash (7) correct solution opened on
There is no need to move.
mark (7) 8 Perform the role of 12 November. There are two
Robert Schechter
22 Makes leaves from aloes fit American in book (5, runners-up prizes of £20. (UK
in stew (8) two words) solvers can choose to receive the
The mission statement’s words are there
23 Fool’s tucked into smooth 9 Impediment’s come up, so latest edition of the Chambers
To make it look as if we care.
vegetable fibre (7) journalist’s encumbered dictionary instead of cash —
The principles we hold are just
24 Box’s function to store once (9) ring the word ‘dictionary’.)
The ones our PR firm discussed. 15 Mother snaps around large
crown (6) Entries to: Crossword 2382,
Great teamwork helps us win the game — 25 English lover rejected coat insects (11) The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
Or gives you someone else to blame. (6) 19 Traveller’s drug condition Street, London SW1H 9HP.
Do, please, critique the things we do 27 Special ship’s aerodynamic (10, hyphened) Please allow six weeks for
(Graffiti pads are in the loo.) device (7) 21 Awfully ill, one consumed prize delivery.
Promotion is the holy grail 29 Argument about curiously salt (9)
That spurs you on until you fail. older etymology (8) 26 Astronomer’s cupboard
The job that matches all your skills 33 List includes depth for containing last of brandy
Will be the one some idiot fills. fisherman (7) (7)
It’s your good work and not the rotten 34 It’s allowed on a lake (5) 28 Make pedestrian search
That soon enough will be forgotten. 38 Fiddles with flowers and without sort of map Name
W.J. Webster French leaves (5) provided (7)
40 School’s firm about 29 Most of wall joint is broken Address
You’re worth no more than morning dew; cocaine (4) in huts down under (6)
Your life’s all dreams that don’t come true. 41 Off booze and off drugs, 30 A weak boring teacher left
However hard you try, success use solvents? (8, hyphened) in a spin (6)
Belongs to someone else, not you. 31 Fluid in ear’s come up (6)
Down 32 German film director’s
You take two steps along the track 2 Online study to find ideal gone round Britain (5)
And then you must take three steps back; location (4) 36 Dancer in bal masqué (4)
When failure comes don’t be surprised 3 Expels Head of Eton with
That Fate sought out the thing you lack. loud jokes (6) Email
4 Knight goes round and
And don’t attempt to change your lot round mounts in Oz (7)
To gain more wealth than you have got. 5 Transport’s errant, if
You’ll simply give what you possess changing track (10,
To others with a better plot. two words)

You cannot win, so never try. SOLUTION TO 2379: SHOCKING

Arrive, and find the spring is dry.
But if you’re lucky, you may glimpse
What might have been, before you die. The word is ‘pink’. Definitions of the eight headwords are:
Frank McDonald CARNATION (9), STAB (43), CHAFFINCH (22D),
SMALL SAILING SHIP (41/1A/13), YELLOW LAKE
PIGMENT (11/45/14), BLINK (40), SMALL (41) and
NO. 3074: WE’RE SCAMMING SAMLET (8). PINK (in the eighth column) was to be
shaded.
You are invited to submit a scam letter ghost-
written by a well-known author, living or First prize Mrs C.J. Stekly, Guernsey
dead (please specify). Please email (where Runners-up Philip Dacre, York; Nick Hussey, Overton,
possible) entries of up to 150 words to lucy@ Hants
spectator.co.uk by midday on 7 November.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 59
LIFE
No sacred cows
Science is on the side
of the trans activists
Toby Young
S
ome interesting scientific
research on gender differenc-
es was published last week.
Two social scientists studied the pref-
erences of 80,000 people in 76 coun-
tries to determine whether there’s a
link between the attitudes of men and
women to risk-taking, patience, altru-
ism, trust and so on, and how advanced
a country is in terms of economic
development and gender equality.
If gender is a social construct, as
many feminists claim, you’d expect
men and women’s preferences to be
more divergent in places like Paki-
stan, Malaysia and Nigeria, where
gender roles are quite traditional and
women have fewer economic oppor-
tunities, than in the Nordic countries.
However, the opposite is true. The
researchers discovered that the more
economically developed a country is
and the greater the gender equality,
the less likely men and women’s atti-
tudes are to converge. This suggests
that average psychological differenc-
es between men and women are part-
ly biological. How else to account for
the fact that when men and women
are free to pursue their own interests,
gender differences become more pro-
nounced, not less?
This isn’t a novel finding: there
have been numerous studies show-
ing much the same thing. Earlier this
year, a couple of psychologists looked
MICHAEL HEATH
60
at the participation of women in Stem
(science, technology, engineering and
maths) across the world and discov-
ered that the more gender equality
there is in a country, the less likely
women are to study Stem subjects
or pursue careers in these areas. The
phenomenon even has a name: the
gender-equality paradox. But it’s only
a paradox if you believe gender dif-
ferences are socially constructed.
Needless to say, plenty of femi-
nists dispute this research and dismiss
‘biological essentialism’ as pseudo-
scientific mumbo-jumbo designed to
justify patriarchal oppression. The
reason I bring it up is because I’m
interested in where it leaves oppo-
nents of the Gender Recognition Act.
The consultation over whether self-
identification should be made easier
has now come to an end, but you can
be sure the debate will continue and,
on the face of it, these scientific find-
ings give succour to the antis. In my
experience, they often appeal to the
idea that gender cannot be divorced
from biological sex to justify their
opposition to reforming the act and
believe that if you’re born with two
X chromosomes, you’re a woman,
just as if you’re born with an X and a
Y chromosome, you’re a man.
But how do those feminists wor-
ried about gender self-identification
reconcile their opposition to the
It’s not as if reform with their insistence that gen-
der is a social construct? After all, if
feminists are gender isn’t an innate characteristic,
in favour of but something imposed on you by
the way in society, why should there be any legal
which gender impediments to changing it? It’s not
as if these feminists are in favour of
is assigned at the way in which gender is assigned
present at present.
the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk
So why not allow people to self-
identify more easily? I’m not an
expert on the metaphysics of femi-
nism, but I think the answer has
something to do with gender being
assigned by society at birth and,
because it is bound up with patriar-
chal power and underpinned by great
impersonal forces, it cannot easily be
changed. To suggest it is something
that can be separated from deep,
structural inequalities, or that gen-
ders can be switched with the stroke
of a pen, is to trivialise the feminist
struggle. I daresay there’s also some-
thing annoying about men electing to
become women, which implies that
being born with two X chromosomes
isn’t as bad as feminists make out.
As such, weirdly, social construc-
tivism isn’t much help to trans activ-
ists either. So where are they to turn?
The answer is to take another look at
‘biological essentialism’. The claim
that average psychological differenc-
es between men and women are part-
ly genetic doesn’t mean that some
women don’t exhibit masculine traits
and vice versa. For instance, if you
plot statistical distributions for men
and women with respect to where
they fall on the systematising-empa-
thising axis, there will be consider-
able overlap between the two. Trans
activists could look at the research
evidence and claim that people with
gender dysphoria were, in some
meaningful, biological sense, born
in the wrong bodies — and many of
them do make exactly that claim.
I haven’t made up my mind where
I come down in this debate. But as far
as I can tell, the science is on the side
of trans activists, not gender-critical
feminists.
 public-sector workers are given pen-
The Wiki Man sions worth millions in their sixties.
Why the four-day Meanwhile, a middle-aged couple
with children have no choice but to
week could work work 80 hours a week between them
Rory Sutherland just to maintain a household. They
might like to move into the larger
house next door, but there’s probably
a pensioner living in it.
A four-day week of nine-hour days
is one option. Yet there is much evi-
dence to suggest shorter hours need
not reduce productivity — often it’s
the reverse. And recent innovations
make it likely that our leisure pursuits
might turn into something valuable.
Significantly, the worldwide web itself
was invented by someone on a four-

M
ost people were scandal-
ised by John McDonnell’s
proposal to promote a four-
day working week. But before we get
incensed about giving people more
leisure during their working life, we
need to ask another question. If it
really is so vital to the economy that
people spend more time at work, then
why does the government spend £41
billion every year (a third of the cost
of the NHS) providing tax relief on
pension contributions? This merely
encourages older and more experi-
enced employees to leave the work-
force several years earlier than nec-
essary. Remember, five years need-
lessly spent in retirement is 20 years
that could have been spent enjoying
a working life of three-day weekends.
We don’t only have a problem
with inequality of wealth — we have
a problem with inequality of leisure.
Britain’s leisure gains have mostly
accrued to the young and the old. To
the young in the form of ludicrously
protracted time spent in higher edu-
cation; to the old in the form of pre-
mature retirement. Relatively modest
Trust me, we need older people in
the workforce. In my experience, it is
only the over-fifties who really know
what they’re doing. And this isn’t the
1930s. Fewer jobs are physically gru-
elling and life expectancy is higher.
Wondrous and under-used technolo-
gies such as video-conferencing allow
people to do much useful work from
home. Both my father and father-in-
law worked happily beyond their mid-
seventies — far healthier than doing
nothing at all. True, they didn’t work
five days a week at 75 — but that’s
exactly my point: it is the length and
rigidity of the working week which
forces people to stop working when
they do: if there were more three-
and four-day jobs, people could work
longer. The money saved on pensions
There is much could then be spent decently provid-
ing for people unable to work.
evidence With a four-day week, better use of
to suggest travel-reducing technology, and more
that shorter flexible working hours, we could help
solve the pensions crisis, the transport
hours need crisis, the housing crisis and the social
not reduce care crisis. It would also give people
productivity the time to retrain in middle age.
day week: the late Mike Sendall, Tim
Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN, gave
Tim 20 per cent of his time to pursue
his ‘vague but interesting’ hobby.
I think most people would prefer
to work this way. In which case, econo-
mists ask, why does it not happen nat-
urally? Because it is a co-ordination
problem. Like monogamy, driving on
the left or bitcoin, it is an idea which
works only when a significant number
of other people adopt it. Until a cer-
tain threshold is reached, there is little
gain to adopting the behaviour unilat-
erally. Currently, few can ask for flex-
ible hours at a job interview without
looking lazy. That would change.
If McDonnell can introduce a
shorter working week, he will be in
interesting company. The six-day
week was first promoted by God, and
the five-day week by Henry Ford. I’m
not sure what God’s motive was, but
Ford’s was ingenious. He realised that
with a two-day weekend, it would be
more worthwhile to buy a car.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman
of Ogilvy UK.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. My wife and I have been
married for 50 years. The
marriage is basically sound but
she has recently developed a
new maddening habit when we
entertain. She waits until I am
in the middle of an anecdote or
story and then starts proffering
plates of vegetables or more
wine — this when everyone has
already got well-filled glasses
and everything on their plate
they could possibly want. And
of course they then have to say
‘No thank you’. These actions
seem timed to sabotage my
performances. When I take it up
with her she always insists she is
just being polite to our guests.
— Name and address withheld
A. This is a prime example of
passive aggression. Your wife may
be nursing a secret grudge against
you. Why not let her take centre
stage before you begin your first
anecdote? Smile pleasantly as you
invite her to regale the table with
a story or nugget of gossip of her
own. Tell those assembled that it
will be well worth listening to, then
add: ‘Before we start, can I make
sure everyone has everything they
need so I don’t need to interrupt
my wife’s flow by offering drinks
or food? Isn’t it maddening when
one partner spoils another one’s
story by doing that? All too easy
a habit to slip into.’ Chuckle
unbitterly as you add: ‘I call it
Anecdote Sabotage Syndrome or
ASS!’ Once everyone’s mindset
is attuned to the potential of ASS,
your wife will feel self-conscious
about interrupting your stories.
Q. We are about to give a
party for 200 with a dinner in a
marquee and a dance floor. How
can we stop female guests from
taking off their uncomfortable
high shoes and going on to the
dance floor, where there is so
often broken glass?
— T.L., Pewsey, Wiltshire
A. Drinks on the dance floor are
only to do with greed, and they
make the floor wet and dangerous
if the glasses get broken. You must
limit the entry points to the dance
floor and have strict waiters in
place to intercept glasses.
Q. I’m staying with friends for a
few months while I’m in London.
They are vegan and I’m often
obliged to join them at dinner.
During dinner they often erupt in
heavenly gasps and exaggerated
‘Mmmms’. Sometimes I have
to join in because of the group
pressure even though I never
think the food is very nice. How
can I hint that they don’t always
have to go on about vegan food
being delicious?
— J.A., London EC1
A. Why not be the first to make
exaggerated approval noises
yourself and then say to the
others: ‘Please stop me if I overdo
the praise … I find I’m always
overcompensating for the fact
we’re not eating meat to the point
where it gets boring for everyone
else — almost as though I’m
trying to convince myself that I
prefer vegan food. Do any of you
find yourselves doing that?’

the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk 61

LIFE

Almost, but there is a basic prob- It is so tempting to conflate truth

Drink lem. It is not clear to me that Jonathan
Searching for God in the twilight himself is a Christian. I have argued
that no one can call himself a Chris-
Bruce Anderson tian unless he believes not only in the
Incarnation but also in the literal truth
of the Resurrection. If it is not true
Christ died on the cross and was raised
from the dead, Christianity is mean-
ingless. This point irritates Jonathan.
He does not see why I should pre-
scribe rules for a club to which I do not
belong. But I would retort that without
the Resurrection, his version of Chris-
tianity has no theology and no histori-
and beauty. Titian’s ‘Assumption’ in
the Frari, the Mass in B Minor, Dur-
ham Cathedral. Surely none of them
could have been created without faith.
As one’s soul soars in response to their
sublimity, it seems churlish not to gen-
uflect to that faith.
I cannot take that step. Man needs
God, to make sense of the universe
and his own existence. We find it
impossible to accept that the universe
is just an accident. But the need for
God does not prove that He exists. It
may be that we are adrift in a mean-

M
y friend Jonathan Gaisman
recently gave rise to a pro-
found philosophical ques-
tion concerning wine. Jonathan is for-
midably clever. He has a tremendous
reputation at the Commercial Bar.
Although he brushes aside any com-
pliments from the unqualified, there
was a recent case — Excalibur —
where his performance won the awed
approval of lawyers to whom even he
might concede quasi-peer status. They
aver that his preparation was exem-
plary, his cross-examination ruthless
and relentless; his triumph total.
That said, he is anything but a
monoglot lawyer. Not only a music
lover but a musicologist, modesty
alone would prevent him from claim-
ing that Nihil artium a me alienum.
Among the minor arts, he is a practised
oenologist. But he is also thoughtful
and combative on the subject of reli-
gion, on which he and I have had many
exchanges. In a recent issue of Stand-
point, he wrote an essay, ‘The devout
sceptic’, which came close to convinc-
ing this devout atheist. Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Christian.
cal continuity. It is merely a matter of
aesthetics and ethical aspirations.
Jonathan once asked me whether
I believed that there were mystical
truths. Caught off intellectual bal-
ance, I replied: ‘No.’ I am still trying
to decide whether I agree with myself.
As the sun sets ‘“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate,
and would not stay for an answer.’
over the wine- ‘It depends what you mean by truth,’
dark Aegean C.E.M. Joad would have asserted. I
Sea, what will be temerarious enough to assert
better than a that truth is only a useful concept if it
relates to a subject matter that is veri-
beaker or two fiable. So mysticism may be beautiful.
of Pétrus? That does not make it truthful.
‘I feel so empty inside.’
ingless cosmos, condemned to a des-
tiny of mini-tragic heroism in our own
lives, with only stoicism to replace
faith. If so, let us embrace stoicism and
defy tragedy.
Recently, Jonathan had what
should have been a most unstoical
experience. He was off to the Aegean,
on a yacht which was plentifully sup-
plied with Château Pétrus. But he
announced that he would drink only
retsina. Was this a penitential exercise,
perhaps expiating the massacre of an
excessive number of solicitors? ‘No,’
he insisted. It was all about genius loci.
I find that wholly incredible. Certain-
ly, one would not wish to drink Pétrus
— or any red wine — in the midday
heat. But as the sun sets over the wine-
dark sea, becoming God-haunted with
nightfall so that one could easily imag-
ine the Homeric deities setting forth
from Mount Olympus to reclaim their
dominions, what better than a beaker
or two of Pétrus? Jonathan believes
that God is everywhere. I think, with
more evidence, that the same is true of
Pétrus. That wine, in that sea: almost
enough to make me a mystic.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Istanbul Polis
My husband, who fancies himself
as something of a classicist, was
delighted to see the Turkish
investigators of the Khashoggi
horror in Istanbul with ‘Polis’ on
their T-shirts. Against the odds
of Ottoman rule and the Turkish
cultural initiatives of Ataturk,
this Greek word for a city
society, polis, still designates the
guardians of civic peace.
The borrowed word was all
the more striking as the police
were acting in Istanbul, the name
of which derived from the Greek
phrase eis ten polin, to the city.
Where are you going? Eis ten
polin, which by the 16th century
had become Istanbul. A Turkish
folk etymology derives the name
from Islam bol, ‘plenty of Islam’,
but this has no more basis than
the popular version of asparagus
in English being sparrow-grass.
When Graham Greene’s
Stamboul Train was published
in 1932, the destination of the
Orient Express (the name of the
novel in the United States) was
still referred to as Constantinople.
Stamboul was a form favoured
by French-speakers, and
Constantinople in the 19th
century boasted a newspaper
called Le Stamboul. Stambouline
dress, as worn by Ottoman
officials, was characterised by a
black frock coat. It went with a
fez, once the symbol of modernity
(replacing the turban), only to be
outlawed by Ataturk.
As for police, the word was for
centuries connected in English
with policy and political economy.
In 1714, when Queen Anne
appointed Commissioners of
Police in Scotland, their duty was
the general internal administration
of the country. In Britain, the first
force called police to keep law
and order was the Marine Police
force on the Thames in 1798, three
decades before the Metropolitan
or ‘New Police’ of 1829.
By a quirk of regional dialect,
police in Scotland and Ireland
were often called the polis, which
was sometimes mistaken for a
plural, and a new singular coined
of polly. This 19th-century Scottish
term had no connection, I think,
with the mocking Polari name for
constables as ‘Polly Police’.
With policemen running
around Europe with a word on
their uniform deriving from the
polite virtues of the polis, it’s
funny that in Greece police are
known as Astynomia, ‘the law’ of
the physical city, not of the polity.
— Dot Wordsworth

62 the spectator | 27 october 2018 | www.spectator.co.uk

 Winemaker Lunches
Readers are invited to join us at 22 Old Queen Street for the following Spectator Winemaker Lunches.
These delightfully informal events, at which celebrated producers introduce and discuss their wines
over a four-course cold lunch, are hugely popular, so early booking is recommended.

Domaine de Trévallon Friday 9 November, 12.30pm for 1pm £80

Eloi Dürrbach, a Parisian architect (and godson of Picasso), gave it all up to make wine in the south of France, planting his first vines
in 1973. What is now Domaine de Trévallon boasts a formidable reputation and its wines are as sought after by collectors as they are
by connoisseurs. Ostiane – Eloi’s daughter – will present her remarkable wines with Jason Yapp of Yapp Brothers, including the 2016
Domaine de Trévallon Blanc, the 2001, 2009 and 2015 Domaine de Trévallon Rouge. www.domainedetrevallon.com

Chapoutier Friday 23 November, 12.30pm for 1pm £80

Maison M. Chapoutier’s Justin Liddle will present a mouth-watering selection of bottles including the 2012 La Muse de Wagner
sparkling Brut from St Péray, the 2016 Combe Pilate Viognier, the 2015 Saint Joseph Granalites Blanc, the 2016 Bila Haut Occultum
Lapidem Côtes du Roussillon-Village (en magnum), the 2016 Côte Rôtie Les Becasses and, finally, the delectable sweet, red 2015 Bila
Haut Banyuls. www.chapoutier.com

Franciacorta Monday 26 November, 7pm £100

Join us for a very special Spectator Wine Club dinner at The Balcon, St. James’s, SW1, featuring the extraordinary sparkling wines of
Franciacorta. Franciacorta’s UK brand ambassador, Tom Harrow, will guide us through a number of spectacular fizzes from such leading
producers as Castello Bonomi, Fratelli Berlucchi, Ca’ del Bosco, Bellavista, Monte Rossa and Ferghettina as we enjoy a three course
dinner at the excellent Balcon. www.franciacorta.net

To book, visit www.spectator.co.uk/lunches or call 0207 961 0015