Spec

Corbyn is untouchable now James Forsyth My transsexual seduction Cosmo Landesman
9 january 2016 [ 4.00
ISIS
IN
CRISIS
Paul Wood on the
crumbling caliphate
WAR AND
PEACE IS JUST
LIKE DOWNTON
JAMES
DELINGPOLE
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established 1828
Through the roof
hen David Cameron said this

week that he is worried his children would not be able to afford
to buy their own homes, he struck on one of
the greatest economic problems of his premiership. The promise of British citizenship
is that if you work hard and make the right
decisions, you can advance in life and one day
own your own home. But for an entire generation, even the hope of home ownership is
slipping out of view. A huge number of young
Britons cannot hope to have the kind of life
their parents enjoyed. This threatens to bring
resentment between the generations.
The Prime Minister must know he is on
dangerous ground here. His own children, of
course, will not have to worry just as he
did not have to worry. A fat handout from
the Bank of Mum and Dad will be available
to help the young Camerons raise a deposit for their first homes. It is people who hail
from families with resources of rather less
than the Camerons estimated 30 million
who face being frozen out of the housing
market for life. Or at least for as long as the
era of rock-bottom interest rates lasts.
We like to blame all kinds of people for
high house prices: immigrants (and their
children) who add to the population faster
than houses can be built for them. The rich
foreigners who buy up apartments in London, jacking up the prices of property across
the south-east of England. Ed Miliband tried
denouncing housing companies and landlords as predators. Then theres the councils
who refuse planning permission. Yet perhaps
the greatest single factor is one that no one
seems willing to acknowledge: the curse of
low interest rates.
Britain is now well into a healthy eco-
nomic recovery the strongest in Europe

and still the Bank of Englands base rate
wallows at an emergency 0.5 per cent. The
cost of mortgages has also collapsed. Before
the crash, the average rate for a 75 per cent
mortgage was 6 per cent; now it is under
2 per cent. The maths is not difficult. The cost
of borrowing is a third of what it was, so people can afford to borrow three times what
they once did, on the same monthly repayment. Asset prices rise accordingly. We have
been witnessing the era of low credit forcing
house prices up by an extraordinary amount
to the delight of those who already owned
For as long as the era of

cheap credit lasts, asset prices
will remain sky high
expensive property, and to the dismay of
those who do not.
This has been an extraordinary windfall
to those who owned expensive houses in the
first place. George Osbornes six-bedroom
house has risen in value by about 2 million
since he bought it ten years ago. Ed Miliband
has ended up owning one of the mansions he
wanted to tax. He bought his two-kitchened
house for 1.6 million seven years ago. Its
now worth more than 2.5 million. The boom
is not restricted to housing: the era of cheap
credit has sent the value of all kinds of rare
assets through the roof. During the crash, a
vintage Ferrari 250 could be bought for 1.2
million: they now sell for about 10 million.
Rather than address the asset bubble,
Camerons government has helped to inflate
it further. With George Osbornes Help to
Buy scheme, the government is making mortgages artificially cheap in the same way that
the spectator | 9 january 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
George W. Bushs administration did when

creating the great sub-prime mortgage disaster. It is as if nothing has been learned from
that crash. The Prime Ministers initiative
this week has a little more to be said for it.
Granting planning permission for 13,000 new
homes on surplus public land is welcome, but
some 240,000 are needed each year just to
keep pace with population growth.
As Communities Secretary Greg Clark
observed this week, 90 per cent of people
consistently say that they would like to own
their own home. The gap between this group
and the 63 per cent who actually do own
their own home represents a vast natural
constituency for the Conservatives, and one
whose interests they are failing to serve. They
should do this by stabilising the market, not
rigging the market.
For as long as the era of cheap credit
continues, asset prices will remain sky-high
representing a grave injustice to young
people who wish to make the same journey
through life as their parents. Once, the Conservatives spoke about the danger of treating
cheap debt as a horn of plenty. Now, Osborne
is presiding over a recovery that is expected
to see household debt ratios rise to where
they were before the crash. And the Bank
of England? It is expected to raise rates at a
glacial speed to just 1.5 per cent by the end
of the decade. At this rate, it would take half
a century for things to get back to normal.
The British economic recovery will not
be complete until interest rates are back
to their historical average. Until that happens, we cannot expect houses to return to
an affordable rate. And nor will we be able
to tell how much of the recovery is real and
how much of it is still a debt-fuelled illusion.
3
The last testament of Charb, p7

Fallen idols, p33
From NYE to A&E, p45
BOOKS & ARTS
THE WEEK
3
Leading article
Portrait of the Week
Diary Man Booker judging;

free speech and its enemies
Amanda Foreman
Politics The untouchable Corbyn

James Forsyth
The Spectators Notes
Lord Janner; Bishop Bell; Siri

Charles Moore
13 Rod Liddle Stand by the Saudis
14 Barometer Common Market
rebels; flood risks; Kyrgyz delicacies
15 Matthew Parris Unnecessary lies
16 From the archive Church service
21 Hugo Rifkind In praise
of Simon Danczuk
22 Ancient and modern
Drinking with Plato
23 Letters Housing taxes; Kids
Company; speed limits
10 Desperate state
Isis is losing territory
and recruits
Paul Wood
BOOKS
26 Timothy Snyder The Gates of
Europe, by Serhii Plokhy
11 Fiona Wilson
Abide with Me: a poem
14 The Isis executioner and me
Did I provoke the new Jihadi John?
Douglas Murray
16 Rwandas new tragedy
An aid-funded slide to dictatorship
Michela Wrong
19 Sticking to his guns
Arguments with my Texan uncle
Leah McLaren
20 The painful truth for Ruth
Scots just wont vote for Davidson
Alex Massie
28 Philip Clark Beyond the Fell Wall,

by Richard Skelton
Lewis Jones The Art of Smuggling,
by Francis Morland
29 Sarah Crompton
A Simple Story, by Leila Guerriero
30 Tom Miller Black Dragon River,
by Dominic Ziegler
31 Jeff Noon on recent crime novels
Christopher Hawtree
The Collected Works of Gerard

Manley Hopkins: Volume VIII: The
Journals, edited by Lesley Higgins
32 Tibor Fischer Captivity,
by Gyrgy Spir
22 Public trans sport

A flirtatious stranger on the bus
Cosmo Landesman
24 Any other business Banking

culture; French growth; honours
Martin Vander Weyer
Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Phil Disley, Geoff Thompson, Adam Singleton, Nick Newman, Bernie, RGJ, Robert Thompson, Pals and
Grizelda. www.spectator.co.uk To subscribe to The Spectator for 104 a year, turn to page 23
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The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952 The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson
Dear Mary and the astronaut, p53

The most dangerous place
in the world, p26
Touring Europe at the V&A, p34
LIFE
ARTS
33 Martin Gayford
A short history of statue-toppling
LIFE
45 High life Taki
Low life Jeremy Clarke
34 Museums
The V&As new Europe galleries
Stephen Bayley
46 Real life Melissa Kite
35 Theatre wonder.land; Hapgood;

Dr Seusss The Lorax
Lloyd Evans
48 Long life Alexander Chancellor

49 The turf Robin Oakley
Bridge Janet de Botton
Hundreds of British Muslims have

joined Isis. If or when the caliphate
is smashed to pieces, some of them
will be coming home
Paul Wood, p10
These were not man boobs. These
were woman boobs. Big woman
boobs, jutting out of a man
Cosmo Landesman, p22
36 Cinema Room
Deborah Ross
AND FINALLY . . .
42 Notes on Cirencester
Daisy Dunn
37 Opera Eugene Onegin

Richard Bratby
50 Chess Raymond Keene

Competition Lucy Vickery
38 Radio Kate Chisholm
51 Crossword Columba
41 Television James Delingpole
52 Status anxiety Toby Young

Battle for Britain Michael Heath
As Eddie the Eagle was to skiing,

so was Francis Morland to
drug trafficking
Lewis Jones, p28
53 Sport Roger Alton

Your problems solved
Mary Killen
54 Food Tanya Gold
Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth
CONTRIBUTORS
Michela Wrong, who writes
about Rwanda on p. 16, has
reported from across Africa.
Her books include In the
Footsteps of Mr Kurtz,
Its Our Turn to Eat and, most
recently, Borderlines, a thriller.
Cosmo Landesman
was one of the founders of
Modern Review and is the
author of a memoir, Starstruck.
On p. 22, he writes about
meeting a transsexual on a bus.
Timothy Snyder is the

Housum professor of history
at Yale and the author of
Black Earth: The Holocaust
as History and Warning.
He considers the history of
Ukraine on p. 26.
Tom Miller is the author of

Chinas Urban Billion, and
contemplates the river Amur
on p. 30.
Tibor Fischers novels include

The Thought Gang, The
Collector Collector and Voyage
to the End of the Room. He
introduces a Hungarian literary
sensation on p. 32.
Home
avid Cameron, the Prime Minister,
decided to allow ministers to campaign
for either side in the referendum on
membership of the European Union, once
his negotiations had been concluded on
Britains relationship with the EU. The
government said it was commissioning
13,000 houses to be built by small builders
on public land made available with planning
permission. Junior doctors decided to go
on strike after all, starting with a day next
week, after talks between the government
and the British Medical Association broke
down. In an extraordinarily drawn-out
reshuffle, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the
Labour party, replaced Michael Dugher as
shadow culture secretary with Maria Eagle,
who was replaced at defence by the Tridenthating Emily Thornberry. Pat McFadden
was sacked as Europe spokesman. Hilary
Benn was left as shadow foreign secretary in
an uneasy truce.
t was the turn of north-east Scotland to

suffer floods. Abergeldie Castle was left
teetering on the edge of the undermined
bank of the river Dee. December turned out
to be the warmest and wettest for the United
Kingdom since suitable records began in
1910. Regulated rail fares rose by 1 per cent,
bringing the cost of an annual season ticket
from Cheltenham to London to 9,800. BBC
websites were brought down by a distributed
denial of service attack that was claimed by
a group called New World Hacking, which
says it opposes Islamic State. HSBCs online
banking failed two days running. Sainsburys
said it had made a 1 billion bid that was
rejected for the Home Retail group, which

owns Argos and Homebase. Thousands of
bottles of detergent were washed up on
Cornish beaches.
olice arrested two men after a shooting
in a car park at a McDonalds in Hull
smashed a cars windows. A man was
charged with murder after a fatal stabbing
in Holloway, London. Two teenagers in
Streatham, London, were injured when
pillion riders on four mopeds stabbed them.
A father and son were wounded when two
men stabbed them many times at Manor
House, London. A man in Preston was
killed by his dog. Hundreds of people in
Penge, London, were evacuated when a gas
main broke. In the second Test with South
Africa in Cape Town, Ben Stokes scored 200
off 163 balls, an England Test record.
Abroad
audi Arabia beheaded 47 people
on the same day, including the man
who had shot dead Simon Cumbers, a
BBC cameraman, and wounded Frank
Gardner, the BBC correspondent, in 2004.
But it was the execution of Sheikh Nimr
al-Nimr, a prominent Shia cleric, that
caused an international crisis. In Tehran,
a crowd attacked the Saudi embassy and
Saudi Arabia expelled Iranian diplomats.
Saudi allies such as the United Arab
Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain backed it
diplomatically. Saudi Arabia severed air
links with Iran but said that Iranian pilgrims
would still be able to make the hajj. The
991ft Address Downtown hotel in Dubai
was engulfed in fire, injuring 15 people.
slamic State fighters attacked the

Libyan oil port of Sidra. The Islamic
State released a video showing five men
(thought to come from Syria and Libya),
who had, it said, spied for Britain, being
shot in the head. The video featured an
Islamic State man with a British accent
calling David Cameron an imbecile. He
was said by observers to be Siddhartha
Dhar, from Walthamstow, a Hindu who
became a Muslim, changed his name to
Abu Rumaysah and fled to Syria in 2014
while on bail, after being arrested on
suspicion of encouraging terrorism. A little
boy in the video, who said that jihadists
would kill the kuffar, was thought to be Isa,
the son of Kadija Dare from Lewisham.
t least 34 bodies were washed ashore

on the Turkish coast when the weather
allowed a resumption of attempts by
migrants to reach Lesbos by boat. Sweden
introduced identity checks for travellers
from Denmark in an attempt to reduce
the number of migrants arriving; Denmark
introduced identity checks for travellers
from Germany. Women protested in the
street after gangs of men described as of
Arab or North African appearance assaulted
dozens of women in Cologne on New Years
Eve. China criticised North Korea for testing
a hydrogen bomb. The Chinese stock market
fell by 7 per cent when it opened after the
new year; a new regulation was put into
effect that temporarily suspends trading.
Shares round the world fell in sympathy.
Batting for KC Gandhi School, Pranav
Dhanawade scored 1,009 not out, beating
the previous school record of 628 set by
Arthur Collins in 1899.
CSH
Amanda Foreman
o far my responsibilities as the 2016

chair of the Man Booker prize have
been rather light. Weve had our first
meeting, received our first batch of
books, and Ive bought a smart notebook
for record-keeping. I shall take a step
back from journalism this year, including
my Sunday Times column, but that
doesnt mean I shall be less active in the
fight for freedom of expression. Some
things are non-negotiable.
Ive just read Open Letter by the
late Charlie Hebdo editor Charb. He
finished it two days before his death
in the massacre on 7 January 2015.
The book is aimed at both religious
extremists and their apologists. No form
of discrimination, proclaimed Charb, is
better or worse than any other. If only
the 145 writers who publicly protested
against the 2015 PEN America award to
Charlie Hebdo could be made to read his
book. Perhaps it would shame them out
of their smug self-righteousness. There
is something disgusting about writers
who defend the assassins veto. Its such
a perversion of power and victimhood.
PEN refused to be intimidated. But
it remains to be seen whether other
institutions, such as universities, will stay
true to their enlightenment values when
we have a new generation of politicised
purity trolls banging at the gates.
the TLS, was the chair and Hilary Mantel

won for Bring up the Bodies. He ran each
meeting with a purpose and intellectual zeal
that made us all strive to be better versions
of ourselves. The experience brought us
together and we remain good friends. I shall
do my best to keep the flame going.
ere in New York Im getting ready
for the last group meeting ahead of
House of SpeakEasys annual fundraiser
on 1 February. Our big push this year is to
served on my first literary prize jury

almost 20 years ago. Yes, a few of the
horror stories about them really are
true. Some people take part because
they think it will make them look good.
Others do it out of a vague sense of
duty that doesnt extend to reading all
the books. Then there are the bullies
who make each meeting feel like an
interrogation session. And lets not
forget the spoilers. Once, during final
deliberations, I realised that a vociferous
juror didnt care what happened as long
as he prevented a rival from winning.
But its the stories you dont read about
that matter most. Behind the odd scandal
and misstep that become media fodder
is the unrecognised (and often unpaid)
work that writers undertake so that
their colleagues get the recognition they
deserve. They do it in the belief that the
pursuit of excellence lifts everyone. I
was a Man Booker judge in 2012, the
year that Sir Peter Stothard, editor of
raise the money for a book bus it will

be like one of those ubiquitous food
trucks one finds in big cities. Ours will
go where there are no local bookshops.
Salman Rushdie and Irvine Welsh are
the headliners for the night two
writers who work tirelessly on behalf of
the industry. I started this literary charity
a few years back, having been inspired
by the cabaret-style evenings put on by
5x15 and the work in schools done by
First Story. The aim of SpeakEasy is to
bring writers and audiences together in
entertaining and innovative ways. We do
community outreach in Harlem and run
a commercial show in Manhattan called
Seriously Entertaining. Many writers
choose to take part in both. Oh, and
one other thing: unlike certain literary
festivals that shall remain nameless, we
split the box-office receipts 50-50.
n the years since weve been putting on
Seriously Entertaining, Ive discovered
that any kind of live show is a bit like a
jury panel. Even the most meticulous
planning and preparation is no match
against human nature. I know now, for
example, that it is unwise to take your
eyes off the writer until he or shes done
with the performance. In our first year
we had someone lets call him Donald
who arrived looking composed. But
when Donald stepped out in front of 400
people he was completely high. As he
giggled his way through his monologue,
he began to have a love affair with his
body. He was, as they say, clearly feeling
it. Oh yes. He was alive to every physical
sensation but not, alas, to our frantic
signals to cut the overrun and get off
the stage. In the end we had to drag
him away. He lived, we learned. Life
at SpeakEasy has been pretty smooth
since then. Apart from the writer who
attempted to read a speech from her
mobile phone but thats another story.
he one question Im always asked

whenever I explain Im writing a
history of women is: Are you starting
with Eve? The fact that the first woman
who comes to mind didnt even exist says
everything.
Amanda Foreman is, most recently,

the writer and presenter of The Ascent
of Woman on BBC2.
7
POLITICS|JAMES FORSYTH
Corbyn is untouchable now
here have been few more pathetic

displays of political impotence than
the tweets sent by shadow cabinet
members paying tribute to Michael Dugher
after his sacking by Jeremy Corbyn. Dugher,
a classic northern Labour fixer, had taken
on the role of shadow cabinet shop steward.
He spoke out against Momentum, the
Corbynite pressure group, warned against
a revenge reshuffle and criticised negative
briefings against the shadow cabinet from
the leaders office.
But rather than protesting at his sacking
through a walkout, shadow cabinet members
confined their solidarity to a 140-character gesture. Their tweets, rather than looking like brave defiance of the boss, actually
showed just how cowed they are.
Dughers sacking indicates how much
Corbyns position has strengthened since
he won the leadership last September. He
is still not in total control, as demonstrated
by the survival of Hilary Benn as shadow
foreign secretary despite his disagreement
with the leader over Syria. But he is more
secure than in his first days in the job, when
chief whip Rosie Winterton was effectively
instructed to get bums on the front bench by
any means necessary. The result was a shadow cabinet that included people who had
never met the leader and others who were
bitterly opposed to his politics. Now, Corbyn has a team with views closer to his own.
Crucially, the new shadow defence secretary,
Emily Thornberry, is another unilateralist.
The events of the past few months have
vindicated those who simply refused to
serve under Corbyn because they so profoundly disagreed with him. Labour figures
who took the opposite course lent credence
to the idea that the shadow cabinet would
represent the full spectrum of Labour opinion. But the sackings of Dugher and the
Blairite Europe spokesman Pat McFadden
show that Corbyn intended to have such
people on his front bench only for as long as
necessary. And as his strength grows, more
moderates will be discarded. By accepting a
job, then being sacked, Dugher and McFadden confirm that if anyone is in charge of
todays Labour party, it is Corbyn.
The removal of Dugher has also demonstrated that Tom Watson, the deputy leader,
cannot protect those who fall on the wrong
side of Corbyn. Many in the parliamentary
Labour party were relying on Watson, the
only person other than Corbyn with an indi8
vidual mandate, to shield them from the

leader and, perhaps more importantly, his
supporters. The removal of Dugher, one of
Watsons best friends in the shadow cabinet,
shows the limits of the deputy leaders power.
Corbyns consolidation of his position
has not been accompanied by any public
surge in support for him. In fact, the opposite has happened. According to the latest
YouGov poll, 60 per cent of voters now
think he is doing a bad job as Labour leader.
And it isnt just the opinion polls; Labour is
doing even more badly in local council byelections than it was in the last parliament.
Nevertheless, Corbyn looks more and
more likely to carry on as leader until 2020.
The Labour selectorate remain enthused
Events of the past few months have

vindicated those who simply refused
to serve under the new leader
by him and there is no sign of the moderates recruiting more than the 100,000 new
members they would need to challenge him
successfully. At the same time, the parliamentary Labour party is showing no interest
in a procedural coup to remove him. Indeed,
the lesson of the Syria vote was that grassroots pressure was effective in deterring
Labour MPs from rebelling against the leadership. It is hard to imagine many of them
having the stomach to topple the partys
democratically elected leader.
For their part, the trade unions wont
mobilise against Corbyn collectively because
the general secretaries know that their own
re-election depends on maintaining a certain level of Corbynite support.
Presented by Isabel Hardman

This week: the Isis crisis, the Labour
crisis and the Rhodes statue crisis
www.spectator.co.uk/podcast
What is so frustrating for veteran Labour

types is that there is no shortage of targets
that the opposition is missing as it fixates on
these internal battles. On a day-to-day level,
Labour failed to land a glove on the government over the floods. Strategically, Labours
reshuffle chaos allowed David Cameron
to announce that he will suspend collective cabinet responsibility for the EU referendum without paying any political price.
Given what is happening inside Labour at
the moment, Corbyn can hardly attack the
Tories for being divided. Longer term, there
is also the fact that Labour is nowhere on
the economy despite indications that the
world economic outlook could give Britain
a very bumpy ride over the next few months.
Senior Tories accept that there is a market for an anti-austerity politics. They are
acutely aware of how effective it could be if
the economy hit the skids. But they believe
that it would require a youthful, charismatic figure akin to the Greek leader Alexis
Tsipras to capitalise on this. They calculate
that not even a global recession could make
Corbyn appear a plausible Prime Minister.
If Corbyn is leading his party to electoral
disaster but he cant be removed, what do
Labour moderates do?
One school of thought is that they just
write off the 2020 election as a bad job and
hope that an even heavier election defeat
will bring the membership to its senses. But
there are whispers that a new party is needed, that now that Corbyn is leader it will
never be possible to put the hard left back
in its box again.
The obstacles to setting up any new party
are formidable as the failure of the SDP
demonstrated. The last election, in which
Ukip gained only one MP despite winning
more than 12 per cent of the national vote,
was a reminder that it hasnt got any easier
to break the mould of British politics. But,
intriguingly, the EU referendum campaign
might be providing the vehicle for the creation of one. The in campaign has brought
together Blairite Labour types and Lib
Dem Orange Bookers, and the two groups
have found that they agree on nearly everything. There is much joking about forming a
new party. One wonders if this banter might
become something more serious if politics
continues on its current trajectory.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/COFFEEHOUSE
Hourly updates from Parliament and beyond.

Charles Moore
t the end of next week, a judge

will decide whether the trial of
the facts can proceed now that its
subject, Lord Janner, is dead. Janner was
accused, on various occasions, of child
abuse, though the Crown Prosecution
Service, on three occasions, over more
than 20 years, decided that there was no
case to prosecute. The amazing Simon
Danczuk, now himself accused of rape,
used parliamentary privilege to accuse
Janner of the same crime (plus torture).
Last year, Janner was forced to appear
in court, though senile. When his senility
was upheld, his accusers resorted to a trial
of the facts to get their day in court. They
were pursuing this aim when Janner died
last month. This procedure exists under
the Insanity Act. Its use is when criminal
proceedings are brought against a person
who lacks mental capacity: it is an interim
process designed to preserve the safety
of the public unless and until the person
accused recovers. The trial of the facts can
only have one of three possible outcomes
a hospital order, a probation order, or
absolute discharge. In other words, it has
a purpose only when the accused person
is alive. Yet such is the spirit of the times
that the terrified CPS has equivocated on
the issue. It must give a view, however, to
the judge. If Mr Justice Openshaw decides
that the trial of the facts can go ahead,
we shall have reverted to a benighted
situation, not known for a thousand years,
in which the criminal law tries the dead. I
can see that this will create exciting new
work for lawyers lets try Jimmy Savile,
the Emperor Tiberius, Adolf Hitler for
bombing Coventry! but it would also
be mad and bad.
dead person who has, in effect,

been tried though without any
defence being provided is George
Bell, Bishop of Chichester, who died
in 1958. His former diocese announced
last autumn that he had abused a child
more than 60 years ago, though no
evidence has been revealed. It has settled
with Bells anonymous accuser, paying
money. I wrote about this injustice
in last Saturdays Daily Telegraph. In
Tuesdays paper, the present bishop,
Martin Warner, wrote a courteous letter
in which he recognised the shock of the
ur country neighbour, Edward

Cazalet, is a retired judge and bold
horseman. He is also the literary heir of
P.G. Wodehouse because his grandmother
was Wodehouses wife. He has produced
a merry book of speeches, comic equine
verse, and reflections (Seen From The
Wings, Shaw Farm Editions). I love his
interpolations about and quotations
from Plum. He notes Wodehouses
conservatism about art and informs us
that his favourite painting, which hung
over his desk, was a quite dull-looking
oil of the Mansion House in the late
18th century. What he liked most in it
were three cattle being herded by a dog
as they make their way through the
carriages in the thoroughfare. It reminded
him of his brief time working in the City
for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank
about 100 years later. Edward also tells
us about the difficulties of rendering
Wodehouse in French. Where the original
says: He [Cyril Bassington-Bassington,
calling on Bertie Wooster at 7.45 a.m.]
was given the raspberry by Jeeves and
told to try again about three hours later,
the French translation says: Jeeves
lui donna respectueusement un jus de
framboise et lui dit de revenir peu prs
trois heures plus tard.
accusation against Bell (one of the most

distinguished bishops in Anglican history),
but complained that I gave little space or
acknowledgment to the perspective of the
survivor. The anguish of an abused person
is indeed a terrible thing, but how can I, or
anyone, acknowledge that perspective in
this case when the point at issue is the facts?
Why should we take it from the Diocese of
Chichester that she/he is a survivor? It was
wrong before in not pursuing real abusers:
why will it automatically be right now
when claiming to have identified one? The
Church, of all institutions, should understand
what the presumption of innocence means.
ne of the things that worries me
about a vote to leave the European
Union (which I should like to cast) is that
it might cause Scotland to vote to leave the
United Kingdom. Theres not much point
in getting our country back if we then lose
it, although I suppose English nationalists
would not agree with my definition of our
country. But the SNP threat needs thinking
round carefully. First, a threat is not a fact.
Second, it cannot be right to disaggregate
the United Kingdom vote in a United
Kingdom referendum. It will certainly be
interesting to find out how Scots voted,
but if they vote differently from England,
this will not invalidate the overall result.
The same applies the other way round: if
Scottish Stay voters swing the balance
their way, English Leave voters should
not complain that the result is illegitimate.
Third, what would Scotlands fate actually
be if it joined the EU after rUK left?
Scottish Nationalists presuppose that free
movement of Scottish trade, money and
people to England would be permitted in all
circumstances. Would the Scots vote to leave
the UK when confronted with the idea that
this might not be so?
eing a rider myself, I sometimes

worry about breaking my neck or
back. In November, a friend of friends,
George Kershaw, suffered this fate in a
crashing fall. He is now a quadraplegic,
lying in hospital, and waiting to see
if he will recover any sensation in his
limbs (there are faint but only faint
good signs). He is writing (or rather,
dictating) a most inspiring blog from his
hospital bed. One of his comforts is Siri,
a voice-activated means of texting and
googling on his iPhone. He asked Google
Can quadraplegics have sex?, but Siri
somehow misunderstood him and told
him I am putting you through to the
Stevenage Escort Service: Unfortunately
I did not know the voice command
for Disconnect. Tricky conversation.
Anyone wanting to follow George
Kershaws struggle can follow the link
georgekershawblog.wordpress.com.
The escort service sent him a charming
Christmas card.
Desperate state
Disillusioned Islamic State recruits are deserting the bloodthirsty terror group as it loses territory
PAUL WOOD
he latest video from Isis introduces a

new British executioner, a successor
to Jihadi John, and it is a classic of
the genre: bombastic, pompous, ridiculous
yet terrifying. O slave of the White House, O
mule of the Jews, says a man in a ski mask,
addressing David Cameron, how strange it
is that the leader of a small island threatens
us with a handful of planes. Only an imbecile
would dare to wage war against a land where
the law of Allah reigns supreme. He has a
cold, arrogant look in his eyes and brandishes a pistol held sideways, aping American
gangsta style. Kneeling before him are five
men in orange jumpsuits identified as British
spies. In fact they may just be Syrian journalists whose crime was simply trying to do
honest reporting about the so-called Islamic State. I have a sickening feeling that one
of them supplied pictures I used in a piece
for the BBC when I was on the Syrian border last year. Of course, the men are killed
in the video.
We have become wearily used to such
brutal propaganda by deed. Isiss new year
message to Britain is much the same as it was
last year: Be afraid! We are coming for you! It
is still chilling. But Isis is not the force it was
12 months ago, and its video nastiness seems
now more a sign of weakness than strength.
The group has suffered a string of defeats in
recent months. The tally so far includes the
town of Kobani in northern Syria; Sinjar,
in Iraq, which fell to the Kurds in November; and Ramadi, taken back by the Iraqi
army two weeks ago. Fighters who promised to love death as we much as we love
life appear to be losing their nerve. In Sinjar,
there are reports that two brigades of fighters deserted. In Ramadi, there was no bitter
struggle to the last suicide vest. Instead, Isis
melted away, leaving behind booby traps and
car bombs to slow the Iraqi advance. So far,
US officials claim, American bombs have
killed 20,000 Isis jihadis.
A friend of mine, a diplomat, has developed sources within the group and he
describes a very different Isis from the one
we see in their propaganda videos: Morale
is plummeting within Isis, especially among
foreign fighters, he says. Many European
foreign fighters in particular are packing it
in. Many want to defect. Whole units have
just gone away in Iraq the Islamic State
is in crisis. There was a struggle within the
Isis leadership between hawks and doves,
10
the diplomat said, with the hardliners gaining

the upper hand. But they were frustrated at
being unable to mount big, shock attacks as
they did in 2014 because of western bombing. Inherent Resolve [the US-led campaign
against Isis] is much more effective than it is
given credit for the further expansion of
Isis has been stopped.
The leadership is still striving to attract
new recruits to Gods Kingdom on Earth.
A video in English and French shows an Isis
loyalist taking his three small daughters to
the shops all well-stocked and then to
a fairground. Brothers and sisters, come to
Morale is plummeting, especially

among foreign fighters, and many are
packing it in. Many want to defect
caliphate, says the narrator, making a special
appeal for engineers, doctors and nurses.
Some do find they like life under the caliphate. A British recruit to Isis described the
attraction to me once. Its a really good feeling. You can go around without anybody trying to harass you [for being a Muslim], he
said. I dont miss a thing about Britain. Here,
I can drive, I dont need a licence. If I want
to watch TV, I dont need a licence for that
either. I can walk around with a Kalashnikov,
with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] if I
want to. Its total freedom, thanks be to God.

Its like Im flying.
But as my diplomat friend says, many others have become disillusioned. Last year I
met an activist called Abu Ibrahim who runs
a network that gets people out of Isis territory. Most of those who go to the caliphate are
true Muslims, he told me. They are shocked
when they get there and see what things are
really like. It is horrible for them it is either
flee or commit suicide. He estimated that 40
per cent of foreign fighters wanted to leave.
But desertion involves a terrifying risk. In
one six-month period last year, 400 fighters
were executed for disloyalty, according to his
own source inside Isis. He managed to take
out a handful before they were killed, including three Britons: two men and a woman.
Abu Ibrahim showed me a photocopy of
a French passport belonging to a woman in a
hijab. He had smuggled her out, too. She had
gone to Syria to join the jihad but learned
along with other women that her duty
would simply be to bear the next generation of jihadis. She was promptly married
off. When her new husband another
French citizen was executed for refusing
to obey orders, she was put into a prison for
women, all foreigners, all widows of executed
men or wives of men held in Isis dungeons.
There were some 300 women in the prison,
she remembered. They were watched all the
time. Two people were executed for trying to
smuggle in mobile phones for them. The only
way out permitted was by marriage, though
she was eventually rescued by Abu Ibrahims
network.
Her husband had been killed for refusing
to join the bitter side-war against the Islamic
States rival, the Nusra Front, al-Qaedas loyalists in Syria. Many others have been killed
for the same reason. They had joined Isis to
kill the unbelievers of the Syrian regime, not
other Muslims classed by the leadership as
sinners. This is a real weakness for Isis: they
are locked in a continual struggle for members with Nusra and other Salafi-jihadist
groups in Syria. Fighters defect to Isis and
then defect back again. Often, whole units
and their commanders change sides in this
way. Isis is not a monolith but a coalition.
That coalition includes criminal gangs and
groups of tribal fighters whose sheikhs have
pledged loyalty to the caliphate. I watched
the Kurds battle Isis for possession of one
town in eastern Iraq. Kurdish intelligence
said they were facing a force of about 800.

That consisted of around 650 locals and some
150 outsiders, Isis shock troops led by a commander who brought with him a bag of cash
for the sheikh and promises to protect the
tribe against all enemies.
When Isis looked unstoppable 18 months
ago, the criminal gangs and the Sunni tribal
leaders all wanted to sign up with a winner.
Now some at least are looking for the next
strong horse. If Isis is driven away from the
Syrian town of Aleppo their next predicted
defeat it will be because of this phenomenon of groups changing sides. The collapse
there could be quite rapid. After that, if
Ramadi really has taught the Iraqi army how
to do street fighting, the next town to fall
could be Fallujah. That might take a bit more
time, but to the optimists it all seems as if Isis
is being marched towards inexorable defeat.
t is too soon, though, to say that the caliphate is done for. Can it really be correct, for instance, that 20,000 Isis fighters
have been killed by American bombs? The
CIA always estimated that Isis could put
30,000 fighters in the field. On US figures,
then, Isis has suffered a rate of attrition of
two thirds. And since the CIA estimate has
not varied, they have supposedly been able
to replace two thirds of their number with
new recruits. That is unlikely. Isis probably
had more fighters than the CIA thought; the
casualties are probably less than US officials
are claiming and, crucially, they continue to
attract new recruits, alienated young men
and women who want to fight for a cause and
live the life set out by God to Mohammed.
The bombing, too, is sometimes counterproductive. Isis are not an organised army
based in large barracks easy to spot from
10,000 feet up. They are a ragtag militia living
and moving among the population. However
careful the targeting, there have been civilian casualties and Isis makes the most of
those for propaganda purposes. In the worst
recent incident, last month, activists say that
some 30 civilians half of them women and
children died in an airstrike on the village of Al Khan in Syria. A year ago, a missile
hit the Isis prison in the town of Al Bab. It
probably looked like a barracks from the air,
with armed men coming and going. But civil
defence volunteers in Al Bab say they pulled
90 bodies from the rubble, most of them
since this was a prison people who had
been enemies of Isis. The Sunni Arabs who
have to be won over in the fight against Isis
are understandably angry about the bombing.
Abu Ibrahim the activist smuggling
people out of Isis territory told me the
war would never be won from the air, nor
with the US-led coalitions existing allies on
the ground. How many airstrikes have they
carried out? 1,000? 2,000? 3,000? (The Pentagon says it is actually 9,400.) If a quarter of
that effort was used for the ground battle, Isis
would have already been crushed. The prob-
Abide with Me
Was our first date really a boxers funeral?
You in pitch, me in blackall in all
a noirish affair, how we felt so at home
with those lump-faced men,
the mourners wrapped in silk and onyx
watches, their Stygian raincoats
soaked. And did their tears
heave a river,
a torrent, down Amsterdam
as the organ struck up the Eventide hymn
and something deepened,
and something deepened,
and was it later, or then,

I took your hand in my hand,
so you could feel my stung fist harden?
Fiona Wilson
lem, he said, was that most of the victories
against Isis have been by the Kurdish militias taking back Kurdish territory, where
there was no Sunni Arab population that
Isis could enlist to mount a defence. In Syria,
outside the Kurdish areas, there are really no
significant armed groups the Americans can
count on as allies. That is what led the former
US Army general and CIA director David
Petraeus to make the remarkable suggestion
of an alliance with moderate members of
the Nusra Front: that is, an American alliance
with al-Qaeda.
In Iraq, it is true, the government has
taken back Ramadi, and before that Baji and
Tikrit. But the Iraqi army is as much a business as a military force. Many of its officers
are there to enrich themselves, happy to leave
the fighting to Shia militias (paid for and
directed by Iran). It is far from certain whether the Iraqi army would be capable of taking
back Mosul, a city of a million and a half, well
defended with tonnes of weaponry captured
by Isis when government forces fled in 2014.
The real problem in Mosul, and elsewhere, is
that many Sunni Arabs quite like being ruled
Im getting in practice for the Chilcot report.
by Isis. Or at least they prefer Isis to what they

fear would be murder and pillage by Shia
death squads sent by a government in Baghdad they still think of as sectarian.
Victory over Isis depends, as it always
did, on winning over ordinary Sunnis. It is a
political problem as much as a military one.
But if Sunnis ruled by Isis can be persuaded
to abandon the caliphate, taking with them
the fair-weather jihadis, the hardest part
of the battle would still be to come. The diehard loyalists would be left, including many
British jihadis. One British official who deals
with this issue compared the core of Isis to
the SS in Nazi Germany: fanatics who would
never give up. These are people who believe
literally that they are about to fight the final
battle, ordained by prophecy and scripture,
marking the End of Days. (It will be fought
against the West and its allies and will take
place in Syria.)
The death throes of the caliphate will
therefore take time. During this period, as
Isis has warned, the West can expect more
attacks. At the end of the new Jihadi John
video released this week, a cherubic little boy,
speaking with a British accent, promises to
bring the jihad back to the UK: We will kill
the kuffar [infidels] over there. Hundreds of
British Muslims have joined Isis. If or when
the caliphate is smashed to pieces, some of
them will be coming home.
Paul Wood is a BBC Middle East
correspondent and has reported from Libya,
Syria and Iraq.
11
Free 10 year
guarantee
ROD LIDDLE
Why we have to stand by the foul, brutal Saudis
he Saudis have got the new year

off to a busy start, havent they?
The authorities executed 47 people,
including a rather grim-looking Sheikh
Nimr al-Nimr leading Shia cleric and childrens party balloon sculptor (giraffes a speciality). OK, I made that last bit up. He was
just a heavily bearded religious agitator and
probably not much fun at parties. Hes dead
now. In time I will overcome my grief and
rebuild.
As a consequence, Shia Iran has severed diplomatic links with the Sunni House
of Saud and the usual furious and violent
massed protests which characterise both
branches of the Religion of Peace have
taken place in Tehran. Screaming hordes
waving placards saying stuff like Down
With Britain! and America The Great
Satan. Youd think theyd have bothered
to make new placards instead of just using
the ones they usually use. They might have
at least crossed out Britain and written
Saudi Arabia above it in biro. But anyway,
embassies were ransacked and the devil was
invoked, as he always is on these occasions.
His Infernal Majesty must find the Middle
East as wearying as the rest of us.
I assume we were cited because we are
Saudi allies, and because we are all-purpose
affluent infidels. Whatever, Saudi Arabias
singularly unpleasant Gulf-state allies have
also shrieked abuse at Iran and some, like
Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates,
have cut diplomatic ties. There has been
unrest too in Saudi Arabias minority Shia
strongholds. I suspect that these outpourings
of anger will end in tears before bedtime
plus, further down the road, a bit of judicious
decapitating. And all this before the Christmas trees have been taken down!
I knew it was going to happen. Shortly
after Christmas Day I caught the tail end
of a discussion on BBC Radio 4 in which a
bunch of the corporations most gilded correspondents predicted what was going to
occur in the year ahead. In amongst the predictions of the Earth burning to a crisp as
a consequence of global warming and the
poor dying everywhere because the West
is rich, white and evil, some woman posited that, on a brighter note, Iran and Saudi
Arabia would come together and heal the
great rift between the Sunni and Shia faiths

and the Religion of Peace would be even
more peaceable than it is at the moment,
if that scenario is even faintly possible to
imagine.
Aha, I thought immediately, its war,
then. I admit I didnt expect it all to kick off
almost immediately after the silly woman
had finished her sentence, but the principle
holds true whatever a western liberal
tells you about the world of Islam, you can
be assured that it is utterly wrong on every
count. The invasion of Iraq (all they want is
a nice secular democracy), the Arab Spring
(all they want is a nice secular democracy),
The rulers are exponentially more

liberal than the population and
also rather more pro-western
the bombing of Gaddafis Libya (all they
want, etc), the support for Syrian rebels
(all they want, etc.), Palestinian elections
liberals demonstrably wrong, every time,
on every issue, without fail. It is only a matter of time before some well-meaning white
liberal halfwit tells us that the murders and
beheadings and reprisals and the setting fire
to stuff which will undoubtedly result from
this current contretemps between Iran and
Saudi Arabia is nothing to do with Islam.
And that will be the final triumph of patent
absurdity for the liberal elites favourite
canard.
Who to support in this crucial battle
between the Sunni majority and the Shia

recusants? It is, for the neutral observer,
rather like a Premier League fixture
between Chelsea and Manchester City: you
just hope that somehow both manage to lose
heavily, and with many injuries incurred.
And thats the most likely outcome, luckily.
To extend the footballing metaphor still
further, Islam does occasionally remind me
of some of the supporters of my own team,
Millwall. At an FA Cup semi-final a few
years back, Millwall fans were disconsolate
to find that the supporters of Wigan Athletic
had no desire to go toe to toe with them.
So instead the Millwall contingent kicked
the hell out of each other, the Downham lot
versus the Bromley lot. So it is with Islam: if
there isnt a proper infidel around to persecute, a sort of half-infidel will do all based
on a schism which occurred at the Battle of
Siffin almost fourteen hundred years ago.
But we do have a dog in the fight, for
good or ill. As the liberals would aver,
the House of Saud is indeed foul, corrupt,
authoritarian, medieval and brutal. But it is
also markedly much, much less of all those
things than any government which might
conceivably replace it. In Saudi Arabia, the
rulers are exponentially more liberal than
the population and also rather more
pro-western. Further, the country is in for
a rough year. A primitive desert satrapy
which lucked out on oil deposits, rather
than by innovation or actually making anything, the Saudis will suffer enormously as
a consequence of the precipitous fall in oil
prices. Already, the hitherto mollycoddled
and subsidised locals are seeing their enormous benefits pared back; it is only comparative affluence which has allowed the
Saudi royals to remain in situ, and it is only
because they have remained in situ that we
have an ally in that godforsaken region.
We dont want trouble in Saudi Arabia.
Contra the agonising of the western liberals,
we really do not want a Saudi Spring, ghastly though the regime undoubtedly is. For
all that there is a growing secular and (as
was always the case) well educated middle
class in Iran, when push comes to shove it
is still the ayatollahs who wield the popular
power. Our bread is buttered on the Saudi
side, for now.
13
The Isis executioner and me
BAROMETER
Did my taunt drive Abu Rumaysah to become the new Jihadi John?
The outsiders
DOUGLAS MURRAY
Did the seven members of Harold Wilsons

cabinet who campaigned to leave the
Common Market in the 1975 referendum
damage their careers?
Michael Foot, Employment Secretary.
Made deputy leader by Jim Callaghan in
1976. Elected leader in 1980.
Tony Benn, Industry Secretary.
Challenged Denis Healey unsuccessfully
for Labour deputy leadership in 1981.
Barbara Castle, Social Services Secretary.
Sacked from cabinet by Jim Callaghan
when he became prime minister in 1976.
Eric Varley, Energy Secretary. Swapped
jobs with Tony Benn after referendum.
Fifth in shadow cabinet elections in 1979.
John Silkin, Planning and Local
Government Secretary. Became agriculture
secretary in 1976. Stood for Labour
leadership in 1980 but was defeated.
Peter Shore, Trade Secretary. Became
environment secretary in 1976, shadow
foreign secretary in 1979. Stood for Labour
leadership in 1980 but came last. Made
shadow chancellor by Foot.
Willie Ross, Scotland Secretary. Retired
from Commons in 1979; made a life peer.
ven if Abu Rumaysah does turn out

to be the new Jihadi John, shown
on video this week presiding over the
murder of five innocent men, Im not sorry I
encouraged him to go to Syria and join Isis.
The last time I saw the 32-year-old Briton
(born to a UK Hindu family as Siddhartha
Dhar) was at a BBC studio in London. He
was one of a group of people who had been
central to the extremist group al-Muhajiroun and its offshoots for years. In 2009 they
had, through a front organisation, lured
me into a set-up with more than a hundred
Islamists which soon became violent and
from which I was extracted by the police. It
was unpleasant, but it did lead to the then
Labour home secretary finally proscribing al-Muhajiroun. Since then I have been
advised not to be in the proximity of any of
their members or affiliates.
So 18 months ago, when the BBC asked
me to discuss What should be done about
British Islamic extremists on their Sunday
Morning Live programme, I said yes. When
they said that the other guests would include
not only Fleet Street heroine Dame Ann
Leslie and Isis expert Shiraz Maher but also
Abu Rumaysah, I explained that I wouldnt
and couldnt be in the same room as him.
And so on the day itself, while the rest of us
broadcast from one studio, Abu Rumaysah
broadcast his views from the studio
next door.
As usual, Rumaysah didnt exactly cover
over his beliefs. This British-born man told
us: As a Muslim I would like to see the UK
governed by the Sharia. It is far superior to
democracy. I dont really identify myself
with British values. I am Muslim first, second
and last. When we got onto the subject of
Isis, he was full of praise and defensiveness.
Videos of journalists being beheaded by the
group were lies, he said. Accounts of the
massacre of Yazidis and Christians were
exaggerations. This led to general incredulity and also anger in the studio.
The presenter asked if Rumaysah would
leave to join Isis. Dame Ann said she bet
he wouldnt because he was a coward. He
insisted that of course he would join if he
could. At which I and others repeatedly
asked: Well why dont you? At one point
I even suggested we would do a whip-round
in the studio to get him a one-way ticket out
of the country that very night.
14
I cant speak for the others, but I did feel

a slight pang weeks later when I heard that
Rumaysah had indeed gone to join Isis, taking his young family with him. There was
also some amazement. At the time he put
himself and his family on to a coach at Victoria station, Rumaysah was on police bail
for membership of a proscribed group (alMuhajiroun). Yet he made his way unhindered to Paris, and from there onwards to
Syria. Once there he posted a photograph
of himself on Twitter holding his newborn
(fourth) child in one hand and a rifle in the
other. What a shoddy security system Britain must have to allow me to breeze through
Europe to Islamic State, he tweeted.
And then this week he appeared to
have filled the shoes of the late Jihadi John
(Mohammed Emwazi). Two months since
Isiss most famous executioner was killed in
a drone strike, here was another video with
another set of executions (this time of five
alleged spies) and another British accent
doing the presenting.
Is it my old sparring partner, as much of
the media is reporting? I dont know. It could
be. It sounds like him. True, a balaclava conceals a thinner face than that of my chubby
fellow studio guest. But who would be surprised if weight loss is not one by-product of
time spent in the caliphate?
Whether it is him or not, the Rumaysah
story remains jarring. Not least as a reminder that he and his British friends are always
vaguely comic figures until they turn up in
an execution video with a knife or gun to
someones head. The British tendency to
treat such people as jokes has its benefits. It
also has its limitations. Obviously if it does
turn out to be him, then the Home Secretary
and border police should hang their heads
even lower. Who could possibly trust the
government to secure our borders when it
can neither keep extremists out nor in?
Isis have no dearth of willing executioners, though having one with a British accent
is certainly a propaganda score. But for my
part, I dont regret that I taunted Rumaysah
to leave. People like him have benighted and
burdened our country for years and it seems
to me that neither our domestic government nor our societal defences are remotely
up to the task of dealing with such people
here. We can only really address the matter
abroad.
The deep end

Where in Britain is your home most likely
to be ooded? These, according to the
Environment Agency, are the districts with
the greatest number of properties at risk of
being flooded at least once every 75 years:
22,000
Boston
North Somerset
19,000
East Lindsey
15,000
Windsor and Maidenhead
12,000
Hull
11,000
Shepway
10,000
Sedgemoor
9,000
East Riding
8,000
Runnymede
8,000
Warrington
7,000
Serves you right

A British mineworker in Kyrgyzstan was
deported after referring to the countrys
national dish, chuchuk, as horses penis.
What do people really eat there?
A suggested menu, with explanations,
from the website www.kyrgyz.net.my:
Tea with katama (deep-fried rened
starch bread)
Chuchuk (horse-fat sausages)
Besh barmak (horse or sheep boiled in
a big cookware every attending gets a
piece of broth according to their social
position)
Plov (large hill of cooked rice with
carrots, garlic and onions served with
sliced boiled meat cooked with spices)
And to drink: kumys (horses fresh
milk fermented in the stomach of a horse)
MATTHEW PARRIS
Our leaders suicidal urge to sex it up
t has been over a month since Parliament voted to bomb Isis in Syria, yet in
that time there have been fewer raids
than there are Lib Dem MPs. A flurry of
three attacks took place immediately following the vote on 1 December, but since then
there has been only one by an unmanned
Reaper drone on Christmas Day. And even
that only probably killed some Isis guards at
a checkpoint. The three earlier manned missions had focused on an oil field that a US
military spokesman later described as having
previously suffered long-term incapacitation
at the hands of the US air force. Presumably
the facility had already been blasted to smithereens and the RAF (perhaps to justify the
Defence Secretary Michael Fallons claim
that Britain was really upping the tempo in
Syria) was invited in for a celebratory kick:
late to the party, late to the fight, and bombing bomb sites. The British Lion roars again.
To critics like me of Britains participation,
the I told you sos will come easily, of course.
But that isnt my point here. I want to suggest
how David Cameron might have presented
his case better, proofing himself against the
sneers of such as I. He could just have told the
truth. The honest case for Britains joining the
scrap in Syria was a fairly decent one.
The honest case for Britains joining the
US-led invasion of Iraq was quite strong, too.
And the honest case for holding a referendum on our membership of the European
Union, and for recommending a stay vote
when the referendum comes, is also mildly
persuasive. But in all three examples a sitting
prime minister has hyped up the justification
in a perfectly unnecessary way, strained honesty, strained credulity and risked simply irritating citizens (and commentators) who could
see all along what the real justifications were,
who were persuadable, and who might have
accepted an unassuming argument where
they rejected the overblown one.
Let us take those three examples in turn,
starting with the Iraq war. There was certainly
an argument for our joining the US-led coalition to topple Saddam Hussein. A monster
and a mass murderer, he was entirely capable of turning on his neighbours or their allies,
and was arming his country to the teeth. It
seemed very possible that he was developing
weapons of mass destruction and (given his
use of poison gas on the Kurds) equally possible that even if he had not yet done so, he
would soon, and secretly.
The Americans probably realised that evidence for actual WMD was patchy and speculative; our own government certainly did
or they would not have gone to such painful
lengths to sex it up. Tony Blair may be truthful when he says he unreservedly believed
all this; but if so he was surely conscious that
a leap was needed between what he could
prove and what he believed.
Just as compelling to him was the need he
perceived for Britain to be good allies to our
best friend in the world, upon whom we ultimately depended for our own security. So if
the WMD evidence was finely balanced, Brit-
Often the justification for action is

hyped up unnecessarily, straining
credulity and irritating the populace
ains loyalty to an ally tipped the balance.
Then why not say that? This man Hussein
is a barbarous threat to the security of the
region. We think he may be secretly developing weapons of mass destruction. I personally
am convinced by the evidence, but I accept it
is incomplete. Washington does believe this
is happening. In the circumstances, I have
decided it is Britains duty to our faithful ally
to join America in military action which the
Pentagon believes is urgent and vital. If that
had been Mr Blairs pitch, so much of the
hatred and humiliation subsequently heaped
upon him could have been avoided. The same

is true of David Camerons renegotiation of
our EU membership. It may achieve something useful (I think that is likely) but it was
never going to be the root-and-branch exercise that was promised. Everybody knows Mr
Camerons first aim was to close down the
chronic and rancourous dispute within Britain and within his party, about EU membership.
So, again I ask, why didnt he just say that?
For too long this issue has poisoned political
life etc. So I have decided to bring this to a
head. Let us see whether the British people
as opposed to their politicians and newspapers have something to say. I propose to
enter negotiations with our partners in which
I shall be seeking important adjustments, but
dont expect miracles. Even without these
changes, membership is on balance advantageous to us, and leaving would be a huge
risk. That is the case I shall be making. I dont
expect convinced anti-Europeans to be persuaded but let us, and them, listen to what
the country says.
Were that the first paragraph, as it were,
of this story, how much huffing and puffing,
how much risible overselling of small beer,
how much contempt and how much sheer
irritation on the part of people like me (no
Europhile) could have been pre-empted? It
would have had the virtue, you see, of being
true. People do notice.
As for Syria, the speech Id have written
for the Prime Minister would have acknowledged that the help we could give would not
be critical at most it would be modestly
useful. There would have been no nonsense
about the 70,000 freedom fighters waiting to take democracy forward but instead
a frank admission that the whole thing was
a bloody mess, the outcomes uncertain, and
that we could not be sure intervention would
bring peace to Syria. But the underwriter of
all Europes security, the United States, had
undertaken to try, our brothers and sisters in
France had been persuaded, and solidarity
called us to support them.
Do you know, I could almost have voted
for that. When shall we find leaders with the
intellectual self-confidence to ask us for no
more than a modest two cheers for a halfway
decent case?
15
Rwandas new tragedy

The ultimate donor darling is becoming a dictatorship whose critics live in fear
MICHELA WRONG
ever lighthearted, my African political exile friend sounded particularly lugubrious on the line from
Washington. His voice was low and pensive.
For the past few months, he said, hed been
hearing of plans hatched by the regime back
home for his assassination. They are very
gruesome, very gruesome indeed.
It was not the first time. In the past hed
always passed the details on to the FBI,
which had also called him up several times
when they thought he was in danger. This
time he hadnt bothered. I always ask them:
What are you doing to protect me? and
they say, Well, if you see anything suspicious, call 911. Ive come to the conclusion
that the people here, or the people in your
place, honestly dont care about our lives.
Ive had similar conversations with rather too many of his haunted fellow nationals,
dissidents convinced that fleeing the country of their birth has done little to guarantee protection from an African government
they dared to challenge. Whats chilling is
that the nation concerned is not some oil
or diamond giant whose wealth allows it
to arrogantly defy international opprobrium, some drug-trafficking republic run by a
crazed general. This is no failed state, torn
apart by warring militias.
No, its orderly little Rwanda, the ultimate donor darling, and a government that
relies on western aid for nearly 40 per cent
of its operating budget, much of it provided by the United States and United Kingdom. Its president, Paul Kagame, hobnobs
with the likes of Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and
the Blairs Tony advises him on governance and Cherie recently defended his spy
chief on war crimes charges in a British
court. Kagame so impressed the organisers in Davos that Kigali is due to host the
African edition of the World Economic
Forum in May.
You might think the intimacy of that relationship would grant western officials some
leverage on behalf of the likes of Theogene Rudasingwa, founding member of the
Rwanda National Congress (RNC) party,
who shared his concerns over the phone.
Or that Kagames regime might think twice
before embarrassing its western sponsors.
Youd be wrong.
As the man who has run the country
since a genocide perpetrated by the late
Juvnal Habyarimanas forces shows signs
16
of becoming permanently entrenched, suppressing all criticism and contemptuous of

international opinion, the response by British and US policymakers goes little further
than putting their fingers in their ears and
singing la la la.
Any student of the Great Lakes will
already be familiar with the claims and
counterclaims that have swirled around
the region since the 1994 genocide. Wellinformed analysts reject the neat theory of
the double genocide, whereby killings of
nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus
British taxes are going to prop up

a regime that even allies admit uses
murder to crush political challenge
by Habyarimanas soldiers and militiamen
were somehow morally counterbalanced by
the massacres of Hutus committed by Kagames advancing Rwandan Patriotic Front
(RPF) rebel movement. But anyone who
reads Jason Stearnss Dancing in the Glory
of Monsters can be in little doubt there is
copious blood on RPF hands, shed in both
Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of
Congo. This is a complex story, without easily identifiable goodies and baddies.
So Kagame has always been accused of
ruthlessness, but the violence was excused
in Washington and London on the grounds
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Church service
From A Mobilisation of the Church,
The Spectator, 8 January 1916: Suppose
the Church were mobilised so that the
majority of the younger clergy and all
the ordinands were set free for service
in the Army, the situation at the end of
the war might be very different from that
which we have been anticipating. There
is no life more intimate than that of the
barrack-room. There is no life where the
essential characters of men are so fully
revealed as the life of the trench. Those
of the combatant clergy who returned
from the war would know all that was
worth knowing of the characters of
ordinary menWith such men as clergy
a new era might dawn for the Church in
this land, and the Kingdom of Heaven be
brought very nigh.
that Rwanda sat in a tough neighbourhood.

A regime that had ended a genocide could
not be expected to respect the Marquess of
Queensbury rules, the thinking went. But
what the international community, mired
in guilt for failing to stop the 1994 massacres, fails to register is that the human rights
charges now being lodged against Kigali
cant be viewed through the traditional lens
of scarred Tutsi survivors hitting out at unrepentant Hutu genocidaires. Like most of
Kagames most vocal critics today, Theogene
Rudasingwa is a Tutsi. He was once Kagames chief of staff and Rwandas ambassador to the US.
Kayumba Nyamwasa, who was shot in
the stomach in a South African shopping
mall in 2010 and lives under armed guard in
that country, was the Rwandan armys chief
of staff before setting up the RNC. He also is
a Tutsi. So was co-founder Patrick Karegeya,
former Rwandan intelligence chief, strangled last year in a South African hotel. These
men were not saints, but its difficult to portray them as genocidaires either, although
the regime in Kigali does its best. No, this is
a case of the revolution devouring itself, as
possible political rivals and successors from
within the RPFs cosy Tutsi elite are systematically eliminated.
Shockingly, national borders count for
nothing in Kagames campaign of removal
and intimidation, a recklessness that can
only be premised on the all-too-accurate
assumption that western donors whose territorial sovereignty is violated in this way
may fulminate in public but never take substantive action.
Not only have US authorities felt
impelled to inform Rwandan dissidents on
American soil that they are in danger a
congressman recently revealed that they
issued a formal warning to Major Robert
Higiro, a former Rwandan army officer who
exposed Kigalis assassination plans and was
living in Belgium, telling him his life would
be in danger if he stayed there.
The British have taken similar action in
the past, too. In May 2011, the Metropolitan Police formally warned two Rwandan
dissidents living in London that they faced
an imminent threat of assassination and
turned back their suspected attacker, who
had taken the coach from Belgium to Folkestone.
Logged by Human Rights Watch, the
series of killings, disappearances, kidnappings and jailings appears to have escalated

as Kagames personal ambition has hardened. Last month, in a referendum whose
outcome bore more than a whiff of Ceausescus Romania, 98 per cent of Rwandans
voted for a constitutional change allowing
Kagame to run for a third, fourth and fifth
term. In his new years address, to no ones
surprise, he confirmed that he would stand.
That means he could still be in power in
2034.
he US has made clear its disapproval,
with Samantha Power, ambassador to
the United Nations, surprisingly forthright
on the topic. However, its hard to imagine Washington, which puts great weight
on Rwandas readiness to deploy troops as
peacekeepers in African hot spots, putting
its aid money where its mouth is.
And what about Britain, due to provide Kigali with at least 75 million in aid
in 2015/16? Under Clare Short and Andrew
Mitchell, the Department for International
Development was an ideologically driven
ministry, ready to robustly defend funding to the likes of Rwanda. Todays ringfenced budget, legally enshrined at a time
when so much public spending faces the
axe, should in theory boost institutional confidence. Instead, the department under Jus-
Weve been sent a threatening letter!
tine Greening, who never asked for the job,

appears to lack both backbone and moral
conviction.
These days its virtually impossible for
journalists to meet anyone in authority at
Dfid, including Greening. Colleagues experiences tally with mine. When I asked the
press office whether Dfid felt any qualms
about funding an African government that
was conducting targeted assassinations on
its allies territory, it sidestepped the question, stressing that no aid goes directly into
Rwandas Treasury, as though that dealt with

the issue. The UK government will continue
to make decisions concerning aid to Rwanda based on the governments commitment to poverty reduction, anti-corruption,
transparency, human rights and domestic
accountability, ran the bland Dfid statement I eventually received after a fortnight
of chasing. As part of our bilateral partnership, we regularly raise concerns about civil
and political rights in Rwanda and continue
to press for reforms in these areas.
The questions Dfid ducks so determinedly have never been more pertinent. In recent
years, the quiet belief has taken hold in aid
circles that benign dictators are better at
delivering clean water, paved roads and primary education to the poorest of the poor
always that justifying mantra than
messy, unstable democracies. Kagame, who
used to share the crown with the late Meles
Zenawi of Ethiopia, now epitomises this
development model, a form of idealism that
allows for some alarmingly cynical policies.
At the very least, the taxpaying British
public should be allowed to debate whether its taxes should be going to prop up a
regime that even its closest allies acknowledge routinely uses murder to crush political
challenge. A thick grey wall of bureaucratic
obfuscation currently ensures it never gets
that chance.
SPECTATOR EVENTS PRESENTS
CAN WE
TRUST
HEALTH
ADVICE?
Tuesday 9 February | IET London, Savoy Place, WC2R 0BL

Every day, we face a number of decisions about how to
maintain a healthy life. What foods should we eat? How
often should we exercise? How much alcohol is safe to
consume? From health professionals to the government,
who should we turn to for health advice and can we really
trust what they say? Join us at The Spectators annual health
debate, with an expert panel chaired by Andrew Neil.
TO BOOK
www.spectator.co.uk/healthdebate
020 7961 0044 | events@spectator.co.uk
TICKETS
22 Standard rate | 19 Subscribers
Doors open: 7p.m. | Discussion begins: 7.30p.m.
17
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Sticking to his guns

What Ive learned from debating mass shootings
with my Texan uncle
LEAH MCLAREN
henever theres another mass

shooting in America, like the
massacre in San Bernardino last
month, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill
in Texas, a retired military man, practising
Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who
lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev
(a retired nurse) on the outskirts of Houston.
Uncle Bill likes to email me redneck jokes in
the hope of getting my progressive Canadian
dander up. Heres a recent one:
The premier of Ontario is jogging with
her dog along a nature trail. A coyote
jumps out and attacks the premiers dog,
then bites the premier. She calls animal
control. Animal control captures the coyote and bills the province $200 testing it
for diseases and $500 for relocating it.
She calls a veterinarian. The vet collects
the dead dog and bills the province $200
testing it for diseases. The Liberal party
spends $2 million to study how to better
treat rabies etc., etc.
Meanwhile, the governor of Texas is
jogging with his dog along a nature trail.
A coyote jumps out and attacks his dog.
The governor shoots it with his stateissued pistol and keeps jogging. The governor has spent 50 cents on a .45 ACP
hollow-point cartridge. The buzzards eat
the dead coyote.
And that, my friends, is why Ontario is
broke and Texas is not.
Or it could be oil, I think.

But what about this scenario, I recently
wrote back to Uncle Bill: a young mentally ill
teenager is having fantasies about killing himself and his entire class. In Canada (or the
UK, or anywhere in western Europe) hed
receive state-funded healthcare and get better. In America he could simply go to Walmart
and buy a semi-automatic weapon and enact
his fantasy. And that is why the schoolchildren
of Canada (or the UK, etc.) are safe and those
of Texas are not.
Uncle Bill and I have a respectful discourse. We agree to disagree, as polite people say. And although we have corresponded
thoughtfully and extensively over the past
few months, the chance of either of us altering position on gun control is small. According to the latest science, progressives and
conservatives have different levels of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics that affect our cognitive
biases, i.e., the way we interpret events like
terrorist attacks and mass shootings. For

someone like me, a mass shooting like Sandy
Hook, in which 20 tiny schoolchildren were
slaughtered by the madman Adam Lanza, is
a clear reason for sensible gun legislation. Im
with Obama, who teared up on Thursday just
thinking about Sandy Hook, and vowed to
tighten gun laws. But for a conservative like
Uncle Bill, its an obvious argument for the
importance of American civil liberties and
gun ownership.
American writer David Robertson wrote
recently in Vox magazine: To the gun owner,
another mass shooting is not an argument for
To the gun owner, another mass

shooting is another reason to arm
himself and defend what hes got left
getting rid of guns. Its a confirmation of his
every instinct, another sign of moral and societal decay, another reason to arm himself and
defend what hes got left.
This has been the revelation of my correspondence with Uncle Bill: we believe in the
same things (life, liberty, equality and all that
other nice French stuff) but we see very different routes for our respective societies to
safely arrive at it.
A couple of years ago Uncle Bills children, my cousins Patty and Billy Jnr, gave
their dad the money for his first conceal and
carry licence for his birthday. They did this
not because they were hoping he might put
a cap in someones ass for fun, but because
they were worried about their ageing parents safety and felt the best way to safeguard
it was to ensure their father carries a gun with
him 24/7 when he is not at home being guard-
Apparently hes in special operations.
ed by armed security. To his credit Uncle Bill

and my Aunt Bev did a gun-safety course but
decided not to buy a weapon (they dont keep
a gun in the house either), but they would
defend anyones right to do so.
The prevailing wisdom is that conservatives are more realistic than liberals, their
vision more pragmatic, their eyes unpeeled to
the awful truth. And in some ways thats true.
But when it comes to American gun owners,
there is instead a deranged sort of innocence
the sort of thinking that occurs when you
take a perfectly good ideal (freedom, say, or
safety), mix in a large helping of irrational fear, then spin it to its logical conclusion.
Uncle Bills belief in the Second Amendment,
like many Americans, is like a religious faith
in the notion of independence the belief
that when it comes right down to it, if the
world goes to hell, a man should at least have
the right to defend his own family and property. Like all ideals it is kind of beautiful, but
its also quite mad.
The comedian Bill Maher once likened
the experience of arguing with American
conservatives as akin to getting your dog to
take a pill. You have to feed them the truth
wrapped in a piece of baloney, hold their
snout shut, and stroke their throats. Even
then, just when you think theyve swallowed
it, they spit it out on the linoleum.
Especially when it comes to the emotional issue of gun control, Republicans like
Uncle Bill are as startlingly fact-resistant and
reason-impervious as a mutt who will always
follow his instinct over rational sense.
The left-wing film-maker Michael Moore
predicted on his blog this year that when and
if the crime-scene photos of Sandy Hook are
ever leaked to the public, Republicans would
be forced to let Obama pass the gun legislation he so desperately desires. When the
American public sees what bullets from an
assault rifle fired at the body of a child can do
the jig will be up for the NRA.
This is utter nonsense, of course. Most
NRA members would be far more likely to
support Republican hopeful Ben Carsons
position that the best prevention for school
shootings is to arm kindergarten teachers.
I began my dialogue on gun control with
Uncle Bill in the hope that I could bring him
round to my point of view through rational,
fact-based argument, but Ive now realised
that this is simply not the way proponents of
the Second Amendment think. Their thought
processes are a closed loop best described
by a brilliant headline in the Onion: no way
to prevent this, says only nation on earth
where this ever happens.
I adore my Uncle Bill and while I know
I will never change his mind, at least I have
gained an understanding into why. You can
wrap the truth in as much baloney as you
want but if the dog is truly stubborn youll
never make him swallow it. At least in Texas
you could put the poor beast out his misery.
Ill give him that.
19
The painful truth for Ruth

Scots love their Tory leader. But they wont vote for her
ALEX MASSIE
inority sects are often more interesting, and more colourful, than
their more popular rivals. That must
explain why the Scottish Tories continue to
be the subject of so much fascination. Barely
a month passes without someone, somewhere, asking if this at long last is the
moment for a Scottish Tory revival. Spoiler
alert: it never is.
Logic says that at this years Scottish parliament elections, things should be different. It is generally agreed that Ruth
Davidson, the party leader in Scotland,
had a good independence referendum;
generally agreed, too, that after Nicola
Sturgeon, she might be the most impressive politician in Scotland. This might be
reckoned a low bar to clear; it remains the
case that Davidson is the first Tory in a
generation who can even think of clearing
it. Everyone loves Ruth; very few people
will vote for her. This has consequences,
not least since the Union needs a Tory
revival in Scotland (and a Labour revival
in England).
In theory, the votes are there for
Davidson. Nearly 700,000 Scots based
their no vote in the referendum on their
attachment to the Union. They might
have had concerns about unanswered
economic questions too, but their primary
motivation was their sense of themselves
as being British as well as Scottish. Most
of them would have voted no even if
they believed the SNPs promise of jam and
unicorns for all. These, then, are the unionist ultras upon whom Davidson is relying in
May. If they wont vote Tory, who will?
Anecdotally, some of them will. Labours
commitment to the Union is palpably weakening and there are some former Labour
voters who are now prepared to back the last
remaining unimpeachably unionist party.
Nevertheless, the electoral mathematics are
unforgiving: the SNP continues to poll at
50 per cent and a divided unionist opposition is likely to be routed on polling day.
The pollsters are divided on the Tories.
YouGov and Ipsos MORI predict a Tory
recovery (that is, they think the Conservatives might win 18 per cent of the vote in
May); Survation and TNS find no evidence
of this, insisting that the Tory vote amounts
20
to no more than 12 per cent of the electorate. The pollsters cannot explain this difference and they cannot all be right.
As recently as 1992, the Tories won 25 per
cent of the vote in Scotland. That amounted to 750,000 voters. Even when, five years
later, they lost their last 11 Scottish seats,
they still managed to take 17.5 per cent of
the vote. At no election since, whether it
be for Westminster or the Scottish parlia-
ment, have they done so well. Last year the

average Tory candidate won 7,358 votes.
Senior figures argue that it is misleading
to focus on the awkward fact that the partys
share of the vote last year 14.9 per cent,
if youre interested was its worst ever
performance. Many natural Tory voters
abandoned hopeless Tory candidates and
supported Labour or Lib Dem candidates
who were, notionally at least, better placed
to stem the nationalist tide. There is some
truth in this. I was one of those voters.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the
Tories won only 434,000 votes in Scotland last year. And that was in a Westminster election in which whatever remains
of the Tory vote can be trusted to turn out
and do their duty. Elections to the Scottish parliament are a different matter. The
Conservatives opposed devolution in the

first place and many a Tory died in the last
ditch defending the unreformed Union.
The party hierarchy accepted that since the
Scottish parliament was not going to disappear, theyd best reconcile themselves to its
existence; a hefty chunk of the Tory vote,
however, has remained scunnered with
Holyrood and would prefer it to disappear.
In 1999 the Conservatives won 364,000 votes
and 15 per cent of the vote; by 2011 so many
Tories had died that the party was left with
just 277,000 votes.
In theory Davidson should be able to
do better than this. The problem is that her
strategys success depends on voters altering
their behaviour. Like Jeremy Corbyn, she
must persuade people who do not ordinarily vote that this time they must vote.
The scale of the challenge is intimidating. If, as pollsters predict, turnout in May
increases to above 60 per cent of the electorate, the Tories will need the support of
approximately 500,000 Scots if theyre to
win 20 per cent of the vote. In other words,
nearly twice as many people will have
to back the Conservatives in May as
were prepared to at the last Holyrood
election. I dont suppose thats an
impossible scenario, but it still seems
extremely unlikely.
The truth is that the Conservatives
remain toxic in Scotland. Some 30
per cent of Scottish voters approve of
the job David Cameron is doing, but
barely half those voters are prepared to
endorse Conservative candidates. The
modernisation project has not been
enough.
Moreover, in a world in which half
the electorate will back the SNP, and
Labour even in its present crippled state cannot avoid winning at
least 20 per cent of the vote, it follows
that once the minor parties have been
accounted for, the Tories best possible
result would see them winning approximately one in five votes.
All of this matters. The SNP are biding their time before calling another referendum. As Corbyn leads Labour into the
wilderness, the Tories have a chance to govern from Westminster until 2030 even as
they remain poisonous in Scotland. In those
circumstances, many left-of-centre Scots
might be prepared to risk a punt on independence. North and South Britain really
would seem like different political cultures,
no longer suited to cohabitation. Thats why
Ruth Davidson and her valiant platoon of
true believers remain important. But if even
the twin advantages of a political realignment along constitutional lines and a widely admired leader cannot save the Scottish
Tories, then one has to ask: can anything?
Alex Massie is Scotland editor
of The Spectator.
HUGO RIFKIND
What a spankingly splendid scandal
pparently, according to a variety

of relatively reliable sources that
include the man himself, the Labour
MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, is in the
habit of accepting money from a paparazzi
agency in exchange for advising them how
they might best snap pap pictures of the
Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk.
Is this not one of the most amazing facts
you have ever learned? Every bit of it
that tabloids want these photographs; that
photographers will pay for them; that an MP
can earn a tidy sum by secretly facilitating
them simply boggles me. Are they all at
it? Maybe thats why we keep seeing those
vile pictures of David Cameron fatly jogging,
or Jeremy Corbyn dressed like Tony Soprano taking the bins out. You never know.
Back to Danczuk, though, for he has
had quite a fortnight. On New Years Eve
it was revealed that he had been sending
explicit text messages to a 17-year-old girl
who had applied to him for work experience. Whether she truly wanted work experience with a Labour MP is a moot point, not
least because it later emerged in the Sunday
People that she runs a dominatrix fetish
website via which she sells used underpants
and toenail clippings, and such things normally only run concurrent with political
aspirations in the Young Conservatives. Still,
she got flirty, and he offered to spank her,
and she went to the Sun.
Thats not all. Danczuks girlfriend, a
Labour councillor, had already dumped him,
partly (she told the newspapers) because
hed been messaging other people, but also
because hed kissed somebody else. Although
so had she, and that somebody (in her case)
was Danczuks second ex-wife, Karen, also
a Labour councillor, whose breasts you
may remember being in a lot of newspapers because she kept taking photographs
of them. Danczuk apparently didnt mind
about that kiss, though, not least because he
was watching. They were all in a restaurant.
Now, after the texts emerged, Danczuks
first ex-wife (not a Labour councillor)
popped up to call him a drunk and a bully
and a drug fiend, and the second ex-wife laid
into her, calling her a leech. She also had a
crack on Twitter at the now ex-girlfriend
[note to subs: would some kind of diagram

help here?], whom she accused of having
oral sex with another Labour MP, although
he denied it, and then so did she and called
the police. Which is a shame, because they
once appeared to get on quite well (second
ex-wife and ex-girlfriend, that is), not only
because of the kiss, but also in some chummy photos of the pair of them and Danczuk
himself. Which it now appears were taken by
the paparazzi agency aforementioned.
Theres also a rape accusation, which
he strenuously denies, and suggestions of a
drink problem. And some fuss about posing
for gleeful selfies with the girlfriend (very
shortly before she was the ex-girlfriend)
while his constituents struggled with floods.
Simon Danczuk has gone the full

Lembit on this... and not even
Lembit Opik did that
In the midst of all this, anyway, Danczuk was
suspended from the Labour party, mainly
due to the stuff with the 17-year-old, and
decided to launch a fightback. This he did by
going on Newsnight and saying and this is
a direct quote I cant deny the fact that I
prefer young women. Different people have
different preferences. My first wife was ten
years younger than me, my second wife was
17 years younger than me, my last girlfriend
was 17 years younger than me, and I should
just make that point. Which reminded me of
a glorious recent sketch on the US comedy
show Saturday Night Live, where Tina Fey
and Amy Poehler host a spoof quiz show
Hey, nice guns.
called Meet Your Second Wife! in which a

variety of unremarkable grown men are
confronted with little girls and told theyll be
marrying them in about a decade. Not that
large age gaps are perverse per se, but most
older men at least declare them irrelevant.
Rather than, like Danczuk, thigh-rubbingly
admitting theyre the whole point.
All in all, then, lets just say that he probably wasnt expecting to land a plum job in
Jeremy Corbyns reshuffle. Or indeed any
other reshuffle ever again. Yet the flip side
to all of this is that Danczuk is not merely a
clown. He has a knack for being in the thick
of things, as can be seen by his lurking presence in the background of photographs of
Gordon Brown having his fateful encounter
with that bigoted woman Gillian Duffy in
2010. His kamikaze approach to, well, everything really, can have clear upsides, as seen
with his bold role in revealing the paedophilia of the late Cyril Smith. And he has
been gleefully indiscreet about Labours
backbench turmoil while colleagues with
better comprehension of things like consequences have stayed cringing and mute.
And yet clearly theres something awry.
His Twitter feed remains astonishing; a barrage of car-crash interviews (by him) and
retweeted headlines about him, via which
he often appears to be calling himself the
disgraced MP Simon Danczuk. By political standards, he seems on the very edge of
collapse; you can only hope that somebody
is looking out for him. Although if they are,
they should take away his iPhone.
But maybe these are the wrong standards. Really, these are the travails of a Strictly contestant, or a rogue presenter of The
One Show. Hes gone the full Lembit, and
even Lembit never did that. This is politics
with one eye on the future a future not
of directorships and ermine, but of reality
shows and jungles. And along the way,
through sheer inadvisable exuberance, it
makes politics reach places it otherwise
would not. There will be a book in all this
one day, and it will be splendid: Alan Clark
meets Alan Partridge. Im glad hes there.
Although I dont think he will be for long.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
21
Public trans sport
ANCIENT AND MODERN
Drinking at school with Plato
My top-deck encounter with a flamboyant stranger

COSMO LANDESMAN
had just sat down on the top deck of a

number 38 London bus when I saw him
looking at me. He was black and wore a
fake-fur coat and orange leggings. There were
glittering rings on his fingers, fake diamonds
around his neck and bright red lipstick on
his lips. In his large hands, a mauve purse. He
looked like the kind of Andy Warhol dragqueen who wiggled on the wild side of life
back in the 1970s.
He made strange chirping sounds and he
batted his heavy eyelashes my way. I couldnt
tell if he was a touch crazy or just over-the-top
camp. Then he smiled at me. Uh-oh, I thought.
But I decided to be brave, so I gave him one
of my big, anxious chimp smiles back. He then
came over and plopped himself next to me.
Hi, he said, with a soft, low American
purr. My name is Melissa.
Gulp. What do I do now? I could just stare
out of the window until my stop arrived. But
no, I told myself, I will not take the cowards
way out. As an open-minded liberal who celebrates diversity and pluralism, especially in
sexuality and gender, I should take the chance
to engage with my fellow traveller. After all,
theres a brave new world of trans-this and
bi-that emerging and we uptight straight men
must learn to deal with it. So I will stay calm.
I will be cool. I will be convivial.
And then he opened his coat and showed
me his tits. My first reaction? Oh! My! God!
My second reaction? Help!
So much for liberal tolerance.
Look, I must make this clear. These were
not man boobs. These were woman boobs.
Big woman boobs, jutting out of a man. Ive
seen this sort of thing in films and documentaries and I have known cross-dressers and
drag queens. But Ive never had the up-close,
in-your-face experience before.
Naturally, as a good liberal I will defend
to the death any mans right to bear womens
boobs, but I have to admit I found it freaky.
And then I realised: I was having my
first encounter with a transgendered person. These days the transgendered are everywhere in the media, in soaps, films, fiction and
conversations But despite their cultural ubiquity, you rarely meet one. Thats not surprising considering that such people make up a
tiny percentage of the UK population. One
estimate puts the figure as low as 5,000.
Now back to those boobs. It was the way he
flashed them, with his big Ooh naughty me
22
smile, that made me wonder: was he just having some fun with me? Here was his chance
to make the guy in the suit sweat a little. And
then I felt his leg move and snuggle up to
mine. We were now joined at the knee.
No doubt he expected to have me dashing
and screaming for the exit. But some modicum of pride inside me wanted to fight back.
I felt like saying to him: Madam, I have news
for you this is one uptight straight guy who
doesnt scare so easily! After all, in the 1970s
I lived for a short time in the gay district of
San Francisco, where every form of sexual
lifestyle known to man or beast coexisted.
This was the pre-Aids era when gays were
fearless, flamboyant, in-your-face and upyour-arse American faggots, as they called
themselves; not your domesticated, bourgeois
gays of today. Youre going to have to try a lot
harder to freak out this heterosexual!
Then he put his hand on mine. OK, that
did it. Off went my internal alarm: Mayday!
Mayday! I was about to get up and get off the
bus and walk the next three stops in the rain
when I thought: its just a hand. Stay calm.
But what do you say to a black transgender
stranger in such a situation without causing
offence? Excuse me, sir err, I mean madam,
can I please have my hand back? Would he
think I was a racist? Or trans phobic? Or
maybe both?
I started to babble on about how white my
hand was and what an interesting collection
of rings he had. There followed a competition
to see who would remove their hand last. Im
proud to say I won.
The funny thing is that earlier that evening I had been on a date with a woman I had
never met before but had been fixed up with
by an expensive dating agency. She spent the
time talking to me about the horrors of her
ex-husband and showing me pictures of her
children, her home and her horse. It was dull.
My new friend spent the rest of journey
showing me pictures of himself in various
wigs and outfits and then pics of Angelina
Jolie, Rihanna and Madonna while providing
funny comments on each one. We discussed
favourite films and singers. And he told me
his mother never speaks to him: But thats
OK, I have many nice friends. I had more in
common with him than my earlier date.
Then he stood up and said, It was a pleasure to have met you, and off he went into the
rainy night. I was sorry to see him go.
Rugby and
Ampleforth schools have decided
to give their charges experience of
sensible drinking by introducing
a little alcohol, under close staff
supervision, at dinner. But, as Plato
realised, what they actually need is
experience of senseless drinking.
Platos last work, Laws (c. 350 bc),
depicts a new utopia, quite unlike
that of the Republic with its
philosopher-kings. Called Magnesia,
it lays down a detailed code of laws
which its inhabitants must obey
without question because the code
will inculcate moral goodness. A
key feature of that is self-control,
which the speaker (the Athenian)
proposes to achieve by means of
symposia, or drinking parties. For, as
the Athenian avers, Drunkenness
is a science of some importance
and I am not speaking about taking
or abstaining from wine: I do mean
drunkenness.
Plato spoke whereof he knew.
Symposia had a nasty habit of turning
into drunken riots, the symposiasts
rampaging through the streets in
public displays of their excitingly
daredevil defiance of conventional
behaviour. What Plato was suggesting
was that pupils under the influence of
drink gave their teachers invaluable
insights into their characters,
especially their capacity to exert
self-control or not. By putting pupils
into situations where this capacity
was tested to the limit, teachers
could train them, by encouragement,
threats and indeed by their own
example, to become aware of their
limits, resist temptation and so learn
moderation. Since education for
Plato was essentially a matter of
training people in moral behaviour,
symposia could therefore be used
as a means of developing that selfawareness without which true virtue
could never be attained. Drinking,
properly regulated, thus became a
means of safeguarding oneself against
depravity.
Rugby and Ampleforth,
meanwhile, are merely offering
pupils something they probably
get at home already. What
conceivable educational value is there
in that?
Peter Jones
LETTERS
A tax on empty dwellings

Sir: Both the Conservative and Labour
candidates (Battle for London, 2 January)
rightly see housing as the big issue in
Londons mayoral election this year: Ukip
and the Greens would probably say the
same. But if one travels along the river
at night and observes the large blocks
of flats that appear to be almost empty,
one wonders if there really is a problem.
Anecdotal evidence says that the owners
are mostly Chinese (but they could be
Arabs, Russians, or others based abroad),
who occupy these properties for little
more than a week or a month in the year.
We who live in London all the time would
benefit enormously if these tax-dodgers
who contribute little to our society were
made to pay an annual levy of five, ten or
20 times what they presumably now pay
in council tax. I have even heard voters
on the right argue for these properties to
be compulsorily purchased. I suggest that
all mayoral candidates should make their
position clear on this matter.
Chris Minter
London SW6
Frank Foley, in 201213. It is a wonderful

place in a picture-perfect setting.
Angela Long
Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin
The highest festival

Sir: No, Easter is not the highest festival
in the Christian year (Letters, 2 January).
Christmas is for the Resurrection
could not have happened without first the
Incarnation. But dont, however, forget
Pentecost. We could never have begun to
apprehend these mysteries of faith had it
not been for the coming of the Holy Ghost.
Revd Dr Peter Mullen
Eastbourne, East Sussex
Horses and hounds

Sir: I have never felt the need for a hanky
when reading The Spectator, until I came to
Charles Moores poignant account of the
tragic death of Tommy, his hunter (All he
did done perfectly, 12 December). I too had
a horse who took me safely over many hairy
hedges, and can understand his sadness.
Hunting and shooting show the
wonderful relationship between humans
More on Kids Company

Sir: I am sure that health professionals
and social workers will have read Harriet
Sergeants piece on Kids Company with
something close to despair (How to spot
a charity snake, 2 January). It seems to
me, as a retired NHS GP, that no one in
government bothered to ask the state sector
about the difficulties involved in helping
this challenging part of the community. Two
things in particular stand out: the need to
have boundaries, especially in regard to
unacceptable behaviour, and the danger of
creating dependency. Above all, as the state
sector has found to its cost, you need to
provide a consistent service, both in terms of
competence and longevity.
I blame the government for not accessing
the experience which is available in our
NHS surgeries and social care institutions,
which would have averted a drain of public
money into a service which was attempting
the impossible.
Chris Nancollas
Yorkley, Gloucestershire
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and their animals. It is important to

understand that wild animals live in a
cruel world where every species predates
another. If you are really interested in
animal welfare and relate it to what
happens naturally, then field sports become
part of natures scene. There is no predator
of a fox, apart from in traditional hunting.
Old, infirm foxes, who are dying lingering
deaths, are instantaneously dispatched
by hounds. The healthy ones are clever
and get away. Long may Charles Moore,
and all those who were out hunting this
Christmas holidays, continue to ride to
hounds and remember with affection their
faithful horses.
John Peake
Dorchester, Dorset
Where cars crash

Sir: Lynn Barbers understanding of
speed limits (Notebook, 12 December) is
mistaken. If the speed awareness course has
left her with the impression that country
roads have a 70 mph limit, she should
ask for her money back. The limit, unless
otherwise specified at a lower level, is 60
mph. She also suggests that the speed
limit is the main factor in the number of
fatalities on them. This is disingenuous. On
motorways, we travel in wide, straight lanes
on well-maintained roads, and all in the
same direction, which is very different from
a driving experience on country roads.
Mark Revelle
Southill, Bedfordshire
In with Ginge
Sir: It will be news to many of those who
served with, or under the command of, the
late Field Marshall Sir Nigel Bagnall that his
nickname when out of earshot was Baggie
(Drink, 2 January). Throughout the army he
was referred to as Ginge, on account of his
hair. This is also borne out by the existence
of an unofficial thinktank he convened aside
from the chain of command, but reaching
down a rank level or two to encourage
talent for the future. It was known as the
Ginger group by those who may or may not
have been invited to be members of it.
Col J.M.C. Watson (retired)
Welford, Berkshire
Postcode
From gym to chapel

Sir: Jan Morris, and your readers, might be
interested to know that the enchanting
modern chapel at Kylemore Abbey in
Connemara (From Celtic tiger to pussycat,
2 January) was formerly a drab school
gymnasium. The magical transformation
was carried out by my architect husband,
Country
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ORDER LINE: 01795 592 886
Racehorse names
Sir: Robin Oakleys piece about naming
racehorses reminded me of the story of
an unsuccessful attempt by a professional
footballer to call one Norfolk Enchants.
Just try repeating that in a Scouse accent.
Dr Christopher Goulding
Newcastle upon Tyne
23
ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Another banking review is pointless:

just carry on naming, shaming and jailing
as the Financial Conduct Authority leaned on by the Chancellor to

scrap its review of banking culture? Or did it decide pragmatically that its
resources would be better devoted to pursuing individual cases of cheating and criminality? I suspect the answer is a bit of both.
Acting FCA chief Tracey McDermott
a no-nonsense northerner and former litigation lawyer is reputed to be just as tough
as her predecessor Martin Wheatley, who
was ousted by Osborne last year, apparently for being too much the turbulent priest.
Tracey became a regulator because she
was interested in seeing if human behaviour could be improved in particular,
the behaviour of people who are not dishonest by nature but are swept along by the
tide. Clearly thats a cultural issue, and the
scrapped reviews declared aim to examine the link between excessive pay and the
propensity to rule-bend or take excessive
risk might have gone to the heart of it.
The trouble is that bankers who have
made their entire careers inside the City
silo since the mid-1980s have no sense of
how their own conduct, or their banks
fate, might have differed if they had been
offered smaller rewards and no one can
prove the counterfactual. Its an argument I
myself tried to conduct at various times with,
among many others, Bob Diamond at Barclays, Stephen Hester of RBS and Michael
Spencer of the money-broker Icap. But I got
nowhere (It depends whether you seriously
think a million pounds is a lot of money, was
the response of one trading-floor titan) and
neither would another grandstanding FCA
review dealing largely in abstractions.
Better, Im afraid, to go on naming, shaming, fining and occasionally jailing proven miscreants, however long it takes, pour
encourager les autres. Meanwhile, George
Osborne was said before Christmas to be
within weeks of appointing a new FCA
chief. Among names tipped are the politically adept Treasury high-flier John Kingman
(who might prefer to hang on for the permanent secretarys desk about to be vacated by
24
Sir Nick Macpherson) and a couple of eyecatching foreign regulators. But if the Chancellor doesnt want us to think hes gone soft
on bankers, why doesnt he confirm Tracey
McDermott in post without further delay?
to terrorist threats, is unlikely to do anything that actually makes French economic

prospects worse. Thats not much to go on, I
grant you, but its the brightest point I can
find so far in a global horizon of gloom.
Gallic optimism
Salute Sir Norman
Following another Shanghai stampede

partly technical, partly in reaction to bad
Chinese factory data the FTSE100 lost
150 points on the first trading day of this
year, having shed 1,000 points since April,
and no one I know expects UK blue-chips
to prosper in the next 12 months, especially if they have anything to do with mining,
oil, banking, supermarkets or Europe; which
is pretty well all of them. Meanwhile, your
deposit account will continue to earn next
to nothing, with few pundits expecting more
than a quarter-point rate rise from Governor Carneys ultra-cautious Monetary Policy Committee. As for the buy-to-let market,
whacked by stamp duty and tax changes, I
believe the technical term is buggered.
So whats the prudent Spectator-reading
investor to do? We shall of course address
that question regularly in our Money supplements, but at best you might hope your
nest-egg wont actually shrink in value in
these non-inflationary times. For something
a little better than that, you might like to
explore well-established peer-to-peer lending websites such as Funding Circle, RateSetter and Zopa, offering returns of between
5 and 7 per cent, typically for five-year loans.
Or, as I was doing over the new year, you
might take a fresh look at France, where
fund managers surveyed by Le Figaro are
expecting bonnes surprises in the form of
stock-market gains of up to 15 per cent: Si
les investisseurs ont les nerfs solides, ils pourront sans doute encore gagner de largent en
Bourse en 2016. Underpinning this outburst
of Gallic optimism is a feeling that austerity
is over, liquidity is ample and good businesses, especially smaller ones, are undervalued;
more to the point, perhaps, lame-duck President Hollande, now focused on responding
New year honours largely cold-shouldered

the City and the wider business world. Former Man Group and Prudential chairman
Harvey McGrath picked up a knighthood
for his social investment work, while fashion retailer Natalie Massenet and easyJet
chief Carolyn McCall became dames. But
the happiest story in the list a neat cameo
of the good that can come from crazy capitalism was that of 81-year-old Norman
Stoller from Oldham, who was knighted for
philanthropy.
Stollers father invented the tubular
bandage; the family business became part of
SSL, which also owned the condom-maker
Durex and was eventually taken over by
household goods giant Reckitt Benckiser.
In the 1980s, Norman established his own
charity to help local causes. Then in the early
2000s he decided to back a kitchen salesman from Bolton, John Roberts, who was
selling white goods via the internet. That
business became AO World, which I also
claim to have spotted before it was famous
but didnt have a chance to invest in. Stoller
did, and when it floated on the stock market two years ago at what I described here
as a slightly ridiculous dotcom valuation of
1.6 billion the shares were being chased
by every institution in London his stake
was briefly worth 120 million.
The price soon dived but Stoller had
already sold half, put 50 million of the proceeds into his charitable trust, and started
pouring cash into projects ranging from
support for young Oldham entrepreneurs
to a new organ for Manchester cathedral.
We dont give money away, we give money
back, he told the Oldham Chronicle. Its
a joy that we have the privilege of giving.
Raise a glass to Sir Norman.
VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM LONDON
Sarah Crompton is dazzled

by the gaucho malambo
dancers of the pampas
who can out-perform Usain
Bolt any day
Lewis Jones suspects that
all drug dealers even if
theyre glamorous, daring
yachtsmen are really
rather a bore
Jeff Noon discovers why
Helen Mirrens DI Tennison
is always so aloof and
defiant
Martin Gayford wishes the
mob of Bologna hadnt
destroyed Michelangelos
statue of Pope Julius II
Lloyd Evans feels the
Oliviers new musical
wonder.land would work
better in Las Vegas with a
disused Rolling Stone
James Delingpole thinks
the secret to War & Peace is
realising its just an
upmarket Downton Abbey
The Virgin of Sorrows by

Jos de Mora, 16801700
Stephen Bayley, p34
25
BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
Between the woods and the water

Timothy Snyder traces Ukraines complex history
from its classical heritage to the present day
The Gates of Europe:

A History of Ukraine
by Serhii Plokhy
Allen Lane, 25, pp. 395,
ISBN 9780241188088
Spectator Bookshop, 20
At the beginning of the historical record, the
lands that we now call Ukraine were a reservoir of fantasy. Achilles probably did not sail
from a Greek port on the north of the Black
Sea up the rapids of the Dnipro River to find
his final resting place, as some Greeks once
believed. Nor is it likely that Ukraine, or the
Pontic steppe as the Greeks had it, was the
homeland of the Amazons. That said, it was
Herodotus who supplied the south-to-north
physical geography that Serhii Plokhy wisely follows: the ports of Crimea and the coast,
the rich steppe heartland, and the forests.
For Plokhy, the formation of Ukraine is the
establishment of a unity among these three
zones, and his themes are geography, ecology and culture.
Greek culture reached Kyiv, a city on the
Dnipro where steppe meets forest, in about
1000 AD. Byzantine civilisation extended
northward, thanks to an assist from Scandinavians. The Vikings, seeking trade and
tribute, were the first to control the northerly forests, but did not master the steppe.
After attempts to intimidate Constantinople, these Scandinavians, known as the Rus,
settled on conversion. Their leaders took the
names of local Slavs and married them, and
accepted the Church Slavonic invented by
Byzantine clerics as the language of their
new faith. Yaroslav, the most famous ruler of
Rus, is associated with the law codes written
in a secularised version of that tongue. His
daughter was unhappy as queen of France,
whose culture she found revolting.
When the Mongols arrived from the east
in 1240, the lands of Rus were divided into
three zones. The westernmost principality, Galicia-Volhynia, would fall under Polish rule. The easternmost, Vladimir-Suzdal,
remained a Mongol dependency until 1480,
when Ivan the Terrible broke the Tatar
yoke. His capital was Moscow. The difference between the trajectories of Gali26
cia and Volhynia, todays western Ukraine,

and Muscovy, later the seat of the Russian
empire and the USSR, are undeniable. But
to concentrate on these two extreme variants is to miss the main story.
Kyiv and most of the territories of Rus,
as Plokhy notes, fell to the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, another powerful pagan domain
from the north. This second southward
conquest allowed for a second northward
transmission of culture. Kyivan law and its
language were adopted by Lithuania, assuring the transmission of a form of Byzantine
culture as far north as Vilnius at the very
moment that Byzantium itself fell to the
Ottomans. Thanks to Lithuania, the main
stream of the history of the lands that we
now call Ukraine flowed north and south
until the 17th century.
The axis of Ukrainian history turned
from south-north to west-east when this
classical heritage was challenged by a
latinising renaissance arriving from westerly Poland. The Polish language slowly
gained prestige in Vilnius and subsequently
throughout Lithuania. Then a Polish refor-
Between 1932 and 1944

Ukraine was the most dangerous
place in the world
mation and counter-reformation brought
sophisticated disputation to all the lands
of Poland and Lithuania, including Rus. At
just this moment, in 1569, the territory of
Poland-Lithuania was reassigned, such that
Rus was split from north to south: roughly
speaking, todays Belarus remained in Lithuania, while todays Ukraine fell to Poland.
Ukrainian nobles, clerics and peasants
faced instead the onslaught of an emerging modern European civilisation. Polish nobles brought, and many Ukrainian
nobles adopted, Catholicism, the Polish
language and principles of land management needed to transform steppe into plantation. Reformers and counter-reformers
turned the principles of disputation against
local Orthodoxy. Some Orthodox bishops
responded both by generating a union of
eastern and western Christianity at Brest

in 1596; this led to the Greek Catholic faith
that is dominant in western Ukraine today.
Others adopted western methods of argumentation and education. The Kyiv Academy, Orthodox, Latin, and baroque, was the
eastern outpost of university education.
This Polish push from the west gave
rise to a rebellion that created an opening
for Muscovite power in the east. Plokhy is
at his best when describing the Ukrainian
Cossacks, free men of what remained of
the untamed steppe. Mainly concerned to
secure legal status in Poland, they roused
the peasants through religious and social
appeals. Having failed to secure acceptable
alliances with the Ottoman empire, their
preferred ally, the Cossacks turned to Muscovy in 1654. The attack of the Muscovite
armies on Poland dug the east-west channel
of influence from the other side. A truce in
1667 left western Ukraine in Poland-Lithuania and eastern Ukraine and Kyiv in Muscovy. By now the term Ukraine was in use
for the lands on both sides.
Russia itself arose from this clash. The
rulers of Muscovy, like the Grand Dukes
of Lithuania, had styled themselves the
successors of Rus. But when its commanders encountered the Cossacks in 1654, they
met a foreign world. The two sides needed
translators. The Cossacks assumed, incorrectly, that they could negotiate with tsars
as with Polish kings. In fact, the defeat of
Poland was a prelude to the subordination
of the Cossacks themselves. The Orthodox theologians of the Kyiv Academy
offered themselves to their new ruler, the
tsar, and brought ideology to Moscow. It
was in their interest to claim that Kyiv and
Moscow were part of the same historical entity, since this justified their position as its ideologists. Thus the origins of a
Russian empire, declared by Tsar Peter I
in 1721.
As the Russian empire joined with the
Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns in partitioning Poland-Lithuania in 1772, it was beginning a process that would bring most of the
Ukrainian lands under a single ruler. Even
as it was dividing Poland, Russia drove the
THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
A 19th-century view of Kyiv Pechersk Lavra (Kievs Monastery of the Caves)

Russian School
Ottomans from the Black Sea coast and

the Crimean Peninsula. Forest, steppe and
coast would be united in the 19th century by railways, so the crops grown on the
steppe could be sold on world markets. As
elsewhere, globalisation was accompanied
by romantic nationalism, which began in
Ukraine in and around the university at
Kharkiv. Russian rulers could not at first
decide whether Ukrainian patriotism was
favourable or detrimental to their own
interests. When they decided upon the latter
and banned the Ukrainian language, important writers moved to Habsburg Galicia, the
one region of ancient Rus now beyond the
Russian empire.
In the late 19th century the industrialisation of what is now southeastern Ukraine,
the Don basin (Donbas), was undertaken by a Welsh industrialist, John Hughes.
The industrial town founded by Hughes
is today known as Donetsk. The confusion between what was Russian and what
was Ukrainian was natural in this region,
where poor Russian peasants migrated
to work in cities surrounded by Ukrainian peasants. After 1917, Soviets inherited
the dual processes of nationalisation and
modernisation. Their first idea was to support Ukrainian culture, on the logic that
Ukrainian national consolidation could
support socialist construction. Yet when
the collectivisation of agriculture brought
famine rather then plenty, Stalin blamed

the Ukrainians for the failure of his own
policy and directed the resulting starvation
to the Ukrainian republic. Meanwhile, Hitlers fantasy was to reverse Soviet industrialisation and transform Ukraine into a
German breadbasket. The second world
war was thus fought for, and largely in,
Ukraine. Between the onset of Stalins
political famine in 1932 and the departure
of German troops in 1944, Ukraine was the
most dangerous place in the world.
Soviet victory extended Ukrainian territory to the west, taking from Poland the
remainder of the territorial inheritance of
Rus todays western Ukraine. When the
Crimean Peninsula was transferred from
the Russian republic of the Soviet Union to
Soviet Ukraine in 1954, this was a concession to geography and ecology. From Russia,
Crimea is an island. From Ukraine, Crimea
is a peninsula. Soviet rulers concluded that
Ukrainian peasants would better farm
Crimea than Russian ones, and irrigated the
Crimean countryside with water from the
Dnipro. In this way the territorial unification
of Soviet Ukraine was completed.
The national idea in postwar Soviet
Ukraine, as Plokhy persuasively conveys,
took two pregnant forms. There were those
who rejected the Soviet system as such,
the guerrilla fighters and the human rights
activists. And then there were the Ukraini-
an communists, who took pride in the industry of the southeast. The Soviet leaders who
arose from the linguistically mixed Ukrainian southeast, Khrushchev and Brezhnev,
maintained patron-client relationships that
were the cement of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev managed to offend both groups,
and brought them together. When the
time came in 1991, more than 90 per cent
of the inhabitants of Ukraine, including a
majority in the Donbas and Crimea, voted
for independence.
In a relatively brief history such as this
one, certain major themes will escape.
A reader seeking a fair account of the
ethnic cleansing of Poles from Volhynia by
Ukrainian nationalists will be disappointed,
as will one seeking a social history of Jewish life and death in Ukraine. The events of
the second world war are narrated at speed,
and without connection to the larger argument. Nevertheless, the basic point is made.
The story of Ukraines emergence, as territory and society, has much more to do with
unity, first economic and then political, of
the three belts of territory already identified by Herodotus. This interpretation
leaves room for debate about just when
a Ukrainian nation arose. The national
question here is one among others, nicely
couched in historical detail, which, like that
journey of Achilles, bridges the known and
the unknown.
27
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL KIRKMAN
BOOKS & ARTS
More terrible beauty

Philip Clark
Beyond the Fell Wall
by Richard Skelton,
illustrated by Michael Kirkman
Little Toller Books, 12, pp. 79,
ISBN 9781908213297
At some point during your reading of this

book the realisation might dawn, if you
didnt already know about his creative
double life, that Richard Skelton demonstrates an unusual sensitivity to sound.
Barbed wire unfolds over a dry-stone wall,
an image which he reimagines as a mutant
stringed instrument. What harmonies would
result if all were sounded in unison?, Skelton asks a question which he is uniquely
placed to answer. Beyond the Fell Wall is a
graceful meditation upon the relationship
between landscape, language and sound,
written by the most strikingly original composer of electronic music currently working in the UK a man who spends his days
exploring and gathering in the sounds of the
fell land that borders his Cumbrian home.
The tools of his trade include digital recording devices and stringed musical instruments; Skelton improvises
inchoate melodies by zoning inside the
changeable moods of the environment,
28
recordings captured in the field

which become source material for
his visionary, shape-shifting electronic soundscapes. Ordinarily,
he releases his music via his own
Corbel Stone Press in editions
invariably accompanied by chapbooks of poetry and fragments
of text. Beyond the Fell Wall is his
first taste of distribution by a commercial publisher, and appears as
interest in the work of nature writers like Richard Jefferies, Robert
Mabey and Robert Macfarlane is
in the ascendant.
Language and landscape and
the conservation of both provided the subject of Macfarlanes 2015
Landmarks, a volume not immune
to wistfully phrased bucolic nostalgia. Skeltons fell wall is situated
near the River Duddon in Cumbria, once William Wordsworths
muse. But he is no Romantic.
Inner-city Hackney has nothing on
this riot of wanton death, destruction and decay. Nature is an aggressor that imposes its arbitrary
life-cycle on anyone (and any
thing) that gets in its way. Urban
destruction has the common decency to crumble around the whims of
the market; but rural decay operates by the code of a secretive rulebook which, of course, nobody has read.
Skelton is, in fact, so over Romanticism
that he feels able to reclaim one of its base
concepts. The original meaning of the word
sublime as understood, for instance, by
J.M.W. Turner was a physical beauty so
overwhelming as to induce sensations of
terror and inadequacy; and anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to conjure up
appropriate vocabulary to rationalise
this immeasurable force was invariably
doomed to failure.
Which becomes Skeltons starting
point. To put down words/ about this
landscape/ as if they were stones the act
cannot accomplish/ much beyond mere
ornament, he states in the first of sever-
Beyond the fell wall is the waste

a no-mans-land where sheep go to
die, separated from the fertile field
al aphoristic poems that are interwoven
through the main body-text. He resurrects
the old Anglo-Saxon word dustsceawung
as he picks through the bones of a ruined
farmhouse a doleful experience which
foretells, he asserts, his own eventual earthly absence.
Composers of electronica are prone
to obsess over mortality. Tape and digital
recording preserves sound, allowing composers to play God by breathing fresh
life through its veins. Beyond the fell wall

is the waste a no-mans-land where
sheep go to die, separated from the fertile field. Death is everywhere. That ruined
farmhouse becomes a corpse: like the eyes,
the roof is the first thing to decompose.
Embedded inside his musical structures
are out-of-body experiences, as microscopic details of dust and earth are viewed suddenly from the heavens as the perspective
abruptly and dramatically shifts.
His book concludes with an equivalent narrative turnaround. In this desolate
landscape cold, frost and ice represent an
ultimate terror, conditions under which life
cannot thrive. But in his epilogue Skelton
rewinds back to the Ice Age then marches
through history towards the arrival of man.
The life-cycle is rebooted.
A posh Del Boy

Lewis Jones
The Art of Smuggling:
The Gentleman Drug Trafficker
Who Turned Britain On
by Francis Morland, with Jo Boothby
Milo, 17.99, pp. 271,
ISBN9781908479853
Spectator Bookshop, 14.99
The Art of Smuggling comes garlanded with

fraternal encomia from Howard Mr Nice
Marks, Phil Sparrowhawk (author of Grass)
and Maurice OConnor (author of The
Dealer), but it seems the author was hardly a master of his chosen art. As Eddie the
Eagle was to skiing, so was Francis Morland
to drug trafficking. Spectacularly unsuccessful but heroically persistent, he was busted
six times and spent more than 15 years in
jail. A better title might have been How Not
to Smuggle.
I was more than once reminded of an
Only Fools and Horses Christmas special, featuring a tall Del Boy with a posh
accent. By the time of his last operation,
undertaken in his seventh decade, Morlands
reputation in the trade had fallen so low that
none of his usual associates would work
with him, and he had to rely on a young man
called Edna, a small-time dealer who turned
out to be a junkie. No longer able to afford
a yacht, he was reduced to a sailing boat
towed on a trailer.
On their way to Morocco through France,
Morland took a perverse pleasure in serially side-swiping and damaging the barriers of
the pages on the motorways, and enjoyed
the little rows that ensued. As they exited a
page on their way back, they were pulled
over by a policeman, who discovered Ednas
heroin in the car and 700 kilos of hashish in
the boat. Morland got six years.
Earlier efforts were more glamorous, and
the books opening describes his greatest
adventure. In 1969 he loaded a 47-foot ketch

named the Beaver with more than a ton of
hash and sailed it across the Atlantic to the
Virgin Islands, then up to New York City,
where he docked next to Riverside Park,
took a room at the Chelsea Hotel, and set
about selling the dope for 30 times what he
had paid for it. Inevitably, though, the Beaver was searched by customs, and Morland
was sentenced to eight years.
The narrative then turns to his early life.
Scion of a Quaker family who set up as manufacturers of sheepskin coats at Glastonbury
in the mid-19th century, and went bust in the
1980s, he was born in 1934 and attended a
school at Kings Langley run by two pacifist
sisters of Ivy Compton-Burnett, where his
fellow pupils included Jonathan Miller and
Nicholas Garland. He went on to schools
At Klosters he lost his virginity

to a Czech film starlet who had been
a mistress of Goebbels
in London, and to the Slade, which prepared him for a career as a sculptor, making
hollow fibreglass tubes and boxes of surpassing hideousness, which he would pack
with hash and send via a fine arts shipper
to New York.
His father, a Harley Street doctor, was
a friend of Arthur Lunn, the travel tycoon
who helped establish skiing in the Swiss
Alps, and through that connection he was
introduced to the sport, at which he represented England though, unlike Eddie the
Eagle, he was not selected for the Olympic
team. At Klosters he lost his virginity to a
Czech film starlet who had been a mistress
of Goebbels.
Famous names crop up occasionally
Eduardo Paolozzi, George Melly, Jeremy
Fry and Terry-Thomas, whom he met in
Ibiza, on his uppers and saying things like
rotter, cad and Crikey! but their owners are never brought to life.
As Morland repeatedly and needlessly
reminds us, he is no intellectual, and his
book was written for him by his friend Jo
Boothby, a barrister. Even so, the narrative
lacks coherence, dates dont always tally, and
he often has difficulties in getting his story
straight. His command of English idiom is
uncertain (the feeding chain), though not
as uncertain as his Irish: You hoping for
something bad for God-fearing Irish folk,
will you be? And there are too many sentences like this one: He dressed like a prosperous businessman in shiny suits and had a
belly to prove it.
He captures something of the heady
atmosphere of the 1960s, and is quite
interesting about his various boats, and
the many prisons he has stayed in; but Im
afraid that like all drug dealers (with the
obvious exception of Mr Nice) hes really
rather a bore.
Dancing like a demon

Sarah Crompton
A Simple Story: Dancing for His Life
by Leila Guerriero, translated from the
Spanish by Thomas Bunstead
Pushkin Press, 9.99, pp. 153,
ISBN 9781782271598
Anything becomes interesting if you look

at it long enough, said Gustave Flaubert.
He might have been talking about this slim
volume, which takes a slimmer subject and
inflates it to an epic of noble proportions.
The subject is unpromising. This is the
story of a man who took part in a dance
contest, runs the opening line. Its hardly one to set many hearts racing, especially since the event in question is no
glitzy Strictly Come Dancing, screened on
television for millions. Instead, Leila
Guerrieros focus is the world championships in malambo, an obscure Argentinian
dance, whose annual apogee takes place in
Laborde, a town of 6,000 inhabitants in the
middle of the flat, fertile pampas.
There is nothing much there except
fields of corn or soya and a ramshackle
stage where the contest is held. The unique
quality of the event lies partly in the dance
itself, a joust for men who take turns to
dance to music. They aspire to gaucho virtues of courage, sincerity and pride, and
perform in the traditional dress of the
gaucho, their feet bleeding due to the
intricacy and intensity of the steps, unable
to breathe because the exertion is so great.
As Guerriero explains:
The fastest 100-metre runners in the world

aim for sub-ten-second times; Usain Bolts
record stands, at the time of writing, at
9.58 seconds. A malambo dancer in full
flow moves his feet just as quickly as a 100metre runner, only he has to keep it up for
five minutes.
What fascinates Guarriero is that, in

order to preserve the prestige of the world
championship, the moment a man becomes
senior champion a feat that may have
taken him a lifetime of practice to achieve
he must instantly retire from dancing.
He becomes a man who is crowned and
destroyed in the same instant.
Its this that takes her to Laborde in
January 2011, to try to uncover the motivation of men who are fighting their way
to the top only to come straight back down
again. But then she meets the man who
will become the hero of her tale: 28-yearold Rodolfo Gonzlez Alcntara. When
she first sees him dance, it is like a coup
de foudre. The night became a thing he
pounded with his fist, she writes.
At the end, he stamped his foot with terrific
force and stood, covered in stars, resplendent,
staring through the peeling layers of the night
air. And with a sidelong smile like that of a
prince, a vagabond, or a demon he touched
the brim of his hat. And was gone.
She rushes backstage, expecting to find

a giant and instead discovers an unusually short, shy man, humble and devoted to
both his family and his dancing. From that
moment her simple story becomes a more
complicated one, as she follows his preparations for the following years contest and
begins to understand the levels of dedication that malambo demands. Faced with
Alcntaras poverty the kind where there
is no money for bus tickets and so little food
that his wife cries with hunger she confronts other questions too:
Are we interested in reading stories like
Rodolfos? About people who believe that
family is a good thing, that kindness exists,
that God is real? Are we interested in the
kind of poverty that isnt extreme misery,
when it doesnt go hand in hand with violence,
when its free from the brutality we love to
see and read about.
By the end of 149 pages, the answer has

to be yes. Although the style is spare and
although Guerriero occasionally overreaches herself in trying to describe the magnificence of the performances she is witnessing
(The first movement he made with his legs
ruffled his cribo trousers like some delicate
underwater creature), she is a mistress of
the telling phrase or the revealing detail. As
the audience awaits the performance she
says: The silence is total, as if theres been
a sudden snowfall. When Alcntara nervously prepares in the bare dressing room
backstage, he sits down, though his limbs
continue to move.
Through patient observation, she builds
a picture of this man, and the lost world he
inhabits, where the glory of winning a contest known only to a few is more important
than widespread fame, and where the power
of a dance lies not just in its technique, but
in its overwhelming spirit. It is worth looking at for a long time. And very interesting.
29
GETTY IMAGES
BOOKS & ARTS
Fishing for
sturgeon at the
mouth of the
Amur River in the
Okhotsk Sea
A separation of powers
Tom Miller
Black Dragon River: A Journey
Down the Amur River at the
Borderlines of Empire
by Dominic Ziegler
Penguin, 19.99, pp. 368,
ISBN 9781594203671
In 2014, Beijing and Moscow signed a

US$400 billion deal to deliver Russian gas
to Chinese consumers. Construction of the
Power of Siberia pipeline began last summer
on the banks of the Amur river, known in
Chinese as the Black Dragon river. It marks
a rapprochement between two powers who
have warily eyed each other across the frigid
water of the Amur, which forms the border,
for more than three centuries. According to
Beijings man in Moscow, China and Russia
are together now like lips and teeth.
In Black Dragon River, Dominic Ziegler
attempts to explain how they got there. Following the 2,826-mile course of the Amur,
the worlds ninth-longest river, the Economists Asia editor unravels the complex
history of a vast region peopled largely by
nomadic tribes but long dominated by the
great empires of Mongolia, China and Russia. It is a fascinating story that begins with
the rise of Genghis Khan, takes in Russias
eastward push over the Eurasian landmass,
and follows the rise and fall of the Manchu empire. These historical shenanigans
in a remote corner of the world, Ziegler
contends, are a key to understanding the
complex relationship between Russia and
China today.
The critical date, etched into the Chinese
consciousness, is 1689. That year, envoys of
Peter the Great and the Kangxi emperor
30
met near a tributary of the Amur to delineate the land border between the fledgling
Russian and Manchu empires. The Treaty of Nerchinsk, Chinas first with a western power, allowed the Kangxi emperor to
lay the foundations of a Chinese empire
unmatched in reach before or since. Crucially, it was negotiated with strict equality in
contrast to the unequal treaties humiliatingly forced on the crumbling Qing dynasty by European powers two centuries later.
Even though Russia went on to grab an area
of land from China the size of France and
Germany combined during the height of
its imperial expansion, Ziegler argues that
Nerchinsk tempers relations between the
two powers to this day.
In truth, Russias annexation of Outer
Manchuria in 185860 was only matched
for sheer egregiousness by Japans incursion
into Manchuria 70-odd years later. Under
Tsar Nicolas I, the Amur River came to be
seen as a site for national redemption a
repository for national myth-making akin to
western Europes New World fantasies. The
Amur was Russias Mississippi, the region
its very own Wild East. Russians looked
out at Siberia and saw America, says Ziegler. Beijing may not condemn Moscow for
its historical actions, but the fear haunting
the Russian Far East is that it is only a matter of time before China takes back what
it lost.
Todays anxious inhabitants are the
ancestors of a motley crew of migrating
Cossacks, revolutionaries, peasants and
convicts. A tale of cruelty, violence and suffering, Russias eastward expansion began
with a rush for the luxurious soft gold of
Siberian sable, worn by the elegant ladies
of St Petersburg, and the thick, sleek pelts
of sea otter preferred by Chinese customers. Then, before the discovery of todays
black gold of oil and gas, explorers found
the real thing. Enterprising smugglers blew

gold dust up the nostrils of Chinese corpses
being returned to their homeland for burial.
The book is at its best when Ziegler
takes to the road, meeting a ragtag of soldiers, drunks and gold-toothed babushkas.
Most memorable is Andrei, a shaven-headed ex-con whose arm is tattooed with a
naked woman astride a giant penis. After
a stunt that involves lobbing rocks over
the walls of Nerchinsk prison, the encounter ends with Ziegler, handcuffed and
behind bars, being investigated by the FSB
and urged to flee the town mafia. It is
intrepid stuff.
Some of the writing is superb. Putins
tour along the new Amur Highway is
likened to that of a strutting alpha dog
cocking a leg to mark his stops. On the
Mongolian steppe, The grasshoppers and
crickets fizz just as they did in high summer, but the khaki grasses rustle underfoot like old parchment. To the south,
the Gobi is not smooth and billowing
as the mind conjures a picture-perfect
desert to be, but gnarled and pockmarked
with rifts and rocky excrescences, a
checkerboard of mineral tones, verdigris
and dull purple, salt lakes and cloud shadows.
My only gripe is the bewildering noodle bowl of peoples and places. Russians,
Mongolians, Manchus, Chinese fine. But
keeping track of Evenki, Yakuts, Buryats,
Nivkh, Daurians, Dzungarians, Altaians,
Nani, Solons and Ulchi without a glossary
is a slog. And when we stray too far from
the Amur and deep into the tides of history, the narrative loses its flow. With sharper
editing, a few decent maps and a photo or
two, the empty Siberian wastelands would
have been much easier to navigate. But
these are minor complaints: a true labour
of love, Black Dragon River is a triumph.
A choice of crime novels

Jeff Noon
Its often the case that present-day
crimes have their roots in the past. Ian
Rankins Even Dogs in the Wild (Orion,
19.99, Spectator Bookshop, 16.99)
uncovers abuse and ill-treatment in a
care home in the 1980s, and the murder of a teenage boy. That terrible act
echoes through the years. When three
people receive threatening notes, and two
of them end up being murdered, the Edinburgh police fear that more will become
victims. Enter John Rebus in his 20th outing. Retired now, but as canny as ever, he
picks at the connections between the present and the past with a sure, unblinking
eye. The search for justice gives him life.
Rankin puts his books together in a
methodical way; line by line, idea by idea,
the story builds up and takes you over. His
style bone dry, observational, even distant
at times, but glinting with poetry proves
hypnotic. He writes complex plots, weaving between viewpoints, and always with a
soundtrack in mind, in this case a song by
the Scottish band The Associates. We learn
that even when the victims are dead, their
spirits can live on; they can still reach out to
exact their revenge.
In 1981, London was caught up in the
final decade of the Cold War. Francesca Kays The Long Room (Faber, 14.99,
Spectator Bookshop, 12.49) is a spy story.
We know the atmosphere from John le
Carr; ex-public schoolboys in dusty grey
offices going about their clandestine business. Stephen Donaldson is far down the
chain of command. His sole job is to listen to the recorded lives of suspected traitors and enemy agents. Hes been trained
to detect the secrets held within normal
speech, looking for clues, slip-ups, subtextual messages. One subject in particular
holds his interest: not the possible double
agent given the codename Phoenix, but his
wife, Helen. Stephen falls madly in love.
He becomes obsessed with her, a woman
he has never seen, only heard. From her
words alone he creates the perfect woman
in his mind. He steals tapes to listen
to at home, finds out where she lives, follows her.
At the same time, hes being studied
himself as a possible suspect. As Juvenal
almost said: Who listens to the listening
men? Its a great idea, even if Kays fine literary qualities do get in the way of tension
and suspense. This is the spy who loved me
from afar: unknown, unseen, untouched.
We move further back in time with
Lynda La Plantes Tennison (Simon &
Schuster, 20, Spectator Bookshop, 17).
In 1973, WPC Jane Tennison has just started her first posting with the Metropolitan
Police in Hackney. She is the well-known
detective from televisions Prime Suspect

series. She is far from that authoritative figure here: young, inexperienced, naive in life
and love. The plotting is simple, a murder
mystery solved far too quickly, and a bank
robbery; the real interest lies in the period setting, the detailed procedural work,
the everyday sexism that the young Tennison fights against, and her first romance.
Female camaraderie does battle with male
banter, all keenly observed. Im not sure
how much interest the book would hold
without Helen Mirrens face and character
in the readers mind, but as the final pages
unfold a new compassion dawns. The story
is really about the incident that created the
future Tennison: aloof, fiercely independent, ferocious when pushed. This is the
moment when young hope dies. DI Tennison was born in tragedy, her mask forged
in defiance of the feelings that threaten to
overwhelm her. Now we understand.
The spy wears his mask with pride, I
imagine, at least at the start of his career.
Later on, it eats at the soul. Helen Dunmores Exposure (Hutchinson, 16.99,
Spectator Bookshop, 13.99) is set in 1960,
and begins when Giles Holloway steals a
top-secret file in order to help the communist cause. Giles is a double agent, and
This is the spy who loved me from

afar: unknown, unseen, untouched
a homosexual, two great passions that
must be kept hidden. In danger of being
uncovered, he names his colleague Simon
Callington as the traitor. Simons life falls
apart; hes arrested, his wife and children
have to go into hiding, the press are moving in. Hes an innocent man. But even
the most innocent of us carry secrets.
The danger with literary thrillers is simple: the more literary a story is, the less
thrilling it can be. Theres a balance to be
found, and Dunmore expertly weighs both
sides. She revels in layers of concealment.
Beautiful poetic phrases, quite startling at
times, enliven the eye and the mind. She
can also be brutal when needed, and its
a woman who finally takes control. We
live daily with the actions we made in the
past: as individuals, as a nation. Often we
wish such incidents would remain dead
and buried. Reading crime novels teaches us to be wary: the grave can never be
deep enough.
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The great inscape

Christopher Hawtree
The Collected Works of Gerard
Manley Hopkins: Volume VIII:
Diaries, Journals and Notebooks
edited by Lesley Higgins
OUP, 110, pp. 722,
ISBN 9780199534005
I am 12 miles from a lemon, lamented that

bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith on
reaching one country posting. He was related to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a priest who,
in the popular imagination, would quite possibly balk at the offer of a lemon. After all,
30 years before Prufrock, Hopkins did not
dare to eat a peach, fearful of its delicious
savour when offered one by Robert Bridges
in a Roehampton garden.
Hopkins was a complex man who delighted in simple things. Our sense of his view
of the world has been complicated by the
circumstances of his publication. Forbidden to publish his great The Wreck of the
Deutschland, he largely squirrelled away,
or burnt, his work. At his funeral in 1889,
there was no body in the coffin, lest it spread
typhoid; and, three decades on, when Bridges published a collection of his poems, it was
almost as if a Harry Lime had sprung forth
to find a ready place in a changing, Prufrockdriven literary landscape. It took a decade
to sell 750 copies at 12/6, but Hopkins was
amongst us.
One of the first to relish him was Virginia
Woolf who, in a letter, wrote:
I liked them better than any poetry for ever
so long; partly because theyre so difficult, but
also because instead of writing mere rhythms
and sense as most poets do, he makes a very
strange jumble; so that what is apparently pure
nonsense is at the same time very beautiful,
and not nonsense at all.
Hopkins would be carried forth on the

tide of Modernism (Mrs Woolf herself typeset key poems: Hope Mirrleess Paris and
Eliots The Waste Land). Muriel Sparks
1963 novel of postwar life, The Girls of
Slender Means, was suffused with The
Wreck of the Deutschland, from elocution
lessons to its very ending. Perhaps the apotheosis of this came with Anthony Burgess
who, steeped in Hopkins, shared his Catholic background with a relish of music and
etymology (Hopkins notes that green wheat
has a chrysoprase bloom). Come 1973, Burgess put Hopkins at the centre of his novel
The Clockwork Testament, about the splenetic poet Enderby, whose script for a film of
the Deutschland is waylaid by the studio so
that it features naked, ravished nuns and
lands Enderby on an astonishing New York
chat show. Owing something to Burgesss
own dealings with Stanley Kubrick, it is a
31
BOOKS & ARTS
bravura performance and a perfectly serious engagement with such notions as original sin which preoccupied Hopkins.
Meanwhile, publication of Hopkinss surviving papers had shown him very much a
man buffeted, and stimulated, by the crosscurrents of his times even when in apparent retreat from them (less than charitable
comments about Gladstone are dwarfed by
an account of the French face). And now, a
century after that first slim volume, everything is being reconfigured into eight stately volumes of the Oxford English Texts. If
this one looks expensive, it is cheaper than
some secondhand copies of the earlier edition and, indeed, the parallel volumes
of his often debonair letters (his shoemakers are murderers by inches) have
quickly gone into a third printing.
The journal follows a similar trajectory
to the letters: from a comfortable, cultured
Essex upbringing bolstered, ironically
enough, by his fathers profiting from the
insurance of potential shipwrecks to a traversal of Balliol, which led to his giving up
any hopes of living as an artist in favour of
conversion to Rome, and dispatch, as a Jesuit, to many locales, some less congenial than
others.
Often intense, the journal dwells on
himself, his ailments (piles, circumcision),
so much so that it is fitting that schoolfellows turned the second syllable of his
surname into the nickname of Skin. For all
this, it is a record of the close observation
from which his poems spring (often in these
pages). Unless you refresh the mind from
time to time, you cannot always remember
or believe how deep the inscape in things is.
Central to his Scotus-inspired conception of
Gods grandeur, this view of the patterns of
creation takes many turns amid flora, fauna
and, abundantly, the shifting clouds.
He is endlessly quotable (just as the
poems read aloud so well). Now first published are his deleted records of sin (as he
saw it). Frequent, for some while, is O.H.
(old habits: masturbation). Not only fixated upon Digby Dolben, whom he met once
before he drowned, he looks at a man who
tempted me, looking at a chorister at Magdalen, and evil thoughts, and looking at a
cart-boy from Standens shop door as well
as confessing to self-indulgence at Croydon in fruit (a peach?). Odder is looking
at and thinking of stallions while, at home,
evil thoughts from Rover lying on me. 150
pages later, Lesley Higgins gives the black
retrievers dates (186475), typical of exemplary scholarship which, in particular, pays
revealing attention to Hopkinss appreciation of art.
Not only did he look, he saw. That lifted him, hovering above many contemporaries, so that even in prose he still speaks
to us: of roses, he notes, the inner petals
drawn geometrically across each other like
laces of boddices [sic] at the opera and his
32
elaboration of a peacocks feather is as fascinating as his attempt to make a duck follow

chalk lines.
Catherine Phillipss splendid 2007 study
of Hopkins and the contemporary visual world notes, for example, how waves
described and drawn in the 1872 journal each with his own moustache surface
in the Deutschland as being at one with
God (a motionable mind). The earlier edition contained a piece by John Piper which
noted: Hopkins used drawing primarily to
illustrate his ideas for himself. Rarely do
the drawings pretend to be anything but
analytical descriptions of things.
Although Piper averred that the artist
could not have got the upper hand, more
drawings will be gathered in another Oxford
volume, all to be crowned by one for the
poems. Of these, T. S. Eliot in an uncollected lecture due to have been given in
Italy early in 1940 came round to the view
that his real place is as the greatest religious
poet of his century. These journals sustain
Hopkins on that journey. The self-lacerating passages can be misleading. Hopkins is
wonderful company, and we can only regret
that he himself did not have more of it.
The wandering Jew

Tibor Fischer
Captivity
by Gyrgy Spir,
translated by Tim Wilkinson
Restless Books, 20, pp. 960,
ISBN 9781632060495
Its been a long time coming for Gyrgy

Spir. However much Hungarian writers
complain about the isolation forced upon
them by their non-Indo-European agglutinative language, the big names have always
got through, maybe to a global shrug from
the reading public, but they have made it
out. And in fact, recently, the Magyar dead
have done particularly well: Bnffy, Szab,
Szerb, Mrai and Karinthy have found many
British fans.
Though hes better known as a dramatist
in Hungary, Spirs massive novel Captivity
was published there in 2005 to great acclaim.
Well, I say thank God for plastic bags!
Now published in English (it has probably

taken Tim Wilkinson this long to translate it),
it follows the wanderings of Uri (a Jew, but
a Roman citizen) across the Roman empire,
with cameos for Christ, Pontius Pilate
and Caligula.
Two major obstacles face a writer wanting to ferret into the Caesars and the start
of Christianity: Robert Graves and Life of
Brian (oh, and maybe Ben Hur too). Spir
works harder than Graves and seems to
have amassed every fact and archaeological
detail about the Roman empire from Augustus to Vespasian, but Graves got there first
and if youve read I, Claudius and Suetonius, Spirs portrait of Roman society doesnt
offer much thats new, apart from being
harsher on Claudius.
There are some moments of black
humour with slave drivers and others, but
perhaps because of the memory of Monty
Python, Spir backs away from full contact with comedy, apart from possibly a line,
almost at the end, on page 854: There was
no necessity to write a bulky historical work
replete with facts. This is either a joke or a
staggering lack of self-awareness.
For me, the Jewish element of the novel
was the most successful. Having a bookish,
short-sighted shlemiel as your central character isnt a bad move with the reading public, and Uri in his travels to Alexandria and
Jerusalem gets to see all aspects of the Jews
of his era. But as with the Romans, Spir is
relentless in his research (if you ever wondered what a sixth of a zuz is, youll find out).
What would have been a great twoline gag about Jewish sailors resorting to
throwaway marriages in order to get laid
in a Syracuse brothel becomes a threepage discussion about the finer points of
Jewish law. Indeed if you thought Malamud, Bellow or Singer were Jewish writers, you aint seen nothing yet. Short of
the Torah, I cant imagine a book being
more Jewish. If you get to the end you must
surely qualify as some sort of honorary rabbi.
Uri ends up very briefly in prison with
Christ and the two thieves. Half of me
admires Spirs tease in flashing the Nazarene and then dumping him, half of me finds
it unsatisfying that Christ gets less airtime
than a ships dog.
You have to admire Spirs industry, because not only is Captivity a mighty
length, it is also dense. Hes really thought
about it. Oddly enough for someone who
made his name as a dramatist, hes quite
sparing with dialogue. But compared with
many of his artsy Hungarian peers such
as Eszterhzy, Kraszahorkai and Ndas,
hes practically Dan Brown in his straightforward narrative. Perhaps because of his
central European background, Spir also
gives Uri a somewhat Kafkaesque sense
of powerlessness and inability to fathom
what is going on, as the emperors, kings and
alabarchs conspire. And a lot goes on.
HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
ARTS
Moving
statues
Sculptural topplings provide an
index of changing times,
says Martin Gayford
ne of the stranger disputes of the

past few weeks has concerned a
Victorian figure that has occupied a
niche in the centre of Oxford for more than
a century without, for the most part, attracting any attention at all. Now, of course, the
Rhodes Must Fall campaign is demanding
that the sculpture its subject having been
posthumously found guilty of racism and
imperialism should be taken down from
the faade of Oriel College. The controversy is a reminder of the fact, sometimes forgotten by the British, that public statues are
intensely political.
This was clear until quite recently, at
least when one drove into the Syrian city
of Hama. There, dominating a roundabout,
was a large bronze representation of the
late President Hafez al-Assad. This was a
reminder to the inhabitants not only of who
was in charge, but also who had ordered that
the centre of the town be blown up in 1982
and somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000
people massacred. Since June 2011 that statue has no longer been there.
Here in Britain we have never been particularly statue-conscious. With the exception of Nelson on his column, few of the
monuments to the once powerful dotted
around our cities have made much impression on the national consciousness. It is hard
to imagine a memorable sculptural monument to any living British politician (though
I am a little sorry the Ed Stone was not
saved as a curiosity for the V&A).
Elsewhere, however, it is different. Images of the Assad family may have been crashing down in Syria, but 2015 was a boom year
for the statuary manufacturers of North
Korea. All over the country, in accordance
with some enigmatic political imperative,
3D representations of the Eternal President Kim Il-sung, founder of the dynasty,
are currently being removed and replaced
Monumental change: the overthrow of the statue of Napoleon I, which was on top of the
Vendme Column. The painter Gustave Courbet is ninth from the right
by those of his descendants Kim Jong-il and

Kim Jong-un.
This was the way things often went in
the ancient world. The woman pharaoh
Hatshepsut was erased from history by her
successor Tuthmosis III, sometimes by the
simple expedient of removing her name
from carved figures, a process eased by the
fact that she was often represented in male
guise. Similarly unpopular Romans, such
as the Emperor Domitian, were sentenced
post mortem to damnatio memoriae or condemnation of memory. This, however, has
2015 was a boom year for the

statuary manufacturers of
North Korea
seldom worked either in ancient or modern
times. Hatshepsut is now one of the best
known among the pharaohs, though not as
famous as Tutankhamun whose successors also attempted to eradicate his very
name.
Nonetheless, the procedure is still popular. And when one statue falls, or is discreetly moved to the outskirts of town,
another often rises. This was the case last
year in Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan.
The former president Saparmurat Niyazov
had in 1998 erected a 75-metre monument
commemorating his nations neutrality and
vaguely resembling a space rocket. This was
topped by a 12-metre, gold-plated revolving
figure of Niyazov himself, which turned so
that it always faced the sun.
Last May, the countrys current presi-
dent Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov a

former dentist had Niyazovs colossus
replaced by an equestrian sculpture of himself, cast in bronze, covered with 24-carat
gold leaf and set on a craggy spur of marble.
The whole caboodle rises to an immodest
64 metres. Meanwhile, the golden revolving Niyazov has been transferred to a suburban site.
The sculptures of the great that are relocated, historically speaking, are the lucky
ones. A worse end awaits those whose fate
is decided by an angry populus, as in the
case of a vanished work by Michelangelo,
the more than life-size bronze portrait of
Pope Julius II, which he made between the
end of 1506 and the beginning of 1508. It
took him more time to carve the David, but
even so the Julius might well have been a
masterpiece.
It was commissioned soon after papal
forces conquered the city of Bologna,
installed over the entrance of San Petronio the principal church in the main piazza and smashed to pieces soon after the
Popes enemies retook the city in 1511. The
bronze lasted such a brief time that not even
a detailed description exists. Its fragments
were melted down and recast into a cannon
that was mockingly named after the Pope
La Giulia.
In France, some statues have gone
through a similar process, sometimes more
than once having been liquefied and
remade alternately according to the political situation. Giambolognas equestrian
monument to Henry IV on the Pont Neuf
33
BOOKS & ARTS
was destroyed in 1792, early in the Revolution. In 1818, however, after the restoration
of the monarchy, it was reproduced, some
of the metal being provided by a statue of
Napoleon that had been on the top of the
Vendme Column.
The bronze Napoleon had taken the
place of Louis XIV on horseback, and after
its destruction in 1816 it was recreated once
in 1840 by Louis Philippe, and again in
a more classical style by Napoleon III.
The whole column was taken down in 1871,
during the Paris Commune, then re-erected
afterwards (the painter Courbet, who had
initially proposed the demolition, was saddled with the bill and had to go into exile in
Switzerland).
On a much greater scale, the fate of the
thousands of sculpted Stalins, Lenins and
Karl Marxs that once strode and gestured all
over the Soviet empire is an index of changing times. Several Lenins fell in western
Ukraine in 2013 and 14, but similar sculptural topplings have been going on for over
half a century. In 1951, a colossal figure of
Michelangelos Pope Julius II lasted

such a brief time that not even a
detailed description exists
Stalin was put up in Budapest to commemorate his 70th birthday. It was pulled down
by revolutionaries in October 1956, leaving
only a remnant of bronze footwear on the
plinth. This farcical vestige was the subject
of an ironic monument to the 1956 revolution entitled Stalins Boots.
Some of the homeless statues of Eastern
Europe have found refuge in theme parks
such as Gruto parkas (alternatively known
as Stalins World) in Lithuania. This seems
a good solution to the eternal question
with all sculpture: where do you put it? The
problem is especially acute with statues
that have been knocked off their plinths.
After all who knows? posterity might
like the chance to see some of these figures.
Nobody can rewrite the history. So the
leader of the Tajik Communist party, Shoddi
Shabdolov, insisted in April 2011. His objection was to the removal of a 74-foot statue of
Vladimir Lenin rumoured to be the most
colossal in Central Asia from the centre
of the city of Khujand. Mr Shabdolov was,
of course, completely wrong about that: history is being tweaked and reinterpreted all
the time. The difficult trick is to ensure your
alterations are permanent.
It is, however, much easier to destroy
a sculpture than to recreate it. The new
Colossus of Rhodes, recently proposed to
rise again in cash-strapped Greece, looks
truly ghastly. The bronze and marble Assads
and Kim Jong-uns may also be utter rubbish, artistically speaking. But many of us,
not least the Bologna tourist board, might
wish Michelangelos giant Pope Julius was
still there, arrogantly dominating the city.
34
Museums
Eurovision
Stephen Bayley
Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its
foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss
at border crossings. By the time I was 18, I
had memorised those warning notices in the
carriages: Nicht hinauslehnen; Defense de se
pencher au-dehors; E pericoloso sporgersi.
Those three different ways of saying
dont stick your head out the window, one
bossy, the other pedantic, another gently
pleading, summarised the nice subtleties of
national borders that were philosophical as
well as political.
Europe is a marvel. Its busy inhabitants
discovered private property, social mobility,
romantic love, democracy, secularism, antiquarianism, nationhood, industry, capitalism, technology, domesticity, privacy, vanity,
revolution, modernism, exploration and selfexpression.
To communicate their beliefs, to give form
to their values, Europeans created images
and objects of great sophistication. Many
of these later became known as art, adding
further levels of richness and meaning. But
because Europeans also invented aggressive
colonialism, the continents values are under
attack. And not only from the historically downtrodden and exploited. Expressing
his concern at the muddle of contemporary
European identity, Kissinger asked, If I want
to speak to Europe, who do I call?
So with nice didactic appropriateness,
the V&A opened its new European galleries at the end of last year. Arrive at the
front door and you will be told Turn left for
Europe, but thats practical guidance, not
a political directive. ZMMA architects has
stripped back an unloved and gloomy part
of the museum, ripping out crapola Ministry
of Works suspended ceilings and exposing
parts of Sir Aston Webbs imperious original while adding new finishes in bronze, walnut, stone and leather. Clarity has replaced
obscurity. With these sumptuous effects and
coruscating display cabinets meticulously
crafted by hyper-tech German bermenschen, the total effect is a little like sitting
in an S-Class Mercedes, that sovereign contemporary symbol of European authority in
matters of luxury and technology.
Intellectually, there is rather a lot going
on: the new European galleries represent a
vigorous rethink of the V&As collections.
The museum naturally has huge British holdings already freshly redisplayed,
but its European catalogue has been massively skewed towards France since the 1882
bequest of John Jones, a military tailor who,
like Henry Frick in New York, wanted to
introduce his new money to old French furniture. Whats more, there is no such thing
as a synoptic European history of art, since

historians still tend to cling to pre-Schengen
notions of national identity.
So, as a corrective to this view and also
to disguise the imbalance in the museums
collections, the new European galleries are
organised not as German, French, Italian and
so on, but by supranational themes. A portrait
of Peter the Great (with his hand wince-makingly on the head of a docile blackamoor)
supports, for example, the idea of the birth
of the baroque and the consequent escape
from the chilly authority of antiquity.
Twenty-eight volumes of Diderots and
dAlemberts Encyclopdie are on show to
explain how meticulously researched technical understanding aided social progress. By
contrast, the Commedia dellarte suggests
the roles of play and satire in the European mentality while a metal character head
of 1781 by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt has
contorted features predicting the 19th centurys fascination with psychological states.
A Dutch travelling shaving set from about
1700 speaks of an individuals independence
and his secular dedication to civilised ritual.
At about this time, bedroom and bathroom
rites and functions ceased to be semi-public
and modern notions of etiquette, still with
us, emerged.
Some of the great marvels of the V&A
are repurposed here. A vanitas painting by
N.L. Peschier of 1659 has the skull, rumpled sheets of music, ears of corn, a smouldering piece of wood; the complement to
world authority in trade and science was
the appalling realisation that its glories
were fragile and temporary. More beautifully, there is Jos de Moras Virgin of Sorrows (see p25) made in Granada in 1680,
an illusionistically beautiful head of painted
pine with glass details. This Virgin is often
loaned and, when travelling internationally,
her divinely tragic aspect is always popular.
Especially in Korea.
There are crossbows, busts, writing cabinets, tapestries, teapots and a grandiose
Meissen table fountain, but the best exhibits
are complete room sets that were always on
display, but never so startlingly as here. There
is the Srilly Cabinet from the Marais and
the lovely vernacular painted room from La
Tournerie in north-west France. But, best of
all, the tiny panelled and mirrored chamber,
perhaps from Lombardy, given to the V&A
by Sir Chester Beatty in 1955.
Here, you are down on one knee, Casanova-like, with strains of Vivaldi. You are in
a silk suit and a lace cravat and quoting to
your lover those fine words of the Marquis
de Saint-Maurice: Amongst the mad, it is
necessary to be mad oneself. When Daesh
comes to get us and exchanges Sharia for
beauty and romance, here will be my own
determined last defence of la dolce vita.
The V&As Europe is a marvellous and
inspiring place. Britain has no part of it
which is perhaps exactly as it should be.
BRINKHOFF MGENBURG
Carly Bawden as Alice and Joshua Lacey as the White Rabbit
Theatre
Alice in cyberspace
Lloyd Evans
wonder.land
Olivier, in rep until 30 April
Hapgood
Hampstead Theatre, until 23 January
Dr Seusss The Lorax
Old Vic, until 16 January
Damon Albarn and Rufus Norris present a

musical version of Alice in Wonderland. A
challenging enterprise even if theyd stuck
to the original but theyve fast-forwarded
everything to the present day. The titular
heroine, a trusting and solemn Victorian
schoolgirl, has been recast as Aly, a wheedling teenage grump who loathes her mum,
her dad, her comp, her teachers and her
playmates. I hate being me, she announces. And as we learn more about her were
increasingly struck by the sagacity of this
verdict. To escape her distress she downloads a game from www.wonder.land and
creates a cyber-self, Alice, who goes on
adventures. Hmm. A computer game. Parents have for decades been urging their
zombie children to toss these time-stealers into the waste-disposal unit. Read a
book, cry the adults despairingly. Learn
a language. Expand your world. Visit the
National! And the National responds with?
A computer game. Beside me sat a couple
of bespectacled twins, aged about 10, and

their unsmiling father who took their punishment with valiant stoicism. Occasionally,
I heard the grinding of Dads teeth.
Some of Carrolls original motifs survive but the central narrative is an underclass soap featuring a family of emotional
derelicts: Aly is a lowing outcast, her dad
is a luckless gambling addict and her mum
is a shouty cradle-filler overwhelmed by
vomiting whelps. Theres very little integration between these thumping zeroes and
the delicate, playful characters who populate Alys parallel world. The libretto is the
The ideal audience for Stoppards

new play would be a theatre full
of Sir Toms
work of award-winning ink-squirter Moira
Buffini, who has no previous experience as
a composer of verse. I salute her courage
in bidding such a spirited farewell to the
rhymesters craft on her debut. Unmoved by
Carrolls whimsical elegance we called
him tortoise because he taught us she
offers us gangsta couplets instead. Sometimes I hear my stepdad shouting/Piss off to
bed or youll get a clouting. Lovely, isnt it?
A small polish and it could be a lullaby.
The show has redeeming features. The
zingy visuals are constantly stimulating. Katrina Lindsays vividly overblown and highly stylised costumes created for Alice and
her friends are a superb achievement. Paul
Hilton exudes verve and charisma as Alys
dad and he easily outclasses the rest of the
company apart from Anna Francolini, who
turns in a scene-pilfering performance as a sexy shrewish villainess. I doubt this show will succeed
at the National. Itll mystify kids
and dismay parents who, perhaps
misguidedly, regard the original as
sacrosanct. But in a trashier cultural environment, like Las Vegas,
and with a cast featuring Madonna and a disused Rolling Stone or
two it could work well.
Heres a classic Stoppardian
conundrum. A spy being shadowed by an enemy agent enters
a public swimming-pool. After
his dip the spy goes into a locked
cubicle and swaps his trunks for
normal clothes. The agent cant
enter the cubicle to monitor the
costume change without disclosing his presence so he must accept
the incomplete evidence before
him: spy enters cubicle in trunks;
spy exits cubicle fully dressed.
But is it the same spy? To complicate matters the spy has an identical twin.
This tableau forms the opening scene in Sir Tom Stoppards
ingenious new thriller which
embraces, among other intellectual disciplines, the puzzles of quantum mechanics.
The twin in the cubicle becomes a metaphor for quantum theory, which has goaded
and bemused physicists for nearly a century.
Todays boffins have yet to advance beyond
the unsatisfactory conclusion that the same
electron can be in two places at once. This
is the only way to rationalise the unpredictable conduct of subatomic particles. And its
a fudge. But it tastes nicer than any other
fudge in the sweetshop.
The central figure in Stoppards play is
M, a female spymaster whose son plays
rugby for his public school. The touchline is
an ideal place to liaise with other spies. This
being Stoppard, M has a twin sister one
of several sets of twins in the play whose
sibling is drawn into an elaborate game of
double bluff. Equipped as I am with a steerage-class degree, Im not confident that my
homespun noggin was capable of grasping
every twist and facet of this cerebral marvel. The ideal audience would be a theatre
full of Sir Toms. Quantum theory can resolve
the logistics.
Dr Seusss The Lorax at the Old Vic is a
charming childrens show starring the excellent Simon Paisley Day. He plays a property developer confronted by the Lorax, a
lovable tree sprite, who wants to halt urban
expansion. The activist goblin is a tiny spherical orange puppet with a pair of Bismarck
moustaches that wiggle up and down. That
sounds like nothing but the effect is magical.
My son, 9, called it the second best play Ive
ever seen. (Its a musical.) I could see that
again, he added hopefully. Yeah, sorry, mate.
35
BOOKS & ARTS
Close encounters: Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson in Room
Cinema
Mad about the boy
Deborah Ross
Room
15, Nationwide
This is the week of The Hateful Eight, the

latest Quentin Tarantino film, but Tarantino
being Tarantino, there were no screenings
for reviewers, so Ive yet to see it. There also
seems to have been some falling out with the
Cineworld, Picturehouse and Curzon chains
such that their cinemas wont be showing
the film at all. Tarantino, such a pain, and if
we were to meet, which I admit is unlikely
we move in very different circles I would
have no hesitation in telling him so. Whats
he going to do? Slice off one of my ears, nail
me to the wall with the other, stroll off to
lunch, then come back and pump my chest
full of bullets? On the other hand, I could
just keep quiet, I suppose.
So, instead of The Hateful Eight, I offer
you Room, which isnt out until next week,
36
but theres nothing much else around, so

youre just going to have to live with it.
Room is based on the 2010 novel by Emma
Donoghue, which was a literary sensation
and, unlike Gone Girl, say, was seriously terrific. In a perfect world you would come to
Room in a state of complete innocence
why are Ma and Jack in this room? but
Tremblay displays a naturalness that

is miraculous and probably wasnt
learned at the Italia Conti Academy
the world isnt perfect, so Ill tell you: this
mother and her young son have been imprisoned by an abductor and the boy, who is now
five, and was born in room, knows nothing
else. I have read the book, which is a pity, as
I cant now unread it, and in some ways this
doesnt quite match up. But, that said, it is
probably good enough, and given the complex and difficult material, as good as you
might hope for.
With a screenplay by Donoghue and
directed by Lenny Abrahamson (Adam
&Paul, Frank), it opens with Ma (Brie Larson) and Jack (Jacob Tremblay) in room,
which is effectively a reinforced shed, on

his fifth birthday. Room is 10ft by 10ft and
it is Jacks entire universe. Hello, lamp, he
says every morning. Hello, table. Hello, sink.
Hello, wardrobe. Jack is lively and curious
and sometimes annoying, as five-year-olds
are. Over the years, Ma has come up with
all sorts of ways to amuse him. They draw
and read and talk and do their keep fit exercises. At night, she is sometimes visited by
Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), her kidnapper
and rapist. Old Nick is kept at arms length
narratively, as this is not his story; this is not
John Fowless The Collector. Room, in fact,
reminded me most of Cormac McCarthys
The Road, but with the mother-child bond
being taken to harrowing extremes rather
than the father-child one.
Their situation changes when Old Nick
says hes lost his job and may have to sell
the house, and as hell likely murder them
rather than set them free, Ma decides they
must escape. To this end, Ma has to tell Jack
the truth about a world he never even knew
existed, and Jack must be made to believe
her. Their lives depend on it, so these scenes
are filled with suspense, urgency and des-
peration. Room, in fact, becomes as tense as

any crime thriller at the midway mark, but
then the story takes a different turn, which
I wont describe here, but from then on it
does descend into more familiar, more sentimental, more plodding storytelling, with
violins.
The film derives much of its power, during the times it is powerful, from its central performances. Larson is both fragile
and ferocious, and her performance feels
piercingly true, while Tremblay displays a
naturalness that is miraculous, and probably wasnt learned at the Italia Conti Academy. (I dont know that for sure. Its just a
feeling I have.)
But, overall, this lacks the emotional
force of the novel, because the point of view
has been changed. The novel is narrated by
Jack, and its the way Donoghue captured
the voice of such a small child, and so brilliantly evoked his headspace, that made it
so poignant and enthrallingly special. This,
having been put in the third person, so to
speak, lacks that poignancy and enthralling
specialness. I found I missed Jack, along with
his whimsy and humour, of which there is
almost none.
Still, this is good enough, like I said, and
although it sounds like a hard watch and a
gruesome watch, there is also joy and exhilaration, and the underlying sense is always
one of compassion and humanity. So, quite

unlike Tarantino. The creep.
Opera
Double trouble
Richard Bratby
Eugene Onegin
Royal Opera House
Its scene five of Kasper Holtens production of Tchaikovskys Eugene Onegin and
Michael Fabianos Lensky is alone with
a snow-covered branch and his thoughts.
Well, not quite alone. At the other side of
the stage stands the man he is about to face
in a duel: his friend Onegin, whos apparently arrived ahead of the appointed time
and is listening to every word of Lenskys
anguished soliloquy. Except he isnt: this is
the Onegin of the present, looking back on
a tragedy in his past. Or possibly imagining it? He cant, after all, have heard Lenskys words, for the practical reason that he
wasnt there. Can he? Oh, is that applause?
The arias over.
The big idea behind Holtens production
apparently tightened up since its 2013
debut is this business with doubles. A pair
of dancers represent Young Onegin and

Young Tatyana; graceful performers, well
chosen for their physical resemblance to
Dmitri Hvorostovskys Onegin and Nicole
Cars Tatyana. They pop up throughout the
opera: Tatyanas letter scene is acted by her
double while Car, as her older self, watches,
gestures at and ineffectively pleads with
what, exactly? Her own memory?
True, theres a certain poignancy, an
added emotional charge, in seeing a character react on stage to some of the most emo-
What carried this Onegin is a

sympathetic conductor and a
superb Tatyana
tionally honest music Tchaikovsky ever
wrote. Theres a literary rationale too: by
presenting the drama as a series of memories Holten evokes the first-person narration of Pushkins novel, and points up the
deliberately episodic nature of Tchaikovskys seven lyrical scenes (Tchaikovsky
refrained from describing Onegin as an
opera). In the letter scene it sort of works, if
you discount the feeling that Holten is muscling in to dictate the audiences response
at precisely the point where Tchaikovsky is
straining with every last ounce of sincerity
and expression to get into your heart on his
own terms. Elsewhere, as in Lenskys aria,
M A RT I N R A N D A L L T R AV E L
EAST
5085
ABTA No.Y6050
4,000 years of ingenuity.

(Ingeniously captured
in 14 days.)
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37
BOOKS & ARTS
Holtens big idea simply confuses and distracts.

At times the direction is just clumsy. For
the exchange between Prince Gremin and
Onegin, Holten empties the stage of all
other attendees at Gremins ball. Since the
plot requires Tatyana to be present later,
Holten simply parks her against a nearby
column in the meantime. Other ideas make
a single effective point, and then become
background clutter. Or (literally) foreground clutter in the case of the gradual
build-up of symbolic objects downstage
a pile of books, a wheatsheaf, that branch
and, for the whole of the last two scenes,
Lenskys corpse. Fabiano deserved an ovation for that alone.
What carried this performance is what
can carry almost any Onegin, however
inconsistent the direction a sympathetic conductor and a superb Tatyana. Semyon Bychkov and the orchestra played the
score like they were in love: really in love,
with a tenderness and an eloquent, unforced
ebb and flow that struck home even more
deeply than the swooning, string-sliding passion that they deployed at the big climaxes.
Car seemed to find exactly the same spirit.
Vocally, she sounds as fresh and expressive as
Tchaikovsky who preferred young singers
in Onegin could have hoped, with shadows and gleams of light emerging naturally
as she sang.
Cars alert, impulsive acting made
Tatyanas youthful love for Hvorostovskys bored-rigid Onegin seem particularly hopeless. Tchaikovsky doesnt provide
much to work with in characters such as
Olga (Oksana Volkova earthy and animated) or Mme Larina (Diana Montague),
and Holten didnt do much to deepen them
here, though Catherine Wyn-Rogers played
the nurse Filipyevna affectingly straight,
and Ferruccio Furlanetto was richly sympathetic as a middle-aged rather than elderly Gremin (Holten devised a particularly
cruel little twist in the tale for him). Fabianos tenor as Lensky opened out from a
tight Italianate warble to a final scene that
deepened and darkened to startling effect:
a powerful, self-denying piece of vocal
characterisation.
More can be found in Onegin, however,
than Holten found a more than usually superfluous man, sung by Hvorostovsky with a consistently golden tone. Given
Hvorostovskys personal circumstances
(he is being treated for a brain tumour),
this was an occasion where human considerations outweighed artistic ones and he
was greeted with a deserved ovation from
the Covent Garden crowd, some of whom
had earlier demonstrated their sophistication by yelling bravo nanoseconds after
the end of Lenskys aria. That didnt help,
except perhaps to reinforce the suspicion
that, individual performances aside, the
whole thing wasnt quite adding up to the
38
quietly crushing experience that a great

Eugene Onegin can offer. Discount the
directorial gimmicks and this is a smart but
superficial production.
Radio
Good cop, bad cop
Kate Chisholm
One of the most shocking items of recent
news has been the bald statistic that the
number of people shot by law enforcement officers in the United States last year
was 1,136. Not died by gangland shooting,
domestic violence or terrorist attack. But
killed by those who are meant to be preventing such deaths. Many of them are black or
Hispanic. As if on cue, the World Service this
week launched a documentary series to find
out why this is happening. What are the deep
structural issues that give rise to such inequalities of experience and opportunity in
the (supposed) Land of the Free?
The first episode of The Compass:
America in Black and White on Thursday,
presented by Rajini Vaidyanathan (and
For teenage refugees the journey is

almost like a game. Each stop is a
level to complete.
produced by Giles Edwards), took a deeper look at how the criminal-justice system
operates there by talking to people who
have experienced its workings in places as
far apart as Kansas and New Jersey. In Nicodemus, for example, surrounded by fields
of corn, Vaidyanathan met Derek Moore
who is a descendant of one of the original settlers of the town, founded in 1877
by freed black slaves (and named after
the biblical figure who reminded his colleagues in the Sanhedrin that those appearing in court should be heard before being
judged). Moore had been at a party raided
by police and ended up in jail awaiting trial
on a drugs charge. The case was eventually
dropped but only after he had experienced
seven months in prison.
Vaidyanathan did find an officer in
New Jersey who understood that the police
should be seen as guardians and protectors
rather than warriors and enforcers. And he
explained how a simple change in body language can make all the difference. When an
officer tells someone to calm down, they
usually gesture towards them with their
palms down, he said. Instead the palms
should be held upwards, opening yourself
up. Its more welcoming.
We were given real insights into the
other big story of the New Year in Hashi
Mohameds programme about The Boat
Children (Radio 4, Sunday, produced by
Tim Mansel). Mohamed himself arrived in
the UK as a child migrant, aged nine, sent

from Nairobi to make a better life after his
father died. He was lucky, he says, because
he travelled with his siblings and came by
plane, flying in via Paris. The teenagers he
met in Italy, at refuges set up by charities
such as Save the Children, had usually travelled on their own, with no one to guide
them, thousands of miles, across numerous
borders, through war zones, hiding on lorries, in leaking boats, walking without food
and sometimes water. Why?
I just want a better life for my family, said Blues, who arrived in Sicily by
boat from Tripoli having travelled there
from deep inside sub-Saharan Africa. Neither of his parents could read. They gave
him money to pay the people smugglers
because they wanted the next generation
to do better.
Mohamed is struck by their bright eyes,
their optimism, their sense of adventure,
even after all the horrors they have experienced. After talking to Ali, who left Ethiopia for Europe by way of Libya, and having
arrived in Italy wanted to make his way to
Finland because he had heard that he could
get a better education there, he began to
realise that these migrants are really only
children in spite of how adult they might
appear. The journey is almost like a game
to them. Each stop is a level to complete.
Radio 3 began the New Year by renaming CD Review, or rather taking us back to
the 1960s and to Record Review, looking
backwards for the future because, we
are told, record is a more accurate reflection of the way we actually consume music
these days. We are promised no changes to
the format. Phew! Meanwhile on The Essay
(Monday to Friday, produced by Elizabeth
Allard) five experts introduced us to seismic moments in new music. On Monday
we heard from Robert Worby, who sought to
explain the significance of John Cages controversial work 433.
This was first performed at Woodstock in upstate New York on 29 August
1952. David Tudor, a pianist, walked on to
the stage, sat down, put his score on to the
piano, switched on a stopwatch, depressed
one of the piano pedals and closed the piano
lid. After 30 seconds he took his foot off
the pedal and stopped the stopwatch and
repeated these actions two more times until
four minutes and 33 seconds had elapsed.
Not a single note was played.
We call it the silent piece but in fact its
usually anything but silent. When the poet
Ian McMillan chose to have it played as one
of his discs on Desert Island Discs the producer ensured we could hear his stomach
rumbling so that we knew the programme
was still on air. And, as Worby explained, the
listeners to 433 supply most of the sound
material. We are just as crucial to its performance as the composer or the performer,
which was actually Cages point.
Peters images of our capital are neither strictly topographical as,
76 x 64 cms 30 x 25 ins
say, those by the eighteenth-century artist Thomas Shotter Boys.
oil on canvas
Criterion Theatre Entrance, Piccadilly Circus, Af ternoon Sun, 2015
peter brown
Nor, despite their clear human interest, are they quite Hogarthian.
But there is nevertheless a touch of both artists in his work.
12th January 12th February

Fully illustrated catalogue of 70 paintings 15 inc p&p.
Signed copies of Peter Browns new book are
available in the Gallery 35.
Architecturally, his paintings are exacting impressions of a

bustling community going about its business in all weathers.
Working quickly, he is able to catch the very essence of the
moment, making his pictures highly skilled impressions of everyday
city life. But each painting has a personal touch, because Peter
engages with his audience, often to such a degree that passersby
return, hoping to find themselves included within the scene.
DM
MESSUMS
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Subscribe to the worlds most prestigious art
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BBC/LAURIE SPARHAM
The edible woman: Lily James as Natasha Rostova in War and Peace
Television
Coming up for air
James Delingpole
Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew
Daviess War & Peace adaptation (BBC1,
Sundays) after all the stale rubbish that was
on over Christmas. There were times when
the yuletide TV tedium got so bad that I
considered preparing us all a Jonestownstyle punchbowl. That way, we would never
have had to endure Walliams and Friend
nor the special time-travel edition of what
everyone is now rightly calling Shitlock.
Sherlock has a terminal case of Doctor Who disease. That is, it has become so
knowing, so self-referential, so ugh!
meta that it no longer feels under any
obligation to put in the hard yards needed to surprise and delight anyone who isnt
already a committed fanboi. If youve ever
been to a Morrissey gig, you will recognise
the problem: you go hoping for a couple of
at least half-recognisable Smiths numbers
and maybe something from Vauxhall and
I, but he just cant be arsed because hes
Morrissey.
In the same way, star screenwriters Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss no longer even
pretend to be capturing the spirit of Conan
Doyles ingenious storylines. Instead, they
prefer to noodle about with wanky meditations on the torturedness of Holmess
druggie psyche, the sublimated homoe-
roticism of his relationship with the ineffably dull Watson and the curious absence
of the female perspective. Its like doing a
bad English course at one of those terrible
unis where Anglo-Saxon isnt part of the
syllabus.
Andrew Davies, on the other hand
now hes the real deal. He pretends hes a
saucy vulgarian, forever spicing up dusty
old classic texts to make them feel more rel-
Andrew Daviess dark secret is that

he is a reverential scholar in dirty old
mans clothing
evant and now (Mr Darcy with his wet shirt
clinging to his manly torso, etc.). But thats
just for the pre-publicity. Daviess real dark
secret is that hes a reverential scholar in
dirty old mans clothing. Sure, for his latest sexed up adaptation, he may have
slipped in a cheeky incest scene between
the Kuragin siblings. It wasnt particularly
obtrusive, though, and nor was it especially dishonest to the relationship they have
in the original. You cant imagine Tolstoy
turning in his grave at it in the same way
Conan Doyle most definitely is over the
finale of this years Shitlock episode where
Holmes reveals himself to be a massive fan
of the Votes for Women campaign.
War & Peace has a terrible rep among
readers as the literary equivalent of
assaulting Everest without oxygen. Actually, though, as this hugely enjoyable,
instantly accessible and gorgeous-to-look-
at adaptation rightly understands, its actually just an

upmarket Downton Abbey
with more palatial houses,
weirder characters and rather
less interest in what happens
below stairs.
Thereve been quibbles
about the casting but Ive
none at all. Lily James looks
perfectly edible as Natasha
and will, Im sure, hit her
stride when she stops having to pretend to be 13 years
old. James Norton is just the
job as the pointlessly goodlooking, worthy and stolid
Andrei, whose main function
is to look great in a guards
uniform, miraculously escape
death in battle, and set off all
the lunacy of Tolstoys other
bizarro creations.
Pierre, for example. How
totally away-with-the-fairies do you have to be to create someone like that as one
of your main characters? In
episode one, as in the book,
bespectacled, running-to-fat
Pierre spends his whole time
blinking bemusedly at the
strange turn of fate that has transformed
him into one of Russias richest men. And
no wonder! Pierre really doesnt deserve
it. Hes a drippy wet idealist whose ghastly
revolutionary dreams are going to be the
ruin of future Russia. Paul Dano captures
this oddity just perfectly.
The older character players Ade
Edmondson as gaily bonkers Count Ilya
Rostov, Jim Broadbent as crustily bonkers
Prince Bolkonsky, Brian Cox as leathery
General Kutuzov, Stephen Rea as scheming
Prince Vassily Kuragin, etc. are better
still, but I dont think this is a poor reflection on the younger cast. Its more a case
of how things are in Tolstoy as in life: the
young are more beautiful but less interestingly formed.
Now to the most important bit: war.
Because the book has been necessarily
so compressed, it isnt immediately clear
which battles are which. Im assuming that
the scruffy skirmish we saw at the end of
part one was merely the holding action at
Schngrabern. If so, that would explain why
it lacked the epic drama and jaw-dropping
scale of that rather brilliant Waterloo they
recreated last year in Jonathan Strange & Mr
Norrell. My dad has got it into his head that
it was all a disappointment. I disagree. First,
as one of the series military advisers has
pointed out, armies were so quickly being
destroyed in that theatre that the troops in
each new battle often had only rudimentary
training. And secondly, I shall reserve judgment till Austerlitz and Borodino.
41
NOTES ON
Cirencester
By Daisy Dunn
verywhere you look in Cirencester

theres another animal: a cockerel, a
hare, a sheep or a skulking lioness. I
rather fancied the big beasts that chase each
other lustily around the Roman mosaics in
the Corinium Museum, home to one of the
liveliest archaeological collections Ive ever
seen.
The Romans of first-century Cirencester
(Corinium) strike me as having been a
fun-loving, optimistic bunch so much of
what they left behind honours Bacchus, the
wine god, and Mercury, god of commerce.
They made some fantastically modern
things. One could easily mistake the model
of Mercurys cockerel (the herald of a new
day), found in a Roman grave, for a Picasso.
Beyond cockerels, historic Cirencester owed much of its success to its sheep.
Both Cirencester Parish Church of St John
Baptist and the former abbey were built
with money raised from trade in local wool.
From the 14th century, wool was sold in
what is now the Corn Hall, transported to
Kent, and shipped thence to Europe. The
Florentines were particularly partial to it.
Cirencesters enterprising sheep-shearers
must have had little difficulty in gathering
enough wool. The Cotswold Lion, traditionally the favoured breed of sheep, is one of
the hairiest ever seen on Countryfile. These
Unchanging: St John the Baptist parish church
lovely shaggy creatures served the Romans

and Elizabethans of Cirencester exceptionally well with their famous golden fleece,
but there are only a few thousand left in the
UK. Could we not strive to breed more?
Perhaps then the branch of the Edinburgh
Woollen Mill on Cirencester market could
be replaced with something more Cotswoldsy. Id call it the Lions Fleece.
I last went to Cirencester with my family,
who wanted me to see the parish church
where my mother was baptised. The churchs
fan vaulting is out of this world, particularly in St Catherines Chapel, north of the
chancel, where it acquires a life of its own
as light issues in through the stained glass
window beneath. Look up to see traces of
bright 15th-century paint on the upper walls,
creeping out from beneath the whitewash.
Seeing central Cirencester with ones
elders, one learns how little has changed in
50 years. On Black Jack Street the former
offices of the Gloucestershire Echo, the local
paper that now operates from Cheltenham,
have been transformed into a restaurant,
but the internal structure of the old building
is the same as in the 1960s. Two newspaper offices were separated by a gangway
leading, via the loos, to a court at the back.
My grandfather, who held one of his first
jobs on the paper, still talks fondly of his
days here, reporting on local news and shuffling along winding streets of antique shops.
Wander from Octavias Bookshop, a
haven for children and Moomins to
the market and down Dyer Street with its
Georgian buildings of oolite ashlar, the
attractive limestone which forms the bedrock of Cirencester. Then drive south-west
for half an hour to Westonbirt arboretum.
Even in midwinter, you may be lucky enough
to spot a hare or game bird among the trees.
Though not, sadly, a Cotswold Lion.
Travel
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42
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4-14 September 2016

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BOOKS
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Is my wifes obsession with the

astronaut Tim Peake a harmless
fantasy?
Dear Mary, p53
High life
Taki
OK sports fans, what do Dame Vivien Duffield and Evelyn Waugh have in common?
The answer is absolutely nothing, so why
start 2016 with such a dumb question?
Waugh was short and round and so is Vivien,
but apart from weight and height there are
no similarities. So why ask? Easy. I was reading about a dinner party Waugh gave for
Clare Luce in November 1949 at the Hyde
Park Hotel. He later wrote to Nancy Mitford complaining how much money the dinner had cost him, and how Clare in my
not so humble opinion the greatest woman
of the 20th century had failed to write a
thank-you note.
Waugh was a hell of a writer but a pretty
piss-poor human being. He was petty, a closeted tortured gay with seven children. And
from what Ive read, he was always down on
his fellow man and on life in general. Pretty
depressing stuff. Why give a dinner and then
complain that it cost too much? I thought
of Waugh because Vivien gave a dinner last
week for more than a hundred. Surprisingly,
she sat me on her right, and insisted I stay on
her right even after I gave a speech that was
close to the bone. Mind you, unlike la Luce,
I wrote a thank-you note.
The Mecca for the new rich and famous,
as Gstaad is often called, turns into a horror show when its packed to the gills, especially when it snows only indoors. But as I
write the white stuff from heaven has been
falling non-stop for three days and nights,
which should make the commonplace interesting. By this I mean that Gstaad is a ski
resort where there are more aprs-skiers
than skiers. When the good white stuff falls,
the place becomes interesting. Otherwise its
like being in any glitzy resort anywhere in
Europe.
Although it sounds soppy, this was a real
family treat for me. Both my children and
my two grandchildren are here, and the
place is always buzzing. It took me a long
time to get it, but family life can be as satisfying as chasing you know what every
night until the early hours. Old is the operative word. It has its good points, and being
surrounded by ones family is one of them.
An added bonus was the arrival of my NBF
Harvey Weinstein, the only producer nowadays making movies that are watchable and
often high-minded. In fact, hes the only one
that relies on storyline and talented actors
rather than explosions and car chases. He
previewed one of his latest, Hands of Stone,
based on the life of the great Panamanian
boxer Roberto Durn, a very interesting
choice for a film given that Durn is better known for saying no mas (no more) in
his fight against Ray Leonard than for the
myriad knockouts he inflicted on his opponents before that. Robert De Niro is perfectly cast as Ray Arcel, his trainer, and the
What do Vivien Duffield and Evelyn

Waugh have in common?
volatile, hot-tempered and very anti-American Durn is perfectly portrayed. You dont
have to be a boxing fan to like this flick.
This month, of course, will see the trial
of a family that, again in my not so humble opinion, should have been put on trial a
generation or two ago. The vast Wildenstein
art empire is to face scrutiny by the French
for tax evasion. When I was very young, a
surly, grumpy and perpetually complaining
man always seemed to be on the next table
in New Yorks El Morocco. He was always
accompanied by a woman, and was forever
asking the best matre d ever, Angelo, to
remove me because . . . I will let you, dear
readers, guess why.
Needless to say, Angelo never did remove
me, but made him move more often than
not. Daniel Wildenstein croaked in 2001 and
his son Guy is now facing the music. The Wildenstein family has often been accused of
shoddy practices, but the art world is noth-
And thats why he wants to blow up

buildings. . .
ing but shoddy as far as Im concerned, so

cheating on taxes would not exactly ruin an
already shady reputation.
Forty-five years ago, in Paris, I played
non-stop polo against Guy Wildenstein, who
was the best mounted player Ive ever come
across, although quite shy when mixing it or
taking a man at high speed. His brother Alec
died some time ago, he being the hubby of
the woman whos had more plastic surgery
than Ive downed bottles of vodka. I will not
go into detail about the trial because it will
all come out in the wash. But I will make
a prediction. Guy Wildenstein was awarded the Legion of Honour in 2009 by Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French president, and
I hate to think what he got it for. The family is accused of having moved and hidden
assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars,
and has been suspected of doing so for donkeys years. Yet Sarkozy rewards him with
the highest award.
People such as the Wildensteins do not
go down. Especially in France. Sarkozy is a
glitzy, shady man who wants to be president
again. Nothing will come out, everything will
be denied, and the meek shall inherit the
earth. And Wildenstein will get to keep his
hundreds of millions.
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
The new year was two hours young. My boy

and I were side by side on a row of three
fixed plastic seats in the corridor of the accident and emergency ward. The both of us
had come directly from our respective New
Years Eve festivities, as had most, if not all,
of the patients swaying, hobbling and staggering up and down the corridor or being
wheeled in on trolleys by porters. Croc-shod
nurses and nursing assistants weaved briskly and nimbly around and between these
injured drunks, doggedly preserving their
calmness, concentration and courtesy.
We faced the wide doorway to the row of
curtained cubicles in which the urgent cases
were being assessed by a single, exhausted
45
LIFE
doctor. A medley of deep, soulful groans

issued from behind the purdah of wipe-clean
curtains. Also female sobbing. A 50-year-old
woman whose pasty, gelatinous thighs were
restrained by tight elastic stocking tops and
suspenders paused before my boy and said,
Do you want to see my puppy? A battered,
unconscious face on a trolley pushed by a
porter rolled smoothly by. Following closely
behind were two hatless policemen wearing
stab vests. The nearest copper bore a plastic
bag containing the chap on the trolleys ear.
He handed it to the nurse standing beside
the large computer screen at the nurses
station. She held the bagged ear up to the
light and said, Ere, ere! To which the copper replied, Ear today, gone tomorrow!
Inter-professional laughter. The bloody face
on the trolley between them slept on. The
elderly porter was a model of probity, awaiting further instructions with a poker face.
I turned to my boy and lovingly studied his mothers dark features. I said, You
look really pissed. And youre not exactly
sober, he said. I said, You took a bit of a risk
driving here, didnt you? Im glad you did,
though. He said, If youd been stopped, by
the look of you, theyd have locked you up
and thrown away the key. Suddenly panicstricken, I said, Wheres my hat? Have you
seen my hat? Its there, on your lap, said
my boy, drily.
An emaciated man aged about 50 with
cuts and contusions to his head and face
(nothing much) aligned himself approximately with the plastic seat between us and
collapsed backwards into it. From then on
he sat perfectly still with his hands resting
together in his lap and his chin resting on
his collarbone. He looked like a man whose
entire life has been one disaster after another. He was drunk, certainly. He couldnt have
been any drunker. But over and above that
we sensed something fundamentally tragic
about him. It was palpable. Whether caused
by improvidence or poverty or poor diet or
addiction or mental illness or rotten luck or
sheer inability to comprehend this complicated, ever-changing world was of course
impossible to say. Perhaps he was a Manchester United supporter, whispered my boy.
A nurse came out from behind the counter of her information station and said to
this man, Whats your surname, Alan?
Alan mumbled at his hands that his name
was Alan. Alan what? said the nurse. But
Alan couldnt or wouldnt say. Whats your
address, then, Alan? Again he couldnt say.
He had a vagrant air so perhaps he had no
fixed abode. If you give me an address, love,
well get a taxi to take you home. Alan,
mumbled Alan.
I asked my boy if he would like a coffee from the vending machine. He said he
would. I asked Alan if he fancied one. No
response. I went and came back with a cappuccino in each hand. Taxi for Alan! I said,
nudging his foot with mine. As I did so, one
46
of the cardboard vending cups imploded,

sending a surge of scalding coffee over the
lower half of Alan, who didnt react in any
way. I ran for paper towels and as I dabbed
the froth from his trousers, Alan spoke. He
said, Jubilee Gardens. I nipped over to the
information station and reported these precious words to the nurse.
Then my mums familiar face cruised
past on a trolley pushed by a porter. It
looked weary. She was progressing from
the disorderly queue of trolleys next to the
entrance, to the corridor next to the casualty bays. She pursed her ashen lips and lifted
her eyebrows simultaneously at us. The porter parked her five yards away and departed.
My boy and I went over. She was still bleeding, she said (shed haemorrhaged at home
at a quarter to twelve), but she thought that
perhaps it wasnt a lot like before. Mum was
parked in the corridor for three hours before
a vacancy occurred in one of the treatment
bays. Under the circumstances we thought
this wasnt bad going.
Real life
Melissa Kite
Start at the back and try to pass as many

horses as you can, said the trainer, as we
stepped on to the all-weather track at Lingfield.
It was only a practice gallop but I couldnt
have been more excited if Id been lining up
for the Gold Cup.
Darcy had been loaded on to the lorry that
morning with eight other horses for an outing
to see if any of them happened to show signs
of what the trainer calls blistering speed.
Jonathan loves Nordic crime drama so much

hes decided to become a serial killer.
Unless your horse has blistering speed

you can forget going under rules. When
it comes to horses there is what I think is
fast, which is how it feels on the training
gallops every morning, and there is actually
fast the speed achieved by the 1 per cent
of thoroughbreds who win races out of the
1 per cent of thoroughbreds who reach the
racetrack.
So I think Darcy is fast but then I get
to Lingfield early one morning, as the
course officials are preparing for the day
and the lorries emblazoned with names like
Godolphin are pulling up at the back of the
stands and a few stray spectators are drifting about.
And before the track has a proper race
on it, I get to gallop Darcy almost for real.
There was no doubt about it. I was

doing the routine to The Birdie Song
She seems to know she is somewhere significant when she comes off the lorry. She
jogs behind her stablemates on tiptoes
along aisles marked out with white racing
rails until we come to the pristine beige allweather track, which is so wide and long it
seems to go on for ever.
We do a circuit in canter to warm up and
the trainer explains the plan. We will canter
to the starting post, then begin to race each
other. Im to stay at the back with another
jockey alongside me who will tell me what
to do as we go along.
Everything is fine in canter, until we
come to where the race starts and then the
other horses suddenly find sixth gear. And
the jockey alongside me yells, Keep up!
But Darcy is stuck in fifth gear and I
dont see that there is much I can do about
it. We are going flat out, I am told later, but
I cannot believe how slow it feels. I feel like
I am galumphing on the slowest horse in
the world. How is it possible to be going
this slow? I think. Every stride seems to
take an age as the horses in front pull away
from us.
We amble along at the back hugging
the inside rail for what seems like an eternity with the jockey upsides me yelling his
head off about how I mustnt let her get left
behind. And I shout back that theyre not my
legs so I cant make them go any faster, can I?
Oh, to explain, something else I hadnt
realised before, you can hold very long and
involved conversations while racing a horse
with the jockey next door to you.
I had always thought movies like Seabiscuit were stretching credulity in scenes
where two rival jockeys start nattering away
to each other as they race along, but you
really can do that.
Im whingeing like mad at the jockey
upsides me the whole time about how I
dont understand any of it.
And then just when I think our slowness
cant get any more unfathomable we pass a
LIFE
marker post and he yells, Now!

Now what? I yell back. Now start passing horses, he shouts.
Shes not passing horses, I yell back, convinced our slowness is becoming epic, recordbreaking, majestic, the stuff of legends.
Ask her! he yells.
The trainer had primed me about this.
The whole point of the exercise is to see
what happens when you ask for that extra
spurt of speed needed to overtake. Can the
horse find it?
So I asked her. By which I mean I started doing a very strange, instinctive flapping
with my arms and legs until I felt like a turkey and within five seconds my limbs were
jelly and I had no strength left to hold me on
and the only way not to fall off was to grip
the saddle with my knees as I flapped. There
was no doubt about it. I was doing the routine to The Birdie Song.
And as I performed this undignified
dance, Darcy said Oh why didnt you say?,
found sixth gear and overtook two horses.
Youre going too wide! the other jockey
yelled, as I over-steered her to the outside
rail like an old granny on the motorway
veering across three lanes.
We still felt like we were in slow motion
as we passed the finishing post third from
last. Just to reassure you, Darcy was absolutely fine. I was done in.
48
Long life
Alexander Chancellor
This is an uplifting story of survival with

which to usher in the New Year. At Stoke
Park, my home in Northamptonshire, I went
the other day into the West Pavilion, one of
two 17th-century buildings that were once
connected by colonnades to a country house
that burned down in 1896. It is one large
room with a single entrance door, originally
used as a library, then in the 19th century as
a ballroom, and nowadays only for wedding
receptions and the like. It is kept locked and
protected by a burglar alarm, but inside was
a hen pheasant scurrying frantically about.
I wondered how it could possibly have
got in there until I looked up and saw a jagged hole in the large Venetian window overlooking the park and splinters of glass all
over the floor inside. There had been shooting in the park that day, and the bird, in desperate flight from the guns, had clearly flown
into the window at high speed and simply

burst through it. But it appeared completely unhurt. I cornered it and tried to catch it,
but it gave me the slip and took off again
in renewed terror towards a kind of hidden minstrels gallery high up above the
entrance door, where it crashed into another
window, cracking another pane, and fell out
of sight on to the gallerys floor. There was
silence and no sign of movement.
I felt that this time there could be no
doubt that it had done itself in, though I
couldnt be absolutely sure until I had found
a tall ladder and gone up to see for myself,
which at my age would have been rather a
hazardous enterprise. But I returned an hour
or two later to find continued silence and so
was confirmed in my conclusion. Next day,
however, the woman who organises these
wedding receptions, who had gone into the
pavilion to show a prospective wedding couple round, telephoned to say that there was
another pheasant running around in there.
Another pheasant? That seemed unlikely. The only way another pheasant could
have got in there would have been by flying through the same hole in the window
that the first pheasant had made, and that
would have shown rather more intelligence than pheasants are usually capable of.
And so it turned out. When a glazier came
a day or two later to repair both windows,
and climbed a ladder into the gallery, there
was no body to be seen. The original pheasant, having lain there unconscious for who
knows how long, must have recovered, flown
down to the floor again and taken the opportunity, when the entrance door was opened
once more, to make a more decorous exit on
foot. Now, I like to think, it has celebrated a
happy new year with its friends and boasted
of its extraordinary survival.
I cant say I am pleased about the damage it did to my windows, but I feel I should
blame the shooters more than I should
blame the bird; and I very much hope that it
survives at least until the end of this month
when the shooting season ends. This cant
be guaranteed, for the gentry of Northamptonshire, when they are not hunting foxes,
spend most of their time in the winter shooting birds. But not all of them are very good
shots, and pheasants, though they get killed
in their thousands, are also extremely hardy.
My shooting days are long over, but I can
still remember many times when a pheasant plummeted from the sky to the ground
only to get up again later and run off into the
undergrowth.
Pheasants are not among the most lovable of creatures, and there probably
wouldnt be many of them around now if
they were not bred in their millions for the
purpose of being shot. Their number is now
about one third of the human population of
these islands, but although they are rich in
protein, few people want to eat them, and
huge numbers of them end up buried in
mass graves. Their main function is to satisfy

the social aspirations of the urban nouveaux
riches, which is not a good cause for which
to die. So we should rejoice at the odd case
of a pheasant that survives against the odds.
The turf
North-south divide
Robin Oakley
The well-bred Sea Pigeon, who had finished seventh in the Derby when trained
at Beckhampton by Jeremy Tree, was later
bought by the wine and spirits importer
Pat Muldoon to go into training over hurdles with Gordon W. Richards in Penrith.
The story goes that on his first foray out of
his new northern yard, the gelding who was
to become one of the greatest hurdlers we
have seen stopped still in shock at the sight
before him: it was the first time he had ever
encountered a cow.
Many find the north is a different place.
As one who cut his journalistic teeth in Liverpool, I go with Tennysons verdict: Bright
and fierce and fickle is the South/ And dark
and true and tender is the North. Now racings authorities are worrying about jump
racing in general and about jump racing
in the north in particular. A review led by
the former Cheltenham managing director
Edward Gillespie has studied such problems
as the decline in field sizes, the drop in jumpracing attendances and horse ownership
compared with the Flat and the widening
gap between Flat and jumping prize money.
In particular, it noted that there is no aspirational meeting in the north other than Aintree at the end of the season to encourage
northern owners and trainers and that the
north has seen a sharp decrease both in the
share of jump horses in training and its share
of top-quality horses. A British Horseracing
Authority task force will seek remedies.
Life has been tough for northern trainers
for some time. No northern-based handler
has been champion trainer since the 1983
84 season. Fred Winter took his last title to
Lambourn in 198485 before his former
assistant Nicky Henderson, also based in the
Valley of the Racehorse, gained the first two
of his three titles in the next two seasons.
Starting in 198889, Martin Pipe then took
the title to Somerset for 15 years, punctuated only by the two seasons David Nicholson, based in Gloucestershire, triumphed in
199394 and 199495. Paul Nicholls became
champion from Somerset in 200506 and
has won every year since with the exception
of 201213, when Nicky Henderson wrested
the title back after a break of 26 years.
It has been a similar story in the saddle.
His association with Pipe and with the top
owner J.P. McManus helped the phenomenon Tony McCoy, based in Lambourn, to
be champion jockey throughout his 20-year

career, which ended last year.
As it happens, Edward Gillespie and I
are collaborating on a history of jump racing
since the Arkle days and just as his review
came out I had been concentrating on the
1970s and 80s. We tend to forget now that
in those days northern trainers and riders
figured frequently as championship contenders. Red Alligators Grand National victory in 1968 helped clinch a trainers
title for Denys Smith. For three years from
1978, Peter Easterby took the trainers title
for Yorkshire and the next three championships, too, went north as Michael Dickinson
rewrote the record books. Had he not then
been tempted away to Flat racing, Michael
would surely have collected plenty more
titles and he and Easterby faced hot competition on their home patch. The canny
Arthur Stephenson, based in Bishop Auckland, Gordon W. Richards in Penrith, Jimmy
FitzGerald in Malton and Ken Oliver in
Scotland turned out winners aplenty in big
races. Ron Barry, Jonjo ONeill and Tommy
Stack all won the jockeys championship
while based in northern yards. In the Cham-
Sea Pigeon stopped still at the sight

before him of a cow. It was the first
time he had encountered one
pion Hurdles most exciting period it was
the northern-trained stars Night Nurse and
Sea Pigeon who dominated and no horse has
figured more gloriously in Grand National
history than Red Rum, trained not far from
Aintree by Ginger McCain.
Of course, there is more money in the
south and money does tend to buy success. If
George Osborne can make a go of his northern economic-powerhouse plans, no sector
of society will be happier than the racing
community to test if the trickle-down theory
works. But when you look at the 200-horsepower winner factories on the Flat established by the northern-based yards of Mark
Johnston and Richard Fahey (and I concede
that with all-weather racing through the winter they may be part of jumpings problem
in attracting new owners), it should not be
impossible for a northern yard to get back
into the jumping big time. A single crowdpulling hero like One Man or Red Rum can
work wonders.
Nobody who witnessed the blood-tingling battle to the line between Cue Card
and Vautour for the King George VI Chase
at Kempton on Boxing Day or who shouted
home Sprinter Sacre and Sire De Grugy as
they repeated the thrill the next day could
doubt the excitement and emotion topclass jumping stirs among the sporting public. What we must do is to see that a little
more of the jam is spread around the smaller tracks who keep the show going between
the peaks, and that bit really is down to the
review bodies and task forces.
Bridge
Janet de Botton
Call me nuts but on 29 December I left
lovely, sunny, delicious France for the fairly unlovely Royal National Hotel to play
the year ends last event, the one-day Swiss
Teams. God it was fun. I hadnt played a
hand in 12 days (and counting) and we
were all in a great mood (unusual), rested
(unheard of) and winning our matches big
(lovely). We needed only to avoid a massive
defeat in the last match and the title was
ours. We drew my friend Simon Gillis, playing with Norwegian world champion Erik
Saelensminde. Were we complacent? Yes.
Were we awful? Yes. And did we lose big?
Yes again. Take this disaster:
Dealer South
E/W Vulnerable
z A 10 9
y KQ
XA 7 3
wA J 6
z Void
yA9 8
X Q 10 6
w KQ 3
6 5
2
2
N
S
z 87
y42
XK J
w8
z KQ J
y J 10 7
X5
w 10 9 7
6 4 2
9 8 4
5
3
5
West
North
East
1y
Pass
x
4z
Pass
All pass
South
Pass
2z
The wK was led at both tables and won in

dummy. Declarer played a trump to hand
getting the bad news and a heart to Wests
Ace. At this point the two defences diverged;
my team mate (who shall remain nameless)
cashed the Queen of Clubs and gave his partner a ruff. This was a hapless defence completely ignoring the need for a fourth trick.
Declarer is now in total control. He can win
any switch, draw trumps, and his hand is good.
At my table Erik gave the situation its
due attention, and found the best shift of
a diamond. South won and tried to knock
out the wQ by playing a small Club from
dummy. Simon, in Easts seat, realising how
important it was to keep control of the hand,
ruffed in and forced South with a Diamond.
After this excellent, dynamic defence,
declarer was helpless: if he didnt draw
trumps, East would score another ruff, while
if he did, he would not have an entry back to
hand while the wQ was still with West. One
down and a well-deserved victory for Simon
and his boys.
49
LIFE
Chess
Winters tail
Raymond Keene
The London Classic, the end of the
million-dollar Grand Tour, was something
of a damp squib. A surfeit of draws meant
the event largely boiled down to who was
most effectively able to despatch the cellar
dwellers Anand and Topalov. Top scores
out of nine were as follows: Carlsen, Giri
and Vachier-Lagrave 5 1/2 each, Aronian 5,
and Britains Mickey Adams 41/2.
What to do about such a preponderance
of drawn games? In the past, whenever the
threat of draw death has loomed, some
charismatic genius Alekhine, Tal,
Kasparov has emerged to revitalise the
game at the top. But the reigning
champion and overall Grand Tour winner,
Magnus Carlsen, effective as he is, simply
does not possess this kind of dynamism.
Proposals to reduce the tedium of draws
in elite events have included Nigel Shorts
plea to convert stalemate to a win, the 3
for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss
scoring system, as well as banning certain
openings, such as the Petroff and the
Berlin defences. A similar system has been
adopted for championship draughts.
Now the Dutch enthusiast Patrick
Wintershoven has come up with the idea of
injecting an element borrowed from poker
to enliven chess at the top and eliminate
draws entirely. Patrick suggests counting all
draws as black wins, while simultaneously
giving White a large time advantage, say
two hours to one, to complete all moves. At
the start of each game players bid secretly
for their preferred colour. If one chooses
white and the other black, then the game
proceeds. But if both choose the same
colour, then an auction begins, with time
allotment as the bidding currency. So after
several rounds of bidding, one protagonist
might secure the black pieces, but might
have expended 45 minutes of thinking time
to achieve the goal. Meanwhile, the auction
loser would revert to having draw odds
Competition
Nostradamus
Lucy Vickery
Diagram 1
WDWDkDWD
DpDWDp0W
pDnGWhWD
DW)WDPIP
WDWDWDWD
)WDWDWDW
WDWDWDBD
DWDWDWDW
against him, but would retain his original
time allotment of two hours. This
proposal deserves serious consideration.
Here is the conclusion of one of the
world champions two London wins.
Carlsen-Nakamura, London Classic 2015
(see diagram 1)
Carlsens bishop pair on an open board grant
him a large advantage in this endgame. His
next move creates a path for his king to enter
the black position and to further destabilise the
black knights. 53 h6 Nh7+ 54 Kh5 Nf6+ 55
Last weeks solution 1 ... Rxf3

50
Neuter genders are declared at birth;

Oceans empty, seasides are extended;
Skinnys out. A whistle welcomes girth,
The fat are fted; diets are suspended.
Religions blend: one God becomes another.
As graveyards overflow, cremations law.
Dictatorships decide who was your mother.
All email melts (what no man can restore).
Kg5 Nh7+ 56 Kh4 gxh6 57 Kh5 Nf6+ 58

Kxh6 Ng4+ 59 Kg7 Nd4 60 Be4 Nf2 61
Bb1 Ng4 62 Bf4 f6 Played to prevent
Mammon is a gameshow. Churches fail.

Undead, the Queen outlives the Prince of Wales.
Whites bishop from coming to g5 but now this

pawn will inevitably drop. 63 Be4 Nf2 64
Sofa bargains hog the Easter sales.

Bill Greenwell
Bb1 Ng4 65 Be4 Nf2 66 Bxb7 Nd3 67

Kxf6 This sacrifice is necessary as after 67 Bd6
Nxf5+ 68 Kxf6 Nxd6 69 cxd6 Kd7 Black draws.

67 ... Nxf4 68 Ke5 Nfe2 69 f6 Blacks
hamstrung knights have no chance to counter
the advance of Whites c- and f-pawns. 69 ...
a5 70 a4 Kf7 71 Bd5+ Kf8 72 Ke4 Nc2
73 c6 Nc3+ 74 Ke5 Nxa4 75 Bb3 Nb6 76
Bxc2 a4 77 c7 Kf7 78 Bxa4 Black resigns
Correction: the solution to the puzzle in the

12/19/26 December issue should have read
1Bc4 Rxc4 2Re8+ Qxe8 3Qg7 checkmate.
PUZZLE NO. 390

Black to play. This is a variation from CarlsenGrischuk, London Classic 2015. Carlsen won but
this weeks puzzle shows how he could have gone
wrong. Black has two ways to win immediately.
Can you find both key moves? Answers to me at
The Spectator by Tuesday 12 January or via email
to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of 20
for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please
include a postal address and allow six weeks for
prize delivery.
In Competition No. 2929 you were invited to

submit an acrostic poem containing some predictions for the next decade, in which the first
letters of the lines read NOSTRADAMUS.
Although the forecast was bleak no
surprise there a welcome smattering of
more left-field prophecies made me sit up
and take notice: Richard Dawkins finds God;
A and Z amicably switch; Durhams new
bishop wins Miss UK; the Chilcot report is
met with universal approval.
Commiserations to near-winners Sam
Gwynn, G.M. Southgate, Brian Allgar, Katie
Mallett and Alan Millard.
Those that just beat them to it are printed below and earn 15 each; the bonus fiver
belongs to Bill Greenwell.
WDWDWDWi
DWDWDPDW
QDW0WDW0
0N0WgWDn
PDWDPDrD
DWDWDWDP
WDW)WDPD
DWDW1RIW
Norfolk is washed away in freak high tide;

Obesitys the national badge of pride;
Storms and El Nino flatten half of Wales;
Train lines in France are blocked by giant snails;
Russia starts all-out war on state librarians;
America bans nuts and vegetarians;
Drought wipes the humble olive off the earth
And decimates the struggling euros worth;
Mosquitoes grow immune to pesticide
(Uzbekistans the only place to hide.)
Sunspots turn frenzied and the Earth is fried.
D.A. Prince
New flags, new faiths tell less truth than we need.
Oppression wears the mantle of goodwill.
Serenity succumbs as cities bleed.
Theology becomes our cheapest thrill.
Radiant hope attends the darkest deed.
Assassins pray for yet more gods to kill.
Division and subtraction rule the day;
Addition has no space to multiply.
Mendacity and greed keep truth at bay
Until the springs of arrogance run dry.
Sages who speak in riddles still hold sway.
Chris OCarroll
News from future world events:
Osama has risen,
Something Trump has said makes sense,
Tony Blairs in prison.
LIFE
Roys lads reach the knockout stage;
Arsne squares the circle.
Dalai Lamas jealous rage
As Putin marries Merkel.
Murdoch spins and pulls the strings,
Ups the ante, runs the rings:
Some things are eternal.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Crossword
2242: Defeated
by Columba
Nets will intertwine to make

One vast, all-comprehending trawl
Some will strive but none shall break
The mesh that will entangle all.
Clues in italics are cryptic indications of partial answers. In

each case, the indicated part
must be 5 39 (five words in all)
to create the full answer to be
entered in the grid. Definitions
of the resulting entries are supplied by unclued lights.
Replacing human wit and skill

Automata the more progress:
Diabolic schemes will fill
A vacuum formed by idleness.
Most fearsome of the fates I see,
Unimaginably dark,
Shall be this last catastrophe:
W.J. Webster
New measures will be found to stamp out crime.
On newly furbished railways, every train
Shall, guided by computers, run on time.
The NHS will start to work again.
Robots will service all our worldly needs.
Airports will ban those endless fenced-off queues.
Dictators will repent of all their deeds,
And Amazon will pay their fiscal dues.
Most of each summer, Britain will stay dry
Under a carbon-neutral friendly sky.
Scots will get independence. Pigs will fly.
Brian Murdoch
Never is the new now.
Oval is the new round.
Surrender is the new how.
Tossed away, the new found.
Running is the new walk,
Argument the new talk,
Daytime is the new night,
Anthems are the new psalm,
Murky is the new bright,
Urgent is the new calm.
Somehow all this serves us right.
Robert Schechter
13
12
13
14
15
16
17
21
22
26
28
29
33
34
35
38
40
41
NO. 2932: DOUBLESPEAK
Weve done this for prose but not for poetry,

so lets have up to 16 lines of verse that are
the fruit of a collaboration between two
well-known poets, living or dead (please
specify). Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on
20 January.
10
11
16
18
20
22
19
21
23
24
26
27
25
28
29
31
30
32
33
34
1
6
14
17
Across
Film second struggle (5)
Riding from base left by
soldier? (8)
Proclaim payment,
engaging former top spies
(10)
New advance in
enlightened state with ace
hospitals (9)
Turkey acceptable in
marketplace (4)
Heather in nunnery
missing energy of office
work (8)
Gold, ounce in firm palm
(6)
Bearded knight seized by
dread deserted (5)
Turning saucy, are people
boring? (11)
Sets of nine seen and
sorted (7)
Saw disturbed state of sea
(3)
Serviceman promoted
before trouble (7)
Hard treatment of a onenation party (11)
Smooth, soft passage (5)
Book little less positive
about revolutionary tax (6)
Shabbiest witness, second
in council (8)
Goddess in ornate clothes
(4)
Change scale a bit to show
region of water (9, two
words)
Shelter you found in home
having colourless features
(8, hyphened)
Scots post special order (5)
12
15
37
Not much certain in the stars:
Order, chaos, earthly wars,
Summer snows and winter drought
Turning climates inside out.
Refugees a grave addendum,
Ayes or Noes for referendum.
Death picks off some rich and mighty,
April sees a Queen turn ninety.
Monthly moons and not one blue,
Unsurpassed space station view
Shows our world its self anew.
Alanna Blake
37
35
36
38
39
40
41
Down
1 Hundred in glut
2 Moving down low via
membrane-covered
opening (10, two words)
4 End of term
7 Sloth supporting spine in
tree (7)
8 Matter occupying barbaric
horde (5)
9 Measured strength of
songbird, valued (8)
10 A carol in a broadcast
relating to priesthood (9)
16 Alloy in groove cut by
men, not badly (11,
hyphened)
18 Power within me rises (3)
19 Object enthralling learner,
thick rhizome (10, two
words)
20 Managing trick during
opening line (9, two words)
23 Charm in admission (8)
25 Eggs broken by alien
27 Motion of horse when
unhappy disrupting
exercises (7)
28 Channel unknown south of
Saskatchewans borders? (3)
30 Current speed of light
31 Risk in North America
splitting Republicans (5,
two words)
36 Slave ends in the
catacombs in Rome (4)
A first prize of 30 for the first

correct solution opened on 25
January. There are two runnersup prizes of 20. (UK solvers can
choose to receive the latest
edition of the Chambers
dictionary instead of cash ring
the word dictionary.) Entries
to: Crossword 2242, The
Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street,
London SW1H 9HP. Please
allow six weeks for prize
delivery.
Name
Address
Email
SOLUTION TO 2240 : VARIOUS SOURCES

The thematic term (formed by letters cut from definitions,
17, and letters added to definitions) is SCISSORS-ANDPASTE. Unclued lights are types of scissors (9, 25, 31, 32)
and paste (1, 6D, 20, 28).
First prize L. Coumbe, Benfleet, Essex
Runners-up Stephen Gore, Seer Green, Bucks;
C.R. Haigh, Hassocks, West Sussex
51
LIFE
Status Anxiety
The lefts
war on science
Toby Young
ow much longer can the liberal left survive in the face of

growing scientific evidence
that many of its core beliefs are false?
Im thinking in particular of the conviction that all human beings are
born with the same capacities, particularly the capacity for good, and
that all mankinds sins can be laid
at the door of the capitalist societies
of the West. For the sake of brevity,
lets call this the myth of the noble
savage. This romanticism underpins
all progressive movements, from the
socialism of Jeremy Corbyn to the
environmentalism of Caroline Lucas,
and nearly every scientist who challenges it provokes an irrational hostility, often accompanied by a trashing of their professional reputations.
Indeed, the reaction of so-called free
thinkers to purveyors of inconvenient
truths is reminiscent of the reaction
of fundamentalist Christians to scientists who challenged their core beliefs.
One such Charles Darwin figure is
the American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. He has devoted his life
to studying the Yanomam, indigenous people of the Amazonian rain
forest on the Brazilian-Venezuelan
border, and his conclusions directly
challenge the myth of the noble savage. Real Indians sweat, they smell
bad, they take hallucinogenic drugs,
they belch after they eat, they covet
Napoleon
Chagnon
was accused
of fomenting
tribal wars,
deliberately
infecting
Amazon
Indians with
measles and
paying his
subjects to kill
each other
and at times steal their neighbours

wife, they fornicate, and they make
war, Chagnon told a Brazilian journalist. His view of the Yanomam
people is summed up by the title he
gave to his masterwork on the subject: The Fierce People.
Chagnon is a key figure in a new
book by Alice Dreger, an American
academic who has spent the last few
years investigating attacks on heretical scientists by the grand inquisitors
of the left. Dreger used to be something of a Torquemada herself. To
defend the interests of people born
with both male and female genitalia,
she used many of the same questionable techniques to discredit opponents
in the medical establishment. Then, in
her words, she became an aide-decamp to scientists who found themselves the target of activists like me.
In 2000, in a book called Darkness
in El Dorado, the journalist Patrick
Tierney accused Chagnon and his collaborator James Neel of fomenting
wars among rival tribes, aiding and
abetting illegal gold miners, deliberately infecting the Yanomam with
measles and paying subjects to kill
each other. Shockingly, these charges
were taken at face value and widely
reported in liberal publications like
the New Yorker and the New York
Times. (A headline in the Guardian
read: Scientist killed Amazon Indians to test race theory.) Many of
Chagnons colleagues turned on him,
including the American Anthropological Association, which set up an
task force to investigate. Chagnon
was not allowed to defend himself
and this task force published a report
confirming several allegations. As
a result, Chagnon was forced into
early retirement. In her book, Dreger

summarises the thought crime that
turned him into such a plump target:
Chagnon saw and represented in the
Yanomam a somewhat shocking
image of evolved human nature
one featuring males fighting violently
over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualised drug use and ecological
indifference. Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed,
naturally peaceful, environmentally
gentle rainforest Indian family.
In a 50,000-word article published
in 2011 in a peer-reviewed journal,
she painstakingly rebutted all the
charges against Chagnon, detailing
the various ways in which Tierney
had fabricated and misrepresented
the evidence. Chagnon has now been
exonerated and resumed his career.
Dreger has not abandoned her
own liberal convictions. She believes
the search for scientific truth and
social justice go hand in hand and
ends her book with an plea to academic colleagues to defend freedom
of thought. But her title, Galileos
Middle Finger, suggests the progressive left may not survive these clashes
with heretical scientists. In comparing
Chagnon to the Italian astronomer,
she implies that the church of progressive opinion will face the same
fate as the theologians who insisted
the Earth was the centre of the universe. Eventually, the truth may prove
too much. I recently interviewed Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist,
and hes confident that the liberal left
can survive without the myth of the
noble savage. Im not so sure.
Toby Young is associate editor of
The Spectator.
MICHAEL HEATH
52
Spectator Sport
Add Ben Stokes to the
worlds greatest batsmen
Roger Alton
n Sunday morning a friend

texted: You watching the
big bash, or the domestic stuff down in Australia? On one
channel, you could be in Cape Town
as Ben Stokes slaughtered the bowling attack of the worlds No. 1 side;
one click and you were in Brisbane
at the Gabba to see the Heat play the
Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash T20
League. What a joy to be in South
Africa well, via TV for the most
extraordinary innings of this century.
It was quicker than most T20 matches
and much more brutal.
I thought there were just three
great batsmen in the world right now:
Steve Smith, Joe Root, and A.B. de
Villiers. With Kane Williamson thereabouts. But now add Ben Stokes. You
would pay to watch all of them: but
maybe now Stokes, like Botham, will
bring the City to a halt as he walks
out to bat. Lets hope so.
If every day of Test cricket had a
Ben Stokes in it, the grounds would
be packed as Newlands was. But
the crowds for the first Test at Durban were desultory. And if every day
If you aint got

a strip club in
your bedroom,
you aint no
cricket player
of Test cricket had Hashim Amlas

dogged 201 off 477 balls then even
Test addicts like me might think twice
before shelling out. In the final Test
against India in Delhi last year South
Africa scored 143 in 143 overs; yes a
run an over. Amla batted an incredible 244 balls for his 25. At Newlands,
Stokess 258 came off 198 balls. Outside the Ashes, even Aussie crowds
for Tests are poor. Only in England
do we deliver big crowds. It needs to
be addressed or this great format of
the greatest game will start to wither.
Meanwhile, Chris Gayle, the
West Indies opener turned T20 cash
machine, got a ferocious rollicking
for some leery remarks to an alluring
interviewer. He said Mel McLaughlin
had terrific eyes and would she like a
drink later? Not on, said a chorus of
largely simulated outrage.
For heavens sake, Gayle is a
graduate of the Tyson Fury school of
political correctness and a man not
known for his aversion to the opposite sex. At home in Jamaica he has
a lap-dancing pole in his bedroom,
mirrors on the ceiling and once said:
If you aint got a strip club in your
bedroom, you aint no cricket player. Hmm, lovely. But what did anyone expect him to chat to Mel about?
Chinese growth figures? Personally, I
would rather this outrageously gifted
player got a kicking for leaving the
West Indies in the lurch, as their Test
decline grows ever more melancholy.
ere is something to celebrate:

in the top ten of the Premier
League are Leicester, West Ham,
Crystal Palace, Stoke and Watford.
What a great time to enjoy football,
even if a Chelsea/Liverpool meeting
is just a mid-table clash now. Arent
we all getting tired of the Travelling
Wilburys of management: Hiddink,
Ancelotti, van Gaal, Mourinho and
the like? Its why we admire Alan
Pardew and Mark Hughes. Get out
the rattles and rosettes and lets be
having you.
But I cant imagine many women
going weak at the knees over Pardew
or Sparky Hughes. Unlike Zinedine
Zidane: news of his appointment to
manage Real Madrid has made some
girls I know start taking a keen and
hitherto unknown interest in La Liga.
Expect the viewing figures for Skys
Spanish football coverage to leap.
ow heres a tester for Eddie

Jones, the new England rugby
coach whose early days have been
blighted by the usual cack-handed management of the Twickers
stiffs. With David Strettle playing
brilliantly for Clermont (as well as
Steffon Armitage continuing to put
in his usual hard shifts for Toulon)
will Jones insist that he can pick the
best players even if based in France?
I hope so. And while were at it, lets
introduce a tries-scored bonus points
system for the Six Nations.
DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Q. Although I have met most

of the fellow occupants of my
building at residents meetings,
we dont socialise. However our
newest neighbour, a Canadian,
has now emailed all the other
women in the building offering
to open up her own flat for a
bonding evening of drinks and
nibbles and where we would
watch a movie together. She has
asked each of us to name some
dates in 2016 when we would be
free so she can co-ordinate an
evening which suits everyone.
From what I have gleaned at the
residents meetings, I dont fancy

the sort of hen night atmosphere
which she might be envisaging.
I dont want to drink and eat
nibbles and watch the movie she
mentions and I can already tell
there is only one other woman
in the block I could conceivably
have anything in common with.
I cant pretend I am busy for the
rest of my life but neither do I
want to seem weird or unfriendly.
J.P., Edinburgh
A. It is a mistake to be stuck up
about this. It is very good to bond
with neighbours for all sorts of
reasons. However you can bond
lite by spending only the early
part of the evening with your
fellow residents, although dont
admit that is your intention when
you suggest some dates with
enthusiasm. On the night, turn up
as early as possible and be friendly
as you sip your drink while

engaging in general chat about
jobs and transport. One hour in,
you should receive a prearranged
phone call from a friend. The code
should be that if you are enjoying
the event, you will say, Can I ring
you back, Im at a party? If not
enjoying it, you should say, Well,
as you know, Im at a party but
if its really necessary, Ill come
back and help you. Turning to
your host, shake your head sadly
and say what a shame you have
to leave such a good party but
youve got to go back to your own
flat and counsel a flaky friend/
niece whos staying. When they
ask what the problem is, reply in
exasperated tones Dont ask!
Then slip pleasantly away.
Q. My wife is obsessed by Tim
Peake and repeatedly watches
every broadcast he makes from
space. As we both work at home

and are together 24 hours a day,
I cannot help being aware of this
new passion. Am I wrong to feel
jealous? Or is she indulging in
a harmless fantasy of going into
space? How can I put a stop to
this compulsion?
D.I., London W11
A. It is likely her harmless fantasy
involves you, not her, going into
space. No woman wants to see
a man about the house all day.
Marianne Faithfull moved out
of the home she shared with
Mick Jagger at the peak of his
magnetism because he was there
all day and she needed some head
space. Give your wife some head
space by getting a room to work in
from 40 a day using the website
Vrumi. Rent out a room in your
own house to recoup the outlay:
www.vrumi.com.
53
LIFE
Food
That sinking feeling
Tanya Gold
he Feng Shang Princess is a

floating Chinese restaurant
on the Regents Canal in north
London, which flows from Little Venice to the Guardian to Limehouse,
and in which they quite often find
corpses in shopping trolleys and vice
versa. I do not know if the restaurant
moves, and could theoretically travel to Paddington. I hope it does. The
Regents Canal is an ugly stretch of
water, which reeks of sexual violence
and cheap alcohol and cyclists, and it
is desolate; place it near London Zoo
and you have a peculiar cognitive
dissonance that could only happen in
London: a tapir near a canal featuring a floating Chinese restaurant. It is
apparently Paul McCartneys favourite Chinese restaurant, which I found
insane until I thought about it.
Its marketing tic is this: it is a Chinese restaurant on a boat. It could be
a falafel restaurant on a milk float, or
a sushi restaurant in a cement mixer,
or a hotdog and champagne restaurant in a Reliant Robin but it isnt. It
serves Chinese food and it floats!
The boat is two storeys high, with
I have no
metaphor for
rice. It doesnt
deserve one
a peaked roof, like a tiny piece of the

Forbidden City, and very red: dragqueen red. It is lit up like a minute
Las Vegas or the aftermath of a collision between a Honda Civic and an
Audi S1 Sportback on the M3. It looks
like the musical box in Camberwick
Green; that is, it seems magical, but
since Camden, its parish, looks like
a Victorian sex shop that has burned
down and taken every teenage gay
and resident goth who came from
Frome to be a goth, but died with
it, magic is easy to evoke. There is literally no competition, whatever Foxtons might tell you. I live in Camden
and I know.
The Feng Shang Princess is, aesthetically, a Wizard of Oz, or a politician, or a relationship; magic melts
with intimacy. There are bins on the
sloping grass; they smell of congealed
fat. The bridge has a dull green awning, a telephone number and a plastic
menu. The canal here turns north to
Camden market and the tattoo parlour called Evil from the Needle; the
Feng Shang Princess is therefore on
a watery cul-de-sac, on which float
algae and duckweed and Diet Coke
Weve narrowed it down to 60 million suspects.
cans. It is grandiose with its lanterns

of paper and its vicious reds; it smells
of damp.
It is, so far, a vivid and interesting restaurant for a TV movie James
Bond, or even Time Bandits, because
this could be any year between 1975
and today. It is almost a themed restaurant. Unfortunately the food is
terrible, and semi-duplicitous. We
order crispy aromatic duck. The waiter brings the piece of duck, and then
removes it. Then he comes again with
some duck chopped up. It is now cool,
and without skin. I am not sure it is
the piece of duck he brought initially;
was that the show duck? And has this
duck the imposter duck, the duck
in the iron mask, the other duck?
been cooling in the kitchen, waiting
for this moment? Is it a Sidney Sheldon duck? Does it have a novel? We
let it go. Sweet and sour chicken and
a grilled lamb chop in teriyaki sauce
are very ordinary, if expensive. Rice is,
well, you know, rice. I have no metaphor for rice. It doesnt deserve one.
If you seek good, hot, cheap Chinese food, do not come here. Seek
out the Golden Dragon in Gerrard Street, Chinatown, even if they
do bring the bill when they, and not
you, have decided it is time for you
to leave.
Otherwise, because human stupidity is without end, the Feng Shang
Princess won an OpenTable Diners
Choice award last year: because, on
a canal basin near Alan Bennett, it
floats.
Feng Shang Princess, Cumberland
Basin, Prince Albert Road, London
NW1 7SS, tel: 020 7485 8137.
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Chattering classes
When the much missed Frank
Johnson (19432006), once
editor of The Spectator, wrote in
1980 that the peculiar need for
something to be frightened about
only seems to affect those of us
who are part of the chattering
classes, I think that those of us
meant himself, and me and you,
dear reader. It is true that, as
the Oxford English Dictionary
remarks, the phrase was freq.
derogatory of a social group
freely given to the articulate,
self-assured expression of (esp.
liberal) opinions about society,
culture, and current events. But
between the establishment of the
literati (in John Evelyns day)
54
and the unexpected development

of the twitterati (in our own), no
commentator like Frank could
avoid being a member of the
chattering classes, nor could many
of his readers.
An event of 2015 for us
chatterers was the updating of
Fowlers Dictionary of Modern
English Usage by Jeremy
Butterfield, in succession to RW
Burchfields well-judged revision
of 1996. It is a grown-up guide,
both descriptive and prescriptive,
like Fowlers. (Butterfield notes

that to pronounce macho as
macco sounds absurd, and he
warns against sounding the z
in chorizo as if it were the zz in
pizza.) When he gets round to
chattering classes, a new entry, he
calls its inventor a right-leaning
British political commentator,
but does not give his name.
In the account of the phrase
the Establishment (which he
retains from Burchfields edition),
Butterfield does mention Henry
Fairlie as the author of a piece in
The Spectator of 23 September
1955 on the whole matrix of
official and social relations within
which power is exercised. He also
follows Burchfield in noting the

advent of the phrase young fogey
in the 20th century. Some people
nowadays, I find, hardly notice
that young fogey was a jocular
variant on old fogey. Young fogeys
were exemplified by writers
in The Spectator in the early
1980s who leant towards tweeds,
proper sausages, architectural
preservation, bicycles with
wicker baskets and the Book of
Common Prayer. Charles Moore,
A.N. Wilson and Gavin Stamp
were among them, and Alan
Watkins commented on the social
trend. Anyone can make up a
word, but few see it confirmed by
Dot Wordsworth
usage.
Booking now open for

the Spring Wine School
A great opportunity to be tutored by the best in the wine business. For eight weeks
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Starts Wednesday 2 March at 6.30 p.m.

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Corbyn is untouchable now James Forsyth My transsexual seduction Cosmo Landesman

9 january 2016 [ 4.00

BAHRAIN BD3.20. CANADA C$7.50.

www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

Through the roof

hen David Cameron said this

nomic recovery the strongest in Europe

For as long as the era of

the spectator | 9 january 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

George W. Bushs administration did when

The last testament of Charb, p7

From NYE to A&E, p45

BOOKS & ARTS

Portrait of the Week

Diary Man Booker judging;

Politics The untouchable Corbyn

The Spectators Notes

Lord Janner; Bishop Bell; Siri

28 Philip Clark Beyond the Fell Wall,

The Collected Works of Gerard

22 Public trans sport

24 Any other business Banking

the spectator | 9 january 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

Dear Mary and the astronaut, p53

46 Real life Melissa Kite

35 Theatre wonder.land; Hapgood;

48 Long life Alexander Chancellor

Hundreds of British Muslims have

37 Opera Eugene Onegin

50 Chess Raymond Keene

38 Radio Kate Chisholm

41 Television James Delingpole

52 Status anxiety Toby Young

As Eddie the Eagle was to skiing,

53 Sport Roger Alton

the spectator | 9 january 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

Timothy Snyder is the

Tom Miller is the author of

Tibor Fischers novels include

t was the turn of north-east Scotland to

rejected for the Home Retail group, which

slamic State fighters attacked the

t least 34 bodies were washed ashore

the spectator | 9 january 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

o far my responsibilities as the 2016

the TLS, was the chair and Hilary Mantel

served on my first literary prize jury

the spectator | 9 january 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

raise the money for a book bus it will

he one question Im always asked

Amanda Foreman is, most recently,

Corbyn is untouchable now

here have been few more pathetic

vidual mandate, to shield them from the

Events of the past few months have

Presented by Isabel Hardman

What is so frustrating for veteran Labour

Hourly updates from Parliament and beyond.

t the end of next week, a judge

dead person who has, in effect,

ur country neighbour, Edward

accusation against Bell (one of the most

the spectator | 9 january 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk