Rishi Sunak’s conference speech gamble

After spending most of his conference refusing to say much at all, Rishi Sunak used his speech to make three big policy announcements as he seeks to pitch himself as the change candidate. The first was HS2, with Sunak confirming that the government will axe the planned Manchester leg. Sunak said he would spend the £36 billion saved to fund other rail, road and bus projects across the country – so all areas either receive as much in funding as they would have done or more.

When announcing this, the Prime Minister mentioned the West Midlands mayor Andy Street several times, saying that he looked forward to working with Street on other infrastructure projects. Given Street has made his displeasure well known on the issue and even suggested he could quit, this seemed as much a plea to Street not to resign in protest.

The next announcement was on smoking – with Sunak confirming that he plans to bring in a phased ban on smoking, in the style of the New Zealand ban. It would come in as a policy in which 14-year-olds would be prevented from ever buying cigarettes (legally). It means a teen who is 15 years old at the time of the policy being enacted would be allowed to buy cigarettes for the rest of their life but their younger 14-year-old classmate would never be. There will be a free vote on the legislation in parliament. There will also be a consultation on vaping and, in Sunak’s words, how to stop it becoming an ‘endemic’ problem for youngsters.

This is the most divisive policy within the Tory party. It has already been criticised by the Institute for Economic Affairs as ‘hideously illiberal’. Polling suggests it is popular with the general public. It means Sunak’s policy pivot is more complicated than a rightward pivot – some of this will be the hardest to swallow for his own party. Meanwhile, Labour MPs are likely to support it, meaning Sunak should have the votes regardless.

The final big shift is on education. Sunak plans to scrap A-levels in favour of a UK version of an international baccalaureate – titled the ‘advanced British standard’. This would mean that students don’t have to specialise so early. However, this policy will take time to implement and require consultation with the sector so it will really only come into effect should Sunak win the next election.

So, on that point, have the chances of Sunak turning around his party’s fortunes risen on the back of that speech? Sunak chose to announce all three together – despite it meaning HS2 speculation dominated the entire conference – in a bid to make a bang that means voters notice and look at him differently.

In the coming hours, he’ll discover whether he has struck a balance that means he will keep his West Midlands mayor and whether the Libertarian wing of the party will go along with the smoking ban. As for voters, the risk is that on HS2 it looks like more Tory U-turns as opposed to his new pitch. No. 10 hope that Starmer will look cautious by comparison when he stands up to speak next Tuesday at Labour’s conference in Liverpool.

Rishi Sunak vows to end the ‘30-year status quo’ in Tory conference speech

Rishi Sunak pitched himself as the change candidate at the next election in his speech to Conservative party conference this afternoon. It was a bold move after 13 years, to argue that ‘if this country is to change, it can only be us who do it’, and to complain that ‘politics doesn’t work the way it should’. He didn’t go so far as to repudiate his predecessors: in fact, he said he didn’t want to ‘waste time’ going over the past and the ‘difficult circumstances’ in which he came into office. But he did refer to a ‘30-year status quo I am here to end’ – at that point in the speech it was in connection to Keir Starmer as the ‘walking definition’ of that status quo, but the past 13 years of status quo have been Tory, not Labour.

Either way, Sunak repeatedly pitched himself as the man who is dismantling the consensus, whether it be on transport policy, health or immigration.

So what is he actually going to change? HS2 was the first policy the Prime Minister went to, saying it was the ‘ultimate example of the old consensus’, and that ‘the facts have changed and the right thing to do when the facts have changed is to have the courage to change direction’. He confirmed – as reported on Coffee House last night – that he was cancelling the rest of the HS2 project, and reinvesting the money in transport projects across the North and the Midlands. After a fortnight of headlines about letting down the North, Sunak tried to reframe the announcement as a ‘new Network North’ and that ‘no government has ever developed a more ambitious scheme for northern transport’. He tried to turn the arguments from his critics back on them, saying that while he respected those who disagree with him, ‘they should have the honesty to admit that they would now be cancelling the hundreds of alternative projects right across the conference that people will benefit from’.

As all eyes were on Andy Street and whether he will resign in protest from the West Midlands mayoralty, Sunak said he had ‘huge admiration and respect for’ him, insisted ‘I know we can work together’, and promised to ‘work with Andy Street to extend a West Midlands Metro’. It sounded as though he wasn’t fully confident that Street would agree. 

His second area for change was the NHS. Much of this section was a re-announcement of previous policies on workforce, patient choice and productivity. He attacked the British Medical Association, which the Tory party has clearly decided can reasonably be characterised as being a militant trade union. But he then moved onto preventive care, and the pre-trailed smoking ban, with the smoking age rising by one year every year. ‘This means a 14-year-old today will never legally be sold a cigarette’, he said. There were still some gasps in the hall as he announced it, and Sunak swiftly moved to explaining why, as a Conservative, he thought this change was acceptable: ‘Unlike all other legal products, there is no safe level of smoking.’ That may go some way to answering questions about a slippery slope to other products that are associated with ill health, including alcohol and ultra-processed food.

The third major change was in education. It is now his ‘main funding priority in every spending review’, which will provoke an interesting response from the more demanding spending areas like health. Once again, his education announcement had been pre-trailed: abolishing A-levels and bringing them together with technical qualifications in a ‘new single qualification for our school leavers’ called the Advanced British Standard. His case for change was that students weren’t spending enough time in the classroom and that technical education had not received the respect it deserves. That final point is one politicians of all parties have been making for decades, but it’s not clear who since Ken Baker has done much about it. 

Sunak used immigration as another example of the way he had gone against the consensus, which he claimed said ‘there was nothing we could do about it’. He said he was ‘confident that once flights start going regularly to Rwanda, the boats will stop coming’. It may actually turn out to be more convenient for the government if the flights don’t start going regularly: then the Prime Minister won’t have to answer questions about why some boats are in fact still coming.

We were promised a ‘personal speech’. He opened with his own family section, joking once again about his father being a GP and his mother a pharmacist, and thanking them for the start in life that they gave him. Later, he told the hall ‘my values are simple: service. family. work’. He spoke about his grandparents and how much the UK had done for his family, adding: ‘The United Kingdom is also the most successful multi-ethnic democracy on earth.’

The attacks on Labour came at the start and end of the address. Like Penny Mordaunt who spoke shortly before the Prime Minister, he described Keir Starmer as being a flip-flopper who ‘just says whatever he thinks will benefit him the most’, and that Labour’s stall was ‘to do and say as little as possible and hope no-one notices’. And there was the Corbyn attack: ‘Keir Starmer might want us to forget about his repeated support for Jeremy Corbyn, but we never will.’ He did deal with his own internal opposition, though didn’t name Liz Truss or the other disruptive figures. But he did take care to say early on that ‘I know you want tax cuts. I want them too, and we will deliver them. But the best tax cut we can give people right now is to halve inflation and the cost of living.’

Did this speech really amount to an end to a 30-year consensus and the start of politics changing? It was well-argued and structured, but it wasn’t revolutionary. Sunak described what he announced as ‘three huge decisions to change the direction of our country’. His peroration offered a vision of his ‘brighter future’, none of which was really particularly controversial. What Conservative MPs wanted from this speech was a sense that Sunak will be able to give voters the reason they are looking for to stick with the Tories rather than have to move to Labour at the next election. The rail reforms are probably the most tangible – but they are of course also the most controversial.

Will Ian McEwan ever get over Brexit?

‘Screw the lot of them.’ Ian McEwan’s blunt advice to young authors having to deal with ‘sensitivity readers’ had me punching the air. At last, a bona fide national treasure prepared to take on the performative offence-taking that has Britain’s publishing industry in its censorious grip. Speaking in Paris ahead of the publication of the French edition of his latest novel, Lessons, McEwan urged authors to ‘be brave’.

Sensitivity readers, unheard of a decade ago, are now all the rage. Individuals with a superior capacity to detect offence comb through an author’s manuscript highlighting anything they consider dodgy. Whether their attention is caught by a two-word description of a character or an entire subplot, authors are expected to humbly acquiesce and remove offending material.

The process hit the headlines back in 2021 when author Kate Clanchy objected to her award-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me being subjected to post-publication sensitivity-reading. But not even death offers authors protection from the perma-offended word-butchers: Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie have all been posthumously sensitised.

McEwan suggests that the demand for sensitivity readers comes largely from ‘very young people who are living in societies that are relatively free’ although, he notes, not all young people think alike. He criticises young authors for subjecting themselves to this editing process, accusing them of wanting ‘to bind their arms and legs in ways that are just trivial’. ‘You’ve got to write what you feel. You must tell the truth,’ he advises.

Anyone familiar with McEwan’s writing – most famously, Atonement and On Chesil Beach – knows that he writes what he feels. And whether he’s writing from the perspective of a fetus (Nutshell), a cat (Daydreamer) or a middle-aged childless woman (The Children Act) the emotions McEwan conveys are authentic. And yet, despite my every urge to cheer on his tirade against sensitivity readers, there are problems with McEwan’s latest comments that suggest he has not truly walked in the shoes of a young author. 

McEwan describes hyper-sensitivity to offence as ‘a weird thing that happens in some universities, which we got from the United States’. He’s right, but only in part. But the danger with this argument is that us Brits are absolved of responsibility. It’s the mad Yanks who are to blame for the ‘mass hysterias’ that ‘sweep through populations every now and then’. This might be a comforting thought – after all, what blows in from abroad can soon blow back out again – but it denies reality. The truth is that overly-sensitive, censorious publishers, literary agents and book sellers are endemic right here in the UK.

It seems that in the book industry, the bar for triggering offence is now set so low that any author wanting to write outside of their own lived experience or argue a point that veers even slightly from that of a Guardian editorial is likely to be rejected. Highly regarded scholars struggle to get their work accepted for publication or find themselves dropped after final manuscripts have been submitted. In this context, if I was a young author who had been repeatedly knocked back by literary agents for not meeting a diversity quota, I might think the fault lay less with me being over-sensitive and more with the industry. McEwan’s rush to blame young authors for the rise of sensitivity readers suggests the 75-year old Booker Prize winner’s own prejudices might just be shaping his views.

McEwan’s failure to grasp the scale and the extent of the problems in publishing means he inadvertently lends weight to some of the key arguments used in support of sensitivity readers. He suggests, for example, that it is possible to draw a line between demands for ‘safe spaces’ on the one hand and calls for ‘a racial reckoning’ on the other. More plainly: he thinks trigger warnings are bad but he backs the removal of statues. Yet the same assumptions about trauma, mental vulnerability, the need for emotional safety and the power of words and images to inflict psychic harm drive both demands.

Ultimately, McEwan’s confusion leads him to blame the rise of woke publishing on Brexit. Brexit, he maintains, represented the end of an old order where power lay with teachers, librarians – and, presumably publishers. Now, in contrast, it lies with rich people who are blithely unconcerned with the social good. But surely he doesn’t think it is hedge fund managers who are hiring sensitivity readers? It is precisely because publishers and book sellers have such power that young authors need to be told to be brave simply to write fiction – and this has nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit.

The suspicion is that when McEwan bemoans the end of an old order, what he really means is he is unhappy that a majority of the great British public ignored people like him and voted to leave the EU. But then, that’s the thing about both free speech and bravery. There’s no knowing where they might lead.

Sunak’s smoking ban is a terrible policy

What, you might ask, has Rishi Sunak been smoking? There is no way to spin as conservative the idea of working towards a complete ban on cigarettes by legislating a progressive age-related bar on buying tobacco. This is not conservatism as libertarianism or as the Scrutonian practice of not taking the axe to existing social institutions. The only serious precedent is not happy: think supremely bossy Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand premier who brought in a similar draconian ban last December before abruptly leaving politics.

Admittedly, there is on one level a kind of abstract logic here. A lacklustre Keir Starmer, seeking a shiny new health policy. would probably have hit on this wheeze himself in the next few months. This pre-emptive raid on Labour’s wardrobe neatly blocks it. Young voters who would be affected by the policy overwhelmingly don’t smoke anyway, and the older Tory supporters who like a couple of Marlboros after dinner wouldn’t be deprived of them. And since Rishi has an interest in reassuring wavering electors that he is a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, what better than a combination of cracking down on vapes with completing some unfinished business on public health?

Unfortunately this is one area where the Tories should be very careful with hedge fund manager logic, however impeccable it might sound in a meeting room. A number of points should ring alarm bells.

One is that it will, rather like Prohibition a century or so ago, open the door wide to bootlegging and racketeering. This racketeering, moreover, may well attract a good deal more sympathy once it becomes not simply a matter of lorry-drivers making a few Euros on the side by bilking the Revenue of some tax, but a matter of supplying a genuine want which an authoritarian government is trying to stifle.

Secondly, the Tories are risking much of the progress made so far in clawing back some of Labour’s lead. This progress is largely due to Rishi’s reputation for getting on with the job in hand and opposing unnecessary government grandstanding on issues few care about. By contrast, the smoking policy, an intrusive piece of interference demanded by nobody apart from a few grim zealots in the BMA who would not be seen dead voting Tory anyway, is exactly what the government should be running a mile from.

Thirdly, the policy is open to ridicule, which is always a big risk. ‘You are charged that on the first of April last you attempted to buy a packet of Silk Cut, being at the time aged less than 27’ isn’t a phrase any prime minister should want to be associated with. Whatever the logic of the matter, British workers in Romford and Rochdale still have a keen eye for the state poking its nose in matters that they see as none of its business.

The Conservatives need eye-catching policies, it is true, if only to differentiate them from the unutterably grey Keir Starmer. ‘Steady as she goes’ is a non-starter: if Rishi wants confirmation of this, he need only look back roughly a century, to what happened to ‘safety first’ Stanley Baldwin in 1929 (hint: he lost). To be fair, Sunak has begun to see this: he is already making the right noises about dealing with the anti-car fanatics, for example, and has been fairly skilfully laying the groundwork for a sudden satori-like discovery that net zero 2050 is ruinous, electorally impossible and not going to happen.

But he needs more. And the irony is that he has plenty to choose from that will go down well among the just about managing outside the south-east. Outlawing zero-hour contracts will please not only academic leftists but ambitious parents in Doncaster and Darlington (not to mention Dover) worried about their children’s employment prospects. A promise of legislation making it illegal, barring tightly-controlled exceptions, for any employer to dictate what its employees can say off the job would also appeal to the feeling of many workers that there should be a part of their life they can call their own. The list is endless.

Measures like the smoking ban are a mere distraction. Even if they don’t make potential Tory voters go for Labour or the Lib Dems they will leave large numbers wondering whether there is any point in bothering to turn out. Rishi needs to realise this and concentrate on what people want, not what his logic tells him they ought to support.

The joy of ‘ugly’ Birkenstocks

Fifteen years ago, when I was a teenager, wearing Birkenstocks meant you were flatfooted or you had no interest in attention from men. While the rest of us clip-clopped around in heels, it was only a brave few who would choose the flat sandal. Your geography teacher might wear them, or your mum when she took out the bins, but no one fashionable would be caught dead in a pair. Television and films encouraged the prejudice. Carrie Bradshaw taught us that you should never stoop so low as flats as she spent every dollar on Manolo Blahniks. And it’s not a coincidence that in Clueless, Travis, whom Cher describes as being from a group ‘no respectable girl actually dates’, has the surname Birkenstock. 

I remember watching a game show in the 2000s, one of those American pyramid ones, and a contestant had five seconds left to describe his final word to his partner and win the jackpot. The word was Birkenstocks. His clue? ‘The ugly sandals that lesbians wear.’ He won the money.

When I was a teenager, I swore I’d never wear those frumpy, orthopaedic shoes. I promised myself that my first real paycheck would go on a pair of red-bottomed heels. But my teenage ideals disintegrated as I reached my twenties and thirties. I never bought those Louboutins and I regularly strut the streets in my favourite pair of Birkenstocks.

I’m not the only convert. This week it was announced that Birkenstock is valued at more than $9 billion, which would have made a teenage me assume the world had become overrun with frumpy geography students. And while millennial teenagers used to avoid Birkenstocks at all costs, now Gen Z teens on TikTok are sharing the best places to get cheap knockoff versions. 

Birkenstocks, like Crocs, are part of the ‘ugly shoe’ grouping, but it’s a term they themselves reclaimed, often using the slogan ‘ugly for a reason’ when describing why they’re so comfortable. And while they might be ‘ugly shoes’, they’re certainly the chicest kind. A pair of black Birkenstock Arizonas with a dark suit, some nude Birkenstock clogs with baggy jeans, even with shorts and some thick socks – these shoes have suddenly become cool. Every celebrity from Gigi Hadid to Gwyneth Paltrow and Tracee Ellis Ross to Julianne Moore have been spotted in a pair. Another indicator of the brand’s fashion ascension is the list of designers they’ve collaborated with, including Jil Sander, Proenza Schouler, Rick Owens and Valentino Garavani. Last year they even created a line with Manolo Blahnik. 

Birkenstock saw a bump in sales this summer after the Barbie movie came out. There’s a scene in the film where ‘weird Barbie’ offers ‘stereotypical Barbie’ the choice of the high-heeled shoe, symbolising the pretty faux world, or the Birkenstock, representing the real, messy one. Initially, Barbie tries to pick the heels, but by the end of the film she’s seen wearing a pair of pink Birkenstocks.

Like so many others with blisterless cradled feet, I get it. I’ve gone from not wanting to be caught dead in Birkenstocks to hoping I’m buried in them; I plan for both style and comfort in the afterlife.

Live: Rishi Sunak scraps HS2 extension in Tory conference speech

Rishi Sunak has confirmed that the HS2 line between Birmingham and Manchester will be scrapped. The Prime Minister said he was ending the ‘long-running saga’ and vowed to invest the money saved – £36 billion – ‘in hundreds of new transport and infrastructure’ projects. The PM also used his Tory conference speech to unveil a crackdown on smoking. He also announced a new qualification to replace A levels.

• Rishi Sunak describes HS2 as ‘the ultimate example of the old consensus’. The PM says its costs have ‘more than doubled’. ‘The economic case (for building HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester) has massively weakened,’ he adds.

• The PM pledges, as expected, to raise the smoking age by one year, every single year, to create a smoking free UK over the next 70 years. It means a 14-year-old today will never be able to buy cigarettes legally. The availability of flavoured vapes for youngsters will also be restricted. On Coffee House, Andrew Tettenborn says the plan is full of holes.
• Sunak says HS2 will travel all the way to Euston station in London. The PM also announces a flurry of transport announcements, including a Midlands Rail Hub, connecting 50 stations, extending the West Midlands Metro, building the Leeds tram and upgrading the A1, the A2, the A5, the M6.
• The PM announces a new qualification called the ‘Advanced British Standard’, which, he says, will ‘bring together A-levels and T-levels into a new, single qualification for our school leavers’.
• Sunak proposes full-life terms for ‘sexual and sadistic murders’. ‘We are going to change this country and that means ‘life means life’. That shouldn’t be a controversial position,’ he tells Tory conference.
• The Tory leader opens his speech by attacking Labour. Sunak says: ‘You can never trust Labour with our country’s security’, as he criticises Keir Starmer for sitting in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Sunak says Starmer is making a ‘bet on people’s apathy’ in its bid to win power.
• The Prime Minister’s warm-up act was his wife, Akshata Murty. Murty tells the conference in Manchester that ‘Rishi cares deeply about this party, and the values that underpin it’.

2622: Local call – solution

The unclued lights are PUB NAMES which include the pair 38/31

First prize  Mary Newbery, Devizes, Wiltshire
Runners-up  David Burnside, Rosewell, Midlothian; John Brown, Rolleston-on-Dove, Staffordshire

Letters: it would be the height of stupidity to ditch the ECHR

The sanctity of the ECHR

Sir: Jonathan Sumption’s criticisms of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘Ruled out’, 30 September) are as lucid and as logical as one would expect from such an admired jurist. He provides a persuasive case as to why the UK could withdraw from the ECHR while preserving all the basic rights that we value and which are enshrined by the Convention. 

Uncharacteristically, however, he fails to mention the single most important reason why the UK was at the forefront of the creation of the Convention – and the accompanying court – in 1949.  

It was not to ensure that basic human rights were enjoyed in the United Kingdom or in other stable democracies which already enjoyed the rule of law and personal freedom. To quote Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, one of the prime authors of the Convention (who became lord chancellor), it was to get a list of ‘basic personal rights to be acknowledged by all governments and a minimum standard of democratic conduct for all members’.

Germany had just emerged from Nazism, Italy from fascism and many other European countries had suffered from dictatorship and autocracy. The UK was leading the successful efforts to entrench democracy and human rights throughout western Europe.

Russia is the only country to have left the European Convention. It was expelled after its invasion of Ukraine. Do we really want to join Putin by abandoning one of the cornerstones of the rule of law in Europe?

The rule of law and democratic values are already under attack by political extremists of right and left in various parts of Europe. The European Convention remains a vital bulwark to protect personal freedom. It would be the height of stupidity and irresponsibility for the UK to throw the baby out with the bathwater because of the current dispute about the lawfulness of transporting illegal migrants to Rwanda.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind

London

French letters

Sir: In his review of Sarah Ogilvie’s book on the Oxford English Dictionary (Books, 23 September), Henry Hitchings refers to an eye surgeon, James Dixon, having the condom in mind when in 1888 he wrote: ‘Everything obscene comes from France.’ One of the stories about the origin of the word is that it derives from the town of Condom in Gascony where, it is said, there was once, a long time ago, a factory which made prophylactics out of lamb intestines. A past mayor is on record as saying, however, that the town’s connection with condoms is misconceived. Incidentally, the town lies on the River Baise, which has always caused some amusement, the verb baiser being a word for the activity for which condoms are intended.  

Richard Symington

London SW17

We need HS2

Sir: Better to call a halt to the whole HS2 fiasco, says Martin Vander Meyer (‘Any other business’, 30 September). In January 2012, I made a written plea that the Conservative government take the advice of the Commons Transport Select Committee when it called in a report for the justification for the particular route for HS2 being proposed.

The government did just that and identified a lack of rail infrastructure in the north, bad connections and infrequent services. The HS2 bill went through parliament with a focus on the route and compensation for those affected, but hardly any focus on costs and the difficulties of a high-speed line with trains travelling 100km faster than HS1 and most comparable services in Europe. It was clear then that costs were going to balloon, because so many mistakes were made in the original design of HS2.

However, it would be a colossal mistake to cut future development in the north, the one place where it is really needed. To end up with a service only from London (and not even London but Old Oak Common) to Birmingham (and there, too, a station outside the city centre) would be the worst of all worlds. To be a success the line must connect to Manchester and eventually on to Leeds. It will cost millions to finish but otherwise millions will have been needlessly wasted.

William Astor

London SW1

Hawk-eyed

Sir: Lucretia Denny (Letters, 23 September) suggests that Rod Liddle (Letters, 9 September) has misunderstood Hamlet’s enigmatic line about knowing ‘a hawk from a handsaw’. Although in Shakespeare’s day a ‘hawk’ could indeed refer to a plasterer’s tool, it more commonly meant what it does today, a bird of prey. The consensus nowadays is that Hamlet is using the metaphor of two birds with contrasting natures – a hawk, a hunter and a handsaw, aka hernshaw or hansa, a dialect term for a heron, used also by Chaucer.

In the context of Hamlet’s situation, he is revealing that he is merely assuming a play of madness but can in fact with the light of reason (‘when the wind is southerly’) perfectly discern the difference between hunter and hunted – Claudius and his lackeys Rosencrantz and Guildenstern being the hunters or hawks, and he himself currently being their prey. 

Salley Vickers

London W11

Never say die

Sir: I was intrigued to read Dear Mary’s response (September 30) to a correspondent worried at the likely eulogies at their funeral. If it is any help, I have already written mine, and it is contained in the order of service, from the first hymn to the final Amen. The eulogy itself is briefly about me, and mainly about the Resurrection, not only of Jesus Christ, but all of us; I have sent a copy to my lawyer, and I have no intention of dying in the foreseeable future.

Penelope Wade 

Cheltenham

The Republican party is a mess

In comparison to the Republicans in the United States, the British Conservative party is a model of unity and discipline. In Manchester this week, for all the blather about Nigel Farage and ‘pandering’ to the far right, the grumbling about nanny-statism and HS2ing-to-nowhere, the Tories held themselves together. 

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, a small group of right-wing representatives in Congress managed to throw out their own House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. A motion for him to ‘vacate to chair’ was won 216 to 210. That’s never happened before. 

The trigger for McCarthy’s removal was disgruntlement over the spending deal he struck with President Joe Biden in order to avoid a US government shutdown. The deeper cause is that a number of Republicans, chiefly Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who led the vote, have long disliked and distrusted McCarthy, whom they regard a classic Washington ‘swamp’ creature. 

McCarthy’s election as speaker was a shambolic affair. He only captured the gavel after two gruelling days of 15 votes, and fierce resistance from the same conservatives who just managed to eject him. 

‘My father always told me, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish’, McCarthy said after that exhausting victory. But now he’s finished – and in fact his speakership was crippled from the start. He always appeared to be appeasing one faction or another. 

Representative Patrick McHenry, the chair of the Financial Services Committee, has been named speaker pro tempore, or interim speaker, until a new leader is elected.

Majority Whip Tom Emmer has said he will not stand and suggested that Louisiana congressman Steve Scalise would make a ‘great speaker’. Scalise, who was shot and nearly killed by a fanatic in 2017 and recently has been suffering from cancer, is House majority leader and now favourite to be speaker – a role the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell – the man who keeps freezing in public – calls ‘thankless’. It’s a gift to the Democrats, of course, who after helping to eject McCarthy can now pose as the party of grown-ups who are willing to work across the aisle in contrast with the fractious GOP. 

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that President Biden ‘hopes the House will quickly elect a Speaker. … He looks forward to working together with them’.

And then there’s President Trump, still the king of this fractious party. On his Truth Social yesterday, he said: ‘Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?’ 

Trump – the unity figure? The funniest thing about that is it might be true. As he barrels towards the Republican nomination in next year’s presidential election, there is a growing sense that only he has popular support and power base to fix the Republican mess. 

Penny Mordaunt reveals the Tory attack lines against Keir Starmer

‘What I have to say to you today is not for the faint-hearted,’ Penny Mordaunt said as she opened the final session of the Conservative conference. She didn’t have a sword as a prop, but the leader of the House of Commons spent much of her address calling on activists to ‘stand up and fight’ in the face of the polling, the ‘sneering’ from the commentators and the Labour party.

The theme of the speech was standing up to bullies, taking in her own personal experience of watching the Falklands Taskforce leaving Portsmouth, and Britain’s identity in fighting the Nazis and being part of ending the Cold War. The tone of it was classic Mordaunt: well-delivered, funny and easily written-up as a leadership pitch. 

Mordaunt moved round to the front of the lectern for a rousing passage on freedom and the risk of what would happen ‘if we fail to win a general election’.

‘Make no mistake,’ she thundered. ‘What will happen if we fail to win a general election and the biggest threat of all is that the sons and daughters of Scargill are ready for a rematch of the battle of the 1980s: no less than the repeal of all the reforms and freedoms we have brought in, aided and abetted by Labour, fuelled by the politics of envy, identity and class hatred. Outdated, dogmatic irrelevance to the needs to the people.’

She talked about ‘people who want to turn the BMA into the NUM’, the ‘iron fist’, and the parallels between Birmingham City Council today and Liverpool in the 1980s.

‘I do not trust the leadership of Keir Starmer to be able to stand up to the iron fist. Why? Because he is not even capable of standing up to Mark Drakeford!’ The conference loved it. 

She then gave us a preview of the campaign that the Tories will wage against Starmer, reminding voters that he sat in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and ‘watched while colleagues of Jewish heritage were driven from his party’. She said the Labour leader had pretended to be Corbyn, to be Kinnock and ‘now in Act Three, he wants you all to believe he’s Tony Blair’.

The line we have been hearing more and more this week, because it is something that the Conservatives have been picking up in focus groups, was this: ‘Starmer will do anything and say anything to win an election.’

This conference has been dominated by two questions about the future. The future of HS2 has followed Rishi Sunak around the event, and up to now, he has refused to answer it. The future of the Conservative Party and who might lead it if it loses the next election has been the key question on the fringe. Mordaunt has already had a tilt at the leadership, and in her speech today she had spoke as though she was in a much more senior position within the government than she is, as though she was in charge of the election campaign rather than the Leader of the House. Activists were as energised as it is possible to be when most of them still expect to lose. Whether many of the cabinet are really pouring as much effort into actually fighting the next election as Mordaunt put into her speech this morning is another question.

2625: Playtime

The unclued lights (one of two words) and four others clued without their thematic definition are of a kind.

Across

1    Two little boys tapped their heads (6)
7    Birettas seldom reveal this tuft (6)
13    US challenge to foil and dismiss at the wicket (5)
14    Material from The Spectator, London (5)
17    Salary and gratuity, collected by mail (7)
18    Incandescent, he’d be forced to put rubbish out (3,3)
19    Infection covered by the oculist? Yes! (4)
22    C19th biologist’s not left film director (6)
25    Violinist’s bow? No, the other end! (5)
26    Followed the progress, we hear, of Lenten psalm (5)
33    Study Latin on express (4)
36    Live broadcast with the French (6)
40    Friendly greeting unwanted amongst Heinz’s offering? (3,4)
41    Spirit lamps Greek characters bore round end of Parthenon (5)
42    Gents harbouring black timber wolves (5)
43    Hatchetman? (4-6)
44    In some ways tiny – but kids love them (6)
45    Cost I’m checking for Not Going Out, say (6)

Down

1    Written permits for roads over the mountains (6)
2    Read intensively of young Thomas in fairy tale (5)
4    Ballerina who pulls the sleigh (6)
5    Wood nymph’s uninspiring notice (5)
7    Nursery rhyme character’s pussies (3-3)
9    Where some, oddly, imbibe alcohol in Massachusetts? (5)
10    Sandy 26s by lake and range (6)
16    Fuel ruined a chair and tent (10)
20    Clay theme word with top missing (4)
21    Guard bird consuming bit of fat (9)
23    Four points for slave (4)
27    Ten acer varieties with leaves having notched edges (7)
29    Eleven in Germany by spring with prehistoric arrow-head (3-4)
30    Elaborate repast comes to a fine end (6)
31    These marks are the first bit of direction in mosaics (6)
32    Walks the dales topless in France (6)
34    Romans’ new demand (6)
35    Last of the unknowns, an All Black egghead (5)
37    Lout in outskirts of Leeds lounges around (5)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on  23 October. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2625, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

The problem with cutting to the quick

‘At least he didn’t say “Cut the cheese”,’ said my husband, suddenly making a barking noise like a seal, which is his attempt at laughter. He was commenting on a remark by Amol Rajan, the affable presenter on Today. An interviewee was invited to ‘cut to the quick’. Of course he meant ‘cut to the chase’, as he might have realised, without time to revisit the slip.

The quick in cut to the quick does not mean something fast. It is the sentient flesh that might be nicked when you trim your nails. When I looked at the earliest quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I had a momentary vision of wounded giraffes and elephants: ‘Nor can the graffe joyn to its trunk unlesse the rinde be refreshed, and cut to the quick with the knife.’

Of course it doesn’t say giraffe but graffe, by which the author, John Evelyn (who knew all about trees), meant ‘graft’.

Cut to the quick is still used figuratively, as by that old-fashioned modernist George Santayana in The Last Puritan, the only novel he published, in 1935 at the age of 71, which turned out to be a bestseller.

I say ‘old-fashioned’ because in a poem like ‘Avila’ (1901), Santayana starts well enough: ‘Again my feet are on the fragrant moor /Amid the purple uplands of Castile, /Realm proudly desolate and nobly poor, /Scorched by the sky’s inexorable zeal.’ But then he gets going with the poetic diction (diadem, hath, o’er, tarry, perchance) as his thoughts grow mistier.

Anyway, in the novel, the narrator says: ‘Damned unfair, too, to my poor father who had made every sacrifice for me, and was cut to the quick.’

Cut to the chase, as a phrase, came in with motion pictures, and presumes that the chase will be more interesting than the stuff cut. Figuratively it means ‘get to the point’, which is a constant ambition on Today. Cut is found in so many ready-made phrases that it is easy to deploy one by mistake for another. The phrase that made my husband guffaw, cut the cheese, means ‘to break wind’ and has been around, at least in America, for 50 years.

Tories know how to find themselves a good drink

I feel old, and feelings are not always wrong, This eheu fugaces mood came on me at the Conservative party conference in Manchester. I realised that it was 46 years since I first attended this gathering, before the present Prime Minister was born and when his predecessor was barely old enough for Father Christmas. The trouble is that she still believes in him.

There have been changes in the near half-century. In the old days, the conference hotel was dominated by knights of the shire, or the grander esquires of the suburbs. They were all at least 55 and identically attired. If it was not Savile Row and Lobb it was something similar and almost as expensive, with a hint of eau de cologne grand cru.

There was also another set of grandees, who chaired the conference itself. They came from the north and were called Sir Fred or Sir Herbert or Sir Alfred. They prefaced every remark in the same way: ‘Ah’m a bloont man and where Ah coom from, we say what we think.’ This usually consisted of views on penal policy which would have made Lord Chief Justice Goddard sound like a wimpish liberal. Over a drink, they were all delightful.

One Lady did reach the higher ranks: Dame Adelaide Doughty, a magnificent old girl who looked like the prow of one of Nelson’s three-deckers. The Sir Fred who introduced her referred to her as Dame Doughty: inaccurate but wholly appropriate.

There was one amusing difference between the representatives who attended the south coast conferences and the Blackpool ones. In Brighton and Bournemouth, the halls were filled with the respectable classes, who were hoping to catch a final few days of Indian summer: they do like to be beside the seaside. During the proceedings, they dutifully applauded every speech from the platform, though Michael Heseltine could be relied on to dispel any torpor. He was always able to find the party’s sensitive areas.

Blackpool was a harder sell to the gentler middle classes. There tended to be a lot more young men, who came to be opinionated while congregating in small hotels to argue for abolishing income tax and sending troops to Rhodesia to defend Ian Smith.

Today all is changed, utterly changed. Mrs Thatcher called for a classless society: her invention, John Major’s borrowing. Where the Tory party is concerned, classlessness prevails. Even in some of the grander hospitality receptions, there is hardly a pinstripe in sight, and only about half the males are wearing ties. These males appear to come from every colour and creed, and of course there are plenty of females. That said, casual dress is no guide to cash status. Some of these gatherings included highly successful hedgies or techies. If any of your leftie friends (we all have some) claim that the Tory party is stale, you can confidently assure them that they are talking balls.

Not everything has changed. Tories know how to find themselves athwart of a good drink. The house of Jeroboams supplies the hospitality suite, to general satisfaction. It is a growing and successful business which still behaves like an old-fashioned wine merchant. Its people love nothing more than finding small growers who produce good bottles at reasonable prices. The hospitality guests drank well. A Rosso di Montalcino, available at £25 a bottle, was excellent, as was a Soave for a shade under £15. It would be hard to match those prices at that quality.

Jeroboams cannot be held solely responsible for boosting the Tory party’s morale. But they certainly helped.   

Spectator competition winners: what Elon Musk’s home says about him

In Competition No. 3319 you were invited to supply a description of the house of a well-known figure from the field of fact or fiction that provides clues to their personality.

This assignment was prompted by Laura Freeman’s reference in a Spectator article
to ‘Great Men’s Houses’, an essay Virginia Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping in 1932. In it she describes a visit to the Chelsea house of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, observing: ‘One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.’

Entries that impressed and amused me included Nick MacKinnon’s J.G. Ballard: ‘The house on its traffic island clings like a Velcro cuff around a flyover pillar, as if assessing the systolic pressure in the concrete aorta above…’ And Janine Beacham’s Falstaff: ‘Located near the Boar’s Head Inn at Windsor, it features poor overall maintenance with cracked, peeling and dirty surfaces, but also offers an impressive bar, overhanging balcony, well-used bedrooms, a vast entertainment area, and a surprisingly capacious laundry basket…’

The winners, printed below, scoop £30.

The house, ‘Superego’, is difficult to find, hidden away behind trees, down several winding lanes, some apparently leading off in different directions. But once its whereabouts are established, it proves to be an imposing erection, with an enormous totem-pole rearing up in front of the wide portal. Inside the house there are innumerable small rooms, many of them locked, and the casual visitor is likely to discover a door which, on being prised open with difficulty, turns out to be a deep and twisting cupboard containing, perhaps, a child’s cot, nine clocks, and a set of fish-knives. One otherwise empty room has a single large wardrobe full of fur coats, but alas without access to Narnia, though this room is said to have inspired C.S. Lewis. There are very many lavatories, not all of which flush. The imposing salon contains only one painting, an enormous portrait of Sigmund’s mother.

Brian Murdoch/Sigmund Freud

Nothing is quite as it seems in this fairy tale residence. A mock Tudorbethan façade conceals a Regency-style interior, with reproduction furniture upholstered in faux-leather and imitation velveteen.

Apart from a trompe l’oeil mural, the walls are adorned with an array of prints (no originals) and stereotypes, as well as a number of trophies and other memorabilia, including an England Test cap and a framed citation for the Nobel Prize for Literature. A study space, complete with mahogany-effect desk, shows evidence of recent activity: a sheaf of papers cut and ready for pasting under a fool’s gold paperweight.

The garden too is rich with borrowings, planted with non-native species and featuring a ha-ha and an imposing folly. We return to the house via a new extension (planning permission retrospectively sought) with a utility room (all mod cons) and a lavatory. Here, at any rate, the plumbing is frank.

David Shields/Jeffrey Archer

The high windows, inch-thick, are hard to see into, or out of; yet the curtains are old-fashioned in a jazzy way. In the small, unsatisfactory hall, a slightly outmoded shoe-rack. In the sitting-room, a chair, a table, a stereogram, a lamp, an electric fire (two bars), books and china, coal in a sudden scuttle, a piano stool. Depending from a hook, two long coats. In the kitchen, where nothing is going on, the hum of a Frigidaire, and beyond it a deepening shelf, with a vase, and other souvenirs. On a work surface, a set of knives, sharp, very cutting, potentially lethal. In a cupboard, behind glass: meringues, a bottle of washing sherry, unbroken eggs, tinned sardines. In the bedroom, a plain wardrobe, red blankets on the slightly fusty bed, hot cushions. In the tidy garden glimpsed from the bedroom, a long slide.

Bill Greenwell/Philip Larkin

Pass through a creaking gate and up the garden path, which is a long and very winding one, often doubling and redoubling back on itself, until you come to an odd, rambling building of three storeys in different styles, none of them quite complete. Above the entrance, an escutcheon bears the owner’s coat of arms comprising a cock and a bull, the bull couchant aslant, the cock rampant. A motto beneath reads ‘Vita brevis, fabula longa’.

Prominent in the hallway is a large grandfather clock looking much like any other until you notice that the hour hand is advancing but the minute one is ticking backwards. Beside the clock on a small table is a wooden box containing the winding key and a torn birth certificate. On the opposite wall is an elaborate picture frame with the inscription, ‘Trismegistus Sh*ndy’. But the canvas is entirely black.

W.J. Webster/Tristram Shandy o.c.

X marks the eXtensive home of Elon Musk. An eXtraordinary residence in an eXclusive neighbourhood, crafted in an eXtravagant manner with infinite spaceX for eXpansion beyond its current level of 280 rooms. It’s eXpensively finished, an eXample of luXurious multipleX living characterised by a range of eXhilarating amenities and eXpressive features in an eXciting compleX that was once an outline anneX. Powered by the sun, the residence runs on eXotic batteries with no eXpiration dates. The luXury home indeX ranks this home the most eXceptionally uninhibited and eXpansive in the world, truly an eXperiment in fleXible eXpressionism, the apeX of domestic cosmic eXcess. There are some eXtra security features, including quirky privacy settings and unique codes guaranteeing eXemption from mass eXtinction. Xanadu is truly eXceptional, way beyond compare.

John O’Byrne/Elon Musk

No. 3322: mind the gap

You are invited to submit a poem reflecting on the fate of the Sycamore Gap tree. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 18 October.

Dear Mary: is it rude to ditch a stag do? 

Q. I have been walking my dog with a neighbour who has turned out to be a very entertaining companion. She knows masses of local gossip and is very funny when oversharing about her own dating life. I enjoy hearing all this, but she has begun fishing for the same sort of details about my relationship with my boyfriend. It seems unfriendly not to reciprocate so how can I say, in a non-hostile way, ‘Sorry, I’m never going to tell you private stuff’ without coming across as disapproving of the graphic details she has given me about her chaotic bedroom life?

– Name and address withheld

A. Nip this in the bud by sighing: ‘I’d love to tell you, but my boyfriend’s an unbelievably old-fashioned romantic. He would never talk about it to any of his mates and he would never forgive me if I did.’

Q. Three years ago a friend asked me to be an usher. We were fresh out of university and without hesitation I said I would. The wedding is finally taking place next year. In the past three years we have hardly spoken apart from wedding planning. The wedding is going to cost me £1,500 for the specific suit hire, the hotel room and the two stag parties he wants – one in the UK and one abroad. I feel I should drop out as I don’t know him that well and I cannot afford the expense, but I know he doesn’t have many friends – so much so that in the time since his engagement he has lost his best man and has yet to find another one. What should I do?

– C.C., by email

A. Your conscience would trouble you if you rugged him, so go for the feel-good factor you will get from honouring your ‘pledge’. But compromise and ask to be excused the stag party abroad, explaining: ‘I want to be able to afford to give you a wedding present.’ If you can, persuade the other ushers to cancel this extra party, as it’s bound to cause discontent.

Q. To add to the stamps debate, you can have had no idea about the gorgeous Dame Shirley Bassey stamps that are available. They celebrate her in all her glory, without ugly barcodes.

– M. O’C., Cardigan, Wales

A. Thank you. These presentation packs include some second-class stamps, still priced at 75p each. A postman confirms: ‘Second-class letters (now 50p less than first-class) are officially delivered within three days. Post office machines recognise second-class stamps and shift them to one side so the first-class can be sorted in the evening and the second-classes on the following morning. But if all first-class are sorted in the evening, they will move on to the second-class so both will be delivered the next day.’

No. 772

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Andrii Sergiienko, Fide Youth Composing Championship 2023. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 9 October. 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 Bf6! gxf6 2 exf6 Rg8 3 Rd8! Rcxd8 4 Rxd8 Rxd8 5 Qg7#

Last week’s winner Matthew Dean, Crewe, Cheshire

Is there such a thing as too much empathy? 

Back in the 1970s, a less politically correct age, there was a standby formula for television advertising known as 2Cs in a K, which would feature two women by a washing machine engaged in unlikely conversation about some wondrous new detergent. Since The Spectator is a family publication, I shall pretend that 2Cs in a K stood for two ‘consumers’ in a kitchen, although it did not. If you are still trying to puzzle this out, the male equivalent is two dicks near a fence, a routine in which one man implausibly explains to his neighbour the many virtues of a particular woodstain, say, or one of those natty electric pressure washers which allow you to jetwash your patio while pretending you are wielding a flamethrower during the Tet Offensive.

Eventually this formula became tired, and it is now in decline. However, like all formulae, there were reasons for its use. The ads were cheap to make and allowed you to say more or less anything you wanted without having much of a creative idea. The same applies to television news, where the equivalent fallback formula might be called ‘Two stats and a sob-story’. This involves cherry-picking a few topical statistics to give a veneer of newsworthiness, followed by an interview with someone who is sad about what the statistics say. Like 2Cs in a K, you can apply this anywhere: one minute someone is sad about climate change, the next someone is sad because their gas bill has gone up. Yes, these two issues are kind of contradictory, but that doesn’t matter.

Achingly sad events happen every day. But this same tedious hand-wringing formula is applied to everything from massacres to train delays. Shortly before she died, Fay Weldon told a friend of mine: ‘The trouble with your generation is you have too much empathy.’ It’s a sentiment that chimes with the views of the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who wrote Against Empathy. In it he argues that, although valuable in certain settings, empathy as a human emotion is a fallible aspect of our evolved psychology and not well calibrated for the mass-media age: it evolved at a time when you felt sorry for people you could materially help.

He also points out that ‘empathy is always on the side of the censor’. If an argument is phrased in empathetic terms, ‘It seems mighty cold-blooded to tell someone who has been offended that they should just “suck it up”. By contrast, the case for free speech seems pretty unempathic.’ Logos looks nasty when pitted against pathos. A friend of mine, a leading transport expert, was invited on to a programme to defend smart motorways. His fellow interviewee – for purposes of balance, see – was someone who had lost family members in a smart motorway crash. In such a context, any counterpoint looks insensitive.

Concerning the Downing Street parties, the slam-dunk argument was: ‘I missed my dad’s funeral while they were drinking.’ It would be heartless – but accurate – to point out that, for epidemiological purposes, funerals and shared workplaces are not really commensurable.

Media bias reveals itself in different forms. One form is simple partisanship. Another, more pernicious form is the relative prominence given to different stories. But a third problem is this: even in the absence of intentional bias, empathy-hacking and confected-outrage stories are (for both right- and left-wing media) just like 2Cs in a K: quick, cheap and easy to make. Three phone calls and you have 30 minutes of TV. Meanwhile, moderate, considered opinion goes unreported.

The conventional media get off the hook too easily by blaming online media for polarisation. Compared with most mainstream news coverage, many podcasts and YouTube videos are rare beacons of measured good sense.

A matter of technique

A queen and king can force mate against a lone king – that is as fundamental as it gets. Almost all regular players know that to be true, and they also know how to execute it. But players are regularly confronted by the distinction between ‘knowing that’, and ‘knowing how’.

Many know that king, bishop and knight can force mate against a lone king. But I would bet with confidence that only a minority of those who know that fact could actually demonstrate it. The technique is somewhat abstruse and, since the endgame arises so rarely, it is easily forgotten.

Imagine – you spent an hour practising this endgame… but that was five years ago. Now you’ve actually got it on the board, but it is, so to speak, a cold, rainy night in Stoke. After several hours of play, only a few minutes are left, and hunger, fatigue and the call of nature are all jostling for attention. In such circumstances, even masters who ‘knew’ what they were doing, have been known to fluff it.

A recent online game between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Magnus Carlsen reached the tricky endgame of king and queen against king and rook. Both players certainly knew that the king and queen should triumph with perfect play. And so they usually do, but owing more to the defender’s mistakes than the attacker’s know-how. A stubborn defence from the king and rook requires considerable skill to break down, and even Nepomniachtchi was unequal to the task.

One endgame caught my eye from the World Senior Team Championships, held in Ohrid, Macedonia last month. In the 50+ section, USA were top seeds, with a team of emigrants from the former USSR. ‘England 1’ were seeded just behind them, and their match against the USA team turned on the following game. (USA won this game, and went on to get gold in the 50+ section, ahead of England, who got silver.)

England’s grandmaster John Emms was under pressure from an early stage, but steered the game into a rook endgame with a single pawn deficit, which I’m sure he knew was tenable. Emms once wrote a well-regarded book called The Survival Guide to Rook Endings, so he knew what to aim for, as well as the pitfalls to avoid. He defended impeccably for almost 30 moves, making several precise moves, and in the diagram position the draw was within reach.

Gregory Kaidanov-John Emms

World Senior Team Championship, 50+, 2023

Here, 48…Kf5 would be a mistake, allowing 49 Rf8+ Ke5 50 Rf4! and the g-pawn drops off 48…Kf7 was correct, because 49 Kxg4 Rxf2 50 b5 Ke6 is a straightforward draw. 49 b5 Kg6 50 Rg8+ Kf6 51 Rb8 Kg6 Kaidanov’s back and forth with the rook is a standard ploy to wear down the defender. Now 52 Kxg4 Rxf2 53 b6 Rb2 54 b7 Kg7! secures a draw. When White’s king comes to support the pawn, it cannot shelter from rook checks. 52 b6 Kg7 This time, it’s different. Black must defend g4 with 52…Rb4!, and then 53 b7 Kg7! draws (not 53…Kf7 54 Rh8! Rxb7 55 Rh7+) 53 Kxg4 Rxf2 54 Kg5 This time, Black is lost, for a subtle reason which manifests itself a few moves down the line. Rb2 55 Rb7+ Kf8 56 Kf6 Ke8 57 Ke6 Re2+ Black would like to play 57…Kd8 58.Kd6 Kc8, which draws, but sadly 58 Rb8 is mate! 58 Kd6 Rd2+ 59 Kc7 For a player of Kaidanov’s level, the rest really is a formality. Rc2+ 60 Kb8 Rb2 61 Kc8 Rb1 62 Rb8 Ke7 63 Kb7 Kd7 64 Rh8 Rb2 65 Rh1 Ra2 66 Rd1+ Ke7 67 Kb8 Rb2 68 b7 Ra2 69 Rd4 Ke6 70 Kc7 Rc2+ 71 Kb6 Rb2+ 72 Kc6 Rb1 73 Re4+ Black resigns

The Battle for Britain | 7 October 2023

An injured hand has given me a glimpse of old age

I first realised something was wrong with my hand last Thursday evening. I’d been invited by a friend to go shooting at his grouse moor in Yorkshire and the bedroom I’d been assigned had a stiff wooden door. After a hearty supper, I returned to my room and gave the door a shove with my shoulder to force it open. The next thing I knew I couldn’t move any of the fingers on my right hand.

The following morning it was no better. Pulling on my plus fours, tucking them into a pair of woollen socks and fastening the garter ties was a work of colossal administration. As for the buttons on my shirt, I gave up after ten minutes and just pulled my shooting sweater over the top. When I arrived on the moor it quickly became apparent that I was destined to shoot even fewer birds than usual. I was literally unable to pull the trigger.

I told the host about my problem and he recommended I go to A&E in Middlesbrough. I later learned that he and all the other guests assumed I’d had a stroke, which, needless to say, also occurred to me. I’m about to turn 60 and my mother died at 62 (although not of cardiovascular disease), so I’ve been having thoughts of mortality recently. Was this the beginning of a rapid decline?

Six hours later, I was eventually seen by a doctor, who also thought I’d had a stroke – although that did raise the question of why I’d had to wait so long following the initial triage. I congratulated myself on having stopped at Morrisons on the way to pick up some aspirin after remembering you were supposed to take them following a stroke.

The doctor prodded and poked my body to see if I’d lost any sensation on the right hand side. The combination of a bad hangover and acute anxiety made it difficult to tell, but I told her I didn’t think so.

To my immense relief, she diagnosed radial nerve injury. Among doctors, this is colloquially known as ‘Saturday night palsy’ because one of the most common causes is sleeping for too long in an awkward position as a result of inebriation. In my case, she thought I’d done the damage when I shouldered the door to my room open. She advised me to see an orthopaedic surgeon.

I returned to London that evening, which was a bit antisocial. But it wasn’t just the fact that I couldn’t shoot – I couldn’t use a knife and fork either. When I eventually got home at midnight, my son Freddie cooked me some sausages and then had to cut them up into small pieces so I could eat them. ‘And so it begins, Dad,’ he said, referring to the fact that it won’t be long before I need a carer to prepare all my meals. (The approaching 60th is a source of constant ribbing from my children.) I appreciated the gallows humour, and the injury was still new enough – and bizarre enough – to be a source of merriment. Another name for the condition is ‘wrist drop’ because it leaves you with a limp wrist. It’s as if I’m constantly auditioning for the part of Widow Twankey in the Lyric Hammersmith Christmas panto.

But as soon as I sat down at my desk and tried to reply to an email, the full measure of my disability became clear. Touch typing was out of the question. I had to resort to the hunt-and-hit method, using just my left hand. A two-line email that would normally take ten seconds took ten minutes. Given that I probably produce 10,000 words a day, this injury was completely debilitating. How was I to cope?

The answer, of course, is text-to-type, which is how I’m composing this column. But by God the technology has some distance to go. My iPhone struggles with words of more than three syllables, often breaking them down into two or three different words, so ‘gobbledygook’ becomes… well, gobbledygook. Even simple sentences get garbled thanks to autocorrect, with ‘earn a living’ becoming ‘own a Living Room’. And don’t get me started on the random capitalisation.

I’m trying to get Bupa to pay for a consultation with a private hand surgeon but I’m quickly discovering the vast range of things my policy doesn’t cover. If worst comes to worst, I’ll have to pick up the fee myself.

What choice do I have? It takes weeks to get an appointment with my GP and I need to fix this problem pronto. When people ask what I do for a living, I often struggle to answer. But the truth is, I’m basically a typist. Plus, I’ve been invited stalking in the Highlands next weekend so I need my trigger finger to be working. And I don’t think I can take Freddie with me to cut up my food.