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 Why flee France? Lionel Shriver I command you see The Favourite Deborah Ross
5 january 2019 [ £4.50 www.spectator.co.uk [ est. 1828

Europe’s
gatecrashers The populists are one election away from
reshaping the EU, says Fredrik Erixon
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JULIE
BURCHILL

Rough crossings
I
t has been a messy start to the new
year for Sajid Javid. For months now,
migrants using small boats have been
landing in Kent, usually no more than a
dozen people at a time. For a country that
receives up to 2,500 asylum applications a
month, this falls short of a national crisis. It
was quite absurd for Tory MPs to talk about
deploying the Royal Navy to fend off a few
dinghies, and absurd for the Home Secre-
tary to rush back from his holiday to handle
the non-crisis and declare it a ‘major inci-
dent’. It is a minor incident, but may turn
into a major one if the government panics.
Migration patterns change, as do the
methods. Over the past few years we have
seen the rise of a global people-trafficking
industry, a new evil that is responsible for
the deaths of thousands of migrants. Most of
those arriving by boat are not fleeing war but
are seeking a better life and — crucially —
have enough money to pay for the journey.
As Sohrab Ahmari explains on page 14, some
traffickers now offer a full service across
Europe. The increase in wealthier Iranian
migrants wanting to cross the Channel has
led to the start of a new kind of trafficking.
Britain certainly has an obligation to
help refugees, but it will not do so by playing
the traffickers’ game. For years, police have
found migrants stowed away in lorries or
shipping containers. Many perish during the
journey. The determination is awe-inspiring:
these migrants are risking death in order
to start at the very bottom in Britain. The
human instinct is to help, especially when
families with young children are involved.
Angela Merkel’s offer in 2015 to wel-
come all Syrian refugees to Germany was
an understandable human reaction but the
results were calamitous. Mrs Merkel unwit-
tingly presented the traffickers with a new
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
business model: to get people to Germany
by hook or by crook, with the promise of
citizenship. Some 3,500 died in the Mediter-
ranean that year, with 5,000 perishing the
next year and another 1,500 last year.
The Australians found that turning back
the boats was the only way to end deaths in
their waters. And they accompanied it with
a clear message: no matter how strong the
claim for asylum, anyone who enters Aus-
tralia illegally by boat would be turned away.
So there was no point in paying traffickers
for the journey.
The old rules for refugees, under the 1951
UN Refugee Convention, are no longer fit
for purpose. They were written to stop a
repeat of the pre-war horrors when several
The people trafficking industry
is based on the premise that
migrants are willing to risk death
countries turned away Jewish refugees, but
there are now far better ways of helping to
save lives. Britain has led the way in this,
spending money on refugee camps in Jordan
to help refugee families — the vast major-
ity of whom seek temporary shelter rather
than permanent resettlement, in the hope of
eventually returning home. It comes down
to a humanitarian calculation: Britain can
help 30 refugees in other parts of the world
for the price of accommodating one refugee
here. We ought to take our fair share of refu-
gees, but this can only ever be a tiny gesture
towards solving a global problem. Using the
aid budget to help people overseas, as Nor-
way does, saves far more lives.
We also need to understand what is driv-
ing the great migration. War is one element,
but a minority of those applying for asylum
in Europe are fleeing conflict zones. Most
come from places like Pakistan and Nigeria,
seeking a better life. The lengths that they go
to ought not to puzzle us. A few generations
ago, people from Britain were risking death
on crowded boats crossing the Atlantic in
search of better circumstances. Between
1847 and 1851, the death rate was 17 Britons
for every 100 who attempted the crossing
— a risk that was seen to be worth taking.
Today, in the Mediterranean, the death rate
is closer to five for every 100. Our stories are
not so different.
The people trafficking industry is based
on the premise that migrants are willing to
risk death. And that they will do what they
can to find money — as much as $15,000 —
to pay for the crossing. As the poorer world
becomes more developed, there will be no
shortage of people willing to make the jour-
ney and able to pay for it too. Some 17 mil-
lion emigrated from the UK between 1846
and 1924. It was legal, of course, but the 8,000
Iranians granted asylum in Britain over the
past seven years have also used legal routes.
We can expect those seeking a life in the UK
to choose whichever methods are most likely
to lead to success.
This new people trafficking industry must
be thwarted. Britain has an obligation to
accommodate some of those fleeing perse-
cution, but we ought to take people direct-
ly from camps outside conflict zones, rather
than accept those who pay traffickers. The
surest way of stopping boats from crossing
is not to ask the Royal Navy to play cat-and-
mouse in the Channel but by making it clear
that this method of migration will not work.
That requires decisive political leadership,
which is a tall order right now. The calamity
that has unfolded in the Mediterranean over
the past few years should at least provide a
clear example of what not to do.
3
 What Queen Anne wants, p41
Will this be his year? p9

Avian menace, p40

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 10 Europe’s gatecrashers BOOKS
6 Portrait of the Week The populists’ plan to reform the EU 28 Philip Hensher
Fredrik Erixon Mr Five Per Cent, by Jonathan
8 Diary Schott’s Original Miscellany Conlin
of P.G. Wodehouse slang 11 Tamar Yoseloff
Ben Schott ‘Night mode’: a poem 30 Alexandra Masters
12 The death of Europe Darkness, by Nina Edwards
9 Politics Corbyn’s battle plan
Katy Balls Outside its prosperous cities, this 31 Ian Thomson
is a continent in crisis Caribbean Winter, by Paul Morand
13 Rod Liddle Save the rabbits from Christopher Caldwell James Hawes
the predatory BBC Kafka’s Last Trial, by Benjamin
14 The new boat people
15 Lionel Shriver What have migrants Why are so many Iranian migrants Balint
got against France? crossing the Channel? Jim Campbell
17 From the archive Sohrab Ahmari ‘Poets and Punctuation’: a poem
A model president 17 Girl trouble 32 Cressida Connolly
18 Ancient and modern What should men call women? What a Hazard a Letter Is, by
How the year was born Mark Mason Caroline Atkins

21 Matthew Parris Let’s talk about sex 33 Patrick Skene Catling

18 The darkest dawn
The Royal Art of Poison, by
23 Barometer The ‘Spanish’ flu, 2019 Remembering the Iolaire disaster
Eleanor Herman
and what should have happened Douglas Murray
Rachel Redford
24 Letters Lords reform, a hardline 20 Brexit: the movie The Story of My Life, by Casanova:
border and feminist children’s books Playwright James Graham on audio books
making a drama out of a crisis
26 Any other business A seven-year 34 Richard Rhydderch
Lloyd Evans
winter or a pleasant surprise? ‘His Hiding Place’: a poem
Martin Vander Weyer 22 The intoxicating way we were
Alcohol and idiosyncrasy were
hallmarks of the 1970s Spectator
Charles Moore, James Forsyth and Geoffrey Wheatcroft
James Delingpole are away
43 Travel special
Featuring William Cook, Harry
Mount and Mark Palmer

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, K.J. Lamb, Paul Wood, Nick Newman, Grizelda, Bernie
www.spectator.co.uk Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: letters@spectator.
co.uk (for publication); advertising@spectator.co.uk (advertising); Advertising enquiries: 020 7961 0222 Subscription and delivery queries Spectator Subscriptions Dept.,
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Distributor Marketforce, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP. Tel. 0203 787 9001. www.marketforce.co.uk Vol 339; no 9932 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952
The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson

4 the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

 Not a happy bunny, p13 Don’t mock the Rock, p49

Bigger than Sartre, p38

LIFE
ARTS LIFE Most international restaurant
35 Interview 55 High life Taki critics agree that even high-end
Dick Clement on his 50-year Low life Jeremy Clarke
French eateries have deteriorated,
partnership with Ian La Frenais 56 Real life Melissa Kite
James Walton
while the quality of British haute
57 The turf Robin Oakley cuisine has soared. Head to head,
36 Radio Bridge Janet de Botton the crumpet beats the croissant.
Serial; Inside Music
Kate Chisholm
Lionel Shriver, p15
AND FINALLY . . .
38 Exhibitions 51 Notes on… Cocaine
Charlie Brown
The ‘yellow vest’ protesters wear
Julie Burchill hi-vis vests because they are
Bryan Appleyard
58 Chess Raymond Keene lo-vis people.
39 Theatre Competition Lucy Vickery
The Tell-Tale Heart; Uncle Vanya
Christopher Caldwell, p12
Lloyd Evans 59 Crossword Doc
60 No sacred cows Toby Young ‘Clean-eaters on coke’ are one of
40 Dance
Royal Ballet triple bill; Battle for Britain Michael Heath our more grotesque modern types.
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake 61 The Wiki Man Rory Sutherland What good is a clean gut when
Laura Freeman Your problems solved there’s blood on your hands?
41 Cinema Mary Killen Julie Burchill, p51
The Favourite 62 Drink Bruce Anderson
Deborah Ross Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth

CONTRIBUTORS
Ben Schott is the author of
the Schott’s Miscellanies and
Schott’s Almanac series. His
novel Jeeves and the King of
Clubs, a continuation of P.G.
Wodehouse’s Jeeves franchise,
is out now. His diary is on p8.
Katy Balls is The Spectator’s
deputy political editor and the
host of ‘Women with Balls’,
a new Spectator podcast. On
p9, she looks at what 2019
might have in store for Jeremy
Corbyn.
Sohrab Ahmari is op-ed
editor of the New York Post
and author of From Fire, By
Water. He writes about the
wave of Iranian migration to
the UK on p14.
Douglas Murray is
Associate Editor of The
Spectator. His family comes
from the Isle of Lewis, which is
commemorating 100 years since
the Iolaire disaster. He writes
about the tragedy on p18.
Julie Burchill began her
writing career, aged 17, at the
NME in 1976. Her play People
Like Us, about the Brexit
fallout, opened in London last
year. On p51 she discusses
quitting cocaine.

the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

 Home
T he number of would-be migrants
known to have reached England in
small boats from France in the last two
months of 2018 reached 239, with 40
making the crossing on Christmas Day.
Most said they were Iranian. Sajid Javid, the
Home Secretary, transferred two Border
Force cutters to help the one patrolling the
Channel. The government awarded a
£13.8 million contract to Seaborne Freight
to run goods ferries between Ramsgate and
Ostend in the event of Britain leaving the
European Union without an agreement;
a £46 million contract went to Brittany
Ferries and one worth £42 million to the
Danish shipping firm DFDS. Without
the slightest encouragement, leaders of
political parties issued New Year messages.
‘If Parliament backs a deal, Britain can turn
a corner,’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister
said. Dame June Whitfield, the comedy
actor, died aged 93. Sister Wendy Beckett,
the eremitic nun who made television
programmes about art, died aged 88.
G atwick offered a £50,000 reward
for a solution to the drones that
had closed the airport before Christmas,
affecting 140,000 travellers. A local couple
arrested and held for 36 hours said they
felt ‘completely violated’. The FTSE 100
index ended 2018 12 per cent down. HMV
went into administration for the second
time in six years; its shops remained open
while KPMG sought buyers. A cap came
into force on the unit price of energy
and the supplier’s standing charge. New
fishing quotas were introduced, with
6 the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
the unintended consequence of capping
expeditions if the wrong sort of fish were
caught. Jeremy Corbyn bought a pair of
half-rim spectacles.
T wiggy became a Dame in the New
Year’s honours list, and Michael
Palin was knighted, as was Alastair Cook,
England cricket captain from 2012 to
2016. John Redwood was among the few
politicians to be knighted. A year that had
seen 134 murders in London, 70 involving
knives, ended with the arrest of 39
people at a party in Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, by police investigating an
attempted murder. The New Year began
with two more people being stabbed to
death in London. A man was detained
under the Mental Health Act after the
stabbing of three people, including a
policeman, at Victoria Station, Manchester.
Jimmy Osmond, 55, had a stroke while
playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan at the
Birmingham Hippodrome.
Abroad
T he United Arab Emirates reopened its
embassy in Damascus after a seven-
year absence; Bahrain followed suit. Syrian
government forces took up position near
the city of Manbij in response to Kurdish
requests for help in resisting Turkish forces,
following the announcement by President
Donald Trump of the United States of the
withdrawal of American troops from Syria
because, he contended, Islamic State had
been defeated. Democrat control of the
House of Representatives came into effect,
leaving unresolved a partial government
shutdown brought about by Mr Trump’s
insistence on seeking funds for a wall
between the US and Mexico. American
investment markets saw their worst
year since 2008. The UN’s World Food
Programme told Houthi rebels in Yemen to
stop stealing food sent for starving people.
Police in Egypt killed about 40 men in Giza
and North Sinai after a bomb attack on a
tourist bus killed three Vietnamese visitors.
Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, died aged 79.
T he internet was shut down in parts of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo
a day after delayed presidential elections.
Sheikh Hasina won her third term as prime
minister of Bangladesh in a landslide that
left the opposition with only seven seats but
complaining of violence, intimidation and
vote rigging. China’s former intelligence
chief Ma Jian, convicted of taking bribes,
was sentenced to life in prison. Russia’s
FSB state security agency arrested a man in
Moscow named as Paul Whelan — he is said
to have been charged with espionage. In
Magnitogorsk, a block of 48 flats collapsed
in an explosion, with at least 40 feared dead.
Airlines managed to kill 556 people in
accidents in 2018, compared with 44 in 2017.
A Nasa space probe called New
Horizons took photographs as it
passed a minor planet called Ultima
Thule four billion miles from the Sun. At
least 426 people were killed and 40,000
made homeless in Sumatra and Java by a
tsunami following volcanic activity by Anak
Krakatoa. In Sicily, Mount Etna erupted.
Venice is to charge a tax of up to ten euros
on cruise ship visitors. CSH
See the film at polroger.co.uk

Y ou’ll be relieved to learn my penguin
is back. ‘How long was it gone?’
you ask. About six months. ‘And sorry,
it’s a real penguin?’ Actually, no. Here’s
the story: back in 2005, I was staying
at the 60 Thompson Street Hotel in
Manhattan. On my first afternoon in
town I went for a stroll along Bleecker
Street and popped into a shop called Leo
Design where I spotted and purchased
a charming bronze penguin — three
inches high, and ounces heavy. Back in
my room I placed Mr Penguin among my
coins and keys, and thought little of him.
The next afternoon, after housekeeping
had visited, I spotted Mr Penguin on top
of the television. Odd, I thought, moving
him to the window-sill. Over the next
week, housekeeping and I engaged in
an anonymous battle of whimsy, moving
Mr Penguin around the room twice a
day. On returning to London I told my
cleaner of this game, and we played it on
a weekly basis for several years until she
hid Mr Penguin under my bed and we
both forgot about him for many months.
Anyway, I lost him again for a longish
spell, and had to lure him back to my
mantelpiece with a shoal of miniature
bronze fish.
I ’ve recently returned from a week’s
language school in Italy, and am
able to report that the best penne
all’Amatriciana is to be found in the
staff canteen of the Verona Carabinieri.
For obvious reasons this is a tricky
reservation to score and my entrée
(in both senses) was secured by a
Carabiniere called Franco who — as the
husband of my wife’s cousin — is now my
honorary Italian brother. Franco picked
me up after school one Wednesday and
Vespa’d me at speed to the military
barracks just south of the old city. After a
brief tour of the facilities, we descended
to an austere basement cafeteria. I have
to admit my expectations were not
great and, out of politeness and caution,
I declined various more elaborate
dishes (including a delicious-looking
pollo arrosto con riso), opting instead
for pasta. It was a revelation: perfectly
al dente penne with a piquant ragù of
fresh tomatoes, succulent guanciale, and
sharp pecorino. The second surprise was
8 the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Ben Schott
to see a number of Carabinieri offspring
eating lunch and doing their homework.
Many Italian high schools, I learned, finish
at lunchtime, obliging parents to feed and
occupy their children every afternoon. I’m
sure there are wider sociopolitical lessons to
be learned about structuring the school day,
introducing children to the workplace, and
the civilising effect of communal eating, but
I’m just plotting how to get another plate of
pasta without resorting to crime.
A s I may have mentioned (cough),
my authorised homage to P. G.
Wodehouse — Jeeves and the King of
Clubs — has just been published. And
because ‘a boy has to hustle his book’,
as Truman Capote once said, this means
a fresh round of publicity. I should
stress that much book promotion is
tremendous fun: to meet the fine folk
who pay hard-earned oof for your work
is a genuine honour — especially when
they arrive with a stack of books or a
curious story. I remember one fragile
young man who asked me to sign an
impossibly dog-eared first edition of
Schott’s Original Miscellany. As I took
pen to half-title he apologised for the
book’s parlous state and explained, in
halting fragments, that a near-fatal car
crash had rendered him amnesiac and he
was using my miscellany to rebuild
his memory.
Not all moments are so poignant.
The oddest encounter took place in
a bookshop in the Midlands, where
I was signing copies of my Food &
Drink Miscellany spectated by a lone
employee. After 20 minutes this chap
finally broke the ominous silence: ‘I love
your books,’ he said in a mirthless voice,
‘they’re hilarious.’ ‘Thank you,’ I replied,
cautiously. He got up, put on his jacket,
and made for the door. ‘You know what
you should write a miscellany about?’
I didn’t. As he reached for the handle he
offered a single word of editorial advice:
‘Sodomy.’
M any parents are rightly concerned
about their children’s activities
online — not least the abbreviated slang
they use with Snapchat and Instagram.
So, in conclusion, and as a public service,
I tabulate below some of the telltale
signs that your child just might be texting
about Jeeves and Wooster:
BRB — Bertie Regrets Betrothal
STFU — Spode’s The Fascist Upstart
NSFW — Never Safe From Wedlock
ASAP — Aunts Seldom Ask Permission
OMG — Our Man Gussie
LMAO — Like Mastodons Aunts Orate
YOLO — You Often Lunch Often
TL; DR — Top Laughter; Drones Reunion
JK — Jeeves Knows

Will 2019 be Corbyn’s year?
I
t’s hard to think of a time when an oppo-
sition leader has had such a promising
start to the new year. Jeremy Corbyn
finds himself up against a prime minister
who barely survived a confidence motion,
with more than a third of the Conservative
parliamentary party voting against her. The
Tories have no majority of their own and
have fallen out with their partner, the DUP.
That same government is facing a make-or-
break Brexit vote in two weeks’ time. It’s
quite possible — some cabinet members
believe probable — that it may soon col-
lapse with a new general election called. All
Labour needs is to be ready.
In parliament, Corbyn’s closest allies
are trying to do just that. A plan for gov-
ernment is being put together, identifying
which piece of legislation would be needed
to make various manifesto pledges happen
quickly should Labour take power. The aim
is to move fast, as Tony Blair did in 1997. In
such turbulent times, even a Labour govern-
ment might not last for long — so the Cor-
bynistas intend not to waste any time.
Before they get there, however, there is
work to do. The priority is to get through
Brexit without fatally wounding the par-
ty’s electoral chances in the process. Most
Labour MPs are die-hard Remainers, and a
recent poll showed that seven in ten party
members favour a second referendum. Until
now, Corbyn has managed to keep a coali-
tion of voters broadly together by being
incredibly vague — and, at times, contradic-
tory — on Brexit. His official policy is to get
to No. 10, then renegotiate the Brexit deal
so that it aligns better with Labour party
values on issues like workers’ rights. To do
this, Labour plans to defeat the government
in a confidence motion after the meaningful
vote this month.
If Theresa May does lose a confidence
motion, the Commons would have 14 days
to approve an alternative government.
Should it fail, the country goes to the polls.
One scenario, being talked up by Corbynis-
tas, is that May wins her Brexit vote, thanks
to some Labour abstentions and support
from opposition MPs representing Leave
seats. But this enrages the DUP, which then
votes with Labour to bring May down. With-
in certain Labour circles this is seen as the
tidier option. ‘You avoid looking complicit
in no deal. You can, in theory, then fight an
election on domestic policy,’ explains a party
insider. Ideally with the same leader: in May
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
POLITICS|KATY BALLS
they trust. ‘Past performance suggests that if
the Tories begin an election with her as their
leader they will do worse than expected.’
The second scenario would see the gov-
ernment’s Brexit deal defeated (which, as
things stand, is more likely). This would
put Britain on course for a no-deal Brex-
it. At this point, the most enthusiastic Tory
Remainers may conclude that they cannot
vote this down unless they vote their govern-
ment down. That might have once sounded
unthinkable but in the topsy-turvy world of
Brexit, there’s reason to think some might.
Conservative MP Nick Boles has already
said he would ‘vote in any way necessary to
stop it from happening’.
But would there be time to stop it?
Unless parliament can agree on a different
Internal critics point to the fact
that the Labour leader is fairly well
practised in missing open goals
course of action, the UK will leave the EU
without a deal in 12 weeks’ time. This has
been the default position since Article 50
was approved by MPs. If it cannot be extend-
ed in time, under this scenario a snap poll
could occur amid a Brexit on WTO terms —
something many Labour supporters would
find hard to swallow and might blame the
leadership for. It would also leave the mat-
ter of Brexit open, which, as a general rule,
tends to make life more difficult for Corbyn.
Even without a general election, Corbyn
will come under increasing pressure to back
a second referendum. Party members tried
to make this party policy at Labour confer-
ence. John McDonnell and Diane Abbott,
both Corbyn allies who help to make the
big Brexit decisions, are seen as open to the
idea of a People’s Vote if an election doesn’t
happen. But a number of Corbyn’s advis-
ers believe this would badly hurt Labour’s
electoral chances by alienating towns that
voted heavily to leave, such as Mansfield,
where the Tories had a surprise victory in
the snap election. Winning support in Leave
towns is seen as crucial for winning a Labour
majority.
Internal Labour polling also suggests
that there is no huge appetite for a sec-
ond referendum among the population at
large. Instead, the overall feeling is one of
apathy and ennui. Focus groups in the Mid-
lands — an area with numerous swing seats
and several Labour marginals with two-fig-
ure majorities — found even Remain vot-
ers sceptical of the idea of a People’s Vote.
Were Labour to endorse a second vote,
there’s concern that Labour Leave voters
might accuse the party of Brexit betrayal
and defect to Ukip, the Conservatives or
not vote at all. This is viewed as a greater
risk to Corbyn than annoying Remain vot-
ers, who are seen as less likely to vote for
anyone else. Just look how the beleaguered
Liberal Democrats fared in 2017 running
on a pro-EU slate.
Overall, Corbyn’s allies are confident
that, Brexit aside, things are going their
way. And that when the Brexit tide eventu-
ally does roll out, the Tories will be found
to be swimming naked. ‘They’re going to
have to find out what they’re actually for
in a way that they haven’t since the refer-
endum result,’ says one Labour staffer. The-
resa May’s paralysis on Brexit means that
the Conservative party’s domestic agenda
is threadbare. This is what Corbyn’s hope
rests on: that record numbers now think
that the country is moving in the wrong
direction. And that there has been a rever-
sal in public opinion in the past five years in
people who thought tackling the deficit was
more important than investment in services
and communities.
Election or not, this year should pre-
sent an open goal for Labour. Internal crit-
ics, however, point to the fact that Corbyn is
fairly well practised in missing open goals.
Given all of last year’s Conservative prob-
lems, they say the Labour leader should be
surging ahead in the polls rather than neck-
and-neck. The final YouGov poll of last year
even gave the Tories a two-point lead. But
given that Corbyn went into the last election
20 points behind and came a close second,
his allies are still optimistic. So will this be
Corbyn’s year? Put it this way: if it’s not, it
might never be.
9

This year’s European elections could change everything
T
here is a strange pre-
revolutionary atmos-
phere in Brussels. At
the various receptions and
dinners before we broke up
for Christmas, it felt a bit like
the Last Supper. Elections to
the European Parliament are
usually predictable affairs,
but this time Europhiles (like
myself) fear it will be differ-
ent. We have grown used to
populists doing well in nation-
al elections over the years,
from Sweden to Italy. But the
European Parliament elec-
tions in May might lead to a landslide vic-
tory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally,
Italy’s League and other nationalist popu-
list parties — and a victory may change the
political face of the European Union.
In the past, it never really mattered much
if the Euro election was carried by the left
or the right: the result was the same anyway.
The parliament has always been keeper of
the federalist flame — much more so than
the European Commission. In practice, elec-
tions only served the purpose of confirming
the dominion of the overriding ideology
in Brussels: that of ‘ever-closer union’. Yes,
Euro elections would take in a haul of fist-
shakers and heretics, and the odd politi-
cal circus act. But whatever the question,
the parliament’s answer had always been:
‘more Europe’.
Even two years ago, that mindset was still
dominant. Emmanuel Macron had just beat-
en Le Pen in the French presidential elec-
tion and promised to put new wind in the
sails of mainstream politics. The West had
reached ‘peak populism’. After the Brex-
it referendum and the election of Donald
Trump — two massive defeats for liberal
orthodoxy — Macron was credited with
breaking the neck of invading populists. It
was safe for centrists to come out. Politics
would become normal again.
But there wasn’t anything normal about
Macron’s victory. In France, Macron is the
insurgent who squashed the centre-left and
centre-right. And within a year of his win,
the Freedom Party had returned to govern-
ment in Austria, and Viktor Orban — the
bête noire of Brussels — had been re-elect-
10
The last heave
FREDRIK ERIXON
ed in Hungary with an even larger share of
the vote. Milos Zeman, widely suspected to
be a Kremlin stooge, had won another term
as the President of the Czech Republic —
after flirting with the idea of an in-or-out
referendum on the country’s EU member-
ship. His win came just a few months after
the Czechs had elected the billionaire and
self-styled populist Andrej Babis as its new
Prime Minister. In Italy, the Five Star Move-
ment and the League had taken charge of
Italy’s government. And most remarkable
of all, the far-right had yet again become an
electoral force in German politics.
We can now see a coherence across
The populists seek to break down
the door of the European Union,
but not to tear down the house
Europe’s populists. And not because Steve
Bannon or anyone else is building a national-
ist populist movement across the continent.
The populists do not specialise in working
together, which in some ways is their whole
point. But many of these parties have now
been around for a while and matured, and
speak for vast swaths of the population: a
third of France, half of Hungary and most
of Italy. They used shock tactics to get atten-
tion, but are changing as they wield power.
As they have grown bigger — or been elect-
ed to govern — they have learnt the virtue
of patience and the art of compromise.
So what began as a bunch of polemi-
cists and rabble-rousers is now sprouting
networks of thinkers, journals and insti-
tutes. There is growing consistency in their
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
policies, more discipline in
the troops. They are nation-
alist and (mostly) xenopho-
bic — but not exactly racist
and fascist. They are Euro-
sceptic but (unlike the Tories)
not against EU member-
ship. They seek to break
down the door, but not tear
down the house. The distinc-
tion is crucial in understand-
ing what is now under way.
Viktor Orban in Hungary,
Matteo Salvini in Italy, Jaro-
slaw Kaczynski in Poland and
Alice Weidel in Germany: all
of them want to reform, rather than leave,
the EU. They think the EU has overreached,
and they want power to be handed back
from Brussels to the nation states. They have
no collective agenda for Europe, and this is
entirely their point: they dislike the idea of
unanimity. Diversity, they say, is the hall-
mark of Europe and they want an EU which
respects that. That message has power partly
because the populists’ gains have made the
centre-left and the centre-right start to ques-
tion their own approach to Europe.
Take the Christian Democrats and their
centre-right group in the European Parlia-
ment, the European People’s Party (EPP)
— which nominated Jean-Claude Juncker
as president of the European Commission.
For decades, they have been the main driver
of European integration, but they now find
themselves squeezed by nationalists. Ger-
many’s centre-right fear that the Alternative
für Deutschland (AfD) will become bigger
than Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat-
ic Union in the May election. In France,
the party of Charles de Gaulle and Nicolas
Sarkozy has been cut down to size — almost
marginalised — by the combination of a
reformist Macron and an extreme right that
is rehabilitating itself from its anti-Semitic
and neo-Nazi past. In Italy, the centre-right
Forza Italia has been obliterated by Salvini
and his League, which has — astonishingly
— doubled its support in the polls since last
year’s election. In the three main countries
in the EU, support for the centre-right has
plummeted.
So this year’s Euro elections will leave
the centre-right without a confident or
coherent voice. And it will look a bit lost
when the main battle of ideas is between lib-
eralism and nationalism. The centre-right’s
political strategy is defensive; its attitude is
irritable. The various EPP parties aren’t win-
ning many elections any more, so they boast
about past gains. Last November, in the par-
ty’s primary election for choosing its can-
didate to lead the Commission, they could
have sought to replace Juncker with Alexan-
der Stubb. A former Finnish prime minister
and Ironman athlete, Stubb is an energetic
conservative and an unabashed supporter of
a stronger EU. Instead they went for Man-
fred Weber, who is virtually unknown out-
side his home region of Bavaria. His main
asset? Weber doesn’t seem to have strong
views about anything.
T he left isn’t doing any better. Across
Europe, its parties will fight this year’s
election with an electoral base that has been
invaded by the nationalists and the popu-
lists. In many countries, social democracy is
now in danger of dying out. When the cen-
tre-left recently picked the polyglot Frans
Timmermans, now Juncker’s deputy, to lead
the party in the European Parliament elec-
tion, critics joked that he hardly represented
Even the supposed torch-bearers of
‘ever-closer union’ are losing faith
in key foundations of the EU project
a member party. His Dutch social democrats
lost more than 75 per cent of their seats in
the country’s 2017 election. Polls now sug-
gest it won’t get more than two of the 29
Dutch seats in the European Parliament.
Just like the Labour party under Jer-
emy Corbyn, many social democratic par-
ties are moving closer to the radical left.
As a consequence, now that the centre-left
is no longer the mainstream and its parties
do not necessarily represent the workers, it
has become entangled in identity politics. In
France’s presidential election, Le Pen had
the strongest support among blue-collar vot-
ers. The venerable Parti Socialiste dropped
from about 30 to 8 per cent in the last bal-
lot to the French assembly, and nowadays is
little more than a lobby group for the post-
modern left.
The supposed saviour of the centrist Ital-
ian left, Matteo Renzi, was bulldozed by
Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement in
the last election. He’s still nursing an ambi-
tion to return to Palazzo Chigi, the home of
the Italian prime minister, but since losing
the election last spring has spent most of his
time producing a television series about his
native Florence. His party is polling below
20 per cent.
So we have centre-right parties spooked
by migration and the borderless Europe.
Meanwhile, the left is focusing its atten-
tions on the single market, and would like
to see scores of new policies introduced that
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Night Mode
The hours are counting
certainty on tiny screens.
I’m turned to silent.
Hair grows faster in the dark
when no one’s watching.
I can hear it break through skin.
Cats disappear in boxes
again and again in slow motion.
This is what passes for entertainment.
Say you’re in transit – it sounds better.
Say you believe in indeterminacy.
No wrong answers, just poor questions.
It’s already morning in Australia.
How exhausting. Someone is always
crowing about clear blue sky.
Failure is a beautiful word,
the way it curls around the tongue.
Embrace it. Let it love you.
Enough. We’ll call it a day.
— Tamar Yoseloff
restrict the freedom to do business across EU wanted to see whether these movements
borders. For these parties, the ‘four free- might fizzle out as quickly as they flared up,
doms’ are problematic. They worry about leaving the grand project to continue.
Polish plumbers fixing the pipes in France Perhaps this explains some of the EU’s
and Hungarian truck drivers delivering robustness in the Brexit talks. Paradoxically,
Amazon packages in Germany. Brussels’s rigidity is a sign of internal weak-
Without the introduction of new social ness — not of strength. Merkel and Macron,
rights, or taxes and regulations on labour Donald Tusk and Michel Barnier fear not
that would ‘level the playing field’ between the country that leaves, but the members
EU countries, the left threatens to disavow that stay. Even if no other country is looking
the principle of free trade inside the EU. So for the exit, many want to have more flex-
the supposed torch-bearers of ‘ever-clos- ible arrangements within the EU. For some,
er union’ are losing faith in key founda- it is about allowing more subsidies for fail-
tions of the whole European project. Even ing industries or bigger fiscal deficits; oth-
they want a different Europe, with stronger ers want less demanding rules about cutting
borders, weaker rules, and more power for carbon emissions or about refugees seeking
nation states. asylum. If the EU gives much ground, the
This, ironically, is the change David Cam- result will be a disunited Europe.
eron asked for in his renegotiation. Europe And now, when the European Parlia-
was moving that way anyway, he said, so why ment could soon be controlled by confident
not cut Britain some extra slack and help nationalists, ambiguous conservatives and
keep the EU together? He was refused, in a radicalised social democracy, that pos-
part because it wasn’t just about Britain. The sibility looks frighteningly likely. Any talk
requests to abandon common rules were about ‘peak populism’ in 2017 turned out to
coming from all over the continent, and be premature — but this might be the year
Brussels needed to hold firm. Confronted by of peak federalism. An era of never-closer
populists demanding change in Europe, the union may be about to begin.
11
 The death of Europe
Outside its prosperous cities, this is a continent in crisis
T
he ‘yellow vest’ protests against Pres-
ident Emmanuel Macron that swept
through Paris and other French cities
last month have evoked overwhelming sym-
pathy: 77 per cent considered them justified,
according to a poll for Le Figaro.
Even after Macron offered a budget-
busting package of concessions to appease
his critics, it was hard to silence the lacerat-
ing self-examination one undergoes after a
soured romance: God, what was I thinking?
Today, France’s café-goers wonder aloud
how they could have voted so overwhelm-
ingly two years ago for a president whom
they disliked and disagreed with even at
the time.
The simple answer is that Macron was
running against Marine Le Pen, whose party,
now called the National Rally, is a haven for
the global economy’s déclassés. The more
complicated answer is ‘Condorcet’s para-
dox’, named after the 18th-century marquis,
philosopher, legislator, abolitionist and the-
orist of probability. Condorcet demonstrat-
ed that in any election that involves at least
three people, as French multi-round con-
tests do, the public’s real preference can be
impossible to determine. People might like
Mr Smith better than Mr Jones, Mr Jones
better than Mr Brown, and Mr Brown bet-
ter than Mr Smith — leaving the majority
feeling cheated.
This May’s European elections, set to
pit Macron’s Brussels-defending ‘establish-
ment’ against the ‘ferment’ of Le Pen and
various men-on-the-street, are a good bet
to be the kind of election Condorcet would
recognise. A recent poll found 30 per cent
of the public think well of Le Pen and 69
per cent think ill of her. You might consid-
er such numbers unimpressive. But in the
present climate they make Le Pen the most
popular major politician in the country, with
twice the support Macron has.
Le Pen is sceptical of immigration, and
European politics is still mostly about immi-
gration. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior min-
ister and the most successful politician in
Europe right now, is successful because he
stopped the trafficking of African migrants
in their hundreds of thousands from the
Maghreb to the shores of Sicily. The traf-
fickers have since moved their operations
12
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
west, egged on by the grandstanding mayors
of Spain’s coastal cities. Thus was the Span-
ish socialist party (PSOE) ousted from its
impregnable-looking stronghold in Andalu-
sia a few weeks ago. A new anti-immigration
party, Vox, took 11 per cent of the vote.
Anti-immigration and populist politi-
cians are like other politicians. They suc-
ceed not because voters are distracted but
because they are attentive. This is even
true of Donald Trump, who on the surface
appears to have done little (and in terms of
legislation has done literally nothing) for
the people who elected him. And yet he can
be credited with a lot of things that didn’t
happen. In December, Trump didn’t sign the
UN refugee pact greeted with such fanfare
The yellow-vest protesters have
to wear hi-vis vests because
they are lo-vis people
by Macron and others. Described as a mere
‘cooperative framework’ to lay down certain
non-political principles, it is — as the activ-
ists who worked so doggedly to pass it well
understood — an invitation to activist judg-
es in the richer countries to order more lib-
eral immigration policies. On reflection, the
populist leaders not just of Italy but also of
Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia, Poland
and Slovakia decided they felt the same
way as Trump.
If you live in a cosmopolitan city, you
will wonder why such politicians aren’t
immediately voted from office, or outright
removed for malpractice — because you are
unlikely to know a single person who thinks
this way. The yellow vest protesters do think
this way. They may even be a majority. They
have to wear hi-vis vests because they are
lo-vis people.
What is going on now is rather like
the reverse of what happened in 1968
when Charles de Gaulle summoned
la France profonde to resist a revolution that
began in Paris. But the yellow-vest move-
ment is one of class, not geography. It is run
by people remote from the global econo-
my’s supply chains and the places those who
control them congregate. Chic Montpel-
lier and high-tech Toulouse are not, in this
sense, remote, any more than Oxford and
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Cambridge are. A reliable journalist’s rule
for finding populists is that any place you’d
go for a holiday or a meal is probably not the
place to look.
A Parisian friend describes her parents’
centuries-old village, charming and cosy 25
years ago, today stripped of its post office and
all its shops except one crummy boulangerie,
and abandoned by all but a handful of geriat-
rics. The major recreation for these old peo-
ple is to drive 10km to the nearest motorway
exit to drink a hot chocolate at a Carrefour.
It was not the yellow-vest marchers who
did this to small-town Europe. Nor have
they been responsible for most of the may-
hem in Paris, despite the assiduous efforts of
politicians to link them to it: that has been
the work of opportunistic anti-globalist
radicals and youth from the suburban hous-
ing projects.
So why have almost all of the smaller
cities in France, Italy and eastern Germa-
ny been emptied of their natives and their
businesses? It has been easy to find articles
about the failure of populist movements
(including Brexit) over the past few months,
all of them written from Europe’s prosper-
ous major cities. But those cities’ prosperity
has been built on transformation of the hin-
terland’s economy. A more accurate word
would be dismantling: outside the charmed
global-economy hubs, Europe is dying. You
can see the same thing in Sweden that you
will see in Hungary. As the French geogra-
pher Christophe Guilluy puts it, ‘There is
not a single model that works.’
New Year’s Day marked the 20th anni-
versary of the introduction of the euro (the
listed currency, not the coins) on 1 January
1999. Did you notice how joyously people
celebrated it? You didn’t? Twenty years:
that’s exactly how long it has been since
Italy has had any significant growth. What a
coincidence. What do you think happened in
1999 that did Italy such harm? The release of
Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’?
This year’s European elections threat-
en to be a Condorcet paradox, a source of
ambiguity and dissatisfaction. Come May,
we might well discover that people prefer
the globalised society to the old days, the old
days to the populists’ vision, and the popu-
lists’ vision to the globalised society.

Save the rabbits from the predatory BBC
F
or a while, as a 13-year-old, I was
obsessed with rabbits — the con-
sequence of having read Watership
Down by Richard Adams. I tried to share my
enthusiasm for the book with my parents,
but my father told me that he thought the
scenario depicted by Adams was ‘improba-
ble’. However, they did consent to take me
to that indeterminate, shifting area where
the novel is set, with its back legs in Berk-
shire and its front paws in the last remaining
unspoilt quadrant of Hampshire.
We were on the way home from a holi-
day at some grim Methodist guest house in
the West Country and were undoubtedly
tired from the drive. But still they followed
me around with my map and tried to look
excited when I suddenly proclaimed: ‘Look,
that’s the combe where Bigwig met the fox!’
And a little further along: ‘I wonder if that’s
the site of the Efrafa Warren!’ It was very
kind of them to indulge me in this. A year
later I was similarly obsessed by Jack Ker-
ouac, but somehow they never got around
to taking me to Big Sur.
I’ve just watched the four-part animat-
ed series of Watership Down, shown on the
BBC, with my daughter. She was slightly
more aghast than me to discover that the
aforementioned Bigwig was a bruv from
the ’hood. And still more repelled by the
elevation of a minor female rabbit charac-
ter into a doughty campaigner for justice,
the transgendering of a rabbit called Straw-
berry, and, most hilariously, the does call-
ing each other ‘sister’ and keening a song of
freedom in an orgy of #MeToo victimhood
— their importance to the book she too had
loved vastly exaggerated for fatuous politi-
cal reasons.
None of this surprised me terribly, as I
have become accustomed to the liberal,
white, middle-class BBC bosses shoe-horn-
ing their absurd social justice twattery into
every single drama production they com-
mission. It had been evident a week or two
earlier with their dramatisation of Agatha
Christie’s The ABC Murders, which was
rightly panned even by journos who get
much less worked up by this sort of thing
than I do. My daughter, meanwhile, is very
rapidly coming to the same conclusion as
me, having junked Doctor Who for its inane
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
ROD LIDDLE
PC gibberish a while ago and terrified they
might soon introduce a transitioning Dalek
or a woke cyberman.
The BBC’s obsession is all-consuming,
bizarre and, I would hazard, counter to the
wishes of that great unwashed rump of peo-
ple beyond London, i.e. the licence-payers.
I have the feeling that people quite liked
The Archers when it was about heterosexu-
al white folk living somewhere in Warwick-
shire and less so when it was invaded by
sexual deviants and Bulgarians.
And it’s not just the BBC. The mindset
was at its most absurd and twisted in an
ITV drama series shown just over a year
ago, Liar. This seemed, at first, a promis-
ing confection. There was an allegation
I feel people quite liked The Archers
when it was about heterosexual white
folk living somewhere in Warwickshire
of rape and viewers were invited to work
out who was telling the truth, the woman or
the man. But it very soon became evident
that there would be no dispute whatsoever:
the man did it, and that’s that. Critics point-
ed out that, of course, it would be irrespon-
sible to suggest that the woman had lied.
Despite the fact that some women do lie in
such circumstances. For reasons of political
correctness, all the drama and uncertainty
were excised.
There is something distinctly Soviet
in this inability to cast one’s imagination
beyond a set of idiotic shibboleths to present
a denouement which might not accord with
the sensibilities of the ruling elite. Indeed it
‘You didn’t swear at me! How was
I supposed to know it was urgent?’
is the kind of mindset which writers such as
Vladimir Voinovich once satirised.
Still, it seems to me even more egregious
when the BBC trawls through the annals
of popular historical fiction, of novels from
more than 30 years ago, and ramrods into
them its bien pensant obsessions. I would
have been much less offended if the BBC
had commissioned a writer to confect a story
about a group of incredibly woke SJW rab-
bits, led consensually by a female called per-
haps ‘Roz’, who not only liberate a fascistic
warren but also open up their own warren
to thousands of Iranian rabbit refugees who
turn out to be kindly and agreeable and work
together with the host population to combat
global warming and eradicate poverty.
Nobody would watch such arrant crap, of
course, but it would at least be true to itself.
But this isn’t done for precisely the reason
to which I alluded: nobody would watch it.
Instead, the BBC piggybacks on the enor-
mous success and popularity of novels such
as Watership Down and warps them until
they are unrecognisable. But there are good
reasons why Richard Adams and Agatha
Christie are popular and one of them is that
they were not noticeably afflicted by a kind
of psychosis that forced them to have their
characters conform to the straitjacket of lib-
eral ideology. Their imaginations exceeded
such a crude template. That’s why people
enjoyed reading their books.
But for the liberals in general, and the
BBC in particular, history is not something
which happened some time ago. Instead it
is something which must be controlled from
the eternal tyranny of Now. Now is right, eve-
rything else is wrong and therefore they feel
no compunction in twisting history to suit
their own purposes. It is the same mindset
that demands the removal of statues of white
British imperialists from university campus-
es, and university English courses that ask of
students: why is my reading list so white?
I suppose the only thing to do is join
Charles Moore in refusing to pay my licence
fee, because the BBC isn’t going to change
any time soon. That may just be my New
Year’s Resolution.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE
The argument continues online.
13
 The new boat people
Why are so many Iranian migrants crossing the Channel?
W
hen the migrant crisis started,
about three years ago, it was seen
as a mainly Syrian affair. Caught
in the crossfire between Bashar al-Assad
and sundry jihadist groups, ordinary Syrians
were heading for Europe, part of the largest
mass movement of people since the second
world war. But as we now know, that analysis
was wrong. Or rather, it was only one facet
of the historical migration phenomenon that
was unfolding then and still is today.
As a reporter, I hit the migrant trail, fol-
lowing the new arrivals by foot, bus, train and
ferry through the Greek islands and the Bal-
kans. I heard many languages besides Ara-
bic, among them Pashto, Urdu, Bengali and
even French (spoken by a Congolese fam-
ily I encountered at the Serbian-Hungarian
border). But the language that really made
my ears perk up was my own: Persian,
including the Dari variant of Afghanistan as
well as the urban dialect spoken by my own
kin, the Tehrani middle class.
Britain is now confronting the hith-
erto invisible reality of Iranian migration.
The recent news reports have been about
migrants making daily attempts to cross
the English Channel by dinghy, and usu-
ally halfway down these reports comes the
fact that the migrants say they are Iranian.
At first glance, this might seem odd. Iran
is not afflicted by a war, famine or other
humanitarian disaster. But according to the
L’Auberge des Migrants group in Calais, this
is what makes Iranians stand out: they ‘seem
to be the only ones who both dare’ to cross
the Channel ‘and find the means to do so’.
For three years now, Iranians have
topped the league tables of nationalities
seeking asylum in the UK with more than
4,000 applications lodged in 2016 and near-
ly 2,600 the following year, according to
Home Office statistics. Only a tiny minor-
ity attempt to cross illegally into England
aboard unseaworthy vessels, but this is hap-
pening far more frequently. Why?
Iran has been miserable ever since the
Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his
Parisian exile to usher in his total Shiite
state. It’s a suffocating place, with Islamic
conformity enforced on pain of flogging, jail
14
SOHRAB AHMARI
and death, and a lousy, mismanaged econo-
my made worse by US sanctions. For all its
ancient civilisational glories, Iran is also a
cruel, spiritually deracinated land. I increas-
ingly struggle to decide where the blame lies:
with the present regime or some deeper ail-
ment in the national soul.
It’s why my own family has largely left.
Some, like my uncle, went abroad for educa-
tion (in his case Utah, of all places) shortly
before the revolution and never returned.
Others, like my mother and me, joined the
diaspora in America post-revolution, thanks
to the family-preference visa programme,
The migrants debated where to settle,
almost like a family weighing up
various vacation destinations
aka Donald Trump’s hated ‘chain migration’.
But all this has been going on for four dec-
ades. It doesn’t explain the latest wave, its
size and timing. The answer lies elsewhere.
To wit: modern human-smuggling net-
works have perfected the business of trans-
porting people from point A to point B,
across national frontiers, for the right price.
Information technologies, not least cheap
smartphones with astonishing GPS capa-
bilities, make it possible to blaze ever-new
trails. Each group of migrants leaves digi-
tal breadcrumbs for subsequent cohorts to
follow. There are tricks to adapt, even as
governments open and close their borders.
Entire Persian-language Facebook groups
are devoted to helping Iranian (and Afghan)
‘travellers’ — the term migrants use to refer
to themselves — cross into Europe.
I had an insight into this world when
I joined a group of Afghan and Iranian
migrants, all of them men, at a smuggler’s
safe house in a working-class district of
Istanbul. The cockroach-infested house was
a staging ground, so to speak, where the
migrants rested briefly, after making the pas-
sage through the mountains of north-west
Iran into Turkey, and prepared for the din-
ghy ride across the Aegean to Greece.
The process was remarkably busi-
ness-like. At one point, the smuggler, an
Afghan with slanted Central Asian eyes and
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
a Bruce Lee haircut, summoned us to his
makeshift office and tried to up-sell servic-
es beyond the basic boat ride to the Greek
islands. If we paid him $8,000 each, on top
of the agreed $2,000 for the Aegean cross-
ing, his men could get the group from
Athens all the way to Paris or Berlin or
wherever else by car, saving the migrants the
hassle of trekking by foot, bus and rail. And
now, it seems, the UK is being added to
this list of destinations — at least for those
with the money.
The migrants I spoke to passionately
debated where to settle once they made it
to mainland Europe, almost like a family
weighing up various vacation destinations.
Finland was ‘too cold, and they don’t pay
much welfare’, said one. Switzerland was
too expensive. And by picking Europe, the
men had ruled out other destinations. Oz, for
example, was out of the question: they had
heard that Australian authorities divert ille-
gals to Papua New Guinea, and you could
end up ‘having to share a hot cell with a
darky’. A consensus formed around Britain,
mainly because most of them spoke at least
a little English. But they also knew the
Channel crossing was no easy feat. In real-
ity, most of them would end up in Germany
or Sweden.
Unlike the Afghans, Iranians can’t claim
to be fleeing war and the Taliban. So they
either pretend to be Afghan (not difficult)
or they cite persecution on account of being
Christian converts. (Liverpool Cathedral has
reported converting Iranians at the rate of
one a week.) There are many sincere Irani-
an converts who risk their lives to follow the
Nazarene; but there are also some like the
young man I met on Lesbos who asked me
if it would be better for his asylum case if he
were a Christian, a homosexual ‘or maybe
both’. I told him to pick one or the other.
A few years ago, these trafficking options
were not open, even to those who had the
money. But the past few years have seen
people-trafficking become a vast global
industry, reaching from Tehran to Calais
and now Kent.
So why do the Iranians come? The
answer is simple: because they can.

What have migrants got against France?
P
itching your tent for weeks on end in
the cold and mud, with no power or
plumbing. Running in a pack after
accelerating lorries and clutching franti-
cally at the back door handles. Risking not
only your own life but even the lives of your
children by crowding into unseaworthy din-
ghies, in which to drift precariously across
the busiest shipping lane in the world… All
this full-tilt determination to flee intolera-
ble circumstances and get into the compara-
tive Valhalla of the UK makes perfect sense
— if the place you’re so desperate to leave
behind is war-torn Syria or famine-ravaged
Yemen. But the country on whose coast
these yearning, immiserated would-be UK
immigrants are camped, and have historical-
ly camped for 20 years, is France.
Excuse me. What’s wrong with France?
Some Iranians the Border Force scooped
from the Channel over the holidays may
have been Christians in flight from religious
persecution, but last time I checked, France,
at least nominally, was Catholic.
Ever since the Red Cross established
Sangatte in 1999, I’ve watched countless
interviews with mostly African and Mid-
dle Eastern migrants in Calais. Journalists
always ask how long they’ve been trying
to get to the UK and whether previous
attempts have been stymied. But to my dis-
may, interviewers rarely pose the $64,000
question: ‘Listen, you’re already in France!
Tourists the world over, including plenty of
Britons, spend buckets to holiday here! It’s a
republic! Also in the EU! Rule of law! Way
nicer weather! What does Britain offer that’s
so enticing that you’ll repeatedly put your
life in peril, the better to be shed of France?’
At last, a recent Channel 4 News broad-
cast supposed that some migrants are
especially hell-bent on reaching the UK
because of ‘the language’ — which might
ring true were we talking Australians or
Canadians. But the interview that had just
concluded was with a Britain-or-bust Afri-
can migrant who, when asked how long
he’d been camped in Calais, answered: ‘Ten.’
The interviewer was obliged to fill in hesitant-
ly, ‘Months?’ A migrant who does not know
the word ‘month’ is not a fluent English
speaker eager to put his second-language
skills to profitable employ.
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
LIONEL SHRIVER
The broadcast’s other explanation was
that some migrants might already have
a family member in Britain, which fails to
clarify why that family member also prior-
itised getting to this country, when for the
most part said relative would also be from
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia or
Sudan, and might very well also have suc-
ceeded in settling in the UK after fleeing
war-torn, famine-ravaged France.
Little the wiser, we’re left to speculate:
1) Most international restaurant critics
agree that even high-end French eateries
have deteriorated, while the quality of Brit-
ish haute cuisine has soared. Head to head,
the crumpet beats the croissant. The Paris-
ian fashion for heavy cream sauces has given
Here’s what’s wrong in France: ID
cards are mandatory, and the French
welfare system is contributory
way to lighter, fresher fare commonplace in
London’s Soho. Judiciously, the newcomers
can’t bear mayonnaise on their chips.
2) France may maintain the appearance
of prosperity, but migrants in what was until
recently known as ‘the Jungle’ subscribe to
Bloomberg. Macron’s retreat on budgetary
reform has pushed this year’s deficit above
the eurozone’s limit of 3 per cent of output.
The French national debt as a share of GDP
has reached an alarming 97 per cent, while
Britain’s is still under 87 per cent. Migrants
find Philip Hammond’s ostensible end to
‘austerity’ worrying, but have faith that the
Tories remain half-heartedly committed
to reducing the deficit. Given the unsus-
tainable largesse of French public services,
migrants see the long-term economic pros-
pects for France as more concerning.
3) Newscasts often reference migrants’
resolve to set foot in Dover before the
UK leaves the EU because these aspirants
have the confused impression that Home
Office policy regarding non-EU immi-
grants has anything whatsoever to do with
EU membership. But it’s the media that’s
clueless. The optimistic self-starters in Cal-
ais anticipate that a WTO no-deal Brexit in
March will open up trade deals across the
globe, and are merely eager to get in on the
ground floor.
4) Back to language. In France, English-
language films and TV shows are dubbed,
making viewing pleasantly effortless for
French-speakers, but depriving the audi-
ence of valuable opportunities to bone up
on English. This impedes mastery of set
expressions like, ‘Where is my free house?’
Here’s what’s wrong with France: ID
cards are mandatory, and the French welfare
system is contributory. Britain’s benefits are
less conditional. Successful asylum-seekers
qualify for the same benefits as UK nation-
als, who don’t have to ante up first. While
cases are processed, which can take years,
applicants get housing and a meagre week-
ly stipend that may still sound like a lot of
money to the Sudanese. Not being sup-
posed to work in theory doesn’t mean you
can’t in practice. Now that the NHS is meant
to charge foreigners lacking legal residency
for care, Channel 4 News inevitably just ran
a package that deplored restricting medi-
cal access for the ‘vulnerable’ and reported
that doctors are pleading for the policy to
be reversed.
Among starry-eyed migrants, Brit-
ain’s reputation for soft-touch social poli-
cy could be exaggerated, perhaps wildly so.
Wealthier, better-educated Iranians may
have grander plans. Yet for the impover-
ished (albeit with phones, connecting them
to www.gov.uk/browse/benefits and kin
who’ve made it here), benefits, and a thriv-
ing black economy that allows for both earn-
ing money and keeping it, have to constitute
major pull factors.
Add the high likelihood that failed asy-
lum-seekers won’t be deported, and you
have the drivers too impolitic to men-
tion on the news. Two or three years back,
I remember one journalist in Calais finally
asking migrants why they wanted so badly
to come to Britain. One said for the edu-
cation (apparently there are no schools
in France). Having clearly done a Goog-
le search on ‘how to bamboozle the Eng-
lish’, another tilted his head with a queasy
grin into the camera and crooned, ‘For the
freeeeeeee-dom!’
Funny, that. Last time I watched the gilets
jaunes tearing up the Champs-Elysées, those
French folks had more liberté than they
knew what to do with.
15

T
alking to someone in her mid-twen-
ties recently, I mentioned someone
else of the same age. ‘She’s a really
talented girl,’ I said. Then I checked myself.
‘Sorry… er … woman.’ Sara smiled. ‘It’s
OK,’ she replied. ‘That’s what I call myself.
I’m a self-identifying “girl”.’
Fair enough. But the exchange stayed
with me. It brought back the episode of
Have I Got News For You which featured
the ‘Michael Fallon touched Julia Hartley-
Brewer’s knee’ story. Quentin Letts offered
the opinion that Fallon had been brave,
on the grounds that Hartley-Brewer is a ‘big
strong girl’. ‘She’s not a girl,’ responded the
presenter Jo Brand. ‘She’s a woman.’ The line
got a laugh, and indeed a round of applause.
Again, fair enough. You can see why,
with that audience and against that oppo-
nent, that presenter would say what she
did. There is indeed something about the
word ‘girl’ that sounds demeaning, even
though it isn’t meant that way. We need
a replacement.
If you’re talking about a man, it’s actu-
ally quite rare that you call him a ‘man’.
You wouldn’t say ‘Mike’s a great man’ —
it’d sound like you were comparing him
to Churchill. Instead you say ‘he’s a great
bloke’, or ‘guy’. If the man is under 30, say,
you might use ‘lad’. (That word took a bit of
a hit during the ‘lads’ mags’ era, but its more
neutral meaning seems to have survived.)
Depending on your age and class you might
even refer to a ‘chap’ or ‘feller’.
But when it comes to females, there are
only two choices: ‘woman’ and ‘girl’. The
former, like ‘man’, is usually too formal,
too strait-laced. It gives you the Churchill
problem, with Winston replaced by Flor-
ence Nightingale. However ‘girl’ has the
unfortunate quality of being the word for a
female child. You’d never refer to an adult
male as a ‘boy’ (with the exception of Cor-
bynites labelling their hero the ‘absolute
boy’). So when you call an adult female a
‘girl’, things can get tricky. It sort of works
for the under-thirties, as Sara shows. But as
Sara also shows, it’s easier if you’re female
yourself. As a man using the term, I’ve
started to feel uncomfortable. There are of
course other words used to refer to adult
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Girl trouble
What should men call women?
MARK MASON
females, but none are as judgment-free as
‘bloke’ and ‘guy’. For a long time there was
‘lady’, but that always had the same formal-
ity problem as ‘woman’, and in any case
has recently fallen out of fashion. Certainly
in sporting circles — last year the Arsenal
Ladies Football Club changed their second
word to ‘Women’. The only place you’ll hear
There is indeed something about the
word ‘girl’ that sounds demeaning,
even though it isn’t meant that way
the ‘l’ word these days is in golf clubhous-
es. Which tells you everything you need to
know about it.
Then there are the downright patronising
words: ‘chick’, ‘bint’, ‘filly’ and so on. ‘Bird’
used to be at the less offensive end of this
scale. Explaining his song ‘Blackbird’, which
was inspired by the civil rights movement in
FROM THE ARCHIVE
A model president
From The Spectator, 4 January 1919:
President Wilson arrived in London
on Thursday week, and was greeted
with full expression of the heartiest
goodwill. The welcome began at Dover;
and when the visitors drove through
the streets of London, they passed
through a heavy barrage of cheering,
which was renewed when the President
appeared with the King on a balcony
of Buckingham Palace.
On Friday week the President,
after a conference with the Prime
Minister and Mr Balfour, was the
chief guest at a State Banquet given
by the King, who, in proposing his
guest’s health, said that he spoke at
an historic moment, nearly 150 years
after the proclamation of the American
Republic, in welcoming for the first
time a President of the United States
in England — in welcoming one whose
insight, calmness, and dignity in the
discharge of his high duties had been
watched with admiration.
1960s America, Paul McCartney says that
the ‘bird’ he’s encouraging to fly is a black
woman. Of course it works because of the
double meaning — the lyrics are ostensibly
about an actual blackbird. It’s a very 1960s
reference, and no doubt Macca would be at
pains to point out that he knows ‘bird’ is less
acceptable these days.
Perhaps some women, like Sara, are
happy with ‘girl’. Even those who aren’t in
their twenties — women of all ages refer
to going on a ‘girls’ night out’. And in 2015
a Downing Street photographer shouted
‘Morning, girls’ at Nicky Morgan (then 42)
and Amber Rudd (51). The quizzical look he
got from Morgan produced an immediate
apology. But after a few seconds’ thought,
and despite being Minister for Women and
Equalities at the time, Morgan called back:
‘Girls? Thank you!’
But I’ve had several conversations like
the one with Sara where the ‘g’ word has
given me pause for thought. Sensing that
it wouldn’t be welcomed, I’ve been forced
into using ‘woman’. So what new term
could we come up with? One solution might
have been to appropriate ‘guy’ and make it
unisex. It’s not uncommon for people
(usually men, though women do it too)
to address a mixed group as ‘guys’. For
instance: ‘Hey guys, shall we get some more
drinks?’ But it doesn’t work as well in the
singular — it’s hard to imagine referring
to a woman as a ‘talented guy’. And any-
way, Jane Garvey has stamped on the prac-
tice full stop. The Woman’s Hour presenter
tweeted last year: ‘I’m not a complainer
to bar or waiting staff generally — no
one wants to be that boring git — but I am
not a guy.’
Perhaps we could take inspiration from
the Australian ‘Sheila’. Granted, that term
itself is outdated, but how about anoth-
er name that could stand for all females?
Maybe ‘Chaka’, on the grounds that Ms
Khan claims to be ‘every woman’.
Whatever we choose, a solution has
to be found. As far as the existing word is
concerned, it’s time to go, girl.
Mark Mason is the author of The
Importance of Being Trivial.
17
 ANCIENT AND MODERN
How the year was born
The darkest dawn
Remembering the Iolaire disaster
DOUGLAS MURRAY

GETTY IMAGES
Why are our years
structured as they are? Censorinus in
his de die natali (‘Birthday Book’) for
his chum Caerellius (ad 238) revealed
all, as follows.
The Roman year once had ten
months. It began in March, named
after Mars god of war, since that was
when the fighting season began. April
derived from aperio, ‘I open’, because
nature ‘opened’ the way for birth
(wrong derivation); May from the
goddess Maia; Junius from the goddess
Juno; Quinctilis meaning 5th (our July);
Sextilis meaning 6th (our August);
and September to December from the
Roman numerals seven to ten.
This ten-month year had 304
days: 31 days in March, May, July and
October; 30 days in April, June, August,
September, November and December.
In about 713 bc, two new months The memorial on Lewis marking the Iolaire tragedy
were added: Januarius derived from
the god Janus, who looks backwards

and forwards (cf. ianua, ‘door’ and
our ‘janitor’), and Februarius from
a ceremony of expiation (Februa).
Fifty-one ‘lucky’ days were allotted to
these months, making 355 days in all,
but more were needed. So a day was
subtracted from each of the six 30-day
months (thus April, June, August,
September, November and December
became 29 days), and added to the
51 new days. These 51 + 6 days were
then shared between January (29) and
February (28).
But this 355-day year still did not
match the solar cycle. With seasonal
sacrifices hopelessly out of kilter
(no good celebrating spring in a
snowstorm), Julius Caesar added
ten days as follows: two days each to
January, August and December (all
now 31); one day each to April, June,
September, November (all now 30).
Aware that the year was still a quarter
of a day short, Caesar added one
day to February every four years.
In celebration, the month Quinctilis
became ‘Julius’ at his death in 44 bc;
and in 8 bc Sextilis became ‘Augustus’,
after Caesar’s adopted son and
emperor.
This ‘Julian’ calendar remains in
force. Pope Gregory’s modifications
in 1582 (1752 in the UK) merely
shortened each year by 0.0075 of a day
and recalibrated the dating of Easter.
— Peter Jones
18
T
he centenaries of the Great War
came to a close in November with
commemorations of the 1918 Armi-
stice. But one final British centenary associ-
ated with that conflict has just passed. Few
people on the mainland will be aware of it,
though it has certainly been marked in the
Outer Hebrides. It is the commemoration of
the worst peacetime naval disaster since the
sinking of the Titanic. And one of the most
terrible, poignant and final tragedies to have
come from the Great War.
On the evening of 31 December 1918, a
vessel was boarding passengers at the Kyle
of Lochalsh. His Majesty’s Yacht Iolaire
had been requisitioned by the Admiralty
to transport some of the hundreds of Royal
Naval Reservists heading back to the Isle of
Lewis and Harris after four years of service.
There were too many people at Kyle for this
boat, and some of the people who marched
onboard the steam yacht could not get a
seat. But it was New Year’s Eve, the war was
over, and the men were returning home.
Though it set off for Stornoway, the
Iolaire never made it to harbour. In the
early hours of New Year’s Day, the yacht
arrived within sight of the lights of Storno-
way, where the servicemen’s families and
friends were waiting on the quay. But some-
time around 2 a.m. the yacht took a wrong
course and struck an infamous reef of rocks
known locally as the Beasts of Holm. Of
the 284 men reckoned to have boarded the
Iolaire at Kyle, only 80 made it to land. Just
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
seven of the ship’s 23-strong crew escaped.
All four officers were drowned. Among the
endless cruel ironies of that night was that
the Iolaire was packed with island men who
could have guided the vessel to Stornoway
harbour with ease.
As John MacLeod recounts in his foren-
sically detailed 2009 book When I Heard the
Bell: the Loss of the Iolaire, the yacht hit the
rocks at full speed. Though only around 30
yards from shore, the night was pitch black
and the January seas were roaring. The ves-
sel immediately tilted, hurling men straight
into the icy waters. An effort to lower a life-
boat was thwarted when it was promptly
smashed to splinters by the waves. Those
men fighting to get off the sides of the ves-
sel were the lucky ones. Inside the ship were
scores of their friends, relatives and neigh-
bours who could not get out. As the star-
board side went down and the floors turned
into walls, few men inside had any chance
of escape.
From on deck, one especially brave soul
— John Finlay MacLeod — managed to
swim and then scramble ashore with a rope.
Though this was to be the wreck’s only life-
line, it was a cruel one. As the number of
men on shore grew, they used their remain-
ing strength to hold the rope and try to keep
it tight for the others to cross. But listing and
rolling on the other end was the Iolaire, pull-
ing and then slackening on the rope. And as
their eyes adjusted to the dark, those on
board could see what might wait for any-
one who tried to use it. John MacLean from
Carloway saw the first man on the rope —
a young seaman — immediately thrashed
on the rocks. ‘It would take some nerve for
you to get ashore after that,’ he said. Donald
Murray later recalled more than a dozen
men struggling along the rope ahead of him.
‘You cannot comprehend the ferocity of that
sea,’ he remembered. ‘The returning waves
were sweeping the rope bare.’ After one
wave swept everyone else from the rope,
Murray scrambled onto the boulders before
the next big wave could overwhelm him.
Then the vessel itself gave up. As it titled
over to port and disappeared from view,
flames shot up from the engine room. With a
flash and a bang she went down ‘like a stone’
with scores of men inside her.
And yet she still had passengers. Three
men had managed to find their way to the
ship’s rigging. Donald Morrison clung to the
main mast, while the other two men held
onto the foremast. All about them were the
shouts of drowning men. Death, as Morrison
recalled years later, was in every wave. He
clung on as wave after wave came crashing
down around and on top of him. The other
two men who were clinging on with him were
swept away. Soon he was the only one left.
He later described how, just as he thought
he could hold on no longer, some lines
from Psalm 37 came into his head in Gaelic
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IN CONVERSATION WITH
FRASER NELSON
Tuesday 26 February 2019, 7.30 p.m.
Emmanuel Centre, Westminster SW1P 3DW
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(‘Thig treis is furtachd thuc’ o Dhia,/ le fuas-
gladh an deagh àm’). ‘The Lord shall help,
and them deliver, / he shall them free and
save.’ He held on all night. Word had by
this point reached Stornoway and so at
around ten in the morning, in the first light
of the new year, a motor launch with a vol-
unteer crew managed, at great risk, to ease
the Iolaire’s last remaining passenger off
the vessel. Of all the men who had boarded
the Iolaire at the Kyle of Lochalsh, Morri-
Even today the Iolaire is
mentioned on Lewis and Harris
in a tone of grief and shock
son was, as he put it himself, ‘the only one to
step ashore on Stornoway pier’.
With daylight, the full scale of the disaster
became clear. So many bodies were washing
up on the rocks that even as they were laid
out first on the grass and then in the mortu-
aries in Stornoway, it became apparent that
there were not enough coffins on the island
for all of the dead.
Among those few who made it to shore,
some staggered the last miles home to their
villages. Yet there was no respite there,
for the relatives of other passengers of the
Iolaire swiftly surrounded them, desperate
for news of their husbands, fathers and sons.
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These small communities of an island that
had already given a thousand of their men
to the war now learned how many of those
who had survived had drowned on their
own doorstep.
The official inquiry that followed did not
satisfy the island. But nothing could have
done. The Iolaire’s officers had clearly been
at fault. Rumours persisted that they must
have been drunk. There was guilt too: guilt
that more had not been able to be done in
time from shore, and of course there was
survivor’s guilt. But with no one to direct ill
feeling at, and in the midst of a tragedy of
such irreconcilable cruelty, the island largely
shuttered down on its grief. The last man to
have survived the Iolaire died in 1992. The
last of the sweethearts of one of the drowned
men died in 2006. The last of the children
orphaned by the vessel passed away over
the course of this decade.
Even today the Iolaire is mentioned on
Lewis and Harris in a tone of grief and shock.
So deep was the wound that it took until after
the next war for a memorial to be erected
on the cliffs above the Beasts of Holm. The
words of the psalm chosen for the memorial
sum up, in Gaelic, the incomprehension and
faith which was the island’s deep response
to the blow that had struck it: ‘Thy way is in
the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and
thy footsteps are not known.’
19
 Brexit: the movie
The playwright James Graham on making a drama out of a crisis
LLOYD EVANS
‘I
try to interpret the most generous
version of somebody’s actions,’ says
the dramatist James Graham. This
rare ability to create open and sympathet-
ic characters has turned the 36-year-old
into our foremost political playwright. His
breakthrough work, This House, chroni-
cled the terminal decline of James Calla-
ghan’s premiership between 1976 and 1979.
Rather than focusing on Callaghan and
his destroyer, Margaret Thatcher, the play
looked at the backbenchers and party whips
who laboured behind the scenes to keep Cal-
laghan’s government afloat.
Graham’s plays are comedic but he’s
principally an observer rather than a satirist.
Yet he recognises the value of caricature.
‘It’s a very necessary weapon with which to
hold people to account,’ he says. ‘It’s some-
thing the British are uniquely placed to do.
Our sense of humour is very piss-takey. I was
surprised, when I went to America to work,
that the first thing people observed about
me was that my way of expressing affection
was by insulting people. I didn’t realise that
was a uniquely English thing.’
In 2017 Graham was invited by Channel
4’s new director of programmes, Ian Katz, to
create a drama about the referendum. It was
the first script Katz commissioned. And Gra-
ham felt qualified to encompass the spec-
trum of opinion on Brexit. ‘I live in Lambeth
in London, in the most pro-Remain constitu-
ency in the country, but Mansfield, where my
family live, is in one of the top ten pro-Leave
areas. My family and friends voted Leave. I
love people who voted differently from me.
And I listen to them.’
Something monstrous, he says, was
released into British politics by the referen-
dum. He wanted his script ‘to make sense of
this feeling that there’s a dragon in the base-
ment that’s been growing and growing and
growing for decades. And it burst out of its
cage in 2016. Something’s been feeding it,
and we’ve been ignoring it.’
Early drafts featured the big beasts,
Cameron, Osborne and Boris Johnson. But
Graham felt it would be ‘more surprising
20
and more interesting’ to repeat his tech-
nique with This House and to peek behind
the scenes at the people running the cam-
paigns. ‘Boris and Michael Gove, bless
them, didn’t come up with the red bus or the
£350 million claim or the slogan “Take Back
Control” even though they were the faces
seen by the public.’
It was only while researching the script
that he realised that the Brexit campaign
had been split between Leave.EU, fronted
by Nigel Farage, and Vote Leave, run by an
Something monstrous, Graham
says, was released into British
politics by the referendum
affiliation of Eurosceptic Tories. ‘Initially
as a dramatist I was a bit annoyed because
you want Leave here, and you want Remain
there. The symmetry is pleasing, and to lose
that symmetry I found frustrating. And it
just added a triangle of confusion and com-
plication.’ But he saw this as an opportuni-
ty to enlighten viewers ‘about the different
tranches of Leave’. A Remainer himself, he
characterises the Remain view of the Leave
operation as ‘quite unsophisticated, quite
thuggish, brutish, crude politics’. He was
surprised to find that ‘people at the centre
of the Leave machine, people like Dominic
Cummings and Dan Hannan, come from an
intellectual and a philosophical background
in their dislike of the EU, and it wasn’t the
same as the more extreme xenophobic, rac-
ist elements of that campaign’.
The resulting film, Brexit: An Uncivil War,
is self-evidently told from a Remain view-
point, but it manages to appear balanced
because it draws a sharp distinction between
‘good’ and ‘bad’ Leave. The bad lot, per-
sonified by Farage and Arron Banks, are
coarse, boozy, under-educated hooligans. The
good guys, including Hannan and Douglas
Carswell, are literate and cerebral, with pol-
ished manners and extensive vocabularies.
Graham admits that the director of Vote
Leave, Dominic Cummings, was unknown
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
to him before he started work on the script.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Cummings as
an idiosyncratic visionary disenchanted by
the stuffiness and incompetence of career
politicians. It’s a sympathetic portrait of an
intellectual patriot, a man of action with
a broad streak of anarchy in his make-up.
According to the film, Cummings some-
times signs in as ‘Osama bin Laden’ when
visiting government buildings. He agreed to
meet both Graham and Cumberbatch dur-
ing their research. ‘He was generous and
gracious. He opened his door,’ says Graham.
‘He hasn’t done that to many journalists. I
wasn’t holding him specifically to account. I
just wanted to listen.’
Cummings revealed that his unorthodox
canvassing methods included a ‘Wether-
spoons tour’ of the country. ‘He went to
market towns to gauge the nation’s mood. It
was unscientific. He just went in and had a
pint with people in places that most political
scientists don’t go. No one had asked these
people what they thought.’
Cummings coined the slogan ‘Take
Back Control’ and insisted that Vote Leave
should focus on the two issues revealed by
his pub focus groups: national sovereign-
ty and the cost of the EU. He also intro-
duced new digital marketing strategies that
reached thousands of neglected voters and,
according the film, swung the result his way.
Graham believes there’s unfinished busi-
ness here. ‘He [Cummings] thinks there is
a problem. Technology is advancing so fast
and unchecked that we should be having a
conversation about it, about how it’s affect-
ing our politics. He would relish that but he
doesn’t necessarily believe the MPs have the
expertise to do it.’
Graham takes a bleak view of politics.
‘It’s not sustainable, this mood, this paralysis,
nothing is being achieved, nobody is agree-
ing, no new vision is being presented, no
answers are being given.’ He says the refer-
endum was held ‘disingenuously, because it
was intended to tackle an internal Conserv-
ative party problem’. And the response left
him dismayed. ‘All of us, Remain and Leave,
defaulted to a very simplistic, a very tribal, a
very toxic, very shouted form of politics when
we could have listened and learned and inter-
rogated this big, important question.’
What about a second vote? ‘In my com-
munity, a former mining town, [the result]
was a reaction to austerity, the death of
industry, unemployment. But have any of
those concerns been tackled? Have those
questions been answered by the people call-
ing for a second referendum? Do we have
the confidence that our discourse has shifted
into a better form of conversation? I’m not
sure. Because that,’ he says, jabbing a finger
as if to conjure up the referendum genie,
‘that was terrifying.’
Brexit: An Uncivil War is on Monday at
9 p.m. on Channel 4.

Let’s talk about sex
L
ong-suffering Spectator readers
deserve a seasonal break from yet
another Remoaner diatribe from me.
My last on this page, making the outrageous
suggestion that the populace may some-
times be wrong, is now being brandished by
online Leaver-readers of my Times column
as proof that I am in fact a fascist; so there
isn’t anywhere much to go from there.
Instead, I turn to sex. There is little time
left for me to write about sex as the thoughts
of a septuagenarian on this subject (I turn
70 this year) may soon meet only a shudder.
But I have a theory which I have the audac-
ity to think important.
What follows is not written here for the
first time, and much of it is neither original
nor new; but on very few subjects have I
ever been more sure I’m right, or more sure
that future generations will see so, and won-
der that it stared us in the face yet was not
acknowledged. My firm belief is that in try-
ing to categorise sex, sexuality and — yes
— even gender, the late 19th, 20th and early
21st centuries have taken the medical and
social sciences down a massive blind alley.
No such categories exist. And it has been
particularly sad in 2018 to see the ‘trans’
movement, with its hopes of modernising
and liberalising public attitudes, walking
straight into the same trap.
Sticking names on things and badges
on people, and spouting corrosive nonsense
about ‘crossing’ from one sex or sexuality
or ‘gender’ to another can only warp self-
knowledge and our knowledge of each
other.
When I was young, I was told the whole
world was divided into heterosexual men and
heterosexual women, bar a small number of
unfortunate ‘homosexuals’ of both genders
and possibly an even smaller number in a
third category, ‘bisexuals’, who ‘swung both
ways’; plus, finally, a tiny band of wretched
creatures who were physically not quite one
thing or the other. Being from a kindly, liber-
al family, I was taught that sympathy, under-
standing and tolerance were called for, and
these things were not a moral question and
not a matter for the police.
Growing up in the 1950s, I had no idea
how recently this prism had been applied to
sexuality, splitting white sunlight into colour-
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
MATTHEW PARRIS
bands; or that a century beforehand these
rigid categories had not existed. But before
the Victorians, sex was described more by
verbs than nouns — as something people
did rather than were — and sexual lean-
ings, mainstream as well as minority, were
appetites to which almost anyone might
on occasion be prey. Those earlier ages had
been vicious in their approach to morally
disapproved behaviour but relaxed in their
understanding that many, perhaps most,
could feel the pull.
Then came an age in which the moral
disapproval and legal sanctions were to fade
— a good thing — but paddocks were to be
constructed with pseudo-scientific names;
and we were all to be badged, placed in one
All in all, I’ve probably slept
with as many straight men as
self-identifying gay or bisexual ones
paddock or another, and (later) offered
assistance and counselling if we wished to
change paddock.
And the counting began. How many
‘homosexuals’ were there?
To my surprise (on re-reading), the first
and still the most important such survey —
undertaken in America by Alfred Kinsey
and colleagues in the mid-20th century —
was the most enlightened. Kinsey distrusted
brutal categorisation but, wishing to count,
constructed what came close to a sliding
scale containing seven gradations between
exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive
homosexuality. He found that almost half
his male interviewees had reacted sexually
to both genders; more than a third had had
a homosexual encounter; and more than one
in ten reported roughly equally strong sexu-
al responses to both men and women.
After Kinsey, the needle begins to swing
so wildly between surveys that the best anal-
ysis is probably that we’re all at sea. Surveys
for the Observer of ten and four years ago
suggest that around 4 per cent of British
men would call themselves ‘homosexual’.
Meanwhile, the first paragraph of a YouGov
survey in 2015 is worth quoting: ‘Asked to
plot themselves on a “sexuality scale”, 23
per cent of British people choose something
other than 100 per cent heterosexual — and
the figure rises to 49 per cent among 18-
to 24-year-olds’.
The important thing to note about this
apparent variance, though, is that it may be
more apparent than real, arising from the
available menu of words offered to people.
Words create categories. People don’t fall
neatly into them.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as I matured and
experimented, what I’d been told did not
tally with what I encountered. I was never
very promiscuous (or I’d be dead) but over
the decades built up a modest personal case-
book. Some of the men I slept with have gone
straight despite a strong cultural barrier to a
gay man doing this. Some friends I thought
— knew — to be straight have gone gay, or
‘bisexual’. All in all, I’ve probably slept with
as many straight men as self-identifying gay
or bisexual ones: I doubt most were lying,
and in some cases have reason to know they
weren’t. For every ‘bisexual’ man who’s
actually gay but reluctant to say so, there’s
a straight man who’s actually bisexual. And
there are plenty of ‘gay’ men who know that,
in a different life, they could reasonably
contentedly be straight. Indeed, hordes are:
happy in real marriages with wives and chil-
dren. And I’ve noticed in myself and heard
reported from others how the shapes of our
desires can shift with the years.
In what passes for the gay ‘community’,
there’s something of a taboo about admit-
ting, even to ourselves, that quite a few of
us (not me) could, with a little coaxing and
self-discipline, be ‘straight’. Straight men
are equally reluctant to admit the converse.
There exist strong reasons for this taboo
among gays: first, ‘we can’t help it’ was abso-
lutely central to our early pitch for equal-
ity, and we needed to believe it. Secondly, if
sexuality really is modifiable for some, how
long before someone suggests cognitive
behavioural therapy minus (or even plus)
the Hallelujahs?
Damn the Hallelujahs. The better view is
that we’re free to choose. The coming age
may extend that from sexuality to gender.
But with this sting which today’s trans
lobby will hate. Don’t demand admittance
to a new category. Don’t crave a different
badge. Dare to believe that there are no cat-
egories, no badges, and no walls.
21
 The way we were
Alcohol and idiosyncrasy were hallmarks of The Spectator’s 1970s revival
‘T
he Spectator, having quite
recently been a very bad
magazine, is at present
a very good one.’ Those gratify-
ing words began a full-dress lead-
ing article in the Times on 22 Sep-
tember 1978, headed ‘On the Side
of Liberty’. Its occasion was this
magazine’s sesquicentenary, which
we celebrated with a grand ball at
the Lyceum Theatre, and much else
besides. Although I can’t possibly be
objective, I think that the praise was
deserved. The revival of The Spec-
tator 40 years ago was wonderful: it
assured what had been the very inse-
cure future of the paper, and it was
the time of my life.
Founded in 1828 by the Dundo-
nian Robert Rintoul to promote the
cause of Reform, by the late 19th
century The Spectator had become Liber-
al Unionist under the almost 40-year edi-
torship of John St Loe Strachey, ‘pompous,
pretentious and futile’ in Lloyd George’s
derisive words. Then, in another long reign
from 1932 to 1953, Wilson Harris made The
Spectator what A.J.P. Taylor called a voice
of ‘enlightened Conservatives’. By the time
I discovered it as a schoolboy in the early
1960s, The Spectator was enjoying a pur-
ple patch, thanks to Ian Gilmour, who had
bought the magazine and edited it himself
for some years, promoting his own brand
of liberal Toryism while assembling some
excellent writers. But he sold The Spectator
to a shady businessman in 1967, and over the
next eight years it went fast downhill, low
in tone, hysterically Europhobic, shedding
three-quarters of its circulation and by no
means sure to survive.
Then came the miraculous rebirth,
credit for which, as the Times rightly said,
went to ‘Mr Alexander Chancellor, its still
new editor, and Mr Henry Keswick, its still
new proprietor’. Sir Henry, as he now is,
bought The Spectator in the summer of 1975,
and installed Alexander, possibly because
22
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
Long life: Alexander Chancellor
he was the only journalist he knew, even
though Alexander had worked for Reuters
and as a television reporter, but never for a
paper, daily or weekly. It proved an inspired
choice. While The Spectator moved from 99
Gower Street to 56 Doughty Street, close to
Dickens’s house, Alexander found himself
Graham Greene gave us the puff
of puffs, calling us the ‘best written
magazine in the English language’
like a manager who takes over a faltering
football club and has to reshape the team.
Some survivors of the previous regime
went on writing for us. Bryan Robertson,
a delightful old queen who’d had a distin-
guished career as curator of the Whitechapel
Gallery, wrote one of the unlikelier pieces
for our arts pages on ‘Punk Rock and the
Sex Pistols’, while Peter Ackroyd also stayed
on, and once a week could be just about
perceived in a corner of the editor’s office
through the pall of cigarette smoke (Alex-
ander smoked 80 a day, alas), turning out an
impeccable 900-word film review in an hour.
But others were more or less gently
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
shed, as Alexander picked his own
people, some of them old friends,
such as Simon Courtauld as man-
aging editor and John McEwen as
art critic. Years before, George
Hutchinson had worked for the
magazine, and was brought back as
deputy editor to provide continuity,
as well as his own kind of bohemian
urbanity. My own brief and inglori-
ous career in publishing had ended
when I was sacked, and by pure
chance I bumped into Alexander a
couple of months later. After a bibu-
lous evening, he offered me a job as
assistant editor, and changed my life.
Our first star signing was Auberon
Waugh, but finding a political col-
umnist was a problem, and there
were a couple of false starts, as well
as a farcical episode when my friend
Alan Watkins was hired but reneged when
he was made a better offer. I’d have liked
to have a go myself, but with his unerring
instinct Alexander made a far better choice
in Ferdinand Mount, while I became literary
editor. After Taki joined us, one of my own
picks on the team sheet was Jeffrey Ber-
nard, whom I knew all too well from sundry
dens in Soho, and so we hit on the double act
of High Life and Low Life. If anyone ever
needed a first-rate secretary to bring order
to chaos it was Alexander, and he found one
in Jenny Naipaul, wife of my dear friend
Shiva Naipaul, who also wrote for us. And
then we found the wonderful Clare Asquith,
the one person from our team who’s still
working for The Spectator today.
To look back is exhilarating but poignant.
Contributors to our 150th anniversary issue
of 23 September 1978 included Waugh,
Richard West, Nicholas Davenport (the
veteran City columnist), Peter Jenkins (the
Guardian political columnist, whom I’d
recruited as theatre critic), George Gale,
Robert Blake, Nicholas von Hoffman and
Henry Fairlie writing from America, and in
the books pages Michael Foot on Silone,
Anthony Quinton on Isaiah Berlin, Ian Gil-
mour on Jo Grimond, Watkins on Waugh,
John Biggs- Davison on Ulster, Thomas
Szasz on R.D. Laing, and Francis King. All
of them are now gone, as is a former liter-
ary editor who generously offered his help:
Graham Greene gave us the puff of puffs,
calling The Spectator ‘the best-written maga-
zine in the English language’.
That other laudatory tribute, from the
Times (in a leader unmistakably written by
William Rees-Mogg, its editor), claimed that,
‘The Spectator now plays an important part
in the most interesting intellectual move-
ment of our time.’ What the New Statesman
had been in the 1930s and 1940s in advanc-
ing the corporatist-collectivism which was
to prevail for so long in British politics, said
the Times, The Spectator had become to the
new mood rejecting it. That wasn’t wholly
wrong. A libertarian tone was set by Ferdy
Mount, who later worked at Downing Street
for Margaret Thatcher, by Bron Waugh,
although his own brand of Tory-anarchism
took the form of contempt for all politicians,
including Thatcher.
B ut if the Times was flattering, it was also
misleading. No magazine edited by Alex-
ander was ever going to be doctrinaire. He
had never voted Tory before he became edi-
tor, and he was no kind of ideologue. Clos-
er to the mark was the American journalist
Michael Kinsley when he said he loved ‘the
bitter wit… that makes American journal-
ism seem paralysed by gentility, the jaunty
undertones of self-mockery and unserious-
ness that run through The Spectator’.
Under Alexander’s almost effortless
guidance it combined the grave and the friv-
olous. We had Jeff’s inimitable column and
Dick West’s idiosyncratic foreign reports.
But we also had Hans Keller’s fine transla-
tion of that most beautiful passage of Ger-
man prose, Grillparzer’s oration for the
funeral of Beethoven, and Colin Haycraft’s
ode on the election of the Oxford Professor
of Poetry, which commented wittily on the
candidates in faultless Latin, with 14 echoes
of Horace.
All this may sound cliquey, but a success-
ful weekly is a club, with its private jokes and
scandals, and its conviviality. There we real-
ly couldn’t be faulted. The sesquicentennial
ball was merely the high point, with le tout
Londres sipping and bopping, and marked
by a violent altercation between two women
journalists which led to a libel action, mer-
cifully not concerning us, although we had
our share of those. Then there was our sum-
mer party, and the lengthy Thursday lunches.
Sometimes we had American visitors, from
Spiro Agnew to Alger Hiss, sad to say not
on the same occasion. Agnew’s fellow guest
was Barry Humphries, who, toward the end
of lunch, left the room. After a remarkably
short interlude, Dame Edna entered, to the
consternation of Agnew.
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Many years later, when Kinglsey Amis’s
letters were published, it transpired that after
visiting the office he’d written to Robert
Conquest to say that, ‘Six of them came into
the boardroom where I had been trying to
read back numbers and each opened a bot-
tle of wine. I don’t know how they bring the
paper out.’ That really did take me aback:
crikey, if Kingsley had thought we drank a
lot… but then we did somehow manage to
bring the paper out.
Reading John Preston’s book A Very
English Scandal and watching the equally
enjoyable television adaptation, with Hugh
Grant’s brilliant performance as Jeremy
Thorpe, reminded me that it was in that ses-
quicentennial year that the Thorpe affair
leapt into the headlines and our pages, with
Waugh, Mount and Christopher Booker all
writing about it in different registers — and
Crikey, I thought, if Kingsley
thinks we drank a lot. But then
we did bring the paper out
not just our pages. Our local, or alternative
office, was the Duke of York in the mews
opposite, where Dave Potton — still duck-
ing and diving, I hope — was our genial host,
and a repository of Cockney humour. One
day when I looked in rather early, he greeted
me: ‘Tell me, Geoff, why is Jeremy Thorpe
like William the Conqueror?’ ‘You tell me,
Dave.’ ‘Cause they’re both fuckin’ Normans.’
If Henry Keswick hoped that his generos-
ity would be recognised by the Tory party, he
was sadly wrong, while for all that praise the
circulation stubbornly refused to shoot up
(that was to come later), and the only thing
that mounted was losses, until Henry under-
standably tired of them and sold The Spec-
tator. In 1984 Alexander was removed. Now
he is the saddest loss of all. At his funeral in
early 2017, Craig Brown observed that Alex-
ander was a wonderful editor, even if those
of us who worked for him could never quite
work out why. In his indefinable way, as an
animating genius, he was the best editor I’ve
ever known, and he really had made The
Spectator ‘a very good magazine’.
‘Oh dear – I thought we were
going to have a dry January.’
BAROMETER
Paths of infection
2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the
height of the Spanish flu pandemic which
is believed to have killed 3 per cent of the
world’s population. But how Spanish was it,
and what should it have been called?
Spanish flu: There is little evidence it
originated in Spain, but news of the disease
first appeared in the Spanish press, because
the country was not subject to the wartime
reporting restrictions of most European
countries, so it was assumed it started there.
French flu: Virologist John Oxford has
suggested the disease crossed to humans
at Étaples, a transit and hospital site in
the Great War. Besides harbouring large
numbers of men with weakened lungs, it also
had a piggery and poultry farm — animals
known to play a role in the development of
strains of the influenza virus.
American flu: An outbreak of flu at Fort
Riley in Kansas in March 1918 affected
soldiers who had not yet travelled to
European battlefields. Many died either in
Kansas or on the journey to Europe.
Chinese flu: China has been a frequent
breeding ground for avian flu in recent
times, and a virulent outbreak hit northern
China in late 1917. Interest has focused on
the 96,000 Chinese labourers who worked
on the Western Front.
A big year
What are we meant to be aware of in 2019?
— Year of Indigenous Language: UN
— Year of the periodic table of chemical
elements: UN
— Year of Green Action: UK government
— Year of Discovery: Business Wales
— Year of Culture: Horsham and District
— Year of Rembrandt: Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam
Bets are off
A reminder of what the soothsayers said
would happen in 2018:
— ‘Start of a world war which will last 27
years; a major eruption of Mount Vesuvius’:
Nostradamus, as interpreted by
investment tip sheet lomardiletter.com
— Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will
split up before the wedding and the Queen
will announce her retirement, with Prince
Charles taking on her duties: Lyndsay
Edwards, clairvoyant
— A nasty new superbug: Old Moore’s
Almanac
— A large US ship will sink within the year.
It is potentially a warship of some kind and
may have something to do with an accident
or an attack of some kind. However, the
exact cause is unclear. Some believe this
could have something to do with the rising
tensions between North Korea and the US:
Psychics4Today.com
23

Lords reform
Sir: How astonishing that the historian
Robert Tombs (‘Beyond Brexit’,
15 December) should think that the Lords
might ‘at last be seriously reformed’ after
more than a century of schemes that
foundered in the Commons. MPs have
an unthreatening upper house; they will
never agree on substantial changes that
would increase its power. They will leave
the Lords to implement its own sensible
plans to cut its numbers to 600 by bringing
party strengths into line with those in the
Commons over the next few years.
Those interested in radical Lords
reform should study the detailed proposals
for a federal constitution drawn up by an
all-party group chaired by the Marquess of
Salisbury, the current custodian of a long
family tradition of creative constitutional
thinking. A member of the group, the
distinguished former Clerk of the
Commons Lord Lisvane, has introduced
a Bill that would completely recast the
role of the upper house. Those seriously
interested in finding a constitution fit for
the post-Brexit world should turn to the
Lisvane Bill.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
Aiding global Britain
Sir: In his article ‘Beyond Brexit’, Robert
Tombs makes a number of unfounded
allegations about the UK’s foreign aid
budget. He says the money is ‘scattered’,
following no plan. In fact, spending closely
follows the DFID Department Plan that
sets out key objectives covering (among
other things) the promotion of global
prosperity, tackling extreme poverty,
supporting resilience and seeking to
strengthen global peace, security and
governance.
He also complains that foreign aid is
‘deliberately not aimed to further’ British
foreign policy priorities. This will be
news to the International Development
Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, who made
a series of speeches this year outlining
how her aim was exactly that, speaking
at Chatham House of ‘global goals in the
national interest’.
Tombs claims that money is ‘simply
handed over to governments or NGOs
while British officials exercise little or no
effective control’. This is demonstrably
untrue. Serious professional scrutiny is
exercised over funds, both internally and
by a number of outside bodies.
Perhaps Professor Tombs would like
to spend a day with me at DFID? If he
is concerned that Brexit Britain is to be
24
LETTERS
global and successful, he might like to
consider how our foreign aid already
contributes to our reputation.
Alistair Burt MP
Minister of State for the Middle East,
FCO and DFID, London SW1
What were they thinking?
Sir: James Forsyth’s comment (Politics,
15 December) that most of the blame
for the Brexit mess lies with Parliament
for holding a referendum ‘without
thinking through the consequences’ is
an understatement. Only 53 MPs voted
against the proposal and the decision of
Conservative and Labour MPs to vote en
masse in favour of it appears to have had
nothing whatever to do with the long-term
national interest. In the related Commons
debate, little was said about what might
happen in the inconceivable event of a vote
to leave. If anything positive comes of such
eye-watering incompetence, perhaps it will
be constitutional reform. In the meantime,
Leavers and Remainers alike have every
right to feel betrayed.
Roger Burgess
Lodsworth, West Sussex
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Hardline border
Sir: Adrian O’Neill, the Irish ambassador
to the UK, states that there was no
discontinuity in Brexit policy between
the current Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and
his predecessor Enda Kenny (Letters,
1 December). One wonders if Mr Varadkar
agrees with him on this point. May I suggest
that Mr O’Neill reads Leo Varadkar:
A Very Modern Taoiseach by Philip Ryan
and Niall O’Connor?
This biography, written with the full
co-operation of its subject and many of his
political associates, notes that in July 2017,
Leo Varadkar, then newly elected, worked
out his strategy on Brexit with Simon
Coveney, his Foreign Affairs Minister.
The authors write: ‘It was agreed that they
would adopt the most hardline stance
possible in relation to the border.’ Is any
sense of discontinuity so false after all?
C.D.C. Armstrong
Belfast
A kiss is not just a kiss
Sir: Misguided Parisian friends decided
that an avuncular English presentation
of a modernised version of Sleeping
Beauty was just right for their four-year-
old daughter before bed. It reminded me
of the books Lara Prendergast referred
to (‘Should we all write feminist stocking
fillers?’, 15 December). All went well until
our hero found her after a mere 40 days,
without fighting his way through any darkly
metaphorical hedge, and woke her with a
kiss on the forehead. ‘What?’ squealed my
young audience, sitting bolt upright and
staring aghast at the book. ‘Et non pas sur
ses lèvres?’ The only way to end the evening
on a happy note was to agree that if he
did not kiss her on the lips, he would not
be worth waking up for. Edit the Brothers
Grimm at your peril!
Jonathan Footerman
Via email
Gone with the wind
Sir: I sympathise with James Delingpole
(‘Will no one ever take on the Green
Blob?’, 1 December). With the advances in
offshore windpower making it financially
more attractive, there is no real need for
any more of the onshore variety. Onshore
windmills really are a blot on the landscape
and their creation only benefits landowners.
Alan Waters
Sevenoaks, Kent
WRITE TO US
The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London
SW1H 9HP; letters@spectator.co.uk
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
A seven-year winter or a pleasant surprise?
Your guess is as good as mine
A
friend reminds me that she sold
her house last summer because
I warned her 18 months ago that
Brexit chaos would loom over every aspect
of life by the beginning of 2019. I got that
horribly right, and I was right too that the
dismissive attitude of Westminster politi-
cians towards the Irish border problem —
call it ‘the Barnier trap’ if you prefer, but I
can tell you I heard grown-up Irish voices
trying in vain to alert UK ministers as long
ago as September 2016 — would come back
to baulk the entire negotiation.
But would I care to make any sort of
prediction for the three months ahead? No,
I wouldn’t. I have no idea whether we’re
heading for an anti-climax akin to ‘Y2K’, the
false fear that the world’s computers would
shut down at the stroke of millennium mid-
night; or a short-term disruption like the fuel
tanker protest in 2000; or a strife-torn seven-
year winter straight out of Game of Thrones.
Then again, we might be in for a pleasant
surprise more like the recovery that gradual-
ly gathered momentum after Black Wednes-
day in 1992, when the pound plunged out of
the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
I have no inkling which of these scenarios is
most likely, and anyone who tells you he has
is a fool or a charlatan. I’ll stick my neck out
only so far as to say that things are bound to
get worse before they get better.
Tired of shopping?
That forecast, such as it is, applies most
obviously to continuing bloodshed in the
high street — a trend that can only periph-
erally be blamed on Brexit. UK wages have
been rising ahead of inflation while inter-
est rates have barely twitched: consumers
still have spending power but are tired and
nervous of spending. Christmas shopping
footfall was 3 per cent down on 2017, its
third consecutive annual decline. The col-
lapse of HMV told us nothing new, since the
music chain was already past its time; but a
profit warning from Asos, the online fash-
ion retailer, was more telling. Data from the
26
insolvency firm Begbies Traynor said that
more than 30,000 retailers were in ‘financial
distress’ before Christmas — and 8,500 of
those were online.
It turns out this story isn’t just about
bricks and mortar. Shoppers are over-
whelmed with choice, while discounters
cannibalise each other. Smart operators con-
tinue to prosper: Next bucks the trend, and
the online grocer Ocado is the darling of a
stock market sector in which others such as
Debenhams, Morrisons and Marks & Spen-
cer have become targets for short-sellers.
Failing store chains and a wipe-out of noth-
ing-special online sellers will be a constant
theme of 2019 — and a dampener on nation-
al spirits, whatever else transpires.
Knights on top
Did you notice that Knights Bachelor still
lead the New Year Honours List, leaving
female counterparts in the DBE category
way down below the Gilbertian chorus of
the Order of the Bath and the Royal Victori-
an Medal? Something should be done about
that, lest anyone thinks Dames Jayne-Anne
Gadhia (former boss of Virgin Money),
Ann Gloag (doyenne of Scottish transport)
and Alison Nimmo (chief executive of the
Crown Estate, the far-sighted property busi-
ness that funds the monarchy) less worthy
than the knights on top, which they’re not.
Mind you, these days it’s a lot easier for
a feisty businesswoman to acquire a handle
than a pin-striped chap. The financial sec-
tor being forever in the doghouse, only two
of its denizens made the cut this time, both
having laboured long for recognition. James
Leigh-Pemberton manages the Treasury’s
interest in RBS and the remnants of North-
ern Rock and Bradford & Bingley; Donald
Brydon is the veteran chairman of the Lon-
don Stock Exchange who will finally retire
in May, at 74. What with the botched depar-
ture of former chief executive Xavier Rolet,
the controversial listing of the Russian alu-
minium giant EN+ and the threatened exile
of Unilever from the FTSE 100, the LSE has
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
had a bad press these past couple of years.
But Brydon — one of my own City boss-
es long ago and a survivor of many battles
since — deserves a gong for stamina.
Win-win for NatWest
High-street forebodings bring me back to
one of my bugbears of 2018: the former Nat-
West branch that has stood abandoned in
my Yorkshire town of Helmsley for almost
four years. In November I contacted Ross
McEwan, chief executive of Natwest’s par-
ent RBS, and was promised an explanation:
not a word since. A further 197 NatWest
branches were due to close last year; Helms-
ley’s is one of many adding to the shopfront
blight. A clutch are for sale through a prop-
erty firm called GVA, but the proceeds
would be a drop in the bank’s bucket. Since
RBS is still two-thirds owned by you and me
as taxpayers, however, so are those empty
buildings — and here’s my suggestion for
McEwan and Leigh-Pemberton: transfer
them all into a social-enterprise charity with
a mission to find new community purposes,
creating a boost for town centres and some
feelgood for your brand. A scheme on these
lines was recently discussed in the House of
Lords — and I say it’s a win-win idea.
Rediscovered City
My Christmas lament for the ‘lost City’
struck a chord. Several of you emailed to
tell me where authentic whiffs of the 1970s
Square Mile, minus the cigarette smoke, can
still be found. Favourites include the Lamb
Tavern in Leadenhall Market, the Wine
Lodge in Fenchurch Street (‘the racing’s on
permanently’) and — for the dwindling tribe
of money market men not yet replaced by
algorithms — the Hatchet in Cannon Street
or the Old Doctor Butler’s Head off Moor-
gate. Meanwhile, London’s oldest chop-
house, Simpson’s Tavern off Cornhill, still
conjures a faint whiff of the 1750s. More
suggestions to martin@spectator.co.uk. A
pub crawl might cheer us up.
Alexander Masters fears
that, in our over-lit lives, we
have forgotten how to
appreciate the dark
Cressida Connolly hates
Virginia Woolf’s anti-
Semitism and semicolons
Patrick Skene Catling
describes the agonising fate
of history’s unluckiest rulers
Dick Clement has always
believed ‘retire’ a miserable
word, since he was 17
Bryan Appleyard thinks
comparing Peanuts to
existentialism is an insult –
to Peanuts
Kate Chisholm compares
BBC podcasts to being
stuck at a party with a
drunk

Like a late-stage Elvis

but with rabbits: Olivia
Colman as Queen Anne in
The Favourite
Deborah Ross — p41
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 27
BOOKS & ARTS
‘I am the master’
Philip Hensher on the ruthless cynicism behind
Calouste Gulbenkian’s colossal fortune
Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of
Calouste Gulbenkian, the World’s
Richest Man
by Jonathan Conlin
Profile Books, £25, pp. 402
Whenever I find myself visiting some great
historic house, I always like to break off
from gawping at tapestries to ask the tour
guide: ‘How did the family make its money
in the first place?’ For some reason, this
almost always astonishes and bewilders. It’s
as if the devotion of capital to bricks and
mortar, acres of commemorative canvas
and fresco, marble and landscaping, covers
up any roots in the slave trade or the amass-
ing of bribes from Indian nawabs. Money is
made, and then it sets about dignifying itself.
The Gulbenkian Foundation is a solid
organisation based in Lisbon. It dispenses
money in improving ways and possesses
a very handsome art gallery, full of treas-
ures. It is a blameless thing. But why is it in
Lisbon? Why does it have so much money?
And how was that money made?
No doubt in a couple of centuries hard-
ly anyone will pose these questions, and
the Gulbenkian Foundation will appear
as innocuous as Kedleston Hall. Jonathan
Conlin’s riveting life of its founder, Calouste
Gulbenkian, lays bare the savage origins of
this expensive tranquillity. Yeats said it best:
‘Some violent bitter man, some powerful
man/Called architect and artist in, that they,/
28
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone/
The sweetness that all longed for night
and day.’
Like many obscenely rich men, Calouste
was from an already very wealthy family. His
origins were in the close-knit Armenian com-
munity in Constantinople. A favourite anec-
dote has his father, Sarkis, complaining that
his coffee-servant had fallen asleep on the
job; the other servants, over-zealously, beat
him to death. His father’s angry complaint, ‘I
told you to beat him, not to kill him,’ forms
the punchline. When Sarkis died, he left the
equivalent of £80 million. Calouste, who had
been educated abroad, a rootless command-
er of money, set about transforming this to an
inconceivable extent.
The source of the vast fortune was oil.
Gulbenkian took a close interest in it, even
at a time when its main commercial use was
as kerosene for lighting. Before the first
world war, he had acquired a 5 per cent
share of oil throughout the territories of the
Ottoman empire. The value of this was not
universally apparent until the 1920s.
At 3 a.m. on 14 October 1927, drilling
near Kirkuk in Iraq hit oil under such pres-
sure that it exploded with 90,000 barrels
a day. The flow could not be brought under
control for more than a week; five work-
ers were asphyxiated by the gas cloud that
formed. Against all advice, Gulbenkian
hung on to his share for decades. He had
written a report on the exploitation of Mes-
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
opotamian oil in 1894; the first crude from
Kirkuk reached the Mediterranean in 1934.
Only once in his life, at the age of 19, did he
actually visit an oil field.
The unflagging efforts Gulbenkian made
to consolidate his position are described in
fascinating detail by Conlin. When it came
to it, Gulbenkian was extremely reluctant
to invest any of his 5 per cent in the neces-
sary infrastructure — in, for instance, con-
tributing towards the costs of constructing
pipelines. But the main interest of this clear-
sighted biography is in its exploration of
what this level of wealth does to a man, and
the people around him.
‘I am the master — it is I who have the
money — I will flatten everything in my
path,’ Gulbenkian once told his wife. If he
was not entirely detached from the idea of
morality, he seems to have permitted him-
self an idiosyncratic notion of conduct.
Among his stated ‘fixed moral principles’
was an open disapproval of friends keep-
ing ‘profitable deals to themselves, without
allowing Gulbenkian to “taste a slice of it”.’
An Ottoman doctor called Kemhadjian use-
fully advised his wealthy patient that it was
necessary for him ‘to have sex regularly with
young women, as a rejuvenating tonic’. Gul-
benkian stuck carefully to this programme.
On the other hand, he maintained no
particular principles about who he was pre-
pared to trade with. The Armenian massa-
cres made no impact on his dealings with

Turks. He had no objection to doing busi-
ness with the Third Reich, and the Rus-
sian revolution presented him with a huge
opportunity, both in terms of oil concessions
and acquiring art from the imperial collec-
tions. Others at the time had moral objec-
tions to the Soviet commissars, one oilman
stating firmly that ‘such money is used to
promote revolution and murder. The Soviet
regime is an anti-Christ regime’. It was not
so much that these views were different to
Gulbenkian’s; more that he considered such
questions beneath him.
Calouste’s family life was a sorry affair.
He acquired a palace in Paris, but kept it
more or less as a museum. He would retire
each night to sleep at the Ritz, after being
hosed down in a silver-lined Lalique bath-
room niche by an unenvied valet. His wife,
Nevarte, led a sad life. Gulbenkian was
an avid collector of jewellery, but she was
never permitted to wear any of it. His son,
Nubar, was kept on a tight leash by either
the promise of more money or the periodic,
wilful withdrawal of all funds. At one point,
absurdly, he sued his father in open court,
claiming 5 per cent of the 5 per cent.
Calouste’s idea of a loving offer of recon-
ciliation after one of these periodic ruptures
was a note inviting Nubar ‘to return with
heart and love to your father’s work and
receive and enjoy your usual allowance’. In
later years, Nubar became a favourite of the
British media for his startling, pantomime-
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Far left: Calouste Gulbenkian. Centre: ‘The Break-up of the
Ice’ by Claude Monet and (above) ‘Boy Blowing Bubbles’
by Edouard Manet, from the Calouste Gulbenkian
Museum, Lisbon
villain appearance and his way with jocular
bons mots. He famously drove around in a
converted London cab, remarking: ‘I like to
travel in a gold-plated taxi. It can turn on
a sixpence, whatever that is.’
The collections are magnificent, of
course, and it is they that ensure that Gul-
benkian’s name is remembered when other
Gulbenkian was an avid collector
of jewellery, but he never allowed
his wife to wear any of it
immensely rich men of the time — his asso-
ciate Henri Deterding, for instance — are
forgotten. Much of the art was amassed in
disgraceful circumstances, inluding Rem-
brandts from the Hermitage after the Rus-
sian revolution. After acquiring what he
wanted, Gulbenkian had the gall to write to
the commissar in charge:
I have always been of the opinion that those
things which have been held in your museums
for many years should not be sold. If word of
their sale were to get out it would harm your
government’s credit.
In other words, he didn’t want anyone
else to be allowed to go shopping at
the Hermitage.
Some of the most important pieces were
immediately loaned to institutions and
never actually seen by Gulbenkian himself.
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Still, the art remains in Lisbon — which was
the one place in Europe he could go on liv-
ing in five magnificent hotel suites through-
out the second world war and afterwards,
until his death in 1955.
This is an excellent book, guiding us with
a sure hand and a lucid talent for exposition
through the very different worlds of con-
noisseurship, family trauma and the making
of millions. Conlin frankly admits when one
of Gulbenkian’s business dealings, intend-
ed to be obscure, remains impenetrable. He
compels unwilling admiration for the sheer
tenacity of his hero over decades, while
leaving us in no doubt of the hellish narrow-
ness of Calouste’s focus.
The tycoon is beautifully summed up in
many passing details, but perhaps particu-
larly the list in his pocketbook of
all the things he needed to have with him
when he travelled: passports, stationery,
telegraph code books, wines and champagnes,
medicines, coffee, honey (a special kind), sun-
glasses and binoculars (for birdwatching).
But no books.
This biography reminds me of Anthony
Powell’s devastating portrait of Sir Magnus
Donners, another rich patron whose
interest leant towards painting rather than
literature. He existed in my mind as one of
those figures, dominating, no doubt, in their
own remote sphere, but slightly ridiculous
when seen casually at close quarters.
29
 BOOKS & ARTS
GETTY IMAGES
‘Dancing to Restore an Eclipsed Moon’ by Edward S. Curtis, 1914
The night has
a thousand eyes
Alexandra Masters
Darkness: A Cultural History
by Nina Edwards
Reaktion Books, £16.99, pp. 288
Edward S. Curtis’s 1914 photograph, ‘Danc-
ing to Restore an Eclipsed Moon’, shows
the Kwakiutl tribe of North American Indi-
ans circling a fire ‘to make a sky creature
sneeze and disgorge the moon’. Raised arms
are silhouetted against the sky, faces remain
imperceptible, and bodies are shrouded
in smoke. It is apt that such a mesmerising
image should accompany the opening chap-
ter of Nina Edwards’s beguiling book, which
gallantly aims to subvert common views of
darkness, both physical and metaphorical.
Given the enormous scope of her subject
matter (from clothing to Christianity, elec-
tricity to the Enlightenment, Islam to the
Industrial revolution, black holes to Steve
Bannon, and Milton to the moon), it’s per-
haps inevitable that some topics receive rath-
er scant treatment (on one page the jump
from disembowelling to unlit coastal paths
is somewhat unnerving). But, for the most
part, Edwards’s approach is considered and
engaging as she explores the curious para-
doxes and possibilities of ethereal half-shad-
ows and ‘umbral blackness’.As Van Gogh
once remarked to his brother: ‘The night is
more alive and richly coloured than the day.’
While the gradual introduction of elec-
30
tricity was regarded by many as a symbol
of progress and a civilising force in the wil-
derness — ‘the lighter people’s lives could
become […] the better all would be’ —
others saw it as an enemy of the benefits of
darkness. Edwards questions our desire to
be ‘brightly and irrecoverably lit’ and quotes
the writer Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathan-
iel) as suggesting it is the gentle light of the
lamp, with its imperfection, impetuosity and
limitations, which is ‘more in sympathy with
this human nature of ours’.
Even before the arrival of electricity, the
concept of light posed a threat to some. In
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats mourned a lost
rural idyll of darkness which stood in con-
trast to the brightened world in which he
lived; and a fevered article in the Kölnische
Zeitung newspaper from 1819 deems street
lighting ‘an interference with God’s order’,
its artificial brightness chasing from the mind
‘the horror of darkness that keeps the weak
from many a sin’.
As the bright lights and torrents of infor-
mation multiply in our modern, internet-
riddled lives, it seems that, ironically, our
capacity for self-knowledge diminishes. Our
perception is so limited that Plato’s theory
may still apply: we remain ‘shackled at neck
and ankle’ in such a manner that we cannot
see what is really going on. As we reach for
our bright screens, hungry for more informa-
tion, we remain blind to our more shadowy,
and yet truer, selves.
If only we could get closer to our darker
sides, our reservoirs of ‘human darkness’, as
Jung called it, then we might find ‘the true
spirit of life’. Just as Marlow’s journey into
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
the jungle in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness might repre-
sent the uncovering of the char-
acter’s unconscious mind, so
our attempts to piece together
dreams might allow us to travel
into the darkest regions of our
psyche. Indeed, sleep (Samu-
el Taylor Coleridge’s ‘fiendish’
other life) presents an ideal state
to give vent to our most primi-
tive selves, and Edwards points
to the paradox that the darkness
of sleep can in fact ‘bring order
and clarity to what was confu-
sion’. Yet, according to the Amer-
ican poet John Hollander, it is the
fragility and impermanence of
human perception that adds to,
rather than diminishes, the power
of what cannot be clearly appre-
hended.
Just as Hollander suggests that
shadow is an essential ingredient
in poetry (‘it insinuates itself into
our consciousness. It reflects our
lives’), so artists in history have
either embraced or failed to
escape the elusive nature of art.
Da Vinci was fascinated by the
sfumato technique which, marking a depar-
ture from the vivid chiaroscuro style, engages
in all the subtle tonal and chromatic shades
that lie between darkness and light to cre-
ate the illusion of ‘intimate humanity’. But
Caravaggio’s attempt to achieve heightened
theatricality in his ‘Madonna dei Palafrenie-
ri’ by making the dark darker was lost on
some, who saw the effect as mere ‘lack of
respectful distance’. Meanwhile, for one art
Van Gogh once remarked to his
brother: ‘The night is more alive
and richly coloured than the day’
critic, the predominantly dark tones of Mark
Rothko’s ‘Seagram Murals’ inspired libera-
tion and peace rather than marking ‘a savage
aesthetic revenge’.
It is Goya’s ‘The Half-drowned Dog’
which perhaps best represents the elusive
wonder of darkness in art and life. With only
its head shown on an otherwise strangely
blank canvas, it simply evades definition.
‘It is a symbol that cannot be explained,’
Edwards says, ‘suggesting a metaphor that
cannot be unpacked, lost in the dark with-
out the grounding of tenor, so that we are left
floating in uncertainty.’
Marking Edwards’s latest work to
embrace the neglected and the obscure (pre-
vious offerings include weeds, buttons and
Offal: A Global History), Darkness leaves
the reader floating, too — but full of convic-
tion that truth and beauty can still exist, to
quote Edward Lear, ‘when awful darkness
and silence reign’.

A tainted paradise
Ian Thomson
Caribbean Winter
by Paul Morand, translated and with an
introduction by Mary Gallagher
Signal Books, £12.99, pp. 171
Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live
and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt con-
sultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick
Leigh Fermor. ‘This, one of the great trav-
el books, is published by John Murray at
25s’, proclaims a footnote in the first edi-
tion. Fleming was a friend of Leigh Fermor,
so this is to be expected. Published in 1950,
The Traveller’s Tree may still be the best
non-fiction account of the West Indies. ‘It’s
by a chap who knows what he’s talking
about’, M tells 007, knowingly.
But Paul Morand’s 1929 Hiver caraïbe
comes a close second. The question is: why
has it taken 90 years for this masterwork to
appear in English? Morand (1888–1976),
a pro-Vichy collaborator and occasional
Jew-baiter, was made persona non grata in
post-Liberation France, and was shunned by
mainstream publishers. Only in recent years
has his reputation been revived somewhat.
His glancing, aphoristic prose did have
its admirers, among them André Breton,
Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau and Leigh Fer-
mor himself (who knew Morand personally
and translated one of his books into Eng-
lish). For all that Morand was a sentimental,
narcissistic snob, he remains a fine writer,
whose Caribbean travelogue memorably
conjures a tainted earthly paradise caught
between the sun and the sea.
The result of two trips made to the West
Indies in 1927, Caribbean Winter is inevi-
tably distinguished by the casual racism of
the time. ‘Gobineau’s theories seem quite
sound to me’, Morand says of the half-baked
19th-century ethnologist Joseph Arthur de
Gobineau, who viewed people of colour as
little better than metamorphosed orang-
utans. Like Fleming after him, Morand was
repelled by notions of hybridity; just as the
Jamaican Chinese baddies in Dr No are
depicted as yellow-black ‘Chigroes’ (an
impure race, no less), so Morand quaked
at the ‘filthy epoch of the half-caste’, as he
found it in the Caribbean.
His fear and loathing of miscegenation
was not confined to European apologists
for Aryanism. Marcus Garvey, the Jamai-
can-born messiah of black liberation, like-
wise viewed any union between black and
white as a social misfortune. Mixed mar-
riages threatened the wholesale ‘bastardy’
of the black race, reckoned Garvey. Morand
doubtless viewed the Garveyite Black
Power movements of 1920s New York as
an equivalent, anti-white racism, though
the analogy is absurd because people with
white skin generally enjoy the liberty of not
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
having to define themselves in terms of race.
But beyond his narrow race politics,
Morand is a wonderful guide to the Carib-
bean, as he is clearly enchanted by the local
colour and intoxicating, noontide languor.
Stretching in a long arc from Florida to Ven-
ezuela, the islands are each vastly different
in their collisions of history, race, conquest
and tongues. If parts of Jamaica remind
Morand of a semi-tropical Isle of Wight
(‘golf courses, hotels and winter woollies’),
Haiti is a slice of West Africa set float-
ing in the Antilles. Among the many Hai-
tian notables commemorated by Morand is
Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of
Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three
Musketeers, who in turn was the father of
Alexandre Dumas fils, author of La Dame
aux Camélias. (Thomas-Alexandre’s birth-
place of Jérémie in southern Haiti has
a main square called, simply, Place des
Trois Dumas.)
Morand’s mandarin and determinedly
insouciant prose is a delight to read (the sky
over Cuba is the ‘colour of a turtle-dove’s
breast’). He served as a French diplomat in
London during the first world war, and was
a cultivated if consciously dandified man
of letters. His impressions of the French
Windward Islands of Martinique and
Guadeloupe are enlivened by learned
allusions to Goya, early Flemish art and
the ‘curly-haired waves’ of Hokusai. The
humour throughout is pungent, if occasion-
ally spiteful. (Morand’s great 1971 account
Poets and Punctuation
that punctuation may well do
from nine to five I can concede
and even bards will sometimes need
a comma – or a dash or two –
but in the wider scheme of things
intrusive editing will take
the tiger’s power out of Blake
deaden his songs and clip his wings
while Emily’s ambiguity
becomes boxed in if each full stop
concludes her stanzas plop plip plop
in nursery-rhyme congruity
the blackbird and the thrush require
no paragraphs or question marks
make poetry in city parks
unpunctuating everywhere
— Jim Campbell
of Venice, Venises, typically excoriated
American hippies for their want of per-
sonal hygiene: ‘Their armpits smelt of leeks,
their buttocks of venison’ — a very
French observation.)
Caribbean Winter, brilliantly translated
by Mary Gallagher, is a glowing, incantatory
work of genius that can profitably be read
in tandem with Morand’s marvellous 1921
trilogy of Proustian novels set in London,
Tender Shoots.
Squabbling over Kafka
James Hawes
Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a
Literary Legacy
by Benjamin Balint
Reaktion, £25, pp. 294
Benjamin Balint’s Kafka’s Last Trial is
a legal and philosophical black comedy of
the first water, complete, like all the best
adventure stories, with a physical treasure to
be won or lost. Balint lays out with cool, col-
lected passion the full absurdity of the 2011
court struggle which climaxed when a cou-
ple of boxes of aged, yellowing jottings, upon
which an elderly Tel Aviv lady had alleg-
edly allowed her cats to sit for many years,
were taken under armed guard, besieged by
writs and counter-writs, to the highest court
in Israel.
Until 1973, you see, these boxes had
belonged to Max Brod, best friend of
Franz Kafka, the legendary Nostradamus
of Prague who (as any fool knows) some-
how predicted the Holocaust. Scholars had
gradually become convinced that they might
hold great unpublished works. At the risk of
bragging, I did warn people on Newsnight
in July 2010 that they wouldn’t (they don’t),
on the simple grounds that if they did, Brod,
founder of the worldwide Kafka industry,
would certainly have published them
decades earlier.
Balint’s agenda isn’t to debunk Brod, or
his myth of Kafka. He still cleaves, indeed,
to the hoary legend that Kafka was almost
unknown in his lifetime. In 1915 The Meta-
morphosis and The Judgement were given
the prize-money from Germany’s biggest
literary award in a bizarre insider deal, and
Kafka’s publishers followed up with a full-
page advert which cited five glowing reviews,
all of them by friends of Kafka’s and/or
Brod’s. So, not very unknown at all. But this
doesn’t matter, because Balint’s book isn’t
for the tiny world of Kafka scholars. It’s
really a deep yet entertaining look at some-
thing we should all care very much about:
the absurdity of our modern obsession with
‘authenticity’ and ‘ownership’.
Now, I’m not sure if readers of The
Spectator have quite realised yet that
history, literature and culture no long-
31
BOOKS & ARTS
er exist. These days we only have splin-
tered micro-cultures, micro-histories and
micro-literatures which officially belong to
one sub-group or another. These groups (like
Protestant sects after the Reformation, they
multiply almost daily) tell the rest of us that
we have no business with their culture, his-
tory or literature. So there is now an Israeli
Kafka, a non-Israeli Jewish Kafka, a German
Kafka, German-Jewish Kafka, and maybe
even a Czech Kafka. Or perhaps some mix-
ture of all of them. But there is no such thing
as just Kafka.
My own tutor, Sir Malcolm Pasley, was
sadly unaware of this. In 1961 he persuad-
ed Kafka’s heirs by convoluted descent (the
family having been practically wiped out in
the Holocaust) that if they let him bring the
manuscript of The Castle and the bulk of the
diaries and occasional jottings to Oxford,
he and the Bodleian library would preserve
them, love them and produce scholarly edi-
tions of them, for the use and edification of
all mankind. So in 1981, in his rooms in Mag-
dalen, Pasley allowed me, despite my being a
mere undergraduate who was neither Ger-
man nor Jewish, to look at with him, and
even very briefly to hold, the original manu-
script of The Castle.
My God, what an outrage! By what impe-
rialist, colonial or other ghastly law could
a mere English baronet claim any kind of
custodianship of the works of this German
genius? Or should that be German-Jewish
genius? Or perhaps Czech-Jewish genius?
Czech-German-Jewish?
Balint skilfully lays out the madness
going on here. He does full justice to the
matchless tragedy of Germany Juda-
ism while turning a cool, at times almost
disbelieving gaze on the absurdity of the mod-
ern battle. So, is anything written by anyone
Jewish, in any age, now the rightful property
of the state of Israel, even if the Jewish writer
in question never set foot outside Europe?
Or do works written by a German-speaking
writer who was completely steeped in Ger-
man literature truly belong in Germany, even
though the German state would have gassed
him (as it did Kafka’s sisters) if he hadn’t
died first? Or perhaps Kafka truly belongs
to Prague, the city where he spent almost his
entire life — but where, in his day (hard as it
is to recall) the people throwing stones at the
Jews were Czechs, while the mounted police
quelling the anti-Semitic rioters were given
orders in German?
Of course, there’s another answer, and it’s
the one Pasley would no doubt have given:
the only reason anyone is interested at all in
those cardboard boxes of yellowing papers,
or in the life and letters of one Dr Franz
Kafka, is that we quite rightly place his works
(the most substantial of which would never
have been read by anyone, but for Brod) as
among the most fascinating literary produc-
tions of early 20th-century Europe: books
which belong to us all.
32
Outpourings of love
and loss
Cressida Connolly
What a Hazard a Letter Is: The
Strange Destiny of the Unsent Letter
by Caroline Atkins
Safe Haven, £14.99, pp. 289
The deserved success of Shaun Usher’s
marvellous anthology Letters of Note has
inspired several imitators, and Caroline
Atkins’s sparkling collection makes an ideal
companion volume. Here are missives both
literary and otherwise, all of them destined
never to be read by their intended recipients.
Some are grave, some are tender; some are
funny, several are vengeful or self-justifying.
It’s a great idea for a book.
A letter which goes missing is of course
a standard tragedy-inducing device in fiction.
Romeo could have lived had he received Juli-
et’s letter; but perhaps the most heartbreak-
ing of all is poor Tess Durbeyfield’s to Angel
Clare. Never was a flap of carpet responsible
The last thing someone who has
gone off you wants is pages
of self-pity and ardour
for so much misery. Atkins includes some ter-
ribly sad real-life letters too: Captain Scott’s,
addressed ‘To my widow’, and Van Gogh’s
penultimate letter to his sainted brother, as
well as a couple between doomed first world
war sweethearts.
It’s not all sorrow and gloom, by any
means. Several of the letters are hilarious,
including Malcolm Bradbury’s response to
a woman who’d sent him a huge pile of her
unpublished novels. He tells her that he’s
unable to lift her weighty manuscripts, on
doctor’s orders, since ‘just the other day
I strained my back, carrying about some
royalty statements’. It goes on in the same
vein. Here too is the letter devised by the
characters in the TV comedy show The
Young Ones, asking for an extension of
overdraft facilities. Having decided that
‘Dear’ is too formal, and having agreed that
anyone who works for a bank is politically
suspect, they hap upon the opening ‘Darling
Fascist Bullyboy, give me some more
‘We come bearing gift receipts.’
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
money.’ My favourite, though, is from Mar-
tin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers.
Tormented by resentment of his sexually
successful father, our hero sits down to pour
out his soul to the older man:
Forty minutes later I had written:
Dear Father,
This has not been an easy letter to write.
It would be fair to say that real peo-
ple are not necessarily shown to their best
advantage here. There’s generally a good
reason that a letter goes unposted, name-
ly that the writer thinks better of it on re-
reading. What seems droll or romantic one
day — or, more probably, one night — can
seem foolish in the cold sober light of the
next morning. Hence Virginia Woolf’s
long riposte to a review by Arnold Ben-
nett. How I hate Virginia Woolf! All those
semicolons, the ghastly snobbery and arch-
ness, the anti-Semitism... Her letter is
meant to be an ironic defence of her posi-
tion as an unabashed highbrow, but comes
across as heavy-handed, self-regarding
and prolix.
Ernest Hemingway isn’t much better. In
a truculent letter to Senator Joseph McCa-
rthy, he calls him ‘kid’ and invites him to
Cuba for a fist-fight. Katherine Mansfield’s
1916 reply to a young soldier friend who has
declared his love to her is not at all kind.
Furthermore, it ill behoves her to com-
plain that she has no roast dinner, but only
eggs and oranges, when he’s at the front
(and soon to be killed at Arras). But per-
haps she can be forgiven since she includes
this lovely sentence: ‘There’s a little bird on
a tree outside this window not so much sing-
ing as sharpening a note.’ And of course she
didn’t send the letter, so we must hope that
his feelings were spared.
Rambling and often drunken love let-
ters begging for reconciliation never help.
The last thing someone who has gone off
you wants is pages of self-pity and ardour.
It may be that the advent of the text mes-
sage has brought the unintended benefit of
saving the spurned the humiliation of pen-
ning such letters, since the form doesn’t lend
itself to endless tear-stained pages. Or could
it be that the immediacy of pressing a but-
ton is too great a temptation for the broken-
hearted to resist? In any case, there is a long,
shining example of this unfortunate catego-
ry in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.
Only Oscar Wilde is dignified in the form:
‘There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we
blame ourselves we feel that no one else has
a right to blame us.’
What a Hazard a Letter Is is lively and
well researched, and includes many exam-
ples I’d never come across before. But it’s
best taken in small doses. Otherwise, the
cumulative effect is rather like going to
a cocktail party and eating lots of nibbles,
but going home without any supper.

Death at the top
Patrick Skene Catling
The Royal Art of Poison: Fatal
Cosmetics, Deadly Medicines
and Murder Most Foul
by Eleanor Herman
Duckworth, £14.99, pp. 286
Agatha Christie’s spirit must be loving this
poisonous new historical entertainment.
Eleanor Herman has already enjoyed the
success of Sex with Kings and Sex with the
Queen, thoroughly researched, gossipy rev-
elations of promiscuity among monarchs and
their noble retainers during the Renaissance.
She is an American author and broadcaster,
born in Baltimore, now living in Virginia,
but, at 58, she still concentrates her profes-
sional attention on the historic immorality
and disastrous vulnerability of western
European royalty.
In the Middle Ages, when monarchs
commanded virtually absolute power, rival-
ry for every top job was sufficiently intense
to motivate assassination, and the least dif-
ficult way to commit it was with poison. As
viewed through Herman’s eyes, the age of
chivalry was one of ruthless ambition, jeal-
ousy and murder. She systematically dero-
manticises the monarchs, portraying them
finally screaming in agony on their soiled
deathbeds.
Describing the terminal condition of
poison victims, she writes — sometimes
overwrites — with clinical precision and scat-
ological excesses. We should not envy 16th-
century royalty, she suggests, if we recognise
that their ‘most magnificent chambers were
Poisons were tested on criminals
due to be executed, allowing them
to gamble on an alternative
befouled by parasites, bacteria, viruses and
environmental poison’. Palaces were ‘putrid’,
‘dominions of dung’. ‘Inside those lacquered
cabinets were chamber pots brimming with
a stinking stew of human waste.’ ‘The castle
moat frequently featured floating turds.’
‘To bring you into this world of sublime
beauty and wretched filth,’ she promises,
I first investigate the palace poison culture of
prevention, protocols and antidotes, followed
by chapters on deadly cosmetics, fatal physi-
cians, and the royals’ perilously unhealthy liv-
ing conditions.
Herman duly recounts 20 case histories of
a rich assortment of ill-fated, influential per-
sonages, such as Henry VII of Luxembourg,
Holy Roman Emperor; Cangrande I della
Scala, Italian warlord; Agnès Sorel, mistress
of King Charles VII of France; Ivan the Ter-
rible, Tsar of Russia; Grand Duke Francesco
I de Medici of Tuscany; Tycho Brahe, Danish
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Grand Duke Francesco I de Medici may have been
poisoned with arsenic by his brother Ferdinando.
Portrait by Agnolo Bronzino
astronomer and imperial mathematician; Sir
Thomas Overbury, royal adviser at the court
of James I, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Their
fates all provide mordibly fascinating evi-
dence that, in previous centuries, the higher
the status, the likelier the fall.
All Herman’s examples knew they were
obvious targets and did their utmost to pro-
tect themselves. There was a widespread
belief that unicorn horns could magically
‘detect poison in anything nearby, either in
food or drink or on garments, paper or fur-
niture’. Being very rare, they were extreme-
ly costly, though they were only the tusks of
narwhals, found in the Arctic. As Herman
observes, ‘sailors were surprised at how
many unicorns chose to die on cold north-
ern beaches’. More reliable protection was
provided by servile tasters, who sampled
all food and drink before offering them to
their employers. Poison and antidotes were
sometimes tested by ‘gallows guinea pigs’,
prisoners condemned to execution, who
were given the chance to gamble on an
alternative.
Unscrupulous physicians prescribed
useless, ‘expensive concoctions’, apothecar-
ies sold them, and they shared the profits.
Even honest doctors supplied preposterous
treatments to correct a perceived imbal-
ance of the four Hippocratic humours.
Medicines containing arsenic and mer-
cury were harmful, of course, and so was
the use of ox dung to relieve facial blem-
ishes, as well as rat droppings mixed with
honey and onion juice to cure
GETTY IMAGES
baldness. ‘Physicians recom-
mended those suffering from
haemorrhoids to stroke them
with the amputated hand of
a dead man,’ Herman writes,
adding that this is ‘a strangely
unpalatable image to ponder’.
After accounts of historic
poisonings, there are modern
postmortems. Advanced tech-
niques, especially assisted by
the analysis of DNA, are often
accepted as conclusive. Her-
man appears disappointed by, if
not downright suspicious of, the
House of Windsor’s opposition
to ancestral exhumations for
scientific study, complaining:
Queen Elizabeth II, bolstered in
her stance by the Church of Eng-
land, steadfastly refuses to disinter
her ancestors. Because the British
monarchy is based on the royal
bloodline, it faces a dilemma when
it comes to studying royal remains.
What if DNA proves that a dead
king was not related to his father?
Would that mean Elizabeth II was
not the legitimate queen?
It is a relief to go on to Her-
man’s appendices on Russia’s
uses of poison to murder Lenin
and Stalin — and, more recently, dissidents
at home and abroad. Poison nowadays has
been democratised: Christie’s fictionally
favourite poison, cyanide, is more conveni-
ent, cheaper and faster than divorce.
Audio books
A rake’s progress
Rachel Redford
This monumental unabridged audio produc-
tion of Casanova’s memoir The Story of My
Life in three volumes covers his first 49 years.
He was born in 1725 into a struggling the-
atre family in Venice, the carnival centre of
Europe, and masks, masquerades and music
were so much in Casanova’s blood that
a glorious, effervescent theatricality lights up
these 125 hours. The narrator, Peter Wick-
ham, is so convincing that he must surely
have had difficulty re-assuming his own iden-
tity after the final recording session.
Constantly seeking pastures new, Casano-
va travelled through France, Russia, Spain,
Constantinople, Poland and England, trans-
ported by sedan chair, sleigh and felucca,
but mainly by hideously uncomfortable car-
riage (74 changes of horses between Moscow
and St Petersburg). A charmed life provided
him with patrons in each country, enabling
him to live extravagantly in aristocratic cir-
cles, dining and gambling, frequently on
33
BOOKS & ARTS
His Hiding Place
Here’s the Yew where Rob found shelter,
out on the Downland’s wind-sliced scarp,
that night he ran away. It was winter
still, shading spring; the chalk sharp
and white as ossuary bones.
Shepherds lay here, maybe, in the past,
vagrants lacking tuppence for the Spike:
old men thwarting the year’s rough blast
with sacks and branches, men unlike
poor frail and trembling Rob.
Alone he lived, yet not alone,
keeping soft vigil with trespassers
dead and undead, wild custodian
of flints and rain, chasing whispers
of wind and prophecy.
I search for signs of habitation:
find none. All’s been trodden down,
below the dark and dusty vegetation
by kids who made their summer den
within the Yew’s dense dome.
Yews are strange, withholding trees.
They hoard the years’ eternal inside
padlocked hearts where birds and bees
are strangers, a sad place to hide
yet dry, safe, a kind of home.
Sad thoughts for this wide, wind-whipped
day when Whitebeam gleams and clouds fly
fast. Dear Rob, may God have stripped
your soul of sorrows and this June sky
find you whole, loved, known.
— Richard Rhydderch
the edge of legality. He narrowly avoided out. Whether in brothels or high society,
the gallows when he presented false bills of dinners included many fine wines (20 bot-
exchange in Holland, and he escaped from tles of champagne served with the oys-
Poland after seriously wounding a duke in ters alone), game birds, freshly killed pig,
a duel, in which an injury to his own hand and in Naples a dozen varieties of aphrodis-
nearly cost him his arm. Venetian spies iac shellfish.
landed him in a tiny cell beneath the roof Casanova’s fascination with the teachings
of the Doge’s palace and his outrageous- of the Kabbalah, codes and zodiacal mysti-
ly perilous escape nearly a year later over cism allowed him to exploit the outlandish
the roofs and then by gondola and donkey beliefs of the credulous rich, and extract
had him banned from Venice for 18 years. serious amounts of money from them. He
Shady deals of espionage in France and Hol- also accumulated considerable wealth from
land, however, earned him enormous sums. the lotteries he established, using his math-
An essential ingredient of the dazzling ematical genius (though he failed to inter-
excess was food, lovingly detailed through- est Catherine the Great in such a scheme in
34
St Petersburg). Meeting many of the great
figures of the age, he discussed opera buffa
with Voltaire and presented Louis XV with
a 13-year-old candidate for his entourage,
whose virginity was confirmed by the royal
hand before purchase.
His inquiring intellect is shown in his
published histories of Venice, Poland and
Russia and in his music and his translation
of the Iliad. But inevitably it is for his sexu-
al adventures that he is remembered. They
are indeed staggering in their candid detail,
even though one suspects that, writing the
memoir to amuse himself when dogged by
syphilis and melancholy towards the end
of his life, he embroidered the more sala-
cious episodes.
From the time of his initiation into carnal
pleasures at the age of 11 by the 14-year-old
sister of his tutor in Padua, Casanova went
In an age of sexual extravagance,
girls of 13 readily responded to this
charming, perfumed libertine
from strength to libidinous strength. Wheth-
er it was with Teresa under his greatcoat
while her husband made them hot choco-
late, or in his carriage ‘comforting’ a country
bride frightened by a raging storm, he never
missed an opportunity to play the ‘game of
love’, with women as eager as himself. But
believing ‘matrimony to be the grave of love’,
he constantly moved on, leaving disappoint-
ed partners behind. Casual encounters —
such as ‘the cup of pleasure’ savoured with
the Greek slave girl through the filigree of
a balcony — fed his voracious appetite, but
parting from the many women he truly loved
left ‘scars on his heart’. The lure of intrigue
was magnetic. Finding a woman’s ‘temple’
beneath the military breeches of a trans-
vestite adventuress was a rich reward.
In an age of sexual extravagance girls of
13 or 14 (their ‘globes tipped with coral’)
readily responded to the advances of this
charming, perfumed libertine in his rose-
coloured velvet suit, often with the encour-
agement of their mothers. Having newly met
the 16-year-old who turned out to be his own
daughter and finding her longing for a child
but yoked to an impotent duke, he left her
pregnant. He also fathered a child on one of
the young ‘ambrosial angel’ sisters in Paris
to whom he repeatedly returned for ‘trans-
ports of bliss’; and his much loved convent
‘nun’ nearly died giving birth clandestinely.
There were dark times for him too: when his
‘steed’ failed him or when, despite the Eng-
lish sheep-gut condoms tied on with a pink
ribbon, that ‘serpent from hell’, venereal dis-
ease, ravaged him once again.
The Story of My Life Volume I (47 hours,
39 CDs).Volume II (40 hours, 34 CDs).
Volume III (38 hours, 33CDs). Available
from Naxos Audiobooks.
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 ARTS

PAUL GROVER/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
The write
stuff
Dick Clement and Ian La
Frenais are still going strong
after more than 50 years. James
Walton discovers their secret

G
iven their track record, you might
think that Dick Clement and Ian La
Frenais would be spared the strug-
gles that lesser screenwriters go through to
see their writing on screen. But this, it turns
out, would be naive. Clement and La Frenais
may have written some of the best-loved
programmes in British television history:
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; Porridge; The Like-
ly Lads; Whatever Happened to the Likely
Lads? Their CV may contain the huge hit
film The Commitments — as well as more
recently acclaimed TV dramas like The Rot-
ters’ Club and Archangel. Yet, when I meet
Writers of some of the best-loved programmes in British television history:
Clement on a solo visit to London, the two
Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement
most striking things about him are how
driven he remains at 81, and how driven he
apparently needs to be.
‘What Ian and I both have,’ he tells me, edges is ‘a tiny little theatre’. (‘But at least — in contrast to Terry, who stays true to his
‘is a sense of being hungry, of wanting to get it’s there,’ he characteristically adds, ‘as working-class roots and ends up miserable.)
stuff made. An awful lot of time you spend opposed to being on paper.’) This richly So has any screenwriting partnership
writing stuff that doesn’t, like architects’ entertaining 90-minute play is a theatrical ever lasted longer than theirs? I certainly
plans that never get turned into buildings. version of Clement and La Frenais’ 2011 can’t think of one — and neither can Clem-
And there’s no job satisfaction in that.’ film Killing Bono — a title Clement never ent. ‘More than 50 years, it’s extraordinary,’
For this reason, he and La Frenais main- he says in a slightly wondering tone. The two
tain an impressive policy of always having Clement and La Frenais maintain an met in the early 1960s in the pubs of Earl’s
at least seven projects on the go: ‘You really impressive policy of always having at Court, when Clement was already working
can’t have any fewer than that. Things will sit least seven projects on the go for the BBC. The first thing they wrote was
there for nine months before anybody does a sketch they performed themselves in the
anything. So what are you going to do? Play liked — which was itself based on the music classic setting of the upper room of a King’s
golf?’ (and with those last two words Clem- critic Neil McCormick’s memoir I Was Road pub — and that featured two blokes
ent abandons his normal urbanity in favour Bono’s Doppelgänger, about how his own called Bob and Terry comparing notes on
of incredulous scorn). At the moment, the dreams of rock stardom fell apart just as his the dates they’d just had.
list includes Jukebox Hero — a musical built, old Dublin schoolfriend was conquering the ‘We realised that we clicked,’ remem-
somewhat improbably, around the songs world. The result shows that Clement and bers Clement understatedly — and soon La
of Foreigner, which opens in Toronto next La Frenais have lost none of their stirring Frenais was showing up at his house every
month; a musical about Alice Cooper; a play ability to combine comedy with an under- morning at 9.30 so they could write togeth-
about Harpo Marx; and three TV series. tow of melancholy. (Think of Whatever Hap- er. And he’s been showing up at 9.30 ever
In the meantime, there’s also Chasing pened to the Likely Lads? where Bob tries to since, these days in Los Angeles where the
Bono — playing in what Clement acknowl- become middle class and ends up miserable two moved in the mid-1970s. The move was
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 35
BOOKS & ARTS
partly because ‘We thought LA was the
head office of the entertainment business’,
and partly so that they could translate Por-
ridge (‘our happiest writing experience’)
into an American series called On the Rocks
(‘one of the most painful. The problem was
we didn’t have a Ronnie Barker, so we had
to make it into a gang show. The main actor
couldn’t carry it.’)
By then, Clement was also a director,
whose films included To Catch a Spy, a thrill-
er that he and La Frenais had intended to be
light-hearted, until he met his leading man,
Kirk Douglas: ‘The first thing he said to me,
before “Hello”, was “I can’t play comedy”.’
On the plus side, the film also starred Trevor
Howard, who ‘was lovely. He did drink a lot,
so in the evenings he was a little sozzled —
but he was a delightful man.’
Clement’s directing career meant that
he and La Frenais, while ‘still intertwined’,
worked separately for a bit. La Frenais cre-
ated Lovejoy and wrote Spender with Jimmy
Nail. Clement did an unproduced screen-
play with somebody else, who admitted to
feeling like ‘the other woman’ whenever La
Frenais popped in.
Before long, though, those 9.30 visits
resumed — as did their unusually harmo-
nious relationship. ‘I can remember a cou-
ple of minor spats,’ says Clement. ‘But when
we do have a falling out, it’s usually because
there’s something wrong with the piece.
I used to say glibly that Ian was better at
dialogue and I was better at structure, but
I’m not sure that’s really true now.’ Nor does
he agree with the theory that every writ-
ing partnership needs a boss. ‘I don’t think
there’s a boss with us, and I don’t think there
was with Galton and Simpson who were our
gods when we started out.’
But that mention of starting out soon
returns Clement to his central theme. In the
1960s he and La Frenais wrote two films
for Michael Winner. ‘And we thought this
is just what happens. You write a script, it
gets made and you move on to the next one.’
Now, the scrutiny is much more ‘neurotic’,
not just beforehand, but also once the pro-
duction is under way, with executives supply-
ing screeds of contradictory notes — or, as
Clement prefers to put it, ‘talking the whole
thing to death’. ‘When we first did The Likely
Lads, I was very hurt that nobody from the
BBC came to see it. In hindsight we were so
bloody lucky that nobody was interfering.’
In the circumstances, Clement and La
Frenais, who’s 83 this month, could be for-
given for taking their choice of any number
of laurels to rest on. But, luckily for both,
neither is keen on doing what Alan Simp-
son did in 1978, after a mere 30 years writing
with Ray Galton. ‘I hate the idea of retire-
ment,’ says Clement. ‘Even when I was 17
I thought “retire” was a miserable word.
It’s one thing if you’ve hated your job. But
you retire and the next step is the grave.’
And with that, he’s back to his plans for the
36
future, starting with Chasing Bono transfer-
ring to a bigger theatre.
Chasing Bono is at the Soho Theatre until
19 January.
Radio
Out of control
Kate Chisholm
You may have noticed the flood of pod-
casts that’s been pouring out of the BBC
since the launch of its BBC Sounds app.
This is supposed to give us easier access
to the programme archive but actually
has been an excuse to show off the pod-
casts now made by the corporation, from
the specially made How to be a Muslim
Woman to Turbulence, a clever series of
linked short stories by David Szalay, which
was commissioned by Radio 4 and released
as a podcast at the same time as being
broadcast on the network.
Podcasts are not bound by time and the
demands of a schedule. They can last for
ten, 20, 50, 100 minutes, taking as long as the
story, the conversation, the facts require. Our
ability to pick up the programme whenever
it suits us means that the exchange is differ-
ent; we are not being given stuff to listen to
but are empowered to listen whenever it fits
into our schedule. Lack of a ‘controller’, of
an editorial vision, shaping programmes into
a network style and character, means that
every podcast sounds different. But that urge
to be as unconventional as possible has its
downside. Listening to the uninhibited chat
and oversharing of so many ‘conversational’
podcasts (unless they are tied to a specific
subject, like a football match, or are ‘guided’
by those who understand how we listen) is
like being stuck at a party where everyone
else has had just a little bit too much to drink
but you’re stone-cold sober. How Unexpect-
ed Fluids, for instance, ever got past editorial
control at the corporation is a mystery.
The number of podcasts now being made
by the BBC also raises the question: where’s
the money coming from? Are podcasts being
given priority funding over network pro-
grammes? Or, perhaps more significantly,
are the BBC’s podcasts constrained by such
tight budgeting that they will never be able to
compete with the sophisticated production
values of online series such as Serial, created
in Chicago by the team behind This Ameri-
can Life and funded by advertising and sub-
scription. The first series, which looked back
at a 1990s murder in the US, questioning
whether the accused, already serving a life
sentence, was in fact guilty, was a global suc-
cess, taking 175 million hits (or downloads)
and still rising. That success was no accident;
the chief reporter Sarah Koenig is a gifted
communicator and behind it lay hours of
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
research and interviews with key players in
the story. It did, at times, feel manipulative
and voyeuristic — the listener a fly-on-the-
wall watching other people’s pain. But the
third series, now being released, has taken
Koenig and her team in a different direction,
no longer simply following up true-crime
stories or resurrecting cold cases. Instead,
they’ve spent a year investigating the crim-
inal-justice system in Cleveland, Ohio.
One huge 1970s building complex, in the
centre of town, houses all stages of the pro-
cess from the underground car park where
suspects are brought in for questioning rising
up through the floors to the various criminal
courts. Koenig has a clear intention: to take
us behind those walls and walk alongside
those trapped within the system, like Vivi-
enne, a 29-year-old mother of three who is
struggling with drug addiction and the need
to pay for her habit. She’s black, as are most
of the accused, but of the 34 judges working
in the Cleveland courts only two are black.
We also hear from Anna, picked up in
a bar-room brawl after she (accidentally)
throws a punch at a police officer. Months
later, she is convicted of a minor misdemean-
our and fined, which could be seen as a victo-
ry since at one point it looked as if she might
be given a prison sentence. But, explains
Koenig, dispassionately and yet urgently
How the podcast Unexpected Fluids
ever got past editorial control at
the BBC is a mystery
(‘Let me shamefully oversimplify for a sec-
ond’), Anna has now to find more than $1,200
to pay court fees and other costs incurred
through no fault of her own. There’s noth-
ing quite like this on the BBC; such a lengthy
investigation, so carefully edited, reportage
that is not news, a documentary given so long
to unfold and reveal. It must have been costly
to make but it would be worth sacrificing the
likes of Unexpected Fluids, made for that elu-
sive youth audience, to create such a thought-
ful, questioning portrait.
Inside Music on Radio 3 has all the charac-
teristics of a podcast: it’s long (two hours), it’s
chatty, it’s self-revealing, but it goes out on the
network on Saturday afternoons. Each week
a musician is given two hours to play a selec-
tion of their favourite music, with plenty of
time to tell us what’s so special about each
choice. What gives it so much more punch
is that the musicians can take us ‘inside’ the
experience of playing the music they have cho-
sen, why it works, how it makes them feel. The
multitalented (and incredibly youthful) Jacob
Collier set off his wonderful programme with
a Schumann piano sonata followed by Peter
Warlock’s Capriol Suite. It was the first piece
played by his school orchestra, established by
his mother, determined that the state school
where she taught should develop its pupils
musically as well as academically. Insight
through purposeful conversation.
 
       


  




 
 
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CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY

8 & 10 Ryder Street St James’s London SW1Y 6QB • 020 7839 7551 • gallery@chrisbeetles.com • www.chrisbeetles.com
 BOOKS & ARTS
LEE MENDELSON/KOBAL REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
The triumph of hope over experience: the Peanuts gang
Exhibitions
Comic genius
Bryan Appleyard
Good Grief, Charlie Brown!
Somerset House, until 3 March
For the hundredth, possibly the thousandth,
time, Lucy van Pelt offers to hold the foot-
ball for Charlie Brown so he can kick it. She
cajoles him with the innocence of her eyes.
He falls for it; he falls for it every time.
Lucy, as she always does, whips the ball away.
Charlie loops into the air and crashes to the
ground.
‘What you have learned here today,
Charlie Brown,’ she explains, ‘will be of
immeasurable value to you for many years
to come.’
Lucy is a cynic, a sadist, a huckster, a real-
ist. Nevertheless, she would be right but for
the fact that nothing is ever of ‘immeasurable
38
value’ to Charlie Brown. He is too battered
by life to be an idealist but he clings to hope,
to the possibility that there is justice some-
where in the cosmos. He finds none but he
is a good man, though only eight years old.
That, in a nutshell, is what Charles M.
Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts is all about —
the persistence of hope in the face of hope-
lessness. The strip ran in newspapers and on
television from 1950 to 13 February 2000,
the day after Schulz died.
It was — and remains — the greatest of
all comic strips. Exquisitely drawn, beauti-
fully written, timelessly true, it tenderly dis-
tils the absurdity and pain of the human
condition. It is about children but it evades
easy sentimentality by making the charac-
ters struggle with and suffer about childish
things that are obviously adult things in dis-
guise. You couldn’t pat Charlie Brown on
the head and tell him not to worry, because
he had already glimpsed the truth that, for
good men like him, life is worry.
And now Peanuts has earned a big exhi-
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
bition — Good Grief, Charlie Brown! — at
Somerset House. I am ambivalent about this,
as I shall explain later.
Schulz’s childhood in Minnesota seemed
to leave him obsessively modest about his
looks and his intellect and with the convic-
tion that he must never be ‘big-headed’. He
was, in short, Charlie Brown, even though
Charlie, like all the Peanuts gang, had an
enormous, non-metaphorical head. Perhaps
that was a kind of revenge.
He started out religious but his faith
faded with age. In Peanuts there is a god-
like character called the Great Pumpkin
who, obviously, never actually appears even
though the faith of Linus, Lucy’s younger
brother, is for ever undimmed. In his teens
— at an age Charlie Brown never attained
— Schulz discovered he could draw. A little
later he went into the army and discovered,
as he puts it, ‘all I needed to know about
loneliness’. He seems to have been a sen-
sitive, unpretentious though complex man
who found an outlet for his personality in
the supremely unpretentious form of the
comic strip.
In fact, I said he was Charlie Brown,
but it may be more accurate to say that he
Comparing the strip to existentialism
is an insult. Charlie Brown is a bigger
figure than Jean-Paul Sartre
dispersed his personality throughout the
entire Peanuts cast. Most poignantly there
is Linus, forever clutching his security blan-
ket, Schroeder playing Beethoven on his toy
piano, Pig-Pen with his magical capacity to
become covered in dust just by getting up in
the morning and, most importantly, there is
Snoopy, Charlie’s dog.
Snoopy is a beagle; he looks nothing like
one but Schulz found the letter ‘b’ funny.
He is the strip’s resident genius. He lives in
a world of fantasy — he imagines himself
a first world war fighter pilot — and he
engages in non-human discourse with a bird
called Woodstock. He gets angry. In a fit of
rage, he tries to part Linus from his securi-
ty blanket. Linus wins and delivers a superb
political insight: ‘Security, like liberty, has to
be won and rewon many times.’ Snoopy also
shows a touch of pretension in his search for
meaning, but when Charlie Brown brings his
food bowl, he finds it there.
The problem I have with this exhibition
is that Schulz’s genius was, like the art he
practised, feather-light. He gave Schroeder
Beethoven because he was Mozart. Like
most good artists, he didn’t explain or con-
ceptualise his insights. In fact, it may be that,
consciously, he had none; his truths emerge
naturally from his observations and his art.
Big exhibitions, however, demand heavy,
literal exposition and we get far too much of
it here. There are dreary, solemn conceptual-
ist installations and a lot of verbal prodding
that reaches a climax with the information
that the strip shows ‘how we struggle to cre-
ate meaning in a universe where no meaning
is evident — the classic theory of existential-
ism’. Good grief, Somerset House!
The writer is attempting to elevate Pea-
nuts into some higher realm called philos-
ophy. This is perverse; comparing the strip
to existentialism is an insult. Charlie Brown
is a bigger figure than Jean-Paul Sartre and
Lucy van Pelt would have made mincemeat
of Simone de Beauvoir. Art floats, it needs
no wordy life jacket.
Furthermore, the postwar art of Andy
Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring
Peanuts is all about the
persistence of hope in the face
of hopelessness
and many others embraced pop image-
ry and comic strips because they saw how
effortlessly they delivered significant form.
Peanuts led the way and Schulz is up there
with the best and brightest. We know all
that; there is no need for disguised apolo-
gies about how this is only a comic strip.
But, other than that, it is a show worth
seeing because, if you avoid the installa-
tions and the worst of the verbiage, it does
convey the dancing lightness of the art. Pea-
nuts, for all the suffering, is an idyll, a little
paradise where nothing makes sense but
‘Beyond superb!
The performances,
the choice of
repertoire, the
venues... all perfect
in my opinion!’
Martin Randall Festival participant in 2017
Photo: Gabrieli, performing at ‘Music
in the Cotswolds’ 2018, ©Bill Knight.
Contact us:
+44 (0)20 8742 3355
martinrandall.com/festivals
ATOL 3622 ABTA Y6050 AITO 5085
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
everything fits. And around Christmas time
it is worth being reminded of the imperish-
able wisdom of Linus: ‘Each year, the Great
Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch
that he thinks is the most sincere.’ And rise,
one day, he will.
Theatre
All in the mind
Lloyd Evans
The Tell-Tale Heart
Dorfman Theatre, until 8 January
Uncle Vanya
Hampstead Theatre, until 12 January
The Tell-Tale Heart is based on a teeny-wee-
ny short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The full
text appears in the programme notes. Here’s
the gist. A madman kills his landlord and is
haunted by a ghostly heartbeat that prompts
him to confess his crime.
Anthony Neilson’s adaptation turns
both characters into women and gives away
the ending in the opening scene. An English
writer lodging with a young Irish landlady
is accused of murdering her by a detective.
At a stroke, all uncertainty is effaced. The
CELEBRATING MUSIC AND PLACE
The J.S. Bach Journey
West Country Choral Festival
Music Along the Danube
Sacred Music in Santiago 26 or 28 September–2 October
The Thomas Tallis Trail
Opera in Southern Sicily
only remaining mystery is why Neilson
can’t understand his chosen genre. He tries
to interest us in the causes of the murder,
and we watch the developing relationship
between landlady and lodger. The English
writer is a haughty prig whom Tamara Law-
rance struggles to invest with warmth or
vitality. (Not her fault, the characterisation
is feeble.) The Irish landlady is a needy and
eccentric chatterbox who aches to befriend
her new tenant. The amazing Imogen Doel
plays her with so much charm and natural-
ism that she appears not to be acting at all.
Just behaving. The characters, both faintly
bisexual, consider a fling but the landlady
is overly shy and the writer seems stupe-
fied with ennui and superiority. So there
are no gymnastics in the bedroom and
therefore no sexual motive for the killing.
What about money? Nope. And it hardly
helps that the murderer, being female, is far
less likely to commit a violent crime than in
Poe’s original.
So why does it happen? The play struggles
to find answers. Clunky recorded speeches
give us glimpses of the writer’s troubled psy-
che. But this hardly explains why she choos-
es to jeopardise her blossoming career by
bumping off an innocent stranger. A weird
additional motive is provided by the land-
lady’s deformed eye socket, which the writer
finds repulsive. But that’s a reason to move
13–19 May 2019
7–11 July 2019
31 August–7 September 2019
2019
1–3 November 2019
5–11 November 2019
39
BOOKS & ARTS
house, not to stick a blade into her skull and
chop her to bits in the bathroom.
The production moves uncertainly
between light entertainment and full-on
horror. There are flashing lights, sudden
blackouts, noisy whumps and crumps from
the soundtrack intended to trigger panic
in the auditorium. At the same time there
are arty in-jokes. We’re told that the Eng-
lish writer has been commissioned to pro-
duce a script for the National Theatre and
the characters make ironic remarks about
the complexities of a play being performed
at the National that features a playwright
writing a play for the National. Quite
funny, but slightly tiresome. It’s hard to
see how this dramatic mutant will win an
audience. Fans of Poe will find no flavour
of his work here. Admirers of girl-on-girl
romance will be disappointed. Those with a
taste for slasher movies may enjoy the dis-
memberment scenes but the effect of stage
ketchup is never as realistic as its cinemat-
ic counterpart. After the interval the audi-
ence thinned out, and the remainers were
treated to a clever-clogs reversal of the
narrative, which suggested that the show
This is a horror show that
appeals to the intellect
but not the gut
was a figment of the playwright’s imagina-
tion. This smart-alec codicil epitomised the
entire problem. This is a horror show that
appeals to the intellect but not the gut.
Terry Johnson’s production of Uncle
Vanya is a model of simplicity and truth.
The design is versatile, unshowy, fairly chic
and yet noticeably rustic. The cast know
their lines. Chekhov does the rest. Alan
Cox’s Vanya has lots of warmth and intel-
ligence, and a strain of self-pity that charms
and engages. His love for Yeliena can never
become a physical reality because he views
it as a creative distraction, like a train set
in the attic that he keeps adding to but can
never complete.
All this is captured well but there’s a
layer of poetry and melancholy that Cox
can’t reach. And he seems too decent and
level-headed to blast two bullets at his
brother-in-law in a flash of temper. Robin
Soans is a treat as the snuffling, priggish old
don who decides on a whim to render his
entire family homeless, and then changes
his mind. Yeliena, a tricky role, is a petulant
airhead whose sole purpose in life is to do
nothing and to have fun doing it. And yet
she fails. The porcelain-skinned Abbey Lee
is hard to fathom, easy to dislike but even
easier to adore. A very good Yeliena.
With a bit of extra magnetism and sexi-
ness, Alex Newman’s Dr Astrov would be
even more appealing to the doomed Sonia
(Alice Bailey Johnson). Patching up a quar-
rel with Yeliena, Sonia laments; ‘I’m unat-
tractive.’ ‘You have nice hair!’ says her rival.
40
What a put-down. Sonia, no fool, observes
bitterly that ugly girls are always praised
for their hair. This exquisite moment would
be more poignant if Bailey Johnson were
a balding, pock-marked lard bucket with
dandruff and a limp. Instead she’s a slender
doe-eyed pin-up. She isn’t Sonia. But she’s
still outstanding.
Dance
Chilling out
Laura Freeman
Les Patineurs/Winter Dreams/
The Concert
Royal Opera House
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake
Sadler’s Wells, until 27 January
The Royal Ballet’s Les Patineurs is January
as you would wish it. No slush, no new-year
sales, no streaming chest colds. Winter, as
imagined by Frederick Ashton, is an eternal
ice rink lit by Chinese lanterns hung from
icing-sugar branches. Ashton’s choreogra-
phy is ingenious. His dancers really do seem
to glide, the boards of the stage to freeze.
You believe completely that they are on
skates, not slippers. The men wear sheepskin
jackets, the women bonnets and polka-dot
tulle. Sleigh bells ring and fresh flakes fall.
The ensemble slip, slide and dance a skating
conga. Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell
are a Torvill-and-Dean dream in the pas de
deux. Kaneko is light, flowing, sweetly flus-
tered as her partner tips her upside-down.
Yuhui Choe and Anna Rose O’Sullivan are
marvels of precision and balance. Choe’s
thousand-and-one spins are done with con-
summate control.
Marcelino Sambé, powerfully charismat-
ic in The Nutcracker, is here the snowiest of
show-off skaters. He is not tall but achieves
extraordinary height in his springboard
leaps and bounds. He dances with a spirit
of mischief, the boy who’ll always throw the
first snowball. His final series of pirouettes
are a feat of physics. On a bleak midwinter
night, Les Patineurs is a pleasure.
Kenneth MacMillan’s Winter Dreams is
a gloomier affair. The tale is a loose adapta-
tion of Chekhov’s Three Sisters danced by
Marianela Nunez as Masha, Itziar Mendiza-
bal as Olga and Yasmine Naghdi as impet-
uous Irina. After the prettiness of Les
Patineurs, Winter Dreams plays out drably
against a backdrop of billiard baize with the
sisters in shades of sackcloth and dish mop.
The storytelling, to a score by Tchaikovsky,
is subtle, unhurried, intelligent, but the cho-
reography so pushes and shoves the sisters
that they become sad and solemn dolls. They
are passed back and forth by their partners,
manipulated and constrained. The perfor-
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
mance opens with the maid (Hannah Gren-
nell) abused and cast aside by a group of
soldiers and there is a sense all through of
the female dancers surrounded and crowded
by men.
Nunez and Naghdi are fine foils for one
another. Nunez is modest, yielding, wom-
anly; Nagdhi flirtatious, capricious, unsure.
She flinches when she is kissed and slaps
her suitor in return. Thiago Soares as Lt
Colonel Vershinin swaggers, then softens,
then stiffens his resolve. It is a nuanced and
convincing performance. The ‘Farewell’
pas de deux between Nunez and Soares
is danced with a sense of tender tragedy.
There are no hysterics, no weeping, no wail-
ing. Their love is not a tempest but a sud-
den cloudburst of passion, submission and
loss. When Vershinin leaves and Masha col-
lapses, Nunez sinks to the floor like a body
without bones.
Welcome light relief, then, in The Con-
cert, Jerome Robbins’s jeu d’esprit to music
by Chopin. Against a front cloth by Saul
Steinberg, a company of concert-goers act
a gorgeous farce. Lauren Cuthbertson is
lovely as the dreamy fangirl so attached to
the maestro’s grand piano that she remains
sitting suspended, toes en pointe, when
a member of the audience steals her chair.
In her leotard and straw hat she gives a rou-
The ‘Mistake Waltz’ is a riotous send-
up of the corps de ballet. Never have
I laughed so much at the Opera House
tine that is part Jane Fonda and part Kate
Bush at her ‘Wuthering Heights’ worst.
Only a brilliant dancer could make a klutz
so irresistible. Laura Morera and Nehemiah
Kish are wittily matched as a virago and her
hen-pecked dancing partner. The ‘Mistake
Waltz’ is a riotous send-up of the corps de
ballet, each girl hopelessly out of time, sync
and sympathy. The Concert ends with the
corps and principals transformed into but-
terflies and pursued by a piano-playing lepi-
dopterist with a very large net. Never have
I laughed so much at the Opera House.
More metamorphosis at Sadler’s Wells,
where Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake
returns. Yes, the chaps in feathered chaps
are back. Liam Mower is the disenchanted
Prince and Matthew Ball, lent by the Royal
Ballet, is the Swan. It is an uncanny trans-
formation. He is sinuous and aggressive, his
neck long and flexing in a performance of
swaggering verve and avian menace. He
is malevolence in leather trousers as he
enslaves the women of the court and tor-
ments the Prince. You can see Ball relish-
ing playing bad. The all-male corps de ballet
still surprise and the dance of the cygnets is
charming and just camp enough. The trou-
ble, though, with inviting a classical danc-
er to join a contemporary company is that
Ball’s technical brilliance begins to make the
others look a little like ugly ducklings.
 Flat-out fabulous: Emma Stone as Abigail Hill in The Favourite
(In fact, she’s been so overlooked that I can’t
Cinema even recall Lucy Worsley ever dressing up as
Women on top her.) Yet this is based on fact, albeit embel-
lished fact, and it’s incredibly fascinating.
Deborah Ross The Anne we meet is not in great shape. She
is fat, reclusive, mercurially tempered, crip-
The Favourite pled by gout and those who care for her also
15, Nationwide have their own agendas. She’s like a late-
The Favourite is a period romp set during the Olivia Colman, good grief.
reign of Queen Anne, but it’s not your aver- She deserves thousands of Oscars
age period romp. The women are in charge. and thousands of Baftas
There is hot lesbian sex. It is savagely funny
and often preposterous, with duck racing and stage Elvis, but with rabbits. She keeps 17 in
ludicrous, vertiginous wigs and an astonish- her bedchamber, where most of the action
ingly weird dance scene. Yet it is also involv- takes place. Her closest confidante is Sarah
ing and deeply moving with performances Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz),
that are monumentally stellar. It stars Olivia who runs the country on the Queen’s behalf.
Colman and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz The power shifts constantly in their rela-
and while they are all flat-out fabulous, Olivia tionship but Sarah knows how to please her,
Colman, good grief. She deserves thousands including in bed. However, trouble brews
of Oscars and thousands of Baftas, and if she when Sarah’s cousin, Abigail Hill (Stone),
can’t fit another through her door she’ll just arrives at the palace seeking employment,
have to bin some. having fallen on hard times. (Her father
The film is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos lost her in a card game to a German with
(The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), a small penis. See how this isn’t like other
with a screenplay by Deborah Davis and period romps?) She starts as a lowly maid
Tony McNamara, and Colman plays Queen scrubbing floors but is smart and ambitious
Anne, who ruled between 1702 and 1714, and seeks to displace Sarah in the Queen’s
but seems to have always been overlooked. regard, as well as in the four-poster.
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
So this is a tale of obsession and jeal-
ousy as the two women vie to become ‘The
Favourite’. And, because there is little expo-
sition, it feels fresh as a daisy, as if it is hap-
pening right now, and we’re being plunged
headlong into it. It could have been plain
absurd, and sometimes it does teeter on the
brink of plain absurd. The wigs are truly pre-
posterous. That dance is truly preposterous.
But the script is razor-sharp and quick-wit-
ted, plus the three women at its heart not
only drive the narrative powerfully, and
stand up for themselves, but also draw you
into matters of serious and complicated
feeling. (There are some men in the mix, but
they’re never what this is about.)
Poor galumphing Anne could have been
portrayed as a figure of ridicule but Col-
man finds her tragic core (the rabbits will
have tremendous significance) and deftly
and effortlessly rolls a lot of personality into
one character. This Queen is imperious and
tantrumy but also generous and humorous
and is shown to play a cunning hand her-
self. I don’t say this lightly, but whatever it is
that Judi Dench does, Colman can do it too.
Weisz and Stone, meanwhile, are knockout
as her foils as well as fully tragicomic in their
own right. I don’t just recommend you see
this film. I command it.
41
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AUSTRIA
Tuning up to Linz
Mark Palmer knew nothing of this musical city – but left enchanted
Y
ou never know who you might
meet on a river cruise. It was
my 89-year-old father-in-law,
Noel, who first recognised a tall, pro-
fessorial man only a few years young-
er than him remonstrating with an
uninterested official at Munich air-
port about a pre-paid taxi to Passau,
where we were due to board our ship.
‘That’s Humphrey Burton,’ said
Noel. ‘We worked together at the
Beeb, though he was far more impor-
tant than me.’ Noel is forever mod-
est but you could argue that Burton
was the Melvyn Bragg of his day — a
description I later put to him but one
from which he recoiled not exactly in
horror, but certainly in mild disgust.
‘I greatly admire Melvyn, particu-
larly for hundreds of editions of In
Our Time and nearly 30 years of The
South Bank Show, but writing and
politics always took up a substan-
tial proportion of his working life,’
he said. ‘At one time I had 150 direc-
tors, 36 producers and researchers
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
under my leadership. But that’s quite
enough trumpet-blowing.’
Burton joined the BBC as a train-
ee studio manager in 1955 and rose
to be the corporation’s first head
of music and arts, before becom-
ing a founder member of London
Weekend Television, where he pre-
sented Aquarius. The recipient of
four Emmies and two British Acad-
emy Television Awards, he wrote an
acclaimed biography of his friend
Leonard Bernstein and was made a
CBE in the millennium honours.
So it was good to have him on
board our naffly named Classical
Music on the Danube cruise. In fact,
Noel, Mrs P and I shared a table with
Humphrey and his delightful Swedish
wife, Christina, who (to continue the
banding around of names theme) was
something of the Selina Scott of her
day on Swedish TV.
One of our first stops was Linz.
Frankly, I knew almost nothing about
the place, but assumed it was where
ISTOCK
they make Linz chocolate. But even
that betrayed my ignorance. The
chocolate is called Lindt and it’s
made in Switzerland.
What I did know was that Hitler
went to school in Linz and later had
great plans for the city. Never one to
play down his ambitions, the brute
wanted to make Linz the cultural
capital of Germany, displaying price-
less works confiscated or stolen by
the Nazis from all over Europe dur-
ing the war they expected to win.
The Führermuseum was going to
We could match anything in Vienna, a city he
imagine never liked, and Linz was going to be
a party more beautiful than Budapest, while
atmosphere in also serving as the country’s industri-
al powerhouse. Completion date for
summer, with the project was meant to be 1950.
restaurants Thank goodness the only thing
and cafés that got built was a bridge which
opened in 1938 and was named the
spilling out Adolf Hitler Bridge dedicated to the
across the ‘glory of the state, the glory of the
flagstones Bavarian Ostmark and the glory of
43
 ISTOCK
National Socialist Germany’. It was
blown up in 1945 in an attempt to slow
the Allied advance and has since been
replaced by the Nibelungen Bridge.
We were interested by all this
but it was clear that Sebastian, our
charming young Europhile guide,
was happier talking about the present
than the past and had no intention of
embarking on a morning of what in
the trade is called ‘dark tourism’.
Instead, we walked along the Dan-
ube and Sebastian pointed out the
pretty church near the summit of the
Pöstlingberg mountain, which can be
reached by the steepest electric rail-
way in Europe. Also on the north
side of the river is Linz’s modern-
day pride and joy, the Ars Electron-
ica Center, sometimes known as the
‘museum of the future’.
Apparently, you can control
robots, clone plants, take photos of
your retina, telephone an android,
isolate your own DNA or ‘experience
a new dimension of travel through
space and time’. None of this prompt-
ed a big response on our part and we
hoped that the building looked better
at night than it does during the day.
Sebastian seemed disappoint-
ed that we had no further questions
about the ‘museum of the future’
but he soon rallied as we made for
the city’s wonderfully preserved old
town, with its pastel-coloured 17th-
and 18th-century buildings. Our first
stop was Linz Castle, first mentioned
as a deed of gift in 799 during the
reign of Charlemagne, but rebuilt
in the 17th century by Rudolf II. It
is now home to the Upper Austri-
an Provincial Museum, which might
have been interesting but it had been
a steep climb to get there, after which
Noel needed reviving. So we stopped
for coffee and cake in a modern Linz does not have a higher profile. The city’s pretty acoustics are apparently sensational.
glass-fronted restaurant, from where For starters, the square is massive and Hauptplatz. A short walk from the Hauptplatz
we could see the city stretched out pretty much enclosed on all sides by Previous page: brings you to the New Cathedral,
The Linz skyline
before us. What especially caught the tall handsome buildings. It was pour- which was finished in 1924 and looks
eye was a sailing boat suspended in ing with rain but we could imagine more Anglican than Roman Catholic.
mid-air, an installation artwork that a party atmosphere in summer, with It’s the biggest church in Austria and
seemed completely incongruous. Per- restaurants and cafés spilling out can accommodate 20,000.
haps that was the point. across the flagstones and hobnobbing At certain times of the year you
As we walked back down from the with various statues and fountains. can stay in the tower of the cathedral
castle, we heard music coming from At the centre is a 20-metre-high as part of what seems like a quirky
an upstairs window and were remind- column (completed 1723), made of idea known as Turmeremit (tower
ed of what Humphrey had told us at white marble and dedicated to the hermit), which started in 2009 when
breakfast about Mozart stopping in Holy Trinity. It was built in gratitude Linz was European Capital of Cul-
Linz on his way to Vienna and quiet- for the city surviving fire, war and ture. And, no, you don’t have to come
ly rustling up his Symphony No 36 in plague — and I dare say Hitler would back down to earth for a pee.
C major. Indeed, the entire work was have demolished it had things turned By the time we returned to our
completed in four days, and its pre- out differently. But it seemed churl- ship my father in law was exhausted
mier took place in Linz on 4 Novem- ish to raise this with Sebastian just as but we all rejoiced in having delved
ber 1783 — well before it was first he was also pointing out the magnifi- into a city about which we knew pre-
heard in Vienna five months later. cent baroque Jesuitenkirche, where cious little.
But it was not until we arrived in the great Anton Bruckner served as
the Hauptplatz (main square) that organist. Fittingly, Linz’s new con- Mark Palmer is Travel Editor at the
we began wondering why on earth cert hall is named after him and the Daily Mail.
44 the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 Shaken or Stirred?
20 Chesham Place, London, UK, SW1X 8HQ | T+ 44 (0)20.7858.0100
info@thehari.com | www.thehari.com

ITALY
The capital of nowhere
Trieste’s mongrel heritage and stunning location
make it an unbeatable city, says William Cook
‘W
elcome to the free terri-
tory of Trieste,’ reads the
sign in the shop window.
‘US and UK come back!’ For me, this
is the sort of thing that makes Tri-
este such a beguiling place. Sixty-four
years since those British and Ameri-
can troops departed and handed this
disputed seaport back to Italy, it still
feels like a no-man’s-land, stranded
between the Slav and Latin worlds.
Jan Morris, the queen of travel
writers, called Trieste the capital of
nowhere, and I needed to read only
the first few pages of her bewitch-
ing book Trieste and the Meaning
of Nowhere to know I’d love it here.
‘The last breath of civilisation expires
on this coast where barbarism starts,’
wrote Chateaubriand, in 1806. Of
course it’s considered rather rude
to call people barbarians nowadays,
but I know exactly what he means.
Despite its elegant architecture
there’s something untamed about Tri-
este — the limestone cliffs that tower
over it, the fierce wind which lashes
the promenade. It’s on the fault line
46
between Catholic and Orthodox,
a frontier between West and East.
But the main thing that makes
Trieste so thrilling is that unlike Ven-
ice (two hours west of here by car or
train), it’s almost entirely free of tour-
ists. It has no must-see sights and it
always used to be a nuisance to get
to. Now that you can fly here with
Ryanair a few sightseers are drifting
in, but they’re generally independent
travellers, keen to spend a few days in
an unspoilt city that’s still undiscov-
ered by big tour groups. What those
coach parties and cruise ships are
missing is an ornate, compact port full
of lively bars and homely restaurants,
in a spectacular location on a narrow
strip of land between wild uplands and
a restless sea. As you stroll along its
grand old avenues, curiously bereft of
traffic, you wonder: how did Trieste
end up like this — and why can’t other
cities be this way?
The Triestini are proud of their
mongrel heritage — Italian, Austri-
an, Slovenian — and as befits a place
with such a hybrid population, Trieste
ISTOCK
has a complicated past. The Romans
were here once, but after they left it
became a backwater. In 1382 the Hab-
sburgs incorporated it into their grow-
ing empire, but not much happened
until 1719, when they opened it up to
foreign trade. All sorts of merchants
flooded in, Jews, Greeks, Serbs, Cro-
ats, and by the 19th century it was one
of Europe’s busiest ports, Austria’s
gateway to the sea. It also attracted
a steady stream of artists and eccen-
trics. James Joyce spent a decade
here before the first world war, writ-
ing Ulysses and Exiles while teaching
at the Berlitz language school. Freud
As you stroll came to study the sex life of eels.
along its grand Trieste’s Italian nationalists always
old avenues yearned for unification with Italy, and
you wonder: in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire
fell apart, their wish was granted. Yet
how did having wrestled Trieste away from
Trieste end Austria at long last, they didn’t really
up like this – know what to do with it. Italy had lots
of other ports in far more useful places,
and why can’t and so the city slowly atrophied. Mus-
other cities be solini put up some bombastic build-
this way? ings, but these were mainly just for
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

show. In 1943 the Nazis marched in
and slaughtered the city’s age-old Jew-
ish population. In 1945 the Yugoslavs
drove the Nazis out and ruled the city
for six weeks. Then the Western Allies
took over and restored order (hence
that sign in the shop window). Finally,
in 1954, they returned Trieste to Italy.
It’s been Italian ever since.
Yet the Trieste you see today is
very different from the city Jan Morris
fell in love with when she came here as
a British soldier, as part of that peace-
ful occupation. When I first passed
through here in the early 1980s on my
way to Yugoslavia, it was hemmed in
by the Iron Curtain, at the dead end of
a one-way street. Only when the Cold
War ended did it become a crossroads
again. Istria, its historic hinterland
now belongs to Slovenia, but the Ital-
ianate ports along that shoreline are
an easy ferry ride away.
A hundred years since the Austri-
ans fled, Trieste is still haunted by the
ghosts of Habsburgs past, and it’s this
strange melange of Latinate, Slavonic
and Teutonic that gives the city its dis-
tinctive flavour. Its cafés are an odd
mix of espresso bar and Kaffeehaus;
its loveliest landmark, the Castello
di Miramare, was built by Maximil-
ian, kid brother of the Austrian Kai-
ser Franz Joseph. Wandering its robust
boulevards, you could almost be back
in Vienna. And then you turn a corner,
and find yourself staring out to sea.
I stayed at the Savoia Excelsior Pal-
ace, a monument to Austrian hubris.
When it opened in 1911, it was mar-
keted as ‘the most luxurious hotel in
the Austro-Hungarian Empire’. Today
the house style is friendly and infor-
mal: a grand hotel built for aristocrats
has become a pleasant stopover for
business travellers and weekenders.
It’s a sign of how Trieste has changed.
With its shrunken population
(smaller than a hundred years ago)
and lots of big empty buildings, Trieste
ISTOCK
has become a city of museums. I count-
ed 22, two of which are among my
favourite museums in the world. Both
commemorate Triestini: one who spent
a lifetime here, the other just a week.
The Museo Revoltella is an art
gallery in the flamboyant home of
Pasquale Revoltella, a wealthy phi-
lanthropist who left his house and its
contents to his home town. But it’s the
Museo di Storia ed Arte which sums
up the enigmatic magic of Trieste. An
archaeological museum in the shadow
of the ancient cathedral, it’s dedicated
to Johann Winckelmann, the father of
modern archaeology, who was waiting
The elaborate here for a ship to Rome when he was
Government House. killed by a young man he’d befriend-
Far left: the Church ed. Two hundred and fifty years since
of Sant’Antonio he died, no one really knows why. In
Nuovo at the end of the garden behind the museum there’s
the Grand Canal a cenotaph in his honour: it felt like a
scene from a film noir, an unsolved
murder mystery. As I retraced my
steps to Trieste’s tiny airport, to catch
my Ryanair flight back to Stansted, I
was already planning my return.
William Cook travelled to Trieste
as a guest of Kirker Holidays
(www.kirkerholidays.com) and the
Savoia Excelsior Palace, Trieste
(www.starhotels.com).

INTRODUCING A NEW SPECTATOR PODCAST

Women with Balls An interview series hosted by The Spectator’s Katy Balls

This week’s guest

Helena Morrissey
Financier and campaigner

I am, in some strange way, grateful my boss

was so overt about passing me over for a promotion
because I’d had a baby — I knew where I stood.
...
It’s become controversial to suggest men and women
are equal but different. I have six girls and three boys
— enough of a sample size to be secure about this fact.

Find us on the Spectator Radio channel in the iTunes store, or visit

www.spectator.co.uk/balls RADIO

the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 47

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GIBRALTAR
The rock of ages past
There’s a lot more to this British Overseas Territory than lager and chips, says Harry Mount
H
ow lazy, snobbish and wrong
it is to mock Gibraltar for the
lager and fish and chips cli-
chés. Yes, you can get lager and fish
and chips there; nothing wrong with
that. The pint of lager I had in a pub
in Gibraltar Main Street was excel-
lent. And the funny thing is that,
unlike consciously ‘British’ pubs in
Rome or New York, there was no
ersatz feel to it. It was exactly like
a pub in Britain, down to the two
middle-aged office workers in shirt-
sleeves, exchanging dull office chat,
breaking off occasionally for low-lev-
el, awkward flirting with the barmaid,
who was in her twenties.
That’s what’s so gripping about
Gibraltar: you move, in an instant,
from carbon-copy Britain to a com-
pletely parallel, foreign universe.
That barmaid was Spanish, one of
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
thousands of Spaniards who come in
every day across the border to work
in Gibraltar.
To snobbishly call Gibraltar pro-
vincial is to be 180 degrees wrong. It
is a unique mix of ultra-Britishness
(itself pretty odd: you come across
more pictures of the Queen every
five minutes than in a whole day back
in the mother country) and excep-
tional exotica.
From my balcony at the Rock
Hotel, I could see Spain to my right,
the mountains of Morocco to my left
and, ahead of me, 30 tankers mooring
off Gibraltar before heading into the
Med or out into the Atlantic. Direct-
ly in front of me sat a gunmetal-grey
Royal Navy warship. On one after-
noon, my view was eclipsed by a mon-
key (yes, they are tailless monkeys,
not apes) scuttling across the wall
ISTOCK
ahead of me, baby wrapped around its
belly, as I drank a perfect cup of tea.
The warship was a reminder of
Gibraltar’s extraordinary identity: a
British Overseas Territory, taken by
the British in 1704 during the War
of the Spanish Succession, and more
or less claimed by the Spanish ever
since. That history dictates Gibral-
tar’s attitude today: 98.9 per cent of
Gibraltarians voted to stay British in
From my a 2002 referendum. In the 2016 refer-
balcony, I endum, 96 per cent voted to stay in
could see the EU. Oh, for that level of certain-
ty — either for Remain or Leave —
Spain to my back in the United Kingdom.
right, Morocco The Gibraltarians are far from
to my left and, b e i n g L i t t l e E n g l a n d e r s. Th e
35,000-strong population is a har-
ahead of me, monious mix of native Gibraltarians,
30 moored British, Maghrebis and South Asians.
tankers They speak, variously, English, Span-
49

ish and Llanito, a kind of Anglo-Span-
ish. There is a long-standing Jewish
community, with four synagogues in
the territory.
For all the Brexit worries, there
is no embattled feeling in this tiny
chunk of land — 2.6 square miles,
much of it taken up by the looming,
grey limestone of the Rock of Gibral-
tar — cut off by Spain to the north
and by the sea on all other sides.
In fact, there’s a jolly, open feel to
the place, thanks to the combination
of everyone knowing each other, and
the economy doing so well. Gibral-
tar’s low-tax regime means drink and
cigarettes are cheap, and plenty of
well-heeled entrepreneurs have an
office here.
Because it’s so tiny, I got my bear-
ings within an hour. And for the
same reason, my taxi driver told me,
Gibraltarians don’t say ‘Hello’ to
each other: they greet each other with
a hearty ‘Goodbye’ instead. If they
had a full conversation with everyone
they met on Main Street, they would
never get from one end to the other.
But, despite its minuscule dimen-
sions, Gibraltar is crammed with
intriguing buildings — again because
of that colonialist history. The streets
are lined with handsome stone forti-
fications, going back to the 1540 wall
50
built by the Holy Roman Emper-
or Charles V. Tucked into the lee of
Charles V’s wall is the deeply mov-
ing Trafalgar Cemetery, where two
of the dead from the Battle of Trafal-
gar were buried just after the battle,
alongside victims of other early 19th-
century naval engagements.
The Rock is as shot through with
holes as a Swiss cheese, thanks to 34
miles of defensive tunnels dug by the
British for 200 years; intensively so
during the second world war.
And then, within and below the
military buildings, are the charm-
ing, classical, terraced houses that
wouldn’t look odd in any prosperous
Mediterranean town.
Within a handful of streets, you
also have to squeeze all the offi-
cial and religious buildings that
go with an overseas territory. In a
15-minute walk, you see the Gover-
nor’s Residence, the Supreme Court,
the Income Tax Department, the
Catholic and Anglican cathedrals…
And my favourite spot, the Garri-
son Library — a southern Europe
London Library. It’s a subtle Regen-
cy villa, with high-ceilinged reading
rooms stuffed with books.
It’s very easy, too, to get away
from the developed, western side of
the Rock. Half an hour’s walk and
ISTOCK
Time-warp you’re suddenly on deserted slopes
Britain: tumbling down to the sea, with zig-
Gibraltar.
Previous page: zagging paths set into the hillside.
the famous You could be in Spain profonde —
Barbary with olive and lemon trees, cacti and
macaques stone pines. The climate and geogra-
phy are so unusual here that unique,
indigenous plants have sprung forth:
Gibraltar campion, Gibraltar saxi-
frage and the gloriously named
Gibraltar candytuft.
You must climb the Rock — or
take the cable car — and meet the
monkeys, who are marvellously indif-
ferent to humans: they mated briefly
but repeatedly, and apparently with-
out pleasure, five yards away from
me. Take a boat trip to see the dol-
phins and Gorham Cave — one of
the last known Neanderthal residenc-
es in Europe. See the stalactite-hung
St Michael’s Cave, thought to have
been the site of Odysseus’s Hades,
at the edge of the known world, by
the Pillars of Hercules. Visit the sup-
For all the posed site of one of those pillars, too.
The other is in Africa.
Brexit worries, Have some lager and fish and
there is no chips as well – but don’t for a moment
embattled think Gibraltar is parochial.
feeling in this Harry Mount stayed at the Rock
tiny chunk Hotel (doubles from £95);
of land www.rockhotelgibraltar.com
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

I
t always amuses me at this time of year
to observe the fuss people make about
quitting booze for a month. Because
three years ago, after three decades of tak-
ing cocaine on a daily basis, I gave it up
overnight. Over-eating, gambling, shopping,
pornography — there’s no cheap thrill that
can’t be mastered with a little self-control.
I first took cocaine as a teenager work-
ing at the New Musical Express. As some-
one who had presented herself as a fearless
punk when she was actually a shy virgin, I
was already a big fan of the amphetamine
sulphate, so when a man from a major record
label said ‘May I?’ and starting racking out
lines on my desk one day I was anticipating
the familiar burn of baby laxative with the
merest soupçon of speed. Imagine my hor-
ror when I experienced something far more
pleasant! Instead of the desire to argue about
whether the Sex Pistols were better than the
Clash, I wanted to give the world a hug.
I soon found myself in the eye of the
maelstrom that was the 1980s London
media, making mad money and spend-
ing it on that thing you spend it on when
you’ve got too much money. Ironically, the
effects of speed and cocaine are very simi-
lar. But the reason cocaine is more expen-
sive is because you pay for what you don’t
get; the crash landing is softer. It’s the party
drug par excellence in that it keeps you
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
NOTES ON …
Cocaine
By Julie Burchill
GETTY IMAGES
going. It kept my party going. And then, I’d
simply had enough. You hear so much rub-
bish about Cold Turkey Cocaine Hell that it
was only a couple of weeks ago that I read
anything I could identify with on the sub-
ject: Keith Richards talking to Rolling Stone
magazine on why he quit drinking. ‘It’s been
about a year now… I got fed up with it… It
was time to quit, just like all the other stuff.’
At the risk of bringing the party down,
there’s a serious reason why I gave up.
Cocaine is like pornography; everyone
wants to believe that regardless of the
Fine Wine
misery and broken lives which litter the
production of everybody else’s kicks, the
source we alone opt for is magically free of
exploitation, torture and death. In my day
we kidded ourselves that growing the coca
plant gave the farmers of South America
a good living, which was pathetically self-
deluding enough, but it’s always easier to
lie to ourselves about the plight of people
in faraway countries of which we know
nothing. Today, it would be an actual moral
cretin who could ignore the human collat-
eral which is left lying in the wake of the
‘cheeky’ line of coke which brings a sparkle
to the eye of the after-dinner educated.
The NHS recently published a guide
to assist the ‘very young’ children being
recruited in their thousands by the drug-
running County Lines gangs and whose
admittance to hospital with knife injuries
has almost doubled in three years to 573.
‘Clean-eaters on coke’ are one of our more
grotesque modern types, like the humani-
tarian aid worker who justifies buying sex
with impoverished women because he is,
after all, one of the good guys. But what
good is a clean gut when there’s blood on
your hands?
I got away from cocaine without doing
lasting damage to myself — but I’ll never
know what I did to others. That’s something
I’ll just have to live with.
51

ITALY
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Seaside Tuscan villa 5BD, 4BR,
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ROME CENTRE. Self catering apts
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VENICE CENRAL. Tranquil, sunny
apartment. Wonderful canalside
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bathrooms. Tel: 020 7701 7540 or
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VILLA NEAR ROME. Sleeps 10.
Heated pool. Tennis. Brilliant cook
available. www.romevilla.co.uk
UMBRIA. Spacious centuries old
farmhouse villa – our home.
Etruscan/Roman Site. Sleeps 11.
Pool. Magical Views. Therapeutic
atmosphere. Brilliant feedback.
www.ladogana.co.uk
PALAZZO NEAR ROME. Sleeps 12.
Heated Pool. Tennis.Fantastic Cook/
staff. www.palazzoparisi.com
UMBRIA/TUSCANY border near
Monterchi. Wonderful farmhouse with
tennis court and pool. Sleeps 12, plus
newly restored annexe for 2. Some
availability 2019, or book early for
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or call 07771 535676
ARTS
52
CLASSIFIEDS
Arts & Travel
RIVIERA: FRANCE/ITALY
Romantic, spacious 2/3 bedroom
garden flat with breathtaking
Mediterranean views.
www.ilvalico.eu
TUSCANY UMBRIA BORDER
Small family agency has villas with
pools, for 2 to 14 people.
www.tuscanyumbria.com
TUSCAN/UMBRIAN BORDER.
Hilltop house in 11 acres.
Looks amazing on the website.
Even better in real life.
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AUSTRIA
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style home in peaceful Biedermeier
cloister. Sleeps 2/3.
Tel: 0043 1 712 5091
www.valleycastle.com
GREECE
ANTIPAROS.
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23 LUXURY
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E mail: Golf, watersports, ten minutes.
jack@anglofrenchproperties.com Calais four hours.
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54 the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

‘Economics has far too narrow
a conception of what people really care
about to justify the influence it carries’
— Rory Sutherland, p61
High life
Taki
Gstaad
My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel
was a bust. Too many people brought their
friends and I ended up asking men and
women to please leave both my bedroom
and, especially, my bathroom. I had some
very pretty young things drop in. Some even
overstayed and — surprise, surprise — there
were some items missing after the clean-up
the next day. But that was then. I’m now in
Gstaad for the duration.
The good news for the nouveaux is that it
rained like hell for three days, washing away
all the snow. Skiing and new moolah don’t
mix. Main Street now sounds a bit like Bei-
rut — or should that be Athens? However it
sounds, it’s not like the Helvetia of the good
old days. My closest friend, Aliki Goulan-
dris, gave a wonderful pre-Christmas dinner
in her chalet, and we reminisced about the
1950s and 1960s in Gstaad. Nothing worked.
The chairlifts were slow and swung danger-
ously when the winds blew. The slopes were
unprepared and without signs warning about
rocks. The bindings often froze, and snapped
open only if you fell sideways, not forwards
or backwards. The chalets were so flimsi-
ly insulated that men and women did what
came naturally in their thermal underwear.
Yet it was paradise because we all knew
each other and we were young. Fifty back
then was the equivalent of 80 today. We
were all in our twenties. The Volkswagen
Beetle was the car to own, and the only
Rolls belonged to the Palace Hotel. It fer-
ried important clients up from the railway
station. The Maharani of Patiala arrived by
helicopter and was told not to do it again.
(It scared the crap out of the cows.) Food
fights were a nightly occurrence (they
sound awfully silly now). The locals were
the only ones who owned chalets; the rest
of us were at the Palace. And then it started.
The one- upmanship, that is. Chalets got big-
ger and bigger, swimming pools were added,
then private cinemas and large gymnasiums;
well, you know the score.
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
Buses now arrive packed with awe-
struck tourists looking for celebrities, the
last one being Elizabeth Taylor, who left us
quite a long time ago. Julie Andrews, David
Niven, Roger Moore, Sean Connery were all
Gstaad people at one time or another. My
favourites were Sir Roger and Lord Men-
uhin, both now performing upstairs. Anoth-
er one I liked was Larry the lorry driver,
married to Liz Taylor and a bit befuddled at
times because of drink. But Roman Polanski
is still here, still skiing well at age 84, and still
pursued by the Americans for something he
did more than 40 years ago.
Snow or no snow, the mountains rise glis-
tening above the glaciers as I look out of
my window. As some of you who read the
review of Snow: The Biography in the gala
Christmas issue of The Spectator will know,
the outdoor white stuff will be all but gone
in 20 years, and only the indoor stuff will
remain. (It might even be legal by then the
way things are going.) Will I miss it when it’s
gone? I won’t be around, so I suppose not,
but the wily Swiss are preparing for it. Gulf
people will replace us sooner rather than
later, and of course the Indians and Chinese.
Symbols and traditions are important,
and in Switzerland money is the symbol
that counts. ‘Show me the money’ should be
engraved on every government building, in
fact on every house, chalet and hovel, if there
are any. Still, the Swiss work hard and expect
nothing to be handed to them. This makes
them pariahs in Europe and North America,
where global citizenship is a paramount idea
bandied about by self-satisfied elites who
look down on ordinary people like the Swiss.
But let’s not get me started on this.
Next week I am putting on my skis and
will race my first grandson, who thinks he’ll
smoke me. He’s 12 and I’ve got 70 years on
him. It all depends on how the slalom course
is set. If it’s wide and fast, I will win. If it’s tight
and intricate, the little shit Taki wins. My son
J.T. will set it. And speaking of family, I never
thought I’d be writing this, but my chalet is
full of grandchildren: Taki and Maria from
J.T. and the latest addition from my daughter,
Antonius Alexander, six weeks old and being
breastfed like a peasant boy of old.
Having a full house of relations is a new
one for me. We are seven, plus nannies and
cooks and outdoor help, and I have never
been happier. This worries me no end. The
other night we had some friends drop in and
everyone got tipsy except the mother of my
children, who retired early as well she should.
My son-in-law had given me an oval gilded
picture of my latest grandson, and I was
looking at it while under the weather. The
tiny baby had quite an aristocratic air and I
thought I saw a hint of pomposity in his blue
eyes. The picture has become my favourite.
A bit of pomposity is needed rather
badly nowadays, what with everyone telling
us how equal we all are; some more equal
than others. Happy New Year.
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
The Airbnb accommodation at Padding-
ton, chez Mohammed, was a fourth-floor
room measuring about nine feet by five. As
well as having a single bed, this small space
was extraordinarily well equipped, with a
wardrobe, huge fridge, sink, draining board,
ironing board, microwave oven, kettle, two
electric hobs, a set of saucepans and enough
cutlery and crockery for a select dinner
party, and a television set. The room’s heat,
which came from an unidentifiable source,
was tropical. The mattress had a couple of
broken springs and was horribly filthy, but
the sheet covering it smelt freshly laundered
and for just £22 a night I was well pleased.
When I switched on the television to see
whether it worked, it showed a photograph
of me wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie
sitting next to Baroness Trumpington at a
Cigar Smoker of the Year awards dinner.
Apparently, one of us had recently died and
BBC news was showing the photograph to
illustrate a jauntily affectionate obituary.
I had taken the room as a London base
for a pre-Christmas week of parties, lunch-
es, a reunion and The Spectator’s Christ-
mas carol concert at St Bride’s, Fleet Street.
You entered the street door by pressing
six numbers on a keypad and then your
room by pressing another four numbers on
another keypad. So it was possible that I
wouldn’t meet my host at any stage of my
stay. Happily, however, we met on the stairs
as I was returning to my room around mid-
night after attending the Literary Review
Christmas party at the Naval and Military
55
LIFE
Club. I was pleased to see him and greeted
him extravagantly.
Mohammed was a courteous and ami-
able man and he paused to ask me if eve-
rything was okay with my room. I said that,
yes, it was fabulous, but I hadn’t been in it
for more than half an hour because unfor-
tunately I’d had to go straight out to a party.
He congratulated me on spending the even-
ing in such a nice way and asked whether it
had been a Christmas party.
No, it was a Bad Sex awards party, I
said. ‘Oh?’ said Mohammed. I elaborated
by recalling that the first prize was award-
ed to a detailed and graphic account of a
lady’s vagina given by a middle-aged man
who had never before in his life seen one
close-up. It was excellent and funny, I said.
‘And what was the prize?’ he said. There
were so many people in the room that
I couldn’t quite see, I said, but I thought
it might have been a medal. ‘Nice, very
nice,’ said Mohammed, warmly. By which
he meant, I think, that not only was it nice
that someone should triumph in this way,
but also that it was nice they should receive
due public recognition in the form of an
award; and nice, too, that I had been pre-
sent at the occasion.
The following evening I went to the Daily
Mail travel and property section Christmas
Thirty or so Daily Mail hacks;
cheese on toast; a free bar.
Paradise on earth
party, held above a pub just off Kensington
High Street. A small, dimly lit room with no
furniture and a sloping floor; 30 or so Daily
Mail hacks; cheese on toast; a free bar. Para-
dise on earth. I can remember at one point
everyone gaping horribly at each other’s
faces in an informal competition to find
who among those present owned the rotte-
nest teeth. It was like watching They Shall
Not Grow Old all over again. One mouth I
peered into had bits of cheese still attached
to the blackened stumps.
On my return to my London residence,
Mohammed was on the pavement putting
out the rubbish. Noticing that my mental
and physical resources weren’t equal to the
task of pressing the keypad buttons in the
correct order to gain entry, he immediately
came to the rescue. ‘Another party, Mr Jer-
emy?’ he said as he opened his front door
much wider than was really necessary, as if
he were shepherding an elderly, crippled,
unpredictable cow up a ramp and into the
back of a lorry. His enquiry was fatherly,
amiable, interested. I was totally spent and
with five flights of stairs and another keypad
now ahead of me, I had to husband what lit-
tle remained of my strength and therefore
could offer only the briefest of explanations.
‘Daily Mail,’ I gasped as I made unsteadily
for the banisters.
Whether or not Mohammed knew what
56
the Daily Mail was, or what it stood for, or
that it was the only newspaper still clinging
to the wonderful old hacks’ drinking cul-
ture of Fleet Street, he politely and urbane-
ly accepted these two magic words as all he
needed to know about how my evening had
gone. ‘Nice. Nice,’ he said. Then I heard him
urging me gently on from below: ‘Left! Left,
please, Mr Jeremy!’
Real life
Melissa Kite
1 January. Rooms left in house to decorate: 1
(only the attic, therefore doesn’t count).Walls
plastered by self with no help from man: 1
(vg!!). Reconciliations with ex-builder boy-
friend for the festive season owing to total
collapse of self-belief right on cue at year end,
notwithstanding evidence of self-sufficiency
in newly plastered walls: 1 (must do better).
Am plastering genius, it turns out. After faff-
ing about with something called a hawk to
no particular avail, I ended up chucking all
the tools on the floor in exasperation and
plastering the dining room with my rubber-
gloved hands.
It was a bit like baking, only instead of
kneading dough in a bowl, I was kneading
British Gypsum MultiFinish on to my walls.
The effect was stunning, unlike any plas-
tering I have ever seen before, except per-
haps on Grand Designs when those rich
couples desert south Kensington for an
eco-hipster encampment in Wales, where
they build a roundhouse using only dung
while camping with their five children
in a tent for three years, then tell Kevin
McCloud about the amazing ‘journey’ they
have been on as grimy tears run down their
newly toothless faces.
My walls were just as artistic. They were
pink and swirly, not flat and smooth like bor-
ing old professional plastering.
Tip: squirt some washing-up liquid into
your bucket of plaster as you mix in the
water. It acts as a plasticiser. Don’t even ask
how I know that, it’s a gift. When I get des-
perate enough, I have moments of divine
inspiration. I hear voices in my head. Let’s
just say the fairy godmother of plastering
told me to do it, and it worked a treat.
Why, then, did I take it upon myself to
text the ex-builder boyfriend to tell him
about my plastering triumph, resulting in
jovial banter, resulting in something like
a rapprochement? Only, as usual with the
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
builder b, it never gets as far as a proper rap-
prochement (a properochement) because
we end up infuriating each other half to
death within a couple of days.
He had some tedious ideas for how
I should finish off the wattle and daub by
skimming it with a coat of something high-
tech to stop lumps of the walls falling off on
to the floor.
Even worse: ‘By the way,’ he said, looking
up at the outside of the house, ‘you’ve got six
big holes in your roof.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose you could
see your way clear to fixing them?’
He promised to bring the ladders in a
few days, but the few days turned into a few
more days, by which time the flooded attic
was even more flooded. I climbed the lad-
der to the loft and found a pool of water an
inch deep on top of the damp sheet I had put
down beneath the missing slates.
‘I’m ankle deep in water up there and
it’s pouring through the bedroom ceiling,’
I told him.
‘Yeah, that’s easy. Don’t worry.’
‘I know it’s easy,’ I said. ‘It’s just that it
actually needs doing, however easy that
may be.’
‘Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll bring my ladders this
weekend.’
My walls were pink and swirly,
not flat and smooth like boring old
professional plastering
But this weekend turned into next week-
end, which came and went.
‘I’m ankle deep in water in the loft and
it’s pouring through the bedroom ceiling,’ I
said again.
‘I’ve told you,’ he said, ‘that’s such an
easy job. I’ll bring my ladders and it’ll take
me 20 minutes. Honestly. Stop worrying
about it.’
‘It’s only an easy job if you do it,’ I said,
putting emphasis on the do. But there was
no arguing with him. For reasons only he
and other tradesmen understand, describing
how you are going to fix something is tanta-
mount to fixing it. The actual act of doing the
fixing is a minor detail, not to be confused
with utter irrelevance.
In any case, almost exactly at that
moment, the Volvo decided to unravel itself
so I had to move on. I heard a sputtering
sound from the engine and took it to the
nearest garage where a mechanic declared
there was a leak in the water pump — ‘a big
job’ for which he quoted a small fortune,
probably more than the car was worth.
So I rang an old friend who has pieced
the Volvo back together many times and he
said he would do it for me.
‘Seriously, this car is falling to bits,’ he
told me as I handed him the Gaffer-taped
key. ‘It’s done nearly 200,000 miles. It can’t
go on much longer.’ ‘Nonsense,’ I insisted.
‘It’s raring to go.’
 He drove it away, sputtering, and a day
later brought it back without the rattle.
‘You were lucky,’ he said. ‘I took a photo.
Look. The cambelt had almost wound itself
off.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I am lucky like that.’
The turf
Robin Oakley
I don’t know who coined the old racing
saying ‘The only person who remembers
who came second is the guy who came sec-
ond’ but he was wrong. What draws us afi-
cionados to racetracks on blazing summer
afternoons when we would be better off in
a swimming pool, or on soggy winter days
when sensible folk are curled up in front
of the fire watching a DVD, is the prospect
of a memorable race, an eyeball-to-eyeball
clash of skills and determination between
two finely honed athletes with the final out-
come in doubt until the very last moment.
Racing in 2018 gave us plenty to cele-
brate. Needing only one winner at Royal
Ascot to pass Sir Henry Cecil’s record of
76 winners there, Sir Michael Stoute pro-
duced four. Mark Johnston became the
winningmost trainer of all time when his
total reached 4,194. Davy Russell, once
sacked over the most famous cup of tea in
racing by mega-owner Michael O’Leary,
became the oldest-ever Irish champi-
on jump jockey at 38 and won the Grand
National on O’Leary’s popular Tiger Roll,
once described by his owner as ‘a little rat
of a thing’.
Charlie Appleby, who is the kind of guy
everybody would like to live next door
to, has risen through the ranks at Godol-
phin from work-rider and horse travel-
ler to being the trainer who finally gave
Sheikh Mohammed the Derby victory he
has yearned for with Masar. He won him 12
Group Ones and a Melbourne Cup into the
bargain with Cross Counter. Oisin Murphy,
No. 1 jockey for Qatar Racing, confirmed
the flowering of his talents by collecting
nine Group Ones, four of them on Roaring
Lion. Once resented in the weighing room
as a sharp-elbowed upstart, Murphy will
have been almost equally pleased to have
been chosen as the Flat Jockey of the Year
by his fellow jockeys.
The statistics and awards will eventually
fade. What we will not forget are the races:
Tiger Roll had been six lengths clear in the
Grand National, but with the crowd will-
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
ing him home after the last fence his stride
was shortening with every yard as Pleasant
Bridge
Company, ridden by the 21-year-old David Janet de Botton
Mullins, strove to overhaul him. A yard
after the post he did so, but Russell’s guile
and Tiger Roll’s courage earned them vic- HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!
tory by a head. I have made a resolution to make some
The Cheltenham Gold Cup in March bridge resolutions. Here they are:
became a magnificent duel between Nicky 1. When declaring, I will never again
Henderson’s Might Bite, ridden by Nico play to the first trick in a nanosecond. I will
de Boinville, and Colin Tizzard’s Native explain to the opps, in an insufferably smug
River, ridden by champion jockey Richard tone, that I always take at least two minutes
Johnson. The other 13 horses might as well to plan the play.
have joined the spectators in the stands. 2. I will NOT play for six hours a day and
Native River, a proven stayer who had won then hit Bridge Baron obsessively the min-
a Welsh Grand National, led over the first ute I get home.
with Might Bite on his shoulder, where he 3. I will watch partner’s signals religiously,
stayed. Their quality jumping all the way rather than pick at my chipped nail.
through took lengths out of the others and 4. I will read more bridge books.
setting out on the second circuit it was clear Today’s hand comes from Lukacs’ and
the pair had the race between them. With Rubens’ Test Your Play as Declarer and neat-
Native River in a lovely rhythm, Johnson ly covers resolutions 1 and 4.
let him get on with it, saying later: ‘The
worst thing I could have done was to start
Dealer East All vulnerable
telling him what to do, getting in his way.’
De Boinville was content to sit quiet down z 98 6 3
the hill before the final rise to the winning
post. Both were where they wanted to be.
yA8 2
Half the crowd thought Might Bite would X KQ J
be unleashed to use his speed, the other half w J 10 8
reckoned Native River had the stamina to
withstand him. Two fences out the pair flew z J 10 5 4 z 2
N
over it together and at that point Johnson y 3 W E
y Q J 10 9 7 6
asked Native River for more, knowing, as X8 7 5 2 S X 10 9
he put it, that ‘the hill was my friend’. The wK 7 6 5 w AQ 4 3
duellists met the last fence together on the
same stride. But suddenly, as they hit the z AK Q 7
rise and softer ground, De Boinville felt yK5 4
his mount falter: ‘A couple of strides after
XA 6 4 3
the fence I knew it was gone.’ At last a gap
opened between the two and an enthralling w 92
race was over.
The Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, in which West North East South
two English fillies, Enable and Sea of Class, 2y dble
finished first and second, was a very dif- Pass 3y pass 3z
ferent contest. Khalid Abdullah’s Enable, Pass 4z all pass
trained by the maestro John Gosden, had
looked invincible when winning the race
under Frankie Dettori in 2017, but she had
suffered a knee injury and another unre- West led the y3 and the key play occurred
vealed setback in training. Her only prep at trick one. If declarer wins with the yK and
race had been on the Kempton sand a tries to draw trump, because they split 4–1 he
month before the Arc. Sea of Class, trained is down. The best he can do is switch to dia-
by William Haggas, had shown electric monds, but after three rounds, when he plays
finishing speed in the Irish Oaks but was y A, West ruffs and the defence take two
drawn hopelessly wide in stall 15. Jockey clubs and a heart. Playing a spade back to
James Doyle could only drop her out at the hand is no better. When he discards a heart
back and pray for racing room to develop. on the last diamond, and plays a heart to the
Dettori took Enable to the front more Ace, West pitches a club and the defence
than a furlong from home but was nursing again take two clubs, a spade and a heart.
her home at the end. Doyle, having woven It’s all so enviably easy if declarer wins
skilfully through the traffic, was closing fast the first trick in dummy with the Ace. He
on the accelerating Sea of Class but got continues with two top trumps, three rounds
there a fraction too late and Enable held of diamonds, a spade to the Queen, XAce
on by a short neck. Both jockeys had rid- pitching his heart loser, and when he advanc-
den a brilliant race: the joy is that both fil- es the yK from hand, West cannot prevent
lies remain in training, so could be meeting him ruffing his losing heart in dummy. Ten
again to battle it out this autumn. tricks. Happy days.
57
LIFE
Chess
Game of the year
Raymond Keene
The time has come again when I award
the accolade of most spectacular game
of the year. It adds lustre if this is from one
of the great matches. However, not one
of the games from the London World
Championship comes close to creating the
requisite brilliance and drama. Instead, my
choice falls on the game Aronian-Kramnik
from the Fidé Candidates in Berlin.
Aronian-Kramnik: Fidé Candidates Berlin 2018;
Ruy Lopez
1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 Nf6 4 d3 Bc5 5
Bxc6 This kind of ‘delayed exchange’ is a popular
counter to the Berlin Defence 5 ... dxc6 6 0-0
Qe7 7 h3 Rg8 (see diag 1) This is an
extraordinary idea and shows an admirable
flexibility of thought. White’s play has been a little
passive and Kramnik alertly realises that he can
exploit this with a rapid kingside advance. 8 Kh1
Nh5 9 c3 White needs a more robust response to
Black’s aggressive plan. The alternative 9 Nc3 fits
the bill so that if Black continues as in the game
with 9 ... g5 10 Nxe5 g4 11 d4 Bd6 12 g3 Bxe5 13
dxe5 Qxe5 then the white e-pawn is protected and
he has time for 14 h4 with unclear play. 9 ... g5
This shows up White’s 9th move as being too slow.
The black attack now develops with terrifying
speed. 10 Nxe5 g4 11 d4 11 Nxg4 is destroyed
by 11 ... Bxg4 12 hxg4 Qh4+ 13 Kg1 Ng3 and mate
on h1 is inevitable. $FÌI$WG
dxe5 Qxe5 14 Qd4 Qe7 Black could play 14
... Qxd4 15 cxd4 gxh3 but he much prefers to keep
queens on and play for the attack. 15 h4 For the
moment White has sealed up the kingside but
Black now swiftly mobilises the rest of his army
and quickly opens further lines. 15 ... c5 16 Qc4
The loss of time that White suffers over the next
few moves proves to be disastrous. 16 Qd3
minimises White’s disadvantage. 16 ... Be6 17
Qb5+ c6 18 Qa4 f5 The key breakthrough.
This creates possibilities of advancing with ... f4 as
well as the prospect of levering open the h1-a8
diagonal. Ì$IWhite cannot play 19 exf5 as
Black then has a winning combination — see
today’s puzzle. 19 ... Rxg5 20 hxg5 f4 21
3F4FÌ3EHWI0C4F
PUZZLE NO. 535
Black to play. This is a variation from today’s game
Aronian-Kramnik, Berlin 2018. How can Black
briskly conclude his kingside attack? Answers
to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 8 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.
Last week’s solution 1 f5
58
Competition
Out with the auld
Lucy Vickery
Diagram 1 In Competition No. 3079 you were invited
to supply a new anthem to welcome 2019,
rDbDkDrD starting with the first line of ‘Auld Lang
0p0W1p0p Syne’ and continuing in your own way.
‘Is not the Scotch phrase “Auld lang
WDpDWhWD syne” exceedingly expressive?’ wrote Rob-
DWgW0WDW ert Burns to his friend Frances Dunlop in
1788, referring to the words of an old folk
WDWDPDWD song that he had heard, written down and
DWDPDNDP later sent to James Johnson, who published
it in the Scots Musical Museum. These days,
P)PDW)PD of course, they are sung with gusto by the
$NGQDRIW inebriated the world over on New Year’s Eve
— an expression of fellowship and nostalgia.
Not much of that in the entry, needless to
say. Though the occasional sliver of cheeri-
Diagram 2
ness (C. Paul Evans, Tim Raikes) leavened
WDWDkDWD the gloom, the mood was mostly waspish
and weary. The winners pocket £25 each.
0pDW1WDp Happy New Year!
WDpDWDWD Should auld acquaintance be forgot
DW0bDW)n
And never brought to mind,
WDWDPDpD Twenty-eighteen’s anither year
It’s guid tae leave behind.
HW)rDW0W They talked Brexit in parliament,
P)WDW)WD Six hundred folk and a’,
$W!RDWDK
And gin they talked til kingdom come,
It wouldnae gang awa.
A parcel of befuddled rogues!
Naebody kens for sure
Rd1 Bd5 (see diag 2) A brilliant coup. If now How much and when we’ll a’ be screwed,
25 exd5 then 25 ... Qe4+ 26 Kg1 gxf2+ forces a And whit’s it all been for.
quick mate. 25 f3 gxf3 26 exd5 26 Rxd3
The cup has got nae kindness in’t,
Qxe4 27 Re3 f2+ 28 Rxe4+ Bxe4 is a beautiful
The brose is awfu’ cauld.
finish. 26 ... Qe2 27 Re1 g2+ White
I’ll bet that eftir Hogmanay
resigns 28 Kh2 g1Q+ 29 Kxg1 f2+ mates.
The new year’s like the auld.
Brian Murdoch
I recommend a new book on Kramnik,
written by his long-term manager Carsten Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
Hensel. Vladimir Kramnik: the Inside Story Each year we ask the same:
of a Chess Genius (Quality Chess) tells the should we from habit send a card
fascinating story of Kramnik’s battles to every listed name?
against unscrupulous organisations and They send us one each year, so we
devious individuals. The discredited for fifty years or more
old guard of Fidé figure prominently. have done the same, with cheery words,
while wond’ring what it’s for.
You went to school with him, while I
rDWDkDrD have never met the guy.
0pDW1WDp I, briefly, worked alongside her
(and always wondered: why?)
WDpDbDWD But if we drop them, will they think
we’ve died/remarried/worse?
DW0WDPDn That ‘auld acquaintance’ Christmas list
QDWDWDp)
hangs round us like a curse.
D.A. Prince
DW)WDW)W Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
P)WDW)WD It may be for the best.
$NGWDRDK
Some friends are magic, some are not,
And some are just a pest.
It is not cruel or unjust
To purge the old, dead wood.
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
 LIFE

As Stalin did it, so we must

For our and their own good. Crossword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

This New Year let us all confound

2389: 10 11 12

Each wretched faux-ami

Who never, ever bought a round,
All change 13 14 15 16

Or bored us endlessly, by Doc 17 18

Or badmouthed us with lying lips, 19 20 21

Or bogarted the bong —
To all those dud relationships 22 23 24 25
Adieu, farewell, so long.
Basil Ransome-Davies 26
The unclued lights can be
27 28
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, paired in some way or other.
’Twould be a waste of time. One is of two words. 29 30 31
We’ve things far better to forget
In the year two-oh-one-nine. Across
32 33 34 35

1 Distrain a dog brutally 36 37 38

Forget the warming of the globe; leading to loss of status
Forget the rising seas. (12) 39 40
Forget the US president 10 Deep blue of
Has a brain like cheddar cheese. Mediterranean ‘îles’ (4) 41 42

14 When this fish turns, it’s 43

Forget that vicious autocrats not fit for eating (3)
Flout democratic rules. 17 Pays attention to journalist
Forget the bone saws Saudis use when he’s around (5)
In their journalism schools. 18 ‘Let It Be’ almost ruined
with inclusion of classy
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, little singer (7, two words)
Perhaps you’ve lost your mind, 19 Trees that appear to be
Which might not be an awful choice almost uncharted (6)
In the year two-oh-one-nine. 22 Love in a home on the
Max Gutmann water (6)
24 Fellow back in police
Should auld acquaintance be forgot custody (5)
And never brought to mind? 26 Such a company about to
Why, yes, they should, and quickly if get by, with Conservative’s
They’re of the German kind, behind (9)
Or French or Spanish, Dutch or Greek 27 Economic deficits – snares
Or even Portuguese into which the old have
We’ll find alliances elsewhere fallen back (9, two words)
And trade with whom we please. 29 Deep in retreat, Irish gods
We’ll give a hand to friendship in (5)
The far-off land of Oz 31 Be disposed to worry
And be the Brits of former days dogged by tax officer
Composing our own laws. (6, two words)
So let us drink to sovereignty 34 Academic, regrettably,
And hail the coming year rebuffed peace gesture (6)
With shouts of joy as we return 36 Competent father cutting
To be the way we were. wire (7)
Frank McDonald 38 Wind, awfully wet,
sheltering at home (5)
Should auld acquaintance be forgot 39 A new crisis erupts causing
As mony since have been, bloomers to be made (8)
For memory is fading fast 40 Expert fancies ignoring
An’ age has dimmed our e’en. the odds (3)
42 Like some previous
We twa hae sown our youthful oats edition? (4)
But that was lang ago 43 Innate tendency to censure
When winter winds blew gentler notes and hurt (12, two words)
An’ Christmas aye brought snow.
Down A first prize of £30 for the first
3 Iris, cheerful university correct solution opened on
type (7) 21 January. There are two
4 A period return to, say, runners-up prizes of £20. (UK
Wembley (5) solvers can choose to receive the
6 Harley Street doctor – latest edition of the Chambers
no sharer of tea (6) dictionary instead of cash —
7 Sheath used in procreation ring the word ‘dictionary’.)
(5) Entries to: Crossword 2389,
8 Hooks a French carp The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
ideally, for starters (4) Street, London SW1H 9HP.
9 Public houses? Please allow six weeks for
(12, two words) prize delivery.
11 From fish, seaweed and
sulphur, something perfect
for chemist (8, two words)
13 Pole redesigned that nice
cart (12, two words)
16 Television company’s palm Name
(3)
28 A near shave with hands Address
laid off? (7, two words)
30 Girl cut into firm material
(6)
32 Circuit of Silverstone
provided amusement,
at first (3)
33 Girl takes the biscuit (5)
35 Neil Armstrong, first
to return from another Email
world? (5)
37 She is able to retire with
what was very little money
abroad (4)

So gie’s a hand to help me up,

Come close so I can hear, SOLUTION TO 2387: ON THE SPOT
We’ll raise anither brimmin’ cup
Tae one more bloody year.
The HISPANIOLA was the ship that brought the other
Alanna Blake
unclued answers to TREASURE ISLAND in the novel by
R L Stevenson. No pirates were named in the grid, except
NO. 3082: HAPPY TALK Ben GUNN who joined against them, but (Long John) Silver
appeared in the clues, which had a nautical/piratical flavour.
You are invited to take as your first line The map in Treasure Island had three red X’s, like the grid.
‘Happy the man, and happy he alone’ (John
Dryden/Horace) and continue for up to a First prize Matthew Hudson, Stoneleigh, Surrey
further 15. Please email (wherever possible) Runners-up Glyn Watkins, Portishead, Bristol;
entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday Peter Wild, Brighton
on 16 January.
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 59
LIFE
No sacred cows
The great awokening
Toby Young
I
s the social justice movement
that’s sweeping British and Amer-
ican universities a secular reli-
gion? The core beliefs of the members
of this cult certainly seem to play the
same psychological role as the central
tenets of the world’s major religions.
They furnish their adherents with rit-
uals and blasphemy laws, a way of
distinguishing between the sacred
and the profane, a vision of what it
is to be a good person and live in a
good society, and they enable them
to engage in tribal sorting, dividing
people between members of the in-
group and the out-group. No doubt
the same could be said of most politi-
cal ideologies, but there’s one aspect
of left-wing identity politics in which
it reveals itself as more cult-like than
other belief systems. I’m thinking of
its magical component.
This was brought to my attention
by the psychiatrist and blogger Scott
Alexander. In a post entitled ‘Devoo-
dooifying Psychology’, he compared
the concept of ‘stereotype threat’ to a
voodoo hex. Stereotype threat holds
that if a person is expected to perform
badly in a test because she’s a mem-
ber of a particular group, she will per-
form badly. It is invoked by the social
justice left to explain the under-per-
formance of women in Stem subjects,
as well as other group discrepancies.
Alexander means two things by this.
MICHAEL HEATH
60
First, that the effect of stereotyping
someone, according to the theory, is
similar to that of a voodoo curse, neg-
atively affecting their performance.
Second, that the effect isn’t real. Ste-
reotype threat is one of the casual-
ties of the ‘replication crisis’ afflicting
psychology, with researchers unable
to replicate this finding.
Another example Alexander
gives is ‘unconscious bias’. This is the
idea that people, particularly straight
white men, are influenced by biases
they aren’t aware of that lead them
to discriminate against women and
minorities. Informing people of their
biases, usually by making them take
an implicit association test, is one of
the key elements of diversity training,
which has become an $8 billion-a-year
industry in the US even though study
after study has shown it doesn’t work.
A belief in unconscious bias isn’t con-
fined to members of the intersection-
ality cult, but they have latched on to
it, partly because it enables them to
claim racism and sexism are respon-
sible for a host of outcome discrep-
ancies in spite of the evidence that
bigotry and prejudice have declined
significantly in the past 30 years
There is while many outcome discrepancies
something have remained stable. Again, there
is something deeply irrational about
deeply this: a belief in an unseen force that is
irrational responsible for many of society’s ills.
about this: In Psychology Today, the soci-
ologist Jason Manning expanded on
a belief in this theme, pointing out that blaming
an unseen stereotype threat and implicit bias
force that is for the underperformance of certain
responsible groups has something in common
with the belief in the ‘evil eye’. This
for many of is the idea, widespread in Mediterra-
society’s ills nean cultures, that if someone gazes
the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk
jealously at another person it can
cause that person to suffer. As with
stereotype threat and unconscious
bias, the ‘evil eye’ is believed to be
capable of having this effect even if
the jealous person doesn’t intend it
to. They are all malevolent, invisible
forces that originate in some mysteri-
ous, non-rational realm.
The same belief in magic reveals
itself in the claim that certain words
or ideas associated with ‘white privi-
lege’ are a form of ‘epistemic vio-
lence’, capable of wreaking untold
psychological damage on women and
minorities. When a group of LGBT+
activists at a university claim that giv-
ing a platform to a ‘Trans Exclusion-
ary Radical Feminist’ will ‘erase’ the
identity of trans students, it is tempt-
ing to dismiss this as hyperbole. But
maybe we should take what they say
at face value. If we grant them that
courtesy, we have to conclude that the
members of this cult attribute a terri-
fying supernatural power to those in
possession of ‘white privilege’. They
really do believe that the people at
the top of the intersectional hierarchy
can literally ‘erase’ people by utter-
ing certain words, almost like magic
spells. In this context, the ‘safe spaces’
that have been created in universities,
in which students are protected from
the harmful effects of these spells,
are a bit like churches — holy places
where evil cannot penetrate.
What’s distinctive about members
of the social justice left is not that
they don’t believe in magic — they
clearly do — but that the supernatu-
ral forces that govern their universe
are all malevolent. Theirs is a religion
bereft of a divine being. There are
only white Devils.
 sion of China to the WTO… all were
The Wiki Man imposed on the world by ideologically
Economics is having motivated elites with little public con-
sultation. Regardless of whether you
an identity crisis think they are good or bad, there is a
Rory Sutherland perfectly sensible secondary question
to be asked about whether they were
too much too soon. Remember, such
decisions are usually made by econo-
bit as powerful as the urge to acquire
wealth. And to disparage this fellow
feeling as though it were necessarily
a malign force is nonsense: it is a large
part of what makes society work.
Economics is obsessed with the
gains arising from scale. But iden-
tity does not scale neatly or quickly.
There is no logical reason why people

I
t has become commonplace for
news reports to refer to almost any
civic unrest, or even unusual pat-
terns of voting, as evidence of ‘resur-
gent nationalism’ — implicitly sug-
gesting a visceral hatred of foreigners
and a desire to set the clock back to
the glory days of racial homogeneity
and casual homophobia. We should
be wary of accepting this media trope:
for one thing it may arouse far more
fear than is warranted.
But apart from the needless fear
it generates, it is also slightly dubious
to suggest that it is the gilets jaunes
or the Five Star Movement or the
supporters of Brexit or even Donald
Trump who are acting intemperately.
It is perfectly possible to argue that
these movements are a sensible, over-
due reaction against governments
that have imposed economic globali-
sation on the world at a pace that is
entirely inconsistent with the human
lifespan and the speed at which we can
adapt to change. The free movement
of people, the euro, large-scale immi-
gration, the dissolution of the nation
state — for that matter the admis-
mists, who do not really understand
either time or scale.
Nor does conventional economics
take into account the importance of
identity. Eighteen years ago, rather
presciently, George Akerlof and
Rachel Kranton suggested that eco-
nomics is far too individualistic in
its conception of human motivation.
Identity Economics, as they call their
theory, holds that people’s pride in
their collective identity can be con-
sidered as a parallel form of wealth,
which people seek to grow and pro-
tect every bit as much as the balance
of their bank accounts. When you
strip people of their identity, the reac-
tion is no different than if you deprive
When you people of their earnings.
strip people Given the fact that we have
of their evolved as a social species, this theory
should hardly surprise us. After all,
identity, the the one quality most likely to ensure
reaction is no survival over the past million years
different than was proudly to belong to one or
more defined, excludable groups
if you deprive with a shared allegiance born of com-
them of their mon bonds and obligations. It would
earnings be odd if this instinct were not every
cannot say ‘I support all the football
teams in the north-west of England’
but nobody ever does. You can sup-
port Liverpool and England; you can
support one big team and one small
team, but that’s as far as it stretches.
This, incidentally, is one principled
argument for a hard Brexit, even if at
some economic cost. It is to make the
perfectly valid point that in a democ-
racy the government should do what
people want, not what economic theo-
ry says is good for them. Quite simply,
economics is anthropologically tone-
deaf: it has far too narrow a concep-
tion of what people really care about
to justify the influence it carries.
The reason I do not belong to the
Ku Klux Klan is not economic. It isn’t
because I resent paying the member-
ship dues or the cost of bedsheets
and firelighters. No, I haven’t joined
because I do not identify with its
aims and objectives. If that is reason
enough not to join the Klan, it’s a per-
fectly sound reason to leave the EU.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of
Ogilvy UK.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. Whenever I go to the theatre
or cinema with any man of
60-plus, he falls asleep, even
when the play or film is of a
high standard. Should I wake
him up? With a West End play
particularly, it seems an awful
waste of a ticket. (I am referring
only to silent snoozing. If snoring
occurs, I will of course give him a
sharp dig with my elbow.)
— E.S., London W11
A. Smelling salts — as used in
Victorian Britain to revive fainting
women — are unfashionable but
still perfectly legal. Mackenzies
is a traditional brand and is
available online. The tiny bottle
contains a pungent mixture of
eucalyptus and ammonia. Once
the lid is uncapped the fumes
trigger an inhalation reflex as
blood vessels in the nasal passages
suddenly expand, opening the
floodgates for a rampant surge
of oxygen to the brain. This
replenishes consciousness. Bring
a bottle with you and, when
necessary, discreetly pass the salts
at a three-inch distance under
the nose of the dotard. He will
be immediately jolted from his
stupor with no idea why.
Q. Twice recently, men whom I
previously thought of as civilised,
have amazed me by bringing
out interdental brushes at the
table and dislodging food from
between their teeth following
dinner. They did this quite
openly, as though it were not
disgusting. My husband suggests
that, since wooden toothpicks
always used to be a feature of
smart restaurant tables, perhaps
this is just the modern and more
effective version and therefore
considered to be acceptable.
What is your view?
— F.J., London SW7
A. Dental dislodgement is not
acceptable at the table and has
never been. Don’t be misled by
the jar of wooden toothpicks
in traditional restaurants. You
are supposed to take a stick and
dislodge the matter out of sight in
the gents or in the taxi home.
Q. My husband and I have
opened an art gallery in the
centre of a university town. Our
private views have been well
attended. Our problem is that,
although the invitation clearly
reads 6.30 to 8.30, a hard core of
drinkers, invariably made up of
hangers-on who have not bought
anything, are quite happy to
stay on for the whole evening, as
long as the drink is still flowing.
We don’t want to spoil the feel-
good factor if it has been a
successful show, but we and our
waiters are exhausted after all
the preparation and want to go
to bed. How can we tactfully ask
people to leave?
— Name and address withheld
A. Continue to be pleasant but at
around 9 p.m. tell guests as you
circulate that tragically, although
the party is going so well and you
are enjoying it so much, you have
an arrangement with the alarm
people that the premises will be
vacated by 9.30.

the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 61

LIFE

er ’61 with Alan Clark. Virtually his
Drink house claret, it was considered the
Comfort in chaos equal of the first growths from that
annus mirabilis, and priced accord-
Bruce Anderson ingly. Not long ago, a single case was
sold for more than £50,000.
Yet I could never taste what the
fuss was about. A good drop of stuff,
certainly; you would not have kicked
it out of the glass. But up there with
Lafite, Latour, Mouton? No. My
friend Robin Bomer, who has an envi-
able cellar and a palate to match, con-
curs in my judgment. I am about to
write something which will condemn
longer exists. The conventions have
all been flouted, and as for wisdom?
That is nowhere to be found. In a
world full of uncertainty and risk,
the West is suffering from much the
weakest political leadership ever.
There is only one consolation. In
some circumstances, weakness can be
strength. You are a bright young aide
to President Putin and you identify
some low-hanging ripe fruit in east-
ern Latvia: let us snaffle it. Putin asks
how Trump will respond. There is only
one honest answer: ‘I have no idea. He
might say: “Where the fuck’s Latvia?”

I
t appeared to be an uneven con-
test. A few friends were meet-
ing for a festive wine-tasting, to
compare and contrast some interest-
ing bottles. The clarets opened with
an Angelus ’98, a superb wine from
an outstanding year. In response, the
Palmer ’04 seemed to be outgunned.
But, gaining strength from a bit
more time in the decanter, it became
increasingly formidable.
Words and wine: there is an
unceasing struggle to translate wine
into language without falling into
euphuism or pseudery. This time,
I felt drawn to a naval image. In its
growing power, the Palmer reminded
me of that early scene from Sink the
Bismarck! Amid the grey skies and
waters of the Denmark Strait, the
watcher from the Norwegian resist-
ance spots an even more intense
greyness, as the great warship scythes
through the waves, on her way to
destruction and doom.
I then realised why the bottle was
beguiling me into martial language. It
was a Proustian madeleine moment.
Around 1990, I drank a lot of Palm-
me to the oenophile equivalent of an
auto-da-fé. I think the 2004 I tasted
the other evening was better than the
’61 was. There: rank heresy.
Thinking about Alan seemed
timely, especially apropos heresy. In
that regard, he could go too far, to
put it mildly. I always assumed that
The West’s his professed admiration for Hitler
was just an attempt to épater les
stability may bourgeois, which he always enjoyed.
depend on Alas, it may have been genuine. But
Mr Trump’s when it came to geopolitics, no one
was ever less beholden to the conven-
instability: not tional wisdom. These days, it is hard-
a comforting er to take that approach, for a simple
thought reason. The conventional wisdom no
‘Happy Nooooooooo Year.’
Alternatively: “Remember the last
Miss World? Miss Latvia: that was one
nice piece of ass. Get her round here.”
Or would it be: “How dare they? Bring
me the nuclear codes.”’ So the West’s
stability may depend on Mr Trump’s
instability: not a comforting thought.
Yet comfort is at hand. Barolo used
to be an immensely long-lived wine.
Still a stripling at 25, it might not hit
maturity until 50. A wine that could
stand up without the aid of a bottle,
there was the fear that it would move
from childhood to senescence without
an intervening phase. These days, eve-
rything is different. There has been a
risorgimento, and unlike the last one
to emerge from Piedmont, this is an
unalloyed good. Excellent new Baro-
lo producers have learned to deal with
Nebbiolo as if it were Pinot Noir. We
had an ’07 from Giuseppe Mascarello
e Figlio, which stayed in the ring with
the clarets. Hew Blair of Justerini &
Brooks knows as much about all this
as anyone. The world may be in a ter-
rible state of chassis, but Barolo gives
us at least one reason for optimism, as
we say ‘Happy New Year’.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Moral hazard
‘Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads,’ said
my husband, tossing an imaginary
coin. The same improbability was
amusing when Rosencrantz won
the toss 92 times in a row in Tom
Stoppard’s play (1966). We know
the odds for the next toss are
50-50, but we can’t help thinking
it morally impossible for the lucky
streak to go on.
This term morally impossible is
not the same as something being
immoral. The thickets here are
tangled. As the Oxford English
Dictionary points out with rare
loquacity, Aristotle declared that
moral philosophy cannot expect
proofs that are mathematically
certain. Aquinas quotes him when
concluding that ‘in contingent
matters, such as natural and
human things, it is enough for
a thing to be certain, as being
true in the greater number of
instances’. (In the Summa it’s
Prima Secundae, q 96, article 1,
reply to objection 3.) But only in
later centuries was moral certainty
methodically distinguished from
metaphysical or physical certainty.
Last month someone wrote in
the Times about the former Bank
of England governor Mervyn
King, in 2007 being ‘obsessed
about moral hazard: the notion
that bailing out one bank would
encourage others to behave
irresponsibly’. This sense of moral
hazard had been applied since
the 19th century to fire insurance
(encouraging carelessness with
candles) and health insurance
(encouraging malingerers).
In the 1960s the economist
Kenneth Arrow wrote about
moral hazard. He found its
origins in the writings of Daniel
Bernoulli, who in 1738 outlined
the St Petersburg paradox. This
supposes that a bank offers you a
game in which, each time a tossed
coin comes up heads, the pot is
doubled. When tails comes up,
you win the pot. How much would
you pay to enter the game? Since
the possible winnings are infinite,
you should offer an unlimited fee.
But no one would. There’s a gap
between theoretical chances and
moral certainty. Bernoulli referred
to espèrance morale, moral
expectation in this jeu de hazard.
As Allard Dembe and Leslie
Boden observed in a paper in
2000, this has nothing to do with
morality. That, however, did
not mean that there was no sin
in bankers earlier this century
reselling risky loans that would
never be repaid.
— Dot Wordsworth

62 the spectator | 5 january 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

January Sale
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www.apollo-magazine.com/M253K
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