MARCH 15 2020

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He’s the favourite to become leader of the stricken

party next month. Has he got what it takes to rescue it?
Interview and special report
 MARCH 15 2020

Your guide to
modern living
40 RELATIVE VALUES
The Michelin-starred chef
Marcus Wareing and his wife

42 THE LIFE COLUMNS

Emma Barnett advises a
woman on whether to date
a friend she doesn’t fancy.
Lorraine Candy on the quiet
power of introverted kids.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown meets
a hug-a-hoodie crime fighter

44 HOW IT FEELS TO …
… bag an art masterpiece for
peanuts at a house clearance

34 MY LOST JEWISH HERITAGE

Katie Glass on her journey of self-discovery
following the death of her father 48 THE DISH
Tom Kerridge celebrates
the unhumble potato,
Marina O’Loughlin enters

5
INDIA KNIGHT
8
THE INTERVIEW: THEO JAMES
20
COVER STORY: KEIR STARMER
a church in Mayfair — and
street-food hell, and Will Lyons
savours wine varieties that
flourish far from home
Can we still enjoy outdated, The Sanditon and Divergent Can the Labour frontrunner
politically incorrect TV actor tells Megan Agnew why he unite his deeply divided party?
shows from the past? hates being called a heartthrob Donald Macintyre reports

7
JOSH GLANCY
14
BOYS AND SEX: THE REALITY
28
TERROR IN THE VIRAL AGE
56 DRIVING
Jeremy Clarkson on Bentley’s
mighty Flying Spur, and the
Apps are fine for casual flings Peggy Orenstein on how online One year on, Julia Ebner Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy’s
— but if it’s love you want, porn and hook-up culture are explains how the Christchurch equally high-speed life in cars
human matchmakers are better ruining love lives attacker exploited social media
59 TECH
Why classic phones and
consoles are having a
renaissance. We put wireless
earbuds on the Test Bench
COVER: DANIEL BIDDULPH. ALAMY

66 A LIFE IN THE DAY

Abba legend Bjorn Ulvaeus on
divorce and their new songs

©Times Newspapers Ltd, 2020. Published and licensed by Times Newspapers Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF (020 7782 5000). Printed by Prinovis UK Ltd, Liverpool. Not to be sold separately
The Sunday Times Magazine • 3
 Is it wrong to enjoy outdated, unwoke TV shows? No.
Don’t write off the culture of the past — context is key

India Knight
T
here’s a current take
on culture that says
everything is objectionable
unless it was made last
week, to last week’s
exactingly pure specifications. Nothing
else should be watched/read/looked
at/consumed, except for the purpose
of denunciation. It isn’t just that you
can’t watch Roman Polanski’s new
film in the UK, or that Woody Allen’s
American publishers pulped his
forthcoming memoir weeks before
publication. No, the tentacular
disapproval extends everywhere, even
to apparently benign sitcoms such as
Friends, beloved of young people (and
their parents) despite some
retrospectively problematic aspects:
the blindingly white cast, the lazy gay
jokes, the fatphobia of Courteney Cox
in a fat suit, the incredulity levelled at
Chandler’s transgender dad (played by
Kathleen Turner), who we are invited to
find funny simply by virtue of existing. trough, of dated content would be Love head kicked in on a Saturday night.
Old episodes of Doctor Who, Thy Neighbour or Mind Your Language, In Love Thy Neighbour or Mind Your
available on the streaming service both remembered as the acme of casual Language, laughing at foreigners or
BritBox, feature actors in yellowface 1970s racism. Actually, those shows calling people “darkies” was meant
and horrible language of the were deliberately trying to make the to ridicule the user of the language.
“inscrutable Chinks” variety. It bigoted, ignorant white man the butt What it did instead was legitimise it
wouldn’t take too much ferreting in the of the joke. There was a good intention and reflect it back at people who were
BBC/ITV archive to come up with in there, albeit horribly misdirected. living through it.
dozens — hundreds? thousands? — of Is it wrong to find an old Friends There has been progress on all this
other examples. Is getting cross about episode funny? Is it bad to hoot with in both legal and societal terms, but
all this insanity? Yes, and also no. These laughter, at, for instance, Joey’s love the issues in question are still very
are museum exhibits, and as such exist of his new bag, which is actually a much with us: you don’t have to be
to teach us about the past and to remind women’s handbag? No, because the an ardent europhile to deplore people
us of the wonders of human progress. laughter is nostalgic; no, because the routinely being told to “go home”;
I mean, you could stand in front of the writing and acting are funny; no, and I don’t think anyone alive believes
Venus of Willendorf (30,000BC) and because the joke wasn’t intended to be that homophobia has been magically
think about the fact that she has huge cruel. But also, yes, because those sorts eradicated. This doesn’t mean that
breasts and no face, and feel outraged. of jokes are what normalised some great curtain of shame should
You could object to Leonardo’s male homophobia; and, yes, because for descend every time you watch a
gaze and feel appalled by the every one of those jokes, some gay man rerun of Friends. But it does mean
objectified Mona Lisa, or by any other somewhere was (and still is) getting his being aware of its more problematic
female subject of a portrait across the aspects — which you have to remind
centuries. You could, but I’m assuming yourself about, because the show
you don’t, because you — an adult — INDIA LOVES remains very funny.
are familiar with the idea of context. Those old TV shows don’t deserve
We’re being asked to reassess our Read Things I Learned from Falling by blanket condemnation. They reflected
ILLUSTRATION BY KATE SUTTON

values, and that includes what we find
funny. When we look at older work
today, we can be struck both by how
the writing is brilliant — Friends is a
case in point — and how the content is
strikingly dated. The absolute peak, or
Claire Nelson (Octopus). In 2018, Nelson
fell and injured herself terribly while
hiking. She lay there for four days, with
no hope of rescue. This is about that, but
also about all the other kinds of survival
the values of the day and even tried,
in their own way, to be slightly
progressive. View them as exhibits
— evidence of how each generation
is better than the last n
@indiaknight

The Sunday Times Magazine • 5

 True love is hard to find on a dating app — no wonder
people are turning to old-fashioned matchmakers instead

Josh Glancy
in America

W
hat comes to
mind when you
hear the word
matchmaker? For
me it conjures up
an image of Yente, the old crone in
Fiddler on the Roof, who shuffles around
her Russian village trying to find a
suitable husband for Bette Midler.
“Find me a find, catch me a catch,”
warbles a wistful young Bette.
However, I met a very different kind
of Yente recently. Talia Goldstein is a
former television producer in her
thirties who used to make celebrity
programmes. Now she makes matches.
Her dating agency, Three Day Rule,
conducts extensive interviews with its
clients before mining its database for
eligible dates. Dedicated professionals
then select possible partners from the
list. It seems to work too: Goldstein
says that about 70% of her clients end
up in a relationship.
At first the idea of a modern
matchmaker seemed to me a rather I’m exhausted just writing about it. their immediate socioeconomic
quaint anachronism. Singletons today App-dating has also tarnished the art bracket, which means that boring
are just one phone swipe away from a of chatting up. When you can connect things such as wealth, education and
hook-up; who needs a busybody social so easily online, coming on to someone how many children you want also
maven sticking their oar in? in person becomes a little creepy. Who matter hugely. As do whether you
The problem, though, is that dating now would take the heart-shrivelling prefer cities or the countryside, wine
apps aren’t working. That isn’t to say step of approaching a beautiful or beer, Narcos or Love Is Blind.
they never succeed. I know happy stranger in a bar or cafe? Of course many of the best set-ups
couples who met through Bumble or “People have become lazy and stuck still come from friends. But as the
Hinge, but the ratio of emotional labour in their phones,” Goldstein told me. latest dramatisation of Jane Austen’s
to fruitful relationships is atrocious. “Communicating romantic interest meddlesome Emma illustrates,
“People are exhausted, demoralised doesn’t come naturally any more.” sometimes it’s better to outsource this
and frustrated by the apps,” Goldstein Matchmakers can also do things that most delicate of roles.
told me. “I’m convinced they are apps cannot, such as give feedback and The matchmaking revival is just one
swiping past their soulmates.” apply all sorts of other dating criteria. example of the growing desire to be
The statistics tell a sad tale. One Because although we’re conditioned to more human in the digital age. For the
study found that men who are active focus on love and passion, in truth we further that technology advances, the
on dating apps use them for an are a lot more practical about this stuff more it reminds us how much we value
astonishing 85 minutes a day. Women than we like to pretend. Pretty much simpler, older things: crafts such as
average 79 minutes. This is everyone I know has married within carpentry and ceramics, sensations
spectacularly inefficient, particularly such as perusing physical bookshops.
when you consider that men’s success In this context, a matchmaking
rate at matching with women is just JOSH SAYS resurgence makes perfect sense, as
0.6% for every positive right swipe. finding love for others requires the
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL PARKIN

And matching is just the beginning,
of course. You then have to establish
mutual sanity, set up a date, prevent
either party flaking, actually like each
other, have good sex, avoid being
ghosted and somehow manoeuvre your
way into a meaningful relationship.
Watch Crossing Delancey, the best
movie ever made about matchmaking
Read Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by
Anna Wiener (Fourth Estate).
Entertaining, depressing diaries of
a Silicon Valley insider
most human skills of all: intuition and
empathy. And, frankly, people could do
with the help. “Somebody has to
arrange the matches,” sang Midler in
Fiddler on the Roof. “Young people can’t
decide these things themselves.” n
@joshglancy

The Sunday Times Magazine • 7

 “Men complaining
about being
objectified don’t have
a leg to stand on”
Theo James
Star of Sanditon and the Divergent films
THE
S
earch for Theo James on the internet and
MAGAZINE
you will find squealing fan clubs dedicated
to the 35-year-old actor; cushions, keyrings,
INTERVIEW smartphone cases printed with his face and
MEGAN video montages of his topless or snogging
AGNEW
scenes, carefully compiled by tweeny fans of Divergent,
the 2014 sci-fi thriller in which he starred. You will find
online message boards full of talk about his bottom,
after he waded out of the sea naked last year in ITV’s
costume drama Sanditon, which he also executive
produced. Newspapers call him the “Downton hunk”
(he died in the first series, of a heart attack in the throes
of passion with Lady Mary) and chat show hosts melt
during conversations about the tightness of his T-shirt.
All the while, James is reading Albert Camus (he
studied philosophy of religion at Nottingham
University and would like to return to the subject as a
PhD) and a “heavy tome” about capitalism and big data.
He is, by his own admission, shy. He talks to the space a
metre to the left of me for the first 20 minutes of our
interview. He is worried about being defined by “the
press”, and says he finds it frustrating to “not have
complete control over how you’re represented”, often
glancing down at my recording device. He continually
presses crumbs from the white tablecloth into his
fingers and cleans them on to the floor. He admits he is
full of existential angst, kept awake at night by the
thought of death: “I’m worried I’m going to run out of
time.” He wears his handsomeness fearfully, and gets
uncomfortable about being described as a heartthrob.
James meets me in the restaurant of the National
Portrait Gallery in London to talk about the musical he
is starring in, an Olivier-award-winning West End
revival of City of Angels. Set in 1940s Los Angeles, it’s
about a novelist, Stine, rewriting one of his thrillers for
the silver screen. It’s a play split in two: the world of
PHOTOGRAPH Stine’s movie is in black-and-white — James stars as the
BEN QUINTON detective — and the real world next door is in colour.
8 • The Sunday Times Magazine
“It’s about artistic vision being dumbed down by power
and influence,” says James. “At the same time it’s about
the allure of the glamour of Hollywood. People see it as
something sexy and glamorous, but underneath there’s
a dirtier backbone.”
We call over the waitress. “Can I get an OJ, please
— an orange juice,” he says. He spends his time
between Venice Beach in LA and north London with
his wife, Ruth Kearney, also an actor. “Have you got a
sandwich?” he asks the waitress, scanning the lunch
menu. “I have limited time before I go on …” He orders
a steak, which he manages to finish in the 90 minutes
we have together.
James describes the musical as a difficult “learning
curve”, although the show’s director, Josie Rourke (also
of the three-time Bafta-nominated film Mary Queen of
Scots), says he is a natural. “He’s an exceptionally fine
actor with a very broad range,” Rourke tells me over the
phone. “He is deeply intellectually curious.”
Contrastingly, you may have first seen James in The
Inbetweeners Movie as a jumped-up club promoter — a
foil to the dweeby protagonists. But his breakthrough
moment came in the Divergent movie trilogy, based on
the bestselling young adult novels, in which he played a
knife-throwing, tattooed freedom fighter, Four.
James used to be the front man in “a bunch of bands”
when he was in his teens and early twenties, wanting to
pursue a career as a musician after his degree. “I guess
the front man is the loud one and supposedly the
entertainer,” he says. “But it’s funny because although
I do a bunch of stuff that’s performance-related I don’t
particularly see myself as a … I’m quite shy.”
He ended up applying to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre
School “on a whim”, where he met Kearney. James is over
6ft and his face is, yes, very symmetrical, but dressed in
a T-shirt and jeans, he goes unnoticed by the lunchtime
crowd around us. He doesn’t carry himself like a “hunk”.
What sort of a person is he at a dinner party?
 BEN QUINTON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
GROOMING: CHARLOTTE YEOMANS. STYLING: MARY-ANNA KEARNEY, TOP BY RAG & BONE

The Sunday Times Magazine • 9

 TOY BOY Clockwise
from right: with
Shailene Woodley
in Divergent, 2014;
on stage with Emilia
Fox in Sex with
Strangers, 2017;
as a Barbie doll; in
The Inbetweeners
Movie, 2011
“I think that’s impossible to self-analyse,” he says.
“What role do you play?” I’m probably the one in the
corner, asking questions, I tell him. “I can be fairly
closed,” he admits, “which isn’t always good, because it
takes me a little while to get warmed up.”
Is this self-consciousness or a fear of giving too much
of himself away to strangers? “I think it’s a mix. Probably
self-analysis, being aware of how you are and how you
play in a room.” How do you conquer shyness? “I don’t
think it’s as easy as deciding to be someone entirely
different, because I think people always long for that.”
He has become more reserved, he says, since
entering the public eye. It’s easy to see why. Online,
there are “Mrs Theo James” T-shirts and memes of his
face saying: “Ways to fall in love: 1% being romantic.
99% being Theo James.” He’s the subject of wild
fanfiction (when superfans write fantasy stories about
their crushes) and endless YouTube videos of his “funny
and sexy moments”. The clip in which he first kisses
Triss, the female lead in Divergent, has 14 million
views on YouTube, and you can purchase a Barbie doll
based on his character in the film.
There’s a whole other Theo James that exists online,
independently of the real one, I say.
“The porn star?” he says with a laugh.
Later, I find out he’s not joking — there are deepfake
porn images of him (with his head superimposed on
someone else’s). It must be a strange feeling, the world
running away with a bit of your identity. “I don’t
interact with it day-to-day,” he says. James isn’t on social
media, for this reason.
His biggest worry is that he won’t be able to achieve
his goals (writing a book, directing a film, walking to the
North Pole) before he dies. “Since I was a kid, I’ve
always been acutely aware of how short and transient
life is and how you have such a limited time, and then
suddenly you’re dead. I was an introspective child.”
Does he worry about the coronavirus outbreak?
“No. I dunno, it’s obviously a big story, but it’s also a
great story, it’s a big headline grabber, so inevitably it’s
going to be perhaps cooked beyond its boiling point.”
“I was a bit of a wild
child. I went raving, to
MARILYN KINGWILL
festivals. Doing stupid
stuff that I shouldn’t”
He spends his spare time on hobbies he can “measure”
his success in: he got his Yachtmaster qualification, and
now he is learning to fly planes. “I’d like to take a year out
when I have kids and they’re above the age of about five
and go sailing around the world, that would be the
dream. But who knows, I could be dead by then.”
Before we meet, I watch clips of him on chat shows.
Most begin with a presenter fawning: “OMG how hot
is Theo James?!” To which James, generally, quips back
something sarcastic, deadpan, dark or shocking. There
is one that I bring up, on the Today show in 2016, where
the four American hosts giggle about how they “don’t
have a problem” with the tightness of his clothes,
interrupting any sincere answer with comments about
taking screenshots of his body on their phones. At the
end, he is followed out by one of the hosts.
It is dressed up as humour, but it must have been
mortifying. “A hundred per cent,” he says. “It’s
uncomfortable and frustrating, but it’s a tough thing to
complain about.” If that were an actress, though, it
would be seen at best as humiliating and at worst
harassment. “There’s always a struggle trying to assert
the real version of myself as opposed to the narrative of
how someone looks. But … I dunno, what the f*** are
you supposed to do?”
So in what ways is being objectified as a man different
from being objectified as a woman? “I don’t think men
have a leg to stand on in terms of complaining about it,
because women have been and continue to be
objectified by men in a much more extreme way,” he
says. “Film sets are still very male, for example.”
There’s an argument that by agreeing to nudity,
actors are in some way reinforcing the objectification.
“The [nude] scene in Sanditon was interesting because
it was an evolution of that great 1995 Colin Firth
moment in Pride and Prejudice. It wasn’t nudity for the
sake of nudity, it was a tool to push boundaries of a
genre that can be quite boring.” Has he said no to
nudity before? “Yes. I have never got my penis out.”
I bring up his character in Downton Abbey, who is
cooed over and flirted with until he dies, mid-tryst, 20
minutes after his entrance. Julian Fellowes, the show’s
creator, later said: “The main thing I remember about
casting [James] was that we asked all the women in the
office which actors on the list to be auditioned they
found attractive and Theo was the head-and-shoulders
winner.” There is no way this could have been said about
a woman. Did he find Fellowes’s comment reductive?
“Not at that point,” James says. “I was f****** needing
to pay my mountain of student debt, so I couldn’t
The Sunday Times Magazine • 11
 give a f*** if it was reductive. Yes, now I think if I was to
play that part it would feel extremely reductive.”
James was born in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire,
as Theodore Peter James Kinnaird Taptiklis. His father
was a business consultant and his mother worked for
the NHS. The youngest of five siblings, he fought hard
to have his “voice heard among the clash and din”.
As a teenager, he says, he got into harmless trouble.
“I was a bit of a wild child,” he says. “I went raving, to
festivals. Doing stupid stuff that I shouldn’t.” He
smoked weed, punched a few walls, got into fights. It
was “a volcano of testosterone,” he explains. “Trying to
find your identity when you’re still a child but being
expected to be a semblance of a man. Reactions are
extreme. It’s all very raw and emotional.”
Women, he thinks, are better than men at letting
NAKED TALENT emotions “be part of themselves” and learning from
Right: at the them. “Especially nowadays in a world where, in a
Underworld: good way, the assumption of what a man is is changing
Awakening premiere and evolving, I think some men struggle [with that].”
with his wife, Ruth Has he become more in touch with his emotions?
Kearney. Below: “I think I’ve got worse to be honest. When you’re a
as Sidney Parker teenager you indulge in emotionality with freedom and
in Sanditon, 2019 without the shackles of masculinity. Then you discover,
rightly or wrongly, you’re not sure how useful that
emotionality is in the day-to-day world. If you’re that
open, in a sad way, I think it can be harder, can’t it? With
age you close doors.”
When I ask him what his outlet is, he jokes,
somewhat facetiously, “headbutting people”. Really,
though, when his brain is busy, he goes for a drive in
one of his classic cars, alone, fast, and late at night.
Does he feel anxious through life? “Yeah,” he says,
“anxiousness is part of 21st-century living. If you
consider yourself ambitious or want to achieve
certain things before we all peg it into the hole of
non-existence, then expectation is a big part of it.” part of my brain,” says James, talking about pitching
A night owl, James says he has tried magic mushrooms to investors. “When you’re selling a product that
(he was petrified), “occasionally” smokes weed and still isn’t you then suddenly there’s an elation. You feel
enjoys clubbing. “I like the release of it,” he says. more at ease.”
“And the wildness. I can be a fairly restrained person, Love Island crops up in our conversation and the
probably in a bad way, so those kinds of nights and men’s buff, hairless torsos. Has he got insecurities
alcohol, there’s a bit of a relief to letting go.” about the way he looks? “All humans have insecurities,
unless you’re a sociopath, so yes. But I’ve got to an age

J
ames is a fan of big romantic gestures (surprise
trips to Paris with his wife) and chooses to
hang out with muggles in LA, rather than
Hollywood types. We talk about a Pavarotti
documentary he enjoyed on the plane — he is
particularly taken by one of the opera singer’s lines
about going on stage: “I go to die. Every night I go to
die” — and about everyone’s obsession with true
crime. Last year he launched a TV and film production
company, Untapped, which specialises in thrillers.
One of their projects is based on the award-winning
Los Angeles Times story “A Dying Mother’s Plan”,
the true story of a terminally ill mother who killed her
schizophrenic son whom she believed might become
a mass shooter. “It’s a way of exercising a different
where I don’t really care in the same way. It doesn’t take
up a large part of my existential thinking.”
Does he see himself as a heartthrob? “No, what does
that mean? Drill that down for me?” He emphasises
each word: “Do, I, see, myself, as, a, heart, throb? So
what’s a heartthrob? Someone that makes people’s
hearts throb faster, so makes people more … interested?
I don’t know, you tell me. It was your phrase.”
Someone who is pinned up for being attractive.
“Then no, definitely not. I mean how could you?
Unless you were a total narcissist. It seems … singular in
dimension, fleeting. Looks only last for so long and if
they were a measure of defining a person that might be
troublesome in 10 years, because then I’ll be an old
craggy f***.”
It is fair enough. I have pressed an old bruise.

“ Do I see myself as a What James really wants to do next, he says, is play a

historical character — to invest time in deep academic
heartthrob? No. How research — and become a respected producer, with
longevity. He wants to prove himself more than most,
desperate to break out of the gilded cage n
could you, unless you
City of Angels is at the Garrick Theatre, London WC2;
were a total narcissist”
GETTY

cityofangelsmusical.co.uk

The Sunday Times Magazine • 13

 Peggy Orenstein, author of the definitive book on girls, porn

WHAT BOYS REALLY

 and hook-up culture, reveals how young men are also struggling

Y THINK ABOUT SEX

A
s a journalist, I have spent a
quarter of a century chronicling
girls’ lives. But in the wake of
publishing my book Girls & Sex,
I was urged to turn my attention
to young men. I resisted. Then
came #MeToo. And Harvey
Weinstein. And Bill Cosby.
And Louis CK. And a
pussy-grabbing president.
Masculinity was declared to
be “broken” and “toxic”. The parents of boys
I met, the ones who when I described my
work with girls used to shake their heads
ruefully and say they were “relieved to have
sons”, suddenly realised that their job may
actually be harder. Perhaps, I thought, this
moment would be a breakthrough, offering
not only a mandate to reduce sexual
violence, but an opportunity to engage
young men in long-overdue conversations
about gender and intimacy.
A 2018 survey of more than 1,000 US
adolescents found that although girls
believed there were “many ways to be a girl”
(the big, honkin’ caveat being they still felt
valued primarily for their appearance), boys
felt there was only one narrow pathway to
successful manhood. They still equated the
display of most emotions, as well as
vulnerability, crying, or appearing sensitive
or moody, with “acting like a girl” — which,
in case you were wondering, is not a good
thing. A third of the boys surveyed said they
felt compelled to suppress their feelings
when they were sad or scared. Another third
had felt pressure to “be a man” and “suck it
up”. More than 40% agreed that when they
were angry, society expected them to be
aggressive; the next most common response
was that they should do nothing, keep quiet
and, again, “suck it up”.
Feminism may have afforded girls an
escape from the constraints of conventional
femininity, offered them alternative
identities as women and a language with
which to express the myriad problems-that-
have-no-name, but it has made few inroads
with boys. Whether you label it the “mask
of masculinity”, “toxic masculinity” or “the
man box”, the traditional conception of
manhood still holds sway, dictating how
boys think, feel and behave. Whatever
comfort, status or privilege is conferred by
the “real man” mantle, it comes at
tremendous potential cost to boys’ physical
and mental health, as well as that of the
young women around them.
I spent more than two years talking to
young men between the ages of 16 and 22,
engaging in in-depth, hours-long
conversations about masculinity as well
as their attitudes, expectations and early
experiences of sex and intimacy. Nearly
all of them held relatively egalitarian views
about girls, at least in the public sphere: they
considered their female classmates to be
smart and competent; entitled to their place
on the sports field and in school leadership;
16 • The Sunday Times Magazine
deserving of their admissions to higher
education and of their professional
opportunities. They all had platonic female
friends. That was a huge shift from what you
might have seen 50, 40 or maybe even 20
years ago. Yet when I asked them to describe
the ideal man, those same boys, who were
coming of age in the 2000s, appeared to be
channelling 1955; their definition of
masculinity had barely budged.
BOYS STILL DON’T CRY
For Rob, a student, as for many of the boys
I spoke to, our interview was a unique
opportunity to grapple openly with his
experience not only of sex but also of
emotional intimacy. We met in January,
about four months after he’d broken up with
the girlfriend he’d had since school. The two
had been together for more than three
years — “I really did love her,” he said — and
although the universities they now attended
were miles apart, they had decided to try to
stay together. Then, in late September, Rob
heard from a friend that she was cheating on
him. “So I cut her off,” he said, snapping his
fingers. “I stopped talking to her and forgot
about her completely.” Only . . . not really.
Although he didn’t use the word, the reality
was that Rob spiralled into depression.
I asked whom he talked to during that time.
“That’s the problem,” Rob said. “None of
my friends talk about feelings. If you were
hung up over a girl, they’d be, like, ‘Stop
being a bitch.’ ” Rob looked glum. He had
never even confided in his best friend, whom
he’d known since the age of 12. The only
person with whom Rob could drop his guard,
be fully open, was his girlfriend, but that was
no longer an option — not when she was the
source of his pain.
Girlfriends, mothers and, in some cases,
sisters were the most commonly cited
confidantes among the boys I met, and while
it’s wonderful to know they have someone to
talk to, teaching boys that women are
responsible for emotional labour, for
processing men’s emotional lives in ways
that would be emasculating for guys to do
themselves, comes at a price to both sexes.
Among other things, that dependence can
leave boys stunted, in a state of arrested
development, potentially unprepared to
form caring, lasting, intimate relationships.
I paid close attention when boys
mentioned crying — doing it, not doing it,
wanting to do it, not being able to do it. For
most, it was a rare and sometimes shameful
“As we started being
more sexual I became
very nervous about
being … sufficient.
I couldn’t perform”
event — a dangerous crack in that carefully
constructed internal edifice. Another
student told me that he hadn’t been able
to cry when his parents divorced. “I really
wanted to,” he said. “I needed to cry.” His
solution: he streamed three films about the
Holocaust back to back (that worked). As
someone who has, by virtue of my gender,
always had permission to weep, I didn’t
initially get it. It took several interviews for
me to realise that when boys confided in me
about crying — or, even more so, when they
teared up in front of me — they were taking
a risk, trusting me with something private
and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or
a desire for it. Or, as with Rob, an inability to
acknowledge it that was so poignant, it made
me want to, well, cry.
PORN WORLD V REAL WORLD
It’s no secret that today’s children are guinea
pigs in a colossal porn experiment. Whereas
(mostly) boys of previous generations
might have passed around a filched copy of
Playboy, today anyone with a broadband
connection can instantly access anything you
can imagine — and a whole lot of stuff you
don’t want to imagine.
Some boys felt that their porn use had
no effect on them, many of them asserting:
“I can tell the difference between fantasy and
reality.” That, as it happens, is the instinctive
response people give to any suggestion of
media influence — none of us wants to think
we’re so impressionable, though we’re quick
to recognise that others are. But decades of
research show that what we consume
becomes part of our psyches, unconsciously
affecting how we feel, think and behave.
Porn use has been associated with boys’
real-life badgering of girls for nude pictures.
Both boys and girls who consume porn at
younger ages are more likely to become
sexually active sooner than peers, to have
more partners, to have higher rates of
pregnancy, to view sexual aggression more
positively and women more negatively, and
to engage in the riskier and more atypical
behaviours porn depicts.
Male porn users report less satisfaction
than others with their sex lives, their own
performance in bed and with their female
partners’ bodies. There is even speculation
that because of its convenience as well as low
physical and emotional investment — porn
never rejects you, never makes demands of
you, never wants you to talk about your
feelings — the rise in porn use is partially
responsible for the lower rates of intercourse
among millennials. That reduction of
pleasure in partnered sex was what
concerned most of my interviewees.
One student called Reza believed porn
increased his awareness of real women’s
physical imperfections. “I’ve got things
narrowed down to a very, very specific body
type that turns me on,” he explained. “It’s
probably not all driven by porn, but I figured
out what I liked from that and I think
 I wouldn’t have otherwise. It doesn’t ruin
my relationships, but it’s not nice when I’m
trying to talk my girlfriend into liking a part
of her body, but I’m secretly thinking, well,
actually, I would prefer …” And Kevin,
a school pupil, said that after watching “all
those skinny white women” (he’s Caucasian),
he was having a hard time becoming aroused
by his black girlfriend’s body.
Some boys fretted more over their own
bodies’ contours than their partners’,
especially (and perhaps not surprisingly)
their penis size. A few boys were so
concerned about size that they avoided
sexual situations. “I had a girlfriend at 16,”
said Mitchell, “and as we started being more
sexual, I became very nervous about being …
sufficient. I couldn’t perform during our first
real sexual experience because that was so
much on my mind. And once you feel like
you can’t, you can’t. You’re done.” With time,
and maybe a little maturity, he got past it. In
retrospect, he said: “Comparing myself to
porn was obviously ridiculous. But, you
know, it’s also kind of understandable.”
Like every boy I spoke with, Mitchell
claimed to know that, of course, porn wasn’t
realistic. But that line between fact and
fiction was not clear; after all, porn is
depicting something, and what other point
of reference do young people have? “If you’re
a teenage guy and you don’t have much
sexual experience, and you’ve been watching
porn for the past six or seven years, you
can develop almost a … fear, really,” said
another university student. “A fear that you
would not be able to perform up to those
standards, though, of course, no one really
can. But maybe the starkest contrast is
your perception of the kind of feedback
that you’re going to be getting from a girl.
Like that they will be moaning and having
orgasms all over the place. That’s obviously
not the case.”
“I don’t consider the porn I watch to be
representative of the person I am,” said
REX
Daniel, a lantern-jawed student with hipster
glasses. “The whole category of ‘Unwilling’
[women who say no to sex, then change their
mind when forced]. It’s very appealing to
me, even though I know it’s wrong. And I do
truly believe it’s wrong. I would never do it.
But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy
watching it.”
In real life, Daniel was consciously trying
to curb his use of the thoughtlessly sexist,
homophobic language that had been
common at secondary school. He also said he
considered any form of sexual interaction to
have “spiritual significance” and claimed to
prize intimacy over “raw sex”.
But that’s not what got him off. Real sex
with his school girlfriend wasn’t stimulating
enough. “I felt like I was never really
satisfied,” he said. “There was always more to
try. Like, ‘Oh, this is pretty good, she’s letting
me do a lot, but we haven’t done this yet, we
haven’t done this, done this, done this.’”
As another boy put it: “I think porn affects
your ability to be innocent in a sexual
relationship. The whole idea of exploring
sex without any preconceived ideas of what
it is, you know? That natural organic process
has just been f***** by porn.”
ANATOMY OF A HOOK-UP
There are two contradictory trends
identified in reports about young people’s
sex lives. One is that they are virtually
celibate, too busy playing Fortnite, watching
porn, scrolling through Instagram or
otherwise living screen-mediated lives to
actually connect with another human being.
The other is that “hook-up culture” and a
plethora of Tinder-type swipe apps have
made sex so accessible that everyone
is bed-hopping in a nonstop, booze-fuelled
bacchanal. The truth lies somewhere in
between. School and university students are,
in fact, having less vaginal intercourse than
they were 25 years ago (the studies quoted
in the press, though, don’t ask about oral or
anal sex, both of which have become more
common), but that’s partly because the
context in which they indulge has shifted.
In a relationship, couples tend to have
intercourse regularly; students who engage
primarily in hook-ups, even those they
consider “consistent”, do so only sporadically
— an irony, given the dissolute presumptions
about hook-up culture.
“Hook-up”, a word adolescents bandy
about incessantly, is intentionally vague. In
reality, about 35%-40% of student hook-ups
include intercourse, which means 60% or
more do not. Because of the ambiguity,
however, students tend to radically
overestimate what their classmates are up
to (not to mention allow others to draw
inflated conclusions about their own
exploits). This can fuel feelings of inadequacy
CROSSING THE LINE From left: Bill Cosby,
Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and Louis
CK were exposed for their toxic masculinity
and Fomo, contributing to pressure to keep
pace through undesired sex, coerciveness or
aggression. According to the Online College
Social Life Survey, which encompassed more
than 20,000 students across America, close
to three-quarters of both male and female
students will hook up at least once by the
time they are 18. The average number of
partners? Seven to eight. Not exactly the fall
of Rome. A full quarter never hook up during
their time as a student and 40% hook up
fewer than three times, though 20% of
students do hook up 10 times or more.
Boys in my interviews were less likely
than girls to express anger, betrayal,
resentment or feelings of being “used” in
hook-ups. That’s partly because hook-up
culture aligns with the values of conventional
masculinity: conquest over connection,
sex as status seeking, partners as disposable.
The Online College Social Life Survey
found that 29%-53% of girls climaxed in
their most recent hook-up, as opposed to
56%-81% of boys. In the words of one boy:
“It sounds bad, but in a one-time thing,
I don’t really care.”
For some male students, treating a sexual
partner — especially one who was not
suitably hot or selective — with roughness
or disinterest and then bragging about it
the next day became a form of image
management, a pre-emptive strike against
potential ridicule, the loss of social currency.
So, when boys assured me that their friends
and classmates would never sexually assault
a girl (it was always those other boys), that
felt like a very low bar: having sex that is
technically “legal” is hardly the same as sex
that is ethical, mutual, reciprocal or kind.
“Casual sex can be great,” observed one
student. “But you can forget to treat the
other person as a human being.”
THE FEMINIST BOUNDER
“I do believe that you can have a casual
sexual lifestyle and also be respectful and
loving.” Wyatt was entering his first year at
a small university that was known for its
entrenched hook-up scene. In part, that was
due to a dearth of men on what was formerly
an all-female campus: competition for male
attention was fierce. Added to that, Wyatt
was a rare heterosexual male dance student
and handsome — wavy chestnut hair,
sculpted features, a well-muscled body that
he was only too happy to flaunt at parties. He
pretty much had his pick of partners on
campus, and over the past year, he had taken
full advantage of that. “There is this inherent
godliness that straight men tend to feel here,
where it’s just, like, ‘Everybody wants me.’”
For much of that first year, Wyatt had a
girlfriend, but since that ended he described
himself as being “on the prowl”. Every
weekend he would have sex with a different
girl. As soon as it was over, he would be back
on Tinder or stalking someone on Instagram,
thinking about whom to pursue next. “The
number of women I’ve slept with is
The Sunday Times Magazine • 17
unbelievable,” he said. “I can’t even begin to
count them. I don’t dare.”
Sex made Wyatt feel good: good about
himself, good in general. It eased anxiety,
numbed depression, distracted him from
and substituted for any true feeling. But he
was starting to worry that he might be
investing too much of his self-worth in
sexual conquest. “My actual attraction to
the person almost doesn’t matter,” he told
me. “If she is assertive, there’s a very good
chance I’ll just say yes.”
I had met Wyatt through one of his former
school teachers, who had told me that he
led workshops on consent for men on his
campus. That was true, he said, although he
found other boys were not always so keen on
the message. “They’ll say, ‘It’s just not how
it’s supposed to be.’ Or they offer up all these
very specific circumstances, like, ‘Let’s say
this girl starts grinding on me and kissing
me. Do I still have to ask her?’ They pick away
at it. So I find myself explaining, ‘Why would
you take the risk?’ Just deal with the fact that
it’s awkward and maybe you don’t think it’s
sexy. I’d rather have something not be sexy
than be accused of rape.”
Personally, Wyatt saw establishing consent
as erotic. His modus operandi was pretty
straightforward. After hanging out and
talking to a girl for a while — maybe drinking
at a party, though sometimes sober — he
would make his “big move”. ‘‘I’ll say, ‘Hey,
I think you’re really pretty. Can I kiss you?’
It’s direct, and I don’t want to do that thing
where I lean in and get rejected like in the
movies. And as things progress, I ask, ‘Do
you think that you’re sober enough? Do you
want some water?’ ”
His partners haven’t always reacted well.
“There was one girl who started laughing
when I asked, ‘Can I kiss you?’ She thought
it was ‘cute’, but she was also, like, ‘What?’
Then, I asked, ‘Can I take your shirt off ?’
And she was, like, ‘You don’t have to ask!’
That just makes me mad because it is exactly
the quagmire I want to avoid.”
Wyatt said he was also clear with his
partners that he was not looking for anything
more than sex, even if he wanted to see
them again. “I’d say, ‘It’s going to be in a
very casual capacity, and if you can’t do that,
then we can’t do this.’ ” When, on occasion,
he had sensed someone starting to “catch
feelings”, he “floated away”, growing “flaky”
and “distant”.
I asked him if he thought that the girls
he was with when he got “flaky” were the
same ones who would tell me that all guys
are dicks? He laughed uncomfortably.
“Gosh! I mean, I hope not, but … yeah.” He
winced. “Yeah, that could be true. I mean
that could be true. Who knows what girls
really think when you tell them you don’t
want to be with them? Maybe they do tell
their friends that all guys are the same. That
if you try to move forward emotionally,
guys immediately back off … because” — he
winced again — “I’ve done all that. I have.
But, in my defence, I always try to ask, ‘Are
you sure you’re OK with the fact that I don’t
go to lunch with you?’ ”
What would happen, I asked, if when
a boy said that, the girl responded that, yes,
she did want to go to lunch? What if she said
that she was looking for a loving relationship?
“Well, at my school that would be lethal
for her social life.”
So, I pressed, what choice does she really
have, then? If you’re having sex with girls
you’re not especially attracted to or
interested in, and your supposedly righteous
honesty about not wanting a relationship
potentially forces them to either deny
their own feelings or sacrifice their sex
lives, how, exactly, are those hook-ups
“loving and respectful”?
Wyatt nodded emphatically. “That’s what
I’m trying to say! I haven’t always been true
to my own philosophy.”
Over the summer, Wyatt had been
hanging out a lot with an old school friend,
going to bars and parties. At the end of every
evening, he would invariably have sex with
one of the boy’s female friends — a different
one every time. Finally, the other boy
confronted him: “I go out with you to have
a good time together, but it feels like you’ve
made a checklist of all my friends so you can
go through it and then discard them.”
That wasn’t far from the truth, and it stung.
“I realised I was becoming the kind of guy
who says all the right things, but still treats
women badly. And that feels horrible …”
Wyatt broke off, pausing for a long time.
“No,” he continued quietly. “That’s a lie.
In the beginning it felt amazing, but
eventually not, because there is no
investment. Because the other person
doesn’t mean anything to me. I thought I
was OK with it. But I’m starting not to be
OK with it. Because …” He paused again.
“Because there’s more to me than that.”
WHY ROLE MODELS MATTER
When I talked to Wyatt again a year later,
he had fallen in love with a girl he’d met at
a dance class. “She’s sociable, bubbly,
outgoing,” he enthused. “She’s very
passionate, just like I am. We both love to
talk; there’s no room for the shallow stuff.
We’re very much a match.”
I was unexpectedly moved by boys who
spoke of love, in part because of the stark
difference in their descriptions of their female
partners. Rather than speaking of them as a
collection of body parts (Wyatt never even
“I realised I was
becoming the kind of
guy who says all the
right things, but still
treats women badly”
mentioned his girlfriend’s appearance), they
would reference a girl’s character, intellect,
personality, generosity, humour, strength,
talent. They spoke with admiration and
respect for girls’ accomplishments or insight
— they veritably glowed.
“Looking back,” Wyatt said, “I did lead
the consent workshops for guys, but I’ve
realised consent is the bare minimum
that should be expected when you’re with
someone. People think once they’ve
been granted consent for sex that all
bets are off in terms of what you do to
someone emotionally, how you treat them.
And that’s not true.”
Wyatt and I were catching up via Skype,
about to wrap up, when I happened to get
a text from another interviewee. Nate was in
the spring of his final year of school and was
out touring the universities where he had
been accepted before making a final choice.
“WTF is up with hook-up culture?” he
wrote from the campus he was visiting. “It’s
like an orgy here — is that the way to live?
Maybe I should just go with it and then try
to be an emotionally available human being
afterwards? Or can I skip that step?”
Rather than responding directly, I read
the text to Wyatt and asked for his advice.
“I would say, ‘Don’t sell yourself out to be
a part of that,’ ” he said. “I have plenty of
friends who don’t live that kind of life — me
included — and they’re so much happier for
it. So, if you have that gut instinct that it’s
not for you, don’t do it just to fit in. That’s
what I did. And it kills you.”
“Thank you,” replied Nate. “Exactly what
I needed to hear. This is where my heart is.”
And then he added a heart emoji.
I thought about all the other Nates out
there. So few teenagers, especially boys, have
an adult with whom to talk through their
confusion about sex and love, who can help
them with basic decision-making.
Despite their eye-rolling, ear-plugging
and other superficial resistance, teenagers
consistently say that they do want such
information from parents, and that they
benefit from it. I know from experience
that’s true: boys often told me that our
conversations had dramatic, sometimes
therapeutic impact — and I was a total
stranger. So, rather than fixating on how
discussing physical and emotional intimacy
makes you — and your son — want to sink
into the earth, consider the opportunity
it creates for a closer relationship, to show
him that you are genuinely there for him,
to display openness, strength and
perseverance in the face of messy realities.
How, after all, will he be able to have those
challenging conversations as an adult if you
don’t pave the way now? n
© Peggy Orenstein 2020. Extracted from
Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love,
Porn, Consent and Navigating the New
Masculinity by Peggy Orenstein to be
published on March 26 (Profile £14.99)
The Sunday Times Magazine • 19
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 ast summer at a Labour Party fundraiser in Camden
Town, Keir Starmer, the MP for Holborn and
St Pancras, took part in a Desert Island Discs-style
event. His choice of music — appropriately, from
someone who once had violin lessons with
schoolmate Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim — was
catholic. Starmer started with Jim Reeves’s Welcome
to My World, in honour of his mother, whose
favourite it had been (“I have to assure you I don’t
play Jim Reeves most nights,” he explained). Dobie
Gray’s northern soul number Out on the Floor and
Desmond Dekker’s The Israelites were also played,
as were pieces by Shostakovich and Beethoven;
Ode to Joy selected less for its EU overtones than for
what Starmer described as the “incredible noise” that
is the Ninth Symphony.
In between he spoke with unexpected intimacy
of his stoical mother, who had suffered from the
debilitating Still’s disease and died in 2015. He told
how she had once come to meet him from primary
school, and he had watched from across the road as
she collapsed in the gutter. But he got laughs too,
describing his first encounter with his wife, Victoria
Alexander. He was a (demanding) QC, about to go
into court, and he phoned Victoria — a solicitor he
didn’t know — worried that a brief she had prepared
might not be “100% accurate”. She reassured him she
knew how to do her job and put the phone down,
saying: “Who the f*** does he think he is?”
His warmth that night contrasted sharply with his
lawyerly, buttoned-up public image. “Wooden” and
“dull” are words often used about Starmer. While he
has loosened up during this seemingly interminable
Labour leadership contest, even his close friend and
fellow international lawyer Philippe Sands
acknowledges a difference between his “very serious”
external persona and his engaging and entertaining
private one. While the 57-year-old may not be the
model for Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary, as is
often touted, his good looks are an obvious asset.
“He’s my new crush. Been thinking about him quite a
bit today,” ran one of the less risqué comments on
Mumsnet as he rose to prominence as shadow Brexit
secretary. But he doesn’t have the platform speaking
skills of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. And it’s hard to
recall a single memorable Starmer soundbite.
Yet barring a seismic upset, the polls suggest he
is heading for victory on April 4. “I think people like
Starmer because he’s quite politician-y — their idea
of what a politician should look like,” said Sarah Jones,
28, a university librarian, after the party hustings in
Liverpool in January, at which Starmer was arguably
the least interesting of the contenders. As a
Corbynista planning to vote for Starmer’s main rival,
Rebecca Long Bailey, Jones may be oversimplifying.
However, his appeal does primarily rest, as Jeremy
Corbyn’s arguably didn’t, on the hope that he can
win in the country as well as the party.
Leaving a meeting of about 250 party members in
Hove, Angie Heath, 46, a supporter of Jess Phillips
before she dropped out of the race, spoke of her
apolitical mother-in-law who “thinks Keir is great.
He’s …” she searches for the word “… electable.”
But is he? Can he climb what he repeatedly calls
the “mountain” — the 124 seats needed to win a
majority in what would be the biggest electoral
switch since the 1997 Labour landslide? Can the
careful, forensic style of Starmer overwhelm the
prime minister’s insouciance? Is his mere five years
22 • The Sunday Times Magazine
in the Commons a fatal handicap? And can he win
from a position well to the left of that other Labour
lawyer-politician, Tony Blair?
He’s hard to pigeonhole on the Labour spectrum:
Gordon Brown has handsomely endorsed him,
saying that “a vote for Keir Starmer is a vote for
hope”. But so too has Laura Parker, former national
co-ordinator of Momentum.
If he looks “politician-y”, it’s untypically so, at
least in an era apparently so suited to a Trump or
Johnson. “The idea that all politicians must now be
entertainers I think is interesting, but not right,”
Starmer tells me, while insisting he won’t “duck
away from the challenge” — making more of his
personality and his backstory. His father worked
13 hours a day as a toolmaker to maintain his often
hard-up household of a disabled wife and their four
children. But, he adds, “it’s a bit odd for a man in his
fifties to be talking about his mum and dad quite as
much, frankly. In most walks of life, people are judged
by who they are. Politics is different … people do,
understandably, want to know who you are and what
you come from, but it does feel odd. I don’t like it.”
Yet Starmer isn’t quite the professional automaton
he sometimes appears. On a wet Monday night in
January, leaving a meeting of Labour members in east
London to catch the Tube home to Kentish Town,
he admits he had found it a struggle to concentrate.
He was back on the campaign trail having taken time
out while his mother-in-law was in intensive care after
a fall that would lead to her death two weeks later. Just
before going on stage, he had spoken to his wife, who
was distraught, as were his son, 11, and daughter, 9, for
whom their grandmother had been a regular
babysitter. It brought back memories of his father’s
death in 2018, when he was struggling to apply the
brakes on Brexit. “I think I’m finding it harder to watch
my wife go through this,” he tells me.
Starmer made no public reference to his family’s
anguish until a Manchester hustings in late February,
when he was goaded about a remark he had made in
a recent interview. “I had been trying to be the best
husband I could be to my wife, the best dad I could be
to my grieving children. Then I’m asked, ‘What’s the
most exciting thing you’ve ever done?’ And I’m
judged on that. I know who I am.”
In a previous era, a politician as ambitious as
Starmer might not have taken time out from the
campaign of his life to care for his grieving family,
but his sense of priorities probably endeared him to
many members. Nor did it stop him ramming home
that night, and at scores of other meetings, some
clear messages: the scale of the December defeat;
the frustrations of opposition; and, above all, the
need for “unity” and an end to “factionalism”.
That he can do this without ridicule underlines
another respect in which Starmer is not a typical
politician. As the Labour peer, fellow QC and Starmer
supporter Charles Falconer puts it: “He has not, as
most politicians on the way up do, defined himself by
political rows.” In this campaign, he has studiously
refrained from attacking Labour figures on the right or
the left, including Corbyn — to the frustration of his
more centrist supporters, Blair included. He doggedly
insists he worked “very well” with Corbyn, despite the
chasm between them on Europe. This has led to
accusations that he is “pandering to the left” for
tactical reasons. These have been compounded by his
commitment to “common ownership” of the railways,
 “People do, understandably, want to know who you are and
what you come from, but it does feel odd. I don’t like it”
water and the energy sector, to abolish student tuition
fees and bring in a “Prevention of Military
Intervention Act” to stop “illegal” wars.
“I think Keir may be making a mistake, with this
tacking to the left thing,” says Trevor Phillips, who first
met Starmer, then director of public prosecutions
(DPP), when he was chairman of the Equality and
Human Rights Commission. Speaking before his
suspension from the Labour Party last week over
allegations of Islamophobia, Phillips added: “His
appeal to unity is very dangerous, because he’s
compromising with people who don’t compromise,
who want control … I think he is more careful than
he needs to be, stronger than he imagines he is.”
This may be true. But while it’s difficult to be sure
at this stage what is tactical and what isn’t, Lord
Falconer insists that “his emotional instincts are
closer to those of decent Momentum members than
you would think”. Certainly, there is little in his
background to suggest otherwise.
rowing up in Oxted, Surrey, Starmer
G passed the 11-plus and was sent to
Reigate Grammar School by his
staunchly Labour parents, who were
keen for him to have the best education.
The school went private when Starmer was 14, but
the parents of existing pupils were not required to
pay fees (which Rod and Josephine Starmer could
certainly not have afforded). They pushed him to
attend scholarship Saturday sessions at the
Guildhall School of Music when he would have
preferred to be playing football, a lifelong passion.
At 16, Starmer discovered active politics and
helped to found a Young Socialist branch. Fellow
member Jon Pike recalls: “I thought, blimey, he’s
pretty cool. It was clear that he was a person of
some substance and value.” Starmer was
prominent in keeping the branch out of the
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clutches of Militant, the Trotskyist (and anti-EU)
sect that dominated the Young Socialists nationally.
Starmer — the first in his family to go to university
— wanted to study politics at Leeds. His parents
urged him to choose law instead because, as he
recalls, “you’ll get a decent job”. Helena Kennedy,
who led him as a young counsel in several cases,
remembers Starmer’s parents at a party to celebrate
his taking silk. “I spoke at the event about Keir’s
commitment to the most disadvantaged who came
before the courts. His work on death-penalty cases
and asylum for refugees, on gay rights and anti-
Above, from left: with
leadership rival Rebecca
Long Bailey; campaigning
alongside Jeremy Corbyn
before the 2019 general
election; clashing with
Boris Johnson on The
Andrew Marr Show last
July. Below: with his wife,
Victoria Alexander
racism. His work with me on battered women. His
mum was there in a wheelchair and she was beaming,
and his father had his arm round her and they said
how proud they felt. But then Keir’s dad sobbed and
sobbed. Life had not always been easy, but here was
their son trying to get justice for people.”
Starmer took to student life in Leeds — not just the
Labour Club, but also the Thursday night union
disco, with its heady blend of indie music and
snakebite, a fearsome lager-and-cider mix. With a
first-class law degree, Starmer went to Oxford to
study civil law. He immersed himself in Labour
Party politics and was a member of a loose left-wing
grouping around the short-lived publication
Socialist Alternatives. The first issue, in the summer
of 1986, contained a strong endorsement by Starmer
of printworkers in dispute with Rupert Murdoch
after the union-busting move of his papers —
including The Sunday Times — to Wapping.
Edward Fitzgerald QC, joint head of Doughty
Street, the celebrated chambers where Starmer
worked for almost two decades, remembers a “young,
very seriously left-wing and very idealistic” Starmer
joining the chambers’ forerunner, 1 Dr Johnson’s
Buildings, in 1987. According to Fitzgerald, a “famous
story” about the 24-year-old Starmer’s initial
interview was that he quoted the old maxim
“property is theft” while expressing reservations
about sending non-violent burglars to prison.
Whether or not this is apocryphal, “one or two
people thought, ‘We can’t have this terrible lefty in
chambers’, but his pupil master Stephen [now Lord
Justice] Irwin intervened and said, ‘He’s absolutely
brilliant and he may have got carried away.’ ”
Starmer later became famous for the “McLibel”
case, in which McDonald’s sued Helen Steel and
David Morris for distributing a factsheet attacking
the company. He advised pro bono and represented
the pair at the European Court of Human Rights,
scoring a landmark ruling. However, he cut his teeth
as an international human rights lawyer, winning
reprieves at the privy council for prisoners facing the
death penalty in the Commonwealth. There was no
doubting Starmer’s abolitionist passion. Once, in the
Caribbean, Fitzgerald recalls, “we had to restrain him
from a fight with some American who was advocating
the death penalty rather loudly in the bar. Keir said,
‘I’m going to go and get him.’”
Falconer says that Starmer at this stage would
have thought party politics “careerist” and that “the
way he could make a real difference was as a very
The Sunday Times Magazine • 23
 talented left-wing lawyer”. As he did, not least by
bringing cases against the last Labour government on
behalf of asylum seekers and others, and vigorously
opposing the Iraq War for violating international law.
In a delicate reference to his old boss and friend Tony
Blair, Falconer adds that Starmer experienced “the
disappointment of what had happened when …
lawyers of the left became politicians”.
So why, at the peak of a distinguished career, did
he change direction? Starmer says he was “always
political” and his practice was increasingly “strategic”
— challenging policies rather than merely
representing their victims. But Fitzgerald thinks a
“watershed” was his appointment as human rights
adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, which
oversaw aspects of the Good Friday agreement. Five
years of immersing himself in the tensions of policing
the annual Orange parades, was “probably when he
got the taste for politics in a world wider than the
bar”. It prompted him to apply, as a radical barrister
who had never prosecuted a case in court, to be DPP.
That job — and the knighthood he accepted for
it — caused him to be regarded as an “establishment”
figure by some in Labour, but Starmer was a reforming
DPP. Besides a string of high-profile prosecutions,
he published humane guidelines on assisted suicide.
The left has complained that by applying the Fraud
Act instead of social security legislation, he raised the
maximum sentences for benefit fraud to 10 years.
However, Nazir Afzal, who was chief prosecutor for
the northwest, says this was not directed at individuals
who had cheated an extra £50, but at “organised
gangs, some of them part of the DWP [Department
for Work and Pensions] system” and operating “pretty
much on an industrial scale”. Starmer, Afzal maintains,
was the “brightest lawyer I ever came across”.
The groundbreaking guidelines Starmer issued
in the wake of the Jimmy Savile revelations, and the
successful Rochdale abuse prosecutions he
authorised, triggered a much later controversy.
Among others, the broadcaster Paul Gambaccini,
who was wrongfully arrested, claimed they later led
to overzealous pursuit by the police of false sexual
abuse claims against public figures. The guidelines
stipulated that witnesses should be assessed on the
credibility of their evidence rather than whether they
would look like “model victims” in court, a proposal
caricatured as suggesting witnesses claiming abuse
should automatically be believed.
When I put this to Starmer, true to form he goes
over the guidelines’ history in detail. In Rochdale,
police and prosecutors had in “good faith” previously
decided not to prosecute members of grooming gangs
because their very young girl victims were abusing
drink and drugs, and in some cases had not gone
straight to the police and had continued a relationship
with their abusers. This meant that “the more
vulnerable you were, the less likely the criminal justice
system was to be able to provide you any protection”.
But, he adds, “the idea that the guidelines simply said
‘believe the victims’ is just mythical nonsense”.
After leaving the Crown Prosecution Service in
2013, he could probably have followed his
predecessors by becoming a Labour peer, but, says
Falconer, “he had absolutely no interest in that”.
Instead, the weekly meetings of permanent secretaries
and his regular contact with ministers had entrenched
his appetite for government. “He could see the
REX
importance of elected politicians,” adds Falconer.
n the cold but sunny Saturday of those
O Liverpool hustings, two local matrons,
unaware of the nearby proceedings,
walked the promenade looking across
the Mersey to Birkenhead. Both voted
Labour in December, out of sheer habit. So who did
they think should become the party’s new leader?
“Not interested,” said Janet Maher, 71. “They’re all a
lot of crap. All politicians. All out for themselves.” Was
there any politician she had admired in the past? She
paused: “Harold Wilson was all right.”
She prompts an interesting question. Is there an
affinity between Starmer — of whom these two
women have barely heard — and Wilson?
Is Keir “What people find frustrating is that I’m not
prepared to hug a political figure from the past,”
Starmer Starmer tells me. “I’ve always made decisions for
the new myself. I’ve never needed somebody else’s prompt.”
Yet the parallels are striking (see panel, left) — above
Harold all, their obsession with party unity, with bridging a
right-left divide as corrosive in the 1950s as in the
Wilson? 2010s. Indeed, it was for his unifying role that Starmer
Like Harold Wilson chose Wilson on Channel 4’s hustings when he was
in the 1960s, Starmer finally obliged to name a predecessor he admired. At
is determined to times Starmer has carried his passion for unity to
bridge the right-left extremes. In the Sky TV hustings last month, he had
divide in the Labour to be pushed reluctantly into saying that Rebecca
Party. But the Long Bailey had not complained as vigorously about
similarities don’t end the party’s handling of anti-semitism as he had. Alone
there. Both Starmer among the candidates, Starmer refused to sign a
and Wilson were Labour Campaign for Trans Rights “pledge card”;
educated at English saying with studied inoffensiveness that he doesn’t
grammar schools; want trans rights to be a “political football”.
both were brilliant Although Labour ultimately failed to halt Brexit,
academically — and his pursuit of party unity enabled him to navigate his
both had fathers risk-fraught passage through the previous parliament
who were forced to without getting embroiled in a stand-up row with
shift workplaces Corbyn. He may have been helped by what one former
as recession bit. Blair government figure claims is a certain “emotional
Both, unusually for detachment”. But according to Falconer, his approach
politicians, had been to Corbyn was that of a lawyer “who can’t ever say
civil servants — that my client’s the most appalling f***wit, because
Starmer as director of that’s not allowed. Do not mistake that, though, for
public prosecutions; him thinking that Corbyn was a good thing.”
Wilson at the Ministry Certainly, while he has promised his Corbynite rival
of Fuel and Power. Rebecca Long Bailey (and his other rival Lisa Nandy)
Both made their bid to places in a Starmer shadow cabinet, he has notably
lead Labour from the — unlike Long Bailey — not done the same for
left of the party; and Corbyn. In 2015 Starmer voted for Andy Burnham as
both resigned from leader. In the abortive 2016 coup against Corbyn, he
frontbench jobs, only resigned with 43 other frontbenchers. Three months
to return to starring later, he accepted Corbyn’s offer of the post of shadow
shadow cabinet roles Brexit secretary because, “the members had decided
under leaders with that Jeremy Corbyn should lead our party, and I
whom they were out of accepted that decision. I was deeply conscious that
sympathy. Wilson we needed the best response we could put forward
chose chancellors on Brexit, and I wanted to do that for the party.”
from the right of the This omits another factor, of course, that it would
party — will Starmer improve his chances of eventually leading a party in
do the same? which Corbyn supporters were a majority. It is
instructive about his self-belief, though. Phillips
suggests that from his days as DPP, “he was really
good at managing the different forces involved.
And, essentially, persuading people that the best
way to solve any problem was to leave it to him.”
Falconer goes farther, saying for all the testimonies
from his former Doughty Street colleagues that
he is a “team player”, he is essentially a “loner who
thinks things through for himself ”.
The Sunday Times Magazine • 25
 “If Starmer wins, people will feel the grown-ups are back in
charge, but that will mean wresting control of the party”
Although a staunch pro-European, Starmer
originally believed a second referendum to be
impossible, and his crablike move towards it
exasperated some prominent remainers. Dianne
Hayter, Labour’s Europe spokeswoman in the Lords,
says the remainers underestimated the strength of
feeling against a second referendum, which Starmer
exposed through painstaking soundings with his
fellow MPs. “What I saw Keir doing, which I thought
was extraordinary, was holding the PLP [Parliamentary
Labour Party] together because it was deeply divided
and you never knew about it,” Baroness Hayter says.
It was not until September 2018 that he infuriated
the pro-Brexit hard left, including Len McCluskey,
Unite’s general secretary. Starmer inserted a much-
applauded sentence into his party conference speech
saying the option of remain must be part of the
referendum commitment he had by now successfully
argued for. On Brexit, he made an alliance with John
McDonnell, whom he persuaded that running the
Treasury would be vastly easier if Britain were still in
the EU. According to Sands, Starmer and McDonnell
came to enjoy strong mutual respect. “The
relationship with John McDonnell is very important.
Keir’s a bridge builder. He’s incredibly strategic.”
Nervous as such “bridge building” makes many
in the neo-Blairite wing, one of its gurus, Peter
Mandelson, professes to be “relaxed” about Starmer’s
stances to date. “The crucial question is whether he
can pass the Kinnock test if he wins,” he says. “People
will feel the grown-ups are back in charge, but that
will mean wresting control of the party, as Kinnock
did when he engaged in hand-to-hand combat with
the hard left and saw off Militant.”
Mandelson insists it is not the broad membership
of Momentum, but the “ideological cabal” that runs
Momentum, and, along with party officers close to
McCluskey, the National Executive, that needs to be
“seen off ”. He adds: “I think he will do that because
he wants to be prime minister, which he can’t be
unless he sorts out the party and makes it trusted and
credible again. That’s the sine qua non, the door he
has to go through to do everything else.”
Another key test will be his choice of shadow
cabinet. Wilson was almost mathematically precise
in balancing right- and left-wingers. Starmer’s
campaign team shows that balance. In the core
group, Kat Fletcher and Simon Fletcher (unrelated)
are highly able figures who worked for Corbyn, but
left his office well before the 2019 election; and
Morgan McSweeney worked for Liz Kendall, the
Blairite candidate in the 2015 leadership election.
Who Starmer picks as shadow chancellor, however,
is a matter of endless speculation; Wilson’s
chancellors were all broadly of the Labour right.
Starmer believes the economy should have a
“moral purpose” and that “transformative change is
needed — tinkering around the edges isn’t going to
make a difference”. His rallying cry at the launch of
his leadership bid was that the “free market model
doesn’t work”, but he’s also a mixed-economy man
who had good relations with much of business while
on the front bench. He criticised Labour’s 2019
manifesto for being “overloaded, and people didn’t
believe it was deliverable”, yet says the next manifesto
26 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Starmer’s “Desert “has to be future-looking. It’s got to have answers to
tomorrow’s questions, not yesterday’s questions, on
Island” picks how well an incoming Labour government can get its
arms around the new economy.”
Wilson offered just such answers in his famous
October 1963 speech, a year before his first general
election victory, promising to forge a new Britain in
the “white heat” of a technological revolution.
Jim Reeves Wilson’s speech projected Labour as having
Welcome to My World understood how the country had changed, while —
Desmond Dekker as relevant today — appealing to private sector
The Israelites workers who were deserting the party. Starmer has
yet to define such a comprehensive vision; he will
need to, if he wins on April 4, to complete the journey
from top-flight barrister to national leader. “I think he
can,” insists Sands, “but I think the question is going
to be one of charisma and humour. I know, and people
who know him well know, that he’s got it.”
Paul Quinn & Starmer hasn’t addressed a specific pitch to the
Edwyn Collins “red wall” of Labour seats captured by the Tories in
Pale Blue Eyes December (where, as elsewhere, a majority of
Dobie Gray constituency parties have backed him as leader). He
Out on the Floor repeatedly says Labour needs to regain seats in every
region to win. While acknowledging the “collective
failure to come to grips with de-industrialisation” in
“traditional working-class areas”, he tells me, “we
must never overlook the fact that there are working-
class communities across the country, including in
our cities. And if you go into any of the estates in
Beethoven Camden, you’ll see working-class people of all
Ninth Symphony backgrounds and colours.”
Beethoven On foreign policy, he says a review of arms sales is
Piano Concerto No 5 needed “from top to bottom” and he’s likely to differ
sharply with the present US administration. “One of
the most important things for a post-Brexit UK is to
reassert values of peace, of justice, reconciliation and
compliance with international law,” he says.
On the home front, he has been robust on social
inequalities; he often points to a 10-year discrepancy
Artists for Grenfell in life expectancy between Somers Town in his
Bridge Over constituency and nearby Primrose Hill. But — in a
Troubled Water hint of revisionism — he has also said Labour needs
Shostakovich to project itself as a party of “opportunity” as well as
Piano Concerto “solidarity”, recognising that “people want to get
No 2 in F Major on … and I’m not sure we’ve done enough of this in
recent years”. This remark was made in east London
at Stratford’s Old Town Hall, where Keir Hardie, who
helped to found the Labour Party, and after whom
Starmer is named, was returned for the first time as
an MP. He was replying to a member who asked, in
view of an “unfortunate sense of entitlement” among
some in Labour to the votes of its long-time
supporters, “why so many of them had voted
Book Conservative”. That the question was asked in
James Kelman, various forms several times during this sombre,
A Disaffection closed party meeting, underlined the palpable sense
of shock at the scale of December’s defeat.
If the Starmer experiment fails, a real question
mark hangs over the party’s future. Some of the seats
Labour needs to win back have Tory majorities of
more than 10,000. If the party can’t win those seats at
the next election, who would then be willing to be a
Labour parliamentary candidate, asks Hayter. In her
Luxury view, for the party — and, she believes, for the
ALAMY
A football country — Starmer looks like “the last hope” n
 Terror
in the
viral age
A year ago today, a far-right
gunman livestreamed his
attack on two mosques in
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Julia Ebner reports on the
chilling tactic increasingly
used to recruit extremists

Julia
Ebner
A
year ago today — March 15,
2019 — my heart is racing and
I feel sick. I can still see the
men and women collapsing
one by one as they are hit by
the rain of bullets, and I can hear those
gunshots fired with the semi-automatic
rifle. I should not have watched the
livestream of the mosque attacks in
Christchurch, New Zealand.
“It’s the birth rates. It’s the birth rates.
It’s the birth rates,” reads the beginning
of the 28-year-old attacker’s so-called
manifesto, “The Great Replacement”. I’ve
seen his words a thousand times. From the
identitarians in Europe to the alt-right in
America, from the notorious online
message boards of 8chan to the private
chat rooms on Discord.
The Great Replacement theory combines
all four features of a violence-inciting
ideology: conspiracy, dystopia, impurity
and existential threat. The idea is that
Europeans are being replaced with racially
and culturally distinct migrants (impurity)
by a cabal of the global elites and complicit
actors in governments, tech firms and
media outlets (conspiracy), leading to the
gradual decay of society (dystopia) and the
eventual extinction of white people
(existential threat).
As I start gathering all open-source
information I can find on the internet to
look into how the gunman was radicalised,
I feel sadness, frustration and guilt. Could
the attack have been prevented? A few
days before he had tweeted pictures of
the guns he would use. They featured the
names of his role models, including the
most lethal far-right terrorists of the 21st
century, such as the Norwegian Anders
Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in
2011, and the Canadian Alexandre
Bissonnette, who carried out the Quebec
City mosque shooting in 2017. Twitter did
not detect the materials, and neither did
any security services, as the visuals-only
post escaped all existing text-based
detection mechanisms.
When the Christchurch gunman
announced the attack on 8chan, many users
— including some of his online friends —
did not know whether he was being serious.
Even as his Facebook livestream began,
Even as his Facebook livestream began,
commentators on 8chan appeared unable to grasp
whether the attack was a prank or a real event
30 • The Sunday Times Magazine
commentators on 8chan appeared unable
to grasp whether the attack was a prank or
a real event. “This is a LARP [live action
role-playing game] isn’t it?” one asked.
“Not LARP, actually happening,” another
replied. At the beginning of the livestream,
he says, “Subscribe to PewDiePie,” the
Swedish gamer-commentator who had
been accused of promoting white
supremacist content. He then plays a
Serbian anti-Muslim propaganda song
from the Yugoslav wars that has turned
into a white supremacist meme.
The Christchurch attacks blurred the
lines between trolling and terrorism.
From the beginning to the end it was
orchestrated to entertain a specific
audience: the 8chan trolls. The “manifesto”
was dotted with jokes, language and
ideologies that I have encountered
numerous times in my research into online
extremist networks. “Well, lads, it’s time
to stop shitposting and time to make a real
life effort post,” he announced on 8chan.
“I will carry out an attack against the
invaders, and will even live stream the
attack via Facebook.”
The first time I briefed counter-
extremism units of the British Home
Office, as a research fellow at the counter-
extremism organisation the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue, about the dangers of
“shitposting”, I felt ridiculous. This is not
an easy-to-grasp internet term; shitposting
means making an unconstructive online
post, which can range from funny or
nonsensical to mocking or offensive
content — extremists sometimes launch
co-ordinated shitposting campaigns.
Warning government officials about some
meme-posting trolls seemed silly, even in
2017 after their effects on the Trump
election had become commonly known.
But when I sat in the New Zealand High
Commission in London to brief security
officers, intelligence analysts and diplomats
from Canada, the UK and Australia two
years later, the threat felt chillingly real.
Everyone in the room was concerned
about copycat attacks. The Christchurch
gunman’s “manifesto” was designed to
game the media and achieve maximum
public attention. To journalists it reads
almost like a ready-to-publish interview.
But to his far-right sympathisers, it is a mix
of instruction manual and dark stand-up
comedy script. His goal was to turn into
the hero whose name would soon feature
across some other terrorist’s gun:
“inspirational terrorism”. He wanted to
draw on the camaraderie within the
far-right trolling community in the hope
of receiving their applause, praise and
respect. There is a sense of brotherhood
in the attacker’s last message: “You are all
top blokes and the best bunch of cobbers
a man could ask for,” he wrote before calling
on his viewers to spread his “manifesto”
and livestream. “If I don’t survive the
attack, goodbye, godbless and I will see
you all in Valhalla!”
The Christchurch attacks happened
as I was putting the finishing touches to
Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of
Extremists, my book about extreme online
communities. Usually when something
significant and disruptive to your subject
happens in the end stages of writing a book,
you have to rethink large parts of the work.
However, the attack felt like the logical
continuation of the incitement to violence
across the new alt-tech ecosystem.
There is nothing new in the potential of
extreme-right ideologies to provoke attacks.
From Breivik to Bissonnette, we have
seen similar ideas drive terrorism. Yet
policymakers and security forces have
systematically underestimated this threat,
investing their resources almost exclusively
in the prevention of jihadist attacks.
Today’s statistics speak for themselves:
in 2018-19, roughly as many far-right
extremists as Islamist extremists were
referred to the UK government’s prevention
programme Channel.
Germany now counts as many as 12,700
potentially violent far-right extremists,
according to the latest report from its
Interior Ministry. Tobias R, named as the
suspect in the killing of nine people in
Hanau, near Frankfurt, on February 19,
reportedly ran a website containing
far-right xenophobic content. In the US,
90% of extremism-related murders in 2019
and all of those in 2018 were linked to
right-wing extremism.
What was new in Christchurch, however,
was the escalation of gamification: the use
of violence at the intersection of fun and
fear. The Christchurch livestream quickly
went viral. Facebook had to remove 1.5
million uploaded videos within the first
24 hours of the attack. Glorifying memes,
some calling the terrorist a saint or an
“invader crusader”, hit the extremist online
echo chambers. Endorsements came in
from far-right gamers, YouTubers and
random sympathisers. Some gamers even
turned his livestream video into a shooter
game, displaying the scores and
ammunition every time he shot someone.
On the Encyclopedia Dramatica, a
parody-themed wiki website, I found an
entry describing the gunman as “a heroic
 IRL [in real life] JC Denton” (Denton is
a character in a first-person role-playing
video game). Then I stumbled across a
video featuring underage girls expressing
their admiration for the perpetrator. Some
told viewers that they wanted to marry
him. I have seen many attempts to satirise
violence and terror, but this was just
beyond comprehension.
Ultra-libertarians, who regard antagonistic
memes and political transgression as
forms of cultural expression, loathe the
idea that the internet should be a serious
place. They mock the suggestion that
anonymous websites need to be regulated
like real-world marketplaces. To them the
internet has been and will always remain
a place of fun.
In the days following the attack, however,
I observed in real time how the dividing
lines between those who were in for the
trolling fun and those who were serious
about the race war became sharper. Some
reacted by encouraging copycat acts,
attempting to spread the manifesto and
translating it into other languages. Others
blamed the toxic environment of their
online communities for the attack.
Certainly, Christchurch was a wake-up call
for those who still believed that the online
and offline worlds are separate realities.
A few weeks later, in April 2019,
a 19-year-old American opened fire in a
synagogue in Poway, a city in southern
California. He killed one woman and
injured three others. Christchurch was
“a catalyst for me”, the gunman wrote in
the open letter he had left behind on
8chan with links to a livestream. The FBI
learnt five minutes before the attack that
a shooting was about to take place in
southern California. They had hints, but
not enough to identify the man in time.
The Poway synagogue shooter was
obsessed with his European ancestry. He
emanated from the image-board trolling
culture and was an active proponent of
“meme magic”. He believed that “global
Jewish elites” are conspiring to replace
the white race. His posting history
UNIVERSAL NEWS & SPORT (EUROPE), STUFF PICS NZ, REUTERS

reminded me of the far-right terrorist

who killed 11 worshippers during the
Shabbat morning service at a Pittsburgh
synagogue in October 2018, and the
21-year-old who carried out a shooting
in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in
August 2019, killing 22 people.
Then, last October, a 27-year-old
far-right extremist carried out another
AFTERMATH From top: the weapons used in the Christchurch attack on March 15, 2019, were shooting in the German city of Halle,
inscribed with references to racial “conflicts”; New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, which again followed the same pattern:
meets one of the first responders; shellshocked survivors in the wake of the shootings he livestreamed his attack, he used

Endorsements came in from far-right gamers

and YouTubers. Some even turned his video into
a shooter game displaying the scores
The Sunday Times Magazine • 31
 8chan insider vocabulary and he made
reference to the Great Replacement theory.
Similar to the wave of jihadist attacks
that followed the calls for lone-wolf
terrorism against western targets
by the Isis spokesman Abu
Muhammad al-Adnani in 2016 and
2017, a form of copycat terrorism
has taken shape over the past two
years on the far right: in the two weeks
after the El Paso shooting alone, more than
two dozen people were arrested under
suspicion of planning to carry out similar
mass shootings.
Today, far-right terrorists all frequent
the same online communities, where
conspiracy theories such as “white
genocide” and violence-inciting language
such as calls for “slaughter” are pervasive.
An analysis of 100 million comments on
alt-tech platforms carried out by the
Network Contagion Research Institute and
the Anti-Defamation League shows that
anti-semitic slurs have doubled since
Trump’s election on platforms such as Gab
and 4chan’s /pol/ board. The n-word has
also been used much more often since 2016.
The document the Poway gunman left
behind reveals that, like so many other
far-right extremists I have studied, he
believed in an impending revolution. “We
are in the early stages of revolution,” he
wrote before calling for further violence.
“We need martyrs. If you don’t want to get
caught because you have children who
depend on you, you can simply attack a
target and then slip back into normal life.
Every anon reading this needs to carry out
attacks. They won’t catch us. There are too
many of us, and we are smarter than them.”
All these terrorists subscribed to the idea
that the “inevitable race war” needs to be
accelerated by staging terror attacks and
mass shootings. To spark a civil war, they
believe, you need to escalate existing
divisions within society and encourage
others to do the same. There are dozens of
groups that endorse this idea. For example,
the administrator of the Right Wing Terror
Centre, a closed Telegram group that has
more than 1,200 members, wrote the
following after the Christchurch attack:
“This guy is a sign of things to come. We
are now at the beginning of the endtimes,
ENTERPRISE NEWS AND PICTURES, REUTERS
which last 10-15 years. The great crescendo
to the ultimate collapse has begun, and we
are hopeless to stop this avalanche. There is
one peaceful solution, which is immediate
remigration, but we all know that the elites
won’t have that.” On and on it went, stoking
division, cultivating fear, exacerbating the
perception of being under attack.
We have entered a new era of extremism. What
was once fringe is now mainstream. Slogans of the
extreme right are on official campaign posters
“ROLE MODELS” Top: an image Anders
Breivik posted of himself. Above: Alexandre
Bissonnette, the Quebec mosque attacker
I
t’s surprisingly easy to find how-to
instructions for terror attacks.
Anonymous accounts shared
a manual on 8chan in 2018 that
collated “sanitised” excerpts from
the Al-Qaeda Training Manual, including
a “bomb-making intro”. I also found
instructions for terrorism, armed
propaganda, liberation of prisoners,
execution, kidnapping and other forms of
urban guerrilla warfare.
The explicitly violent far right continues
to stay on the fringes of the internet. But
the ideologies and language that underpin
their calls to action have long since reached
the mainstream. The extremism expert
JM Berger estimates that there are at least
100,000 Twitter accounts that support
the American alt-right. The volume of
tweets about far-right extremist concepts
such as the Great Replacement and
remigration has greatly increased in the
past seven years.
Researchers who monitor emerging
trends in extremism were in shock after
Christchurch, yet no one was truly
surprised. The attack combined all the
elements we warned of: alt-tech platforms
turning into hotbeds for radicalisation
on a global level; identitarian conspiracy
theories fuelling hatred and violence
against ethnic and cultural minorities;
livestream functions on social media
serving as a means for making terror go
viral; gamification and internet culture
coupled with DIY terrorism.
The normalisation of violence-inciting
ideologies poses new questions for
extremism prevention. Should Twitter,
for example, take down hateful or
conspiratorial propaganda, even if it comes
from democratically elected politicians?
We have entered a new era of extremism.
What was once fringe is now mainstream.
The Great Replacement theory was cited
by leading figures in far-right parties such
as the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the Freedom
Party of Austria and the French Front
National. Slogans of the extreme right
have made their way into official campaign
posters and election manifestos. The
official 2019 European Elections posters
of the far-right party Alternative for
Germany encouraged votes “so that Europe
won’t become Eurabia!”, in reference
to the far-right conspiracy theory of a
Europe-wide invasion by Islamic migrants.
Apolitical internet subcultures have turned
political, while the political space has
adopted the bizarre cultural elements of
online communities. Fun and evil join
forces, making it more difficult to
distinguish between harmless prank
and prosecutable crime.
Where do you draw the line between
freedom of speech and hate crime?
Between citizen journalism and
information warfare? Between trolling
and terrorism? These are not just legal
questions. They are questions that touch
the very heart of democratic identity.
What happens if we over-censor? How
detrimental would the backlash against the
entire political system be? But equally, what
is the cost of inaction? n
© Julia Ebner 2020. Extracted from Going
Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner (Bloomsbury £11.99)
The Sunday Times Magazine • 33
 Salt beef,
Shabbat
and me
When Katie Glass went in search of her lost
Jewish identity, she discovered more than
she expected about her family — and herself
PORTRAIT BY CHARLIE CLIFT
I
f I’d known anything about being
Jewish I’d never have asked the
question, “Am I Jewish?” But I didn’t.
So it was naively that I set off to explore
my Jewish identity, not knowing it was
a journey with no end. I also didn’t realise
that I was seeking something else as well.
There were clues that I, Katie Rebecca
Glass, may be Jewish. People told me quite
often: “You look Jewish.” Whatever that
meant. I love Leonard Cohen, Amy
Winehouse, Tel Aviv, salt beef and chess.
I am anxious and bookish with frizzy hair
and sallow skin. Still, if you’d asked me if
I was Jewish, I’d have told you: “No.
Because it goes through your mother.” That
is what my non-Jewish mother had always
said; and that’s where our conversations
about Judaism had started and stopped. In
a way, she was right. In Orthodox Judaism,
descent follows the matrilineal line. In
Somerset, where I grew up, I never met
another Jewish person to ask. It was only
later that I discovered things were a little
more complicated.
My parents had a difficult divorce. I saw
my father in London sporadically and
although I was aware he was Jewish, I could
not tell you how I knew. I never saw him
wear a kippah, the little cloth cap
traditionally worn by Jewish men. We never
had Friday night dinners on Shabbat (or
Friday night dinners at all). I don’t think he
was even a Woody Allen fan. The thought of
him going to synagogue would have been
absurd. The only vaguely Jewish thing
about him was that he would take me to
Selfridges’ Brass Rail, a restaurant famous
for its salt beef sandwiches. Somehow this
food — comforting, sharp but sweet, and so
different from what my school friends ate at
home — tasted exotic and signalled
something intriguingly different about him.
My father’s mother died when he was
very young and his father had left him and
his sister soon after. It was also something
we did not talk about. I never knew my
father’s family. So these sweet trips to eat
salt beef were the only glimpse I had into
where he’d come from.
My father died of Alzheimer’s. The last
time I saw him, he didn’t know who I was
and the subject of religion never came up.
So it was something of a shock when he
died and his rabbi called me to arrange his
funeral through his Orthodox synagogue.
What synagogue? What rabbi?
At the funeral I was frightened and lost.
I didn’t know what to tell the rabbi when
he asked me for my father’s Hebrew name.
I did not understand the words of the
Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
I did not know we would follow the coffin
and lay earth on my father’s grave. In the
moment of my father’s death, I’d never felt
more distant from him.
This world, I thought, is dead to me,
because all my Jewish family is dead.
In the years that followed, I dipped my
36 • The Sunday Times Magazine
laughed: “Of course you are, look at you!”
I was making a BBC Radio 4 documentary
about my quest, and I approached my
research as I would any other story. My
father’s close family have passed away and
because my mother and I are estranged,
I did not even have a photograph of him.
Knowing only that he was born in Scotland,
I ordered his birth certificate. I hadn’t
realised I would cry when it came. It was
like having a piece of him back — and like
having a new piece of me.
My father (a generation older than my
mother) was born in April 1920 to Jacob and
Deborah Glass, whose maiden name had
been Rapstoff. I tried on her name,
“Rapstoff ”, delighted. My grandparents’
wedding certificate said they had been
married “according to the forms of Jews”.
I liked that bit. A dead world began to bud.
With the help of Harvey Kaplan, the
director of the Scottish Jewish Archives
Centre, I traced my family back to Lithuania.
I learnt how my father’s grandparents had
come to Edinburgh at the end of the 19th
century with many other Jewish people
KOSHER EATS Top: A typical Jewish Friday fleeing pogroms. My great-grandfather
night dinner. Above: plaited challah Harris arrived in Scotland able to speak
only Yiddish. He signed my grandfather
toes into my father’s faith. I read about Jacob’s birth certificate with an X. In 1924,
Shiva, a seven-day period of mourning. Harris got his British naturalisation
I went to a menorah lighting (menorahs are certificate. During his life, he appeared in
multi-armed candelabras) for Hanukkah, one newspaper article — a story about two
the festival of lights. I considered joining friends falling out over money. The headline
Jdate (a Jewish dating website), but decided was “A breaking of a Jewish friendship”.
it was too fetishy, too Freudian. I took I read about these people as if I were
myself to Israel, where people spoke reading a history book, unsure if their story
Hebrew to me. When they asked, I would was mine to tell.
inform them no, I was not Jewish “because My father’s mother died when my father
it goes through your mother”. They was four. I found her gravestone in
Edinburgh with its Star of David, and traced
the beguiling Hebrew letters. I had no idea
What I had to learn what they meant. Among them was her
Hebrew name: Dooasha Bas Reb Shenur
Halakha being blessed by Zalman. Her middle name was Rebecca.
The laws that guide saying the Kiddush. I realised that in keeping with Jewish
the Jewish way of tradition, my father had given it to me.
life, made up (in part) Kippah I started with the easy stuff. I dived into
of 613 mitzvot Also called a Jewish pop culture. I watched Simon
(commandments) yarmulke or skullcap, Amstell’s sitcom Grandma’s House, about
in the Torah. worn in reverence to growing up in an east London Jewish family.
God. Traditionally I binged on Friday Night Dinner and Curb
Shabbat worn only by men, Your Enthusiasm, but I didn’t get the jokes.
The weekly day of in the Reform I worked my way through Jewish authors:
rest begins at movement now it is Philip Roth, Howard Jacobson, Primo Levi.
sundown on Friday accepted for women Every Jewish person I spoke to
and lasts until to wear them. recommended another book. I wanted to
nightfall on Saturday. claim this rich cultural history — from
Bar and bat mitzvah Kafka and Einstein to Amy Winehouse —
Friday night dinner A religious coming- but I had Jewish imposter syndrome.
The first meal of of-age, typically held I bought tickets to see Fiddler on the Roof.
Shabbat, and most for 12- to 13-year-old I felt guilty for enjoying it because
popular among boys (bar) and girls Howard Jacobson had written it off as
non-Orthodox Jews. (bat), in recent “shtetl kitsch”, but I loved imagining my
It begins with decades they have great-grandparents singing Tradition, the
challah (plaited been held by adults opening number of the musical. The friend
bread, pictured as an affirmation of I took to the show noted dryly that I’d
above) and wine their Jewish identity. booked for Friday night: “There won’t be
any real Jewish people here.”
 I was conflicted about taking a DNA test,
but I took one because I was searching for
an identity that felt elusive and I was
desperate for something solid to pin it on.
When the results arrived, I was too scared
to open them. I panicked. What if it turned
out I wasn’t Jewish at all? I screamed when
I discovered I am 49.7% Ashkenazi Jewish.
“What did you expect if one of your
parents is Jewish?” a friend asked me,
genuinely bemused. I was embarrassed to
tell him: legitimacy.
While Orthodox Jews follow the
matrilineal line, the Reform movement
recognises descent from either parent,
although the children of Jewish fathers are
expected to convert. According to a 2010
survey by the Cohen Centre for Modern
Jewish Studies, six out of 10 American Jews
identify as secular or “just Jewish”.
I joked to my boyfriend that discovering
I may be Jewish felt like thinking I may be
gay when I was a teenager in Somerset:
I started wondering where I could go to
meet other people like me. “You’re being
melodramatic,” he said. “We live in north
London. If you go outside, you’ll bump into
someone Jewish.” He was right. Most of my
friends are Jewish. “Of course you’re
Jewish,” they shrugged, when I told them
about my “epic journey of discovery”. It
occurred to me that I had found a Jewish
community long ago but hadn’t realised
I belonged to it. My subconscious — or
my soul — had led me to the right place.
When you ask people what it means to
them to be Jewish, you get 30 different
answers, half of which are jokes. “Two Jews,
three opinions” is the famous line. Some
people speak about a shared history, a
culture, their marriage. Others mention
Israel or the Holocaust. Another friend
confided that she is Jewish, but “doesn’t
talk about it in public because of all the
problems you get on Twitter”.
I had kosher Friday-night dinners in frum
(observant) households and went for bacon
and chips with Jewish atheists. The Jewish
PREVIOUS PAGES: CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THESE PAGES: ©KATIE GLASS, REUTERS
world is a diverse community. I wasn’t sure
where I might fit in. All I knew is I wanted to
belong. “You have a Jewish soul,” someone
told me. “You have a Jewish spirit,” said a
friend. I started to feel I was allowed in.
A family was opening up to me. My
friend’s mother took me shopping for
bagels and schmaltz herring, and gave me
a copy of Florence Greenberg’s Jewish
Cookbook. My Friday nights started to fill up
with family suppers, gathered around loud,
friendly tables over which Hebrew songs
were sung, bread passed, warm debates
raged. I dipped challah (a special bread) into
honey with newlyweds and lit candles with
my friend for the first time.
I imagined another history in which my
father had shared his Jewish experience.
Would it have changed how I understood
myself ? I cried for the Friday night dinners,
Passovers, bar mitzvahs and Yiddish slang
Top: The grave of Katie’s grandmother
Deborah Glass. Above: desecration in France
I’d missed. The chance to be proud of
where I’ve come from. I called my mother
and demanded to know why she’d never
told me about my Jewish heritage. “You
never asked,” she said.
I learned to say the Kiddush (the Shabbat
blessing) and started looking on eBay at
menorahs. But I worried I was panic-buying
pieces of Jewish identity, still unable to own
it. I worried that I was being a cultural
tourist and that I was hijacking a religion to
help me grieve for my father. My Jewish
producer joked that the amount I worry is
the most Jewish thing about me. And I
worried that I had been avoiding the big
question: God.
I was eating doughnuts on the way back
from my friend’s Hanukkah party when I
heard about graffiti sprayed in Hampstead,
“You have a Jewish
soul,” I was told. “You
have a Jewish spirit,”
said a friend. I started
to feel I was allowed in
north London: a Star of David and “9/11”,
an allusion to the conspiracy theory that
Jewish people were behind the twin towers
attack. That week, Jewish graves were
desecrated in France. Their white stones, as
beautifully inscribed as my grandmother’s,
were sprayed with black swastikas.
As we made the documentary, I noticed
the security everywhere we went. At the
Jewish Museum London, the Jewish
community centre and the synagogue they
checked bags on the way in. People
nervously asked me why I was recording.
I felt the shadow of the Shoah hanging
over me, but I didn’t feel I had the right to
discuss it. A genocide that unites Jewish
people has had no place in my life. I had
once asked my father, who was in his
thirties during the Second World War,
how it had affected him. It was another
thing he hadn’t talked about. Another
Jewish experience I felt alienated from.
I worried I was cherry-picking parts of a
culture when I didn’t understand what it
was like to suffer its burdens too.
Perhaps my father hadn’t wanted me to
be Jewish. The joyful fascination I’ve found
in discovering my “exotic heritage” is the
privilege of growing up in an identity-
obsessed generation, for whom it’s cool to
be different. Yet even in an age of identity
politics, being Jewish remains controversial.
Maybe that’s another thing that pulls me in.
Who decides if you’re Jewish? Can you
self-identity? Do you need to convert? In
the end I went to see three rabbis. I was
hedging my bets. I saw one Orthodox rabbi
and two Reform rabbis. They couldn’t have
been more welcoming. At their core they
all said something similar: that I needed
to decide what Judaism meant to me.
That the Jewish religion is the lynchpin
holding the Jewish people together through
generations. That I would have to convert.
That, ultimately, the question is not
whether I feel Jewish, but whether I want to
pass Judaism on to my children.
I had started my journey claiming I was
trying to find out whether I was Jewish, but
I was searching for something else. I wanted
to know who I was. I wanted to belong.
I began opening myself to questions as
profound as they are exciting. I started
meeting with the Orthodox rabbi, going to
his house in Golders Green. I went for
Friday night dinner with one of the Reform
rabbis, and I learnt to say the Kaddish for
my father, savouring the strange feel of the
words in my mouth. I felt joined to him by
a thread. I let myself cry for him and all the
things we never said.
Something is calling to me, something
ancient and alluring, but I don’t know
what it is yet. I don’t mind. I think of the
Yiddish joke: if you want to make God
laugh,tell him about your plans n
Katie’s documentary, And the Good News Is
You’re Jewish, is on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday
The Sunday Times Magazine • 37
 Have grapes, will travel
Will Lyons on wines that flourish far from home, page 55

Your guide to
modern living

Tough Love Power of good

Should a woman date a Jeremy Clarkson has a blast
friend she doesn’t fancy? in a Bentley Flying Spur

42 56

Spud lust Four-wheel driver

Tom Kerridge’s versatile Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy
potato-based recipes on his other sporting life

48 58
GETTY

The Sunday Times Magazine • 39

 Relative
Values
The Michelin-starred chef Marcus Wareing and his wife, Jane, on
falling out with Gordon Ramsay, temper tantrums and their recent
burglary. Interviews by Caroline Scott. Photograph by Anna Batchelor
Marcus
I met Jane when we were both
working at Gravetye Manor, a
beautiful country house hotel in
Sussex. I was a sous chef and she
had come straight from university
to work on reception. Neither of
us was looking for a serious
relationship. Shortly afterwards
I left to work as Gordon Ramsay’s
sous chef at Aubergine [Ramsay’s
first restaurant, in Chelsea].
I was a single-minded man
doing a single-minded job — my
cookery came first, good friends
and Jane second. I didn’t need
anyone for anything and I didn’t
see any reason to be worrying
about a girlfriend. I loved my job
more than anyone, but I found
London intimidating, aggressive
and lonely. You don’t go through
Aubergine without someone to
lean on. It was a tough, tough
kitchen because it was the best.
I had lived my life like a monk
and realised if I wanted a family I’d
have to get cracking. Jane is the
opposite to me — she’s thoughtful,
friendly and will do anything for
anybody. Back then, I thought only
about myself and succeeding.
Jane’s mum and dad are the key
to understanding her — they’re
incredibly smart, kind people. My
family are a bit more coarse. We’re
mouthy northerners. We punch
above our weight and ask questions
later. From the age of 11 I worked
with my father in his fruit and veg
business in a warehouse full of
aggressive men. His philosophy
was finish school, get to work.
No one in my family has ever
left Southport. When my dad took
40 • The Sunday Times Magazine
me to Lime Street station [in
Liverpool] when I was 18, he said:
“Make sure you marry someone
who understands your world.”
I asked Jane for one promise —
never ask me to take my chef ’s
jacket off, meaning don’t ask me to
change. She’ll sit and read a book
and play Scrabble with the kids,
I can’t stand that stuff. I’d rather
be doing my own thing. Why does
it work? Because we’re a team.
We’re chalk and cheese, but we
complement each other.
I wanted Jane to be a full-time
mum. It was always her call, but
I was never going to be on hand to
help. I didn’t see much of our kids
[Jake, 18, Archie, 15, and Jessie, 12]
when they were small. They
inspired me to drive myself even
harder because I wanted them to
go to good schools.
Jane and I worked together
again after I split from Gordon [in
2008 Wareing took over the lease
of Ramsay’s restaurant Pétrus and
launched Marcus Wareing at the
Berkeley, leading to a bitter feud].
She ran the bookings and we spent
the entire time fighting. She saw
a completely different man from
the one she married. It used to
wind me up when she left to pick
up the kids bang on 4.30pm,
because there was so much work to
do. Classic chef, not seeing anyone
else’s point of view. I was under a
huge amount of pressure and my
passion sometimes overtakes what
I know is right. I’d taken on the
biggest financial commitment of
my life, I’d fallen out with my best
mate and I was skint because I’d
spent everything on litigation.
I never expected wealth and I
don’t feel comfortable now. When
we were burgled [in October
burglars stole watches and
jewellery worth £33,000], my first
question was “Tell me we’re up to
date with the insurance, Jane?”
because she does all the house
admin. I’m a northerner, I don’t go
out and buy watches. They were all
gifts — two from Gordon. I didn’t SUGAR AND SPICE
realise until I lost them that I was Jane, 48, and Marcus,
so sentimental. It was a horrible 49, with their dog,
experience. As a man, you’re Esme, at their home
supposed to protect your family. If in Wimbledon. Left:
I’d been at home … put it this way, Jane’s 40th birthday
they wouldn’t have been walking at the Connaught
out with my stuff. But no one was Hotel, Mayfair
hurt, that’s what matters.
The thing that shocked me
most was how organised it was.
We’d been watched, then targeted.
They broke in through the back,
scaled the wall and climbed the
Love
drainpipe like monkeys. They
took nothing that could be traced:
they left iPads, phones and laptops
and went for the stuff that could
be sold — watches, Jane’s
jewellery. Then the stupid f******
splashed it all over social media.

Jane reads me like a book. She
knows when I walk through the
door whether I want to talk or be
quiet. At home we’re as daft
together as we were 20-odd years
ago. I’m really enjoying this part
of our lives. What worries me
most is slowing down and getting
comfortable. I don’t ever want us
to one day look at each other and
think, I can’t stand you any more.
ANNA BATCHELOR FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Jane
I knew, when I met Marcus, there
wasn’t much room in his life for
me, but it didn’t matter. At 23,
he was so hard-working it was
unbelievable and that was very
appealing. My goal was to be a
hotel manager, but we couldn’t
both have had big careers. I knew
when we got married that his
career was the focus.
He was pretty much absent
when the children were little, so
I was parenting alone, really. That
was the deal, I bought into it and
I totally got it, but it was a
nightmare. I went to every parents’
evening and every sports match
alone. Tana [Ramsay, wife of
Gordon] and I spent a lot of time
together because we were in the
same boat. But Marcus and I have
always talked on the phone a lot
during the day. I have a long list of
jobs he’s given me and he’ll phone
to say, have you done them?
Marcus won’t get involved in
the kitchen at home unless
everything is tidy. When he cooks,
I’ve lost count
of the shoes he’s
thrown into the
street. But he’s
learnt to be calmer
everywhere has to be spotless.
Years ago, when he was home late
every night, I’d have to make sure
his route through the house was
clear of clutter. I’ve lost count of
the number of times he’s thrown
shoes into the street.
When you train to be a chef,
you’re taught how to cook, not
how to manage people. Marcus
has learnt the hard way, but age
and children have definitely
mellowed him. He’s learnt to be
calmer, slightly less obsessive and
sometimes to walk away.
His bust-up with Gordon was
horrible and scary for both of us.
It was worrying because we didn’t
know if we would lose everything,
but also upsetting because
Gordon was his best friend and he
still has so much respect for him.
Marcus is so loyal, it would have
been easy to hide behind Gordon
for ever. That circle was immensely
powerful, it felt like being among
the aristocracy and suddenly
deciding to step out of court. It
was almost as if someone had died.
We were ostracised by everyone,
or maybe we ostracised ourselves
as a form of protection. But it was
the right thing for us to do.
Marcus was never home for
dinner. For years I fed myself and
watched TV on my own. Now
he’s home more, it’s weird because
I have to think about feeding us
both. He doesn’t criticise my
STRANGE HABITS cooking, but I can tell when he
Jane on Marcus doesn’t like something. However,
My office is a his comments are only ever over
graveyard of broken seasoning and tidiness, and I’ve
things. If I leave had more than 27 years’ training in
anything lying around, dealing with that.
Marcus chucks it Marcus doesn’t see himself as a
personality. He doesn’t feel he had
Marcus on Jane
a good education and that bothers
The inside of her car
him. Deep down, Marcus is a bit of
is filthy — coffee
a softie, immensely loyal and
cups and rubbish
deeply protective of his family. He
everywhere. She
knows it does
gets angry and he can be shouty,
but far less so these days because
my head in
he’s realised it doesn’t help.
Stepping back a bit has given him
perspective. It’s not heart surgery,
after all. It’s just cooking n
Marcus Everyday by Marcus Wareing
is out now (HarperCollins £20)
The Sunday Times Magazine • 41
Tough Love
Emma Barnett advises a woman unsure if attraction
will grow for a male friend who has asked her out
Give love a chance
ASK EMMA
Emma wants to hear
Q I’ve never been in a
relationship before. Usually
I like guys who don’t like me
from you. Write to back and, less frequently, guys
her with any problem are interested in me, but the
across work, love feeling isn’t mutual. I’ve just been
and life — tough let down by someone I liked and
love will be doled
I’m feeling disillusioned with
out accordingly.
men. However, there is a man
Email askemma@
whom I very much like as a
sunday-times.co.uk
friend, but he wants more than
or send her a message
that. I don’t think of him in a
via the Sunday
Times Magazine romantic way, but he is being
Facebook page open and direct about his
feelings. Should I give him a
chance and see if attraction
follows, or could that be
perceived as leading him on?
A “Why not?” is my overriding
reaction to this message. But
I understand your reticence. It is
perfectly reasonable to want to
Lorraine Candy Quieter children are naturally more reluctant
O n one of my parental
WhatsApp groups, a mum
Family
with young children is worried
about how quiet her little ones
are at school. At parents’ evenings,
teachers have suggested she
encourage her kids to speak up, to
be more extrovert than introvert,
and now she mistakenly thinks
they aren’t doing well. She also
feels guilty that she can’t “make”
them be more outspoken.
42 • The Sunday Times Magazine
fancy someone before going on
a date, and yet sometimes things
happen back to front.
I am not sure of your age or
stage in life. I mention this because
I do know some older women who
have tried this exact formula and
it has worked in a few instances.
Love came through a slow burn
and the prism of friendship. It’s
a very different way of coming to
love and one that should be
approached with care. It will need
a shift in perspective to start down
this road, but what the heck —
you only live once.
You seem ready to go there,
which is why I say give him a
chance, especially as you have
never had a relationship. It could
develop and it could not. Being
honest with him and yourself is
key and only fair. I wouldn’t tell
I feel her pain. Two of my four
were relentlessly described as
“quiet” in class. Yet I was always
confused as to why this was seen
as a problem; they were both
foghorn loud at home and it takes
a mix of alphas and betas to make
the world go round. I know
teachers have good intentions,
but mums and dads don’t hear
“It’s good to be heard in class”,
we hear “Your child is failing”.
your friend that you don’t find
him attractive, but I would give
him a very clear heads-up that you
hadn’t thought of him in that way
before. Tell him you are intrigued
enough to give it a slow go.
You must really enjoy each
other’s company and only kiss if it
feels right. You don’t want to be in
a situation where you are holding
your nose as you swoop in for a
peck that you feel obliged to give.
At the very minimum, a kiss
must be wanted. Let him woo you.
The least the experience will
give you is a chance to put your
best self forward and some decent
dates. At its very best, you’ll have
a longed-for relationship.
Worst case, you lose a friend
and have some bad and deeply
awkward sex that will make you
shudder for some time to come.
On balance, I believe it’s a risk
well worth taking, as long as you
state that crucial sentence — you
had never seen him in such a
light, but are intrigued to give
things a try. He can’t remain your
friend easily now in any case, as
you know his true feelings. All you
are doing is playing ball. If it feels
right and you both go in with your
eyes open — you are grown-ups,
after all — what’s the harm?
Go forth and mix it up. Report
back too, please. It’s a road less
talked about and I, for one, am
thankful for your honesty n
Emma presents the Emma Barnett
Show on BBC Radio 5 Live, Mon-
Thu, 10am-1pm; @emmabarnett
In his new book, A Quiet
Education, the English teacher
and author Jamie Thom implores
schools to review how they deal
with quieter temperaments. While
I know educators are rethinking
the mantra of “Hands up who
knows the answer”, isn’t it time
to stop talking about this as a
negative during parents’ evenings?
My two “quiet” children are
forthright when they want to be,
 Reasons to Be Cheerful How can society reach out to young gang members? It
takes bravery and a leap of faith, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Hugs for hoodies
S erious drug, gun and knife
offences keep rising. People
fret about feral youth, county
lines, drill music, postcode gang
wars. So much talk and alarm, so
little understanding. Politicians
are stumped, the police are
overwhelmed. The criminals,
most from poor families, carry on
doing their worst. What made
them mad, bad and so dangerous?
For meaningful answers, we
could look to Harriet Sergeant,
a wealthy, middle-aged, attractive
blonde journalist and policy wonk.
Strange but true. Twelve years ago
she befriended some tough teens
in south London and got to know
them intimately. We agreed to
meet. At first, sipping tea in her
gorgeous London mansion, with
TOUGH LOVE ILLUSTRATION BY CECILE DORMEAU. REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ILLUSTRATION BY XENIA LATII
a maid cooking in the kitchen,
to speak up in class. Hands up if you’ve got a problem with that
but nothing I could say or do
would have changed their
reluctance to speak up at school.
For a while I worried they were
being put under pressure to
change what seemed to be their
innate personalities. I feared
they would been labelled as the
quiet ones too early. Kids change
by the day, so this seemed at
odds with encouraging them to
be more confident.
I was gripped by socialist distrust.
Why should Sergeant care about
gangsters and their hunger
games? It turns out she was doing
research for a right-wing think
tank and one thing led to another.
In 2012 she published a book on
them, called Among the Hoods.
She met the first lot outside
a fried chicken shop — lads in
hoodies, intimidating people on
the street. She went over with her
escort, Jerome, a reformed robber.
Tuggy Tug, the son of a drug addict,
took charge, acting tough. Joints
were smoked. Sunshine (with a
gold tooth), Jiggers and Mash had
big plans: deal drugs, get rich, go
“legit”. Harriet bought them food.
All were school dropouts, a few
were illiterate and some had been
in care. But “they were articulate,
At its most extreme, this kind
of stigmatising of introverts can
lead to anxiety and feelings of
shame among quieter youngsters
— children for whom school may
feel like a dreadfully intimidating
party that goes on all day, and God
knows we’ve all been there.
I’ve advised the mum on my
chat group to ignore this accidental
label and let her children be —
after all, there is no reason why
insightful”, she says. “Really smart.
They have to be, after being
neglected by everyone.”
This encounter and many more
chicken suppers led to a lasting
bond. They say they’ll take care of
her, “punish” anyone who bugs
her. The bravado hides their own
vulnerabilities. A number of them
are always in stormy seas and she
is the rock they cling to. She goes
to court with them, visits them
in prison, uses her middle-class
power on their behalf at jobcentres
and other state services.
They visit her at her posh house
and some even keep clothes there.
“I consider them my family. Life
has been so awful for some of
them. They get no real care or
attention. My son could have gone
that way. Any of our sons.”
She thinks the education and
care systems need to be better
structured; that there is a laxity
among teachers and carers. They
need authoritative figures to look
up to. They get tough love and
some stability from Sergeant. It
doesn’t always work, but she keeps
faith. They have never had that
from anyone before. Now, she and
one rehabilitated gang member
have written a thriller together.
As I leave, she says: “We
shouldn’t be letting decent boys
and men turn into misfits and
criminals.” She is right. But who
among us can muster such pluck,
steadfastness or kindness? n
Some names have been changed.
Email yasmin@sunday-times.co.uk
society places greater value on
more outgoing temperaments.
There are many strengths to being
more self-controlled and
thoughtful in life. Just as there are
larks and owls, resilient dandelions
and sensitive orchids, there are
quieter and louder pupils. At
school, all those personalities
should be made to feel welcome n
@SundayTimesLC;
postcardsfrommidlife.com
The Sunday Times Magazine • 43
How it feels to...
RECORD
BREAKER
£3.5m
The amount in today’s
money that Dürer’s
The Isolated Rock of
Doss Trento sold for in
1978 — making it the
world’s most expensive
watercolour at the time
THE NEW YORK TIMES 1978
44 • The Sunday Times Magazine
...pay $30 for
a masterpiece
When an amateur enthusiast took a punt at a house clearance sale,
he ended up owning an artwork by Dürer. Simon Worrall reports
W hen Clifford Schorer, an
American art dealer who
specialises in Old Masters,
realised that he had forgotten to
buy a present for a colleague, he
had no idea that a chain of
coincidences was about to lead
him to one of the most sensational
finds in recent art history.
As a senior partner at the
London dealer Agnew’s, he is well
known in the art world for his
“eye”. His speciality is
misattributions: the Turner on
sale as the work of a minor artist;
the Winslow Homer no one
recognises. “You’re looking for the
mistakes the auction houses
make,” he explains.
Last May, though, his only
concern was finding a gift. He had
spent the day on Cape Cod,
Massachusetts. In the evening, he
was due to attend a retirement
party for a friend, Amy Myers, the
director of the Yale Centre for
British Art. It would be bad form
to arrive empty-handed.
A Google search on his phone
showed he was not far from an
antiquarian bookshop, owned by
a garrulous former English teacher
and would-be novelist named
Brainerd Phillipson. When Schorer
arrived, he was amazed to discover
a first edition of the 1925 Nonesuch
edition of Blake’s complete
writings, a particular favourite of
Myers’s. A much bigger surprise
was about to follow. As Schorer
browsed through Phillipson’s large
collection of art books, the two
men struck up a conversation. “He
asked me if I knew anything about
art attribution,” Schorer recalls.
“When I said that’s what I do, he
told me a friend of his owned an
Albrecht Dürer drawing. I said,
‘No, he doesn’t. He has a Dürer
engraving.’ Fateful words I regret.
But I left the bookseller my card.”
Phillipson had seen the drawing
in 2017 soon after his friend had
bought it at an estate sale, in
which the contents of a large
private house are sold. He wasn’t
sure if it was an original drawing
or an engraving, but knew his
friend had financial challenges and
so urged him to do something
with it. “I had the feeling it was
real,” he says. “It looked very old,
because of the frame.
“My friend is what I call a typical
‘Yankee picker’,” he continues.
“He’s like a magpie who collects
everything he can find.”
Like many antiques “pickers”,
the owner, who is in his sixties, is
more interested in buying than
selling. (He and his wife have
chosen to remain anonymous, so
I will refer to them as Bill and
“Even though I’m
not an expert, I
knew the chances
of it being a Dürer
were slim to none”
Flora.) Bill did show it to a number
of people with a view to selling it,
but was unsuccessful, though one
dealer offered him $2,000 for its
elaborate gilt frame. So, for the
next two years, the drawing sat in
the storage room of the modest,
two-storey house in
Massachusetts where Bill and
Flora live, with hundreds of other
items and framed artworks he had
purchased at various sales.
Eleven days after his visit to the
bookshop, Schorer received an
image via email from Phillipson:
a drawing of a Madonna and child.
“I thought, this has got to be the
greatest forgery that has ever been
done,” Schorer recalls. “I just
couldn’t make the mental leap that
it was right.”
Often called “the Rembrandt
of the north”, Albrecht Dürer
was born in Nuremberg,
Germany, in 1471. Prodigiously
gifted from childhood, he became
one of the most famous artists
of the Renaissance. His double-
panel painting of Adam and Eve,
now in Madrid’s Prado museum, is
one of the most iconic images of
western civilisation.
His genius, and the rarity of
sales of his work, has kept prices
astronomically high. The last time
a Dürer drawing of this quality
went under the hammer, at
Sotheby’s in 1978, in what has been
called “the sale of the century”, it
fetched £250,000 (equivalent to
£1.4m today). The Queen and
Princess Margaret mingled with
movie stars such as Alain Delon
and Jack Nicholson to see the
artist’s works. There were gasps
when one of his watercolours
went for more than £600,000
(£3.5m today), smashing the
record for a work on paper.
Most artists of that era made
drawings only as preparation for
 other works, but Dürer proudly
signed his with his famous AD
monogram and kept them in
meticulous order in his studio,
often adding notes later on to
record the date and circumstances
of their creation. Among the
1,100 artworks that survive, there
are images of a life-size shoe, a
group of dancing monkeys and his
iconic depiction of a hare, which
has hung in the nurseries of
millions of children. He was deeply
devout and many of his greatest
works were also on religious
subjects. The roots of Dürer’s
GETTY
preoccupation with the theme of
the Madonna and child can be
found in his own life. He was the
third child of Barbara Dürer, who
went on to give birth to another 15
children. All of them died, except
for Albrecht and two younger
brothers. Watching his mother
bring so many children into the
world, then lose them, left a
profound impression on the artist.
When Schorer arrived at Bill and
Flora’s home to view the drawing,
they were watching their favourite
antiques show on TV. “The house
was like Dickens’s Old Curiosity
Shop,” Schorer recalls. “It was
piled with knick-knacks, paintings,
REDISCOVERED old telephones, books.” The
The recently found couple told him they had bought
Dürer drawing of the the drawing for “a low sum” in an
Madonna and child. estate sale at the country home of
Left: a self-portrait Jean Paul Carlhian, a well-known
of the artist aged 28 Boston architect.
painted in 1500 Bill recalled arriving early,
queuing at the front with a
number of other dealers. As soon
as the door opened, he headed
for the room where the art was
being displayed on the walls and
tables. “I noticed this nice,
old-looking piece of artwork of the
Madonna and child in the room,”
he recalls. “It had Dürer’s
monogram on it, so I picked
The Sunday Times Magazine • 45
 How it feels to...
it up to see if I could figure out
whether it was just an old print or
an actual drawing.”
Like most semi-professional
“pickers”, Bill carries a magnifying
glass. Scanning it over the image,
he couldn’t be certain it was a
genuine Dürer, the possibility of
which seemed far-fetched. “Even
though I’m not an art expert, I
knew the chances were slim to
none,” he says. “But I thought it
was a wonderfully rendered piece
of old art, which justified
purchasing it.”
Later, after browsing a few other
items, Bill noticed an early French
gilt frame near the drawing. “It
appeared to be an original late
17th- to early 18th-century period
frame, with irregular dimensions,”
he recalls. “When I placed the
drawing on it, the frame fitted
perfectly. This indicated to me that
the drawing had been presented
in this frame in its history, which
intrigued me even more. So I
purchased the frame as well.”
Back home, Bill examined it
more thoroughly with his
magnifying glass. Could it really
be a Dürer? “My plan was to send
photos to some of the larger
auction houses to get their
opinion,” he explains. “But I have a
habit of procrastinating, so the
drawing just sat in my storage
room for a couple of years. The
only person I showed it to was
Brainerd, and he kept nagging me
to do something with it.” Bill was
almost ready to do so when Cliff
Schorer came knocking.
The drawing was already laid
out on the table when Schorer
walked in. Bill showed him the
entry in his “stockbook”, where he
records all his purchases: “#8907
Albert Durer Madonna and Child
drawing (?) $30.00.”
“As soon as I examined it I
instantly felt it was right,” Schorer
recalls, his eyes gleaming at the
memory. “I said, ‘This is either the
greatest forgery I have ever seen,
or it’s a masterpiece.’”
I meet Schorer, a fit-looking
52-year-old, at his house on
Cape Cod. An inscription on a
bookcase reads: “The harder you
work, the luckier you get.” It’s a
motto Schorer has lived by. Born
in working-class New York, his
first entry point into the world of
collecting was via his great-
grandfather, who had a hoard of
more than a million stamps. Later,
he began collecting paintings and
46 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Chinese porcelain, teaching
himself about art history in the
basement of Harvard’s art library
and studying the market by
poring over decades of Sotheby’s
and Christie’s catalogues. When in
2013 the London gallery Agnew’s
became available, after two
centuries of ownership by the
same family, he put together
the financing to take it over.
The hunt to prove the drawing
was an authentic Dürer was
now on. First, with the owners’
permission, Schorer
commissioned a series of tests
that lasted several months. By
then, he had already written the
couple a cheque for $100,000 as a
good faith advance, so they could
take care of some immediate
financial needs and hire a lawyer
to negotiate a consignment
agreement with Agnew’s. “I have
spent my life disbelieving things,”
Schorer says, laughing. “Now, here
I was out on the thinnest of limbs.
But I was sure it was right.”
The key to proving it was a
genuine Dürer was the paper. In
Britain, Schorer enlisted the help
of the world-renowned expert
Jane McAusland, who has worked
on drawings in the Queen’s
collection at Windsor Castle. After
an initial examination, she sent
Schorer an email from her Suffolk
studio. It was headed: The news is
bad. “She said the glue that held
the backing on was synthetic; and
the distilled water had removed
some pigment, which implied that
the paper had been artificially
aged. I was very downcast. I had
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL basically drunk my own Kool-Aid.”
The art dealer Cliff After a sleepless night, Schorer
Schorer with Dürer’s asked McAusland to do further
drawing, which was tests, and a few days later a second
bought by an email pinged into his inbox, this
unsuspecting couple time headed: The news is good.
at a house clearance “She had transluced light through
the paper and found a watermark,”
he recalls. “She sent me an image,
and when I saw that my heart
stopped. It was the trident and
ring watermark that is known to
have been made for Dürer by his
patron. The Queen’s own signed
drawing of 1503 bears that same
watermark, as does the one in the
Morgan Library in New York.”
Schorer knew that one opinion
by a British paper expert, however
well qualified, would never suffice,
so he contacted others. One of
the first was Andrew Raftery, a
professor of printmaking at the
Rhode Island College of Art and
Design and an authority on early
modern engraving. “I just couldn’t
believe I had such a drawing in my
studio, where I work on drawings
myself,” Raftery recalls. “It seemed
so vibrant and alive, even though
it is over 500 years old.”
Raftery even did his own copy
of the drawing, using Dürer’s
original materials, a crow feather
quill and carbon-black ink, which
he made himself. What emerged
as he made his copy was the speed
and virtuosity of Dürer’s original.
“This speaks to the fact that Dürer
had done some of these motifs
many times,” Raftery explains. “If
you look at the grass, it’s clear that
they were done with exceptional
speed, you can almost hear the
pen scratching the paper as he
worked. No forger would be
capable of doing this.”
How long does he estimate
Dürer needed to do the drawing?
His answer amazes me. “I couldn’t
imagine it took more than an hour
or two,” he says. “He probably had
to wait quite a while for drying,
because we see no blotches or
blots. It’s an act of virtuosity.”
Schorer’s clinching opinion
came from the leading Dürer
expert Dr Christof Metzger, a
curator at Vienna’s Albertina
Museum, which holds the world’s
most important collection of
Dürer’s drawings. “He opened the
folio, and 15 seconds after looking
at it, he said, ‘This is absolutely
right, it’s magnificent.’”
The drawing is believed to have
been executed circa 1503-05,
when Dürer was at the peak of his
powers. What is unusual about it
is that it shows the Madonna and
child in a rare domestic setting.
The Christ-child is turned away
from his mother, who holds
what looks like a nappy cloth, as
though she is about to wipe his
bottom, a ritual Dürer must
 “I’ve spent my
life disbelieving
things. I was out
on the thinnest of
limbs, but I was
sure I was right”
have observed his mother
performing countless times. “It is
part of an attempt to humanise
the Madonna in Germany,”
Schorer explains. “To make her
look like a typical hausfrau.”
T he drawing’s journey from
Dürer’s hand in 16th-century
Vienna to an estate sale in
Massachusetts reads like a
labyrinthine Umberto Eco novel.
Its first home was the collection
of the Holy Roman emperor
Rudolf II, who amassed the
world’s largest collection of
Dürer’s art (most of which now
resides at the Albertina Museum).
When Napoleon crushed the
Hapsburg army at the Battle of
Austerlitz in 1805, the drawing
was seized by Baron Denon, the
first director of the Louvre, who
looted vast quantities of art in the
wake of Napoleon’s conquests,
sometimes parading them
through the streets of Paris, with
elephants and other wild animals,
like a Roman triumph.
In the late 19th century, the
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, GETTY
drawing passed between the
hands of renowned Parisian art
collectors, ending up with André
Carlhian of the Maison Carlhian
interior design firm.
Carlhian’s speciality was
supplying lavish interiors for
America’s super-rich during the
Gilded Age, often dismantling
entire rooms and shipping them
across the Atlantic. When he died,
the drawing was inherited by his
son, Jean Paul, who had settled in
America. Although the exact date
the drawing passed into obscurity
is unclear, it is certain that at some
point in the late 19th century or
early 20th century Maison
Carlhian decided to tart the
drawing up with a view to selling it.
It was mounted on a new backing
and enclosed in an ornate Louis
XV frame. Foxing marks were even
added to the paper to make it look
antique. Ironically, it was these
interventions that made dealers
and collectors suspicious of the
drawing. “They dressed it up to
help sell it, but that made it seem
like a fake,” Schorer explains.
As a result, this masterpiece,
which had survived war and
political upheaval, languished in
the attic of Carlhian’s home in
Concord, Massachusetts. On his
death, his family, having no idea of
its true worth, sold it for $30. One
can imagine how they feel now.
The drawing is now in
safekeeping at Agnew’s in London.
It was due to be unveiled at the
Maastricht Art Fair in March, but
due to fears about the effect on
attendance of the coronavirus, it
will now be unveiled at Agnew’s in
July. Schorer is coy about its value,
but when I ventured £1.5m, he said
it would be “much more than that”.
The details of the deal Schorer
struck with the couple are
confidential, but it is undoubtedly
tens of thousands times more
than they paid at the estate sale.
“This is a godsend for them,” says
MASTERPIECES their friend Brainerd Phillipson.
Dürer’s paintings of Already, the down payment
Adam and Eve hang Schorer gave them has enabled
in Madrid’s Prado. them “to pay off their credit cards,
Left: his iconic study put a new roof on their house and
of a young hare buy a new car”. As devout
Christians, they have also made a
donation to a local church. “They
felt God had put them in the room
with Cliff,” Phillipson explains.
From the start, Schorer has been
determined to treat the couple
who discovered the drawing
honestly, not simply because he
believes it is ethical to do so, but
because he does not want to
become bogged down in the
sort of legal quagmire that
engulfed Leonardo da Vinci’s
Salvator Mundi — purchased at
a minor sale in New Orleans in
2005 for less than £5,500, it went
on to become the most expensive
artwork ever auctioned, after its
sale for £340m at Christie’s in
New York in 2017. Now the subject
of a lawsuit, its current location
and owner are unconfirmed.
“So many of these art
discoveries become litigious,” he
says. “ I didn’t want to be sleepless
for the rest of my life.”
As I am about to leave, he reads
out a thank you card from the
couple: “Wishing you the best
possible outcome as you continue
without us and that you will leave
a lasting mark on art history”.
“That brings tears to my eyes,”
he says, looking away as the
breakers crash on the rocks
below his house n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 47

The Dish
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48 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Old or new, let’s celebrate the versatile potato, says Tom Kerridge
There’s nothing
humble about spuds
Photographs by Ant Duncan
1
T he days of people buying a
bag of generic spuds from the
supermarket are over. We now
know which ones to get — old
or new, floury or waxy — for
whatever meal we have in mind.
I don’t know anybody who
doesn’t like potatoes, and if I had
to answer that eternal question of
bread or potatoes, I know which
I’d go for. I’m a chef not a baker!
They may be a staple in all our
kitchens, but there’s nothing
humble about potatoes, really;
they have a wonderful richness
and starchiness that makes
them brilliant for so many dishes.
At my restaurants we use them
to thicken sauces and soups, and
we even use the skins of baked
potatoes to make a stock for our
potato risotto, which tastes
incredible. There’s so much
flavour in the skin, I can’t believe
people don’t eat it.
Potatoes are so versatile, from
fluffy mash to supersweet little
new potatoes or crisp, crunchy
roasties. The baked potato dish
that we created for our
Manchester restaurant has been
so popular that my chefs down
south are inventing ways to
bring it to their menus. For
a special occasion we’ll
sometimes add a little caviar.
It’s the soil that makes
Jersey royals taste so good.
A farmer once told me that
potatoes from various
parts of the same
field can taste
different. The soup
here, with a subtle
tang of wild garlic,
tastes really fresh.
As for the
gratin, you need
to cook it with
love and care, but
it’s something
really special. I’d
happily eat it as a
main course, like
macaroni cheese.
Buttermilk
potato gratin
with blue cheese
Cooking a gratin at too high a
temperature can make it split.
So try it cooler, and press the
potatoes during cooking to end
up with a firm, delicious main
course. The buttermilk in this
recipe cuts through the richness.
SERVES
4-6 people
INGREDIENTS
6 large maris piper potatoes, thinly
sliced with a mandolin
200ml buttermilk
75ml milk
75ml double cream
100g blue cheese
01 Heat the oven to 160C (180C
non-fan). Pat the sliced potatoes
dry with a tea towel.
02 Bring the buttermilk, milk
and double cream to the boil, and
season with salt and ground white
pepper. Remove from the heat and
stir in the cheese until melted.
03 Arrange one layer of potatoes
in an ovenproof dish and pour
over some of the buttermilk
mixture to cover. Add another
layer of potatoes, then cover
with more buttermilk. Continue
until you use up all of the potato
and buttermilk. Put the dish on
a tray and cook for 25 minutes.
04 Remove from the oven and
press down on the potato with
a palette knife. Put back into the
oven and cook for a further 10
minutes, then press again. Repeat
another three or four times until
the potato feels firm.
05 Bake the gratin for a further
20-25 minutes until the
buttermilk thickens and browns
on top. Remove from the oven and
let it cool slightly before serving.
2
PROP STYLING: LEANNE BRACEY. PLATES FROM THE GIO AND STRATA RANGES AT WEDGEWOOD. CUTLERY FROM A SELECTION AT DAVID MELLOR
ANT DUNCAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. TOM KERRIDGE PHOTOGRAPH BY NEALE HAYNES. FOOD STYLING: FRANKIE UNSWORTH.
Baked jacket
potato with
steak tartare
and smoked
mayonnaise
At the Bull & Bear in Manchester,
we cook potatoes on the rotisserie;
there’s nothing like it for getting
a crisp skin and a fluffy inside.
However, time and a hot oven also
does the trick — no shortcuts!
SERVES
4 people
INGREDIENTS
Rock salt, to bake the potatoes on
4 heritage-style baking potatoes
(medium-sized)
PICTURE CREDIT TO GO HERE

The Sunday Times Magazine • 49

50 • The Sunday Times Magazine
1 shallot, peeled and diced
1 tbsp chopped chives
2 granny smith apples, peeled and
finely diced
4 tbsp crème fraîche

For the smoked mayonnaise

2 egg yolks
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp cider vinegar
200ml smoked rapeseed oil

For the tartare dressing

3 tbsp tomato juice
5 drops of Tabasco
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp creamed horseradish

For the tartare mix

250g fillet steak, chopped into
small dice
1 tbsp cornichons, finely diced
1 tbsp capers

01 Heat the oven to 180C (200C

non-fan). Spread rock salt onto
a baking sheet, then place the
potatoes on the salt to hold them
steady while they cook. Bake for
1 hour or until cooked through.

3
02 To make the mayonnaise,
place the yolks, mustard and
vinegar in a blender. Slowly add
the oil while the blade is turning
on a low speed. Once the mixture
is thick and glossy, pour into a
piping bag.
03 Once the potatoes are cooked,
cut off the top and scoop out the
fluffy insides into a bowl, being
careful not to break the skin.
Keep the skin to one side.
04 Using a fork, mash the potato
and add the shallot, chives, apple
and crème fraîche. Season to taste
with salt and cracked black pepper.
05 Pack the potato and apple mix
back into the jacket skins and
return to the baking tray. Put back
in the oven for 10 minutes to crisp
up the skin.
The Dish
New potato and
wild garlic soup
This is a celebration of early spring.
If you find wild garlic growing,
grab it — it’s free and abundant.
Serve this soup with croutons or
any other pesto, if you prefer.
SERVES
4 people
INGREDIENTS
125g butter
250g shallots, peeled and sliced
250g Jersey royals, peeled and sliced
25g garlic, grated
1 litre milk
1 vegetable stock cube
15 wild garlic leaves, shredded
2 tbsp chopped chives, to serve
For the egg yolk dressing
01 Heat the butter in a large pan
until bubbling. Add the shallots,
potato and garlic, and gently cook
until the potato softens slightly.
02 Add the milk and vegetable
stock cube. Bring up to the boil
and simmer until the potatoes
are fully cooked.
03 To make the dressing, place
the yolks, vinegar and mustard
in a bowl and whisk together,
slowly adding the oil. The
consistency should be thinner
than mayonnaise.
04 When the potatoes are fully
cooked, transfer to a blender, add
the wild garlic and blend until
smooth. Season with salt and
white pepper to taste, then pass
through a fine sieve and chill.
05 To make the pesto, boil 100ml
water, pour over the mushrooms

06 Whisk together the tartare
dressing. In a separate bowl, mix
the steak, cornichons and capers,
then add just enough dressing to
coat the diced fillet. Mix together
to lightly bind.
07 When the potatoes are baked,
remove from the oven and place
on serving plates. Top off each
stuffed potato with the dressed
tartare and smoky mayo.
50g free-range egg yolk and leave to reconstitute for 20
5ml white wine vinegar minutes. Once soft, drain the
5g English mustard liquid and place the mushrooms
15ml extra-virgin rapeseed oil in a blender with the nuts, truffle
oil, parmesan, zest and oil. Pulse
For the mushroom pesto (optional) to make a coarse pesto.
25g dried mushrooms
50g hazelnuts 06 To serve, bring the soup back
1 tsp truffle oil up to the boil and pour into bowls.
50g parmesan Drizzle with plenty of the yolk
Zest of 1 lemon dressing, mushroom pesto and
100ml rapeseed oil chopped chives n

The Sunday Times Magazine • 51

Table Talk
Street food goes to church —
but it’s no religious experience
Mercato Mayfair
Mayfair
Marina O’Loughlin
I t wasn’t Hong Kong or Bangkok
or LA where I first fell in love
with the whole idea of street
food, but Portland, Oregon.
This most liberal of US cities
welcomed the mushrooming of
micro-restaurants on every corner
with wide-open arms until the
whole city was colonised by
street food pods. Competition
ensured quality was high: the
Mercato Mayfair, magnificent Nong’s Khao Man
St Mark’s Church, Gai with her seductive, silky
North Audley Street, poached chicken and rice was
London W1K 6ZA; worth the trip alone.
020 7403 0930, So I was delighted when the
mercatometro trend hit the UK. I thrilled to the
politano.com democratisation of it all, the fact
52 • The Sunday Times Magazine
that virtually anyone from
anywhere could set up shop.
I loved the festival atmosphere
of the collectives; I even threw
a few quid’s investment in their
direction. The whole shebang
came across as a giant win, win,
win: businesses and punters and
entrepreneurs, everyone happy
in the sunlit uplands of fun and
affordability and good food.
And then street food started to
change. For one thing —
popularised by the runaway
success of the Time Out model
in cities such as Lisbon, Miami,
Montreal and, sometime soon,
London — it came indoors.
Understandable: punting Korean
fried chicken or twisted tacos in
blustery northern Novembers is
nobody’s idea of a good time.
And then they became slicker
and slicker. No longer were we
taking part in the equivalent of
a rave, travelling miles to
unmarked destinations, waiting
for hours while panicking that
the (usually) burger might run
out. Streetfood 2.0 brought
effectively food malls with existing
“name” restaurateurs, collection
buzzers and card readers, all
carefully insulated against, er, the
actual street.
I know, I know. Eyes to heaven
at the inevitability. Gentrification,
chunter, chunter. No longer really
target audience — nouveau
swankiness notwithstanding —
I’ve left them alone for a while,
old and spoilt enough to require
non-shared tables. Drinks in
glasses. Service. I’ve paid my dues
in the street food pits worldwide,
comrades. Until this remarkable
number crossed my radar.
I’d been to the initial Mercato
Metropolitano in a former paper
factory in Southwark and found it
a bit so-what. But now it has
landed in Mayfair and the
deconsecrated St Mark’s Church,
a ravishing Grade I listed slab of
Greek revival history. At least
nobody could accuse MM’s
Italian ownership of trying to
gentrify Mayfair. This gothic
beauty, four soaring floors of it
with stalls in the nave and
upstairs gallery, enoteca in the
vaults, plus roof terrace, is
dazzling: Ionic columns, jewel-
hued stained glass, towering
ceilings. The gilded altar is given
over to beer and gin cocktails:

The ragu is good,
but the dumplings
come with an
unfortunate
garnish of wiry hair
never mind transubstantiation,
here’s a small batch G&T.
Despite the market’s name, this
is no monocultural Eataly. There
are stands selling sushi and
ceviche and lobster rolls. There’s a
German in-house microbrewery.
Turkish pide from Lala: decent
enough with quantities of smoky
aubergine and sharp, stretchy
cheese on fairly stodgy dough.
Something called Steamy & Co
sells fine bao — puffy buns,
big-flavoured meat: braised pork
belly and sriracha brisket. But
their pork gyoza are unsettling, the
dough waxy and stiff, the impacted
fillings plopping out at first bite in
a disturbingly biological fashion.
The best things among this
collection of mostly unknown
names are, unsurprisingly, Italian:
Fresco’s pneumatic and pleasingly
blackened Neapolitan-style pizza
topped with coarse-cut salsiccia
and authentically exhausted
looking friarielli (aka cime di rapa).
Ice creams from Florence’s
historic gelateria, Badiani. And
Italian Steakhouse — Florentine if
the menu is anything to go by: the
eponymous fiorentina steaks, the
city’s beloved lampredotto
(grey-beige, super-savoury cow’s
fourth stomach, slow-braised with
aromatics and bunged in a bun),
and chicken liver crostini. None of
these is available on either visit,
though the jolly, twinkly Italians
manning the place are highly
entertained by my requesting
GIULIA VERDINELLI FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
them. Yes, the quality of the meat
FROM THE MENUS
is good, but I’m not keen on
Steamy & Co braised spending £22 on 300g of ribeye or A lot on her plate
pork belly bao bun £13 on shaved truffle potatoes to
£8 (for two) hoover up at a tiny table while Three more things
being constantly bumped by
Pasta London backsides of queuing customers.
Marina ate last week
I suppose this is why everyone is
gnocchi ragu £11
ordering the burgers. The worst
Lala Istanbuli I try is, bizarrely, from a sort of
Turkish pide £11 build-yourself pasta concept:
gnocchi with the day’s special of
Fresco pizza wild boar ragu. The ragu is good,
pasqualina £14.50 properly ripe and porcine, but the
dumplings are soggy and
Italian Steakhouse waterlogged and come with the
300g ribeye £22 unfortunate garnish of a wiry hair.
Recently, a piece by the writer
DRINKS Dan Hancox described the new CROQUETTES, MADAME?
Aged barrel negroni £11 wave of street food markets as Emile from chef Damian Clisby and
“hallmarks of everything that is Nick Gibson (Petersham Nurseries
“Cha cha” margarita going wrong with our big cities”, and Drapers Arms respectively) is
£11 blaming Anthony Bourdain and exactly the kind of restaurant I
identifying “middle-class ennui adore: small, independent, charming,
Sparkling water £1.50 and yearning for authenticity”. delicious: these Lincolnshire
Fair enough: sometimes we have poacher croquettes with mushroom
TOTAL to look long and hard in the ketchup set the tone. The
For three, without mirror. But I realise that my Shoreditch pop-up has just closed
service charge £90 personal antipathy to this place — a permanent site is on the cards.
despite its raving beauty (and, let’s
face it, that’s less to do with
Mercato Metropolitano and more
to do with God) is shallower still,
that of the early adopter watching
in horror as their niche passion
becomes mainstream.
MM delivers neither the thrill
of discovering real street food
nor the comfort of a restaurant,
inhabiting an unhappy valley
between the two. For this here THAT’S MOMO LIKE IT
Catholic, after visiting the fourth A wander along the Seven Sisters
or fifth uninspiring stall, being Road and a find: Junction Market
watched by various saints, starts comes across like streetfood 1.0,
to feel less charming and more a small hub of indies — Malaysian,
accusatory. Mea culpa. Japanese, vegan Mexican, Chinese
Both times I visit, it’s thronging — and these bouncy Nepalese
with affluent Italians, merrily momo with a thrilling garlic, chilli and
maintaining their comedy ginger dip. What it used to be like.
chauvinism. They’ll no doubt
return to the homeland,
prejudices against food in Britain
comfortingly intact. Because even
though the website drones on
about missions, environmental
impact, sustainability, food
autonomy and supporting
communities — and it does a
lot of droning — there’s one

blessed truth: the food just isn’t

good enough. Mercato
Metropolitano hasn’t lasted in
Milan and Turin. Here, at least
two more sites are in the pipeline
and there are breathless reports
of their £ millions of UK sales.
Lo: a miracle n
Twitter: @MarinaOLoughlin
PIGGING OUT Flavoursome pork belly and sriracha bao buns Instagram: @marinagpoloughlin
THE FULL MONTY’S
Back to the new breed: Kerb at
Seven Dials, Covent Garden. I mourn
the loss of the handsome tiled
Monty’s Deli on Hoxton Street, but
this is a great pitstop for its latkes,
reubens and excellent homemade
bagels, laden with fine smoked
salmon, cream cheese and capers.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 53

Drink These distant cousins
confound grape expectations
hectare vineyard in Burgundy that
produces a full-bodied white of
exceptional quality and
sophistication. The village of
Barolo gives its name to a powerful
red wine made in Piedmont in
Italy, while Château Cantermerle
is the name of an estate in the
Haut-Médoc region of Bordeaux
Will Lyons that produces long-lived red wine.
grape variety. It is through
learning the aroma and taste of
each that one comes to
understand the many different
wine styles such as sauvignon
blanc, merlot and pinot noir.
Some grapes become
synonymous with a place —
chardonnay with Burgundy, for
example. (In France they have

T here are two languages of

wine. The first, perhaps more
romantic language introduces the
taste, flavour and myriad wine
styles through the names of the
villages, vineyards and properties
of the grand regions of Europe.
A name such as Le Montrachet,
for example, evokes an eight-
This language is based on the
understanding that in essence the
flavour and character of a particular
wine is principally derived from
where it is made — taking into
account the soil, climate,
winemaker and growing season.
The other, perhaps more
practical language is that of the
enshrined this sense of place into
law, the appellation d’origine
contrôlée system.) Others like to
travel. In today’s homogenous
world, here are six examples that
are flourishing outside their
traditional homeland n
Twitter: @Will_Lyons
Instagram: @mrwill_lyons

2019 TRAPICHE 2018 KALKSTEIN 2019 FORREST 2017 MUHR VAN 2016 FATTORIA 2016 KANGARILLA
VINEYARDS SAUVIGNON ALBARINO DER NIEPOORT ALDOBRANDESCA ROAD PRIMITIVO
PINOT GRIGIO BLANC WAITROSE SYDHANG VIE CAVE MALBEC MAJESTIC, £14
MORRISONS, BOOTHS, £10 CELLAR, £14 JUSTERINI & HANDFORD Australia
£6.75 Germany New Zealand BROOKS, £21 WINES, £26 Also known as
Argentina Sauvignon blanc Albariño originally Austria Italy tribidrag in Croatia
Pinot grigio has a is now planted all hails from the Iberian From the lauded Originally from and zinfandel
cheap and cheerful over the world, peninsula, but is now Weingut Dorli Muhr France — and made in California,
reputation, but this is but this, from found planted in a estate comes a famous by Argentina primitivo has
cracking value for the Pflaz region, handful of countries sought-after syrah of — this is one of only become popular
money. Made in the is one of the first outside Europe. This exceptional quality. a handful of malbecs down under. This
Mendoza wine I have tasted from example, from the Elegant and fine, it made elsewhere that has spicy aromatics
region from grapes Germany. It is winemaker Dr John delights with a purity is really interesting with notes of cherry
sourced at 2,000ft, precise, elegant Forrest, is vibrant of fruit and distinctive to taste. It has a and wild rose, and
it has strong and lively, with and refreshing, notes of white lovely texture with finishes with lively
aromas of citrus and charming notes of with white peach pepper reminiscent soft, dark fruit and acidity and
peach with a crisp, gooseberry and flavours and a dry, of the syrah’s home finishes with a hint of pleasingly juicy
zesty finish. green pepper. saline finish. in the Rhône Valley. Tuscan character. notes of berry fruit.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 55

 The Clarkson Review: Bentley Flying Spur

Driving This bruiser has

a spring in its step
motor sport there are around the
world, and it’s just about
impossible. Certainly there are
thousands, and each one comes
with its own set of rules and
regulations. No one could possibly
be expected to follow all of them.
Most of us, in fact, follow just one:
Jeremy Clarkson Formula One. Which, I guess, is
why we all drive to work every day
car parks are drawn to Formula E.
My favourite, though, has always
been the Bathurst 1000. I first saw
it on television about 500 years
ago and couldn’t believe my eyes.
The cars, big Fords and Holdens,
had cameras that could be
remotely swivelled to ensure they
captured the action. And the
commentators could talk to the

I t’s been argued since the dawn

of automotive time that if a car
manufacturer wins at the track on
in our Red Bulls.
Occasionally a new “thing”
roars into our consciousness,
drivers. And we could listen in.
This annual event was
absolutely huge in Australia,
a Sunday afternoon, its sales will such as the British touring car where the Ford and Holden rivalry
increase in the showrooms on championship in the 1990s. That was deep. It was Manchester
CONTACT US Monday morning. Fair was tremendous. And these United v Liverpool but on an epic
Write to us at enough. So who won the days an increasing scale. Big, nasty fights would
driving@sunday- 12-hour Bathurst race number of people who break out every year,
times.co.uk or Driving, in Australia recently? want to watch so in an effort to cut
The Sunday Times, You don’t know, milk floats down the violence,
1 London Bridge Street, do you? I tried whizzing organisers restricted
London SE1 9GF the other day to about alcohol. Which meant
work out how in city fans went to the site
DRIVING.CO.UK many types of centre weeks or even
For daily news, reviews,
videos, buying guides
and advice

56 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 Lamborghini, Aston Martin and
Audi. Yes, I know this racing
The Clarksometer version had two-wheel drive and
Bentley Flying Spur weighed only 1.3 tons, but even so.
Watching something that big do
that well was quite a spectacle.
I haven’t driven a Continental
recently, but I have been driving
its four-door brother, the new
1,484mm
What’s more, around the base
of the gearlever there are several
thousand very small buttons. To
see which does what, you must
put on your reading glasses and
lean over for a good peer. This
could be construed as “driving
without due care and attention”.
Plus, you need to be mindful,

2,220mm 5,316mm
Engine Fuel / CO2
5950cc, W12 21.9mpg / 304g/km
Power Weight
626bhp @ 6000pm 2,437kg
Torque Price
664 Ib ft £168,300
@ 1350rpm
Release date
Acceleration On sale now
0-62mph: 3.8sec
Jeremy’s rating
Top speed
207mph
months in advance and buried
their beer so it could be dug up
Head to and consumed before the fight on
head race day.
In 1992 the entire crowd was,
Bentley Flying Spur v for once, united in sorrow and
Rolls-Royce Ghost
grief, because, to everyone’s
horror, a Japanese Nissan Skyline
won. “Boo,” they shouted at the
winning driver, Jim Richards, as
he took to the podium. After
Price
they had pelted him with beer
cans, he snatched the microphone
£168,300 £245,790
and called them “a pack of
Fuel arseholes”. It was all very Western
Suburbs. I loved it.
21.9mpg 20.0mpg
Today the Ford v Holden battle
0-62mph is over, chiefly because Holden
has gone to that great scrapyard
3.8sec 4.8sec
in the sky. But the racing has
survived, and earlier this year
Power
Bathurst staged a round of the
626bhp 563bhp
Intercontinental GT Challenge
— a branch of motor sport that
allows supercar manufacturers to
go wheel to wheel and see which
is best. It should be bigger than
the Premier League and the NFL
combined. But the average
attendance is about one. You
get bigger crowds at a county
cricket match. And the coverage
in terms of column inches is
even smaller. Which is why you
don’t know who won that
12-hour race in Oz.
It was a Bentley Continental. In
a race interrupted by the arrival on
track of two kangaroos, the big
Brit bruiser somehow put one over
on the much more lithesome
supercars from McLaren, Porsche,
Flying Spur. And even though
this emphatically does not weigh
1.3 tons and most definitely does
have cumbersome four-wheel
drive, it still absolutely flies. You
put your foot down and, when
you glance in the rear-view
mirror and see all that quilted
leather and all that trinketry, you
can’t help thinking: “How is this
even possible?”
In the previous version the
gearbox could be a bit dimwitted,
but not any more. And there are
other improvements. There are
cupholders in the front. There’s
even more Volkswagen tech. The
ride, even on big 21in wheels, is
massively improved. And it is a
much more joyous car both to sit
in and behold. You can even have
an illuminated flying B emblem
that rises silently from the leading
edge of the bonnet — who doesn’t
want that in their lives?
Mistakes? Well, let’s start with
the dashboard trim. So many types
of wood are on the options list,
you need to be a qualified arborist
to decide which would be best.
Oregon crab apple, Manchurian
walnut with a splash of Siberian
stone pine or good old-fashioned
Cretan zelkova?
In the Spur, you
get astonishing
smoothness and
silence coupled
with insane power
Bentley sent my test car with
a glossy piano-black finish, and it
looked lovely until the sun came
out. Then the reflection was so
powerful, it was like being shot in
the face with a ray gun.
There were other issues. All
companies these days are engaged
in a headlong rush to reinvent the
gearlever. Slotting it into D and
setting off is deemed to be
old-fashioned, so you must jiggle
it this way and that or engage D
twice before you can go. And the
Bentley’s no different. I got cross
with it often.
because they, too, are all set in a
glossy piano-black veneer, so if
you’ve got up close and personal
when the sun comes out, it’s like
being shot in the face by several
thousand ray guns.
My main issue, however, is the
mountainous torque. That
gigantic turbocharged W12
engine produces so much of it
that your passengers will get an
idea of what it would have been
like to ride a Saturn rocket. If
you have a driver, he’ll need
ballerina feet and the touch of
a gigolo to be smooth.
I don’t care, though. This is a
fabulous car. Yes, there are small
mistakes, but that’s what gives it a
human quality. Who chooses their
friends because they’re reliable
and sensible? In the Spur you get
astonishing smoothness and
silence coupled with insane
power. When I pressed the brakes,
I always thought, “How are they
stopping it? How?!”
Most of all, though, you get a
sense of deep satisfaction every
time you get inside. Yes, it’s a bit
chintzy and a bit Wilmslow here
and there. But in a world where
everyone else makes car interiors
look like the inside of a man’s
washbag, it’s refreshing to have
a bit of diamond-gnarled
brightwork and some chrome
organ-stop vent knobs.
After driving the previous
Spur, I concluded by saying the
Rolls-Royce Ghost was a better
car. But that is not the case any
more. The new model is just so
sensational.
Plus, it’s very affordable, if you
are a successful chief executive or
a pop star with several No 1 hits in
your past. I suppose I’d call it
affordable too, but as I’m from
Yorkshire, I’d wait until the
summer, when the V8 version is
set to come along. Not only will
this be about £20,000 less
expensive, but you won’t have to
tell your passengers to hang on
every time you pull away from
the lights.
This means they won’t know
it’s a racing car. No one knows,
but trust me on this. It is n

The Sunday Times Magazine • 57


GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY The cyclist takes a Ford Ranger Raptor and monster trucks for a spin in his new show
Me and
My Motor
Olympian Chris Hoy
now puts pedal to
metal on the racetrack
W hen Sir Chris Hoy, the
six-times Olympic gold
medallist, decided to try his hand
at motor sport, it was a short
trajectory from car racing at
weekends to proper competitions
such as the Le Mans 24 Hours.
Still, when he got behind the
wheel of a 600bhp world
rallycross car a fortnight before his
first race, he had the jitters.
“It was the most nervous I’ve
been since the Olympic final at
London 2012,” concedes Hoy, who
recently sounded a note of caution
about British cyclists’ medal
prospects at the Tokyo Olympics.
“I’ve become quite good at hiding
it, but I was absolutely petrified.”
He was driving in the Super
1600 class of the world rallycross
championship as part of a new
on-demand show called Dream
Jobs with Chris Hoy, in which he
takes part in motor sport
challenges, from driving monster
trucks to competing in Formula E.
58 • The Sunday Times Magazine
He picked up rallycross —
collision-heavy circuit racing —
remarkably quickly. After a few
laps, he was within a tenth of a
second of his instructor’s time.
“Motor sport has always been
a passion,” reflects the Edinburgh-
born Hoy, 43. “When I was about
seven, I got a Scalextric kit — a Le
Mans edition with two Porsche
911s with working headlights. I
was amazed by the idea that you
could race through the night.”
As he got older, rallying began
to fascinate him, and particularly
one of its stars, Colin McRae, the
first Scottish winner of the world
rally championship, in 1995.
Hoy’s formative years were
spent on two wheels, however.
He took up cycling after watching
the BMX chases in the film ET.
As a track cyclist, he had his first
big win in 1999, taking silver in
the team sprint at the world
championships in Berlin.
He took his driving test so he
could get from Edinburgh to the
Manchester velodrome regularly.
“I started using my parents’
sketchy old Citroën Xantia. It had
this ridiculous air suspension that
just kept dropping randomly.”
In his twenties, having won
silver at the Sydney Olympics, he
splashed out on a 1997 BMW 318i.
“I couldn’t afford it and was
terrified it was going to get stolen
or damaged.” It was followed by a
“more sensible” VW Golf, but in
Driving
MY LIFE IN CARS
2001
BMW 318i
2008, after winning three golds at
2012
the Beijing Olympics — to add to Lotus 2-Eleven
the one he won in Athens in 2004
— he bought a BMW M3.
Next, Hoy became a Jaguar
ambassador, driving a string of
XKRs. By now he was taking part 2014
in track days on four wheels too. Nissan GT-R
He bought his first Caterham in
2009, and a Lotus 2-Eleven track
car after winning his fifth and sixth
Olympic golds in London in 2012.
Nissan’s sponsorship led to a 2017
series of GT-Rs and the chance to
compete in the British GT
championship in 2014. In 2016 he
Porsche 911 GT3
achieved his Le Mans ambition,
coming 17th overall (12th in class). 2019
Hoy is due to broadcast from Audi RS 6
Tokyo this summer and has tried
to temper medal expectations,
saying other countries have raised
their game and British cyclists
“are not going to dominate in the 2020
way they have” . Caterham Seven 420R
Still a keen cyclist, he lives with (on order)
his wife, Sarra, and their children
Callum, 5, and Chloe, 2, on the
edge of Manchester, and now
drives an Audi RS 6 — with a
Caterham Seven 420R on order. MY DREAM CAR
Callum recently graduated to a “A Singer Porsche
bike with 20in wheels from the 911 DLS, made in
range his father created. The collaboration with
future of British cycling? n Williams — it’s a work
Interview by Emma Smith of art on every level”
Dream Jobs with Chris Hoy is
available via Motor Trend on
Demand, a new streaming service
for motoring shows
 Tech
Classic mobile phones and games consoles are being updated,
so fans can enjoy old-school gadgets with a modern twist

Blasts from the past

that bring it all back
update of the OneStep, a camera
that prints a picture you can hold
— an appeal that’s been Test Bench
rediscovered in an era dominated
by smartphone photography. Wireless earbuds
Gamers have also been lapping
up the retro experience with
full-blown arcade machines from BEST FOR AUDIO QUALITY
Arcade 1Up and more Cambridge Audio Melomania 1
Stuart Miles approachable versions of the £100

H ollywood loves a remake and

so too, it appears, do
consumer electronics companies,
Nintendo and Sega consoles from
the 1990s.
While Microsoft and Sony are
Apple’s AirPods aren’t the only
Bluetooth buds you can hang out
of your ears. With a
which have started to reboot some gearing up to sell us the latest battery life of more
of their most popular devices with generation of all-singing, all- than eight hours,
DON’T PANIC: YOUR gusto — and a modern twist. dancing Xbox and PlayStation these bullet-like
PROBLEMS SOLVED The latest manufacturer to consoles later this year, people rivals play for
My login for PayPal embrace the retro approach is are still keen to play the original about twice as long
is my old BT email Motorola, which has just launched Mario, Sonic or Street Fighter. as the AirPods.
address, which, as a a reboot of the Razr. According to Nintendo, combined They weigh less
former BT customer, If the name sounds familiar, sales of its NES Classic and than 5g each — and
I’m having to pay to it’s because the clamshell phone, SNES Classic consoles have sound sensational.
keep access to. Is it launched in 2004, is one of the exceeded 10 million since their cambridgeaudio.com
possible to change biggest-selling handsets to date. reboot in 2017.
my PayPal login? The difference this time is that, I don’t think all gadgets deserve BEST FOR NOISE-CANCELLING
PH, Poole instead of having a metal keypad, a reboot. While I’m all for bringing Sony WF-1000XM3 £220
which looked like something out back the Walkman (yep, it got These in-ear buds pack in noise
PayPal allows you to of the sci-fi film Tron, this is a a reboot late last year) and some cancellation without too much toll
register more than smartphone with a huge foldable of the classic hi-fi designs — on the battery: expect six hours’
one email address screen and 2020 specs. haven’t modern speakers just use with active noise control
to a single account. Over the past couple of years, become so boring-looking? — turned on. They’re chunky
First, register the new Nokia has also launched updated I’m not sure I want a retro and weigh 9g each
address by logging in versions of a number of its television. I’m quite happy to have but come with
as usual, going into the late-1990s handsets, including the a thin piece of glass on my wall seven tips for
settings and clicking 8110 “banana phone”, which rather than a big box in the corner a snug fit.
the plus sign next to I remember reviewing almost a of the room. Mastering the
“Email address”. Once quarter of a century ago. Nostalgia is all well and good. touch controls
PayPal has confirmed And it doesn’t stop with phones. By and large, though, while the takes practice,
the new address, make Polaroid has zoomed back from past is a great place to visit, you mind. MB
it your primary one by bankruptcy with a 21st-century wouldn’t want to live there n sony.co.uk
clicking “Update”, again
in the settings. Do so,
and it will become your
username. Follow those Tech Fix How to send a confidential email
steps for any other
online services you use
and then cancel that
direct debit to BT —
I f you want to send sensitive
information by email, such
as a password, you don’t need to
message you are composing. Click
this and you can set options
including a time for the message
Emails sent in this way cannot
be forwarded, copied or printed by
the receiver, and you can deny
no one need pay for open an account with a to self-destruct, from one day them access at any time. If you
email these days. specialist security provider to five years later. You can send an attachment, it can only be
Matt Bingham — just tap into a little-known also lock the message with a viewed, not downloaded.
feature in Gmail. Google-generated passcode Bear in mind, however, that the
CONTACT US Using the web version of sent by text to the person system is not foolproof. You
Email your tech Gmail, rather than the app, receiving the email, like the cannot stop the recipient taking a
queries to dontpanic@ look for a locked clock two-step identification screengrab of any opened
GETTY

sunday-times.co.uk symbol at the bottom of the protocol used by banks. message, for example. MB

The Sunday Times Magazine • 59


Bjorn Ulvaeus
A Life in the Day
The singer-songwriter and Abba legend
on coffee, break-ups and their new music
U lvaeus, 74, was born in
Gothenburg, Sweden. He
began songwriting with Benny
Andersson in 1966. Three years
later he met his future wife
Agnetha Faltskog , who along
with Andersson’s partner, Anni-
Frid Lyngstad, joined them in the
studio. Abba became household
names after winning the
Eurovision Song Contest in 1974,
before splitting in 1982. They
have sold 385 million records
and spawned a successful
musical and film franchise.
Ulvaeus lives near Stockholm
with his second wife, Lena.
I wake up quite early
and the first job is a
coffee. I have up to 20
cups a day — black with a dash of
milk. I don’t start eating until
noon. It’s a way to keep trim and
not put on too much weight,
which is at my age very easy to do
and really difficult to get rid of.
WORDS OF
WISDOM
BEST ADVICE
I WAS GIVEN
Slow down, look at
every situation and
see it for what it is
ADVICE I’D GIVE
Don’t be scared
of getting old
WHAT I WISH
I’D KNOWN
That I would feel
as relaxed and
free as I do at my age
66 • The Sunday Times Magazine
We live on a little island just
north of Stockholm, so if the
weather permits I’ll start the day
with a paddle on my surf ski. It’s
a form of kayak but your legs are
out in the open. You’re in total
isolation, and that lends itself very
well to thinking. But even then
music creeps in. I’m constantly
thinking about lines and melodies,
so sometimes I get very excited
and have to paddle home quickly.
Most days I’ll write music or
have business meetings. I listen
to the radio and the latest pop
hits, but it’s like what Rod Stewart
once said — it feels like you’ve
seen and heard it all. When Benny
and I started writing together, we
were just two guys sitting in a
room with a stand-up piano and
a guitar writing the best songs we
could, never imagining so many
people would like them. Then
we were just two couples who
played and sang together and
something magical happened.
Eventually Agnetha and I grew
apart, like young couples do, and
I think the same happened with
Benny and Anni-Frid. It was an
amicable divorce, we both knew it
was time. And we both thought we
have this platform to do wonderful
things, so why break up the band?
We did some of our best songs like
Super Trouper and The Winner
Takes It All afterwards.
For lunch I’ll grab a sandwich
and some fruit. The afternoon
might mean more meetings.
I still work because I get excited
by new ideas, but I’m extremely
cautious when it comes to
anything about Abba. I said from
the start with Mamma Mia!, if it
ever felt wrong for the four of us
or the songs, we’d put a stop to it.
But that moment has never come
and now we have a musical, two
films and a party experience.
Will there be a third film? I didn’t
think there’d be a second, so
who knows?
One of the reasons bands fall
out is because they don’t split
up in time. We split in 1982. But
we’ve actually recorded a couple
of new songs, which will be
out this year. There won’t be
a tour, though. That life never
appealed to me.
My wife, Lena, is a really good
chef so I leave dinner to her. She’ll
make something like my favourite,
gravlax. Several nights a week, one
of my daughters and her family
will join us. My older grandkids
are briefly impressed by my career,
but then I’m just Grandpa again,
which is perfect.
After dinner I’ll use the gym in
our basement for an hour. I have a
sweet tooth for ice cream and
chocolate so I need the exercise.
There’s a huge screen so I’ll look
at a movie while I run. Good
action films like the Bourne trilogy
work the best. Before bed, I’ll have
a final coffee and I go to sleep
around 10pm.
I often dream about situations
where I don’t have control, but in
dreams, like reality, you have to be
ready to grab something good
when it comes along. It’s
incredibly humbling when
somebody says how much our
music means to them. It happens
ANTHONY HARVEY/SHUTTERSTOCK
very often, but I never get used to
it. It still blows my
mind all these years on.
I hope it always will n
Interview by Emma Broomfield
Mamma Mia! The Party is at
the O2; mammamiatheparty.com